Episode 2163 Scott Adams： Wow, The News Is Juicy And Fun Today. Grab A Coffee
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 9 minutes
Words per Minute
144.39026
Summary
Dilbert talks about a calendar problem, a breakthrough in solar power, and China developing a nuclear weapon that could make you stupid. Plus, a new kind of coffee, and a new way to make money on the internet.
Transcript
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Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the highlight of human civilization.
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Yeah, you thought you'd seen the highlight already, but no, this is it.
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And if you'd like your adventure to go to levels that nobody's ever seen before,
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all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tanker, a chalice, a canteen, a jug, or a flask,
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a vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee.
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And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine at the end of the day,
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the thing that makes everything better. It's called Simultaneous Sip. It happens now. Go.
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Well, if you're looking for your daily Dilbert comic, for you subscribers on Twitter and also on Locals,
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if you didn't know this already, I think I've told you this before,
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meaning that I can't put things on the right calendar dates pretty much ever.
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I don't know why. It seems related to maybe, I don't know, being dyslexic or something.
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But for some reason, this has been all my life, because I know what you're going to say.
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I know what you're going to say. But it's been all my life, right?
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So there's never been a time when it wasn't the case.
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So the Dilbert comic for today will show up right as soon as I'm done with this.
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I'll post it. But I do put the date in. Here's what I do.
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A week ahead of time, I queue up all the comics to run.
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I just look at the date on the comic, and then I schedule it for that date.
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If you were to do that six times, you know, let's say I do it six times.
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Out of six, how many times would I incorrectly put the wrong date in when I'm just looking at the date?
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All I have to do is type it in from looking at it.
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Do you know how often I would write the wrong date on the comic itself for 35 years while I was cartooning?
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And when I get into a new relationship, it's the first thing I have to explain.
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I can't tell you how many times I've said, all right, look, there's going to be a thing that's going to happen with us.
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You're going to ask me to put something on a calendar, and I won't be able to do it.
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You will not believe that I'm unable, because you'll see me functioning okay in other ways.
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You won't believe that I simply can't write dates on calendars.
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There's going to be more of it, not less of it.
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CBS is reporting some big breakthrough of beaming power from space.
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The big advantage would be if you could build a ginormous solar power collector up there, you could actually microwave it to Earth and use it.
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And apparently this technology already works, because we could use it terrestrially to light a light bulb from a distance, et cetera.
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So I guess they tested it with a satellite or something.
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So the amount of electricity you could collect from space is unlimited.
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And if you can beam it to Earth so that it's never cloudy.
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In other words, somewhere in the world, there's always going to be some sun, I guess.
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China is allegedly developing a neuro-weapon where they can beam something at your head and it'll make you stupid.
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China is allegedly developing a weapon that if they aimed it at you, you would become, you know, it would be difficult to make decisions.
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And it does beg the question, how long have they been using it?
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I feel like they're pointing it at the whole country right now.
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How would you ever know if they'd employed the weapon?
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Can you imagine being on the battlefield and you're like there with your fellow, you know, fighters?
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And you're looking over at Bob and Bob's there like.
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You're like, oh, I think he was a little bit like that before.
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Speaking of that, I told you the other day that Cenk Uyger, I think is his last name, notable progressive type, had agreed with the Supreme Court on two things that the political right liked more than the left.
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He liked the Supreme Court on affirmative action, getting rid of it, and he liked the Supreme Court on not paying off student loans.
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So a lot of people on the right were praising him, and I was one of them.
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And he wanted to, he needed a little pushback on that.
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For the right wing is celebrating that I'm pointing out some left wing activists can't stand any disagreement.
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Remember, your house is made entirely of glass.
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The right wing is not allowed to disagree with Trump when he makes up outrageous lies about how he won 2020 election.
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How would anyone, the only reason I'm going to read this is I'd like to model for you the best answer.
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In my opinion, this is the best answer to people saying, hey, you say that election was rigged, but there's no evidence of that.
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How would anyone know an American election was not rigged?
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We can only know the results are impossible to fully audit, and no confirmed rigging was found.
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But rigging is guaranteed over time because the system invites it.
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You don't know if it happened yet, but it's guaranteed.
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There is no way to know because you can't fully audit the election.
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You can only know for sure that it's guaranteed, either now or later, or maybe in the past.
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What is guaranteed by the design of the system.
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That sounded really smart when it came out of my mouth.
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Because the design is what drives behavior, right?
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If you design it so there's one path, people take that path.
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If you design it so there are two paths, but one looks scary and one looks inviting, people take the inviting path.
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I can only say it was designed to make that inevitable.
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Speaking of sketchy-sounding things, actually, one more thing about Cenk.
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Yesterday, I sent him a compliment, and maybe I was one of the people that he may have.
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You can imagine what happened when I complimented him.
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The progressives have decided that if you get a compliment from somebody like me, somebody like me, well, that's no compliment, is it?
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But I do compliment Cenk because he quite knowingly degraded his own economic opportunity
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Even if I disagree with him on a hundred other things, I'm not going to lose the fact that I respect that.
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Tucker Carlson was on Russell Brand show and made news, as Tucker often does.
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And Tucker says he got fired by Fox News right before he aired, and apparently he'd already done the interview, but it hadn't aired.
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Was it the D.C. chief of police or chief of capital police?
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He said he interviewed the chief of the capital police and was told that the chief of the capital police,
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the person who would know the most about what was going on, said the January 6th crowd was full of Feds.
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In your brain, how do you interpret if somebody says, oh, that big crowd.
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How many of those would have to be Feds before you would accept the, before you would accept that there were a lot of Feds, right?
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If there were thousands of people there and there were 20 Feds, just hypothetically, would that be a lot?
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Would 20 feel like they were controlling events?
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If there were 100 Feds, do you think that they could control the flow of the event by creating provocations or maybe breaking a window that wasn't going to get broken?
00:11:40.800
There's no way to know how many there were, but in my mind, just subjectively, as a consumer of news and somebody who has to make political decisions, it seems to me if somebody in that role is saying that it was full of them, probably more than 20.
00:12:04.580
If I had to guess, like you put a gun to head and said, make your prediction, I'm going to say 60.
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It's just based on one person who should know something about it that I don't, said there were many of them.
00:12:45.100
So, you know, the latest story, this story just keeps getting funnier.
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I don't think you can get funnier than cocaine in the White House, but it just actually does.
00:13:03.480
And so, first it was found in the library, right?
00:13:15.100
Then it was moved to some other area and then some other area.
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And now they're saying that it was in a construction zone.
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What would be different about a construction zone?
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What would make that a unique and different place than all of the other areas?
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You know, if I were going to remodel an area, there's a pretty good chance I'd be disconnecting the video cameras.
00:13:52.820
I mean, you have to move a wall and, you know, there's no reason for the cameras there anyway because you're just doing construction.
00:13:58.860
Yeah, the first thing I'd do is remove the cameras.
00:14:04.520
That of all the places it could be, it was in that non-camera place.
00:14:13.220
I'm just assuming that's the next part of the story.
00:14:20.920
All week it took us to research until we found out that the construction workers had taken the camera down.
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There was no camera because the construction worker took it down.
00:14:42.140
I don't know for sure if it's coming, but it feels like it is.
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They're signaling it that it's coming so clearly that you're just waiting for that to drop today.
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Or would it be Monday, depending on how the news cycle is going?
00:15:00.880
But then my favorite part about it was, this is just too good.
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The spokes clown, cringe Jean-Pierre, she's trying to answer this question.
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And the reporters are asking directly, did this cocaine belong to anybody in the Biden family?
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So you would think that would be a pretty easy question, wouldn't you?
00:16:00.860
Instead, she acts all mad like she's answered it.
00:16:07.980
Again, let me say that the Bidens were out of the White House those three days.
00:16:16.400
How many times do I have to say they weren't there?
00:16:24.860
How many times do I have to tell you they weren't there?
00:16:33.780
But we're still asking, can you say yes or no to do they own it?
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Because it's our understanding that the cocaine did not go on vacation with them.
00:16:48.900
Can you tell us if the ownership of the bag, maybe they had encountered these people at an earlier time, for example, had it been their ownership?
00:17:00.360
How many times do I have to tell you that they were not there and they were not there?
00:17:14.260
She totally, the whole family just threw them under the bus.
00:17:19.120
And I think Joe must have thrown them under the bus, too.
00:17:22.000
I feel like the private conversation went something like this.
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Did you leave a bag of cocaine in the White House?
00:17:41.980
Do you believe that Joe Biden believes that Hunter Biden has always told him the truth?
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Let me introduce you to something called a drug addict.
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Is there anybody here who's been a drug addict who can confirm to me there's no such thing as the truth from a drug addict?
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It doesn't matter how much, it doesn't matter how good your character was before you were an addict.
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Before you were an addict, your character could have been exceptional.
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You're not the same person you were before the addiction.
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And it lives in your head where your brain used to be.
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If you don't understand that about addiction, you don't know addiction.
00:18:43.720
well, the fentanyl problem would go away if people would stop doing the fentanyl.
00:18:47.340
Well, they were not in the White House for three days.
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They were not in the White House for three days.
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No, you can't ask people to stop doing an addiction.
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An addiction is the thing that you can't choose.
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If you could simply choose not to do it, nobody would be addicted.
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It would be like the rarest thing instead of the most common thing.
00:19:21.020
If Joe Biden asked Hunter if it was his, and Hunter said, no, it wasn't,
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could Joe Biden believe him, given what logically would have been their history?
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When you have an addict as a son, they have lied to you.
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I don't think there's any way around that, really.
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And anybody who knows an addict knows that's true.
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Are you addicts telling me that addicts don't lie?
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So you believe that addicts don't lie, just sort of as a general statement?
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You just don't know what an addict is if you believe that.
00:20:17.100
The Threads app, as you know, got gigantic pickup.
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Lots and lots of people went over to the new meta product that's going to compete with Twitter called Threads.
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And I would like to ask you this question, dear users.
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For those of you who have signed up for Threads, give me thumbs up, thumbs down.
00:21:00.420
A number of people were already banned for life over there.
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It turns out a lot of the people on the Locals platform tried it and they're already banned.
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He says it's for those, the Threads is for those looking for less angry conversations.
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And he framed his new offering as an open and friendly public space.
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I'll tell you that Zuckerberg sure makes me want to do it.
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He's like, he's like the king of anti-marketing.
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It's funny watching him compared to, it's impossible not to compare him to Musk because, you know,
00:22:05.640
It's impossible not to, now that they have a competing product, especially, or a more directly
00:22:11.780
So, I don't think that Zuckerberg understands what Twitter is.
00:22:19.720
Twitter is sort of the place you go to fight, isn't it?
00:22:28.240
The thing that makes Twitter, Twitter is the conflict.
00:22:32.560
You know, there's a whole bunch of Twitter that's probably just people tweeting their
00:22:41.920
So, on the political stuff, people are looking for a fight.
00:22:45.900
And if they're not looking for a fight, they're at least looking to, you know, raise their profile,
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which is not exactly a, you know, a holy, you know, activity.
00:22:56.520
So, basically, everything on Twitter is people's worst instincts, but it's a free market.
00:23:04.280
And the free market element of it, the Wild West free market of it, is what makes it valuable.
00:23:11.400
Because you put an idea on Twitter, it's going to get beat up.
00:23:17.620
You take an idea you think is just really good, you put it on Twitter, it'll get the shit beat out of it.
00:23:24.240
If it still is living when you're done with Twitter, it might have been a good idea.
00:23:32.460
But suppose you put it on threads and everybody said, oh, that's good, and people who said bad things got banned.
00:23:58.160
But I'm not hearing people who went there and looked at it coming back and saying they're hooked.
00:24:04.820
Is anybody saying, oh, man, I was on threads all day today?
00:24:09.600
It was bad enough I used to be on Twitter all day, but now I moved to threads, and I spend four hours on threads.
00:24:19.780
Now, I'm going to tell you the most provocative theory that you will never hear in the mainstream news.
00:24:26.440
Do you know why you will never hear this in the mainstream news?
00:24:31.840
Not because it's left-leaning or anything like that or right-leaning.
00:24:36.920
Because they all have spouses, and I'll tell you why.
00:24:42.600
The news can't report this because they're mostly married people.
00:24:53.240
I'm not a mind reader, so I don't know for sure.
00:24:56.660
So this is speculation, but it's speculation based on a universal truth.
00:25:03.340
If you start a social media company, your spouse, male or female, so this is not a gender thing, it's not a gender thing, male or female, your spouse will believe that they also have excellent ideas for how you should manage that in social media.
00:25:24.320
Everybody thinks they're an expert on social media.
00:25:30.060
Well, I once owned a restaurant when I was single, and then I got married.
00:25:42.620
Everybody who's ever eaten at a restaurant is an expert on restaurants.
00:25:54.620
Try doing anything in your restaurant that your spouse thinks is a bad idea.
00:26:04.200
Try to make any change in your restaurant that you just think is a good idea, but your spouse thinks is a really bad idea.
00:26:18.020
Do you know how quickly you will talk yourself out of your excellent idea?
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And if home is ruined by what you did over here, you can't go home.
00:26:40.100
Do you think that Zuckerberg wants threads to work more than he wants his marriage to work?
00:26:54.440
So I believe that Zuckerberg can't compete with Musk because Musk is single.
00:27:02.100
And Musk has wisely diversified his wives because they're all ex-wives.
00:27:07.260
He's diversified them so even if one of his exes or one of his kids complained, Musk doesn't even have to listen to his kids.
00:27:14.320
Because if one of his kids says, I don't like what you're doing on Twitter, he's got nine other kids or whatever it is.
00:27:22.200
He's got the ultimate diversification of influence over there.
00:27:26.120
Like he doesn't have to really pay attention to any of them.
00:27:33.360
Do you believe that the, let's say the censorship, let's say scope, you know, where they put the guardrails, do you think that's determined by Zuckerberg, by the people he's working with closely, or by his wife?
00:27:49.780
Who do you think determined the bounds with which threads can be provocative?
00:27:59.020
Do you think that she said anything specifically to him?
00:28:06.220
No, because everybody knows their wife's opinion by this point.
00:28:12.580
He cannot have on his platform the same things that Musk can have on his platform, because Musk can just say it's free speech, and there's nobody to tell him he's wrong.
00:28:23.880
If Zuckerberg put the same content, you know, the same edgy, a lot of really disgusting stuff, if he put it on his platform, he wouldn't be able to go home.
00:28:36.120
There's no way his wife's going to put up with that.
00:28:42.580
And I don't think that the news will ever report this, because, first of all, it's all speculation, so it's terribly unfair.
00:28:54.980
I don't know anything about Zuckerberg's wife, but he's pretty smart.
00:29:00.500
So if he chose her as a wife, and they've stayed together a long time, I'm guessing that she's a pretty solid human being, and we know that she's super smart, right?
00:29:10.900
So it could be that they have a situation which is completely opposite of everything I described.
00:29:19.140
So I want to put it out there that I can't know for sure, it's like a private person, I can't read his mind.
00:29:25.280
But if you were to make me bet on which of those two platforms had more freedom to do the things it needs to do, I would bet on Musk every time.
00:29:36.600
So I think that Zuckerberg is competing with one arm tied behind his back.
00:29:39.880
He can't let provocative things on the platform, but it's the provocative things that creates the energy.
00:29:50.740
He's succeeded more than I've succeeded, so I think it would be inappropriate for me to second-guess his business decisions.
00:29:59.580
He's obviously brilliant at it, one of the best operators of all time.
00:30:09.780
So I have a lot of respect for Zuckerberg in terms of his business skills.
00:30:19.580
All right, the jobs report was kind of lackluster, but not too bad, which is probably good for inflation.
00:30:26.260
Can anybody tell if jobs going up or down is good or bad for the economy anymore?
00:30:33.940
The most basic thing, and we're not quite sure.
00:30:37.300
Well, well, we want people to have jobs, but if the job market is too hot, it means the economy is too hot, and that means inflation, and that means the Fed will keep the interest rates high, which will tamp down on our, you know.
00:30:56.260
So we can't even tell if the jobs report is good, bad.
00:31:07.480
My take is that it's good because it's still strong.
00:31:19.120
So I think we're going to limp along without anything that looks like a major recession.
00:31:23.800
I would put my predicting about the economy as the best in the business.
00:31:33.200
So I predicted, how many of you remember that for quite a while now, I predicted that the economy after the pandemic winds down would either be not a recession or a very mild one.
00:31:54.720
I heard Peter Zan, who talks about geopolitics, talking about China.
00:32:01.440
He was talking about some kind of trade war thing with minerals or some kind of component, which is less important.
00:32:10.640
The important part is that he said that President Xi in China has purged all of the competent government people.
00:32:23.320
And he says that you can't do a deal with China now because there's nobody to do the deal.
00:32:39.240
So the idea is that if you wanted to do, let's say, a deal with China over some technology or microchips or something,
00:32:48.000
that they wouldn't have anybody who could understand the deal.
00:32:52.560
That in China, they wouldn't have anybody who could make a decision who would also understand the deal because they got rid of all those people.
00:33:02.200
It used to be that the Chinese government was heavily filled with engineers.
00:33:07.280
And the engineers are the perfect ones to make a deal because, first of all, they'd understand it.
00:33:12.500
And second of all, they're just looking for what works, right?
00:33:15.540
They're not necessarily operating on animal instinct.
00:33:20.960
So maybe a lot of the people with engineering and more technical skills got purged.
00:33:34.440
So Peter Zayn's take on it is that China will be going through a huge incompetence problem,
00:33:43.020
like actually government incompetence, like at a massive scale because they got rid of all the good people.
00:33:50.960
That feels like a little too much wishful thinking, doesn't it?
00:33:57.220
I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if some of the good people were purged,
00:34:10.420
He also has a take that we're not really in much trouble if China decides to hold back on its rare earth minerals and some other stuff like gallium and stuff.
00:34:22.720
Apparently, there are other places in the world that could spin up fairly quickly.
00:34:27.540
It's just that presumably they don't need to because it's coming out of China.
00:34:33.000
So it's sort of like a two-month spin up for anything they tried to deny us.
00:34:37.880
And then Zayn's take is that China would be in worse case than we would if we got into a fight about raw materials because we have all the silica.
00:34:49.080
So they wouldn't be able to make silicon chips.
00:34:53.560
So basically, China would be computerless if they decided to fight us, but we would have two months of a little bit of problems and we'd be back to where we were.
00:35:11.600
Yeah, apparently there's a special kind of sand that you need to make the chips.
00:35:27.180
Yeah, but I think it has to be a special kind of silica.
00:35:34.880
So I'm going to say that I don't know enough about that to judge the accuracy of it.
00:35:44.560
I would say that there is a continued fast collapse of wokeness.
00:35:49.620
Would you agree that you're seeing a collapse of wokeness or not yet?
00:35:59.180
So Clay Travis was writing today in Fox News on their website.
00:36:12.160
Nobody can ignore a 30% decrease in sales of a top product, you know, the number one product.
00:36:24.660
But apparently, as Clay Travis was saying, it's not widely reported, but the NBA took a gigantic hit when they went woke.
00:36:41.020
Did you know that NBA viewership dropped and didn't recover?
00:36:44.400
So that's two cases where wokeness just took businesses out.
00:36:53.340
He didn't mention Target, but does anybody know, have Target sales resumed to where they were or have they stayed lower?
00:37:08.280
Larry Fink, again, reiterated that he doesn't like to use it because it became toxic.
00:37:18.280
Now, apparently he was surprised that overt racism in America would be considered toxic.
00:37:34.460
Well, he'll be delighted Larry Fink will be when he's starring in a Dilbert Reborn comic that's in the pipeline.
00:37:44.000
I'm just making sure that the mocking is complete.
00:37:51.360
But beyond that, BlackRock, who Larry Fink is the CEO of BlackRock, they're not the only ones who think ESG is toxic.
00:38:04.480
There's another report today that other CEOs are quite pointedly avoiding mentioning it.
00:38:12.640
So it went from something you had to mention to something that people are afraid to mention.
00:38:28.240
Like some of the stories they do, they play it straight.
00:38:36.720
So Fox News had an indigenous Native American chief in Vermont said he would be open to talking to Ben and Jerry,
00:38:49.560
because Ben and Jerry are concerned about America having stolen all the land from the Native Americans.
00:38:56.300
And he said he'd be open to talking to Ben and Jerry about taking back the land under its headquarters.
00:39:13.220
Jerry, Ben, hey, hey, Ben and Jerry, where are your homes?
00:39:19.040
Do you know nobody's ever produced a home, a picture of Ben and Jerry's, Ben or Jerry's house?
00:39:29.980
Because they love the Earth, so they're probably living in maybe a tent, possibly a tent,
00:39:37.420
so that they're not using up all the resources of the Earth.
00:39:41.720
Wouldn't you love to see a picture of either Ben or Jerry's house?
00:39:51.220
Well, it won't be nice for long, because those Native Americans were going to make a claim
00:40:00.920
for the land that they stole to build their homes on.
00:40:17.380
that the Native Americans want to take Ben and Jerry's land.
00:40:39.280
So they're going to have to form a new government.
00:40:50.180
It just means they have to form a new coalition.
00:40:58.220
The government collapsed just means they have to form a new coalition, basically.
00:41:13.040
Somebody else pointed out that, well, I've said this as well.
00:41:26.520
to a lot of things that were maybe a little problematic before.
00:41:34.060
So, I think everything's heading in the right direction in terms of that.
00:41:39.800
So, the Wall Street Journal had an article by Peggy Noonan.
00:41:51.380
I've often called her out as one of the world's best writers,
00:41:59.040
it doesn't mean I'm going to agree with her on all her points, right?
00:42:34.060
Now, does that sound like the walls are closing in?
00:42:46.640
When I mocked this for not being the walls are closing in,
00:44:08.000
I would definitely want the editor to know that.
00:44:11.780
And the way I'd do it is I would just retweet what I said.
00:44:28.040
and then you can understand why she does what she does.
00:44:52.680
Well, the Wall Street Journal is also reporting
00:45:55.120
So, he has the best record of defeating the left
00:46:01.320
If he has a solid record of defeating the left,
00:48:24.020
It's like when you compare them next to each other.