Episode 1413 Scott Adams: And Now For the Best Simultaneous Sip in the World!
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
Dr. Ronny Jackson: Cognitive test Biden
Alset eHome building 20 eHomes
Weak mask persuasion
CRT = LOA
Victim vs oppressor framing
Olympics don't make sense in 2021
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It's called Coffee with Scott Adams, and I think science has proven that nothing is better.
Really, nothing.
I'm back on the mainland.
I might even show you the view from here.
Would you like to see it? Sure.
I think you would. Here you go.
Let's see if I can reverse this view for you.
Ta-da! Columbus Circle.
You can probably guess where I'm at.
But that's the view today.
I'm just staying here for a few hours and then heading home.
Wanted to break up the flight from Greece.
So we did a quick sleepover in New York City and then we're out of here in a few hours.
But not until I've done Coffee with Scott Adams.
If you'd like to Enjoy it.
The Simultaneous Sip, that is, to its maximum extent.
What do you think you need? Well, I'll tell you.
You need a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank of chalice, a canteen, a chicken flask, a vessel of any kind.
Join me now for the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes absolutely everything better.
It's called the Simultaneous Sip, and it happens now.
Oh, yeah, that's good.
Yes, I'm in New York City, but only for a few hours.
Didn't have time to do anything here.
We just slept overnight and then heading home in a little bit.
Let's talk about the news.
First of all, I'd like to give my compliments to somebody at Fox News.
I'm not sure who, but somebody wrote this headline, and I'd like to call this out.
The headline reads, U.S. Open, male streaker hits balls on fairway.
However you snuck that through your editor, good job.
Or if you were the editor, good job.
I'd like to add to that this story.
Do you know how that naked streaker at the US Open golf tournament, do you know how he broke his leg?
Fell off the ball washer.
Now if you golf, that's hilarious.
If you don't golf, you don't know that there's a thing that's about the size of a parking meter That you put your dirty golf ball in and crank it, and it literally washes your balls.
So, think back to the joke.
Much better now, isn't it, now that you have that context?
Well, I love the story about Ronnie Jackson, who had been Trump's personal physician, as well as somebody else before him.
Maybe it was Obama. And Ronnie Jackson is calling for Biden to take a cognitive test.
Now, don't you think that's a good idea?
And how does most of the news, the entire left-leaning news, sort of not pay attention to that story?
He is qualified.
He was a president's physician.
And if a president's physician says, hmm, I think I'd give that one a cognitive test, I think you have to respect that.
It doesn't mean that there's anything wrong, but it's certainly enough of an indication you ought to check.
And I don't think anything will come of this because obviously they're not going to test Biden.
Does anybody think there's any chance, any chance, that the Democrats will allow Biden to take a cognitive test?
Nope. Because I think they like him just the way he is.
Whatever that way is, pretty sure they like it that way.
Here's an interesting story.
There's a company called LSAT eHome International, and they're going to build 20 what they call e-homes that are going to have Tesla solar panels.
I believe that means as the shingles, so as a replacement roof kind of thing.
So it's going to have Tesla solar panels plus the Tesla Powerwalls, which are the battery that you use at home to Store your energy when it's sunny so you can use it at night when it's not.
And then also a charging station for your presumably electric car.
And this is a pretty strong package.
I have to say, there's something that speaks to me about a home that could live for a while if the main grid dies.
Because I live in California, and the odds of our grid failing in the next week or so are, I don't know, 100%.
We're going to be, I would guess, there's almost no chance that I could make it through the summer, especially with the heat as it is, without losing electricity.
I think it's going to happen.
So I would pay extra.
I'm not sure if you would, but I would pay extra for a home that had that little bit of extra Electricity protection.
So this is great, I think.
In terms of the golden age, I want to see homes that can live off the grid.
Tremendous benefit to everybody, I think.
Especially if your grid is going to get hacked.
We can't stop the grid from getting hacked, but maybe your house will be okay if you get this deal.
So I was looking at CNN's pushback on the Tucker Carlson and Revolver idea that there are some FBI assets within these various...
Sorry, my stomach is making a noise.
There are some FBI assets that might be encouraging violence within the groups that they've penetrated.
But here's the pushback.
So this would be a reason to not believe...
That these FBI agents who may or may not have penetrated these groups, we assume they have, are pushing them to do anything bad as opposed to just observing.
And let me read what Ross Garber, a Tulane University law professor and former CNN legal analyst, said.
He said, quote, Federal agents acting within the scope of their duties are never considered unindicted co-conspirators...
Because by definition, they aren't conspiring with the alleged bad guys.
To which I say, doesn't that only matter if they're no longer undercover?
Right? If they're undercover, wouldn't you have to treat them the way you're treating everybody else, but maybe don't name them, you just, you know, you tell people that they're indicted, and then they can tell their other buddies, yeah, I got indicted, you got indicted, I got indicted too, because I'm just like you, I'm not an FBI agent. So I need a fact check on this.
Give me a fact check.
Would there ever be a situation in which they would, let's say the legal system, would call an FBI agent who's still undercover, the still undercover part is important, would they call him an unindicted co-conspirator just so they've captured all the people involved but treated them differently?
Is that a thing? Or does Ross Garber have a solid point?
I'll tell you that as a non-lawyer reading it, it's not persuasive.
But if a few other people, especially if people on both sides who are lawyers, said, yeah, yeah, yeah, he's right about this, I could be persuaded.
But speaking about persuasion, I'm going to focus on some topics you've heard before.
Don't turn it off.
There are a bunch of people who tell me, Whenever you talk about vaccinations or masks, we turn off the live stream.
I'm only going to be talking about the persuasion involved with those things, right?
So there's some new stuff, and that's worth learning the persuasion element.
So, the CDC has been saying that, from their perspective, scientifically, in the scientific sense, that if you're fully vaccinated, you don't need to wear a mask For basically anything, but you should obey local and maybe business requirements.
Now, is that fair?
For the CDC to say, scientifically, you don't need them, but if the local officials require it, you're going to have to obey them, and if a company requires it, of course, it's a right.
Now, that's okay, but I feel persuasion-wise it's a failure.
Here's what they should have said.
They should have said that you don't need masks scientifically.
And if anybody requires you to have a mask, be they local government or be they a company, they're almost certainly operating non-scientifically.
Because you've got to arm the citizens, right?
If you're going to come out and say science doesn't think you need a mask if you're vaccinated, say it.
And then say the next thing, which is the obvious part, which is if your state government is still requiring it, they're not acting according to the science.
Because if you say that, then the citizens can act on it and just push it through, right?
We can just say, look, the CDC just said in the clearest possible terms that your current rule is anti-science, or at least ignore science, right?
Give us a little help, CDC. You know, we're dealing with local restrictions, companies that are being cautious.
Give us a little cover.
Just let the citizens do the rest.
We'll handle the local stuff.
You've just got to give us a little cover, and you're not doing it.
You're giving them an out.
Say it directly. They're not following the science, and then let us handle it locally.
We'll take care of it. But got to give us a little cover.
So, there are two arguments which I'm seeing in the news that I consider very non-persuasive.
The first article, or the first argument, is that masks work.
Now, I happen to be on that side of the belief system, but the arguments for why they work are, it's hard to notice, it's hard not to notice how bad they are.
So I was just reading through a number of articles in the common press about why masks work.
But here's what I would do if I were trying to persuade you that masks work.
Anything I wrote on that topic, I would say, let's begin by pointing you to these five studies that say masks work, along with Maybe a few experts from different places who say, yeah, these five studies and other reasons totally works.
Here's what is not persuasive.
Experts say masks work.
No, not in 2021.
Don't tell me experts say masks work.
That doesn't mean anything.
If you want me to wear a mask, don't do it that way.
Point to the actual studies.
Then point to the experts who are talking about those studies, and then you have something, right?
So I would say that the way journalists especially are presenting this information to the public, you shouldn't believe it.
Because it's presented in a non-persuasive form.
Should you believe experts when they are non-persuasive in their communication?
That's usually telling you something.
If they can't persuade you of something that's clearly true, Let's say, for example, it's clearly true.
I think you have every right to be skeptical.
Now, again, I think that masks work in the right situations.
Here's the other argument that is really poorly made.
Masks don't work.
Wouldn't that be easy to prove, too?
You just show the studies that say they don't work, whatever.
There's an article in Town Hall essentially saying that Masks don't work.
And I asked on Twitter for people to tell me what are the obvious problems with that analysis.
And there are a lot of them.
I'll just run through a few.
Number one, the headline didn't match the article, which is the headline says masks don't work or indicates that, whereas the article says mask mandates don't work.
Are those the same?
Masks don't work versus mask mandates don't work?
No, they're not the same.
So right off the bat, if you see an article where the headline doesn't match the content, you're done, right?
All persuasion power is gone.
It's just gone. But there's more problems with it.
So, number one, and by the way, Joshua Ganz, who you should follow, is an economist.
And do I always tell you that economists are the ones you should look to to figure out if you've at least compared the right stuff?
Because that's what economists are good at.
Like, did you compare the right two things?
And that's usually what we get wrong.
Andres Bekaus was pointing out that for a start, he said in a tweet responding to this, when researchers say, quote, associated with, they mean they couldn't say whether one thing caused the other or not.
So apparently mask mandates are not associated with some obvious reduction in infections.
There's a reason That we favor randomized controlled trials, right?
Because those tend to be fairly good and everything else isn't.
It's not like there's a randomized controlled study and then there's things that are almost as good.
That's not anything.
There's just randomized controlled studies that are pretty good and everything else is sort of closer to nonsense.
Now, even the meta-analyses of the nonsense can be a problem, but that's another topic.
So, and then Joshua Gans points out that there's also an aggregate effect, meaning that masks might reduce infections, but it might make people feel a little bolder and to risk more infection than they would without a mask, and maybe it cancels out, which wouldn't tell you if masks work.
It would just tell you if mandates work, and that's a little unclear.
Here's my Here's my personal favorite.
It doesn't make sense to average mask effectiveness.
Let me ask you this.
For those of you who are anti-mask, and I know many of you are, there's many of you watching this who say masks just don't work.
So in the comments, and this is only for the people who say masks should never have been used, if your grandmother had not been vaccinated And maybe she had an immune issue.
Would you wear a mask around her?
Let's say you're not vaccinated yet.
You're not vaccinated.
Would you wear a mask around your own grandmother who had maybe an immunity problem?
I'm saying mostly no's.
Man, I would not want to be in your family.
I didn't know which way this was going to go.
I'm seeing lots of yeses, but more noes.
So, by the way, this demonstrates an important principle, which is the consistency principle.
When people take a stand, they don't want to change their minds, even if there's a reason to.
People will just dig in.
And when I ask you, from a risk management perspective, you wouldn't put on a mask.
Let's say it wasn't required.
It's just up to you. You wouldn't put on a mask.
Around your own grandmother when every expert in the civilized world says it's a good idea.
And you still wouldn't do it.
Now, keep in mind, you might be talking to grandma for 15 minutes.
And you wouldn't wear a mask for 15 minutes to maybe save your grandmother's life according to every civilized country's medical experts.
Okay, well, at least you're consistent.
So I'll give you that.
But here's my point.
It doesn't make sense to average mask effectiveness.
Because what are you averaging?
I would say 90% of the time that I spend or have spent with a mask was in places that nobody was going to get it anyway.
How much of the mask wearing is outdoors?
People jogging. I'm looking at the street.
There's all these people wearing a mask.
They have no chance Of giving it or getting it walking down the street in New York City?
No chance, right?
And yet they do. So would you average those mask wearers who are getting exactly zero benefit with the person talking to their immunocompromised grandmother for 15 minutes in a poorly ventilated room?
What does it mean to average one of those with the other one?
It's like I averaged an apple and a And an orange and got a tangerine or something.
Doesn't make sense. So when you're looking at mask effectiveness, and this is something Andres Beck has pointed out, you need to slice that a little bit finer.
Say, these are the places we really think it might make a difference, and then see if it does.
And here are the places we're pretty sure it doesn't, but why would you average those things together?
That makes no sense at all. So both the arguments for and against masks are so Poorly presented to the public that neither of them are credible.
They're really not.
Now I still have an opinion that friction always works.
So friction always works.
Build a wall, doesn't stop everybody, but it gives you friction.
Probably reduces the number of people coming across the border.
Wear a mask, doesn't stop infections, period.
But it probably causes some friction because the The water particles are bigger than the holes in the mask, even if the virus isn't.
So you're stopping some of it, right?
Now, my understanding is that the people who know how to look at studies are pretty sure that the studies show that masks work.
I don't know if those studies are accurate or not, but to me, whenever your common sense matches what the science is, it's a little bit better than not matching.
All right, let's talk about Critical race theory.
Let's say you don't like it, and I think that fits for most of the people watching this livestream.
Let's say you think critical race theory and the teaching of it in schools is bad for your kids because it just sets up some kind of a racial division without solving anything, which would be a common point of view.
But what do you see in terms of persuasion for how to persuade against it?
Well, mostly I see people saying it's Marxist.
How many people do you think know what that means?
Or even think it's bad?
Or even believe it?
It took me a long time to even figure out what that meant.
And I consider myself reasonably well-informed.
Let's say, just for the sake of argument, I'm not trying to brag, but because I pay attention to the news, I'm probably in the top...
10% of people who are informed about things, right?
Not perfectly informed, but probably the top 10%, only because I spent so much time doing it.
And I didn't know what the hell anybody meant by saying it was Marxist.
It was just like it didn't connect with anything in my brain.
Now, later somebody made a good argument and said it's about class warfare.
So instead of class being rich versus poor, it was class as race, black versus white, etc.
And that made sense. But it still was conceptual.
Like it didn't really grab me.
I could get it.
I could understand it.
But it didn't really move me in any way.
So the Marxist thing may be true.
It may be completely true.
It might be important. But it has no persuasive value to it.
Because people just don't know what it means.
And when you say it's anti-white...
If you're a Republican, you already didn't like it, probably, so that sounds good to you.
But are you trying to persuade Republicans?
No, they're already persuaded.
You're trying to persuade the people who are not already on your side, right?
If you say to them, hey, your critical race theory is anti-white, what do they say?
What would the people on the left say about that?
Oh, yeah, that's what we mean.
Yeah. Yeah, it is sort of anti-white.
Exactly. That's why we're doing it.
It means nothing.
It has no persuasive power to say it's anti-white or that it's Marxist.
I think you could argue it's both of those things.
So I'm not saying it's not true-ish, right?
They're both true-ish.
They're not like true in the...
There's nothing else to say about it since.
There's context. But it isn't persuasive.
So I submit the following frame instead.
Number one, you want to simplify the hell out of it.
If you're talking about the origins of it and the intellectual history of it, you're already dead.
There's nothing to be had there.
Here's what I would suggest.
Keep it simple, like build the wall.
And here's a frame that I'm testing out.
So instead of saying it's Marxist or anti-white, say it teaches kids that they are either losers or assholes based on their color.
Let me say that again.
It teaches your kids that they can only be one of two things, losers or assholes.
Now, that's just true.
Meaning that when you hear it, you think, Oh, yeah.
Even if you're in favor of it, you feel that's true, right?
Because the whole point of critical race theory is that if you're born black or a person of color, that you have such a disadvantage that you're going to be, relatively speaking, a loser in life, and that's your fate.
You're sort of locked into a racial limit on your abilities.
So that would be a loser.
Maybe still winning, but not winning as much as, let's say, white people in this model of things.
So you'd be a loser.
But let's say you're a white person in this model.
You're not doing enough, are you?
You haven't done enough.
And you're just benefiting from the work that other people did in the past.
You're benefiting from slavery and racism and all that.
And you're not doing enough about it.
You're kind of an asshole. You're kind of an asshole.
You're just taking free stuff and acting like you deserved it.
It's kind of a jerk, right?
Now, the simplification is what makes this powerful, but also it has to ring right, right?
When you hear it, you have to be able to say, mm, that's kind of true.
And I think this meets that.
But we'll A-B test it.
So instead of CRT for Critical Race Theory, I think I'd replace it with LOA, losers or assholes.
So if you send your kid to school, which one do you want him to learn, him or her?
What do you want them to learn?
Do you want to learn that they're a loser or an asshole?
Because those are the only options that it gives you, in my opinion.
Here's a recommendation for a follow on Twitter if you're not already following.
Malcolm Flex.
I think if you just search for Malcolm Flex, it'll pop up.
But his Twitter handle is Malcolm underscore Flex 48.
Here's why I recommend it.
There are some people that I've been following for a while on Twitter who consistently operate at the strategy level of awareness.
I think you could actually rank levels of awareness.
Where the strategy level, I put at the top.
Meaning, yeah, you have problems.
We all have problems.
But if you use the right strategy, you effectively overcome them.
Right? So Malcolm's a strategy guy.
And he's got a talent stack that's one of the best I've seen.
So he's a former Division I athlete.
So he learned discipline, obviously.
Systems. Because you'd have to be a systems person to be a high-level athlete.
He's also jacked up.
He's just immensely muscled out.
So he knows discipline and hard work and systems, right?
So that's just the start of the Talents Act.
But he's also an industry research scientist.
He's got STEM experience.
He knows marketing.
He knows technology.
Persuasion. I think some of it you may have gotten from me.
He's got social media skills.
He's got writing skills.
These are just the ones I've seen.
Who knows how many other skills he's acquired.
But it's very obvious when you see his tweets and his opinions that he's taken a strategy approach to life and it's working.
And I would submit to you that everybody who takes a strategy approach gets a good result.
It's very observable.
You don't need a lot of science.
You can just look. Okay, you're taking a strategy approach to life.
Check back in five years.
Looks good. Five years later, yeah, that worked.
If you take a victim versus oppressor approach, how's that working out?
The victim versus oppressor thing might be perfectly true, depending how you define it, but it doesn't help you.
It's a lower level of thinking.
Whereas Malcolm is just at a higher level of thinking.
And so if you had to follow somebody to figure out how to live your life, I would put him high on the list.
So give him a follow. There's a...
Are you all following the story of the transgender weightlifter?
So there's apparently a transgender who is competing in the women's event.
Somebody who was...
Allegedly born with male genetic material, I guess.
I'm not sure what the right way to say it is these days.
But I, of course, have a completely different opinion than almost all of you.
I think almost all of you say, that's not fair, because he's taking a spot from a woman.
But here's my take on sports in general.
Sports are mostly about rewarding people who are lucky.
That's it. Sports...
Or about rewarding people who are lucky.
But making it look like it's something else.
Because you have to be lucky to have exactly the right kind of genetic gifts to be a good athlete.
I didn't get them.
Right? I mean, I'm a good weekend athlete.
I could play tennis better than most people who play tennis.
But I don't have any kind of genetic gifts that would make me like a Malcolm Flex, for example.
I don't have anything like that.
So... Where's my fairness, right?
It's not about hard work.
It's about some people are born with genetic gifts, but one of those gifts is their ability to work hard and stick to something and focus.
That's a genetic gift.
You don't really learn that, right?
But then on top of that, you've got to be born in the right place in the right time, and you've got to have the right mentors, and you've got to not be hit by lightning.
It's basically luck.
Which we dress up as skill, so we can all feel that if we tried a little harder, we could do well, too.
Yeah. And the comment was, everything's about rewarding lucky people.
On some level, that's true.
But I would argue that in the non-sports realm...
If you have a systems versus goals approach, and if you have a talent stack that you're building, your odds of success are basically really good.
Really good. And that doesn't require luck.
Well, except the luck that you're exposed to the idea.
I suppose that would be luck. So yes, ultimately luck is going to drive a lot of these things.
But the reason that we enjoy watching sports is just that we don't know how it's going to come out, and we imagine that there's some kind of Grit and intangible stuff that's driving things, and that makes it fun.
But I would say the story about this transgender weightlifter, it's not so much a story about him having a dick.
It's more of a story about him being a dick, isn't it?
Because at the moment, he's taking advantage, she's taking advantage of a loophole.
That's sort of a dick move, really.
It's just sort of a dick thing to do.
So I wish this young lady well in the Olympics, if only because it will maybe teach us that the Olympics are bullshit to begin with and that we shouldn't even have Olympics.
Olympics made sense in a pre-internet age, you know, some reason to interact with other countries and, you know, make it a friendly competition and stuff.
Doesn't make any sense in 2021.
If you want to have a good competition and you want people to observe it and watch it and entertain it, just put the same quality of athletes on the same teams and forget about the gender.
If you're good enough to play on this team, it doesn't matter what gender you are.
And just make sports organized by level of skill.
In other words, exactly like intramural sports are already organized.
If you're familiar with any kind of intramural sports, they just divide it by skill level.
Now, they usually also divide it by gender, but not always.
Not always. As long as everybody's the right skill range, you can mix the genders and everybody's fine with it.
The exceptions would be weightlifting and wrestling and boxing and stuff.
And I think those are special cases where you just have to protect people from From getting hurt too badly.
Alright, I believe I have gotten myself cancelled here by accidentally using the wrong terms, which I never do intentionally.
So, intention has to matter for something.
Alright, this is an incredibly stupid take.
Oh, we'll come back here.
Says Maple Bob.
Oh, it's Maple Bob.
You can ignore that.
The people who just say, this is a crumbly stupid take.
Which part of that didn't you like?
Did you not like the part where sports should be competitions among people who are relatively closely matched?
Was that your problem? I don't know what your problem was.
Most men would be able to go pro with co-ed.
Well, why does anybody need to be pro, right?
Why does anybody need to be pro?
If it's fun to watch, that's good enough.
You know, I'll tell you that I've enjoyed watching, let's say, women's tennis more than men's.
So, you know, you could argue that they don't play at the same level as the men in tennis, which is true.
But I like it better.
So from an entertainment perspective, as long as the teams are matched, it's great.
Some of you are old enough to remember Billie Jean King playing Bobby Riggs, the so-called Battle of the Sexes back in the 70s, I think.
And Bobby Riggs was older in his 60s, I think.
And Billie Jean King was closer to her prime, and they played, and Billie Jean King beat him.
And it was great entertainment.
It was fun to watch. It didn't matter that they were different genders.
It just mattered that it was a good match.
So, that's all I have to say about that.
Now, I know that you hate it when I talk about this topic and masks and vaccinations, and so I'll try to keep it only to the persuasion element of it and how we think about it.
Whether you wear a mask or not, or vaccinated or not, it's not my call.
Those are personal decisions, and I don't try to influence you on that.
Mass did not work during the Spanish flu, some people say.
We don't know what worked during the Spanish flu.
Nobody knows any of that.
Anything you say about the Spanish flu is not likely to be right.
We don't even know why it went away.
Do you know that? Nobody knows why the Spanish flu went away.
Because it doesn't look like it was herd immunity.
It just sort of went away.
And if we don't understand that, we don't understand anything.
Did you see a study that said that, I think it was drug addiction and depression were both related to vitamin D? Doesn't mean there's a causation there, but there's a strong correlation, which definitely makes you wonder.
And I feel as if we might be on some kind of a A path in which we learned that vitamin D fixes a whole bunch of stuff.
Way more than we suspected.
So that's just speculation, but it feels like that's where it's heading.
"The Spanish Flu didn't come from Spain," somebody says.
Well, maybe. Don't know about that.
Alright, that is all I have for you today.
I'm just looking at your comments for a minute.
Yes, being in the sunshine fixes a lot of stuff.
I can tell you that my frame of mind and my mood are completely dependent on exercise.
And if I exercise outdoors, let's say taking a walk in the daytime, I feel better.
I always feel better after spending some time in the sun.
I don't think there's ever been an exception to that.
Alright, that's all I got for now.
Let me give you one more view of the street.
See it all happening there.
Let's see how many people are wearing masks walking all alone today.
