Episode 1496 Scott Adams: More Lies in the Headlines That Go Well With Coffee
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Content:
NYT uncovers Biden drone attack lies
Nobody fired for the Afghanistan withdrawal?
Black national anthem concept
Moderna vaxx outperforms the others?
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But I'm not going to talk about that too much because there'll be plenty of that in the news and you don't need any more of it.
And I'm sure you're not going to forget it.
But hey, is there anybody here who'd like to take it up a notch?
Is there? Is there anybody here who wants to have a really good time?
Well, you came to the right place.
And all you need to take it up a notch is a cup or a mug or a glass of tank or a chalice of stein, a canteen jug or a flask.
A vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
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The thing that makes everything better.
It's called Simultaneous Sip.
It happens now go That's some good stuff I Now, let me find something here that I should have had ready for you the moment I logged on.
There it is. So I tried to live stream on the Rumble platform as well.
I was planning to do that this morning, but I couldn't make it work.
I got some kind of technical problem.
I don't know what to do about it.
I don't know how anybody signs up for Rumble.
I mean, I'm not criticizing it.
I'm just curious.
Why is it that no matter how hard I try...
I can't sign on and just use it.
So I assume it's just me because I have a lot of users.
But it's only the live stream portion.
And I think that might be still in beta.
I'm not sure. But you can watch us here on YouTube and the Locals platform.
Speaking of the Locals platform, subscription service, I now have 149 micro lessons up there.
So if you're a subscriber, you can see 149, roughly two minutes apiece, video lessons.
And each one is designed to give you a skill, an actual useful skill, in two minutes.
So if you had been a subscriber since the beginning, you would have 149 extra skills in one year.
149 extra.
Extra skills in one year.
Now, most of you would say, I don't know if every one of these lessons applies to me directly, but I think 50 to 100 of them would easily.
Imagine adding 50 skills to your skill stack here.
I think it's worth it. Anyway, CNN fake news.
I guess Joe Rogan is thinking about suing them.
Because some reporter claimed that he took, quote, horse dewormer to treat COVID. And as Joe Rogan would like you to know, what he took came from a doctor.
You know, people with a medical degree and all that.
He didn't take the horse version of the doctor.
And I'm sure the CNN's viewers actually think he took some kind of a horse-paced product and chewed on it for a while.
But no, that didn't happen.
So here's the question. Is it appropriate to sue somebody for this kind of defamation, I guess it would be?
And I'm generally anti-lawsuit for this sort of thing, so I wouldn't do it.
But it seems like it might be important to You know, I kind of doubt Joe Rogan will do it.
He just doesn't seem like the...
You know, from the outside looking in, he doesn't look like the kind of guy who wants to waste his time on lawsuits.
I mean, what could be a less good use of your own time?
But he does have an interesting situation in which his reputation affects his brand, and his brand affects his income, and it could be very expensive to have CNN telling people that you're taking a horse dewormer.
That does not build confidence in your audience.
So I feel like he has a case.
That doesn't mean you necessarily want to pursue it, because that's a lifestyle decision.
But it looks like he's got a case.
You know, just sort of on the conceptual level.
Not necessarily on the legal level.
Here's a question. If you were single, would you date...
During the pandemic, somebody who was not vaccinated?
Now, here in my question, I'm assuming that you are.
If you're not vaccinated, too, you don't care, probably.
But if you're vaccinated, would you date somebody who is not vaccinated?
I'm seeing mostly yeses.
I see one no.
Almost all yeses.
Interesting. I think you're wrong.
You're all wrong. I know.
You think it's your opinion. You can't be wrong about your own opinion, can you?
Oh, yeah, you can.
Here's the correct answer.
It depends how hot the person is.
If you're dating somebody who's super hot, maybe you don't care if they're vaccinated.
You'll take your chances.
But let's say it's somebody who's just they're about as good as you are.
They're not better than you.
They're about the same quality of date as you are.
Well, in those cases it might not take as much to knock me off the path.
So the correct answer is always.
Depends how hot that person is.
It reminds me of one of my favorite stories from my corporate days.
I used to work in a Big company, and I worked in the technical laboratory.
And a big discussion in the laboratory one day was about the use of one of the drawers, because it was a shared space, so you had to kind of decide, you know, what was in each drawer so everybody was happy.
And one of the drawers, we were trying to decide if it should be the snack drawer, where you keep all our snacks, and Or should it be the extra screwdriver drawer?
Because you always needed screwdrivers for playing with your technology.
And so I said to my boss at the time, I said, what do you think?
Do you think we should put the food in there or the screwdrivers?
And my boss looked at me, and in a mannerism that could only be compared to Buddha, possibly Gandhi...
He answered the question of, should there be screwdrivers or food in the drawer this way?
He said...
Well, actually, the way I asked the question was the setup.
So I went to my boss and said, should we have screwdrivers or food?
In other words, should we be screwing or eating is the way I asked the question.
Hey, Mike, do you think we should be screwing or eating?
And Mike looked at me and he said, without missing a beat, depends how hungry you are.
I'm just going to let that sit there.
My old boss, who by the way named Dilbert, he came up with a name when I was just thinking about it as a comic.
Everything you need to know about human beings in one statement.
I said, would you rather screw or eat?
And he said...
Depends how hungry I am.
That's the whole thing.
That's everything. That's everything you need to know about people.
It's done. You could just take that formula and apply it to everything, and it would explain everything.
All right. Apparently, in San Francisco, the school kids are 90% vaccinated.
And what do you get when you have 90% vaccinated school kids?
Listen to this.
90% of them are vaccinated.
And what do they get for that?
Zero infections.
90% are vaccinated.
Zero infections.
Zero. Do vaccinations work?
I don't know. I mean, I don't know how many of them they would have had otherwise, but I think some.
Right? Feels like there would have been some.
So, I just put that out there.
I'm hearing a lot of people making the analogy that the vaccination decision and the abortion decision are kind of similar.
Meaning that Who has control over your body?
Do you have control over your body?
Well, the pro-abortion people would say, yes, yes.
It's your body and it's your choice, they would say.
But why don't they say the same for vaccinations?
That's the point that I'm seeing on social media.
Why isn't it the same?
My body, my choice, right?
Well, here's my take on that argument.
It's ridiculous. They're just different situations.
Every situation you should look at Uniquely.
And make a decision uniquely.
Do we ever tell people what to do with their bodies?
All the time!
Do you know what civilization is?
It's the government telling you what to do with your body.
That's what civilization is.
It's the government telling you what you can and cannot do with your body.
You don't believe me? Try walking down the middle of a freeway during rush hour.
Just stand in the middle of the lane and just take a walk during rush hour.
See how it turns out.
Your body isn't allowed there.
It's your body. Why can't you make your own decisions about what your body does?
Nope. Civilization doesn't work that way.
How about if you want to drive your car without your seatbelt?
Hey, it's your life.
Nope. Can't drive your car without your seatbelt.
How about, let's see, what else?
How about a polio vaccination?
Let's say you don't want one.
Can you just say, I don't want my polio vaccination?
Does that work out for you? Nope.
Nope. You're going to have to get one.
How about drinking and driving?
Hey, it's your body.
Right? If you want to put alcohol in your body...
And then put your body in a car and drive your body around in your car.
That should be legal, right?
Well, it's not. It's not legal.
How about doing drugs before going to work?
Can you do a bunch of cocaine and, you know, shoot up a bunch of stuff and then go to work?
Well, people do. But if they get caught, probably get fired.
Probably get fired. But why can't you do a bunch of drugs and go to work?
It's your body. It's your body.
Who tells you what you can do with your body?
Civilization. Civilization tells you where your damn body can be and what your damn body can do.
Period. If you want to do anything you want with your body, you can.
But you have to leave civilization.
Now, having said that, Does it make sense that you say, well, if this is how we treat seatbelts, this is how we should treat a COVID vaccination?
No, no.
Just look at them all individually.
Everything's going to be its own decision.
But decisions by analogy is just crazy.
Apparently the botched Afghanistan withdrawal was even more botched than we imagined.
Do you remember that Biden drone attack on what we thought was some ISIS bad people?
A planner, they said.
An ISIS planner.
Well, it wasn't maybe an ISIS planner.
I think the New York Times did an investigation and found out it was less an ISIS planner than it was...
A citizen who works for some American entity.
Basically somebody on our side.
And there might not have been any secondary explosions or it's not clear that we could determine it.
So it looks like what we did was drop bombs on innocent people and claimed victory and tried to get away with it.
Ouch. I don't know that you could fail harder than the United States failed in Afghanistan.
I mean, just... And, you know, adding tragedy to tragedy, killing innocents, worst possible thing.
But, wow.
And as Glenn Greenwald and others have pointed out, why is General Milley still employed...
Seriously? Nobody got fired for Afghanistan?
Nobody. Nobody got fired for that.
Well, that's fine if you don't want to win in 2020, Democrats, and you want a Republican president next time.
Because this, to me, seems like a big deal.
It would be one thing to make a mistake.
And you've heard me say a million times that, you know, let's be at least a little realistic about the fact that even our leaders are going to make some mistakes.
Because they don't have perfect information.
They've got to guess, right?
Unfortunately, leaders have got to guess sometimes.
So they're going to make some mistakes.
But the Afghanistan mistakes, you have to fire somebody for that.
There has to be accountability. And I just don't know why Millie is still in his job.
Bill Maher continues to go after the left for their silliness.
He goes after the right, of course.
But the left, as he pointed out, is just getting more ridiculous.
And it is literally embarrassing him.
So Bill Maher says he's just literally embarrassed by the people on his own side, I guess.
But the latest weirdness is that there's...
Did you know there's something called the Black National Anthem?
And apparently at last night's football game, I don't know which one it was, but Alicia Keys sang Lift Every Voice and Sing, and there was also the regular national anthem.
So now we have the regular national anthem and then the special black national anthem.
Can you think of anything that would be dumber than that?
What would be dumber than that?
It's... Persuasion-wise, you're persuading the country to be more divided.
That's the opposite of the reason for a national anthem.
The whole national anthem idea is to get everybody on the same side.
As soon as you throw in that other national anthem, you've reduced any need for it.
So let me say this.
Either do one national anthem, I don't care what it is, or get rid of it.
But don't do two.
Two is the dumbest solution.
One, pretty good.
I like that. None, acceptable.
So one or none, national anthem, completely acceptable.
More than one? More than one.
No. That's the opposite of a national anthem.
That's a divisive anthem or something?
No. If you're going to aggressively try to do the opposite of what you want to happen, don't expect people not to notice.
New information says that people who were not fully vaccinated, in the spring anyway, in the summer were more than ten times more likely to be hospitalized and die.
Ten times.
Ten times. Ten times more likely to be hospitalized and died.
Did you know that?
Does that fit with what you kind of think it is?
You know, whatever it is that you think is the effectiveness of the vaccines, when you hear that, does it track with what you generally thought it would be?
No, I think...
In this case, I think you would look at the obese compared to the obese and the non-obese compared to the non-obese.
It would still be 10 times, I think.
Unless... I don't know. No, I'll take that back.
I don't think you would necessarily find that to be smoothly distributed.
You said persuading us to get the vaccine was unethical.
Please stop. Can you not handle facts?
Because it's just a reporting that...
Well, I don't know if it's a fact.
I don't know if the base is a fact.
But it's a fact that it's reported in the news.
That's a fact. If you can't handle facts, how do you operate?
If you're accidentally getting persuaded by facts...
Don't you think you should be persuaded?
Really? I mean, if you're persuaded by a fact, that's good, right?
How is that bad? Let's say I told you a fact that you checked out and it was actually a fact.
And it had the impact of changing your mind.
Did I persuade you?
Facts are not persuasion in the way that I view the world.
A fact is just a fact.
And if I report them in the order that they arrive, that's not persuasion.
Could it persuade you? Yes.
Because anything that comes across your head could persuade you, but there's no intention if you're just talking about facts.
There's no intention there.
If I wanted to persuade you, I wouldn't use facts.
Do you get that? If I wanted to persuade you, I probably wouldn't use facts.
Somebody says, you failed yesterday.
Well, that's untrue.
That's untrue. Yesterday when I told you that it would persuade some people, I did hear from people who were persuaded.
So when you say it didn't work, talk to the people who said they changed their minds because of it.
Now remember, persuasion doesn't get everybody.
It's not supposed to. I mean, it's not really designed to do that.
But persuasion can get, you know, 5% on a good day.
That's a lot. If you could move 5% of a crowd in one day, wow, that would be like a superpower.
And I think I might have.
I think I might have moved 2% to 5%.
The other information we have is, this is kind of good news for me, is that the Moderna vaccination seems to be the good one.
By quite a bit, actually.
Now, they all seem to be protective.
But apparently the Moderna one just totally kicks ass on the other ones.
Now, it's good we didn't know that.
Well, let me ask this question.
Do you think we didn't know that earlier?
Do you think that somebody...
Do you think that somebody wasn't aware that the Moderna would outperform the other ones?
I think this is like the mask situation in the early days.
I feel as if we knew this but didn't want to tell the public.
Because if you told the public, then they would wait for the good one and there wouldn't be enough of it.
So I think that the government may have lied to you.
I don't know that, so this is not based on facts.
But it feels to me that if the government...
Let's put an if on this.
If the government knew that Moderna was the best performer, and they had to, right?
Don't you think they've known this for a while?
Because all you have to do is study, just look at the antibodies, right?
Whoever has the most antibodies, well, that was the best vaccination.
And... They didn't just start looking at the antibodies yesterday, right?
Of course they've known this.
Isn't this another example where the government almost certainly lied to you?
Now, I think they lied to you for your own benefit.
And that might even be true.
Well, no, I take that back.
They didn't lie to you for your own benefit.
They lied to you for the country's benefit, which might have been bad for you.
Because suppose you could have pivoted and gotten the Moderna instead of something else, if you'd known that it was worth doing.
Well, that might have been good for you, because you got better information, you got a more powerful shot.
But then there wouldn't be enough.
If everybody went out and tried to get the same one, there wouldn't be enough.
And then that's bad for the country.
So does your government get a pass if they lied to you about this?
In the comments...
In the comments, if you buy the notion that the government certainly didn't want us to know one of them was the good one for the benefit of the whole, are you okay with the government lying to you if they did it for good intentions?
I see one yes.
I see a no. I see no, no, no.
I see mostly no's.
Another yes. Now and then.
No, no, no. No, no, no.
Somebody says that's not what's happening, so somebody says I'm characterizing it wrong.
Never, yeah. I don't know.
I might disagree with you because I feel as though the government lying to you about which vaccinations would be more effective, and I think that's what happened.
I'm going to speculate that that is exactly what happened because I can't imagine they know a long time ago.
But I'm going to surprise you.
I'm going to say it's unethical, and I approve it.
It's unethical, completely unethical, and I approve it.
There are situations in which doing an unethical thing sometimes is your best plan.
And the situation is this.
It would be unethical to individuals...
Because you're denying them knowledge that could maybe be useful to them.
So very unethical to individuals.
But it might be ethical for the nation, if that's even a thing.
Because it could be the thing that's best for the average, while it's terrible for some individuals.
Scott has confirmation bias about Moderna.
No, I read a study that came out today...
If the study doesn't exist, then I probably have some kind of cognitive dissonance or confirmation bias.
But I'm just telling you what the study said.
Is there another study?
If there's another study that says something else, I'll report that too.
Now, the caveat on all of this is that studies are often wrong.
And it seems to me that I saw Ian Martesis, and by the way, I need a fact check on this, Ian.
I thought I saw the antibody test that he did suggested that the vaccinations were fairly similar in terms of antibody production.
So that would be different than what this new study says.
So, do you trust the study?
Yes. Always put a little check mark next to the skepticism column.
Was it double-blind?
I don't know. Do you think Fauci and Gates just want what's best for you?
I think Gates does.
Remember, Fauci is doing a job.
He's a politician. He's trying to keep his reputation and all that.
So he's got more complicated motivations.
But do I think that Bill Gates only wants to do what's good for the country?
Yep. That's exactly what I think.
With no hesitation and no ifs or buts.
I think Bill Gates only wants to do what's good for the world and the country.
Now, I respect a disagreeing opinion.
If you have a different opinion, I respect that.
Because neither of us know, right?
We'd have to be in its head.
We can't do that. But...
Look at, you know, follow the money, right?
If Gates was only interested in making money, he would not have the Gates Foundation, which spends all of his time giving away his money.
So he's clearly not in it for the money.
He's in it to give away money, literally anti-money.
Now, is Fauci in it for the money?
Well, I doubt it.
But he may have financial interests, and those could make a difference.
Oh, power?
Yeah, power, I suppose, is a motivation.
I don't see Bill Gates craving power, though.
At least not in any way other than a functional power, so he can do his charity stuff better.
Dig deeper in the foundation, someone says.
Does not prove he's right.
That's true. It's moronic to blindly trust billionaires.
Nobody does that. Is there anybody who's blindly trusting billionaires?
I don't think that person exists.
It's not about money.
It's about power. Not for Gates.
I don't think Gates has any power motivation for the pandemic.
What kind of power is he going to get from that?
Let's see.
Seems you do a bit of mind reading of Gates.
Well, here's what I'm trying to do.
I'm trying to look at the things that would influence his mind as opposed to his mind directly.
Things that influence your mind would be profit, for example, and that's clearly not a motive because you can see that he's not acting in a profit way about anything at the moment because he's giving away his money.
He has a hero complex.
He should. In the comments, I'm saying that Gates has a hero complex.
I hope so.
Don't you? Does Elon Musk have a hero complex?
I sure hope so.
I sure hope so.
My God! Imagine if they had all that power and didn't have an impulse to help.
You want them all to have a hero complex?
My God. There's nothing I want more than for Bill Gates to have a hero complex.
Is there anything you want more than that?
Yeah.
Wisdom is more than that.
Well, I don't know what that means.
All right, I'm just looking at some of your comments now because it's a slow news day.
We, of course, will be paying respect to all of our fallen heroes on 9-11.
But while I got you here, let me read to you some of the micro lessons that you could have been looking at on the Locals platform.
So here are all the things you can learn in two minutes, little two-minute videos I have on the Locals platform.
Beating procrastination, saving your relationship from TDS, how to make friends, how to learn something effectively, creating assets from nothing, lots of stuff in persuasion, how to know if you live in a simulation, how to build your self-esteem, programming your brain, talking to strangers, be careful what you measure.
Lots more on persuasion.
How hypnotists read body language, motivating employees, conflict resolution, creating ideas.
There are 149 of these.
Now, if you've watched me for a long time, and a number of you have, you may know that I'm always uncomfortable doing marketing because, you know, I have to sell my books and calendars and all that stuff.
And I never loved that stuff.
Because my view is, you know what a Dilbert book is.
If you want it, you'll get it.
I don't want to talk you into buying a Dilbert book.
You know what it is.
If you like it, you'll buy it.
If you won't, you won't.
But the micro-lessons are different.
Because I've watched the feedback from the people who have absorbed them, and people are changing their lives.
I mean, people are just reporting amazing results from just what they learned or how they applied it at work, etc.
And I'm hearing this every day.
Every day I'm hearing this.
And so I would submit to you that for $7, which is what one month costs of subscription to locals, or $5 if you do a yearly package, but you could, for one month, $7, you could find out...
If you get $7 worth of value.
If you don't, well, $7.
But there are 149 things that you could add to your talents.
Give them a look.
If you did like five of them, there's no way you're going to feel the same.
Just watch five of them and see if you feel the same.
I don't think you will.
I think you'll feel like you learned a lot.
Alright, so that is my Pitch.
And like I say, for the entertainment portion of the things that I make, calendars and books and stuff, I don't pitch them that hard because you know what you like.
In those cases, just letting you know they exist is all you need.
But the micro-lessons will change your life.
And so I'm going to push a little harder for that because I think it's good for you.
