Episode 2407 CWSA 03⧸08⧸24
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 17 minutes
Words per Minute
141.36302
Summary
Biden's speech, the hate of the union, fake news, and much more! Enjoy the bonus episode of the highlight of civilization featuring Scott Adams. Scott Adams is a stand-up comedian, podcaster, and podcaster who travels the country talking about politics, current events, and pop culture.
Transcript
00:00:02.920
Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the Highlight of Civilization.
00:00:09.280
Only for the locals' people today, although it might get uploaded to another platform later.
00:00:15.600
I've got a little internet problem today, so I'm coming off of my 5G.
00:00:21.020
If the 5G fails, and it might, we'll see what we can do.
00:00:26.360
But in the meantime, all you need to make this experience special in a 5G, low-fidelity kind of way
00:00:32.860
is you need a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or chalice, a canteen, a jug, a flask, a vessel of any kind
00:00:40.160
Join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine of the day thing that makes everything better.
00:01:02.700
How many of you watched the State of the Union?
00:01:07.920
I saw somebody describe it this morning as old man yells at the teleprompter.
00:01:33.800
That Haley voters, 63% of them say they're going to back Biden.
00:01:42.560
Haley voters, 63% said they're going to back Biden.
00:01:51.700
What's left out of the story is that, you know, some percentage of them are Democrats.
00:01:57.160
If you leave out the fact that they're Democrats, and they were just gaming the system for the most part, there's no story here at all.
00:02:17.520
So they say that Biden quoted Trump with alarm for boasting that he would encourage Russia and Vladimir Putin to, quote, do whatever the hell they want to NATO allies if those countries do not spend enough on defense.
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How many of you watched it and can confirm, no, it didn't happen?
00:02:45.600
What Biden did do is he said that Trump said he wouldn't defend NATO.
00:02:53.660
Biden left out that it was in the sort of negotiating for NATO to pay its fees.
00:02:59.740
If you leave out that, you can't add it in in the story after the fact.
00:03:25.540
It's no surprise that the Democrats thought it was a masterful performance.
00:03:32.260
And it's no surprise that people like me saw it as angry, dementia, yelling, and disunity.
00:03:48.180
So he starts with freedom and democracy, you're under attack both at home and abroad.
00:03:53.520
When you say democracy is under attack, you make it possible to assassinate anybody who's opposed to it.
00:04:02.260
So it sounds like they're calling for assassination, or Biden is for Trump, but doing it indirectly in that mafia boss way.
00:04:10.860
The secret assassination whistle, that's fair, right?
00:04:16.980
If there could be a secret racist dog whistle, can't there be a secret assassination whistle?
00:04:30.120
He referred to him as, quote, my predecessor, but he said it 13 times, which apparently 13 times is a lot.
00:04:39.980
So it was, some say, therefore, it was more of a political speech than a State of the Union speech.
00:04:51.060
Could have been a lot more political than it was.
00:04:57.020
And, of course, Biden was pushing hard on the January 6th hoax.
00:05:01.780
So it looks like they're going to focus on the January 6th hoax.
00:05:10.900
Now, that's more political than the State of the Union, so maybe that's the only reason it wasn't in there.
00:05:21.180
I can't believe he put shrinkflation in the speech.
00:05:26.400
The State of the Union, we don't have enough chips.
00:05:29.000
So RFK Jr., quite rightly and cleverly does his response, in which he says, the entire country is suffering from chronic disease because our food supply is bad, and Biden wants to give more chips to the kids.
00:05:55.880
Am I wrong, or do Democrats prefer every policy that's bad for children?
00:06:03.580
Let's say we're going to increase the amount of your unhealthy snacks.
00:06:10.360
I don't know how true that is, but let's throw that in the mix.
00:06:17.800
We're going to transition you with surgery while you're a child.
00:06:23.240
We're going to keep you home from school during the pandemic.
00:06:34.260
I feel as if that's a theme that needs to be explored, because in every single situation, they do what's bad for children, including the lack of, you know, family as an emphasis.
00:06:47.400
Yeah, this other pro, everything that's bad for children, basically.
00:06:58.880
How many of you are opposed to IVF, in vitro fertilization?
00:07:44.000
So I think the anti-IVF thing is probably the dumbest fucking thing that the Republicans have ever done.
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It might be the number one dumbest thing they've ever done.
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Because the entire Republican thing is more babies, right?
00:08:03.620
Now, being opposed to IVF has no logical, religious, or moral backing.
00:08:16.840
So you pick the least important thing, but it's the least important thing.
00:08:24.680
Because you don't care about somebody else's IVF, do you?
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If it's not your own, why do you care that someone else is doing it?
00:08:36.740
You got really quiet when I said, why are you opposed to it, right?
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I think there must be some reflex kind of thing.
00:08:52.200
The people who are doing it are not complaining.
00:08:55.540
But, yeah, buying a baby is a different situation than, oh, is that why?
00:09:07.460
Are they opposed to IVF because it's an anti-gay thing?
00:09:17.560
So, basically, that's just handing the Democrats a victory.
00:09:23.340
I think Democrats would literally vote a corpse into office if it looked like they could protect abortion rights.
00:09:32.260
And the IVF stuff looks like a slippery slope to them.
00:09:36.580
So, basically, it's just giving the election away.
00:09:40.080
I have no idea why Republicans would do such a thing.
00:09:49.920
You know, you turn on the network, CNN, MSNBC, and they've got the fact-checker there.
00:09:55.060
And the fact-checker is just like, oh, that's right.
00:10:09.660
Now, I didn't look at everything all the time, but they were usually pretty prominent.
00:10:16.540
How many things did Biden say that were literally not true in a pretty easily demonstrated way?
00:10:30.320
I think he said a lot of things that were true-ish, but, you know, the context is all whacked.
00:10:42.080
He said, you can't love the country only when you win.
00:10:45.640
Now, of course, yeah, that's propaganda and narrative, and it's horrible.
00:10:51.220
But in terms of politics, it's a pretty good line.
00:10:54.720
I would say the speech was pretty well written.
00:10:59.980
Well, separately, we'll talk about how he performed.
00:11:02.440
But I thought the speech was pretty well written for his base in a political year.
00:11:10.220
And he had some actually good-sounding little economic things, you know, where he could say that he negotiated lower drug prices.
00:11:22.980
But there was something about insulin, capping insulin.
00:11:28.980
And I saw on social media somebody said that Trump tried capping it and Biden reversed it.
00:11:36.620
So basically, everything has a, but what would Trump have done that's always left out?
00:11:44.100
Is there any reason that Trump would not have negotiated better drug prices?
00:11:51.960
Was it the Republicans that were stopping Trump from negotiating better drug prices?
00:12:00.420
I don't think any Republicans were stopping Trump from doing it.
00:12:14.720
If the only thing you heard was he reduced your insulin costs, but at the same time, he's recommending more snacks, so you're going to need more insulin.
00:12:29.060
The good news is I'm going to lower your insulin costs.
00:12:32.280
The bad news is I'm going to make sure there's a lot more snacks in your bag so you get more diabetes.
00:12:39.880
So he made, so Biden started with that really scary, you know, Hitler-like reference.
00:12:50.680
And at first I thought he was entirely talking about Trump.
00:13:04.280
Well, I'm really just talking about Putin, but it's foreign and domestic problem, so Hitler.
00:13:13.160
Yeah, it did sound like he went full Hitler right away.
00:13:17.120
As others have pointed out, he seemed to be quite hard on Russia, but soft on China.
00:13:28.600
I wonder if he's got any lost diamonds that would explain that.
00:13:36.180
He proposed a minimum tax for billionaires of 25%.
00:13:40.020
Do you think there's something missing in that?
00:13:52.600
Do you know why the billionaires are not paying as high a tax rate?
00:14:03.640
In other words, they get their gains and capital gains and take out loans and do clever things.
00:14:30.360
Well, you know, that was not Elizabeth Warren's plan.
00:14:33.720
She was actually going to tax their worth, like 2% of their net worth.
00:14:42.020
So, it looks like he wants to raise taxes on everybody who makes over $400,000 a year as well.
00:14:51.300
So, he's running for president on raising taxes.
00:14:55.380
He's not good at explaining how economies work.
00:14:59.980
Because if you raise taxes on the billionaires, well, they're going to find some other country.
00:15:09.220
He says, no billionaire should pay a lower tax rate than a teacher, a sanitation worker, or a nurse.
00:15:16.800
What have I taught you when people use the percentage but not the total dollar amount?
00:15:23.640
Or they use the dollar amount but not the percentage.
00:15:27.380
In every case, if they do one without the other, it is a lying, bullshit, propaganda, persuasion technique.
00:15:39.140
If you see one without the other, it's obvious it's just propaganda.
00:15:44.780
You want to put a cap on credit card fees and make the credit card companies only recover, you know, the amount it costs them to recover.
00:15:54.460
You know, I'll tell you, I used to work for the phone company, as you know.
00:16:00.000
So, I got to hear things behind the curtains, what people really thought about things.
00:16:04.620
And we used to laugh that our most profitable line of business in the phone company was unpaid bills.
00:16:13.760
Unpaid bills were our most profitable line of business.
00:16:17.360
Because we would charge somebody, you know, I don't know, $25 or something, a reconnection fee.
00:16:22.840
So, in addition to whatever late fees they would still have to pay, you know, we'd get an extra $25 we weren't going to pay.
00:16:30.000
But the reason it was like free money is that everybody has to pay their phone bill.
00:16:34.920
If you don't pay your phone bill, or at least in those days there was one local phone company,
00:16:39.720
if you didn't pay your phone bill, you didn't have an option of another phone company in those days.
00:16:45.040
So, they could guarantee that you would pay, you had to.
00:16:49.240
So, they could just give you any penalty they wanted, you'd pay it.
00:16:53.200
So, yeah, we were evil bastards, and we knew it.
00:16:58.600
Do you think the banks know that the credit card late fees are really abusive?
00:17:05.440
Yeah, of course they know it's abusive, but they were getting away with it.
00:17:10.960
So, I have to back Biden on capping credit card fees and maybe doing something with drug prices.
00:17:18.740
I don't know that Trump wouldn't have done something with drug prices.
00:17:22.780
I don't think he would have capped credit cards.
00:17:28.160
It doesn't seem like something he would have done.
00:17:29.640
And I'm not sure it's necessary in a competitive environment.
00:17:35.520
You'd think that at least one credit card company would come up with the idea of not having that penalty.
00:17:42.840
You'd think the free market would take care of that really easily.
00:17:46.360
Credit cards are a pretty competitive business, right?
00:18:04.900
So, Trump tried to be doing live posting on truth.
00:18:10.640
Now, I couldn't get into truth last night because it was unavailable.
00:18:20.060
Was it crashing because it was getting attacked?
00:18:36.480
Well, maybe it's the same thing to knock down my internet.
00:18:43.980
Any Californians with no, especially Northern California?
00:18:47.920
Anybody with no internet in Northern California besides me?
00:18:52.800
Anybody in Northern California with no internet?
00:19:08.940
And he was well prepared for his critics as well.
00:19:11.680
So, when the critics started yelling, say the name of Lakin Riley, because she was a victim
00:19:24.920
He had a pin with her face on it, and he said her name.
00:19:30.680
Well, some say he said her name wrong as Lincoln, but that's probably just because he slurred
00:19:37.860
So, he did a good job of knowing what the criticism would be in the room and having his little prepared
00:19:52.240
He was ready because he immediately said her name and then went into a thing about how bad
00:20:05.340
See, the trouble is you have to either decide whether you're ranking him for how well he
00:20:10.180
did considering his age, or you're ranking him compared to everybody.
00:20:15.900
If I rank him compared to good speakers, let's say Obama or Reagan or Bill Clinton or Trump,
00:20:24.180
I would say all of those four I just mentioned would be an A, and I would give maybe C, C- for
00:20:36.380
But, he really only had to survive, and he did.
00:20:43.640
So, he did everything he needed to do for his base, and the people who don't like him still
00:20:48.640
don't like him, so it didn't make any difference at all, I don't think.
00:20:52.240
I did see, maybe it was Charlie Kirk saying that it looked like there was a change in strategy,
00:21:00.320
and that maybe they found out that the dictator thing wasn't working.
00:21:04.620
So, he didn't say extreme or mega or dictator, did he?
00:21:15.020
So, it looks like maybe he got the idea that we were going to mock him mercilessly for doing
00:21:29.800
He did do something about chaos, though, right?
00:21:43.340
So, we don't know if this signals anything about the campaign, because the State of the
00:21:51.420
Well, I guess Nancy Pelosi slammed Joe, not slammed him, but said Joe Biden should have
00:21:59.060
talked about Lauren, or Lakin Reilly's killer as an undocumented, whereas he referred to
00:22:11.720
All right, are you amazed that they're actually telling Democrats that there's no immigration
00:22:24.860
And basically, they're saying there's not really a problem.
00:22:28.720
It's kind of unbelievable that that's happening.
00:22:34.480
According to Rasmussen, 65% of Democrats think Trump should be banned from the X platform.
00:22:41.720
Two-thirds of Democrats think the guy who's going to be probably the next president, or
00:22:51.160
at least if the election's not rigged, and that he should be banned from the major political
00:23:02.860
Now, Biden is running to restore freedom and democracy.
00:23:18.940
The only freedom that Republicans are trying to take away is reproductive.
00:23:30.120
Well, actually, reproductive options, including IPF.
00:23:32.520
So the only thing that Republicans want to do is limit what women can do with their own bodies.
00:23:41.800
So Republicans have no argument about freedom, unfortunately.
00:23:46.840
I'm saying politically speaking, politically speaking, Republicans have given up freedom as
00:24:01.260
So I would say that both sides are trying to take your freedom away.
00:24:07.140
So the Republicans are definitely limiting what women would call their freedom.
00:24:14.360
I know you would call it saving a baby or, you know, not having something that God doesn't want.
00:24:21.320
So you'd have a different framing on it, but it doesn't matter what your framing is.
00:24:33.080
I'm saying that to the Democrats, he has a completely credible argument that Republicans
00:24:46.600
He said, no matter how much you hate it, it doesn't matter.
00:24:50.660
No matter how much you say, he's using the wrong words, he should call it, we want to
00:25:01.160
So his people think you're trying to take their freedom.
00:25:08.180
So they're telling their people that birth control will be banned next.
00:25:14.500
How many of you would like to ban birth control?
00:25:21.920
Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope.
00:25:45.520
But if Republicans are going to die on the IVF hill, they deserve to lose.
00:25:55.380
I mean, if you're going to do something, you're just going to hand it to them.
00:26:02.140
But the other team deserves to lose, too, because they're running Biden.
00:26:05.940
Who runs Biden if they think they should try to earn the election?
00:26:27.420
And I think the Republicans should take a note from that.
00:26:32.400
So here's how the Democrats are taking your freedom.
00:26:37.460
Now remember, this is just the framing that the opposing party would put on.
00:26:48.140
He's limiting it on the, or at least the government is limiting it on the platforms.
00:26:56.560
And the open borders are sort of taking away your freedom to be safe in your own country.
00:27:01.820
Now, that's not an explicit freedom, but we had it before.
00:27:13.820
So I think the Republicans could probably say more about the Democrats taking your freedom.
00:27:29.040
So Jerry Nadler came up to Biden afterwards and said,
00:27:32.960
nobody's going to talk about cognitive impairment now.
00:27:37.720
Jerry, you were just talking about cognitive impairment.
00:27:40.540
As you were saying, nobody's going to talk about cognitive impairment.
00:27:43.100
You can't say nobody's going to talk about cognitive impairment when you're talking about it.
00:27:54.500
And Nadler's basically saying, well, it's the first thing I was thinking about.
00:28:04.300
Paul Krugman is sort of the economic wing of the turd caucus.
00:28:07.880
Yes, the turd caucus are the Democrats who are willing to say the most absurd lies
00:28:14.800
that even other people who agree with them on most of stuff would never say in public.
00:28:26.220
The whole Biden is too old thing was kind of a bubble
00:28:29.200
in the sense that people were buying it mainly because other people were buying it.
00:28:37.880
Well, I don't think we saw something that tells us the big picture
00:28:50.180
You tell me what drugs were in his system, and I'll tell you
00:28:53.140
if I'm concerned about his dementia at his age.
00:29:01.100
saw an old man yelling at a teleprompter, and it didn't look good.
00:29:05.280
And everybody who's trying to pretend he's not too old
00:29:08.480
saw him in command and full of energy and seizing the moment and winning the day.
00:29:25.380
State Senator Katie Britt is some kind of a rising GOP star,
00:29:34.120
I would like to give you my impression of listening to Katie Britt give the rebuttal.
00:30:01.260
Her voice and her charisma are like anti-charismatic.
00:30:14.040
Now, if I'm saying that, now remember, I'd like to see the Republicans do well in this election.
00:30:27.160
And then one of the other, I forget who, one of the women in Congress, I think,
00:30:39.240
So the Republicans finally, you know, which I suppose is not,
00:30:45.440
I'm sure they've had women do the response before,
00:30:47.860
but it's, you know, if they're trying to show that they're open-minded,
00:30:58.900
And then have her dressed, you know, semi, you know, maybe like business casual,
00:31:05.900
but something you might have been wearing in the kitchen as well?
00:31:19.620
I mean, there's a reason she did relatively well.
00:31:22.420
I would consider Haley a very good, very good public speaker, above average.
00:31:33.140
Yeah, she's not ready, and she doesn't sound like a serious person, actually.
00:31:40.060
All right, so that didn't work out for the Republicans.
00:31:42.440
Tucker Carlson is doubling down on saying that Biden can't win,
00:31:54.880
And he says that they're basically saying it out loud,
00:32:11.320
And how he is out there in public talking about getting rid of IDs for voting
00:32:16.960
and doing more mail-in ballots and basically everything that makes your vote less credible?
00:32:23.980
So he's literally out there just strongly promoting things that really don't have a purpose other than cheating.
00:32:34.980
And to even pretend there's some other purpose other than cheating is a little too far.
00:32:43.560
I can't wrap my brain around the fact that there's any legitimate reason to not require ID.
00:32:49.640
You know, the whole black people don't have ID thing is beyond absurd.
00:32:58.600
I don't want to get more votes from people who can't figure out how to get an ID.
00:33:07.520
If you were to talk to black American voters, you say, you know, hey, sir, do you vote?
00:33:14.900
Well, as a voter, do you think that black voters, black people who can't get an ID,
00:33:26.280
I don't know, actually, but what would a black voter say to the idea that black people who can't get an ID
00:33:53.520
Do you think somebody who doesn't have a government ID is worried about being disenfranchised?
00:34:00.600
That might be the last thing they're worrying about.
00:34:11.400
I don't have a way to buy things without cash, and cash is going to go away.
00:34:15.340
No, you have much bigger problems than being disenfranchised from voting for somebody you haven't paid attention to.
00:34:27.320
So, Tucker's right, but the funniest thing he said was he referred to Chris Hayes on MSNBC,
00:34:34.180
and I quote, as the most famous lesbian in television.
00:34:58.980
Now, the thing is, that's not an insult to lesbians, is it?
00:35:07.600
I don't believe anybody's trying to insult lesbians with that.
00:35:11.620
It's more like Chris Hayes is just morphing to whatever he needs to be.
00:35:17.360
So, to me, it just sounds like a Chris Hayes insult that's kind of funny.
00:35:21.760
But I wouldn't say it if I thought it was intended to be insulting to lesbians.
00:35:41.280
because it's, you know, kind of a crappy neighborhood.
00:35:49.900
There's no such thing as that dangerous gay neighborhood,
00:35:52.240
or the lesbian neighborhood where they didn't clean up their yard or something.
00:35:59.300
Probably if you were going to, you know, just be a jerk and rank people,
00:36:08.420
what do you want a citizen to contribute to the world,
00:36:19.460
But, you know, everybody, every interest group can go too far.
00:36:31.960
neither my uncle nor my father would recognize the version of America that we have today.
00:36:36.300
And he talks about we're becoming a nation of chronic illness.
00:36:39.040
So I mentioned this, and violence and loneliness.
00:36:40.960
He also mentioned the loneliness and depression.
00:36:46.180
You know, I think this whole loneliness and depression thing
00:36:55.940
You know, your first thought is, well, go make a friend.
00:37:13.580
You know, and by friend, I mean somebody who comes over to your house
00:37:17.900
and you go over to their house, that sort of thing.
00:37:32.080
Well, I would like to offer some possibilities.
00:37:38.540
One is, you know, we spend a lot of time on our devices, of course, the obvious.
00:37:42.640
But I think people don't have anything in common anymore.
00:37:50.500
We're so divided and so different in our interests.
00:37:54.020
It's hard to find somebody that you want to spend time with on a regular basis
00:38:05.340
It's funny that this used to be true and it's not anymore.
00:38:08.280
Do you all remember a day when, if you got invited to a party,
00:38:12.640
it didn't matter what the politics of the host were?
00:38:26.200
But after Trump, I lost 100% of, you know, my Democrat-only friends.
00:38:38.500
So that just, you know, wiped out most of my social life.
00:38:42.980
Yeah, and then you've got the dating problem as well.
00:38:45.840
So there are pretty good reasons why we're lonely.
00:38:49.680
And a lot of it has to do with being, you know,
00:38:52.460
out of shape and having chronic illness and all that stuff.
00:38:58.100
I think our food supply is everything from our health care costs
00:39:02.200
to our quality of living to depression to anxiety.
00:39:06.200
So there's another story in the OSINT Defender account I saw.
00:39:18.920
who sold a whole bunch of top-secret military things to China for $42,000.
00:39:25.380
It makes me wonder, does China have any problem at all buying our secrets?
00:39:38.400
about our air defenses and stuff like that, our technology,
00:39:44.460
I mean, don't you think that China just has everything?
00:39:56.160
So I don't know if this is, you know, he's innocent until proven guilty,
00:40:17.880
Now, that doesn't mean the bill has been voted on.
00:40:20.200
It's just the panel that's coming up with the bill
00:40:22.160
that could ban TikTok from all U.S. phones and tablets if enacted.
00:40:34.880
Do you think that's going to get voted on and it's going to get banned?
00:40:42.300
only if ByteDance doesn't sell it to an American interest.
00:40:48.540
Now, my information as of this morning is that there's no buyer.
00:41:04.440
Now, I just don't think there's any chance of it happening.
00:41:13.020
Is there any chance that the larger Congress and Senate
00:41:25.180
and there might be people who are working for China.
00:41:30.860
who don't want to ban it because of free speech.
00:41:38.840
So you know that typically I love my Rand Paul,
00:41:57.680
However, it's not really a free speech question.
00:42:13.000
who captured a U.S. citizen in a foreign country
00:42:16.940
and the terrorist was probably going to kill them