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April 16, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
30:34
Episode 494 Scott Adams: The Fire, A Glass of Water With a D. Cher’s TDS Relapse, Divorced Dad
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Hey everybody, where are you?
Jonathan, good to see you.
Where are the rest of you?
Oh, there you are, Sharona.
Good to see you, Tyler, Andrew.
If I don't say your name, it might be because your screen name is weird.
And Caleb, good to see you.
Grab your cup, your mug, your vessel.
Your stein, your tankard, your container, your thermos.
Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of this simultaneous sip.
If I seem sleepy today, it's because I'm sleepy today.
I overslept. So I'm just catching up with things.
Of course, the big news is the fire at Notre Dame, or is it Notre Dame?
I don't know how to say that.
Notre Dame or Notre Dame?
Well, whichever is correct, it was a horrible tragedy, ripping out the heart of the French and much of the world.
It was really hard to watch.
I have to say, as fires go, I didn't know that a fire could have that much emotional content.
But I've never really quite seen anything like that beyond fire before.
It was a moment in which the entire world focused for a little while and felt bad and thought about the same thing.
And for a little while, we were all on the same page.
But, of course, like everything, it's got to have a political dimension.
And are we surprised that people are already asking the question, who did it?
Now, if you didn't see the clip of Shepard Smith shutting down...
It was a French politician he had on the air, live, talking about the fire, and...
When the French politicians started to speculate about the causes of the fire, and he mentioned that there were other church vandalizations that happened recently, so he was adding some context that a number of other churches had been vandalized recently.
And Shepard Smith immediately shut him down and ended the interview because he didn't want to start speculating That maybe it was some Islamic terrorist act.
And I thought about that, and I thought to myself, on one hand, those were just facts.
So the French politician was just adding facts.
It seems to me an important fact...
If there's a church-like fire, and the context is that there have been lots of church vandalizations recently, it seems like a relevant fact.
But at the same time, it's not connected.
So I think, you know, I thought about it all night, and I think I'm going to agree with Shepard Smith on this, that it was probably an act of For a shepherd's part, an active character and principle.
And I think I appreciated it.
You know, at the time, I thought to myself, well, wait a minute, this is information we should have.
And, you know, I suppose we'll have that information.
But just talking about that context...
Simply talking about...
No, it was Shepard Smith, for sure.
If Kavudu did it also, that was separate.
It might have been separate.
But I have to appreciate that point, because simply talking about the context makes it look like a story of Islamic terrorism, which would be a horrible thing to put into the public's mind with no factual basis.
As far as I know, there's zero factual basis.
To suggest that it was anything but an accident.
Now, you're seeing, of course, no surprise, that you're already seeing on On the social media, there's a grainy little video that seems to show somebody who may or may not be wearing traditional Islamic garb, you know, somewhere upstairs in Notre Dame.
And everybody's saying, who is this?
Does this mean something?
Well, probably, if I had to guess...
Without knowing anything about that video, if I had to guess, it's probably not even the same day.
It's probably just completely out of context.
So, it would be a tragedy to make this yet another reason for us to hate each other.
At the same time, reasonable people want to know the full context.
But unfortunately, the context makes this potentially seriously misleading.
So it's one of these weird situations where you don't want to put context on it.
Because actually putting the proper context on the story, in this case, it's weird.
But in this case, it might make it misleading.
Generally, that's the opposite.
Usually you want to add context to clarify.
In this case, it's just a weird situation that context would maybe be misleading.
All right. There's not much to say about the fire that won't be said a thousand times today, so I don't want to spend too much time on that.
Let's talk about some other stuff.
Michelle Obama recently compared President Trump to, it's like, going on the weekend to visit with divorced dad.
She actually said that.
So Michelle Obama compared Trump as an insult to As an insult, she called the president like a divorced dad.
My God. Have you ever heard a worse insult to men?
Because I don't think any man gets divorced because he wants to.
There's no man who says, oh, my plan is to go get divorced.
You know, life happens.
Things happen. Divorces happen.
And half of the people who get divorced are men, roughly speaking.
So for her to use as an insult that it's like he's a man who got divorced is a really deep insult.
I mean, that's an F-you insult, Michelle.
F-you. Yeah, so let me just say it.
Hey, Michelle. F-you.
Because that's a direct insult to just men.
I mean, there's no other way to characterize that.
It's sexist. And I personally find it insulting.
And by the way, I would not accept an apology for that.
I don't think she'll offer one.
But if she did offer an apology for insulting men, I don't think I would take it.
Because the insult was intended as an insult.
It wasn't something she said carelessly.
It was a considered statement that men suck.
And if they get divorced, somehow that's their fault, I guess.
And that they suck even worse because they got divorced.
I'm trying to hold back because I want to just completely unload on her right now.
But you've got to be a pretty bad piece of shit to say something like that in public.
I mean, that's low.
That's really fucked up.
All right, sorry, I couldn't...
I tried to not swear, because I promise you I'm trying to do less of that.
But sometimes you just have to.
And that's a messed up thing to say, really.
All right. What else is going on?
I put some things in my title so you might have to remind me because I can't see the title of my own podcast anymore.
What else is going on?
Oh, CNN has once again used a deceptive edit and once again CNN is spreading the fine people myth.
And this time I guess it was on Chris Cuomo's show and he had a guest whose name doesn't matter I'm not even going to mention the names of people who spread this hoax because I don't even want to give them attention.
I would hate to live in a world where you actually thought the fine people thing really happened.
Can you imagine that?
What would that be like to be in such a delusional state that you believed you lived in a country, like right now, that you lived in the United States and to actually believe That the president was a monster.
You know, he was like a racist monster.
Like an actual, not trying to hide it, completely overt racist monster.
The CNN guest appeared to me sincerely like she believes she's living in that reality.
When indeed, we have never been in as good a shape as we are right now.
Think about that.
The United States has never been as good as it is right now.
This is the best we've ever been.
And it looks like it's getting better.
And some part of the country thinks they're living in some kind of a gulag hell.
So yeah, somebody was pointing out Cher's comment, which of course made the news.
Let's see if I can find that.
So Cher came back.
I guess she didn't like it that one of her tweets looked like she was supporting the president's immigration policies.
That's gone already. Oh, maybe it's over on Fox News.
I'm sure it would be on Fox News.
They would like that sort of thing.
Oh, damn it, where is it?
Cher, Cher, Cher. I just saw it the other day.
Cher, Cher. There it is. Cher blasts President Trump.
All right. So the setup was that her prior tweet, she said, I understand helping struggling immigrants, but my city, Los Angeles, isn't taking care of its own.
What about the 50,000-plus American citizens who live on the streets?
So in one tweet 21 hours ago, or longer, Cher was saying that we should take care of our own instead of the immigrants.
Trump cleverly retweets Cher.
So Trump retweets it and says, I finally agree with Cher!
Which, of course, she couldn't let that stand.
So she has to follow up.
And she goes, Cher says, I agree, dot, dot, dot, that Dems still don't get that they're playing politics and Trump's playing butcher your enemies and create constant mayhem.
What has Trump done lately that looks like butchering your enemies and creating mayhem?
What would fit into that?
What the hell category would that be?
Name something he did that would fit into the category of butchering his enemies.
Giving them nicknames?
Does giving people funny nicknames now count as butchering your enemies?
And then she goes on.
He's an ignorant thug with lizard brain that guarantees his survival above all else.
If Dems are waiting for him to have an epiphany, good effing luck.
He has the heart and soul of a skeleton or death or something.
She says with an emoji.
And I'm thinking to myself, in what universe, in what reality...
Is he acting like a thug with a lizard brain with no soul?
And he's butchering his enemies.
Do any of those words have any correspondence with anything in your reality?
Let's see. Oh yeah, he butchered his enemies with prison reform.
He butchered his enemies with good jobs.
He butchered his enemies by literally reducing the military presence in other countries.
Unbelievable. Alright, what else is going on?
Can somebody remind me what I put in the title of my own Periscope?
Because I said to myself, I'll put these things in the title, and then I won't have to remember them.
But I'm going to have to look up my own Periscope.
Oh yeah. So Nancy Pelosi refers to AOC as a, she said that a glass of water with a D on it could have won the election in AOC's district.
So, and this is the second time she's minimized AOC and her, what she called five people on that side.
That was amazing.
Anyway, there's not much to say about that.
Oh yeah, I guess I covered everything.
How much else is going on?
So, once again, I'm going to make the same...
Yeah, we talked about divorce, that, and that.
So I'm going to make the same comment I made for the last few days, and I'm going to see how often this still works.
All right, remember? So CNN, of course, the stated enemy, enemy of the people.
So of course...
Their top page, which normally would be nothing but non-stop anti-Trump news, they're running out of news.
The president has taken all the news away by doing such a good job that there's nothing left to complain about.
Here's the only thing they had to complain about.
It's about six headlines down, and it says, Trump gives fire advice.
See how French officials responded.
Now, Trump also gives airplane branding advice.
Trump gives advice to everybody about everything.
And even Trump didn't have anything else to tweet about.
I mean, think about it.
Our problems are so well solved at the moment that even Trump didn't have anything to tweet about.
He ran out of tweets.
He tweeted about how to put out a fire.
I'm going to say I don't need to look at that link.
Because I don't care what he said about the fire.
I don't care what they said about what he said about the fire.
It's all they got. All right.
The rest is, of course, about the fire.
And there's literally...
Oh, I forgot the other story.
So there's another piece of fake news that's based on real news.
And the real news is terrible out of context.
When you put it in context, it's still terrible, but it's a completely different story.
There's a story about the surviving parent.
So there were a couple, one of them died in Afghanistan, the other was not a legal citizen, and they had a child.
So the one who died in Afghanistan is gone.
The surviving spouse was asked to appear at court for something.
Did not appear in court on the day because it was some mix-up with the addresses or whatever.
And ICE deported that person.
And then once they figured out what was going on, they undeported that person, and now the person's back.
So people are blaming the president for deporting this person because the president is a monster.
Now, do you really think that the president was involved in that decision?
How dumb do you have to be to think that the president was...
Let's deport the surviving spouse of a veteran.
Does anybody really think the president was somehow involved in that decision?
Secondly, the moment I saw it, I said to myself, I'm going to wait because you know this isn't what's being reported.
I just said to myself, I'm not even going to talk about this dumbass story because you know this story is not the way it's being reported.
And sure enough, there was something bad that happened and we should not be happy about it.
Somebody was deported that most of us think should not have been deported.
As soon as ICE figured out what they had done and what the problem was, they fixed it.
Now, probably there are situations in which they don't fix it, and they do make mistakes.
But let's be honest about the fact that we live in a country where ICE exists.
You want them to exist in some form, because you can't have open borders.
So you need some kind of border enforcement, and there's no such thing as that much border enforcement without some mistakes.
Now, I've said this before, but I think the way you should judge any organization or any person is not by the mistakes they make, because we all make mistakes.
If we judge people by our mistakes, we would just all hate each other, because we all make mistakes.
So it's a terrible way to judge people.
Here's a better way. Judge people by how they respond or correct their mistakes.
Because if you say, I'll only like people who don't make mistakes, well, you're going to live a very lonely life.
How about we say, everybody makes mistakes, we wish you wouldn't, but now what are you going to do about it?
ICE made a mistake, they fixed it, the only way they could.
They couldn't do more than fix it, because they couldn't travel back in time.
To me, that's as good as any organization can do.
Make your mistake, own it, fix it, move on.
That's the best we can do.
So I'm okay with ice on that one anecdote anyway.
Not a general statement.
You may have seen that I tweeted today that today is a special day for me.
I'm not sure how many people know that.
But today's the 30th anniversary of the first Dilbert published comic.
Today's my 30th anniversary.
Alexa, what is 365 times 30?
365 times 30 is 10,950.
10,950 comics.
That's how many you have to draw if you do a comic a day for 30 years.
But I've done more than that because I've also done books with original comics, etc.
So, I have probably drawn somewhere in the neighborhood of, I would say, 11,500 comics.
11,500 comic strips.
That's how many I've drawn and written.
So today is that day.
My publishing and syndication company, they asked me if we wanted to publicize this and make it a big deal.
And I demurred.
I said, let's not make this a big deal.
I like sharing it with all of you because we have a relationship.
A periscope relationship and sometimes more than that.
And so I like sharing it with you because it's a personal accomplishment.
I don't love anniversaries as a public event.
It's not meaningful to the public at large.
And so I'm not a big fan of anniversaries, but it's a milestone.
And thank you for sharing it with me.
Does it get easier or harder?
That's a good question. It gets easier in terms of technique.
So the actual execution of a strip is all easier.
But it is harder in terms of I'm more likely to wake up wishing I didn't have to do a comic today.
You know, in the first 20 years, I was happy to get up and draw a comic.
But that's a lot of comic drawing.
I wouldn't mind doing something else.
I don't know what it would be like if I didn't have that in my life.
It's such an organizing principle for half of my life.
So, I've been drawing Dilbert for half of my life.
Do-do-do...
Alright, thank you, thank you, thank you.
Is there anything else going on you want to talk about?
Given that we have...
Oh, let's talk about Bernie Sanders.
So Bernie Sanders does his town hall.
And I was very disappointed in Fox News.
Because when they talked about climate change...
I don't remember if...
I think Bernie said we should phase out nuclear...
We should phase out nuclear toward green stuff.
But here's the thing.
Neither Bernie nor the hosts, was it Brett, who was it?
Brett Baer and Martha McCallum.
What they needed to do, and this should be sort of a Sort of advice for anybody who's talking to the candidates from this point on.
If you have a conversation with a presidential candidate for president, and you do not ask them, what do you think of Generation 4 nuclear, and you let that candidate answer a question as if the nuclear power option is the old nuclear power that we already have that's problematic and even most of us would like to phase out, you know, just for danger reasons.
If you let them answer the nuclear...
Or even the climate question without directly saying, but what do you think of the new technology that doesn't have the meltdown risk and can use waste from other nuclear plants as its fuel?
What do you think of that?
If you don't ask that specific question and make sure that you've carved out that Generation 4 is not your grandpa's nuclear technology, you haven't asked the question.
So I'm going to say that Fox News, they failed on that point.
You know, their hosting duties, they failed hard.
Not only did they fail, you know, I hate to criticize the hosts of anything, but keep in mind, if climate change is the risk that we think, the risk that the scientists think, That's one of the biggest errors that civilization could ever make, which is not to inform the public and not to ask our candidates what are they doing about it when there's only one solution that we know of.
That is a big, big problem.
It's a gigantic problem.
Here's another question that hosts should ask, not just Fox News hosts, but anybody who's talking to a presidential candidate.
They should say, Do you believe that the president called the racist at Charlottesville fine people?
And they should, they should play, then if they say, yes, I believe that, then they should say, here's his actual quote.
I'm not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white supremacists.
They should be condemned totally.
And then you say to them, is that unclear to you?
Condemned totally. How do you interpret condemned totally?
Does that seem like there's some wiggle room in there?
I think that every town hall, every interviewer should ask those two questions.
The most important two questions for every candidate are, how do you feel about Generation 4 nuclear?
And do you believe that this is an unclear statement about racism?
Two biggest problems right there.
All right. Yeah.
Oh, somebody says they're seeing people start to wake from their TDS. What's a linguistic kill shot for Buttigieg?
I'm not going to tell you the linguistic kill shot for Mayor Pete because I don't think you need one.
So here's the problem.
In your mind, when you say to yourself, my God, he's a tough matchup.
Because you say to yourself, all right, Mayor Pete, you can speak all these languages.
He went to Harvard. He's an intellectual.
You know, he's so smart.
How can President Trump compete against this guy who's so smart and clever and he's good with words and, you know, he's got a great education and he's sort of an intellectual?
How do you compete with that?
Let me tell you how.
Nobody likes that shit.
If you put President Trump on a debate stage with Mayor Pete, Mayor Pete is going to have lots of little intellectual zingers.
Zing! Did you see how I made that play on words?
Zing! Gotcha! Gotcha!
How about this? Play on words!
Whoa! Whoa!
You didn't see that play on words coming!
Ha! Gotcha!
Zing! Zing!
Zing! I got you with my little word.
Word repartee.
Wah! Wah! Hey, President Trump, I know a fact you don't know.
Ha! I know a fact.
You don't know a fact. Ah!
I'm intellectual.
I'm intellectual. And then President Trump gets up there and says, I lobbed 25 missiles into Syria just for fun.
He didn't actually do that.
But... Consider the two images side by side.
And by the way, Mayor Pete is awesome.
I don't mean to insult him.
He's a smart, serious guy, veteran.
He's got a lot going on.
I mean, he's got a nice package of talents and it is not an accident that he's doing well.
So no insult to him at all.
But the matchup is going to look like Power and maturity.
The president.
Power and maturity.
And it's going to look like it's word stuff.
So you're going to see Mayor Pete having all the best words.
He's going to have vocabulary.
He's going to have cleverness.
It's going to tie together. He's going to have little sayings that you wish you said.
He's going to have a twist of a word that you're going to say, wow, that was clever.
That was a clever little thing you did there, Pete.
And he might wow us with his cleverness.
But he's going to be up against the force of nature.
If you have a choice, because we're all sort of lizard-brained, as Shara was nice enough to say, we're all a little basic as human beings.
And when you imagine the people coming at you, you imagine that you're in a world full of people who would do you harm.
The stronger character has a gigantic advantage, especially if he's coming off the best first term anybody ever came off of.
So, the President's matchup with Mayor Pete, you don't want to discount the fact that the President would be bringing power and Mayor Pete would be bringing cleverness.
So let me summarize it this way.
If you put them both on stage, you've got power and then you've got cleverness.
Power wins. Power wins if you're running for president.
Especially if you have a president.
It might have been a different situation.
Could have been a different situation if neither of them had already been president.
But coming off a hugely successful first term, cleverness doesn't buy you anything.
What is it that Mayor Pete's going to do that we need or isn't already working?
What's he going to do? Somebody said that Yang has a nuclear power plan.
That would be interesting. He would be worth a second look if he has that.
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