Episode 1258 Scott Adams - Biden Inauguration and How to Feel About it All

hey anybody out there you know this is a big day it's inauguration and i'm not entirely sure how many of you gonna be on this livestream because it's the wrong time but 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 you feel uh do you hear an annoying buzz somebody said i don't hear it all right so it looks like youtube's not gonna work but we don't care about that do we i don't think we do hey bill good to see you all right so i've been uh 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 cohen not easy not easy so we christine and i tried to squeeze in the honeymoon that we postponed because of the coronavirus and i am now in a uh 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 um if you think there's some buzzing on this uh 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 that's everything i can control so if you've got a problem with it please sign off because i can't fix it all right um and youtube looks like it's not gonna work at all so let me turn that off boom all right so the first thing you need to know if you're flying is i needed to we needed to get the cova test before we flew those were negative and then when you reach your destination in this particular case um i don't have a tan this is 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 yet another test so i'll have three copa 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 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 seven 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 copper mug or a glass a canteen no a copper mug or glass let's see if this will be the first time i'll try to do it by memory in a long time a cup remember glass uh does anybody know how this goes canteen jug flask something like that anyway simultaneous up 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 uh so 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 gonna 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 you put your room key card in the 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 the entire unit just falls off the wall off the floor you know the whole front part of it just collapsed as soon as i put my my card in it just falls on the floor so i'm having a four star uh 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 later and that will be amazing uh a chalice yes that was the other word canteen jugger 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 all right let's talk about joe biden so i'm gonna be a little bit non-political if that even makes sense i'm not even sure that's the 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 about one day we just be americans and i'm not celebrating you know 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 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 there are either trivial things or things that maybe can't get done so we'll have to wait to see how much damage he could 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 cancelling the legacy of the last president it feels like that's the game now now of course you'd have to blame trump trump for doing it first and so you can't really hold joe biden to a different standard you know 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 yeah he didn't start it and well we you know i i gotta say uh i had a little exchange with ian bremmer on twitter yesterday and uh he he made a tweet and i responded to his tweet saying that 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 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 we're treating it as though the the system has made a decision and i'm 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 you know 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 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 uh 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 be 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 there are two opinions that i consider stupid all right there are some opinions that you could be wrong but you're you're being smart it's just that everybody gets everybody's wrong sometimes right so uh 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 what would we look at as just citizens to know that that 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 percent on it based on my i know experience in life and things i've seen before if you said 95 that it was fair or even 95 percent 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 you're acknowledging that it can't be known if you think it could be known i don't think you should be in this conversation it feels like not a reasonable position whereas ruby friedman freeman somebody says i think the ruby thing is one of the uh the most unfair things that came out of it and i found myself defending ruby because i watched the same video that you didn't have to see anything even slightly worrying in that video if you think you did that's probably confirmation bias because all you saw was the countenance of 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 really low likelihood on any of those three things sony says she admitted it no she didn't she didn't admit anything because there wasn't anything to admit um and wouldn't you think by now you'd have a uh some kind of a whistleblower don't you think you'd have at least one whistleblower because i think people have offered um large sums of money for a whistleblower in fact you could do that tomorrow if somebody said all right i'll you know let's say the uh mike lindell the my pillow guy let's say just hypothetically he said i'll give you a million dollars for a whistleblower who has enough information to you know to show that there was a problem would you 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 uh 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 you know remember you were you were involved in a criminal activity in this uh 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 all right um if you've watched hey omar uh if you've watched any of the uh the press coverage of biden so far since you know 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're gonna pick somebody to be your style uh you know symbol would it be kamalaris i don't know i'm not saying she dresses poorly i'm just not sure it's a fashion statement um so somebody says i like the buzz all right there are too many complainers and not enough technology working so i'm going to cut it short but i just wanted to make sure i touch bases with you today and i will talk to you tomorrow

hey anybody out there

you know this is a big day it's

inauguration

and i'm not entirely sure how many of

you gonna

be on this livestream because it's the

wrong time

but 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

you feel uh do you hear an annoying buzz

somebody said

i don't hear it all right so it looks

like

youtube's not gonna work but we don't

care about that do we

i don't think we do hey bill good to see

you all right

so i've been uh 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 cohen not easy

not easy so we christine and i tried to

squeeze in the honeymoon that we

postponed because of the coronavirus

and i am now in a uh

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 um

if you think there's some buzzing on

this uh 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

that's everything i can control so

if you've got a problem with it please

sign off

because i can't fix it all right

um and youtube looks like it's not gonna

work at all so let me turn that off

boom all right so the

first thing you need to know if you're

flying is i needed to we needed to get

the cova test

before we flew those were negative and

then when you reach your destination

in this particular case um

i don't have a tan this is 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 yet another test

so i'll have three copa 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 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 seven 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

copper mug or a glass

a canteen no a copper mug or glass let's

see if this will be the first time i'll

try to do it by

memory in a long time a cup remember

glass

uh does anybody know how this goes

canteen

jug flask something like that anyway

simultaneous up 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 uh so 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 gonna 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 you put your room

key card in the 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 the

entire unit just falls off the wall

off the floor you know the whole front

part of it just

collapsed as soon as i put my my card in

it just falls on the floor

so i'm having a four star

uh 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 later

and that will be amazing uh

a chalice yes that was the other word

canteen jugger 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 all

right let's talk about joe biden

so i'm gonna be a little bit

non-political

if that even makes sense i'm not even

sure that's the 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 about one day we just be

americans

and i'm not celebrating you know 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

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

there are either trivial things or

things that maybe can't get done

so we'll have to wait to see how much

damage he could 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 cancelling the legacy of the last

president

it feels like that's the game now now of

course you'd have to blame trump

trump for doing it first and so you

can't really hold

joe biden to a different standard you

know 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 yeah he didn't start it and

well we you know i i gotta say uh i had

a little exchange with ian bremmer

on twitter yesterday and uh

he he made a tweet and i responded to

his tweet

saying that 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

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 we're treating

it

as though the the system has made a

decision and i'm 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

you know 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

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

uh 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 be 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 there are two opinions

that i consider stupid

all right there are some opinions that

you could be wrong

but you're you're being smart it's just

that everybody gets

everybody's wrong sometimes right

so uh 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 what would we look at as just

citizens

to know that that 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 percent on it based on my

i know experience in life and things

i've seen before

if you said 95 that it was

fair or even 95 percent 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 you're acknowledging that it

can't be known

if you think it could be known i don't

think you should be in this conversation

it feels like not a reasonable position

whereas ruby friedman freeman somebody

says i think the

ruby thing is one of the uh

the most unfair things that came out of

it and i found myself defending ruby

because i watched the same video that

you didn't have to see anything even

slightly worrying

in that video if you think you did

that's probably confirmation bias

because all you saw was

the countenance of 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 really

low likelihood on any of those three

things

sony says she admitted it no she didn't

she didn't admit anything because there

wasn't anything to admit

um and wouldn't you think by now you'd

have a uh

some kind of a whistleblower don't you

think you'd have at least

one whistleblower because i think people

have

offered um large sums of money

for a whistleblower in fact you could do

that tomorrow

if somebody said all right i'll you know

let's say the

uh mike lindell the my pillow guy let's

say just

hypothetically he said i'll give you a

million dollars

for a whistleblower who has enough

information to you know

to show that there was a problem would

you 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 uh 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

you know remember you were you were

involved in a criminal activity in this

uh 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 all right

um if you've watched hey omar

uh if you've watched any of the uh

the press coverage of biden so far since

you know 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're gonna pick somebody to be your

style

uh you know symbol would it be kamalaris

i don't know i'm not saying she dresses

poorly

i'm just not sure it's a fashion

statement

um

so somebody says i like the buzz

all right there are too many complainers

and

not enough technology working so i'm

going to

cut it short but i just wanted to make

sure i touch bases with you today

and i will talk to you tomorrow