Episode 1368 Scott Adams： Virus Conspiracy Theories, Trump the Kingmaker, CNN's Slide to Oblivion, More
Episode Stats
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Summary
On this episode of Coffee with Scott Adams, host Scott Adams talks about a variety of topics, including: - The problem with printers is that they don t work anymore. - Fake news and how they can prove things don't exist - How to prove something doesn't exist by not looking for it - Fact or Fiction? - Is the election a fair and square election?
Transcript
00:00:00.660
Oh, wouldn't it be good if I had more than one piece of paper in my hand?
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Oh, because if I did, that would indicate that my printer was working
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and that my notes for today would be in my hand.
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But no, I have two fairly new printers in my home.
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At least one of them is going to be sacrificed today.
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But I'm going to take one of them and throw it off the balcony.
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So one of them will be executed today because they've been way out of line.
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I mean, they just don't like to print anything anymore.
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And so I'm going to destroy one of them for my pleasure while making the other one watch.
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But before I do that, wouldn't you like to enjoy this episode of Coffee with Scott Adams
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But you could have a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or gels or a canteen jug or a glass.
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And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine hit of the day.
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It's called the Simultaneous Sip and it happens now.
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Now, I've been told that sometimes you can't see the Simultaneous Sip because you're getting
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here too late and there's a commercial running on YouTube when it live streams.
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You could, you could subscribe to YouTube and then you don't see the commercials.
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Or you could, if you don't want to watch it live.
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It's, it also turns into a podcast after we download it and convert it to a podcast.
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So you can listen to it without the commercials on any, on any of the podcasts.
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Let's talk about the news, which I'm going to be looking in the wrong direction at my glowing
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screen because if I haven't mentioned this yet, printers, printers don't work.
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Now, if you have a printer at home, one of those things that tries to put ink on paper,
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just unplug it, carry it to the window and just throw it out the window because printers
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So I'm going to be reading off of this other screen here, annoyingly not looking at you.
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So there's something that, uh, the fake news does that, you know, the fact that they can
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get away with this is amazing, but here are the two ways that they prove things.
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So they can prove something doesn't exist through the process of not looking for it.
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That's their investigative process for the fake news is don't look for it.
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Well, I didn't look for it and I didn't find it.
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But the other thing is they can prove something does exist by finding some anonymous sources
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who have no credibility and are known to hate the person that they're, they're talking about.
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Talking to people who hate the person you, you want to report on.
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Chris Eliza today in CNN has an opinion piece and he says this following, quote, facts say
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So they, they must agree that this is true enough.
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The facts say the election was for one fair and square.
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You can't prove something didn't happen because you didn't look for it.
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What would be the point of an Arizona audit if everybody's already looked at everything?
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Wouldn't the audit just be, oh, just show us your documents.
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We'll just look at the documents because we already know everything.
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You wouldn't have to do an audit if you knew everything you needed to know.
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This might be the last time you see me on social media.
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It's true that there's no proof of any widespread fraud.
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There's no proof, at least what I would consider proof.
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Oh, there are, you know, there are statistical arguments and there are questions and things like that.
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But there are no facts that prove it's, that the election was fair and square.
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And the fact that somebody could say that in public is just mind boggling.
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This is one of those times where I wonder, does Chris Silliza believe what he's writing?
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Which is scarier than, you kind of hope he's lying.
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Because if he's not, if he's not doing it intentionally, and I don't think he is.
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You know, I don't have any evidence to say that he's doing it intentionally.
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He actually believes, if this is true, you know, if you take him at his word,
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he believes that not looking for it proves it doesn't exist.
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That that's just, that's just a fact that's out there.
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Didn't look for it everywhere, so it must not exist.
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So yesterday, I had an interesting, interesting situation.
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And if you do home renovations, there's this continuous stream of people that you didn't know before coming in and out of your house.
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Usually doing work or delivering something or whatever.
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And it has become so easy to identify Trump supporters versus Democrats by the mask.
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So yesterday, there was a, let's just say a couple of people showed up.
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And immediately, I looked at them and saw them, you know, maskless in the driveway.
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The only ones who would take their masks off outdoors were the vaccinated Trump supporters, basically.
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We're going to be passing through this weird period of time where you can just identify somebody's political leanings just like that.
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I mean, I suppose if somebody had blue hair, you could say they're probably a Democrat.
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Here's my persuasion suggestion for Republicans who are trying to argue that changes to the voting rules in their states, Democrats are saying any change to the voting rules, such as Georgia or Florida or Texas or wherever it happens, that any change is designed to restrict voting.
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And specifically restricted against minority voters, I guess.
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And suppose you're the GOP and you want to persuade against that.
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And you want to make it seem as though the only reason you're doing these things is to make the voting system more secure.
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Is it true that these changes are to make the voting system more secure, to make sure only the right people vote?
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Or is the secret real reason to suppress the vote of minorities and keep Republicans in power?
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It's also true that we should do it no matter what.
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Because protecting the integrity of the election is really important.
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And other countries and states are doing what we want to do.
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But if you're asking us, do we also have a motive that we think will win more elections?
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Yeah, that's one of the reasons we're doing it.
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But that doesn't change anything from the fact that it should be done.
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Like you would get chills on your arm if you heard a politician tell you the truth.
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You wouldn't even know what was coming out of their mouth.
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There is no shame in saying, yeah, we totally are motivated to win elections.
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And you should be motivated to have a good election that you can trust.
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I always tell this story about Willie Brown, the politician, Democrat, politician in California for many decades.
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And there was this one situation where he was asked to vote on something about smoking in public or public places.
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And somebody pointed out, how could he be a legitimate politician on the question of smoking when he had accepted money from tobacco companies?
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And Willie Brown, to his enduring glory, I think I'll always love him for this.
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He said, he looked at whoever asked him the question, and he said, I'm paraphrasing, but he said, if you can't take money from somebody and then turn around and screw them, you're in the wrong business.
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When somebody says something that honest sounding, you just go, okay.
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And for a moment, you don't know who you are or what you're doing.
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It's like, ah, you weren't supposed to answer that honestly.
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Now, I don't know which way you voted, but that's like the most transparent answer I've ever seen.
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Yeah, I could take their money and I can screw them.
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If you couldn't do that, you don't belong in this job.
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Instead of arguing that, you know, it's good for their elections and it's good for the country, too, or it's good for the state, they should do the opposite.
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Well, actually, let me change the topic a little bit.
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Sorry, I don't want to think out loud while I'm doing this, but sometimes it happens.
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That's because I don't have a printer that works.
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If it were written down on my little piece of paper, I wouldn't have any problems at all.
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So imagine if the GOP funded some commercials or some ads, some viral ads, ideally viral,
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that opposed any restrictions on illegal voters.
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Suppose the Republicans funded commercials that are not branded Republican, so you can't tell who made the commercial.
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And it just promotes trying to protect the votes of illegal citizens.
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I'll say undocumented, but people are not citizens.
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What would you do if you saw a whole bunch of commercials supporting the right of undocumented people or even illegal votes?
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Just say Americans who are Americans who are not legal to vote in that state.
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What would happen if you saw a bunch of push for illegal votes to be counted?
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It would sort of change the argument, wouldn't it?
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Because the Republicans could make it, turn it into an argument about whether illegal people should be,
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people who are not legal to vote, should be able to vote.
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And I think that would just mess with people's minds.
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There's a great piece of writing that I tweeted.
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You'll see it at the top of my Twitter feed this morning.
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And it talks about the question of whether the virus was engineered in a lab,
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be it the Wuhan lab or other, but mostly the Wuhan lab.
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So basically, the article, a very smart article, talked about how completely doable it would be
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to engineer a virus that nobody could tell was engineered.
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Do you believe, without knowing anything about viruses,
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do you believe that somebody who does know about viruses
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could make a new virus that's more powerful in some way
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and that other people couldn't tell that it was engineered?
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Do you think that you could always tell if something is an engineered virus?
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Your common sense tells you it's possible, right?
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Now, I have to tell you that early on in the pandemic,
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I privately, because I didn't want this to be public speculation,
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doesn't it seem obvious that you could make a virus that's engineered
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that doesn't look like it's anything but natural?
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Every smart person I asked that question to said the same thing.
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But yet the news was consistently reporting that these experts could tell if there was an engineered virus.
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Now, again, I don't know anything about anything,
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but if you said to me, Scott, how could you engineer a virus that looked natural?
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I would say, well, I would just make it natural.
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All you'd have to do is, you know, get some viruses together to mutate or evolve,
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then test the different ones that evolve until you've tested and found the one that's the most badass version of all the naturally occurring things that you sped up the evolution of.
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There would simply be speed evolved, but nobody in the world would be able to tell.
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Now, apparently there's also another technical way to do it that doesn't involve just natural mutations.
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But common sense tells you that was doable, right?
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I mean, did you really need to be a virus expert to know that you could mutate some genes and then pick the good ones?
00:16:08.120
You know, maybe you needed to mutate it through some different species, which is part of the process, right?
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You know, bats to pangolins or bats to anything else.
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And then apparently we do know that some people who are saying it wasn't doable had some connection to the Wuhan lab.
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Some of the experts saying that it wouldn't be possible to do this without being detected had a little connection to the lab.
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Well, read about it in that article who's the author whose name I didn't write down, but I should have.
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Jen Psaki, apparently, you know, the spokesperson for Biden,
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apparently said on the David Axelrod show that, and this is a quote,
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talking about Biden taking impromptu questions for reporters.
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So even the spokesperson says they don't recommend Biden just take random questions from reporters.
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If you could have controlled Trump, which obviously was impossible,
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but if his staff could have controlled him, would they have told him to not take questions, random questions?
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Because answering random questions from reporters rarely is going to help you,
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but, you know, I would think four to five times it's going to hurt you.
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So just mathematically speaking, you know, playing the odds,
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you probably shouldn't take random questions from reporters.
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And we learned probably more than we would have if it had been some, you know, more organized scenario.
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I actually would not criticize Jen Psaki for saying out loud what I think is just common sense.
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You don't want the boss answering random questions.
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You want to control your situation as much as possible.
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So I think he would have said that about anybody.
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But when he said about Biden, it just sounds a little extra bad.
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You probably, a lot of you saw Tucker Carlson talking about a database called VAERS, V-A-E-R-S.
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And apparently anybody, literally anybody, can enter a report that says I got a vaccination and then some bad adverse effect happened or somebody died.
00:19:10.660
Now, the trouble is that these are unverified reports.
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And others might be just correlation without causation.
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Now, you saw Tucker report that if it's true that 30 people a day are dying from the vaccination, which, by the way, I don't have any evidence that that's true.
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That if that were true, that would be a big problem and we should know about it and somebody should be doing something about it.
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But this database does not have that kind of credibility.
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What it does do is say that reportedly, and again, you don't know that the reports are true, but there's somebody got a vaccination and then somebody died.
00:20:00.720
Let me put this in context using the argument on a tweet from Aaron Blake, who writes for The Fix and other things, I think.
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So he says, Tucker cited unverified data that 30 people who got vaccinated die daily.
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The unverified part, meaning it's in that VAERS database.
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And then Aaron points out that 8,000 Americans die every day.
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I had to, I Googled it to make sure that's in the, that's in the ballpark.
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High 7,000s, close to 8,000 people, Americans die every day.
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More than 40% of the population has received one dose of vaccine.
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So if you took 40% of 8,000, you'd expect more than 3,000 people a day would die in America soon after getting a vaccine.
00:21:00.280
Now, these are, you know, back of the envelope numbers, so, you know, you could refine these quite a bit.
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But in general, in a general sense, if the math works the way math works, you should see something like 3,000 people a day dying not long after, you know, within some period not long after they got a vaccination.
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In other words, if there's no problem at all with vaccines, if the vaccine problem were zero, and it's probably not zero, right?
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But if it were zero, you would still see 3,000 people a day dying soon after they got a vaccination.
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Now, if you didn't know that, what would you think when you heard 30 people a day are reportedly, again, not verified, reportedly dying of soon after getting a vaccination?
00:22:07.160
Yeah, it's completely misleading, and I think you have to keep that in context.
00:22:10.260
All right, have you noticed that there are a lot of people hiring, and yet the unemployment rate actually got a little worse?
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So we have tons of open jobs, and we got more people looking for work than ever.
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And the answer is that they don't have the right skills, or they're not in the right area for the jobs.
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Now, I've been telling you that we're in a golden age.
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Try to think of any problem you would rather have than this one.
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I mean, I hate to be an optimist about everything.
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But seriously, if you could pick a problem, because you don't really get to have no problems, that's not one of your options.
00:23:03.480
If you could pick the problem you had to have among all the problems there could be, I'm going to take that one every time.
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I want the problem that we have more jobs than we have people trained to do them.
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Your best situation is not that you're perfectly healthy, because nobody gets that.
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The best thing is you can have a health problem that has a pill.
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So if you've got an economic problem that's as easy, relatively easy, and straightforward to fix as this one, you're in a really good place.
00:24:08.440
Let's talk about the ratings of the news, according to Rasmussen.
00:24:18.260
So this is not a poll of ratings the way ratings companies do their own ratings.
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I forget which time period, but this is a recent change to the ratings.
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I guess CNN lost 22% of likely voters from their viewership.
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I don't know if this might be in the last year or something.
00:24:47.780
Now, my first thought was, you know, you don't want to take a run at the king unless you can finish him off.
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And Trump, although he's out of office at the moment, he's definitely not finished off, if you know what I mean.
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It's like, oh, they went after Trump, but they didn't finish him off, so now they're paying for it.
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So CNN is down 22%, but another left-leaning entity, MSNBC, is up 5%.
00:25:22.560
And then Fox News, the juggernaut, which is Fox News, they're up 9%.
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I'll tell you, say what you will about Fox News.
00:25:36.720
And I've said this a number of times, and I'm going to double down on it.
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Fox News is the best produced show for the news.
00:25:45.420
I mean, they just clean the table with MSNBC and CNN just on production.
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And production, I'm going to include talent selection and the way they organize shows.
00:25:58.640
If you look at the engineering behind The Five, you know, that show on Fox, if you look at
00:26:05.420
Goffeld's new show, if you look at Hannity, if you look at Tucker, they're just really well-produced
00:26:12.520
And so politics aside, I think it's just a higher-quality product.
00:26:18.380
I think people are just drawn to a higher-quality product.
00:26:20.560
So I say this all the time, but as often as I, especially recently, as often as I will
00:26:28.320
criticize Fox News if they get a story wrong or there's some bias, there's always plenty
00:26:34.420
But boy, the people that you don't see on screen, the producers, the people who do everything
00:26:41.300
from the color to the, you know, just the look of it, everything, it's just really well
00:26:50.060
So I see in the comments somebody's mentioning Fox babes.
00:26:54.340
Now, we do not be, we're not sexist here, but it is nonetheless true, it is just a fact
00:27:01.000
that Fox hires probably a little bit on sex appeal.
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If we're being honest, it's a little bit about sex appeal, at least for the female talent.
00:27:16.220
Because I think the news is an entertainment product.
00:27:19.780
And in the context of entertainment, because it really is, I mean, we watch the news for
00:27:29.140
And the fact that they don't ignore human motivation, how often have I told you this,
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That the difference between the left and the right is that the right understands human
00:27:42.140
beings, like how we're motivated, what makes you turn the channel, what makes you watch.
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And then they just build a product around human motivation.
00:27:55.240
So, no, I don't have COVID, it's just allergies.
00:28:02.640
All right, and then I got this question, a lot of you were asking it, from a persuasion
00:28:07.760
viewpoint, when we see our top officials who are vaccinated, wearing masks, let's say Joe
00:28:15.020
Biden, classic example, if you see somebody who's fully vaccinated and still wears a mask
00:28:20.800
outdoors, in public, what do you think of that?
00:28:27.440
Does that tell you the vaccination is less effective?
00:28:41.020
The counter argument is that everybody understands the leaders are modeling.
00:28:45.080
They're modeling, they're modeling, the epitome of what they would like to show you is the
00:28:56.460
When you see Biden wearing a mask in every situation, even though he's vaccinated, do you
00:29:07.780
Or do you say, oh, I get it, he's just modeling the extreme, because the extreme of safety is
00:29:14.480
sort of a good thing for a government to model.
00:29:19.120
This will be the weirdest, this will be the weirdest analogy ever, and therefore invalid.
00:29:26.740
But I've stated before that the federal government, the president in particular, let's just say
00:29:32.700
the president, I've said before that the president of the United States is the only person who
00:29:38.120
should not be in favor of abortion, regardless of what he personally thinks of abortion.
00:29:46.540
You never want the leader to be in favor of anything that even comes close to a gray area
00:29:57.940
You don't want the president ever to be in favor of anything, in any scenario, that's about killing
00:30:06.580
a person who is an American citizen, or even maybe, you know, just is a resident here.
00:30:19.260
They can talk about the pros and the cons, and they can treat the nuance.
00:30:22.960
But I feel like the president should just say, nope, if it's a question of killing Americans,
00:30:34.900
I think the president should stay out of capital punishment.
00:30:39.780
You just never want a leader who ever can say, I have a good reason to kill an American.
00:30:50.220
Governors, you got to, governors got to get some business done, right?
00:30:55.160
If it's not the president's job to make decisions on abortions, for example, just stay out of it.
00:31:11.300
Just as I say, the president's the one person who should stay out of life and death questions
00:31:16.320
about Americans, the president's the one person who should be able to wear a mask even if you don't
00:31:27.340
It's not so much about the president's opinion.
00:31:29.860
It's not about the president's sense of the science.
00:31:34.360
So, I get the logical argument where you say, hey, he's making it seem like the vaccines
00:31:45.200
I mean, it's a reasonable, that's a reasonable critique.
00:31:48.420
But I just don't know anybody's actually persuaded by it.
00:31:56.120
I'm feeling, I saw a comment yesterday that hit a little bit too close to home.
00:32:07.200
I was making a comment that Democrats are wearing masks even when they don't need to
00:32:13.680
And somebody who shall remain nameless said that it might be true that there's a large
00:32:20.800
segment of the population who is ugly, and that ugly people don't mind wearing masks.
00:32:27.780
And when I first heard that, I laughed, because it's like, ha ha, you know, nobody's going
00:32:32.100
to want to wear a mask just because they're not confident with their looks.
00:32:36.300
And then I realized that I like wearing a mask because I'm not confident of my looks.
00:32:43.860
I could say absolutely, absolutely, that I feel more comfortable wearing a mask in public
00:32:52.060
just in the terms of people judging me, you know, how old are you, or how do you look,
00:32:57.680
or do you have some wrinkles, or anything, anything.
00:33:03.640
So as a representative of ugly people all over, I feel these are my people.
00:33:10.520
Like, I don't consider myself a Republican or a Democrat or even a white person.
00:33:22.560
You know, the people who are short and bald and wear glasses and, you know, and every other
00:33:32.660
I understand ugly people better than, better than you beautiful people ever could.
00:33:42.100
I do believe that some people are, just want the mask thing to last them a little bit longer.
00:33:51.980
That is about all I wanted to talk about because somebody says, I am not an animal.
00:34:00.940
If you look at the people who are fighting the hardest to get rid of masks, it's not a perfect correlation.
00:34:11.400
I'm sure you're going to see the, I'll bet you're going to see the correlation.
00:34:15.900
I'll bet you attractive people want to leave, lose the masks first.
00:34:31.120
I can't, I can't bring this up without Elephant Man coming into the conversation.
00:34:38.060
Somebody says, I want to wear a lipstick again.
00:34:40.880
How many of you have thought I'd better brush my teeth before I leave the house?
00:34:50.060
How many of you have eaten, eaten something that like, you know, is all in your teeth?
00:34:55.140
Like a, like a cookie or something that's just all in your teeth?
00:34:58.180
And you go to walk out the door and normally you'd be like, I don't know, brushing your teeth
00:35:03.060
And you say to yourself, ah, I'm not going to be within six feet of anybody and I've got
00:35:12.760
Great Britain, Great Britain with, let's say, less, less dental care than the United States.
00:35:19.880
Maybe they like their masks a little bit longer than we do.
00:35:29.240
I've, I've heard that people are wearing, I think this is a real fact.
00:35:36.120
Was it Ulta or one of the makeup companies said that there's way more sales of eye makeup
00:35:43.500
So, you know, they're, they're selling less makeup.
00:35:54.340
You want to go to, do you want an investment advice?
00:36:02.540
So what I say next will be more because it's fun.
00:36:09.500
If any of you bet on this and lose your money, it's your own damn fault.
00:36:25.640
Well, what will happen to them when the masks go away?
00:36:34.080
I mean, not double, but shouldn't they have a substantial, like a really good quarter the
00:36:46.260
But I don't know how that's possibly not going to sell more lipstick and more whatever the
00:37:02.540
There's a lighting problem, which is when you use any of the Apple products, they're so
00:37:09.860
good on light that they just brighten everything.
00:37:17.060
But it's almost, the lighting in my room, it would be late twilight right now.
00:37:24.480
But if you look here, it looks like I've got a daytime window right in front of me.
00:37:30.700
Yeah, even, I've got light rings turned way down and facing the other direction.