Episode 1336 Scott Adams: How to Quit Coke and Other Junk Food, Virus News, and Updates
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
Glenn Greenwald...a mandatory Twitter follow
The evolving Matt Gaetz story
China's fishing boat invasion of Philippines
How to kick your Coca Cola addiction
George Floyd trial, camera perspective bias
Is herd immunity really possible?
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If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topics to build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure.
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A little bit late. You know, have you ever wondered what would it be like to watch Coffee with Scott Adams if he had no time to prepare and had literally Just awakened 15 minutes earlier.
What would that be like?
Well, you're going to find out.
And if you'd like to enjoy it, and I know you would, I mean, why not?
Why not enjoy it, right?
All you need is a cup or mug or glass, a tank or chalice or stein, a canteen jug or flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. Join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, The thing that makes everything better.
It's called the simultaneous sip.
If you haven't tried it, oh, I feel sorry for you.
Those of you who have, get ready.
It's happening now.
Go! Do you remember, some of you have been watching me for a while, I once told you that if you take the Dale Carnegie course, one of the things it teaches you is really, really valuable for some situations.
One of those situations is happening right now.
And let me tell you a little bit of a story before I get into that.
Years ago, I was doing a book tour going around the country signing books for whatever book was out.
And I got to a Denver bookstore, one of the biggest ones in, I don't know, the country or Denver, just some massive bookstore that had a room with a stadium audience and everything.
I mean, it was just a big bookstore.
And I get there, and the owner of the bookstore greets me and says, all right, people have been waiting for two hours to see you.
And I said, oh, that's great.
And I thought they meant to sign books.
And they said, yeah, they can't wait to hear your speech.
And I said, what?
Yeah, your speech that you're going to give in 10 minutes.
They're really excited about it.
And I said, huh, I didn't know I was giving a speech in 10 minutes.
No idea. I thought I was just there to sign books.
But apparently the audience had already assembled.
So there were, I don't know, several hundred people in the room waiting to hear my speech, which didn't exist.
So my point is, if you take the Dale Carnegie course, they actually teach you how to be prepared To always have a speech.
So you can walk into these situations, as I did, I just gave a speech.
Because you just always have one.
Now it's usually pieces of speeches, right?
So you have these little components that if you get in one of these situations, you can just take them off the shelf.
You say, okay, I'll take one of these, one of these, one of these, and I'll just put them together on the fly.
Which is what I just did.
So that story about the bookstore, some of you have heard it before.
And the point of it is, it's one of my shelf points.
Always keep a few on the shelf.
So anytime you get a little situation like this, you go, oh, I'll introduce it by the Denver bookstore story.
And then I'll have a good momentum going, and then I'll find other pieces as I go.
I'm going to give you today my first mandatory Twitter follow recommendation.
You ready? Now when I say mandatory, I'm going to the next level.
I'm taking it up. Because I've told you before there are some people you should follow.
I'll probably mention them again.
But there are a number of people who are just way better to follow than other people.
Because they have some kind of insight or they're just good at tweeting or something.
And I'm going to give you my first ever mandatory follow.
Meaning that if you follow me, I'm telling you it's mandatory.
Glenn Greenwald.
Now if you don't already follow Glenn Greenwald, here's the first thing you need to know.
It has nothing to do with politics.
He talks about politics.
So his domain is politics.
But that's not the recommendation.
He's one of the few people who every time he writes or tweets, he can take the curtain of reality and just pushes it back.
And then he's done, and then he brings it back, you know, after you're done reading them, and then you have to live in that other artificial world for a while.
Then Glenn Greenwald says something, and he pulls the curtain back again, and you can see the real world for a little bit.
Now, usually he's pulling back the curtain on the media itself.
So that you can see that you're living in an artificial world, literally.
That you've created an artificial, subjective world that you're living in.
And he's one of the people, and there aren't many of them, who don't live in that world.
I don't know why.
I would love to know the history of what hallucinogenics he's ever tried in his life, if any.
I would love to know how he became who he is.
Because somehow he lives outside that world.
And he can just pull the curtain back and look and show you.
It's kind of amazing. So he's a mandatory follow because he shows you what's on the other side of the curtain.
And you don't get that from everybody.
I'll give you other mandatories as we go along here.
Here's a way to know if you are dumb.
A lot of you have been wondering, am I dumb?
You ever have that thought?
Sometimes it might be the imposter effect.
You're not really dumb, but you're worried that you are compared to other people.
But one way to know you are dumb is if you hear an argument and the first thing you think is, oh, you love that person you're talking about.
Why don't you just kiss them?
Apparently you love them.
Okay, if that's your response to an argument, you're kind of dumb.
You're not really ready for talking in public.
If you say, oh, Scott, you're defending the worst person.
You're an apologist for the worst person.
If that's your feeling, you're dumb.
Because for some reason you can't separate an argument, which could be good or bad, from the people who are making it.
If you can't do that, you just probably shouldn't talk in public.
Maybe that's not for you, okay?
Have I set you up enough?
Alright, let's talk about Matt Gaetz.
Because I refuse to be limited by dumb people not understanding that you can talk about people, you can talk about their situation, But you're not an apologist defending people.
You're just not that person, right?
Can we do that? I would like to know that the people who follow me are smart enough to separate an argument from people.
If you can't do that, you're on the wrong live stream.
So let's do that.
As these stories go...
And of course, you all know the weird Matt Gaetz story.
There's allegations of orgies with underage people with no evidence that we've seen to suggest any of that's true.
But the longer you wait, don't you expect the evidence to come out?
Big old story like this, you know, more and more evidence is coming out.
So it becomes a different story the longer you wait.
It starts as one thing, and now it's evolving.
And it's so evolved to sort of a new thing.
And that's what I'm going to describe right now.
Number one, Matt Gaetz has said from the beginning that any allegations that he was with a 70-year-old are just completely false.
It just doesn't exist.
But he's gone further to say That the accuser doesn't exist.
That's pretty gutsy, isn't it?
How many people accused of something like this would go so far as to say, not only did I not do it, but the accuser doesn't exist?
Now, that's a pretty big claim.
Later, if you find out that the accuser does exist, then there's a separate question of whether anything happened with that accuser.
A similar... To what was accused.
But isn't that an unusual claim?
Don't you think? Because if somebody knew that the accuser would exist, in other words, if Matt Gaetz knew the person exists, wouldn't that be the worst defense to say that they don't even exist?
Right? Unless it's true.
Put yourself in that position.
Now, we can't read his mind, okay?
So we're not reading his mind.
But put yourself in the position.
You've been accused of something with an underage person, 17.
Would you say, if you knew you'd been accused of that, would you say, no, we did not do that thing.
I know who you're talking about, but certainly we didn't do that thing.
That's very different from saying nobody exists.
That they just don't exist.
That's really different.
I don't know that, like, you'd have to be pretty sure they don't exist.
Wouldn't you? Because, for sure, the simplest thing to prove is that a person exists.
Am I wrong? Is there anything easier to prove than that a person exists?
It's interesting, isn't it?
Because what happens if they produce the person?
He looks really, really bad.
Would he put himself in a position, and it's obvious that he's thought about it and planned it, His defense, right?
It's not like an off-the-cuff thing he said.
He's saying this repeatedly and often.
The person doesn't exist.
Now, if that person ends up existing, that's going to completely change what I think about the situation.
And for you, too, I would think.
But at the moment, every day that goes by, when we don't hear that the person exists...
And by the way, I don't think the person would be still 17.
A number of months have gone by since the accusations even began.
So statistically speaking, it seems deeply unlikely that there's still a minor involved, at least today.
It would be somebody over 18.
So do you think that there is somebody deeply involved in some kind of a secret investigation who doesn't want to be known at this point and the leaks don't produce that person?
I don't know. There's something sketchy about the fact that the longer you wait, you don't find out.
Now, if tomorrow we hear the name of the person and the person exists, change everything, right?
I'm just saying that every day that goes by, you have to say, I'm starting to wonder if this person exists.
That's the reasonable question.
Here's the other part that I haven't heard anybody say.
There's this weird element of it where apparently the Gateses had We've seen the documents and emails going back and forth.
Between the two attorney types who were proposing to Gates Sr.
that for $25 million they could get this alleged, what would you call them, captive back from Iran who may or may not exist.
He may or may not be alive.
We don't know. There's indication he's not alive, but these two people said they had indication he was alive.
You and I don't know.
So we don't know if that guy exists.
But imagine you're the gazes, and people approach you and say, for $25 million, we can maybe get this hostage back that you think might not even be real.
You're saying to yourself, I'm not even sure there's a real guy alive that could be saved.
And if he is, why isn't the government doing it?
So it's kind of sketchy, right?
The government wouldn't do this?
Are you saying that there's nobody in the government of the United States who would be interested in getting back this hostage?
So right away, it's sketchy, right?
Now, you could argue, oh, the government tried, or they don't care, or they don't believe the story, but it's true.
So you could maybe, maybe come up with some stretch of a story that would say, yeah, this is the way to do it.
You wouldn't use the government.
You would make some deal with a private citizen.
I mean, it doesn't pass the sniff test, right?
But it doesn't fail it so badly that you could say it's impossible.
It doesn't pass the sniff test, but it's not completely ruled out.
Now, I looked at the documents.
The emails back and forth.
And the way it's presented is that, hey, there's an extra benefit if you help us out with this $25 million that they call the loan.
But I don't know if you would call it a loan.
Because a loan is something you expect to get repaid.
I don't know if anybody expected that to be repaid.
So let's first say that characterizing it as a loan is maybe a subjective call, even if there was some alleged plan to repay it.
Feels a little iffy to me.
Now, when you looked at the documents, did you say to yourself, there's an extortion thing?
Because part of the offer was that they would try to lobby the government to get Matt Gaetz cleared or pardoned, presidentially pardoned, of some wrongdoings which were unspecific about whatever they heard about these sex crimes.
Now, do you believe that these two lawyers had enough weight that they could have done anything at all To get a pardon from Matt Gaetz should he have done anything that so far we're not aware of.
So let me say it again.
There's no evidence of a specific anything.
None. No evidence.
To the public. We don't know if anybody else has seen anything.
But you and I have seen no evidence of a crime.
Now imagine you're the Gaetzes and you've got this offer that will help you get out of this alleged crime...
If you help us with this alleged loan for a captive who is allegedly alive.
What do you do with that?
Well, what the Gateses did is they went to law enforcement and they said, this feels like extortion.
Now, let me ask you this.
We're amateurs looking from the outside, right?
And we take the clues... And Carpe!
Good to see you. That wasn't worth $20.
You should just text me. But thank you.
What was I saying? It was just good to see you, Carpe.
Carpe Donctum has just joined the show here.
So we're looking at this situation, and here's my question that I haven't seen answered.
What would cause the Gases to think this was extortion?
What would cause them to think that?
I think one thing that would certainly cause you to think that is, wait for it, if you were Matt Gaetz and you knew for sure that you had not been involved in any sex crimes, right?
If you thought you had been involved in sexual crimes and these people said, we have a way to maybe help you get out, Wouldn't you be a little bit interested in talking to him if you'd done the crime?
Because if you've done the crime, and allegedly there's an investigation, you know there's witnesses.
And you know there's real evidence.
And you know you're in real big trouble.
You would at least listen to the offer, wouldn't you?
Yeah, you would. The only situation in which you would say, my God, this looks like an obvious scam, As if you knew there was no crime.
Thank you, Kevin. Yeah.
And I haven't seen anybody mention that.
It seems to me that given that these documents and the offer from the two lawyer people were kind of sketchy, the way they handled it was as if they didn't believe there was any crime.
That's the way they handled it.
That means something. They didn't handle it as if, well, maybe there is a crime here.
They handled it like no crime existed.
That's the way you'd handle it.
This must be a scam because there's no crime.
They're trying to extort me over no crime.
You go right to law enforcement.
But suppose you had done the crime and you knew it.
Is the first thing you do to get law enforcement involved?
I don't think so.
It doesn't quite fit, does it?
So I would say the documents are quite exculpatory, but we are far from knowing the final conclusion to any of this.
I'm just going to say that the Gates situation is looking better for Gates every day and worse for his accusers, but we'll keep watching this.
Meanwhile, World War III has begun.
I don't know if you've heard about this.
World War III is underway.
And I'm not even kidding.
There's an actual world war that just started.
Apparently the way it's begun is that China has started to capture Philippine fishing territory by just moving 220 fishing boats to fish, but they're not exactly there to fish.
They're really there as part of the military to occupy until they have so much functional control of the sea That for all practical purposes, China owns it.
Which is what they're doing to the entire South China Sea.
It's hard to see that as not World War III. Because they are literally conquering territory.
It just happens to be ocean territory.
And they're doing it directly with assets.
It's obvious. There's no question about it.
It is World War III. They are absorbing...
Enormous swaths of the earth and putting it under Chinese control.
Parts of the world that people think China doesn't control.
Now, the thing that makes it a little different than, say, a normal world war, a little different, is that China might need that ocean to feed its people in the future.
So apparently it's very rich in fish, and I don't think that they want to control it just for export.
I think that China has a massive problem feeding its people just because there are so many of them, and they probably need that fish in the future.
So it's not like a regular war of conquest.
It might be a war of necessity, and I don't know what historical precedent there is for a war of necessity or presumed advantage slash necessity.
It's a little different. But it's a similar strategy they're using that Russia used in the Ukraine, where you send in, I guess the Russians sent in what were called the little green men.
So they were Russian soldiers, and they just took off their uniforms, and they just invaded Ukraine and said, oh no, we're not military.
Are you kidding? No!
Look at me, I'm not even wearing a uniform.
How could I be Russian military?
Until there are so many of them there, it's It becomes kind of a fact on the ground that Russia controls some territory.
So China's doing the same thing with these fishing boats.
They're just making it a fact that they own it over time.
Let's talk about Coca-Cola.
Let me start by saying I oppose boycotts.
I oppose boycotts.
As soon as you go down that boycott road and you get re-boycotted, everybody's boycotting everybody, it's just better to let business be business and let politics be politics.
It's just better, right?
It's better for all of us.
Let's just not be attacking companies.
But sometimes, sometimes the company attacks you.
That's not your fault, right?
Sometimes the company attacks you.
Well, that's different. I would say don't boycott a company just because they have some opinion or something.
But if that company attacks you, well, you certainly have a right to defend yourself.
And so let's talk about Coke.
So there are many conservatives who would consider that Coca-Cola, the company, has attacked them in a way.
By going after Georgia for their voting ID laws, which conservatives would say are just common sense and it's the same laws or similar laws requiring an ID to vote, similar to most countries, most places.
Nothing unusual about it.
So this is just an attack by a company on the system and on conservatives, basically.
So many conservatives have called for people to stop drinking Coca-Cola.
Matt Walsh did a tweet which he summed it up well.
I'll just read it. He said, Now, here's my take on this.
Quitting Diet Coke or Coke is really hard.
I know, because I had a 12-Diet Coke-a-Day habit for, I don't know, 30 years or something.
And I did quit, but it was hard.
And I'm going to tell you how.
So I'm going to teach you how to stop your Diet Coke habit or Coke habit, soda habit.
And it's not hard if you do it right.
If you do it wrong, it's pretty hard.
And I'll teach you how to do it right.
And it goes like this.
Don't quit anything else at the same time.
It is such a strong addiction, at least that's how I found it to be, not addiction in the scientific term, but functionally it's an addiction, that if you're trying to, let's say, improve your entire diet, the same time you're quitting Diet Coke, that's a lot to ask of you.
You want to be hungry and also not have a Diet Coke.
Those are two really strong forces to be fighting at the same time.
So I say take two months.
Give yourself a break on the rest of your diet.
Eat healthy food, but don't obsess over it.
And just do one thing.
Just quit Diet Coke.
Or Coke or soda.
It doesn't have to be the Coca-Cola company.
Just sugary drinks.
Just quit that. In two months, you will not only not crave it, it will look like a chemical experiment, not even look like a food beverage item.
In two months, the way you think of it will completely change just by not drinking it.
You don't have to do anything else.
Just don't drink it for two months and you will think it's crazy that anybody puts that in their body.
It won't even look like a beverage.
I look at a soda now and I think, oh my god, I just feel sorry for anybody who drinks this stuff.
After drinking 12 sodas a day for 30 years, right?
So I'm the biggest hypocrite in the world and that's what I'm telling you.
The moment you go two months without it, it doesn't look the same when you're done.
It completely changes what it is, subjectively.
So, two months.
Don't do anything else hard.
Just do that. And here's the extra, extra benefit.
You know I like to find the benefit out of chaos, right?
Whenever there's chaos, there's advantage.
Whenever there's tragedy, there's something.
Some little thing somebody created to make money.
And here's what the Coca-Cola company did for you, and you should thank them for this.
Coca-Cola just made it the easiest it's ever been to stop drinking soda because they pissed you off.
Use it.
Use it. If you're pissed off, don't waste that.
Do not waste a good anger.
Employ it.
Use it. When that Diet Coke's looking at you saying, drink me, drink me, use this anger and say, I would love to drink you, you little frickin' bastard, but I'm not, because I hate you.
I hate you. Use it!
The Coca-Cola company made, I think, a gigantic business mistake, because they made it easier for a third of the country to quit their product, And it's good for your health if you do.
Now, I'm just going to quote people who know more than I do to make that claim that it's good for your health if you do.
So do it. Take the good from this, which is they made it easy.
Dr. Nicole Sapphire tweeted on these sets of tweets, and she said, pandemic aside, an unhealthy diet contributes to approximately 678,000 deaths each year.
With diabetes, heart disease, and obesity making people vulnerable to COVID-19.
And this number is much larger in 2020 because of the pandemic.
670,000 people a year dying from basically eating themselves to death.
That's the comorbidity that puts them in the vulnerable position.
So, let's get healthy.
I want everybody who watches this live stream to be healthier than the average.
Just take the tips and put together a system that works for you.
All right, let's talk about the Floyd trial.
So there was something interesting that came out of that.
You know, I've been telling you that the defense for a shaven, they'd be missing the most obvious play if they don't challenge the quality of video evidence.
All right. You want to challenge the idea That just because you think you saw it with your own eyes on video, that doesn't mean anything.
Because video lies.
So the point that video lies, and lies a lot, and lies easily, has to be communicated to the jury.
Because if the jury sits there and thinks, well, it's on video, I saw it with my own eyes, it's over.
So the defense, I'm going to give them a...
They get an A-plus for the following move.
Apparently, they had some camera angles, which has showed that Shaven's knee, at some point, we don't know how often during the nine minutes, we don't know how often this was, but at some point, Shaven's knee was actually on the shoulder blade above the neck, and it's very clear in the photos.
But at other times, I think he was on the neck.
So, the way that I guess the way the lawyer introduced this was he asked one of the experts, whoever was on stand, if he'd heard of camera angle bias.
Have you ever heard of camera angle bias?
And I think the witness said no.
And then he showed him two photos side by side, one of the one you've probably seen that looks exactly like the knee is on his neck, and then another camera angle of the same thing where it looks like it's on maybe further back on his shoulder blade.
And apparently they timestamped it, so you can tell it's the same time.
Now, imagine you're in the jury.
The entire time you've been watching these videos, because you've seen them as part of the trial, the entire time all you saw, all you saw was a knee on the neck.
And now the defense says, okay, here's a different angle.
It's not on the neck.
Now, you might say to yourself, but Scott, that doesn't matter, because he just took it off at one point, put it back on.
It's not really relevant to anything.
To which I would say, it is relevant to intent.
The entire argument is that he intentionally put Floyd in a dangerous situation.
Not intentionally killed him.
Intentionally killed him, I think, is a higher charge.
But intentionally put him in a dangerous situation.
Where if he took his knee off every now and then, that would suggest he was trying to mitigate the danger, right?
That he was aware of a situation that was trying to not kill him, because sometimes he took his knee off the neck.
But I think there's other evidence that suggests that might have been after he'd already passed out.
So he might have been dead by then.
Don't know that part. So the only thing I'll say is, I don't know if the evidence makes the point the defense wanted to make, because of the timing.
It might have been too late when the knee was off.
But it's a really good play in terms of persuasion.
Because the persuasion of it is that the jury just learned that they can't trust their own eyes.
Regardless of the timing of when the knee was on the neck or the shoulder, the lesson is the same.
You can't tell by looking at it.
That's really good defense.
That's really good.
We'll see what happens.
Again, for the people who are watching this, I don't defend Shaven.
I don't defend Matt Gaetz.
We just talk about the persuasion element of it and see if we can learn anything.
Karl Bergstrom, who often tweets about the virus and statistical truths about it, is warning us that we're misinterpreting, we being the public, Excuse me.
That we're misinterpreting what it means to reach herd immunity.
And specifically...
Specifically, that herd immunity doesn't mean that we're past all the trouble and that the virus goes away.
So herd immunity, you should understand, is not the point when you don't have any more virus or more deaths.
Herd immunity is when it doesn't go as fast.
In other words, it's not another pandemic peak coming.
But the baseline infections could just go forever.
I mean, you could just have new babies being born and being infected forever.
So if you think that getting to herd immunity means, oh, we're done, throw away the masks, stop the social distancing, unfortunately, it might not mean that.
Now, I'm not telling you that we're going to wear masks forever.
I don't think we will. But we...
The cough has to be a technique, somebody says.
No, just woke up.
And I've got a little allergies at the moment.
So here's what I would add to this.
I'm less concerned because the weirdness of this virus is that we might be able to vaccinate basically 100% of the people who would die.
So if the...
It's not a dry cough, don't worry.
I don't have COVID. So I'm going to disagree with Carl Bergstrom, even though he's about 100 times smarter than I am on the topic I'm disagreeing.
And the only thing I'm going to add is that I think this virus is not like any other virus.
Because you actually could vaccinate 100% of the people who might die from it.
Nothing would stop you from doing that.
Alright, so what happens if 100% of the people who are vulnerable, or something like it, get vaccinated?
Do you care if the rest of the people get it?
I don't know. I don't know if you care.
Now, you got the long-haul problem, but isn't the long-haul problem probably, you know, even that people seem to get over it.
It's just a really bad problem for several months.
Elon Musk said he will not take the vaccine.
Interesting. I should tell you that I have scheduled myself to take the vaccine.
I've been telling you that I wouldn't make a decision until I had to, until it was available, because I'd get all the information I could.
And I've decided that, given my age, that I'm going to take it.
If I were Elon Musk's age, I don't know.
I might think differently, but I'm not.
So, I'm going to call this early today.
Because I'm going to go do some other things and my allergies are killing me.
