Episode 1528 Scott Adams: I'll Tell You Which News is Fake Today. Spoiler: Most of it.
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Content:
Naval's meditation
Is Southwest Airlines lying?
France, UK, others...pursuing nuclear energy
Habits, habits, habits, habits, habits
Mike Pence was correct?
Baby Aspirin still being Dr. recommended?
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And watch me pause another moment until the YouTube feed catches up because it clips off the first part here.
And now.
All right. Good morning, everybody.
And welcome to the best thing that's ever happened to anybody everywhere.
Ever? Everywhere? Let's make that a word.
You've heard of anywhere.
You've heard of nowhere. But introducing today a new word called everywhere.
Wait. I don't even know what the hell I'm talking about today.
You think I'm stoned.
You think so.
But I'm not. Maybe I should be.
Because something's not working this morning.
Everywhere. Yes, everywhere.
Correct. Everywhere is the new word.
Thank you. Thank you in the comments.
You know, have you realized that what we've created here collectively is like a new kind of intelligence?
Think about it.
Your old kind of intelligence was just stuff happening in your head in the old days.
And then you got a smartphone or a computer and your intelligence was a little offloaded, but you had to do some work.
You had to go search for stuff.
But we've created, with this model here, with the live stream and the instant comments, we've created a situation where I simply think I need to know something, I say it out loud, or even sometimes I don't say it.
And then the new information appears for me on the screen.
Because many of you are anticipating or correcting me as I go.
So my brain is actually now extended to those of you who are watching live and commented live.
The system is almost instant now.
It's kind of weird. I mean, you could argue that this is a form of intelligence because I don't think I've ever seen this before.
If I give a speech in a, let's say, a crowded room...
People can make comments, but not in any efficient way.
That's just me talking.
And if this were recorded, of course, it would just be me talking.
Those of you who watch it later.
But when it's live, there is actually a collective intelligence that is literally happening.
It makes me amplified in a way.
But... What is more important than the simultaneous sip?
Yes, Dennis reminds me that we should be doing more sipping and less talking.
And I think that's fine advice.
And I'm going to take it.
And all you need is a cup or mug or a glass, a tank or chalice or cider, a canteen jug or a flask, a 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.
Yeah, the thing that makes everything better.
It's called the simultaneous sip.
And let's go, Brandon.
Let's sip this baby. Go!
Oh, yeah. I think we sipped the hell out of that.
You know, sometimes you're just sipping along the edges.
You know, you're almost a spectator to your own sip.
But not today. I think we went deep today.
There was some serious sippage penetration into the deeper, deeper meaning of life.
Yeah, that just happened.
What else happened?
Well, Netflix has a big hit with a show called Squid Games.
Not only did 100 million people, 111 million people at least, sample it, which is a new record, but...
I don't know why.
I don't think I've ever seen a trailer for a movie that made me, or a series, that made me less want to watch it.
So here's the actual advertisement.
This is how they're trying to sell you to watch Squid Game to Netflix.
It's about a bunch of people who are badly in debt...
They're in desperate times, they're badly in debt, and they're somehow collected together to play some deadly game where many of them die, I guess.
Now, good times.
If any of you are feeling bad about yourself or your situation, I can't think of a more entertaining thing than to watch people in desperate financial trouble playing a deadly game because it's the best chance they have.
Don't watch this show.
Don't watch this show.
Now, I get that you might enjoy it while it's happening, but how could that possibly be good for you?
Compare these two uses of time.
One hour a day trying to meditate...
Which I'll talk about in a moment.
Meditate for one hour a day.
Or watch a show about people in desperate financial problems who are in great physical risk and many of them dying.
For fun. Which one of those would help your life a little bit more?
Well, I would like to refer back to Naval Ravikant who is a big proponent of meditating.
And let me just give you an alternative.
Because I like it when some percentage of my listeners go away with a better life.
I can't get you all every time, right?
So I'll pick off a little sliver of the viewers every time and make your life better.
Here's where some of you will get a better life right now.
Listen, you might want to Google him, but look for Naval, N-A-V-A-L, Ravikant, and read what you can about, I think he's been interviewed a number of times, been on podcasts, about meditation.
Now, the big thing that he brings to the meditation conversation is he tells you, don't bother trying to clear your mind.
That's the dumb part.
I mean, the dumb part of meditating is when they tell you, clear your mind.
That's not a thing.
Who the hell is teaching you to meditate by clearing your mind?
The only way you can clear your mind is by being dead.
It's not a thing.
So there's this, like, illusion that's kept, I don't know, seven billion people from meditating?
It's the same illusion. The illusion is that the point of it is to stop thinking.
And people think, well, that's not going to happen.
I can't make that happen.
And if they try, they realize quite quickly that they can't make that happen.
So what is the great innovation that Naval brings to this?
That it was always an illusion that you needed to stop your mind from thinking.
It was never possible...
It was never a thing and it was never even desirable or necessary.
The important part is to sit quietly for an hour a day and let your mind do what it wants to do for an hour.
That's it. You just let it play.
Just stay awake.
Sit comfortably. Do it as a habit.
Don't skip days.
Just every day. Sit there for an hour and let your mind play.
The belief, the allegation, the proposition, if you will, is that that will fundamentally change your entire mental outlook in a positive way.
Now, I have great faith in Naval's opinion and recommendations.
Have I tried this technique?
Nope. Because I don't know how I would get an hour a day to sit there.
I guess that's the hard part.
If you can figure out any way to fit an hour a day of unmolested time, if you can figure out how to find an hour a day to do that, good luck.
That's the hard part. So forget the squid games.
Even if it's entertaining, it's going to put bad thoughts in your head.
You don't need that. Instead, spend that same time, one hour a day, trying to meditate.
About 1% of you, your lives just changed.
Isn't that cool? I mean, most of you, you know, you're going to do what you were going to do, and this made no difference whatsoever.
But about 1% of you, your whole life just changed.
Seriously. About 1% of you.
Your whole life just changed.
Because that's about how many people are saying, you know, I might be able to find an hour.
I'll give it a try. And try it for about two months.
If you haven't tried it for two months, you haven't tried it.
That's the other technique.
So the thing that Naval brings to this is the simplification and the removal of the illusion.
That's a big deal.
If that seems like a small deal, it's not.
It's a big deal.
He got rid of the illusion that you have to clear your mind.
Now you're free of that.
And he's described it in a way that you can't do it wrong.
Do it an hour a day for a couple months, see what happens.
That's it. That's it.
Everybody can do that if they have an hour.
All right. The most important story in the country, and I think you'll agree, is that there was an elk that sometime in its early life got its head stuck in a tire.
So it had a tire around its neck for however many years.
It had been observed for a long time.
But finally, I guess they tranquilized it and cut off its horns and got the tire off.
Now, you might say to yourself, that was the way to get the tire off?
You had to remove the elk's horns.
You couldn't think of another way to remove a tire from the neck.
I'm just going to brainstorm here for a moment.
Cut the tire. I don't know.
Did they think of that one? Cut the tire?
I mean, maybe they didn't have the right tools or something.
There may have been some practical reasons.
Now, just for full context, I'm told that the antlers fall off once a year anyway.
So the elk would not be damaged by the removal of the horns because they just grow back next season.
I'm told. I think that's true.
But still, still, is it just sort of messed up?
Don't those horns have some purpose?
Like to protect them in a fight with another elk that does have his horns?
I mean, I feel like it was just a messed up thing to do.
And why did they go into this project not having a tool that can cut a tire?
I mean, I feel like they should have brought a tire-cutting tool to the project.
I mean, they had some planning.
It wasn't like off the cuff, hey, let's tranca an elk and see what happens.
But the most important thing about this story is the puns.
That's right. The worst part for this poor elk, when he had that tire around his neck, is that the other elk would tease him.
Yeah, it was almost sort of a Rudolph situation.
Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer.
The other reindeer would tease him.
Well, you know how it went for the elk.
The other elk teased him.
They'd say stuff like, Hey, Carl, you look tired.
That's just messed up.
They're bullies, really, is what I'm saying.
Yeah, they'd say stuff like, hey, Carl, did you have a good year?
Was it a good year?
That's just messed up.
You shouldn't say something like that to an elk who's having a tough time with a tire around his neck.
And then, of course, there was no inner tube in the tire, which means that this elk had no problem with inflation.
No problem with inflation.
See, that's not funny.
This is just bullies.
Elks making fun of another elk.
I don't approve of this bully.
And then somebody suggested that he may have voluntarily been wearing that tire because, wait for it, he's had it for years and his antlers fall off every season.
Now, the tire was not stuck on the neck.
It was sort of loose-fitting.
And his antlers would fall off every year.
What would happen when the antlers fell off and the elk bent down to eat some food?
It's almost as if the tire would fall off.
Like, maybe he liked it.
Like, maybe he was wearing it like a crown.
Because he was the king of the elks.
And we just ripped his crown off.
I didn't make that one up.
Somebody said that on Twitter.
But I liked it. It could have been an elk crown.
We may have changed the entire royal family situation for that elk group.
Yeah. Well, maybe enough about that story.
Let's take a look at this story.
Remember I ran through the...
The fake news filter, which you can find on my Twitter feed.
I tweeted it out. So it's a checklist to see if something is fake news.
And I ran the pilot sick out of the story through there.
And what do you think?
Do you think it's true that pilots are calling in sick or taking personal days and that's the reason that Southwest has slow flights?
Well... It is not being reported by either Fox News or CNN to be true.
Somebody fact-check me on that.
I need to fact-check.
But I think, because I'm saying I didn't see it, so maybe I missed it.
But I don't think that CNN or Fox News are confirming that Southwest had a problem because of the COVID mandate.
Tucker's an opinion guy.
The opinion guys are not relevant to this truth filter.
Because the opinion people are opinion people.
I'm talking about the news.
And CNN reports it basically as a false claim.
They just report that Jen Psaki says...
That it's not true.
But also, according to the AP News, they looked into it.
And here's what the AP says.
They say the airline, this being Southwest, its pilots and the Federal Aviation Administration denied the claim circulating online that the so-called mass account was over the mandate.
So the Federal Aviation Administration, the pilots, I don't know how many they talked to, and the airlines have all denied it.
So basically, everybody who's close to it denies it.
But there are pilots who say it's true, right?
Haven't you seen that online?
You've seen individual pilots say, oh yeah, it's totally true.
And when you see that, do you see the pilot saying it?
No. You see somebody saying they talked to a pilot who said it.
I haven't seen a pilot say it, have you?
I've seen people say they know a pilot.
I know a pilot and the pilot said it.
But I haven't seen a pilot say it.
So, do the pilots believe it?
Now, I would definitely believe there are some pilots who believe it's happening.
Why would they believe it's happening?
They saw it online.
They saw it online, same as you did.
So they believe it's happening.
I mean, if you were just one pilot and you knew a few other pilots, you would only know what you thought.
But if you read online that a bunch of pilots at Southwest are doing this, you know, fake sick-out thing or personal day thing, you'd probably think it was true, too.
So that would be your interpretation, even if you thought it was some other reason before that.
Alright, I'm going to call that fake news preliminarily.
It doesn't mean it's guaranteed to be fake news.
It does mean that the odds are against it being true.
Alright, and by the way, I'm going to go back to...
Let me ask you this.
I'm often asked this question.
How do you know if somebody's lying?
How do you know to trust somebody?
Just like an individual.
I'm not talking about organizations or fake news, but just an individual.
How do you know if they're lying?
And the answer is, you can't.
Most of the time. Most of the time you can't tell.
Sometimes you can. But most of the time you can't tell.
Here's what you can know.
The only thing you can know for sure, and even that's not 100%, is that people will be the same people they were yesterday.
If somebody was a giant liar yesterday, well, probably today too.
If they were always honest every day of their life up until yesterday, probably that last thing they told you is true too.
Or at least they think it's true.
So you can depend on people being like the way they've been before.
Do we have any history that Southwest Airlines is a gigantic liar today?
Such a big liar that they would lie in a way that they could easily be discovered.
Really? Southwest Airline.
They have one of the best employee reputations of any company in the United States.
Year after year after year, they're in the top rung of somewhat trusted, well-managed, straightforward companies.
Do you think they suddenly became gigantic liars and such liars that they're telling a lie that's easily discovered?
Because it would be literally, what, tens of thousands of witnesses that they lied?
It would be all the pilots.
Because the pilots would say, oh my god, they're lying.
My company's lying.
Would they do that? It doesn't make sense to me that anybody would tell a lie, a corporate entity, would tell a lie that's so easily discovered as a lie.
That would be crazy.
I don't think Southwest changed overnight from a company that we trusted, relative to companies, right?
It's still a company. To a company we trusted to one we totally wouldn't trust overnight.
I don't think that happened.
It could have. I mean, anything's possible.
But that would be really unusual.
So I'm going to say it's fake news until something changes my mind.
All right, here's another story.
See if you believe this one.
A biological male in a skirt assaulted a student in a bathroom.
In Virginia. So a female student was allegedly, so we're using the word allegedly in these stories, sexually assaulted by a biological male wearing a skirt in a restroom at school.
True or false?
Run it through the fake news filter.
Which of the checklist fits this?
Which of the...
Yeah, you got it.
Two on the nose. Two on the nose.
What story did you most not expect but fear if you were a conservative?
If you're a conservative and you were sort of worked up about the trans issue...
Let's say you're not as pro-trans as a woke person should be.
If that's what you were already worried about...
What kind of story would play perfectly into your bias?
The story of a biological boy putting on a dress for the purpose of going into a woman's facility, locker room, or bathroom for a sexual assault.
That story is exactly, exactly on the nose for what people feared.
The slippery slope.
I mean, people were drawing this direct slippery slope line.
Okay, if you allow this, the next thing you know, they're going to be assaulting people in the restrooms.
Slippery slope. Well, there it is.
There it is. Proof. There it is.
Somebody put on a dress just to assault somebody in a restroom.
I'm seeing a lot of people saying it's true.
Why do you say it's true?
Do you say it's true because it was on the news...
Or do you say it's true because the father of the alleged victim says it's true?
And the alleged victim says it's true?
The police report says it's true, so you believe it because it's in the police report.
Where did the police get their report from?
Did they watch it? Did they watch it happen?
Or did somebody tell them it happened?
Everything you know about this is somebody told you.
You didn't see it. You weren't there.
And the people who told you, how much do you trust them?
Well, we don't know anything about the alleged victim.
If you told me the alleged victim had never told a lie, I would say, she's never told a lie before.
Do you know that? Has the alleged victim ever made a false accusation before?
Has the alleged victim ever told a big whopper of a lie?
I don't know. And I'm not alleging that there's anything up with the victim.
I'm just saying we don't know.
The attacker did it twice.
Same way? Wearing a dress?
Now here's what I do believe.
I do believe it's likely there was an assault.
I don't believe the assailant was wearing a dress.
Do you? If somebody says somebody got sexually assaulted, I'd go, well, probably, because that happens all the time, unfortunately.
But somebody says this fits your bias, does it?
Am I the one with the bias?
Because I'm saying that unusual things don't happen very often.
Is that a bias?
That unusual things don't happen?
That's almost just the definition of unusual things.
Somebody says a Scottish kilt.
Doubt it. All right, let me ask you this.
Imagine you're this kid and you've got bad intentions and you're thinking to yourself, I think I want to assault somebody.
Would you put on a dress to do it?
Would that be your plan?
I think I'll put on a dress and nobody will even know I'm a man and I'll walk into that restroom and I'll be doing some assaulting.
Or do you think it was a genuine trans...
Person who was identifying as female but still wanted to do some raping of a woman with male equipment.
I don't know. None of it checks out, does it?
So I'm going to go on record.
So this will be a test of the fake news filter.
So, as far as I know, I'm the only one saying this.
Can anybody confirm that there's nobody else that you know of, at least nobody who's got a show?
Is there anybody else saying that this is almost certainly fake news?
Not the assault.
I'm not questioning that an assault happened.
I'm questioning that it was a boy dressed as a female so he could use the ladies' room.
That part, no.
Yeah, on the skirt detail, I think it's fake news.
Let me ask you this.
How many of you have done a kid pickup at school?
Took your car there, picked up a kid.
You see hordes of kids walking by.
Lots and lots of kids.
How many of the girls are wearing skirts?
How many of the girls are wearing skirts?
None. None.
The girls aren't even wearing skirts.
So he's going to wear a disguise as a girl, or whatever it was, and he's going to dress in the most ridiculous way.
Ridiculous in the sense it would be non-standard, even for the females.
Right? No.
None of this story makes sense.
It doesn't. Maybe he had a sweater wrapped around his waist and it looked like a skirt.
I don't know. I don't know what happened.
But I don't believe any of the story and I'm going to go on record saying it's probably fake news and you're probably going to find out.
Now, given that I'm the only person in the country saying it, right?
I think I'm the only person saying it.
Just like I doubted the Havana Syndrome secret sonic weapon.
Only person in the world saying it.
So that's a good challenge, isn't it?
A good test of the filter.
I'm the only one saying it.
So if the filter works, it will have caught this one.
And if this turns out to be real, well, then we have to revise the filter, right?
All right. Suddenly, you saw this in the news, that suddenly a whole bunch of countries are real serious about nuclear.
The United States being one of them.
Biden administration has gone strong on nuclear, which I credit it with.
But also France has decided instead of phasing them out, they're going to go hard.
Great Britain and several other countries have lobbied to have nuclear power labeled as green technology.
Or zero carbon, I guess.
Or green, I don't know, whatever. Green technology, I guess.
To which I said to myself, what?
Are you telling me there's any official body that didn't already include nuclear energy as green technology?
Did you know that wasn't already a thing?
I just assumed they thought that.
Because it is.
It doesn't produce...
I mean, it's probably the best green technology of all.
I had no idea that it wasn't considered green.
I thought they didn't want it for maybe other reasons, but I didn't think it was because it wasn't green.
How wrong could they be?
But now they say it's green, of course.
So what changed?
Let me ask you.
What made everything change?
It seems like overnight, doesn't it?
We went from, I don't know, to...
Somebody says the science changed.
Somebody says that the Generation 4...
But we haven't built a Generation 4 yet.
There are no operating Generation 4.
Somebody said COVID changed things.
The wind didn't blow, right?
So the green technology didn't do its thing.
The space race...
Some say it's me, but I don't think that's the full story.
Bill Gates? No, not Trump.
I don't think Trump had anything to do with it.
He should have, and I fault him for that.
Mike Schellenberger? Yeah.
Mark Schneider? So I'm not sure it was one thing.
It could be that a whole bunch of things happened, but here are some of the things that happened to make it look like there was an overnight change.
The number one thing that happened was the trigger.
The trigger is the brown ounce and the black ounce and China having to fire up their coal plants.
So all over the world now, the stories are that the classic green energies didn't work.
So we know that just solar and adding solar and And wind power can be awesome, but it doesn't cover you if you need a little surge.
So the first thing is that we had triggers that happened about the same time all over the world where it was proven that the way we were doing it wasn't working.
The second thing is that the media...
has decided that climate change will be another focus.
It's been a focus in the past, but, you know, it is a focus.
Someone also mentioned space, right?
Space is very much on our mind now because of all the flights going up.
I guess Shatner's going up there today or something, 90 years old.
So when you talk about space, you have to think nuclear.
And I think every country is realizing that if they don't have a A domestic nuclear skill set that they're not going to be part of space.
It's just a base requirement, as far as we know, for getting into space and being productive up there.
So there's that.
So you've got a bunch of things that sort of coincidentally happened.
But I think there's something else happening, that the argument against it was slowly chipped away.
I'm going to call it reframing.
Reframing. So, as you mentioned, Mike Schellenberger, I think one of the biggest effects here.
Mark Schneider, also very influential to me and through me to other people, etc.
So, there definitely was a more productive communication and reframing that happened.
Meaning that...
The idea of the newer generations being safer, I think that message finally got through.
Yeah, nuclear, the old kind, had some problems, but even then it was safer than everything else.
Even the old kind, with its problems, the meltdowns, etc., the Fukishimas, etc., even all of that was still safer than all of the other alternatives.
But now we have the newer technologies.
The Generation 3, this kind you would build if you built one today, has never had a problem.
They figured out how to do it safe enough, and the generation after that would be so safe that it won't even be an issue after that.
And the generation after also will eat the existing waste as part of its fuel.
So we have a technical solution coming online for the waste.
Solution number one is you store it at the facility that created it, because it's already a nuclear risk, if you will.
And that's been working.
And then the fact that we might be able to eat that waste with new generations of plants, that looks pretty good.
So I think that there was a whole bunch of persuasion by all the right people to finally get the message to Congress and Congress I think other countries were having the same realizations.
So I think it was a whole bunch of things happening at the same time.
But essential to it is that it got framed correctly for the first time.
If you were thinking of nuclear as safe or unsafe, that was the wrong frame.
It got changed to climate change solution or don't solve it.
That's a big difference.
Because once the left had decided that climate change was their big existential risk, it was over.
You could then see the future.
As soon as they had said, it's our existential risk, they didn't have any other solution.
There was only one solution once you said this could end civilization and you're all afraid of it.
It had to go this way all the time.
It just had to be greased.
So the people like, you know, Schellenberger, you know, greasing it, and Mark Schneider, you know, I tried to help.
And I know a lot of you who are even watching this would retweet us and, you know, boost the message.
So I would say that this is yet another example of the social media effect being productive.
Because I think that smart people got to people who were influential, in terms of persuasion, influential.
People like me. And between the technical know-how and the reframing, it made it safe for politicians to say, hey, hey, hey, now we're thinking about climate change.
And we love science.
Because they already said, the left said, we love science.
And they were denying science like mofos.
If they were against nuclear, they were just denying science because we knew it was a safe alternative relative to the other risks.
So that's all good, but it's interesting to watch it all come together at the right time.
I think the lights had to actually turn off before we got serious about it, but that happened.
I did a little research on...
I tried to figure out where ideas come from.
Especially ones that I'm involved in.
And here's a... I'm going to give you a little history of this idea, the idea of using small habits, changing a small thing to get some incentive, or get some momentum going to get something done.
There was a book in 2012, a book by Charles Duhigg.
The Power of Habits, a giant bestseller.
And The Power of Habits talked about how to change your habits or modify your habits to get what you want.
Now, I don't remember it talking about small changes.
Maybe it was in there? I'm not sure.
Now, here's something you don't know, that the author of that book spent a full day with me.
So Charles Duhigg came to my home and just spent the day with me, interviewing me about things that he thought would be relevant to his book.
Now, I didn't make it into the book, so I don't think there...
Well, I know that there's no mention of me in the book, but he did spend the day with me, sussing out my habits for success, because I'd been talking about it and blogging about them.
In October of 2013, now if you're an author, you know that it takes over a year to write a book and get it published.
So when he was talking to me was about the time I was putting together my book, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Went Big.
And there I talked about micro steps.
Taking the smallest step and getting some momentum going.
So that was 2013.
So Power of Habits, Duhigg was 2012, roughly the same time, and he interviewed me, roughly the same time How to Fail came out, talked about micro steps.
And then, this is what I found out today, on December...
Just a few months after that, an e-book came out.
Now, you can do an e-book pretty quickly because you don't have to wait for the whole printing-publishing cycle.
And just a few months after my book came out, Stephen Geis published Many Habits.
Which is this concept.
You know, getting a little habit going to move you in the right direction.
So that was just a few months later.
And then, after many habits, came Micro Habits by Brian Ledger.
And then came...
He was in 2015.
I think that was an e-book, too.
And then came Small Habits, Big Changes, How the Tiniest Steps Lead to a Happier, Healthy You.
Steve Handel in 2018...
And then Atomic Habits, October 2018.
Now, these were obviously being written about the same time because they came out pretty close to each other.
So then Atomic Habits was a huge bestseller, and I think that's the one that moved the needle the most on this topic.
And then right after that was Tidy Habits by B.J. Fogg.
Now, here's the question.
Listen to these books. Power of Habits, then Mind, How to Feel, then Mini Habits, Micro Habits, Small Habits, Atomic Habits, and Tiny Habits.
Yeah, is nano habits taken?
Now, here's the question.
Did I cause all of these?
Or were they going to happen anyway?
Did I cause them, or were they going to happen anyway?
What do you think? Just looking at your comments...
Zeitgeist. Good answer.
That's where I'm going to go with this, too.
So you accelerated it.
So some people think I had a role in it.
Some don't. Let me tell you the story about Isaac Newton.
My favorite story about Isaac Newton...
Of course, you automatically think gravity with Newton...
But my favorite story about Isaac Newton is that he invented calculus just to solve a problem he was working on.
He invented calculus just to solve a problem he was working on.
Now, the fun story about this is that somebody else invented calculus at the same time, in the 1600s.
Two people, independently, invented calculus.
At the same time, in different countries.
They didn't know the other one was doing it.
And they didn't share it.
Yeah, there was no communication.
What's up with that? Right?
Somebody will give me the name of the other guy.
Leibniz. Thank you.
I knew it would take about five seconds for you well-educated people to give me that name.
Yeah, Leibniz. Was he an astronomer or scientist?
I don't know what he was. But he invented it at the same time.
So they get sort of co-credit.
So here's the question.
How in the world do you explain calculus being invented at the same time in two different places?
Well, here's one explanation.
It was just time.
You know, there was enough other stuff happening that the idea of calculus could have been thought of by other people.
In other words, the environment of whatever scientific mathematical things were floating around was suggestive enough that two people got the same idea at the same time from maybe the same kinds of influences.
Maybe. Or they were trying to solve the same kinds of problems at the same time.
So maybe it wasn't a big coincidence.
Maybe the environment just suggested it and two of them picked it up.
Likewise, there is something about the environment that changed to make all this microhabit, tiny habit stuff make sense at the same time.
And the thing that changed was life got really complicated.
Life got too complicated.
That's the thing that changed everywhere at the same time.
So does it make sense that there would be more than one person who would say, how do you solve all this complicated life stuff?
Like, what do you do about it?
And one of the solutions is to make small steps because you know it seems overwhelming to do anything bigger than a small step.
So, it could be that the environment certainly just served up a situation that people like me and other people said, you know, I can only think of one way to approach this, and we came up with the same idea.
Now, I'm not going to compare this idea to calculus, right?
So I'm not comparing myself to Isaac Newton.
Somebody's always going to say that.
I think he compared himself to Isaac Newton.
No. No, I'm not doing that.
I'm just saying that people think of the same ideas at the same time.
The other possibility is that I did have some influence on it.
I can't rule that out either.
Well, it turns out that Mike Pence was right.
So the New York Times commissioned a poll and found that a majority of women and nearly half of men said it's unacceptable to have dinner or drinks alone with someone of the opposite sex other than their spouse.
Oh, oh.
I am so going to have to complain.
Let me listen to this again.
And you should be offended on behalf of other people, if not yourself.
It's unacceptable to have dinner or drinks alone with someone of the opposite sex.
Because that's the only people we have sex with, right?
The only people you have sex with are people of the opposite sex.
So I can go to dinner with a gay guy, and my wife won't care.
So when did the only kind of sex we think about turn into heterosexual sex?
Huh? You think you can be woke?
I will overwoke your ass so hard.
You can't overwoke me.
No. New York Times, go back to your troglodyte world.
Crawl back into your caves.
And don't ever darken our doorway with your misogynistic, anti-LGBTQ crap.
Your crap.
You can have sex with anybody you want.
It's 2021, and you do not have to limit yourself to the opposite sex.
And by the way, what is the opposite sex?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the idea of an opposite sex suggests there are two genders, which I can't buy off on that.
I believe there is infinite variety.
And that we are all special in our very different and unique sexualities.
I don't have an opposite, for God's sake.
What is the opposite of bisexual?
Huh? I think this opposite stuff is very anti-woke and I complain.
By the way, in an unrelated...
I've been very jealous of the black community because they can sing all of the lyrics of their favorite songs when they come on the radio or on some device.
Because most of the best songs lately have the N-word in them.
And if you are black, you can just sing the entire lyrics, including that N-word.
But if you're white, you can't even sing your favorite song.
Assuming your favorite song has those words in it.
If you're white, you can't even sing your favorite song out loud.
So I thought, well, I do agree that black Americans, they could have their reserved word, and I agree with it.
It's an ugly word, and if they want to reserve that word for just themselves, it has some historical...
You know, reason for it and everything.
I'm all for that.
No objection whatsoever.
But why can't white people have a word that they can use and nobody else can?
Why can't we do that?
And so I did a little brainstorming and I solved it.
I was going to say cracker and say, hey, I can call myself a cracker and I can call other white people crackers.
I mean, I could if I didn't identify as black, but you get the point.
But cracker? It's not really...
It doesn't sound good if it's in a song.
It needs to be cracker.
Because the N-word has an E-R ending, but also an A-H ending or an A ending.
So instead of cracker, which is not cool at all, it's going to be cracker.
And instead of the B word, which you'll hear a lot in popular music, bitch, I don't like to use that word.
I feel that's very disrespectful.
So I want sort of a white version of that, and I think Karen would do it.
So I'm going to write a white rap song in which it uses the word cracka quite a bit and refers to women as Karens, because I don't want to use the B word.
I think it's going to be a bestseller.
We'll see. Anyway, Mike Pence was right.
You don't want to have a meal with somebody that's going to get you in trouble.
I have adopted the Mike Pence philosophy.
I don't know if I've mentioned that to you.
But as a married person, I would not have drinks.
Well, I don't drink, but I wouldn't have drinks or dinner with a woman alone.
Nor a gay man.
Nor a gay man.
Nor anybody else who might want to jump on me.
Because, you know, that's a big problem.
The women, they just want to jump all over me.
No, it's not a big problem.
It turns out it's not a big problem.
All right, the Rolling Stones have decided to retire their song, Brown Sugar.
The biggest surprising thing about this is how did they get away with that song as long as they did?
Isn't that the surprising part of the story?
For the longest time, I've said to myself, is there anybody except the Rolling Stones who could have done this song into the 2000s?
I don't think so.
I don't think so. I think they did have a protected status there.
Now, part of it is because nobody is wondering if Mick Jagger is a racist.
Literally nobody thinks that.
I mean, if you look at his dating history and everything else, it's pretty obvious that he's not a racist.
And we assume the same thing about the rest of the Stones.
In fact, the Stones are the most...
Probably the biggest promoters of black music.
And they say they borrowed slash stole it.
And they're very generous about saying who really...
Muddy Waters and everybody who should get the real credit.
So we know the Rolling Stones are nothing like racist in any normal way that we think of the word.
But I did wonder how they got away with that for so long.
Now, I am aware that it's anti-slavery lyrics.
If you actually knew what the lyrics were about, you would understand it was about the horror of slavery, and therefore there's no bad messaging intended.
But I didn't know that.
I've listened to that song about a million times.
I had no idea...
I had no idea...
That it was about slavery.
I just thought it was a little sort of not current way to refer to each other, if you know what I mean.
So they decided to retire.
I think that's probably a reasonable decision.
There'll be a lot of pushback on that.
I think Mick Jagger's take on it was it just wasn't worth the trouble.
If people were going to complain about it, it was too hard to explain that we're all on the same side here, the song isn't what you think.
It's just too much work.
So I think I agree with them on a business level that just wasn't worth the effort.
They have other songs.
Rasmussen says that 68% of those polled either strongly or somewhat agree that the heated encounters between concerned parents and school boards is protected speech.
Yay. Two-thirds of the country still likes protected speech.
Now, of course, things can get heated and, you know, there has to be a limit.
But good news.
Two-thirds of the country still like free speech.
Biden's poll numbers are still plunging.
38% approval. That's based on doing everything wrong.
If you do everything wrong.
All right, there was a study that came out that said baby aspirin might help a lot for COVID. It was not a randomized, large, controlled trial.
So it's a study which does need confirmation.
You should not be taking baby aspirin because you heard that there was that one study.
But here's the weird thing.
At about the same time that the news was reporting that aspirin could be like a real godsend for people with COVID, because apparently it reduces blood clots, at the same time we heard that, unconfirmed, right?
You still have to wait for the real randomized trial.
At the same time, just about the same time, it was announced that the medical community says you should not be taking drugs.
A baby aspirin every day to prevent strokes and other problems.
Is it a coincidence that the moment it works for COVID, or it looks like it might, unconfirmed, is the same time that the drug industry says stop taking it?
And, of course, all the conspiracy people say, that's just so you'll sell more vaccines, right?
You're trying to make people think that they can't easily treat it themselves or reduce their risk by taking an aspirin.
I don't know that those are connected, but you sort of suspect it, don't you?
We live in a world in which that's a little bit too big of a coincidence.
So I'm not going to say that's a coincidence.
I'm also not going to say it's not.
It could be. I'm not going to rule it out as coincidence, but it doesn't look like one, does it?
It really doesn't. But here's the most confusing part of the story.
Are the rest of you just learning that baby aspirin is not recommended?
I learned that years ago on the news.
And then I asked my doctor, and my doctor said, yeah, we don't recommend that, don't take that.
And yet today, people are treating it like it's new news.
It was years ago we do this.
Right? Now, was the problem that it wasn't promoted as strongly as it was because they were selling a lot of baby aspirin, maybe?
Maybe big baby aspirin was behind it?
I don't know. I don't know how exactly that would be the case.
Doctors still prescribed it.
So here's the deal.
How many of you...
We're still on baby aspirin as of this morning.
In the comments, how many of you are from the doctor?
Let's say a doctor recommended.
How many are on doctor recommended baby aspirin as of today?
A lot of you. A lot of you.
Look at the comments.
It's just streaming by.
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
My spouse. I am, I am.
Yes, yes, yes. A lot of no's.
But the... How many of you went to a doctor who didn't know that aspirin was no longer recommended?
Here's a little wake-up call for you.
Let me show you what just happened to all of you who are still taking baby aspirin because your doctor recommended it.
May I do...
this is my impression of what just happened to you right now.
What?
I would do it again, but it kind of hurt.
Your doctor didn't know as much as I did about baby aspirin, if you're still taking it.
Because I heard this a long time ago.
And you can see in the comments, many, many people were aware of this for years.
Years. It's been in the news.
This is not new.
I don't know what's going on.
Are we just being gaslighted in some weird way?
Anyway, link to a study.
I don't have one. You heard there was a big crash of a twin-engine Cessna crashed into some buildings and a UPS truck.
In San Diego, the driver of the UPS truck was killed by the airplane.
Now, let me tell you, if you're a UPS driver and you're putting in a million miles a year on the road and the thing that kills you is an airplane, it was time.
I don't mean to be insensitive to the family, but...
Talk about when your time is up, your time is up, because a million miles of driving a UPS drug didn't seem to faze him, but the airplane got him.
All right. What question do I ask myself when I hear that a small airplane crashed?
What's the first question I ask myself?
I mean, after I ask myself if my wife was in it, because she flies Cessnas.
So the first thing I ask is, where's my wife?
So I want to make sure she wasn't in it.
The second thing I ask is, what kind of doctor was he?
Yeah, that's the second question.
What kind of doctor was he?
Do you know why?
Well, I don't know why, but doctors crash a lot of airplanes.
So much so that when I heard this, I said, and I'm not joking, The first thing I thought was, what kind of doctor is he?
He's a cardiologist.
Now, the airplane is not the...
There's a brand of airplane.
I won't mention it because I'll probably get sued or something.
But not the Cessnas.
The Cessnas are actually easy to fly.
So a doctor in a Cessna should not be crashing.
But a doctor in another airplane that I won't mention, sometimes called the doctor killer, more common.
But it was still the first question I asked.
What kind of doctor was he?
Sure enough, I don't know how to explain that exactly.
Do you? I don't know why doctors crash more airplanes than other people.
Maybe they can afford airplanes.
Is that it? So Columbus got cancelled.
But there's still a lot of people who are pretty happy about it.
We changed that to Indigenous People's Day.
I have some slightly mixed feelings about Columbus, but I'm okay with cancelling him.
I'm okay with cancelling Columbus.
Columbus was horrible.
I don't know if you've ever read the things that Columbus and his actual crew did to the locals.
I mean, I read a story where they used them as horses.
They actually would have them carry them on their shoulders...
So that, you know, Columbus's men didn't, like, I don't know, get their feet dirty or something.
Yeah, they beat him and killed him and tortured him and treated him like horses, basically.
Now, if there was anybody who should get cancelled, I would think it would be anybody involved with something like that.
So, I mean, it's a little bit like saying, you know, Hitler did a lot of bad things, but you have to look at his accomplishments, too.
The Volkswagen... I mean, it feels a little like that.
It's like, yeah, the Volkswagen's cool.
I don't know if it's true that Hitler was behind the Volkswagen.
It's probably not true, but I'm just using it for my example.
I don't know that we can say Columbus did some awesome stuff, too.
First of all, he didn't find the right part of the world, and second of all, he was like a major torturer of what he was.
So I guess I'm in favor of Indigenous Peoples Day.
Um... It feels like everything white and European is getting cancelled.
But seriously, he was a torturer.
I mean, that's got to count for something.
DeSantis went the other way because he's so good at this populist stuff.
But he characterized Columbus as, quote, a singular figure in Western civilization who exemplified courage, risk-taking, and heroism in the face of enormous odds.
A visionary, etc.
Now, those things can all be true, but can be said of other people who did bad things.
You remember the story about the trans employee who got suspended at Netflix, allegedly for complaining about Dave Chappelle's show, but that was fake news.
She did not get suspended for complaining.
Netflix says that, and they've reinstated her.
But the complaint was that she got on some kind of a Zoom call that was only for executives, but it turns out she was invited.
Somebody sent her the link.
So some executive or somebody who had the link seems to have invited her, and she didn't know she couldn't be there.
So there wasn't any bad intention.
And once Netflix looked into it, they just didn't find anything wrong.
So they said, all right, you're back in.
Do you like that? I like that.
I like that. I like this outcome.
I like that the employee could complain and that that wasn't the reason she got fired.
She was called to task for doing something that looked like it was against the rules, but they didn't fire her.
They just said, suspend you.
We're going to look into this. They looked into it.
There was nothing to it. They said, oh, sorry, you're back.
I'm okay with that. She got a little attention.
Her point of view got spread a little bit better.
Netflix looks like a responsible employer.
I think everybody won. I think the trans community won.
I think Chappelle won. I think Netflix won.
This is one of those weird stories where everybody won.
Am I wrong? Didn't everybody win?
How often do you get that?
Everybody won. Was it planned that way?
No, I don't think it was planned that way.
I think it's just one of these rare situations where everybody did the right thing.
Maybe we should note that.
Maybe we should note. Rare situation where everybody did the right thing.
I'm not saying you agree with your opinions, and you don't have to.
Shatner down? Oh, is Captain Kirk up?
Did he make it? Oh, so he's already been up and back.
So Shatner's back.
Well, I'll tell you, if I had been on that flight, there's a pretty good chance I would have, shall we say, Shatner my flight suit.
That's right. You put me in that experimental flight situation, and I would Shatner my flight suit.
Um... And how's the Dow doing?
Yes, there is driving, but I get to go a little bit later today.
All right. But I do need to go.
Yeah, space travel for 10 minutes.
He's got four minutes of light stuff.
All right. Columbus was great because he was a good navigator.
And you know who else was great?
O.J. Simpson.
O.J. Simpson was great at football.
Let's not forget that.
Let's not forget that O.J. was really good at football.
Same thing. Columbus, O.J., kind of similar.
Got to take the good with the bad or sort them out.
All right. Yeah, I see you mentioning the aircraft correctly.
Read Delaney to find out why you're wrong.
Wrong about Columbus?
All right.
Carol Delaney. Yes.
So there's... Apparently somebody must be defending Columbus.
You know, it doesn't matter. Does it matter if the real story is that Columbus was an awesome guy and he never did anything bad to anybody?
It kind of doesn't matter.
Because that's not who we think he is.
And as a national symbol, it only matters who you think he is.
It doesn't matter who he actually was.
Unfortunately, it's not relevant.
It should be. If you're telling me it should be, or the truth matters, does it?
No, the truth should matter.
It doesn't. The truth should matter in a perfect world.
