Episode 1368 Scott Adams: Virus Conspiracy Theories, Trump the Kingmaker, CNN's Slide to Oblivion, More
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
How Fake News proves and disproves things
Chris Cillizza says facts show Biden won?
Staying in power AND protecting election integrity
VAERS database for vaccine side effects
CNN down 22%, MSNBC up 5%, Fox News up 9%
Attractive people and masks
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Oh, wouldn't it be good if I had more than one piece of paper in my hand?
Because if I did, that would indicate that my printer was working and that my notes for today would be in my hand.
But no, I have two fairly new printers in my home.
At least one of them is going to be sacrificed today.
I don't know which one. So they're both new.
They should both work. But I'm going to take one of them and throw it off the balcony.
But you have to make the other one watch.
So one of them will be executed today because they've been way out of line.
I mean, they just don't like to print anything anymore.
And so I'm going to destroy one of them for my pleasure while making the other one watch.
But before I do that, wouldn't you like to enjoy this episode of Coffee with Scott Adams like you never have before?
Well, that's not going to happen, but you could have a cup or a margarita glass, a tanker, gels, or stein, a canteen jug or flask, a vessel of any kind.
You could fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And 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, and it happens now.
Go! Now I've been told that sometimes you can't see the simultaneous because you're getting here too late and there's a commercial running on YouTube when it live streams.
You could, you could subscribe to YouTube and then you don't see the commercials.
Or you could, if you don't want to watch it live, it's It also turns into a podcast after we download it and convert it to a podcast, so you can listen to it without the commercials on any of the podcasts.
Available everywhere. All right, let's talk about the news, which I'm going to be looking in the wrong direction at my glowing screen, because if I haven't mentioned this yet, printers don't work.
Now, if you have a printer at home, One of those things that tries to put ink on paper.
Just unplug it, carry it to the window, and just throw it out the window.
Because printers don't work.
They are just a source of annoyance.
So I'm going to be reading off of this other screen here, annoyingly not looking at you.
So there's something that the fake news does that You know, the fact that they can get away with this is amazing, but here are the two ways that they prove things.
So they can prove something doesn't exist through the process of not looking for it.
That's it. That's their investigative process for the fake news, is don't look for it, and then you can prove it doesn't exist.
Well, I didn't look for it, and I didn't find it, therefore it doesn't exist.
But the other thing is, they can prove something does exist...
By finding some anonymous sources who have no credibility and are known to hate the person that they're talking about?
That's how you prove something does exist.
Talking to people who hate the person you want to report on.
But here's an example of this.
Chris Eliza today in CNN has an opinion piece.
And he says this following.
Quote, Facts say that.
Do facts say that? This is CNN. They're a news organization, and apparently this got past the editors, so they must agree that this is true enough.
The facts say the election was for one fair and square.
Which facts are those?
This is an example of proving a negative.
You can't prove something didn't happen.
Because you didn't look for it.
Why would there be an Arizona audit?
What would be the point of an Arizona audit if everybody's already looked at everything?
Wouldn't the audit just be, oh just show us your documents and we'll just look at the documents because we already know everything?
You wouldn't have to do an audit if you knew everything you needed to know.
So it would be true And I would agree this is true.
This might be the last time you see me on social media.
It's true that there's no proof of any widespread fraud.
There's no proof, at least what I would consider proof.
Certainly not court-blessed proof.
Oh, there are statistical arguments and there are questions and things like that, and plenty of things we haven't looked into.
But there are no facts that prove that the election was fair and square.
That just doesn't exist.
And the fact that somebody can say that in public is just mind-boggling because you can completely get away with that.
This is one of those times where I wonder, does Chris Silliza believe what he's writing?
And I think the answer is yes.
Which is scarier than you kind of hope he's lying.
Because if he's not doing it intentionally, and I don't think he is.
I don't have any evidence to say that he's doing it intentionally.
Lying, I mean. He actually believes, if this is true, if you take him at his word, he believes that not looking for it proves it doesn't exist.
Isn't that weird? That we really live in that world, that that's just...
That's just a fact that's out there, and we're like, oh, okay.
Didn't look for it everywhere, so it must not exist.
So yesterday, I had an interesting situation.
So I'm doing some home renovations, and if you do home renovations, there's a continuous stream of people that you didn't know before coming in and out of your house, usually doing work or delivering something or whatever.
And it has become...
So easy to identify Trump supporters versus Democrats by the Basque.
You know, the people who show up...
So yesterday there was a...
Let's just say a couple of people showed up and immediately I looked at them and saw them, you know, maskless in the driveway.
Now it's the driveway.
They're not inside and they're not standing near anybody.
They're outdoors. The only ones who would take their masks off outdoors were the vaccinated Trump supporters, basically.
So it was pretty easy to tell who's who now.
Now, I don't think that was always the case.
We're going to be passing through this weird period of time...
Where you can just identify somebody's political leanings just like that.
Has that ever been the case before?
I mean, I suppose if somebody had blue hair, you could say they're probably a Democrat.
But maybe it's a little more obvious now.
Here's my persuasion suggestion for Republicans who are trying to argue that changes to the voting rules in their states...
Democrats are saying any change to the voting rules, such as Georgia, Florida, Texas, or wherever it happens, that any change is designed to restrict voting and specifically restrict it against minority voters, I guess.
And suppose you're the GOP and you want to persuade against that.
And you want to make it seem as though the only reason you're doing these things is to make the voting system more secure.
First of all, What is true?
Is it true that these changes are to make the voting system more secure, to make sure only the right people vote, or is the secret real reason to suppress the vote of minorities and keep Republicans in power?
Why can't it be both?
Why can't it be both?
It's not even unethical.
It could be both.
And I think Republicans should just say it.
Oh, totally. This will definitely keep us in power.
That's one of the reasons we're doing it.
It's also true that we should do it, no matter what.
Because protecting the integrity of the election is really important, and other countries and states are doing what we want to do.
We're just conforming to best practices.
But if you're asking us, do we also have a motive that we think will win more elections?
Totally. Yeah, that's one of the reasons we're doing it.
But that doesn't change anything from the fact that it should be done.
Just frickin' tell us.
Can you imagine how that would sound?
Like you would get chills on your arm if you heard a politician tell you the truth.
Because it's just so unusual.
You would say, what are you saying?
You wouldn't even know what was coming out of their mouth.
There is no shame in saying, yeah, we totally are motivated to win elections, and you should be motivated to have a good election that you can trust.
We're on the same page.
It just isn't good for Democrats, and we fully admit that.
I think you can just say it.
People would appreciate it.
I always tell this story about Willie Brown, The Democrat politician in California for many decades.
And there was this one situation where he was asked to vote on something about smoking in public or public places.
And somebody pointed out how could he be a legitimate politician on the question of smoking when he had accepted money from tobacco companies.
And Willie Brown, to his enduring glory, I think I'll always love him for this.
He said, he looked at whoever asked him the question, and he said, I'm paraphrasing, but he said, if you can't take money from somebody and then turn around and screw them, you're in the wrong business.
Am I right? When somebody says something that honest-sounding, you just go, okay.
It just completely throws you off your game.
And for a moment, you don't know who you are or what you're doing.
It's like, ah, you weren't supposed to answer that honestly.
Now, I don't know which way you voted, but that's like the most transparent answer I've ever seen.
Yeah, I can take their money, and I can screw them.
If you couldn't do that, you don't belong in this job.
That's a great answer. But here's what I think the GOP should do.
Instead of arguing that, you know, it's good for their elections and it's good for the country too, or it's good for the state, they should do the opposite.
And fund...
Well, actually, let me change the topic a little bit.
No, let's do this.
Sorry, I don't want to think out loud while I'm doing this, but sometimes it happens.
That's because I don't have a printer that works.
If it were written down on my little piece of paper, I wouldn't have any problems at all.
So imagine if the GOP funded some commercials, or some ads, some viral ads, ideally viral, that opposed any restrictions on illegal voters.
Let me say that again.
Suppose the Republicans...
Funded commercials that are not branded Republican, so you can't tell who made the commercial, and it just promotes trying to protect the votes of illegal citizens.
I'll say undocumented, but people are not citizens.
What would you do if you saw a whole bunch of commercials supporting the right of undocumented people, or even illegal votes?
Just say Americans who are Americans who are not legal to vote in that state.
What would happen if you saw a bunch of push for illegal votes to be counted?
It would sort of change the argument, wouldn't it?
Because the Republicans could make it, turn it into an argument about whether illegal people should be People who are not legal to vote should be able to vote.
And I think that would just mess with people's minds.
But anyway, that's just speculative.
That's never going to happen. There's a great piece of writing that I tweeted.
You'll see it at the top of my Twitter feed this morning.
And... It talks about the question of whether the virus was engineered in a lab, be it the Wuhan lab or other, but mostly the Wuhan lab.
And here was the outcome.
So basically the article, a very smart article, talked about how completely doable it would be to engineer a virus that nobody could tell was engineered.
Now, you're mostly not experts here.
Most of you are not experts on virology.
Let me ask you, just common sense, do you believe, without knowing anything about viruses, do you believe that somebody who does know about viruses could make a new virus that's more powerful in some way, and that other people couldn't tell that it was engineered What do you think?
Do you think that you could always tell if something is an engineered virus?
Yeah. Right?
Your common sense tells you it's possible.
Right? Just common sense.
Now, I have to tell you that early on in the pandemic, I privately, because I didn't want this to be public speculation, I privately asked the smartest people I know Doesn't it seem obvious that you could make a virus that's engineered that doesn't look like it's anything but natural?
Every smart person I asked that question to said the same thing.
Oh yeah, you could do that.
All of them. But yet the news was consistently reporting that these experts could tell if there was an engineered virus.
Now, again, I don't know anything about anything, but if you said to me, Scott...
How could you engineer a virus that looked natural?
I would say, well, I would just make it natural.
All you'd have to do is, you know, get some viruses together to mutate or evolve, then test the different ones that evolve until you've tested and found the one that's the most badass version of all the naturally occurring things that you sped up the evolution of.
There would simply be speed evolved, but nobody in the world would be able to tell.
Now, apparently there's also another technical way to do it that doesn't involve just natural mutations.
But common sense tells you that was doable, right?
I mean, did you really need to be a virus expert to know that you could mutate some genes and then pick the good ones?
Maybe you needed to mutate it through some different species, which is part of the process.
Bats to pangolins or bats to anything else.
But it's all doable.
It's understood, known science.
And then apparently we do know that some people were saying it wasn't doable, had some connection to the Wuhan lab.
What? That's right.
Some of the experts say that it wouldn't be possible to do this without being detected.
Had a little connection to the lab.
Did you know that?
Well, read about it in that article, the author whose name I didn't write down, but I should have.
All right. Jen Psaki, apparently, you know, the spokesperson for Biden, apparently said on the David Axelrod show that, and this is a quote, Talking about Biden taking impromptu questions for reporters, Psaki said, it is not something we recommend.
So even the spokesperson says they don't recommend Biden just take random questions from reporters.
Now, on one hand, that's just being smart.
If you could have controlled Trump...
Which obviously was impossible.
But if his staff could have controlled him, would they have told him to not take questions, random questions?
Probably. Probably, right?
Because answering random questions from reporters rarely is going to help you, but I would think four to five times it's going to hurt you.
So just mathematically speaking, playing the odds, you probably shouldn't take random questions from reporters.
Right? But we all appreciated that Trump did, right?
It made news. It was fun.
It was provocative. And it was really transparent.
And we learned probably more than we would have if it had been some more organized scenario.
So, thank you, James.
I actually would not criticize Jen Psaki for saying out loud what I think is just common sense.
You don't want the boss answering random questions.
It's just not a good idea.
You want preparation.
You want to control your situation as much as possible.
So I think you would have said that about anybody.
But when it's said about Biden, it just sounds a little extra bad.
All right. Let's talk about that VAERS database.
A lot of you saw Tucker Carlson talking about a database called VAERS, V-A-E-R-S. And apparently anybody, literally anybody, can enter a report that says, I got a vaccination and then some bad adverse effect happened or somebody died.
Now, the trouble is, That these are unverified reports.
So some of them might not be true.
That's a problem. And others might be just correlation without causation.
Now, you saw Tucker report that if it's true that 30 people a day are dying from the vaccination, which, by the way, I don't have any evidence that that's true, that if that were true, That would be a big problem and we should know about it and somebody should be doing something about it.
But this database does not have that kind of credibility.
What it does do is say that, reportedly, and again you don't know that the reports are true, but that somebody got a vaccination and then somebody died.
Let me put this in context using the argument on a tweet from Aaron Blake who writes for The Fix and other things, I think.
So he says, Tucker cited unverified data that 30 people who got vaccinated die daily.
The unverified part, meaning it's in that VAERS database.
And then Aaron points out that 8,000 Americans die every day.
I googled it to make sure that's in the ballpark.
So that's in the ballpark.
High 7,000s, close to 8,000 Americans die every day.
More than 40% of the population has received one dose of vaccine.
So if you took 40% of 8,000, you'd expect more than 3,000 people a day Would die in America soon after getting a vaccine.
Now, these are back-of-the-envelope numbers, so you could refine these quite a bit.
But in a general sense, if the math works the way math works, you should see something like 3,000 people a day Dying not long after, you know, within some period not long after they got a vaccination.
But the number is 30.
We should see 3,000.
In other words, if there's no problem at all with vaccines, if the vaccine problem were zero, and it's probably not zero, right?
But if it were zero, you would still see 3,000 people a day Dying soon after they got a vaccination.
Now, if you didn't know that, what would you think when you heard 30 people a day are reportedly, again, not verified, reportedly dying soon after getting a vaccination?
Yeah, it's completely misleading, and I think you have to keep that in context.
Alright. Have you noticed that there are a lot of people hiring, and yet the unemployment rate actually got a little worse?
So we have tons of open jobs, and we got more people looking for work than ever.
How can that be true?
Lots of open jobs, but more people unemployed.
And the answer is that they don't have the right skills, or they're not in the right area for the jobs.
Now, I've been telling you that we're in a golden age.
Try to think of any problem you would rather have than this one.
I mean, I hate to be an optimist about everything.
I tend to be. But seriously, if you could pick a problem, because you don't really get to have no problems, that's not one of your options.
If you could pick the problem you had to have, among all the problems there could be, I'm going to take that one every time.
I want the problem that we have more jobs than we have people trained to do them.
Because you know how to fix that, right?
You train more people to do those jobs.
So we know how to fix that.
That is your best situation.
I always say that about health.
Your best situation is not that you're perfectly healthy.
Because nobody gets that.
It's not an option.
You can't be perfectly healthy.
Nobody gets that.
The best thing is you can have a health problem that has a pill.
For example, I have acid reflux.
Fairly common. But I'm lucky.
There's a pill. I just take a little pill.
Basically, no harmful side effects.
So if you've got an economic problem that's as easy, relatively easy, and straightforward to fix as this one, you're in a really good place.
And we might be.
Let's talk about the ratings of the news, according to Rasmussen.
Now, this would be a poll of likely voters, so this is not a poll of ratings the way ratings companies do their own ratings, but this is likely voters.
Here's the change recently.
I forget which time period, but this is a recent change to the ratings.
I guess CNN lost 22% of likely voters from their viewership.
I don't know if this might be in the last year or something.
I forget the time period. But 22%.
Now, my first thought was, you know, you don't want to take a run at the king unless you can finish him off.
And Trump Although he's out of office at the moment, he's definitely not finished off, if you know what I mean.
So that was my first thought.
It's like, oh, they went after Trump, but they didn't finish him off, so now they're paying for it.
But then I saw that MSNBC is up 5%.
So CNN is down 22%, but another left-leaning entity, MSNBC, is up 5%.
And then Fox News, the juggernaut which is Fox News...
They're up 9%.
I'll tell you, say what you will about Fox News.
And I've said this a number of times, and I'm going to double down on it.
Fox News is the best produced show for the news.
I mean, they just clean the table with MSNBC and CNN just on production.
And production, I'm going to include talent selection.
And the way they organize shows.
If you look at the engineering behind The Five, that show on Fox, if you look at Goffeld's new show, if you look at Hannity, if you look at Tucker, they're just really well-produced shows.
And so politics aside, I think it's just a higher quality product.
I think people are just drawn to a higher quality product.
So I say this all the time, but as often as I Especially recently.
As often as I will criticize Fox News if they get a story wrong or there's some bias, there's always plenty of that.
But boy, the people that you don't see on screen, the producers, the people who do everything from the color to just the look of it, everything, it's just really well done.
So I see in the comments somebody's mentioning Fox Babes.
Now, we're not sexist here, but it is nonetheless true, it is just a fact, that Fox hires probably a little bit on sex appeal.
If we're being honest, it's a little bit about sex appeal.
At least for the female talent.
Is that wrong? No.
No. Because I think the news is an entertainment product.
And in the context of entertainment, because it really is, I mean, we watch the news for entertainment, especially the opinion shows, I think that's perfectly fair.
And the fact that they don't ignore human motivation...
How often have I told you this, right?
That the difference between the left and the right is that the right understands human beings.
Like, how we're motivated.
What makes you turn the channel?
What makes you watch? And then they just...
Build a product around human motivation.
Yeah, Roger Ailes was the mind behind that.
No, I don't have COVID. It's just allergies.
All right. And then I got this question.
A lot of you were asking it.
From a persuasion viewpoint, when we see our top officials who are vaccinated...
Wearing masks, let's say Joe Biden, classic example.
If you see somebody who's fully vaccinated and still wears a mask outdoors, in public, what do you think of that?
Does that tell you the vaccination is less effective?
What is the persuasion on this?
I say this doesn't hurt persuasion.
I get the argument, but here's the counter-argument.
The counterargument is that everybody understands the leaders are modeling.
They're modeling.
The epitome of what they would like to show you is the safest thing you could be.
But I feel like we understand that.
Right? When you see Biden wearing a mask in every situation, even though he's vaccinated, do you say to yourself, oh, that's how I will act?
You don't really do that, do you?
Or do you say, oh, I get it, he's just modeling the extreme, because the extreme of safety is sort of a good thing for a government to model.
Let me give you an example.
This will be the weirdest analogy ever, and therefore invalid.
But I've stated before that the federal government, the president in particular, let's just say the president.
I've said before that the president of the United States is the only person Who should not be in favor of abortion.
Regardless of why he personally thinks of abortion.
Here's why. You never want the leader to be in favor of anything that even comes close to a gray area of maybe killing people that are citizens.
That's the one person.
You don't want the president ever to be in favor of anything, in any scenario, That's about killing a person who's an American citizen.
Or even maybe, you know, just as a resident here.
Everybody else, fair game.
State? Individuals?
Okay. They can talk about the pros and the cons, and they can treat the nuance.
But I feel like the president should just say, nope.
If it's a question of killing Americans, I'm out.
Because no way.
Doesn't matter what the argument is.
Even capital punishment.
I think the president should stay out of capital punishment.
Let the states do it.
You just never want a leader who ever can say, I have a good reason to kill an American.
Never. That should be an absolute for the president.
Governors, you gotta...
Governors gotta get some business done, right?
If it's not the president's job, To make decisions on abortions, for example.
Just stay out of it. That's my opinion.
Alright, but same with...
So here's the analogy to masks.
Just as I say, the President's the one person who should stay out of life and death questions about Americans.
The President's the one person who should be able to wear a mask even if you don't need to.
Right? The President is just sending a message.
It's not so much about the president's opinion.
It's not about the president's sense of the science.
It's just sending a message.
So I get the logical argument where you say, hey, he's making it seem like the vaccines are not effective.
You know, it's a bad message.
I get that. I mean, it's a reasonable, that's a reasonable critique.
But I just don't know anybody's actually persuaded by it.
Are you? Do you know anybody who was persuaded by it?
I'm feeling...
I saw a comment yesterday that hit a little bit too close to home.
I was making a comment that Democrats are wearing masks even when they don't need to and Republicans are not.
And somebody who shall remain nameless said that it might be true that there's a large segment of the population who is ugly and that ugly people don't mind wearing masks.
And when I first heard that, I laughed because it's like, ha ha, nobody's going to want to wear a mask just because they're not confident with their looks.
And then I realized that I like wearing a mask because I'm not confident of my looks.
It's true for me.
I can say absolutely, absolutely, that I feel more comfortable wearing a mask in public just in the terms of People judging me, you know, how old are you, or how do you look, or do you have some wrinkles, or anything.
I absolutely feel that.
So as a representative of ugly people all over, I feel these are my people.
You know, I'm not a big joiner.
Like, I don't consider myself a Republican or a Democrat or even a white person.
You know, I just don't, I'm not a joiner.
I don't like to be in a team.
But I'm definitely in Team Ugly.
The people who are short and bald and wear glasses and every other kind of thing that's off-standard.
These are my people.
I understand ugly people better than you beautiful people ever could.
So I get that, and I think there's something to it.
I do believe that some people just want the mask thing to last them a little bit longer.
I think that's real.
All right. That is about all I wanted to talk about because somebody says, I am not an animal.
Well, Sandra, you're probably also attractive.
If you look at the people who are fighting the hardest to get rid of masks, it's not a perfect correlation, but ask yourself if they're attractive.
I'm sure you're going to see the correlation.
I'll bet you attractive people want to lose the masks first.
Right? I'll bet that's true.
That's what Elephant Man said.
I can't bring this up without Elephant Man coming into the conversation.
Somebody says, I want to wear lipstick again.
How many of you have thought, I'd better brush my teeth before I leave the house, and then you said, oh, I don't need to?
How many of you have done that?
How many of you have eaten something that, like you know, is all in your teeth?
Like a cookie or something that's just all in your teeth?
And you go to walk out the door, and normally you'd be like, I don't know, brushing your teeth or something, and you say to yourself, ah, I'm not going to be within six feet of anybody, and I've got a mask.
I'm good to go. How about Great Britain?
Great Britain with, let's say, less dental care than the United States?
Maybe they like their masks a little bit longer than we do.
We'll see. Somebody says, I've skipped shaving.
I've heard that people are wearing...
I think this is a real fact.
I don't think I imagined this.
Was it Ulta or one of the makeup companies said that there's way more sales of eye makeup?
So they're selling less makeup that's below the nose and more makeup that's above the nose, just like you'd expect.
Do you want an investment advice?
All right. Let me stop here.
I don't give investment advice.
So what I say next will be more because it's fun.
Alright, so this is for entertainment.
If any of you bet on this and lose your money, it's your own damn fault.
Don't blame me. Here's my investment advice.
That's not really advice.
So don't do this.
What's going to happen to a company like Ulta?
It's a big makeup company.
What will happen to them when the masks go away?
Isn't it going to double their income?
I mean, not double, but shouldn't they have a substantial, like a really good quarter the first time the masks are really, really gone?
Now, maybe it'll be too gradual.
There'll never be a day when they're gone.
But I don't know how that's possibly not going to sell more lipstick and more whatever the hell you do below the nose.
Seems to me. Somebody says, I need some sun.
That could go a long way. Well, you know what this is?
There's a lighting problem.
Which is, when you use any of the Apple products, they're so good on light that they just brighten everything.
I'm actually sitting in the dark.
Weird, isn't it? But it's almost, the lighting in my room, it would be late twilight right now.
But if you look here, it looks like I've got a daytime window right in front of me.
Yeah, even I've got light rings turned way down and facing the other direction, so it's like dark in here.
