Episode 736 Scott Adams: Bloomberg, Bader, Blunts, Cybertruck, Elbonia and Coffee
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Hey everybody!
It's so good to see you.
Like always, every time I see you, it's the best day ever.
This is no exception.
I know why you're here.
It probably has something to do with the little thing I call the simultaneous...
Sip! And it goes like this.
To prepare, if you're new here, these instructions will be very important.
If you've been here before, this will sound a lot like those pre-flight instructions where they tell you how to hook your seatbelt because you didn't know that.
All you need for this The Simultaneous Sip is a cupper among our glasses, snifter, stein, jealous, tanker, thermos, flask, canteen, grail, goblet, vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
Join me now, Oilers Builder 3, for the Simultaneous Sip.
Go! Go! There's a comment going by that I agree with, but I'm not going to say it.
All right. How many of you have already ordered your copy of LucerThink, already being touted as the greatest book ever written in the history of books?
That's right. People are saying...
See what I did there?
People are saying...
People unspecified.
Anonymous sources say, LoserThink is the best book ever written.
Now, that might be hyperbole, but I think it's directionally true.
Please buy it. That's the best way you can support my Periscopes if you like these things.
Anyway, let's talk about some other things.
If you haven't noticed...
If you have not noticed, I tweeted a Dilbert comic today, which in and of itself is not unusual.
I'll bet I tweet a Dilbert comic every day.
But there are some unusual things about this one.
It's about the country of Elbonia.
I would like to read it to you now.
You can see this at Dilbert.com.
You can also see it on my Twitter feed.
It starts with the boss...
Entering the room and seeing Dilbert, and the boss says to Dilbert, and I quote, we're moving our manufacturing operations to Albania to save money.
Dilbert asks, are you worried about the Albanian government's reputation?
And the boss says, nah, I try to stay out of the weeds.
Dilber says they're building concentration camps and rounding up dissenters.
They intentionally poisoned 100,000 people in this country.
They are habitual stealers of intellectual property, and they routinely ignore agreements they have signed.
And they have a well-known goal of weakening other countries so they can dominate the world.
And in the final panel, the boss says, why can't you just admit I'm saving money?
Now, you might ask yourself, what's the blowback going to be?
Well, we don't know yet.
But I'll tell you a couple of things.
I've already heard reports that people tried to like it with the like button, and the like button was turning off as soon as they hit it.
So, I would be interested, if any of you have the experience, of being unfollowed from me or trying to like this comic and it gets unliked automatically.
Let me know. Put it in the comments to the comic itself and I'll check it.
Now here's another little interesting thing.
Every day I post my comic.
Every day. So, that's important to the story.
Every single day, I go through the same process to publish my comic, you know, in social media.
I put it on Twitter and LinkedIn.
And the process is always the same.
I have a standard URL, and I just change, you know, the one or two digits for the today's date.
Only one time has that URL not worked.
Meaning it's a URL that my syndication company gave to me, specifically for this purpose, and all I ever need to do is change the digits for today's date.
Today's the only day it didn't work.
Today, to post it, I had to post it as tomorrow's date.
Now, is that a coincidence?
Only one time it's ever not worked.
And it was this one. I don't know.
Is that a coincidence? Let me ask you this.
Do you think this comic will make any difference in the world?
There's a non-zero chance that this Dilbert comic just took 1% off of China's GDP. If you think that's an exaggeration, let me remind you that That the Dilbert comic has been used for decades to tell senior management what not to do.
It's one of its greatest powers, is it embarrasses people away from doing things that were stupid ideas.
Now, you can build your factory in China if nobody's brought up the fact that it's a bad idea.
You can do all kinds of bad behaviors in corporate America if nobody points it out.
But as soon as it's pointed out, it's a little harder to do the bad behavior.
You need to be ignored if you're going to get away with bad behavior.
And if it's called out in a bright Sunday Dilber comic that moving your company to Elbonia, let's say, could be supporting a triple Holocaust regime.
Now, I call China a triple holocaust because if the reports are true, they are using the Falun Gong folks for body parts, selling their organs, killing them on demand.
This is just the allegations.
I'm not there myself.
I can't say for sure what's happening in China.
So that would be one Holocaust.
Then, of course, there's the rounding up of the Uyghurs, putting them in concentration camps and assigning rapists to the wives that have been left behind.
I didn't make that up.
This is the report.
Again, you can't know exactly what's happening over there.
But the report is that China is assigning a new husband, actually a rapist, To sleep with the wife when the husband is taken away to the concentration camp.
These are the Uyghurs. So that's the second Holocaust.
The third Holocaust is, of course, the fentanyl that they're shipping to this country and could stop.
Now, I know somebody else will ship it here if they don't, but it doesn't stop the fact that they're shipping it here and it's killing tens of thousands of people.
So China is a triple Holocaust country.
And I thought I would make it a little harder to do business there.
So that's what the Dilbert comic is intended to do.
It's intended to shame anybody who wants to move a factory there.
Because if you are, you're moving it to a country with an ongoing triple holocaust.
One of those holocausts is against this country.
And one of them killed my stepson.
So, fuck you, China.
Fuck you. Sorry, I forgot your kids are home today.
Sue, don't let your kids watch the coffee with Scott Adams.
Alright, there was a mystery that was solved for me today.
I've had this...
You know I often talk about President Trump being good at picking up free money.
So there are a number of situations in which Trump takes something that anybody could have taken.
It's just laying there. It's free money.
And everybody walks past it, except Trump looks down and says, hey, free money?
Nobody? Nobody? Okay, I'll take it.
One of those examples was when he created Space Force and gave it a name.
I've been saying that some president was going to create a Space Force You know, that was inevitable.
There's no way we would not someday have something like a Space Force.
And whether or not this was the perfect time to do it or not, It's so Trump-like that he picked it up.
It was like free money. There's some president who will be famous forever for being the person who created Space Force.
It's free. All right, I'll create a Space Force.
So he seems to just pick up free money off the floor or off the table every time he sees it.
And there was one glaring example of A free money that I always didn't understand why he didn't pick it up.
And that's the legalization of marijuana.
Is there anybody here who thinks President Trump would not be benefited By saying, let's just take the federal government out of it.
Whatever you states want to do is up to you.
But the federal government is just going to get out of the marijuana business.
Who among you thinks that would be a bad idea, given that the states, the states could still do what they want.
They could still make it illegal.
They could make it legal. It's just up to the states.
I can't think of anybody who would think that's a bad idea.
And then I saw a clip on Smirconish.
In which Matt Gaetz was the guest, and the topic was marijuana legalization, and Smirkanish played a clip of Kellyanne Conway speaking out against it, which I didn't know about that.
I didn't know that Kellyanne Conway was against legalizing marijuana.
Her argument was...
That the new strains of marijuana are not your grandfather's marijuana.
They're so much stronger that it's essentially something you need to rethink because now marijuana is so strong that it's not like old marijuana.
Then I come back to Matt Gaetz and Smirkanish asked him for his comment on Kellyanne Conway's idea that marijuana should not be legalized.
And Matt Gaetz Your future president looks into the camera and he says, okay, boomer.
All right, seriously, could that have been better?
And then he goes on to very eloquently explain why marijuana should not be criminalized, and that is just old thinking.
Now, I don't know...
I don't know all the ways that I love this interaction, but it's a lot of ways.
First, I loved it because it was really effective.
A lot of people, including me, hate that OK Boomer thing.
I hate to hear it.
But I've never seen it applied so effectively.
Because you don't expect it to come out of a congressman.
You don't expect it to come out of a congressman when he's talking about somebody who is a close ally.
So Matt Gaetz is pretty close to President Trump.
He's one of his closer confidants.
And Kellyanne Conway, of course, is as close as you can get to Trump.
So they're both in the sort of inner ring of the Trump administration.
And Matt Gaetz just OK boomered her on CNN. Now, was that fair?
Totally. Totally.
The reason he can get away with that is that he's 100% right.
If he were only 99% right, well, maybe there'd be some risk involved.
You know, you don't want to go after a cohort, somebody who's on your same team, unless you're 100% right, which he is.
Politically, legally, medically, he's 100% right.
And she's 100% wrong.
So I think the I think the mystery is solved.
It's Kellyanne Conway who is preventing President Trump from picking up free money.
Free money just sitting there on the floor, and President Trump won't pick it up.
My guess is that Kellyanne Conway is the main voice preventing him from doing that.
Matt Gaetz is trying to fix that.
We'll see who wins.
But there's no doubt about who's right.
In this case, it's Gaetz.
All right. So the reporting today is that Michael Bloomberg plans to officially get into the 2020 Democratic race like right away.
It might happen today.
He's bought $37 million worth of ads.
Now, do you remember what my prediction was?
So my prediction was, and still is, that he's not getting into the race.
Now, I'm going to stay with the prediction because I don't think it's fair to change it, you know, right before it happens.
So I want to be, you know, wrong, cleanly.
So I want to be either completely right or completely wrong.
So I'm going to keep the prediction.
If the reporting is correct, I'll be completely wrong.
I'm going to still keep my prediction.
Here's the basis of my prediction.
I don't believe Michael Bloomberg is a total idiot.
All the evidence suggests that he's not a total idiot.
If he gets in the race, I'll be proven wrong.
He'll be a total idiot.
Because he's not going to win.
He's not going to fix anything.
He's going to spend millions of dollars and he's going to weaken the Democratic Party.
I don't know. There's just nothing right about it.
Now, of course, it could be some clever plan to get Biden out of the race.
And make Warren and Bernie lose support?
I don't know. I don't even think he would.
So maybe it's like some clever four-dimensional chess kind of thing where he's not trying to win the presidency.
He's trying to change the candidate or something.
But I don't think so.
I think it's possible the age has gotten to him.
He's 77. Maybe he's not making good decisions.
Because this doesn't look like a good decision, does it?
Now, keep in mind that if he had been in from the beginning, or even early in the process, I wouldn't have this opinion.
It's just that he's joining now that makes it look like bad decision-making.
So maybe he's doing it to lower his taxes because he doesn't want Elizabeth Warren to be his president.
So Amy Klobuchar commented on Bloomberg maybe getting into the race and saying, I'm paraphrasing, do we need someone richer as president?
Imagine you're the Democrats.
Imagine you're the Democrats and your savior is another billionaire who's richer than Trump.
How does that go over?
How does your party like another old white billionaire?
Is there anything that the Democratic Party is asking for less than a very old white billionaire?
I don't think there's anything they want less than that.
Nothing. So, he's not doing them any favors.
Somebody smarter than me pointed out that there are another few problems with Bloomberg.
One of those problems is that he owns a media empire.
So he owns a gigantic news organization.
Now, the first problem, of course, is that you'd expect his own news organization to be unable to cover him objectively, right?
Yeah, I know. I see what you're saying.
Somebody in the comments, predictably, is saying he's not white, he's Jewish.
I don't know. Is that just a racist thing?
Is that just being racist to say that Jewish is not white?
I see that in the comments.
I don't know what to make of that.
That just looks racist to me.
But... Whatever.
All right. I don't know the particulars of that.
So, what was I saying?
Oh, Bloomberg. He owns a media empire, but here's the problem.
It's not just that his own media empire would, of course, have a bias in his favor, which makes an entire media group completely...
Completely, you know, out of the picture, at least in terms of credibility, but it's worse than that.
So somebody smart pointed out that if you're a journalist and you think you might ever want to work for Bloomberg, because remember, the big news organizations are only a few of them, you know, CNN, Fox News, Bloomberg.
So let's say you lean left and you're a high-end journalist or want to be one.
Are you going to take on Mike Bloomberg?
Because someday you might need to work for Bloomberg.
They hire a lot of people.
And the answer is, you probably wouldn't.
So Bloomberg is a weird entrant, because not only is he a billionaire, but he owns a media empire.
I just don't see how the Democrats are going to think that's appropriate.
To use the word that could get you impeached, it doesn't seem...
Appropriate. Now, of course, anybody can run for president, but I would think that if you own one of the biggest media empires in the country, voters should take that into consideration.
That's not really a fair...
That's not a fair race if one of them owns a media empire.
That's not fair. Fairness, of course, is not a real thing, but people will imagine they see it.
All right, there's a little controversy about Elizabeth Warren was asked about her plan to, I guess she wants to do away with school choice and just make public school for everybody, and somebody asked her about her own kids.
And she said, my kids went to public schools.
She said she sent her kids to public schools.
And then somebody found out that one of her kids, for some of the years, not all of them, was in a private school.
Did she lie?
Is it a lie to say, my kids went to public schools, when in fact all of her kids went to public schools?
One of them also went to a private school after the kid had gone to public school.
Is that a lie? It's as close as you can get to a lie.
It's a lie by omission.
So it's a special kind of lie.
But she's getting some heat for that.
It did seem a little out of character.
And I think... Here's the problem with being a lawyer.
I'm going to make you a prediction.
I don't know if a lawyer will ever be president again.
Because the way that lawyers interact with the public is lawyerly.
And we don't love lawyerly.
You know, I think Obama got away with it, but he might be the last one.
And I can't see a lawyer beating Trump, can you?
Can you imagine Trump running for election versus anyone who's ever been a lawyer?
It just feels like a landslide material there.
All right. Let's talk about the Tesla Cybertruck.
Now, I saw some other people commenting very similar to how I'm going to comment.
I wondered if people's first impression, which often was negative of the new Tesla truck because it's a very unusual design, I wondered if people's first negative impression would fairly rapidly evolve into, okay, that's kind of cool, I want one.
And so I was also tracking that with myself.
So my first impression when I saw it, the very first time, I was like, Oh, I was expecting more from that truck.
You know, I thought it would look a little cooler or something.
And then I saw the name of it, Cyberpunk.
And I thought, oh, it's not even named with a name that makes even sense in 2019.
It's like, who designed it?
And then the next day I looked at it and I thought, huh, I'm kind of interested in this thing.
I'd like to see it from another angle.
And then I clicked another link because it was going to tell me some of its special features.
And I looked at its special features and I thought, huh, these are kind of cool features.
There's a thing where you can close the top automatically and so solid you can walk on it.
There's a camping option where a camping stove will run off the battery.
I thought, huh, those are pretty cool.
And then, you know, I saw pictures of the inside of the cockpit.
It looks like it's all just a big iPad-looking thing.
There's no regular console.
And I looked at the steering wheel.
It's like a jet steering wheel, you know, with not a round circle steering wheel.
It's like a little jet steering wheel.
And I was like, huh, huh, yeah.
And 24 hours...
After telling myself that was an ugly damn thing that nobody, including me, would ever want to own?
I kind of want one.
I kind of want one.
So, whatever damn magic it is that Elon Musk puts into his products, I will never understand it, I don't think.
But how did he make me want something?
That I really don't want.
Yeah, Cyberpunk just seems like the wrong name.
I would not want any vehicle of mine associated with those words.
So that part's just a mistake, I think.
I think we can all agree that the name of the product is a complete mistake.
I wouldn't say that normally, because usually things are somewhat subjective, and there's a little bit of good and a little bit of bad and everything.
But the name Cyberpunk, or is it Cybertruck, or whatever it is, it's just wrong.
It's just a mistake.
But, having said that, I'm kind of falling in lust with it.
So much so, that I looked at a regular truck Some of you know that I've been looking at trucks forever.
It's impossible to buy a truck because you could never test drive the one you want to buy.
You have to test drive a different one.
And I'm not willing to spend $50,000 on a truck without driving it first.
And they can't seem to be able to create a business model that lets you test the thing you're actually going to buy.
They test the thing you don't want to buy.
So, I looked at, like, some standard trucks.
I was looking at a Ram truck, and I was thinking, yeah, that Ram truck looks pretty cool.
You know, I looked at some of the features.
Yeah, that's a good-looking truck.
Maybe I'll buy that truck.
And then I saw another picture of the Tesla truck, and damn it, it made the regular truck look old.
Try this experiment.
Look at the Cybertruck.
Yeah, it's Cybertruck, not Cyberpunk.
But look at the Cybertruck and whichever name it is, if it's got cyber in it, it's the wrong name.
So look at the Cybertruck and spend a few minutes just sort of clicking on its features and stuff.
Then do this experiment.
Then go look at a regular truck and see what you feel.
This won't work for all of you.
But for a lot of you, The moment you go back and look at the traditional looking truck, it's going to look old.
And that happened in 24 hours.
In 24 hours, Tesla made regular trucks look a little old.
So, we'll see.
I don't think we can predict yet how the Tesla truck will do, but I certainly wouldn't hold it against either Elon Musk or Tesla that that test of the bulletproof window didn't work the way he wanted it to.
Because who needed a bulletproof window anyway?
It wasn't like high on the list.
It was kind of cool if it worked.
And I think it would still stop a lot of things.
So I think he got a lot of attention for it.
All right, let's talk about Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
She went to the hospital for some, I don't know, fairly minor-ish things that would be minor if you were not 86 years old, but they had to airlift her in just to be cautious.
And I thought, do you know how much money, and this is, I shouldn't laugh at it, but do you know how much money is going to be spent in the next 12 months trying to keep Ruth Bader Ginsburg alive?
And I mean that...
I'm not trying to...
I don't know how to say this without sounding inappropriate, so I'll just go ahead and sound inappropriate.
If Ruth Bader Ginsburg...
Should end her life, not end her life, but should the end of her life arrive sometime soon, it's going to be the biggest political event ever, of course.
And, you know, I wouldn't want that to overshadow the fact that a human being would be dying in that case.
Certainly a dedicated public servant for many years.
So we should fully respect her, but you can't ignore the fact that her mortality Is the headline.
So they airlifted her for a fever.
Do you know how much it costs to airlift somebody?
It's pretty expensive.
But they airlifted her for a fever.
So they're going to spend a lot of money keeping her alive.
I would like to suggest that we modify the Constitution to make 80 the mandatory retirement age.
Anybody with me? Supreme Court, make the age of 80 mandatory retirement.
Who's with me? There's no reason life has to really mean the last year of your life when there's not much left.
I think 80 is fine.
You know, that's even generous.
Let's just time it down at 80.
President, too. I think the president should stop at 80.
Let's see, what else we got on here?
Not much. It's going to be one of those...
Yeah, it looks like there's not much else happening.
So we've devolved into the two-movie theory on impeachment, or sham-peachment, as I like to call it.
And I've been telling you for a while that part of the reason that we see two movies on one screen is that each news source is telling a different story.
So, you know, the conservative news is saying, well, it looks like there was nothing there.
On this year impeachment, and the CNNs and MSNBC are like, well, there's so much there, he's certainly impeachable.
So you can see perfectly what I've been telling you, that people get their opinions assigned to them by the media.
Now, that doesn't mean 100% of the people, but close to it.
Most of us, including all of us, have opinions that were assigned to us by our preferred media sources and the people who are influential on those sides.
So you can see that now, and it's a weird thing when you see it so clearly.
All right, a lot of agreement for 80 as the mandatory retirement age.
All right.
Yeah, it looks like everybody's agreeing on 80.
Somebody says 70.
I think 70 might be too young these days.
I'm very curious how all feel at 70, because it's not that far away.
The justices usually know when to retire.
Oh, I don't think they do.
So the problem is, it's sort of like having a couple of drinks.
You know you shouldn't have 10 drinks unless you've had four drinks.
If you've had four drinks, suddenly you can't remember you're not supposed to have 10 drinks.
So I think being in your 80s does make you incapable of knowing you should retire, even if you should retire.
I think you would be incapable of knowing.
What's the next bombshell?
Well, good question.
Let us speculate.
The next bombshell I don't know.
I think they're going to have to ride this impeachment thing for a while to watch it blow up in their faces, which it is.
Did you all see the clip of Schiff doing his almost crying because he was so sad about impeachment?
You know, his final thing he said at the end of the testimonies, just before he bangs his gavel, he starts to tear up and he feels so sad for the country.