Episode 1258 Scott Adams: Biden Inauguration and How to Feel About it All
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Content:
The Biden inauguration
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And I'm not entirely sure how many of you are going to be on this livestream, because it's the wrong time!
Well, better late than never, wouldn't you say?
Let's try... YouTube's having a little trouble connecting here.
We'll see if we can improve that.
Well, it looks like Periscope is outperforming YouTube today.
YouTube's trying to reconnect.
You feel bad?
Do you hear an annoying buzz, somebody said?
I don't hear it.
Alright, so it looks like YouTube's not going to work.
But we don't care about that, do we?
I don't think we do.
Hey Bill, good to see ya.
All right, so I've been off the internet for more than I've been on it lately because I've been flying.
So before we talk about politics, let me tell you what it's like to try to travel during the age of COVID. Not easy.
Not easy. So Christine and I tried to squeeze in the honeymoon that we postponed because of the coronavirus.
And I am now many, many miles away from the United States.
I'll tell you where I am when I get there.
I've got another plane ride and another boat ride before I get to where I'm going.
If you think there's some buzzing on this, I'm going to be ignoring everybody who says that.
So whoever says there's buzzing on here, I'm going to start blocking you, okay?
I can't do anything about it.
I plug in the microphone, I turn it on, that's everything I can control.
So, if you've got a problem with it, please sign off, because I can't fix it.
Alright, and YouTube looks like it's not going to work at all, so let me turn that off.
Boom. Alright. So, the first thing you need to know if you're flying is we needed to get COVID tests before we flew.
Those were negative. And then when you reach your destination in this particular case, I don't have a tan, I'm just in the dark.
I haven't even been in the sun yet.
But when you get to your destination, they hand you another kit, you have to test yourself four days later, and then to get on the plane to come home, you add another test.
So I'll have three COVID tests just for one trip, and I'm actually kind of happy about it.
I also saw some data that airplanes have such good filtration systems that the odds of getting something on the airplane is basically zero.
So that felt pretty safe.
Now, the problem was that I flew United, and if you've ever flown United, you know how that goes.
You get there on time, and then United says, the flight is delayed, because they always do.
And then half an hour later, they say, ah, it's a minor problem, you know.
It's a little minor problem, but half an hour.
And then four hours later, which is what happened yesterday, Four hours later, they put you on a different plane because they give up.
But here's the funny part. The thing they were trying to fix for over three hours was a software problem.
So the plane kept giving software errors and they would change things and reboot things and they changed the card and it would just give them new errors and then they would fix it and then it would give them a new set of errors.
All software. Now, how much do you think I wanted to get on that airplane?
and be over water for over 7 hours on a plane that had never been tested because you can't really test the new software when you load it you can tell if it doesn't give you an error But all the other things gave errors.
And what was that other error about?
So I would say that that was not an ideal situation.
So I did about 12 hours wearing a mask yesterday, which if you have a little asthma like I do, it's like being waterboarded.
But it's worth it once you get there.
All right. Who wants the simultaneous sip?
Who wants it? You do.
All you need is a cup or a mug or a glass.
A canteen. No.
A cup or a mug or a glass.
Let's see if this will be the first time I try to do it by memory in a long time.
A cup or a mug or a glass.
Does anybody know how this goes?
Canteen, jug, flask.
Something like that. Anyway, simultaneous sip.
Let's do it.
Go.
So I'm in a hotel that's the just an overnight hotel before we end up in our actual destination and And so this is a four-star hotel, but they have one employee.
So the woman who works the front desk, and there's only one of them, is sort of the only person.
And she said, yeah, nobody else here.
There's no porters. Nobody's going to take your bags.
Just me. All the restaurants are closed, no room service.
So we got here at night, couldn't get food, and they have one of those situations where you put your room key card in a little unit right by the door so that that's the only time the AC and the lights come on is if you've got your room key in it.
So I walk in, I put my room key in it, and the entire unit just falls off the wall, off the floor.
The whole front part of it just collapsed as soon as I put my card in it, it just falls on the floor.
So I'm having a four-star vacation experience, which, if I'm being honest, closer to a two, because the coronavirus takes two stars right off the top.
But later today, we will be in a much better place.
I'll tell you about it later, and that will be amazing.
A chalice. Yes, that was the other word.
Canteen, jug, or flask?
Well, I'm glad some of you remember it.
So I'm not so good at remembering things.
That's why I'd never be a good actor.
Let's talk about Joe Biden.
So, I'm going to be a little bit non-political, if that even makes sense.
I'm not even sure if that's a thing.
Maybe I should take that back.
But I'm not going to be going hard at Joe Biden today.
I feel like the country deserves one day where we just say, how about Not today, right?
How about one day we just be Americans?
And I'm not celebrating Joe Biden's victory or Joe Biden.
I'm not celebrating that.
What I am celebrating is that we have a system which seems unstoppable by people.
Which is pretty amazing.
The system just grinds along.
We may or may not have had an election that enough people think is credible, but I don't think it mattered.
We ended up with some kind of professional class politicians that have always been in charge, except for the Trump interlude there.
I don't know that it's the end of the world, because even Biden isn't going to be able to get everything he wants.
Congress will still push back.
The public will push back.
When he tries to do things that Trump did better, it's going to be obvious, and that will limit what he can do as well.
So if you look at some of the things he's going to do, They're either trivial things or things that maybe can't get done.
So we'll have to wait to see how much damage he can do other than the executive orders and reversing some of the Trump stuff they didn't like.
But here's the thing.
I feel as if we've slipped into this place where politics is the politics of revenge and canceling the legacy of the last president.
It feels like that's the game now.
Now, of course, you'd have to blame Trump for doing it first, and so you can't really hold Joe Biden to a different standard if he didn't complain when Trump did it and tried to erase Obama's legacy.
It's hard to complain if Biden just does the same thing and tries to erase Trump.
So, you know, he didn't start it.
And, well, you know, I got to say, I had a little exchange with Ian Bremmer on Twitter yesterday.
And he made a tweet, and I responded to his tweet saying that Trump's response to the election was terrible unless he was right.
Wouldn't you say? Because how you judge Trump's insistence that the election was rigged depends entirely upon you knowing that it wasn't.
How would you know that?
How would you know it was or was not rigged?
Have you ever looked at the source code?
And if you did, would you know what you were looking at?
I haven't, and I wouldn't.
Do I have any personal information about the system working perfectly or even being, you know, imperfect?
Well, everything's imperfect, but I don't have any specific proof of fraud or not.
But I also don't have any reason to believe that it was fair.
So this is the part that I would disagree with Ian, because he thought I was joking when I said, well, you know, if Trump could be right, Now, we're treating it as though the system has made a decision, and I'm happy with that.
I'm okay that the system grinds on, even if it's imperfect, because it's better to move forward than it is to fight forever about something you thought was wrong.
So I think what's good for the country is to move forward and then try to adjust.
Republicans will have another shot at it, a couple more shots.
And I don't buy into the theory that the Democrats will put a lock down on the government and make rules changes that will put them in power forever.
I feel as if there's too much pressure against that and that it would be too much of an overreach and therefore Biden being a...
The one thing you can depend on Biden is that he's a moderate.
So I think if it looks like a gross overreach, he's exactly the guy who wouldn't do it.
So you might have some safety there, at least as long as he's in office.
Don't know how that will last.
But here's the thing. How can anybody say they're sure the election was good just because we haven't discovered any specific provable fraud?
Does that feel like that statement could be made?
Because I'm telling you, I don't know that it was fair, but I also don't know that it wasn't fair.
But more importantly, how the heck would I know?
How could I possibly know?
So there are two opinions that I consider stupid.
There are some opinions that you could be wrong, but your being smart is just that everybody's wrong sometimes, right?
So, I feel the two stupid positions are 100% certainty that the election was fair and 100% certainty that it wasn't.
If you hold either of those two positions, I feel like that's stupid.
Because you and I don't know.
How could we? What would we look at as just citizens to know that it was fair or to know that it wasn't?
Now, if you put odds on it, I'd say that would be reasonable.
Let's say you were pretty sure it was fair, and you said, you know, I'll put 95% on it based on my, I don't know, experience in life and things I've seen before.
If you said 95% that it was fair, or even 95% that it wasn't fair, I would say to you, that's probably not the percentage I would put on it, but at least you're talking logically.
You're acknowledging that it can't be known.
If you think it can be known, I don't think you should be in this conversation.
It feels like not a reasonable position.
Where's Ruby Freeman?
I think the Ruby thing is one of the The most unfair things that came out of it.
And I found myself defending Ruby because I watched the same video that you did and I didn't see anything even slightly worrying in that video.
If you think you did, that's probably confirmation bias.
Because all you saw was they counted some votes.
And the people who know what's happening and how vote counting worked looked at it, every bit of it, before and after, all the way through, and they said, all we see is vote counting, just the way it's supposed to be done.
So if you believe the Ruby story, that would be the least likely one to be true.
Along with the Venezuela part, that's least likely.
The Italian connection, very unlikely.
Anything's possible, but I would put a really, really low likelihood on any of those three things.
Somebody says she admitted it.
No, she didn't. She didn't admit anything, because there wasn't anything to admit.
And wouldn't you think by now you'd have some kind of a whistleblower?
Don't you think you'd have at least one whistleblower?
Because I think people have offered large sums of money for a whistleblower.
In fact, you could do that tomorrow.
If somebody said, all right, let's say Mike Lindell, the MyPillow guy, let's say, just hypothetically, he said, I'll give you a million dollars for a whistleblower who has enough information to show that there was a problem.
Would he get any takers?
For a million dollars? You don't think there was somebody, hypothetically, if somebody was involved in fixing an election, they wouldn't take a million dollars?
Because I feel like they would.
And probably people would offer a million dollars if they had the money.
So that's another thing that's a dog not barking.
So if you're looking for a reason to believe the election was not fraudulent, The fact that no whistleblowers have come forward, given that there would be an enormous financial benefit to do so, that would be...
Somebody says, and your life would be ruined?
Would it? Would it?
You'd have a million dollars.
How many people would take that chance for a million dollars?
If you didn't have money, you know, you were just getting by, I feel like you'd take the chance for a million dollars.
Remember, you were involved in a criminal activity in this hypothetical situation, so I don't know that there are too many criminals who wouldn't take a million dollars even if it caused them a little social anxiety.
So, that's something.
If you've watched...
Hey, Omar! If you've watched any of the press coverage of Biden so far, since about the time of the inauguration, it's actually hilarious because it's just a love letter to Biden and Harris and how wonderful Harris is and her power suits.
There's even something about Harris's style.
And I'm thinking to myself, I really don't think of Kamala Harris as a style leader.
Which is not an insult, because I'm not a style leader either.
Most people aren't. So I don't even consider that a criticism.
I'm just saying, if you were going to pick somebody to be your style symbol, would it be Kamala Harris?
