Episode 1402 Scott Adams: Rainbows and Warm Summer Nights Are My Decoy Topics Today
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Content:
Kamala Harris unique hand gesture
69% of Dems believe the news is truthful
Biden allows TikTok and WeChat
Merck's Ivermectin vs Merck's Molnupiravir
Biden and Putin, side by side?
Fake News is the biggest threat to America
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Hey everybody, it's time for Coffee with Scott Adams.
And yeah, the rumors are true.
What you've heard is true, I'm afraid.
This will be the best Coffee with Scott Adams of all time.
Pretty sure I'm going to nail it today.
And I want to give you an update on my quality of my broadcast.
I get a lot of complaints about the quality of my sound.
Fair enough. But it turns out that there is a gigantic market opportunity.
Because it turns out if I use my iPad, which I'm using now, I get really good video.
But you can't do much with the sound.
There's no microphone you can attach to it.
There's nothing you can do.
There's an internal problem with the iPad.
So with the iPad you can have a good video, but not good sound.
If I go to my Mac laptop, I can get better sound if I connect a good microphone, but it's got a back camera that's not very good.
So I have two choices, good sound or good video.
Now you're saying to yourself, Scott, there are lots of people in the world who have figured out both of those things.
They have somehow figured out how to have good video at the same time as good audio.
To which I say, have they?
No, they haven't. I don't think so.
Because if you're live streaming, it's hard to do those things.
Now, if you're doing a recorded version, you can do everything in high quality.
It doesn't matter if your technology has some hitches in it, because you just fix it and then record it and you're fine.
But if you're live streaming, everything has to work.
It just has to work.
So, I always make the decision to go for what is simple over what is complicated.
Now, the complicated solution would be to get an external camera, an external microphone, figure out the connections, because nobody makes a good microphone that just plugs directly into your laptop, apparently.
So you can get little toy microphones that plug into your laptop, but if you get a nice professional one, You gotta get a mixer or something to connect it.
So there's a gigantic market opportunity for someone to make a simple device that has good video and good audio, and it works every time.
Nobody makes that.
Imagine what a big market that is, given that everybody's zooming and stuff.
Nobody makes that product.
It's kind of fascinating, right?
Because it's literally the number one thing that people would want right now.
Good video and good audio.
Nobody makes one. It's just astonishing that Apple doesn't have a product for that.
Anyway, I know I could piece it together with various parts, but when I do, those things will start breaking.
So probably one in five live streams just wouldn't work.
Something like that. Something like a 20% failure rate.
As soon as you add just a little bit of complication to what I'm doing here, the failure rate would be about 20%.
Way above acceptable.
Well, if you'd like to enjoy the broadcast today, in its maximum potential, I think you need to enjoy the simultaneous sip.
And all you need is a cup of margarine glass, a tanker, chalice, a time canteen, a jug of glass, a vessel of any kind, filled with your liquid.
I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
Everything. Everything. Everything.
It's called the simultaneous sip, but it's going to happen now.
Go. Savor it.
Savor it. Good.
Good. All right.
We've got lots of fun news today.
Did you see the videos of Vice President Kamala Harris Saying to the immigrants in Central America in a speech, she said, and I quote, Do not come.
Do not come.
So that happened.
Separately, but related to the same trip, she gave an interview in which she was talking to somebody, and she has an interesting hand gesture.
Have you noticed that?
You notice all the politicians have different hand gestures.
There's the Trump...
The Trump is the thumbs up, closed fist.
Well, we're going to do this, we're going to do this, right?
With that motion.
Then you've got the, you know, the hands open version.
That's one way of talking.
Blah, blah, blah. Kamala Harris has the most unique hand gestures I've ever seen.
Now, I can't reproduce them because I don't want to become a meme.
So I'm going to describe it for my listeners without Producing it visually.
Imagine, if you will, that you are holding a fist in front of you, roughly about the height of your own chin.
And let's say that your hand was in a slightly closed position as if you were holding a rake.
Yeah, say you were holding a rake and your hand was sort of about where your chin is.
Now imagine that instead of just staying in one position, your hand, which is grasping an imaginary rake, Sometimes goes up and sometimes goes down from that position in a rapid motion from up to down and then down to up.
Now imagine, if you will, that the clip of that interview, in which she made the motion fairly a number of times, with the hand going from low to up and up to low, at the same time somebody took that and made a meme in which her quote, do not come, do not come, was Overlaid with the visual.
Now, I'm not saying that a meme maker should do that.
I'm just saying it'd be funny if they did.
That's all I'm saying. I don't mean to encourage it, but I'd certainly tweet it.
Fake news alert!
Fake news alert! Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep.
Latest fake news.
You would be amazed to learn that the story about Trump Allegedly, in his administration, clearing Lafayette Park so he could hold a Bible photo op never happened.
That's right. The entire news cycle that talked about Trump clearing this park just so he could have a...
clearing it of protesters just so he could have a fake photo op never happened.
So investigation looked into it and found out that the clearing did happen.
But it happened before the president decided about this photo op, and it was going to happen anyway, and it was just a general security thing, and it was completely fake news from top to bottom.
Reported as a fact for, what, a year and a half or however long it was?
A year, maybe?
Reported as a fact that never happened.
Just wasn't a fact.
So keep that in mind.
Once again, another example of the news being absolutely made up.
Just completely made up. In related news, there's a poll.
New polling from Morning Consult and Politico found that a third of Republican voters believe Trump will be reinstated by the end of this year.
What? Are you serious?
How many of you think that?
In the comments, since I probably have more conservatives than anything else on here, how many of you think that Trump is going to be reinstated?
I see one. Yes, sir.
I see no. I do, somebody says.
Mostly no's.
So if you're listening to this, it's mostly no's.
99% no's, it looks like.
So do I just have a smarter audience?
Because I'm pretty sure my audience skews pretty Republican, but overwhelmingly you're saying no.
I'm just seeing a sprinkling of yeses.
So my audience is nowhere near one-third thinking he's going to be reinstated.
You do know that there's no provision for that, right?
The Constitution doesn't have a redo clause in it.
Once it's certified, it's just done.
There's nothing you can do. Well, for those of you who think it could happen, I'll just say this.
There's no mechanism for it to happen.
So, thinking that Trump would be reinstated would be similar to thinking that a train might run across your front yard even though there are no tracks.
You can't say it's impossible, I suppose, but there are no train tracks in your front yard.
It's not really likely a train's going to go by.
Likewise, there's no system, no process, no law, no rule That would reinstate a president who has been certified, correctly or incorrectly, has been certified to have won the election.
You can't get there from here.
There's no way to get there. So, that's not going to happen, but a third of Republicans believe that, I guess.
According to an article in The Hill, who would you think is more trusted?
The Trump administration back in its time, or The news media, according to an Emerson College study or poll.
And you would not be surprised that the Trump administration was considered truthful by roughly half of registered voters.
Now, it's no surprise that that would be almost entirely Republicans, of course.
But half of the public...
Well, actually, if it's 49%, it's a lot more than Republicans.
So half of the country Thinks the Trump administration was truthful.
Which seems like a high number, doesn't it?
For a politician.
I'm not saying anything about Trump here.
Just for a politician. Half of the country believing they're honest?
That feels high.
I don't know. But, of course, the numbers split along party lines.
9 out of 10 Republicans were saying that.
Whereas 3 out of 4 Democrats said the opposite.
Of course. Now, the poll also found that 69% of Democrats think the news media is truthful.
What? How could 69% of Democrats still believe the news is truthful?
Even if they believed that their news was truthful, and they believed that right-leaning news was not truthful, how could they have not noticed that the news is not the truth?
How do you not notice that?
Whereas 91% of Republicans consider the fourth estate untruthful.
That feels closer to being right, doesn't it?
If you were going to say, hey, let's see which group is the smart one, the fact that 91% of Republicans don't trust the news kind of suggests they might be the smart ones.
At least in this one question.
I'm not going to say they're always on the right side.
But on this one question, it's sort of obvious.
But this is amazing.
Now, I would imagine that cognitive dissonance is a lot of the reason for this.
Democrats need the news to be true to support their version of reality.
So if they believe the news was fake...
Then they wouldn't have any support for their version of reality.
So probably this is just a psychological phenomenon.
Meanwhile, independents think that both the Trump administration, when it was in power, and the news media are untruthful.
I wonder if this might have been an older survey.
I'm wondering if I saw the date wrong on this.
Somebody tweeted this today, but it's probably an older survey during the administration, now that I think about it.
I hate it when somebody tweets at me an old article, because I have a bad habit of forgetting to look at the date when I retweet them.
I might have done that here.
But I doubt the numbers have changed much since then.
President Biden signed an executive order reversing Trump's...
Trump tried to ban TikTok and WeChat because they're Chinese apps.
And Biden is trying to be more of a thoughtful, careful systems guy.
I like the systems part.
But they're trying to come up with some criteria for any apps.
So sort of a broad criteria so that it's not just about TikTok and WeChat, but it's just about any app, I guess.
Maybe any Chinese app.
And some objective way to say whether it should be banned or not.
I would like to add to that conversation by saying I would like to give you a criteria for whether to ban these apps or not, and it goes like this.
Does China have any control of your data?
Does any of your data go through Chinese assets?
That's it. That's the whole story.
If any of your data goes through Chinese-owned infrastructure, it's vulnerable.
Is there really any argument about that?
Do you think because it's encrypted, they can't get at it?
I don't know. If it's their app, I would think that they could encrypt it and unencrypt it.
They own the encryption.
So if you send encrypted data across a Chinese internet, When China owns the encrypting asset, and also, therefore, logically, they own the unencrypting asset on the other end, you don't think that they can unencrypt that in the middle?
You think it has to get all the way to the end, and that's the only place you can unencrypt it?
If you have the technology to unencrypt it anywhere, if you get the signal, you can unencrypt it.
So, yeah, maybe there's a backdoor, whatever.
I got a feeling...
This whole TikTok, WeChat thing being reversed makes me wonder if the Biden administration is competent in terms of technology.
Now, you have to assume that they've got plenty of experts, right?
But does this reflect what the experts would have recommended?
Because it's sort of this space that's half technical and half political, right?
So it's a little bit of both.
But this doesn't look like a technical recommendation.
Because I think the technical recommendation would be dead simple.
Does it go through any Chinese assets?
Yes or no? I mean, I just don't know how this could be a big question.
What am I missing? Are they going to come up with some kind of argument that says, oh yeah, the TikTok and WeChat traffic, it does go through all these Chinese assets, but it's so well encrypted that nothing would happen.
Are we going to believe that?
Right? And is that the only issue?
Let me tell you how they have completely ignored the big issue.
Are you ready? It's not about data privacy.
Data privacy is a big deal.
And we should certainly hope that China is not stealing all our traffic.
But there's a much, much bigger deal.
Like, much bigger. Maybe ten times as big, just to put a size on it.
Maybe a hundred times as big.
I don't think that would be out of the question.
A hundred times bigger problem than the data privacy is influence.
If they can turn a knob and turn some TikTok meme from a thing that nobody would notice into the major thing trending on TikTok, then that jumps over to Snapchat and jumps over to Instagram and jumps over to Facebook.
They can control what we think through apps.
Mostly TikTok.
WeChat would stay in the Chinese language mostly, I believe.
But TikTok is how China can actually control opinion in this country.
Why do we let China control American opinions?
Through this influence machine.
So I didn't see the Biden administration even mention it.
Like it's even an issue, but in terms of sizing and risk, it's probably 10 to 100 times the danger of just losing some data privacy.
I mean, data privacy is real important, but nowhere nearly as important as the influence.
It's not even in the same universe.
Well, we've got some new interesting stuff on both hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin.
Which I hasten to note are not approved medications in this country.
At least not for the COVID, but they're approved for other stuff.
Now, hydroxychloroquine got a new observational study published by Medrixv, whatever that is, and it found that the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine, along with zinc, could increase the coronavirus survival rate by as much as 200%.
If distributed at higher doses to ventilated patients who are severely ill.
Now, what do you make of that?
Well, if you look on the internet, you see people dancing in the streets and saying, I told you so, I told you so, I told you, told you.
But do you think that they should really be so happy about this?
Well, first of all, it's number one, an observational study.
How do you rate the credibility of an observational study, which basically is looking backwards, versus a controlled study where you're designing a study in advance, and then you get the data?
So which is more credible?
The one where you're just looking at what happened on its own, or where you're setting up a controlled, randomized study where you're looking at data in the future?
Not even close, right?
The observational study will not be in the same league with a controlled study.
Do you think that the FDA approves medicine based on observational studies?
I don't think so.
I'll take a fact check on that.
But I don't believe any drug has ever been approved in the United States.
I probably shouldn't say any drug.
But I don't think that's the process.
I don't believe the process says you can be approved with this kind of a study.
So how excited should you be about a study that I believe the FDA would not even use?
Secondly, what do you make of the fact that it was published in MedrixV?
I think that's a preprint place, isn't it?
I don't think that means it's been peer-reviewed.
So this would be close to the lower quality of study.
Right? So, does this tell you something you didn't know?
Not really, because we had stuff like this before.
So I would say this is more of the same, which is not saying that this drug works or doesn't work.
I'm not telling you either one.
I'm just saying that it's just more low-quality data that you need to be pretty skeptical about.
You should be pretty skeptical about it.
Doesn't mean it's wrong. It's just not that credible.
But what about ivermectin?
Well, if you're following Brett Weinstein, he's making an effort to sort of raise the issues that the public can see, that although the studies on ivermectin are not the gold standard type that is nailing it down with some near absolutes.
But there are lots of studies, and if you did a meta-analysis of them, most of them, but not all of them, suggest that it works.
So keep in mind, there are studies that show it doesn't work.
Did you know that? So they don't all show that it works, but mostly they do.
But, you know, a majority, a solid majority say it works.
Now, all of the studies have a pretty wide degree of uncertainty.
So wide that it could go from it works to it doesn't work.
It's a pretty big wide uncertainty in a number of them.
And, of course, the idea of using a meta-analysis has been criticized.
And let me give you some A specific idea of why a meta-analysis, which is basically taking all the lower quality studies and looking at them as if they were one big study.
And the idea is that any errors in one study would be sort of averaged out and cancelled by the other studies.
So as long as they had different errors, they might sort of cancel each other out.
But let me give you an idea of what kind of problems that runs into.
Number one. Merck, who actually makes ivermectin, who you would normally expect would be very pro their own drug, right?
But this is what Merck says in February, so it's just February, not that long ago, about their own drug.
I think there's probably been more information coming out since February, so this might be a little dated, but they haven't updated it yet.
So they say about their own drug, no scientific basis for it as a therapeutic against COVID. From what they call preclinical studies.
So they say there's no scientific basis from preclinical studies.
I guess that means the observational stuff.
So the people who are looking at those same studies say, oh, it totally works.
And Merck, the company that makes the drug, Is looking at the same studies, at least the ones that were there up to February.
I think there have been some more after that.
But at that point, they're saying, no, I'm looking at those and it doesn't work.
They also say there's no meaningful evidence for clinical efficacy, which is really just saying the same thing.
And then number three, concerning lack of safety data in the majority of studies.
Okay. But you'd also think that probably they have a pretty good sense of the safety of their own drug, because it's been used for years.
So do these reasons strike you as convincing?
Because there's a problem here with Merck.
So they make ivermectin, but they seem to be dumping on their own drug.
But wait, it turns out that they're trying to promote a new drug.
It's called monuprovir.
It would be an oral antiviral.
And they already have procurement agreements with the government of the United States.
In other words, it's pre-sold.
All they have to do is show that it works, and they get a big check.
A really big check.
Like a god-awfully big check from the government.
And they just have to show that it works, And wouldn't it be great if it worked better than this ivermectin that might not be as profitable?
It's kind of sketchy, isn't it?
So this is what Brett Weinstein pointed out, that isn't this interesting that the company is trashing their own drug, which some of these studies would indicate it works, but at the same time they're pushing one that would be far more profitable If they could get this through the system.
Huh. So, now, Anatoly Lubarsky, who is one of my favorite skeptics, he's good with the data and good with the logic, unusually good.
And he noted that Manu Purivar was part of Operation Warp Speed, which means it had been contemplated for quite a while.
Probably before we had a lot of information about ivermectin.
And meanwhile, it failed the trial for hospitalized patients, and I guess Merck had two vaccine candidates that failed.
Imagine being Merck when your other pharmaceutical companies are making a gazillion dollars during the pandemic, and poor Merck has two vaccine candidates that failed.
It's the difference between many billions of dollars and no dollars.
It's a really big difference.
How much does Merck need to win?
How much does Merck, their management, need to get some money out of this pandemic?
Pretty much, right?
I mean, they got a lot riding on this because their competitors have made money.
But Anatoly thinks that the ivermectin decision by Merck is unlikely to be related to what they're doing with their new drug just because of the timing of it.
Now, I'm not sure that any of this you could take as a definitive, but there's an open question whether Merck is being completely objective about this or if it's a money grab.
And you can't really tell.
But it's terrible that we have to ask the question, isn't it?
It's terrible that we have to ask the question.
Because that would be sort of putting Merck in a bad light, and have they ever done anything that would suggest that they could do something this unethical?
Well, let me tell you about a drug called Vioxx that Merck also had, in which there were a number of doctors who were against it, But of course, if they could get this drug approved, it would make lots and lots of money.
And so Merck drew up what they called a doctor hit list, where they tried to discredit and criticize anybody who said their drug was bad.
Doctors. They actually had a hit list of doctors that they were going to discredit just for saying bad things about their drug.
So, if you could do that, could you do the other thing?
There are different things, but if you believe that this is, and apparently there's good evidence of this, if you believe that they had a hit list of doctors to discredit just because they had different opinions about the value of this drug, do you think that they wouldn't push one drug over another even if people died?
Do you think they wouldn't do that?
I'm not saying they did.
I'm saying that if you have people who act one way unethically, you kind of have to assume that at least they're flexible in this ethical domain.
So here's my...
And then I was looking at some comments by Andres Backhaus, who was looking at the meta-analyses.
And I'm just going to read you his tweet, because I think if I try to summarize it myself, I'll get it wrong.
But here's what he says about one...
So this is a review of the individual lower-quality studies about ivermectin.
And Andres points out that going through the Bryant et al.
meta-review, the mortality effects for patients with mild to moderate or severe COVID are insignificant in six and of eight checks.
Much seems to hang on one RCT randomized controlled trial.
The bunch is different patient types.
And isn't peer-reviewed.
So, although you're looking at a bunch of different studies, what happens if one of them is sort of bigger than the other?
If there's one that's really big, it's going to sway your result, right?
What if the big one's the only one that's wrong?
That's a problem, right?
Now, I'm not saying the big one is wrong.
I'm saying, what if it is? What if it's the only one that's wrong, and it's the biggest one?
Well, there goes your whole meta-analysis.
And what if you said to yourself, well, I won't include that one because I think it's wrong.
Can't do that. Because then it's not a proper analysis.
As soon as you decide what's in and what's out, it's not a study anymore.
It's just you deciding what's in and what's out, and then that will give you the result you want.
So if you're deciding what's in and what's out, I'm not sure it's science or math or anything.
It's just you making some opinions.
But... If you put it all in and say, okay, I'll just dumbly put them all together, then you've got this one big one that may have made the whole thing irrelevant, because what if the big one's wrong?
Now, I'm not saying it's wrong.
But, to Andres' point, the big one bunches different patient types, which seems like something you should be concerned about, and it isn't peer-reviewed, which also seems like something you should worry about.
And also, separately, Andres was pointing out that the margin of error on these things is pretty big.
Alright, so bottom line, do I think ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine work?
And my answer is, I don't know.
I don't know. If you're positive that they work, that's not a good opinion.
Could be right.
You might be right.
But it's not a good opinion, because the science isn't there.
If you're positive it doesn't work, That's not a good opinion.
That's a terrible opinion.
Because there's plenty of evidence they both work.
They're just not quite good enough evidence.
So anything that looks like certainty, either direction, seems like a bad play.
But if you were to say to yourself, should you take them?
Well, that's a different question.
Because let's say that you were 70 years old and didn't have access to a vaccine for whatever reason.
Would you take it in that case?
Let's say you had the COVID, you're 70.
Let's say there's some reason you can't take the vaccine or can't get it, whatever.
Yeah, it might make sense as a risk management thing.
All right, Biden is talking to Putin, I guess, pretty soon.
And when asked what he would talk about, I believe that he said something along the lines of...
What was he going to do? He was going to tell him what he needs to know.
That's what Biden said. I'm going to tell him what he needs to know.
So I guess we're okay with Russia because Biden's going to tell him what he needs to know.
I've got a feeling that Biden will not be moved by Biden, or that Putin will not be too moved by Biden telling him what he needs to know.
What exactly is Biden going to do?
Threatening? Somebody says, are you serious about what?
Am I serious about what?
Put a topic in there.
All right. So anyway, I'm not expecting much out of the Biden-Putin meeting, but we'll see.
Now, do you think that Biden will come out of that acting too friendly to Russia?
Because remember, when Trump seemed too friendly to Putin, that was a lot of criticism.
So how is Biden going to be Biden without being too friendly?
Like, what's that look like?
I feel as if, you know, if they have a joint press conference at the end, like Trump and Putin did, it's probably a mistake.
You probably shouldn't do that.
But if they do, seeing Putin and Biden side by side, how's that going to make you feel?
Are you going to feel like, yeah, my team's looking pretty strong.
Look at that Biden.
Look at him go. He's sharp.
He's going to show that Putin what for.
If you're Biden's handlers, do you let him stand side by side with Putin and talk, you know, one after the other in front of people?
I don't think so.
So we'll wait to see.
But I'm going to predict there is no side-by-side Putin-Biden press conference after it.
What do you say? I say no.
We'll see. Well, eight years after my book, How to Filled Almost Everything That Still Went Big, was published, it's actually gaining in popularity eight years later.
And when I wrote it, I actually thought that would happen.
I thought that it would be a minor success when it was published, and that it would grow in power over time, As people read it and tried the techniques and then recommended it.
And I swear, every single day I'm seeing memes about it.
I don't see that about other books.
I've written a lot of books.
But this one is a meme almost every day.
Almost every day somebody's tweeting about it eight years later.
And if you look at a lot of other self-help books, you'll see its influence has gotten into a lot of other books at this point.
I won't name names, but you can figure out which one's there.
So I would take a look at that if you want to know what makes a book more popular eight years after it's written and growing in popularity, actually.
It may have its...
This is one of its biggest years.
I told you I was having this weird...
I don't know if it's a debate, but conversation about masks, usefulness versus social distancing.
And I was talking with Donald Luskin, who I only know from Twitter, but apparently he has some data analysis skills, and he says that his analysis shows that masks definitely work.
The numbers seem to show that.
I don't know if I can get Christina on here, Michael.
She's not crazy about this kind of stuff.
And I was trying to figure out why Donald was saying that according to his numbers, it's very clear that social distancing doesn't work.
Now, what do you do when your obvious common sense differs from the data?
Which would you believe?
Certainly, I don't think any of you would argue That if you're standing on one side of the world and I'm standing on the other side of the world and you've got the virus and I don't, you can't really give it to me.
Because the virus can't travel.
Now, it probably can't travel too well, more than six feet, right?
Maybe even just three.
But how could it be possible that staying away from each other physically doesn't work?
Does that make sense to you?
Is there anybody here...
Who thinks it could make sense that social distancing doesn't work?
And I was kind of going back and forth thinking, am I crazy?
Because it's obvious it works.
It couldn't not work.
There's no mechanism by which this doesn't work.
Now, you might say you tried to do social distancing and everybody cheated.
If that's what you're saying, oh, okay, that's not really social distancing.
That's people pretending to social distance.
Of course that doesn't work. But I believe I solved the mystery.
I believe that lockdowns and social distancing were being used as a similar thing.
I don't believe there's evidence that lockdowns work.
But I do believe that distance works.
Because you can have lockdowns or no lockdowns and still do plenty of social distancing.
So I think the problem is that Donald was...
Probably, and I think this is true, he was looking at lockdowns not working, which I totally understand.
If you told me lockdowns don't work and the data proves it, I would say, oh, okay.
I mean, that makes sense to me.
Because the difference between the lockdown and the no lockdown was not that big.
Because even if you didn't lock down, you probably socially distanced within the store, wore masks within the store, did more curb pickup, more takeout.
So, yeah, lockdowns probably didn't work, especially if you calculate in the economics.
But social distancing has to work.
There's no way it could not work.
I don't know how much data you would have to show me to tell me social distancing doesn't work, but I'm not going to believe any of it.
I wouldn't believe any of it.
So, all right.
Here's CNN talking about the experts.
Apparently they showed a video that's amazing of some medical doctor who is testifying in some place that the vaccinations have some kind of metal in them, so much so that people are magnetized such that they could put a key on their forehead and it would just stay there.
And I don't have to tell you that there apparently is no way that the vaccinations actually magnetize you.
But this was a doctor, right?
Do you know what people tell me all the time?
Scott, you're not an expert in this field.
Don't give us your stupid cartoonist opinion, because you're no expert.
Why can't you be like a doctor?
If you were a doctor, we'd listen to you.
Well, the fucking doctor says you could be magnetized by a vaccination.
Now, this is obviously not representative of doctors in general, but you've got to be careful about believing you're experts.
Just saying. If you're believing experts just sort of automatically because they're experts, don't do that.
Another case in point, two members of the FDA have quit from an advisory panel Because a drug got approved for Alzheimer's that they think should not have been approved.
So if you're believing the experts, do you believe the experts who quit because they were so angry that something got approved?
They called it a sham process.
Their accusation is that it was approved before it was even looked at.
In other words, it was sort of pre-approved in people's minds And they basically just approved it without looking at the data or something.
This is a pretty big claim from experts.
So now you've got one expert saying that vaccines will magnetize you.
Two experts saying...
And these are high-level experts.
There's one of these guys who's quit, David Notman.
He's a neurologist at the Mayo Clinic.
He's a neurologist at the Mayo Clinic.
They don't hire jerks, right?
In the Mayo Clinic. They probably look at your resume before they hire you.
This is a qualified guy.
Disagrees with the other experts.
Have I told you before that once you understand how narcissism is not just feeling you're great, but narcissism is a constellation of specific behaviors that apparently applies to entire news networks.
CNN... It has a personality now, collectively, which is narcissism.
And let me give you an example.
So one of their analysts, Stephan Collinson, who is one of my favorites to read, I read almost everything he writes, and it's only because it's such blatant propaganda.
You know, it's an opinion piece, so opinion pieces look like propaganda.
But he's always humorously...
So far into the ridiculous that I read it for entertainment.
And that's not a joke. It always entertains me because it's just so over the top.
Let's see. Here's what he says.
So Collins says, the most extraordinary feature of Biden's trip is that he's not an American president going out to confront tyranny abroad.
That's happened before.
He's huddling with US allies at a moment when the greatest threat to democracy comes from within the United States.
What? What?
The greatest threat to democracy comes from within the United States?
From where?
Now, I assume he's talking about the January 6th riot and the belief that white supremacists are climbing everywhere.
But one of the characteristics of narcissism that's in this constellation of behaviors is projection.
Projection. Blaming somebody of the thing you're guilty of.
What is the biggest threat to democracy in the United States, in your opinion?
So, if you don't count the external world, and of course this is just crazy talk, obviously China's the biggest threat, but if you take out the rest of the world, and you're looking at the greatest threat to democracy that comes from within, what do you think it is?
I think it's the fake news, isn't it?
I'm pretty sure it's the fake news.
Because if we had real news, We'd make good decisions.
We'd keep our democracy.
We might even make it stronger.
But if you have fake news, you're doing the wrong stuff because you don't know what the problem is.
This is projection.
CNN is the biggest threat and other fake news.
The fake news is by far the biggest threat to democracy.
There's nothing even close.
Nothing even close.
So you see it, right?
This is the projection part, where they are the biggest threat to democracy, so they say you are.
That's how it works. That's how narcissists work.
They always tell you that you are the thing they're doing.
Here's something else they do.
They act arrogant, like they're better than you.
Does CNN ever act like it's better than Republicans?
Yeah, that's their whole act.
Their entire act is that CNN is better than How about misdirection when they get caught?
Criticisms when they don't run a story or they get something wrong?
Well, sometimes they might run a correction.
But they don't really do that.
They kind of go after the other team and say, but you did worse.
Look at what you did.
Misdirection. That's a narcissist trick.
How about blame the messenger, not the message?
Do they go after the people?
Or do they go after the ideas?
They go after the people.
Now, the right does that too.
But the right almost always also goes after the idea.
The idea that Marxism works.
It doesn't have the right incentives, for example.
So the right does go after people as well.
But they always include the motivation, the system.
That's the real criticism.
The fun part is going after people.
But I believe on the left, they just sort of go after the people.
They never say the system would work better if...
They just go after people, it feels like.
All right, and lots of lying.
Lying is part of narcissism, too.
Here's Chris Silliza, also an opinion piece on CNN, and he says, Today, everywhere you look within the Republican Party these days, there is an effort to forget and to minimize what happened at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th.
A Senate report released this week, and I guess it must have been Republicans behind this, aimed at examining the security, blah, blah, blah, about the riot, and they left the word insurrection entirely out, except when quoting somebody talking about it.
The reason? AIDS also steered clear of language that could turn off some Republicans, including not referring to the attack as an insurrection.
So CNN opinion guys, Eliza, It's saying that it's bad that Republicans are leaving out the word insurrection.
Do you know why?
Why would they leave out the word insurrection?
Could it be?
Because they know that you can't conquer a country by occupying a room for a while.
That's not an insurrection.
It's not even close to an insurrection.
That would be as close to an insurrection as mowing the lawn is to a haircut.
Right? That's really not even in the general neighborhood of an insurrection.
That's not in the solar system of an insurrection.
And CNN is actually criticizing them for not using the word that is completely inappropriate.
And the way they talk about it is like, well, you can see it too, right?
Isn't it obvious to you that they stopped using this word insurrection?
They don't even make arguments anymore.
They just act like it's obvious.
It's obvious. Well, yeah.
They should have used the word insurrection.
It's obvious. I don't need reasons.
Don't ask me about the reasons.
It's just obvious. All right.
That is right. I'm reading your comments, and you're all right.
My daughter thought we mowed the carpet when it got too long.
Okay. The fake news is responsible for 2020.
Maybe. Maybe they were.
I feel as if the fake news causes almost all of our activities, really.
We just don't know. At least in the political domain.
Alright, that is all I had to say today.
And I'm pretty sure this was one of the best coffees with Scott Adams of all time.
Until tomorrow. Wait until tomorrow.
It's going to be so good you won't even believe it.
