Episode 1476 Scott Adams: I Tell You How to Fix Our Biggest Problems While Drinking Coffee
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
Green Woke People are destroying America
Afghan officers couldn't read, write...or count?
Age, possible dementia and a botched operation
Mark Cuban vs President Trump in 2024?
300,000 Chinese elites in American colleges
How many people have well-meaning pundits killed?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topics to build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure.
---
Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scott-adams00/support
Good morning, everybody, and welcome to Coffee with Scott Adams, possibly the highlight of your entire life.
Don't know yet. I mean, you can't rule it out.
It might go well. But suppose...
Hypothetically, you wanted to take this from an incredible situation to even better?
Even better? What would you do?
Well, you'd probably find a cup or a mug or a glass of tank or a chalice or a canteen jug or flask or a vessel of any kind.
You'd probably fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And then maybe you'd join me for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine of the day, the thing that makes really everything better.
Everything better except the withdrawal from Afghanistan.
It's called the simultaneous sip, and it happens now.
Go! Hello, Anne-Marie from Kuwait.
Good to have you. You're probably drinking something in the afternoon.
All right. Whatever happened to...
I saw this question on Twitter...
Whatever happened to the Matt Gaetz story?
What happened to it?
The longer you wait to find out if an allegation is true, the less likely it is.
So I'm going to test out a new rule for prediction.
Are you ready? This is based on pattern recognition and is not supposed to be some kind of hard and fast rule, but maybe a tendency.
And I guess this is as much of a question as it is an assertion.
So the question is this.
Is it true...
That when there's a big story and maybe somebody did something, that the longer you wait and don't find out they did something, the less likely they did something.
Let me give you some examples.
It's been a long time since the Matt Gaetz story broke.
He allegedly did something with women paying them or something.
So it almost doesn't matter what the details are at this point.
But it's been a long time, hasn't it?
Right? Now, every day that goes by, and I think I told you this from the start, every day that goes by when Matt Gaetz is not, I don't know, indicted or charged with something, it's less likely it's going to happen, I think.
Now, that doesn't mean something couldn't happen.
You know, it's not ruled out.
But I think the likelihood goes down every day.
Let me give you some other examples.
Do you remember when Russian collusion was a thing?
Every day that went by, and we did not prove there was Russian collusion, made it less likely than it was.
Right? And then in the end, we didn't find any.
How about the Capitol insurrection?
And all of the planning from the White House, allegedly, or something about the insurrection?
And the longer they look for that insurrection, the less insurrection they can find.
But it's not just things that you might agree with.
What about the vaccination side effects?
The longer you wait to find out if the vaccination itself was more dangerous than the COVID, the more likely it is that it's not dangerous.
Now, that's pretty direct in the case of vaccinations because the sooner after the vaccination is the highest likelihood of problems, right?
That's why you have to wait 15 minutes after you get the shot because the biggest risk is right then, the first 15 minutes, and then, you know, the first few days.
But if you go three months and you've got three months without a side effect, the odds of ever seeing one start going down.
Not zero. Not zero, but the odds go way down.
Here's another one. How about Trump's legal troubles from all of his financial and or tax-related stuff?
Where is Trump getting indicted?
Trump himself, as opposed to the organization.
Well, the longer we wait, I feel like the less likely.
How about the Arizona audit?
I know you really want them to have the goods.
You really want...
I know. I know.
I know you want them to find something, because that would make you happy, many of you.
But the longer we go, the less likely.
Here's another one. How about ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine?
The longer we go without proof that they work, the less likely that they work.
Right? Right? And I think it's been a while that we've been looking at both of those, the ivermectin and the hydroxychloroquine.
If we had proof that they worked, I feel like that would be sticky and that we'd know that by now.
I'm not saying it doesn't work.
Remember, in each of these topics, you can't know for sure what the future is.
But I'm going to put this out there as a rule...
The proof is suppressed.
Yeah, so what I'm seeing is somebody saying that the proof of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine is being suppressed.
Let's take that as not a given, but let's take that as a high awareness understanding of the world.
Can we agree on that? It's cynical, it's skeptical, but it's probably an accurate view of the world that information gets suppressed by big entities for lots of reasons, right?
So we can all agree that that's a thing, but would you agree with me that they can suppress it easily for one day, not too hard for two days, but suppressing something like this for a year...
When it's the biggest question going?
That's a lot harder, right?
So every day that goes by that the suppression is keeping you from knowing about this, I think you have to start biasing your prediction toward there's nothing there.
Doesn't mean there's nothing there.
I'm saying that your prediction should start biasing in that direction.
So, just keep an eye on that.
And tell me how often it is wrong...
Okay? It'll be wrong sometimes.
It's not one of those rules that's hard and fast.
But I'll bet you, I'll bet you if you use this for your predictions, that you would be right 80, 90% of the time.
Something like that. So that's just speculation.
Keep an eye on it and see if that predicts.
I think it does. All right.
Why is it we're in this weird situation...
In which... I'm lazy, somebody says.
Because I didn't do my own research?
So why is it that all the smart people are telling us two things?
So let's say CNN, MSNBC. They're the smart people, right?
So all the smart people are telling us two things.
Number one... Use science and use data to make decisions.
Would you agree? All the smart people say that.
Use science and accurate data to make decisions.
So far, so good.
And then how do they help us make decisions?
By showing us anecdotal reports.
So on one hand, they're saying, make your decisions based on the science and the data...
But then they're spending all their time producing anecdotal stories of this one guy who died because he didn't get the vaccination.
So it's sort of a mixed message, isn't it?
It's like, you should use data in science, but we know that it doesn't work.
It's not going to convince anybody.
So we better try to convince you with our anecdotal stuff, which is the opposite of science.
So if science is so good, why can't you use it?
It's a perfectly good question, right?
If science is so good, and we should make our decisions based on science, why can't you just tell me the science?
Why do you have to give me an anecdote and persuade me by scaring me with this one story of this one guy who did something?
If the science is so good, well, it's because science doesn't work, right?
It doesn't work to persuade.
I mean, it can get you just so far.
It gets about half the public.
But then the rest just say, ah, I don't believe it for one reason or another.
So the only way to sell science is by denying science, in a sense.
Now, I would argue it's actually scientific to understand that people are not rational beings, and you can't convince them with science.
So I would say that's also a scientific view.
But it just feels kind of crazy that we're mixing these two things at the same time.
Anecdote? Sure.
Sure. All right.
I would like to assign blame to people who have destroyed the world.
Who are these people?
Well, let me give you some examples of how the world is being destroyed, and you tell me who's responsible.
We have a major drought in the West.
So California is in major drought.
Much of the West is in big drought.
And people say climate change.
Is a big component of that.
Now, there's some skepticism of that.
Of course, there always is.
But that's sort of a general thing you're seeing in the air, that climate change is to blame.
Now, who's to blame for that?
Hold on to that thought. Don't answer it yet.
Here in California, we also have very little power.
So we don't have enough electricity.
Who's to blame for that?
Hold your thought.
Don't answer it yet. So who's to blame for climate change, drought, lack of electricity?
These are our big problems coming up.
Who's to blame for climate change itself?
I mean, the larger question. How about the risk of losing in space?
So right now, Russia and China look like they're going to be pretty aggressive in controlling space militarily.
How are we going to do in space militarily?
Well, we've got a problem because we don't have a good nuclear industry.
Right. If we had a more robust commercial nuclear industry, we'd be in good shape for going to space because you need all that skill.
So what would be a solution to running out of water?
Well, I can only think of one.
Other than changing climate change totally, which could take decades.
The only way I think you can get there is using nuclear power and desalinization.
But who has stopped nuclear power from being a big deal already?
It's the green people, right?
The green people stopped nuclear energy...
Using persuasion as opposed to science.
And now we don't have a robust nuclear industry that could possibly save us by building some quick nuclear plants, maybe Gen 4, if we're almost there, and giving us some water.
What about our lack of electricity?
Same problem.
No nuclear power. If we had nuclear power in California, or more of it, we would have plenty of power.
But who stopped it?
The green people, right?
So the green people are responsible for me not having water.
The green people are responsible for me not having electricity.
But, you say, at least they stopped climate change.
No. No.
If they want to stop climate change, you need more nuclear power.
Right? So they made nuclear power worse.
I'm sorry. So the green people made climate change happen because the only solution is nuclear power and they're making it hard.
So there are climate change, water problems, electricity problems, and we won't be able to militarily control space, and so we're basically doomed in the long run.
It's the same frickin' people.
The green people have destroyed...
America, apparently. And if you look at our gas prices, who's to blame for that?
It seems like it's all coming down to the same place.
Now, let's say somebody says, you know, the war in Afghanistan is made worse by climate change, which they do.
Again, where's my nuclear energy to get me out of the climate change problem?
It all comes back to the green people.
It's like the green woke people destroyed the planet.
It just took a while. You know, it's working through the system.
So I assign blame to the green people.
David Reboy has a tweet in which he's tweeted an article, I think it was in Reuters or something, or NPR, I forget which one.
But there's a quote in there from somebody who knows something about Afghanistan that said, years ago, a U.S. general told us that not only...
that they couldn't make many of the Afghan officers...
No, not only couldn't many of the Afghan officers read or write, but they couldn't count...
The Afghan officers that we trained to be the officers in the military, they couldn't read and write, and many of them couldn't count.
So I wonder what happened.
I wonder how they lost so fast.
Oh, my God!
So apparently we just were trying to train the dregs, and the Taliban must have been doing a better job of recruiting.
Looks like they got more talent.
That's part of it.
Well, here's my current updated take on Afghanistan and the withdrawal.
I started with a contrarian take.
Which said that we don't know how much of a mistake it is yet.
Meaning that there's some information we don't have, and we know we don't have it.
And it could be important. And the information is this.
Why is it that everybody who's not in Afghanistan knew what to do?
Get the Americans out, then get the military out, bomb the bases.
Everybody knew it. The only people who didn't know that, that very obvious thing, were the people in charge of it.
Is that possible?
It's not. Let me just say that's a rhetorical question.
It's not possible. There's something we don't know about how the decisions went down.
Something big. Because I'm not buying that every single person at any level of education, at any level of IQ, every one of us knew the right way to get out of Afghanistan, but the people who do it for a living didn't?
It's just not working for me, right?
We're going to find out something.
But here's what we can say.
It looks like the Taliban is not going to let all the Americans out.
So that's what's happening on the ground, according to the reporting.
Now, if the Taliban had been really smart and maybe better organized, they would have just said, OK, get out of here.
The best thing we can do for ourselves is to let everybody out so we can totally control the country, no Americans coming back.
But that's not happening, which probably means the Taliban leadership can't completely control all the individual checkpoints and stuff, don't have that kind of command and control.
But if we know the Americans can't get out, then it's a botched operation and there's no explanation that's going to make me happy.
I don't think so. I mean, I could be surprised.
Here's something that, whoa, I didn't know that.
Or maybe there was some other big thing we traded for it.
Who knows? There could be some kind of secret deal that we don't know about.
But at this point, it looks like the biggest botched operation in the history of operations.
So the evolution that I'm giving you here is I started with, hey, it's fog of war.
Let's make sure we really know what's going on here.
And now enough time has gone by that I can say, okay, if it's true for sure, and it looks at it that way, it looks to be true for sure that the Americans aren't going to get out, or a lot of them.
So at this point, we can say it's botched.
I mean, that clears it up, right, in a bad way.
Okay. Here's what Biden's problem is.
So the biggest problem with Biden is his age and the presumption of some dementia.
Now, if you have that, and you also have the biggest botched operation of all time, like a historically big botch, one that both sides say was botched, which is rare.
It's pretty rare to get both sides to say anything was botched.
That's a pretty big step.
And I don't know that Biden can possibly survive this.
I feel as though the Democrats are going to have to have a ritual sacrifice of Biden to show that they can still govern.
They're getting close to that.
Let me say it again. The Democratic Party is going to have to take Biden out and shoot him themselves, metaphorically, figuratively speaking.
The Democrats are going to have to take him out.
Because if they don't, It's going to be a big problem trying to get the next Democrat elected because it's going to be a bad look.
So if they get him out early, but the trouble is that would put Kamala Harris in charge and she might be a bigger disaster.
So tell me this in the comments.
Who is the top Democrat who would run for president against, let's say, presuming Trump runs again?
Who would be the top Democrat?
I can't think of a single person who would be president material that we also know.
Buttigieg? Yang?
I don't know. I think Buttigieg and Yang didn't really find the center of their own party.
Cuomo, yeah.
I know you're joking. Mark Cuban.
Well, now there's an interesting thing.
Mark Cuban. That's an interesting idea.
I can't think of anybody who would be better poised.
How much would you like to see Mark Cuban run as a Democrat against Trump running for a second term?
Oh, my God.
Oh, my God.
Can you imagine that? That would be so good.
That would be the best thing ever.
I would love that.
I mean, just from an entertainment point of view.
And I wouldn't mind who got elected, honestly.
If either Mark Cuban or Trump got elected, I'd be okay with that.
Because I think both of them are practical people, not political people.
I mean, you'd have to be political to be in the job.
But I think both of them would go for the solution that works.
I don't think either of them would take the solution that doesn't work over the one that does for some political reason.
Now, they might disagree about what works, but I think they're both free of politics in a weird way.
So that would be fun.
Yeah.
No, I don't think The Rock is serious about politics.
Just made news, Scott and audience.
What just made news? Is there some news about me?
I've been watching the hit pieces come out, trying to take out any prominent voice that is associated with either side.
There was this giant hit piece on the Weinstein brothers, Brett and Eric, the long thread, taking them down.
I think everybody's going to get their chance on the barrel, and I must be next.
But seriously, who in the world are the Democrats going to run for president?
I feel like they've got nobody.
Oh, I just realized...
I just realized why my last two shows seemed short.
I've been printing on double-sided paper and I didn't realize it.
Okay. So there's a new NBC poll and Biden's approval rating is dropping.
But it's at 49%, and it was 53% in April.
This is according to NBC, who loves Biden.
But I feel like no president can be less than 49%.
Yes, all paper is double-sided.
What I meant was, I didn't realize I was printing double-sided.
So yesterday when I did my...
I did my podcast. I was looking at my notes and I thought, damn, I was sure I had four pages of notes, but I only have two.
So if it seemed like a short show yesterday, now you know why.
I might be the dumbest guy in the world sometimes.
But I have one brilliant idea.
Would you like to hear it? Would you like to hear my one brilliant idea?
So I pinned it to my...
Now, I think I've raised this before, but I just included a Tom Cotton...
There's a reference in there, so hopefully he'll see it.
Now, as you know, Congress is mostly useless, with the exception of a few senators, right?
Tom Cotton being one of the few people who works for the government who's actually trying to do something useful and seems to be, you know, making some headway.
So I included him because he's a China hawk, as I am.
And here's my idea.
So we're reaching record levels of fentanyl coming into the country and record numbers of overdoses.
We know that China is the source of it.
It's going through the Mexican cartels and killing Americans by the tens of thousands.
And asking them to stop doesn't work, right?
So if you just say, hey, please don't send that fentanyl anymore, they'll say, sure, we'll take care of it, and they just won't do anything.
And there's just nothing you can do about it.
So I'm suggesting that we depersonalize it and just completely remove China's leadership from the decision.
And you do it this way. You just say, here's what we're going to do for every death recorded from overdose in this country.
And we don't even need to know if it was fentanyl.
Let's just say every death recorded from an overdose.
And we will send back one Chinese citizen who's in college here.
There are over 300,000 Chinese citizens going to college in the United States.
We are training their elites.
Their elites want their kids in college in the United States.
That's why they're here. And what we should say is, it's nothing personal.
We're just going to go in alphabetical order.
And this is a key, by the way.
This is a key to the persuasion, alphabetical order.
Because alphabetical order says it's not personal.
All we're doing is, for every death from overdose, we're going to pick the next person in alphabetical order and just send them home that day.
And here's the thing.
If you're an elite and your last name starts with the letter C and the A's go home, You're going to start lobbying your government pretty hard to cut the fuck out of the fentanyl because you don't want your kid coming home.
And you're having lunch with President Xi because you're an elite.
The elites know the other elites.
So only the elites can talk the other elites into anything.
It's not going to be anybody else.
So you simply say, look, elites, it's nothing personal.
We don't have any way to solve this problem, but we're going to let you solve it.
And the way we're going to let you solve it is we're going to send one of your students back for every fentanyl death, and then you take care of it.
If you never take care of it, that's fine.
We don't care. But take care of it.
Because we're going to get rid of all of them.
And how long would it take for China to say, OK, we like killing you with fentanyl, but not that much.
We have other ways to attack America.
We don't need it that way. So, Senator Tom Cotton, one of the maybe three senators who is not a complete worthless piece of shit, and actually I think would be a fine president someday, possibly.
So Tom Cotton, if you'd like to maybe look into that to see if there's some way we can just make it unpersonal and just put it on a formula and let China take care of their own fucking problem.
Because the problem is we made it our problem.
Here's a little persuasion tip for you.
When somebody makes something your problem, make it their problem and then walk away.
They'll solve it. You've just got to make it their problem.
If you let them make it your problem, it's never going to get solved if you can't solve it.
Make it their problem. All right.
Let's see what else we have on the back of my papers that I didn't look at yet.
Provocative question from Joel Pollack.
He asked this, and there's some writing in...
Well, so he asked this question.
With Trump promoting vaccinations, how many people died because he has denied a platform?
Good question, isn't it?
Could you calculate how many people Twitter killed by keeping Trump off of Twitter...
Who, at least in his rallies, says you should get the vaccination.
Now, I'm not going to enter the conversation of whether you should get the vaccination.
You can work that out on your own.
But, zero.
What would happen? Let's just game it through.
Let's say that Trump was on Twitter and got to tweet maybe once a week.
Let's say, imagine once a week he tweeted, get your vaccinations.
Imagine. Imagine. How many people would be persuaded by Trump himself telling you to get vaccinated?
Well, he is the most persuasive person on the planet, so some, right?
Now, maybe some other people would say, no, I don't want the vaccination because Trump is saying we should get it.
I doubt it, because everybody's saying you should get it, right?
So it's only the people saying you shouldn't get it that I think are going to be the problem, right?
And if you could get one more persuasive voice to say you should get it, would that save lives?
Now, I know those of you who think the vaccination is going to kill us all think that that would be a bad idea.
I get that. But if you believe that the vaccination saves lives, and if you believe that Trump is persuasive, with his base anyway, how many lives would he have saved if he had been on Twitter?
Now, maybe you could argue that he would have killed just as many people with some other thing he said, I suppose, but you don't know what that is.
Somebody says 5% to 10% of his base.
Yeah, I think something like 5% to 10% of the base could be persuaded.
So let's say 8 million people get persuaded who wouldn't have been persuaded.
That's probably at the high end.
How many of 8 million people would eventually die of COVID? That wouldn't otherwise die?
I don't know. It's an interesting question.
Likewise, how many lives did I save by being one of the early people to say closed travel from China?
I know we didn't close it completely.
But did it slow anything down?
Did it make a difference? Were any lives saved?
I don't know. Somebody asked the question about Brett Weinstein talking about ivermectin.
Did people talking about ivermectin being an alternative to vaccination, in a sense, not directly an alternative, but in a sense people saying, well, as long as I have the ivermectin, I don't need the vaccination.
Is there anybody who died because they believed ivermectin was going to save them?
Well, we have one example.
Apparently there's a There was a conservative radio host named Valentine, I think, who just died tragically from COVID, and he was an anti-vaxxer.
And he thought that the ivermectin would save him if he got the COVID, and the ivermectin didn't save him, apparently.
Now, that's anecdotal, right?
So you don't make decisions based on individual stories.
But... It does look like there is some kind of an effect where pundits are killing people.
It looks like it. Now, of course, that assumption and that particular anecdote depends whether you think ivermectin works or not, right?
If you think it works, then he did the best he could and he died anyway.
But I did see a Jordan Peterson retweet of a study.
It's not a brand-new study.
It's been out in a few months. And he was doubting ivermectin.
So basically, Jordan Peterson was retweeting a skeptical article that said, it's possible that the ivermectin meta-analysis is skewed by one big fake study.
So when you look at the average of studies, there might be one real big one that's fake that makes it look like it's working when it's not.
Now, I think Brett has addressed that.
I think he addressed it and said that even if you take that out, it still works or something.
But hypothetically, how many people did get killed by pundits?
Now, I don't know if the Weinsteins will...
Is it Weinstein or Weinstein?
I will never know...
I'll never be able to pronounce those names correctly, and so I apologize.
I apologize publicly for that.
Um... Yeah, it just makes me wonder how many people are being killed by bad punditry that's well-meaning.
I mean, all of it's well-meaning.
Nobody's trying to do anything. All right, here's my next question.
This is another one of those dogs not barking.
So we think that the Taliban are not going to let all the Americans out.
Anecdotally, it's looking like that.
Why are there so many Americans there?
Has anybody ever answered the biggest question of all?
Why are there many Americans living in rural Afghanistan?
And, I mean, tens of thousands?
And if they are living there, why didn't they get out months ago when Trump said he's getting out of Afghanistan?
Did he really not have any warning?
Yeah, you're saying U.S. contractors, but didn't they have warning?
As in months of warning to get out when it was still possible?
What in the world kept them there?
And if it was the United States keeping them there, as in saying, hey, please stay, don't leave until we tell you to, and then they just pulled up and stranded them there?
Well, if that happened, we need to go back in.
Or something. Now...
Presumably, I hear that the British paratroopers are going and collecting British citizens in Afghanistan and bringing them back.
So they're bringing a show of force to do that.
And the United States is not.
And I'm wondering if we could just pay some other country that's capable to save our people for us.
Maybe we should just do a GoFundMe and get some other country who has a military and actually knows how to use it and stuff to go in and get our people at the Expendables.
Doing humanitarian work.
Yeah. I just don't understand Americans in Afghanistan.
It doesn't make any sense to me.
And if they're there, do they want to be there?
Did they choose to stay?
I just don't understand it.
Rome had to hire mercenaries and then fell.
Yeah. Yeah. Glenn Beck raised $22 million to help get people out.
Wow. If that's true, that's pretty impressive.
But I don't know how you'd pay for it.
You'd probably have to bribe a lot of people.
Alice says, not one patient who takes hydroxychloroquine for lupus has died.
That's not true.
If it is true, send me a link on Twitter.
But let me tell you, without even looking at the data, so there's a claim in the comments here that nobody who's taking hydroxychloroquine for lupus has died of COVID. There's no chance that's true.
Is it? Really?
There's no chance that's true.
I don't think that's true.
If there's a real study on that, I'd like to see it, but no, there's no chance that's true.
Yeah, and there's no way the data is being collected exactly.
