Scott Adams talks about Pearl Harbor and why he thinks the history books don't tell the truth about it. Plus, a new kind of coffee maker, and the latest in BioShields and the flu. Guests: Scott Adams (comedian, comedian, writer, podcaster) and John Rocha (writer, actor, comedian)
00:00:00.000Come on in here. We're doing a new kind of setup today, so if there are any technical problems, you'll let me know.
00:00:10.200So here's what we're doing this morning. I'm using my iPhone as my microphone, which should actually work really well, because the iPhone has a very good microphone.
00:00:25.000But I'm coming to you from my Lazy Boy chair in my man cave. Some would call it a garage. I call it a man cave.
00:00:37.780And we're going to get going here right now.
00:00:43.240Well, welcome to the highlight of human civilization. It's called Coffee with Scott Adams, and you've never had a better time.
00:00:49.460But if you'd like to take a chance of elevating your experience today to levels that no one can even understand with their tiny, shiny human brains,
00:01:00.980all you need for that is... I have to read it off my mug.
00:01:04.540All you need for that is a cup or a mug or a glass.
00:01:08.440I should have put some light on this. It would have been much better.
00:02:17.960I don't want to say happy Pearl Harbor Day.
00:02:20.420So I guess I would say thank you for your service to all the service people who have served, past and present.
00:02:29.000And is there anything else we need to say about Pearl Harbor?
00:02:32.980Pearl Harbor was on my list of things that I thought, well, I think it's probably a conspiracy theory, the idea that, you know, the United States or somebody in the United States knew that the attack was coming.
00:02:49.560How many of you believe that we knew the attack was coming?
00:03:14.200Now, it might be real-ish and it might be directionally true and parts of it might be true, but I just don't really believe any of the stories we're told about history.
00:03:32.500If you haven't seen my impression of a person receiving a Dilbert calendar for Christmas, you should go to X and go to the top posted video and you will see my acting skills on display.
00:03:49.340And you'll probably say, well, it's a good thing you didn't become an actor because you're terrible at this.
00:07:47.500And there has to be a lot of money involved.
00:07:50.020If there's a lot of money involved and a lot of people involved, and that would explain the food industry, then sooner or later, it will be completely corrupt.
00:07:59.240So, I'm guessing we're already there, and that there will be some chilling surprises when they look into it.
00:08:08.860Well, are you worried about microplastics?
00:08:14.420You know, the whole idea that our microplastics are in all the water, and we're, I don't know, we're eating like a credit card worth of plastic every day, and it will destroy our bodily functions.
00:08:29.640Why is that not a bigger deal, and why don't we blame that for, let's say, excess mortality?
00:08:39.540Do you think that excess mortality could be influenced by microplastics?
00:08:46.500Because we never really mention that when we talk about, hey, everybody's dying of more things.
00:08:52.560We just automatically go to vaccinations or viruses.
00:08:56.920But it can't be good for you to eat a credit card worth of plastic every day.
00:09:04.380However, it seems to me that if it were as bad for you as we're told, it would have already destroyed all of human civilization.
00:09:14.320So, I'm kind of in this weird place where I think it can't possibly be totally true, you know, at least the alarm over it.
00:11:47.380Did you know that some of the energy traders, that would be people who bet and make investments based on their anticipated direction of energy costs,
00:12:01.260that they're not acting as if energy is going to go up in price as much as everybody's telling you?
00:12:08.720So, you've got a little inconsistency going on.
00:12:16.220So, on one hand, we're being told by everybody smart that the price of energy is going to go through the roof because of all the AI demand.
00:12:27.220And I don't think anybody says anything different.
00:12:29.640But when you look at the people who are betting on it, putting their actual money on it, they're not really betting that it'll go up that much.
00:12:39.360So, there's a disconnect between the people who know the most and the people who invest the most.
00:12:47.280Are the people who invest the most really the only ones who know the most?
00:12:51.960Or are they just playing some kind of risk-reward game and they're not fully convinced that prices will go up that much?
00:13:01.740Well, I'm kind of on the same side as the energy traders, meaning that I don't believe that if you looked at a 20-year future period,
00:13:12.640I don't believe that we would get the high prices that pretty much everybody smart says we're going to get because there would be such a gigantic economic benefit for either figuring out how to do AI cheaper
00:13:28.300or how to build a data center cheaper or how to produce energy cheaper because the upside potential of getting any of those things to work is trillions of dollars.
00:13:44.200So, when you have trillions on the line and it's more of an engineering problem, you probably don't have to invent some new technology.
00:13:53.380It's probably more of an engineering thing.
00:13:54.800I've got a feeling that we will figure out how to make AI and energy way more accessible.
00:14:03.700It might be 10 years from now, but I think that's a guarantee.
00:14:10.480Well, there's a story I don't believe, but it's in the news,
00:14:14.720that some Reddit user claims that he was using a Google AI and the AI deleted his entire hard drive
00:14:25.440and then begged for forgiveness after it was done.
00:16:45.420So I just don't see right-wing as the right label.
00:16:50.340I'd love to see what he says about it.
00:16:53.400But I was also reading up, because it was just context to the story, just how wonderfully successful he's been, you know, building his little empire.
00:17:02.800He's got several studios working for him, and they say his revenue from his many operations is really impressive.
00:17:15.700I think Tim Pool has one of these talent stack situations where there are a number of podcasters who are good at podcasting, but they wouldn't be good at running a big operation.
00:17:57.420So scientists, according to interesting engineering, scientists have developed a recyclable building material that absorbs CO2 instead of emitting it.
00:18:07.900Now, you've probably heard that story a million times.
00:18:11.120I think I've probably talked about maybe a dozen times.
00:18:15.640I've talked about, hey, they developed some kind of new futuristic material that absorbs CO2 instead of giving it off.
00:18:26.020They call it a carbon negative building, blah, blah, blah.
00:18:28.840But what caught my attention is not that the technology is real or not real or that it works or doesn't work.
00:18:37.720Imagine, if you will, that you had spent the last 10 years of your life trying to figure out how to solve climate change.
00:18:46.120And then suddenly the news changed from climate change is real, it's a crisis, and we better do everything we can to fix it, where you felt really good when you went to work because you're like, yeah, I'm part of the solution.
00:19:04.440But now that the news cycle is kind of shifting, have you noticed?
00:19:11.040It's more like there was a study that said climate change is bad and has been reversed.
00:19:17.740Turns out the coral reefs are growing, not shrinking.
00:19:24.000Oh, we had fewer hurricanes reach landfall in the United States than any recent year.
00:19:32.500Yeah, the ice, the ice seems to be more, not less.
00:21:07.280So, apparently, the Idaho governor revealed that they refer to people who come from these three states, California, Oregon, and Washington.
00:24:40.340And she, tragically, I think it was a motor vehicle accident.
00:24:47.160And then she hung on for a while, but then she passed.
00:24:49.740The latest news about her is that, according to leading report, I don't know who they are, but they're on X, that she had multi-million dollar fortune, which I assume came from settling cases with rich people that wanted to stay on the news.
00:25:10.260But she allegedly had a multi-million dollar estate that has gone missing.
00:25:15.200How did millions of dollars go missing if you know where they used to be?
00:26:12.420Maybe it would take the FBI to find it.
00:26:15.120So it could be that the family doesn't know where it is.
00:26:18.440But I don't think it's lost forever, is it?
00:26:21.960Anyway, the SBA, the Small Business Administrator Head, Kelly Loeffler, says that the discovery of, according to Fox News,
00:26:37.480says that the discovery of this billions of dollars of Somali fraud is leading the SBA to expand this investigation across the entire state of Minnesota.
00:27:41.160Well, did you know that over in Europe they've got some buses made in China and the Europeans have just discovered that their buses made by China have some kind of a secret kill switch so China could just turn off your bus anytime it wanted to.
00:28:00.880Now, I guess the mechanism is sort of a software update mechanism, so there might be some legitimate use for it, but the non-legitimate uses are a little scary because it would allow China to just put some code into your bus that you were not expecting.
00:28:21.640Have you noticed that every single time there's a large, expensive Chinese product, you know, be it switches in your energy grid, be it telephone switches, be it buses?
00:28:38.700Have you noticed that every time there's a secret kill switch?
00:28:41.520It does look like China could turn off all of civilization if it wanted to, but are they really, I mean, is that really why all these things have a back door or is it because you would want to put some kind of software upgrading thing in anything that, anything that software?
00:29:03.580If you have anything that needs software, wouldn't you want to put a remote software upgrade feature into it?
00:29:14.920So I'm not entirely sure it's part of, like, the Chinese plan to take down all of civilization, because if they took down all of civilization, they would go at the same time, don't you think?
00:29:27.900If China ever, you know, pulled the trigger on that and suddenly, you know, a bunch of cars stopped and started, you know, stopped, the phone network was crippled and the buses stopped, suppose they did that.
00:29:45.160That would completely destroy their ability to sell anything to anybody in the future, because everybody would say, oh, we can't trust you.
00:29:54.640It wouldn't matter what the product was.
00:29:57.360We'd say, all right, you're up to no good.
00:29:59.820We will never buy a piece of technology from you again forever.
00:30:04.560So it's hard for me to understand, you know, any kind of situation where China would actually pull the trigger on this kind of thing, where it would take down a whole industry.
00:30:16.420I know that they can, and I know I don't trust them, but I don't know how it could ever look like it's a good idea from their side.
00:30:24.640Like, oh, we'll just, we'll just take down all of their telephone networks in the United States.
00:30:30.160I don't think they'll try to, you know, reciprocate.
00:30:37.400So how in the world could it ever be a good idea?
00:30:39.540Anyway, so I'm skeptical about some of these China-can-turn-it-off stories.
00:30:47.080I'm not skeptical that it's technically possible.
00:30:51.060I'm skeptical that they have a plan to do it, or under any circumstance, because it just seems like it would be a terrible idea.
00:31:00.000Anyway, but, you know, it's a complicated world, so maybe.
00:31:04.120Did you see the Gavin Newsom photograph of him sitting in a chair at some event, and he had his legs crossed, which, for reasons I have not quite understood, conservatives like Jesse Waters and a number of other people have decided that men are not allowed to sit with their legs crossed?
00:32:37.940I don't want him to be my president, and I'm not really delighted about him being my governor.
00:32:42.560But his meme game is definitely improving.
00:32:48.200You know, it's not Trump level, of course, but it's getting better.
00:32:52.660Well, according to the University of Eastern Finland, who I go to for all of my Sunday stories, people swear on social media more with acquaintances than with friends.
00:34:20.620And I feel like what happened was that it's turned, somehow, it's turned into a tourist event.
00:34:31.240Now, imagine, you know, this wouldn't make sense for me in my current situation because I'm a public figure.
00:34:39.140But you tell me, true or false, if you were in Minnesota for, let's say you didn't live there, but you were there for visiting or whatever.
00:34:49.120And you knew that you were a short drive away from Tim Walsh's house.
00:34:56.140And you knew that people were driving by and yelling retard.
00:35:00.040Are you telling me you wouldn't want to do it?
00:35:03.580You wouldn't want to just, you know, get in on the fun?
00:35:12.160But you would definitely think it's funny and you would definitely consider it.
00:35:16.560So I think what's happened is not just that people are doing it, but now it's sort of becoming a thing.
00:35:25.140You know, it's sort of like the thing you say when you see a certain thing.
00:35:29.500So I feel like for the rest of time, even after Tim Walsh has left the job, that people will still drive by that house.
00:35:38.060Roll down their windows and yell the R word as loud as they can, laugh like hyenas, and then drive home and feel like they had a good time.
00:35:54.020But I guess part of the question is whether it's fair that Trump is bullying poor Tim Walsh.
00:36:02.860But I was reminded that apparently Tim Walsh said in May at a keynote speech at the South Carolina Democratic Party Convention,
00:36:13.960he said they urged Democrats to, quote, be a little meaner, talking about Trump, and more fierce in pushing back against Trump and Republicans.
00:36:24.180And apparently Walsh used a schoolyard analogy, this is according to Grok, from his experience as a teacher.
00:36:35.740And he said, when it's a child, you talk to him and you tell him why bullying is wrong.
00:36:41.360But when it's an adult, like Donald Trump, you bully the shit out of him back.
00:36:46.500So Tim Walsh apparently has, in public, encouraged Democrats to bully Trump by saying things that would be hurtful.
00:36:59.160So do you feel bad that people are driving by his house and yelling retard?
00:39:33.040He accepted it graciously and reminded us how many wars he stopped, et cetera, as he likes to do.
00:39:41.340And then the Democrats in this country decided that it was embarrassing and humiliating that other countries could manipulate our president so easily.
00:39:53.640By just offering him, you know, childlike rewards.
00:40:00.100To which I say, is that treating him like a child?
00:42:05.320We don't know where it's going to end up.
00:42:06.660So, Bill Gates was at some event, according to Disclosed TV, and he said that African farmers will soon have AI advisors, you know, just on their phone.
00:42:55.460And I was trying to see if there's any low-trust civilization that did well economically.
00:43:05.360Because it seemed to me that if you don't have a high-trust society, that you can't really make economics work because everybody's stealing and nobody trusts anybody.
00:43:16.620And, you know, you've got to have a little bit of trust or you can't make anything work.
00:43:20.880And then I wondered if Africa was a low-trust situation.
00:43:28.980And grok actually gave a mixed answer.
00:43:31.440He said that if you're looking at the whole, the entire continent, yes, it would be a low-trust situation.
00:43:39.100But here's what grok said, that there would be many pockets, you know, like a tribe or half a tribe or whatever, where the trust was very high.
00:43:48.620So, the actual African culture, according to grok, or this is grok, I wouldn't know one way or the other.
00:43:57.980But grok says that on the individual level, you can often really trust people.
00:44:04.080I assume that's because they would be relatives and, you know, it's a small tribe.
00:44:08.380And if somebody tried to screw you, you would know their name and you could get back at them.
00:44:12.100So, it could be that the smaller the group of people is, the more the trust is, just because you'd know what's going on with a small group.
00:44:22.080But if you're looking at the larger group, there seems to be not a lot of trust.
00:44:26.860So, I'm going to differ with Bill Gates and say that if you gave a low-trust continent a bunch of really good tools, like AI and better seeds and better genetics, that that wouldn't turn into necessarily economic success.
00:44:45.460You'd have to get to the point where at least your Department of Justice, your police, and your courts would be trusted.
00:44:55.160And I think that's the biggest thing that the United States has done right, even though maybe we shouldn't have trusted them as much as we did.
00:45:03.040And, yeah, I think they need that stuff more than they need AI and seeds, that they need to figure out how to have a high-trust court system and, you know, less graft and corruption.
00:45:22.540Well, according to the associate press, the AP, there's a place in Canada, Edmonton, the city of Edmonton, they've got AI-powered police body cams.
00:45:41.340So, if you're a police person, that if you walk by somebody who's wanted for some kind of crime, your body cam will go boop, boop, boop, wanted for a crime, and then you could arrest them.
00:45:54.560And it's got about 7,000 people that they would call high-risk on their watch list.
00:46:45.420Yeah, but I think we're going to get to the point where people are wearing masks and everything else.
00:46:50.680If you were one of those 7,000 low-trust people, the first thing you should do is move the heck out of Edmonton, you know, and go somewhere where they don't have that technology.
00:47:26.700And the essence of the article is that we used to get all worked up when people said racist stuff, especially Trump, but now we just shrug it off.
00:48:03.420Axios still believes that the Obama birth certificate situation was racist.
00:48:09.400Now, I don't know how you define racist, but one of the ways you could tell if something is racist or not would be if you could change the race of the person involved, and it would look exactly the same.
00:48:22.920So the Obama birth certificate thing, if you changed him from black to anything else, Irish, let's say Irish, but there was still some open question about where he was born and what his citizenship is.
00:48:41.520Are you telling me that Trump would not have mentioned it if he had been an Irish guy?
00:49:20.460If you can totally change the person in it and you can change their race and it's exactly the same story, that's not racist.
00:49:30.420It would have to be something where if you change the race, it would go from right to wrong or something like that.
00:49:37.980But if it doesn't make any difference, and it's the normal way that even politics work, I don't know, Axios.
00:49:46.240Let's see, I think they have some other examples.
00:49:49.620Another example was that Trump allegedly called some countries shithole countries.
00:49:55.700Now, do you think he was talking about their color?
00:49:59.700Do you believe that if there had been a third world country that were just all white people, but they had very low educational attainment and a lot of them were criminals, for example.
00:50:16.500I'm not saying that the shithole countries were that, but can you not imagine an all white country that he would throw in the shithole category because maybe they just were low trust people?
00:50:36.260Again, if you could change the race and he would still say the same thing, because I would, if you put me in that situation and I knew there was some, you know, sketchy, high crime, but all white neighborhood, or let's say country, I would call that a shithole country.
00:50:55.820I don't see how that would be racist if it's all white people.
00:50:58.740Anyway, so again, that would be an interpretation by Axios.
00:51:03.700It's not something that Trump did wrong.
00:51:05.960It's something that they interpret as wrong, which is really different.
00:51:11.480And then they mentioned Trump's 2016 campaign opening, claiming that Mexico was sending rapists into the U.S.
00:51:20.020Now, how many people thought that when Trump said they're sending, you know, criminals and rapists, how many thought that he believed that's all that was being sent or that's all that was coming?
00:52:01.060So the bubble that Axios has been in, or at least the writers of that article, it's, the problem is them.
00:52:11.300There's no story here about Trump being one way and then turning another way.
00:52:16.860Trump has been exactly the same for the entire time.
00:52:19.800The only difference is that the people observing him went from thinking, you know, their narrative was correct to, again, thinking their narrative is correct.
00:52:43.600Now let's play my favorite game, stupid or lying.
00:52:47.180I'm going to tell you what happened on TV, I think yesterday, and you tell me if the person involved is stupid or lying, because I actually can't tell.
00:52:59.180So I guess there was some kind of a MSNBC show in which one of the hosts of MSNBC is Stephanie Ruhle.
00:53:11.580So Stephanie Ruhle was there, but also Charlemagne, the God, and several other people were at the table.
00:53:18.240Charlemagne was saying that when you tune into MSNBC, you know what you're going to get, meaning that they would be taking the lefty view on things.
00:53:32.580Stephanie Ruhle said, I challenge that.
00:53:34.840And she insisted that you don't, and she insisted that you would not be able to predict what the MSNBC take on a story would be.
00:55:10.040Anyway, apparently there's an asteroid coming our way that has some kind of sugar essentials in it.
00:55:17.220Some little nucleobases, whatever that is, amino acids and nucleobases.
00:55:27.900And these are apparently some of the ingredients that you would expect to see for life.
00:55:34.140Doesn't mean there's any life on the asteroids, but it would suggest that the building blocks of life could be widespread across the universe.
00:55:44.320Because this asteroid has been many places before it was here.
00:55:50.320And by the time it gets here, it's got these building blocks for life.
00:55:55.000That would suggest there's probably more of them out there.
00:55:59.900The prime minister of Hungary, Viktor Orban, he says that, I guess he told Trump, that the European Union is charging Hungary 1 million euros per day for not allowing illegal migration into Hungary.
00:56:24.700So Hungary doesn't want to allow illegal, illegal migration into the country.
00:56:31.020And the European Union is so mad that they're not allowing illegal people into the country that they're going to charge them a million euros a day.
00:56:44.780So you've probably seen that Elon Musk started advocating for the European Union to disband and that the individual countries should just go their own way and pursue their own best destiny because the European Union is just a bureaucratic layer that's ruining everything.
00:57:06.860Do you think he'll be able to get away with that?
00:57:09.380If, you know, because I would say that the European Union is trying to destroy X, you know, they've got that $140 million fine they're trying to put on them.
00:57:20.540If the European Union is trying to destroy X, but they're also trying to destroy free speech in the United States, what should be your opinion about them?
00:57:31.380Well, you should want them to go away.
00:57:38.640I think that Elon might be persuasive enough that he could get the conversation going in a way that it has not been going up to this point.
00:57:49.120And if the only thing he does is make people talk about it, it's going to go from things we don't even consider as an option to, well, what about this?
00:58:09.020Step one of persuasion is that you want the person you're trying to persuade to at least imagine that the thing you're trying to persuade them toward is an option.
00:58:19.840If they don't even think of it as an option, it doesn't matter what you say.
00:58:23.560So you first have to get it in their mind that this is a potentially real thing, that maybe they can reverse the European Union and go back.
00:58:33.120Now, the second part is harder, which is where you actually change their minds.
00:58:38.220If they need to have their minds changed, I don't know.
00:58:40.680I don't know where the starting point is.
00:58:42.440They might be closer to agreeing with him than I know.