Episode 1467 Scott Adams: Watch Me Threaten My Printer and Talk About the Funny News
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
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Content:
Chris Cuomo's dancing
Afghanistan withdrawal, our allies fate?
Republicans and Blacks vaccine hesitancy
Biden's record so far
Russia ignores Biden's threats
DHS Miles Taylor's dark take on Republicans
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Alright, just imagine, if you will, That over there in that direction, God has just shown up.
And he's got some things to say.
He's pretty pissed.
All right. How would you like this to be the start of something special?
You would, right? Well, you came to the right place for that.
Because it's time for the simultaneous sip.
And what do you need for that? A cup or mug or a glass?
A tank or chalice? It's time to contain junk or flask.
A vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid.
Have I mentioned I like coffee?
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine of the day, the thing that makes everything better, except my audio, my lighting, and my video, and the content.
But everything else is better.
It's called the Simultaneous Sip, and it's happening now.
Go! Well, I don't know how your day went yesterday, but let me tell you about mine.
So yesterday, Christine and I, my wife, we decided that we wanted to get a really good night's sleep.
So yesterday was the day that we were going to exercise, get really tired.
I was going to enjoy a larger-than-normal dose of indica.
And the idea was that by bedtime...
We were going to be really, really tired and ready for bed.
Well, part of our plan worked well.
The part of the plan where we got really tired and ready to sleep.
That part, really good.
The part that didn't work out as well is when I got a knock on the door last evening from my neighbor who said there's a gigantic water leak.
Gigantic water leak in front of your house, to which I said, gosh, I hope that's not my problem.
But it was my problem, because the water leak started just on the other side of the town's responsibility, and a giant geyser of water was coming out of my lawn and flooding the street.
Now, what do you do when it's the middle of the night and your water has gone crazy?
Well, you call the emergency plumber.
Now... I don't want to tell you what it took to get temporary water to my house because there's a kludgy setup that took hours to complete and all the creativity in the world and me working with two different plumbers at two different times.
I mean, it was just a mess.
So I thought to myself, well...
My idea of going to sleep early, because I was exhausted, turned into getting three hours of sleep, and here we are.
So this is your show, brought to you on three hours of sleep.
Now, does not getting enough sleep make you cranky?
Has that ever happened to you?
Anybody? Anybody? Have you ever had a problem where you get a little tired and sometimes your mood is a little off?
Well, that's the kind of day when you know you have audio problems and you're worried about the crackling and you're thinking, oh, don't want that to happen.
Then part of your lighting system breaks for reasons that are unclear.
So we're a little bit in the dark today trying to use a kludgy setup.
But at least my printer would work, right?
I mean, yeah, sure, a lot of things are going wrong, but at least my HP Tango printer...
We'll be working like a champ.
No. No, it's not.
And I couldn't get it to work this morning.
And so if you'd like to say goodbye to my HP printer, this would be a time to do it.
Now, I don't know if a lot of you are mechanically minded.
You may not be mechanically minded, but let me teach you a little engineering trick.
If your printer doesn't work once or twice, that's no problem.
Just try it again. Maybe recycle it.
If it doesn't work three, four, five times in a row, well, maybe you need to try reloading the software or maybe get it repaired or something.
But if it doesn't work 45 times in a row, well, then it's time to go to plan B. Plan B involves printing.
Making sure that all of your other electronic instruments are aware of what's going to go down.
Computer? Do you see this?
Digital phone?
Screens? Coffee warmer?
Are you all listening? Lights?
Ring lights? I know you're not listening, ring light, but this ring light's still listening.
We've got the stereo of the TV. Are you guys all paying attention?
Everybody? Lights?
All right. All right.
What's going to happen to your printer friend?
You're not going to like it.
And I'm hoping you're all learning a lesson because your printer is going to have a long fall from a high height.
It's fighting back.
I knew this was going to happen.
Ow.
That will be a special episode that I'll be doing after everybody's awake. - It would be going out the window right now, but there's at least one member of the household who may or may not be awake yet.
And I don't want this to wake them up.
So... I've already ordered a new printer.
And then later today, I'll set up my camera so that you can see the actual destruction of this one.
Because it needs to be destroyed throwing it out the second story window.
I mean, if you've learned nothing from the Taliban and ISIS, that works.
All right. Now, did you all see the video of Chris Cuomo partying and dancing?
Has anybody not seen the video of Chris Cuomo dancing on vacation?
Well, he did a dance that I'd like to teach you.
It's called the white person dance.
And I think I can do it.
If you don't mind, a little demonstration.
So this is Chris Cuomo on summer vacation.
Dancing. And watch the moves carefully, because a lot of people...
You're not as good at dancing as I am, so it's going to take you a while to get the moves.
I'll try to do it in slow motion first, so follow along.
This is slow motion.
Watch the shoulders. The overbite is optional.
Chris didn't use the overbite, but you can.
Okay? I hope you're getting all the moves.
Then you do this, and then...
Like that. All right, that's the slow motion version.
Now let's put it all together.
We'll take all those moves, try to integrate them into one move.
And I think it looks like this.
Now, I hope you all got that.
Okay.
If you're listening on audio...
I'm so sorry. You've missed the best show ever.
But those of you watching on video, I'm pretty sure that you've learned something that you can add to your talent stack.
A lot of you didn't know how to dance properly, but thanks to Chris Cuomo, problem solved.
Problem solved. All right, I'm also trying to figure out why my audio is sometimes crackly.
So if it starts crackling again, I'll put my headphones on and at least determine if it's on my end so I can at least test my own equipment.
So Afghanistan withdrawal is going great.
And by great, I mean worst debacle in the history of losing wars since Vietnam.
Quite a feather in our cap.
But you know what? I feel as if the only way that we could end that war was if two presidents tried to do it.
That was like a two-president operation.
You needed Trump to get it going, and then Republicans would say, yeah, get out of there.
And then you needed a Democrat to finish the job.
So I think it actually worked about the only way it was going to work.
Right? It was messy, but we didn't want to get out of there.
Now, of course, getting out of there means leaving our allies to be slaughtered, which is the worst possible look for a country.
And it looks like that's going to happen.
You know, we're going to flail around and try to save some people, but I don't think the Taliban are going to be too happy about anybody who is a little friendly to the American regime there.
Okay. And I feel as though Noam Blum on Twitter talked about the strategy here for Afghanistan.
Apparently Biden's strategy for pulling out of Afghanistan was to pull out of Afghanistan and then pretend we didn't know it would go so poorly.
Okay. That's actually the strategy.
Pull out and act surprised that things didn't go well.
What? The Taliban is trying to take over?
What? They're making gains very quickly?
What? Are you telling me that Kabul, the capital, is being surrounded?
What? That's their strategy.
What? I think I did that pretty well.
Better than the Cuomo dance, really.
Here's another episode of Permanent News!
Now, Permanent News is news that I can give to you every single day, and it will never be different.
It will still be called News...
I don't know why, because it's never really new.
But here is your permanent news!
Well, it turns out there might be some problems getting the infrastructure bill passed.
That's your permanent news!
This time, nine Democrats are threatening to withhold it unless they, I don't know, vote on the first part or whatever.
It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter.
Can I just summarize this with Congress has a 9% approval rating, which is about 9% too high.
9% too high.
Let's talk about vaccine hesitancy.
So, of course, famously, Republicans seem to be resisting the vaccinations, but also only 27% of, I think, black adults are vaccinated.
How many times in the last several years have I told you that black Americans and Republicans need to be on the same team?
They're so often on the same team.
It only makes sense that they work together.
At some point, that point is just going to become obvious.
I feel like there's going to be some kind of tripping point where the black public in the United States says, wait a minute, nothing was working.
Black Lives Matter didn't do anything.
Turns out... Turns out not much happened.
But there are all of these situations where Republicans and black Americans line up, like school choice, vaccine hesitancy, a lot of stuff.
I mean, it's a pretty long list.
So they have more in common than they think, and I think someday they're going to figure it out.
But 27%.
Now, I've seen a number of clever articles and tweet threads on why would it be that people in this country would be, let's say, not trusting the experts?
Is there anything that's happened in the last several years that you could think of that would cause anybody to be skeptical about experts and about your government?
Anything? Anything?
Oh, that's right. Every single story in the news, because they're mostly fake.
Everything. And the news that was real, we thought it was fake.
So there was only two kinds of news last year.
News that was totally fake, and news that at least 30% of the country thought was fake, even if it wasn't.
So basically, we had completely fake news and 30% fake news.
And we're supposed to believe the experts this time.
Now, I got the vaccination, so I believed them enough, you know, to make the choice.
But man, do I completely understand, completely understand anybody who says, I don't want to put anything from the government into my arm.
So I get that.
So how is Joe Biden's record looking?
I think you're going to see his approval sort of drift lower.
But let's just take a tour through the things that will be on Biden's record.
Now, to be fair, I like to say this about Trump, and I'll say this about Biden to be as balanced as I can muster.
There is some stuff that's just going to go wrong during your time.
And it's just going to be on your record, right?
So some of this stuff is by no means Biden's direct fault, but he's definitely going to get blamed for it.
So here's the list. So we've got the withdrawal from Afghanistan that looks like a disaster.
Would that have been better if Trump did it?
Well, Trump says yes.
Are you surprised?
Trump says he could have done that better.
We'll never know. But I don't think Afghanistan was going to be a smooth withdrawal.
So if Trump had done it, maybe it'd be better.
Who knows? Maybe it'd be worse.
Don't know. No way to know that.
But we do know that whoever was president was going to have a stain on the record.
Trump or Biden. This happened to be Biden.
All right, so Afghanistan's looking bad.
The pandemic's not solved.
Again, not Biden's fault, is it?
I mean, I would say Biden did a reasonably good job on the pandemic.
It's just there's some things you can't solve.
So we still need masks, and we're still in the pandemic.
So again, it might not be Biden's fault, but he's in charge.
Gas prices are up.
That is Biden's fault.
China and Russia are moving more aggressively than ever, cyber and every other way.
That's definitely Biden's fault.
But would things have been different under Trump?
Don't know.
No way to know.
But it would have been Trump's fault had he been president and the same stuff was happening.
But it just happens to be Biden's fault now.
inflation, again, whose fault is that?
Bipartisan, right?
I mean, there were enough people who voted for stuff that it's at least bipartisan, but we had to spend a lot of money to get out of the pandemic, probably.
So Biden gets stuck with that bill, too.
How about the infrastructure bill?
Could be one of the things he succeeds at.
But not yet. At the moment, it's not successful.
So we'll wait on that.
Climate change is getting worse, and I don't see Biden doing enough that that would look like he made a difference.
So it's going to look like Biden didn't do enough on climate change.
That's going to look like a failure, too.
Again, probably wasn't anything he could do, but he's in charge.
What about the income inequality that used to be a big deal?
With the Occupy Wall Street stuff, but now we just sort of forgot about it.
Well, we're putting billionaires in space at the same time that regular people are just out of work.
It looks worse, but people aren't complaining about it.
Still, it looks worse under Biden.
The Iran deal probably looks worse to more people than it looks good, I would think.
So Iran probably is worse than Trump might have done, but we don't know.
We don't know that.
That would be pure speculation.
How about did Biden bring the country together?
Did he bring the country together?
Now we don't have Trump, so we're all unified now?
No. Nope.
Nothing like that happened. So he didn't keep that promise.
I doubt Trump could have either.
Country's still divided. How about immigration?
Immigration, worse. Much worse.
Trump definitely would have done better on immigration, depending on what...
Your point of view about what needs to be done, he would have done better.
And then let's give him his positives.
Stocks are up. If this had been Trump, we would have given him credit for the stock market being up.
So we give it to Biden.
Biden's in charge. I don't know if that's enough to compensate for the other stuff.
And the economy, I'd say, is recovering well.
And you have to give that credit to Biden, even if he didn't do anything.
He's in charge. That's the way it works.
So, it looks terrible overall.
But at least the economy is relatively okay, except for gas prices and then inflation.
I just said inflation.
Stop saying inflation, dude.
I just talked about it, and I'm talking about it a second time.
Two times, not enough for you?
It's the only thing I'm going to talk about twice.
Do you think you can handle that?
All right. Yes, so inflation's up, and that could kill the economy and kill the stock market increase, but it's slow-moving.
So if you're going to look at just the persuasion angle of this, I don't see how Biden or somebody or even Kamala Harris could get re-elected with this record.
It doesn't look like it.
It doesn't look like you could get re-elected, but it depends who you run against and what happens six months before the election.
So one of the worst things about the country right now is that if somebody takes any side for any reason, the other team, Democrat or Republican, they just have to take the other side.
And so we get this weird situation where, in terms of the vaccinations, everybody got what they wanted and everybody's unhappy.
What? So the people who wanted vaccinations got them.
So they're happy. The people who don't want vaccinations so far haven't gotten them.
So isn't everybody getting what they want?
Vaccination people got vaccinations.
No-vax people got no-vax.
Now, of course, there are pressures from various entities emerging.
So somehow we managed to find a way where everybody got what they wanted and was unhappy about it.
Think about that.
Everybody got what they wanted.
Vaccination if you want it.
No vaccination if you don't want it.
And we're still unhappy.
We found a way to give everyone what they wanted, and we had to dig deep, but we found a way to beat each other's throats over it.
Okay? Now, I get the argument, right?
You know, what you do affects me.
That's everything. That's everything.
Everything you do affects other people, unless it's trivial, just walking across the street.
But if you have an unhealthy lifestyle, it makes my health insurance go up because you're in my pool.
I mean, everything you do affects other people.
I'm not sure why it matters this time.
Now, of course, hospital capacity is a big deal, but we're still waiting to see what that really looks like.
And here is what I call a segment called Least Surprising News.
News? That's barely news.
The least surprising news is that China refuses to cooperate in the further World Health Organization coronavirus origins probe.
How surprising.
China's not going to participate in the probe that would make them look like a pariah and be terrible for the future of the country.
Hmm. Surprising.
Well, in other non-surprising news, a recent poll said that 59% of Democrats have a favorable view of socialism.
What? 59% of Democrats are now in favor of socialism.
Now, doesn't it depend...
What people imagined when the question was asked.
If you ask me if I'm in favor of socialism, I would say yes.
I would say yes.
It's just that that's how you define it.
If you define it as social security, yes.
If you define it as replacing capitalism, no.
No. I like capitalism.
But I also like a little bit of socialism.
It's about amount.
It's not a binary.
You're not either socialist or capitalist.
We're some kind of a blend.
And I think the blend makes sense.
How much of each you get is a big deal.
But I don't trust any poll that asks people about socialism because everybody's defining it differently.
And certainly too much of it would be bad.
Well, the latest news is that Russia is totally ignoring Biden's threats as they've ignored America's threats forever.
It doesn't matter who is president. And they're still interfering in America's elections and in our social media.
The reporting is that they're trying to just stir the division in the country.
But here was the most interesting point I saw from someone who seemed to know about Russia.
That the Russian intelligence agencies are competing to impress the boss.
I'll bet that's true, because it looked exactly like that in 2016.
Remember the terrible memes that the Russians did that tried to divide us?
Some were pro-Trump, some pro-Hillary.
More of them were pro-Trump, I guess.
But they were mostly trying to sow dissent.
But when you looked at them, they were so poorly done, the memes, they couldn't have made any difference.
It didn't even look like a professional operation.
And I said to myself at the time, that doesn't look like Putin ordered that.
Are you telling me that Putin ordered somebody to make a bunch of bad memes that are so bad they look like High School Project, and that that came from the top?
I hope not.
I'd like to think Russia was a little more competent than a few bad memes that wouldn't make any difference.
So, to me, that always looked like an independent operation, meaning that the, what was it, the Click Farm or whatever they were, probably somebody came up with that idea and it wasn't Putin, but maybe they thought Putin would like it.
So now there's at least one other person who knows more than I do about Russia who's saying that that's probably what the model is.
Competing intelligence agencies trying to impress the boss.
The troll farm, thank you.
The troll farm looked to me like an independent operation because it was just so weak.
It just didn't look like it came from the top.
It looked like it came from somebody who was trying to impress the top.
So we don't know, but it has that feel to it.
So apparently in the summer of 2020, this is the reporting on it, these Russian operatives, they used social media to spread extremist viewpoints about Black Lives Matter.
Huh. Are you telling me that some element of the Black Lives Matter story was determined by Russia propaganda?
It was.
It was. Reportedly.
Now, what do you make of the fact that Russia doesn't care one bit how much we threaten them with their cyber stuff?
They don't care one bit.
Apparently, they've made no changes.
Very much the way China made no changes to their fentanyl shipping, even though we asked them and they said yes and all that.
I guess that's the category that you just say yes and then you don't do it.
Because there's no way to punish them.
Is there? I'm sure we're already doing cyber stuff to Russia, don't you think?
Don't you think Russia is maybe paying us back?
Because we never see the reporting of what we're doing to them.
It's not nothing. I'm sure we're doing something.
But we don't hear that reporting, so it looks like all just Russia against us.
And maybe it is. Maybe it is just Russia doing all the bad stuff, but I kind of doubt it.
Don't you? Let me...
Get back to my feed here.
I lost it. Every 28 minutes, this time sound on its own.
Come back to me.
Bear with me one moment.
Almost back. There we go.
All right, so I'm back. Remember I told you that if Biden won the election that Republicans would be hunted?
Well, more evidence of that every day.
So Miles Taylor, I guess he used to work for Homeland Security, an ex-official.
He says that the radical...
This is on MSNBC. So he says that radicalized elements of the Republican Party now represent a bigger threat to our democracy than organizations like al-Qaeda and ISIS ever did.
Now... That sounds a lot like trying to make Republicans seem like ISIS. Doesn't it?
Or worse than ISIS? That is the kind of language you hear before things get really wet.
And I don't think that's going to happen.
I'm strongly betting against it.
I don't think we're going to lead to any kind of full-scale armed conflict against each other.
I just don't think we have that in us.
If you read the room, it doesn't look like it's there.
But, man, when you hear this kind of rhetoric, it's hard to feel comfortable about it.
But feel comfortable about it anyway.
These are crazy people. Florida, speaking of no matter what you do right, the other side is going to say it's a mistake.
Right down the line.
So here's Florida Governor DeSantis.
Once again, I don't know how he comes up with so many things to do that make headlines and look leaderly, but man, he just does one after another.
Nobody's doing a better job of...
Let's say managing the media and the state at the same time.
Nobody's even close.
He's doing by far the best job of managing his brand as well as the state.
But he's rolling out a new treatment plan in which they'll have these mobile clinics for Regeneron's monoclonal antibodies.
Now if you're following all the COVID stuff, you know that this Regeneron stuff is like magic.
You know, you get the Regeneron drip going if you've got COVID, and you're going to feel better really fast.
So we know that works, and we know it's a big deal, but it's also $1,500 per dose.
So what did the Liberals say?
I saw a few critics say that masks basically cost nothing, and vaccinations are free.
But why are we pushing these Regeneron treatments that are $1,500 per dose?
Well, allow me to talk to you, those who do not have economics degrees.
The vaccination isn't free.
The vaccination isn't free.
It's just the end user isn't paying.
It wasn't free. Do you know how many billions of dollars the government put into vaccinations?
A lot. A lot of billions.
It's the opposite of free.
It's like really, really, really expensive.
It's just that maybe you don't pay it when you get it.
And how in the world can you be angry about mobile Regeneron clinics that are definitely going to save lives?
Definitely. They're going to keep people out of hospitals.
Everything about this plan is great.
I mean, it's expensive.
But everything about it is great.
But, of course, the critics had to criticize Mary.
All right, here's the most optimistic thing I've ever said.
The most optimistic thing I've ever said is, is there any possibility that the COVID vaccinations will cause you not to get the common cold?
Did we accidentally cure the common cold?
Carpe! Did you get reinstated?
I'm seeing a message from Carpe Donctum that he's talking about reinstatement, I guess, on YouTube?
So, Carpe Doncte?
Ah, crackle is back.
Yay! All right, hold on a second.
We're going to test the crackle.
I'm going to see if I can hear it on my end.
I wanted to hear the crackle.
Oh, yeah. A little bit of crackle.
Is it my phone? Let's see if I put my phone over there.
Is there any crackle? Release the crackle, somebody says.
Yeah, I'm not getting it on YouTube.
The crackle seems to be.
Only when I talk.
Let's see if any of my stuff is causing this crackle.
Bear with me. It seems to come and go, right?
Free the crackle. Microphone maybe, copper tape.
All right. All right, well, here was my optimistic thought for the day.
We know that, or we think we know, that if people have been exposed to other coronavirus, they're more likely to have a good outcome if they get the COVID, right?
So I think that's established.
As much as anything is, I guess.
So would you agree with the following statement?
That the science agrees that if you've had other colds, regular colds, and viruses, you might be in better shape to fight off the coronavirus.
But is it possible that the coronavirus vaccination would cause you to do better against the common cold?
Or is the small change that they make in these viruses unrelated to the other Is it possible?
Just had two vaccinated friends die of COVID. Wow.
You said you had a hunch it was the phone.
The phone didn't make any difference when I moved it.
But I did buy a new printer, so I don't need to use the phone for my notes next time.
Well, by Monday or so, I won't need my phone.
And the phone didn't seem to make any difference when I moved it around.
All right. The vaccine isn't curing COVID, so it won't cure anything else.
Well, cure is too strong a word, but it makes me wonder if we're going to make some headway on the common cold.
I could easily see us getting vaccination boosters every year to get rid of all the cold and flu stuff, but maybe we'd be worse off if we did.
The other day you said you didn't know anyone who had a cold the last 18 months, but everyone that had COVID... But everyone thinks they already had COVID, even though...
Good point.
So there's a comment on locals that said...
I said, I don't know anybody who says they had a common cold since the pandemic started, but there are a bunch of people who believe they had COVID before you knew it was COVID. I don't think any of them are real COVID, or almost none of them.
I think those are common colds.
But lately, have you heard of anybody in the last six months?
Somebody had a cold and tested negative for COVID. So there definitely are colds going around, but it feels like fewer of them.
Now the kids are back in school, so we'll see.
Have I been keeping up on ADE? No.
Let's see. About the spike...
Is part of the vaccine target?
Yeah, so it depends on how similar the spike proteins are, somebody's saying.
No cold since vaccinated, somebody says.
You can be infected with both at once.
Yeah, that makes sense. Mike Pompeo is losing weight.
Somebody says that's a tell for getting ready to run for office.
It is a tell for getting ready to run for office, but we'll see if that's real.
