Episode 941 Scott Adams： I Overslept. Come Sip With Me.
Episode Stats
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Summary
In this episode of Coffee with Scott Adams, host Scott Adams talks about the time he was wrong about a viral video about the coronavirus outbreak, and how he got hounded on social media by people who thought he was an idiot.
Transcript
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Hey everybody, come on in. It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams. Yeah, it's part of the best
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part of the day. Well, I can't tell you how hard I've been laughing this morning. If my
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eyes look like they're, if they're red, it's not from crying, it's from laughing. Rarely
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do you get such a clean wind as I had this morning. You know, sometimes you wake up and
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you wake up and you think, ah, what's today going to be like? Because yesterday, I was
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getting hammered yesterday. And then last night, I was just getting hammered on social media.
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Now, let me tell you why if you missed the show. But I'll do that after the simultaneous
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sip. Yeah, it's after the simultaneous sip. And all you need is a cupper, a mugner, a glass,
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a tanker, a chalice, a steiner, a canteen, a jug, a flask, a vessel of any kind. Fill it
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with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. Join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the
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dopamine. At the end of the day, the thing that makes everything better, including the
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coronavirus. It's called the simultaneous sip. It happens. Now, go.
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Ah, oh, where was I? Oh, yes. I was talking about how much fun I was having this morning.
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So, yesterday and last night, just to catch you up, before I get to the good part,
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I swear to God, I couldn't be any happier this morning. If you wonder what it's like
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to see me looking so happy that I can't stand it, this is what it looks like.
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I know it won't last, but man, am I going to enjoy it this morning.
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So, I'm having sort of a shadow of the feeling that I felt, a weaker version.
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When Trump won the election, and I went from the dumbest guy in the whole world,
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that I spent a year and a half being the dumbest guy in the whole world, until he won the election.
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And then, I was the smartest guy in the world. You know, at least for an hour. It felt like that.
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So, yesterday, I had criticized this viral video that was going around the internet. Most of you have
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seen it by now. There was a Dr. Erickson, and some other doctor, mostly Erickson, I think, was talking.
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And he was an ER doctor. And he had his own statistics and arguments about the coronavirus.
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And he said, basically, his argument was, hey, look at my numbers. According to my numbers,
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coronavirus is sort of overblown. Let's get back to work.
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Now, people sent it to me, and I ignored it, and they sent it to me, and more people sent it to me,
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and I still ignored it. Because there are lots of stuff on the internet to look at.
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You know, in the beginning, I didn't think it was important. It was just one of many things that
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people sent to me. But then people started DMing it. It's like, oh, my God. You know,
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they're sending it to me directly. I'm getting it through. I got it through LinkedIn. I got it.
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But everybody's sending me this video. So all right, I'm going to look at it. So I listen to
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the doctor. I get about five minutes into it. And my head is on fire. Because everything he says
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sounds to me, not being a doctor, not being an expert, not being an epidemiologist. But it sounded
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to my cartoonist brain like it was all BS. Like it didn't even sound a little bit credible.
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Everything he said sounded either under-informed or reckless. I use the word reckless. It sounded
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like he was comparing the wrong things. It was like he was bad at math. I mean, it was just a hot mess.
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Yes. So I made the mistake of publicly disagreeing with two experienced doctors who were on the front
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line of this crisis. How do you think that went for me yesterday? How do you think it went when I
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disagreed with two doctors who had a viral video who were saying exactly what people wanted to hear?
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See, that was the problem. The trap, if you will, the trap, somebody says your ego is huge. Whoever
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said that, please don't leave yet. Whoever just made that comment, your ego is huge. You have to stay.
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You have to hear the end of the story. You'll be so disappointed if you don't. So all day long,
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I was hammered for being the idiot cartoonist who would dare to disagree with doctors, professional,
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real, real, qualified doctors. And all day long, people said to me, and all night, they said,
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oh, Scott, tell us about your doctor degree. Oh, where did you get your virology experience,
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Scott? Because you know, you're a cartoonist. These are professional medical doctors. Went to medical
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school. You're not an idiot like you. Now, to make things worse, because I like to do that to myself
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sometimes. When I'm in hot water, sometimes I like to add some hot water to the hot water.
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I don't know why. It's like a character defect. Honestly, it is. I'm not proud of this at all.
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When I get in a lot of trouble, my first instinct often is, I'm in a lot of trouble. I'm really exposed
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here. How could I make this a lot worse? I swear to God, I think like that. And it's part of it is
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because I want to see if I can get out of the trap. I want to see if the trap is so bad that it looks
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like I can't get out. And then just to see if I can, you know, it's sort of like going to one of
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those escape rooms. You know, you go to an escape room where they, they, you have to figure out how to
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escape. Well, you do it just because it's hard. That's the whole point. That's why you climb a mountain,
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because it's hard. So after being beat up roundly for making medical opinions, I doubled down and I
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said, you know, the last time we had this conversation, we meaning the internet, my critics
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and me, it was over the question of face masks. Does anybody remember that? I bring it up too often
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because it's too much fun. When it was the cartoonist against the entire medical community,
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the Surgeon General, World Health Organization, Fauci saying the masks were not effective.
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And I like an idiot said, no, allow me to overrule the medical opinion of every professional on the
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planet with my cartooning degree. I don't have a degree, but you know what I mean, my cartooning
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experience. But who was right? Well, I was, I was right. And every medical professional in the world
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who probably wasn't wrong, I think they were lying or they were trying to protect the supply.
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So based on the fact that I was right once, just, just realize how dumb this is. Okay. This is the
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beauty of how, how, how fun this is. If you don't realize how stupid I was, you're not going to fully
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appreciate how it turned out. All right. So like an idiot, I overrule the highest doctors in the world
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publicly, um, you know, very vigorously, but I got lucky. I got lucky on that one, right? Because it
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turns out that I'm pretty good at spotting bullshit. So you don't need a medical degree
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to spot obvious bullshit. That's actually a separate skill. So when people were saying, Scott,
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Scott, Scott, you don't have a medical degree. They were actually, they were reading the wrong book
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because the book they should be reading is not the medical book. It's the spotting bullshit book.
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Because if you're a bullshit spotter and you saw the doctor say the face masks don't work.
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Well, the bullshit detector was on, you know, 10 bullshit detector. So then these two doctors come
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along. I watched this video for five fricking minutes. I told people I bailed down after five
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minutes because it was lacking so much credibility that I couldn't stand it anymore. And then what
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did people say? Scott, man, how can you have a confident public, you idiot in public? You're saying
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this. How can you have a confident public opinion about medical professionals? You're not a doctor
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and worse, you fricking idiot. You didn't even watch the video. Are you kidding me? You only watched
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five minutes of five minutes of this long video. And that was enough to conclude that you're the
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expert, Scott, and these medical experts are not. Good try, Scott. So I woke up this morning. You also
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heard that the video got taken down by YouTube. And a lot of people said censorship, censorship.
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And I said, well, you should at least consider the possibility that YouTube also thinks it's not
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good medical advice. And people said, doesn't matter. It's still censorship. We should be able
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to see it even if it's not true. It's a, which is a fair argument, by the way, I'm not arguing that
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point. As long as you could also see the counter argument, said people. And I thought to myself,
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that's a reasonable argument. But it would also be reasonable to say that you can't scream fire
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in a crowded theater. Would you agree? We've sort of accepted that free speech does exist. But you
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still can't yell fire in a crowded theater because it would just be a health problem. People would kill
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each other trying to get out. Similarly, analogies are always dangerous, right? But you could make an
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argument that giving objectively bad medical advice during an emergency in which it's very much life
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and death, that if people got the wrong medical advice, that might be like yelling fire in a crowded
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theater. You could make the argument, right? So I'm not going to come down on either side of that.
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I'm just going to say the argument exists, and that it happened last night.
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So I wake up this morning to a statement from the ACEPAAEM. And it goes like this.
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The American College of Emergency Physicians and the American Academy of Emergency Medicine,
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they sound pretty medical, don't they? They sound very medical.
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jointly and emphatically condemned the recent opinions released by Dr. Daniel Erickson
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and Dr. Arden Masihi, the two doctors on that viral video.
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These reckless, what? They used the word reckless.
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These reckless and untested musings do not speak for medical societies and are inconsistent with current
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science and epidemiological regarding COVID-19. Fill in medical word back in that sentence.
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As owners of local urgent care clinics, that would be the doctors who are on the video,
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it appears these two individuals are releasing biased, non-peer-reviewed data to advance their
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personal financial interests without regard for the public's health.
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Now you've seen condemnations before from professional organizations, right?
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We've seen that lots of times. Some organization will say,
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oh, this person does not speak for us. We condemn them.
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This is sort of the hardest condemning I've ever seen.
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It says, COVID-19 misinformation is widespread and dangerous.
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Members of the ACEP and AAM are firsthand witnesses to the human toll, blah, blah, blah.
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And we strongly advise against using any statements of Drs. Erickson and Masi as a basis for policy and decision-making.
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Now, I hope you're enjoying this as much as I do.
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Now, for those of you who are sort of new to this, new to the show, if you will,
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one of my most frequent themes, I write about it in my books, is managing your ego.
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What you're watching is me not managing my ego at all.
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Like, right now, I'm doing whatever is the opposite of managing my ego.
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I just decided to open all the doors, and it's just out now.
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You can let your ego out to play on these special cases, because really, how often do you get to be the biggest jerk in the world for a day and a half and then win this hard?
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So I'm going to enjoy it a little bit, and then I'm going to try as best I can to remind myself of how often I'm wrong about other stuff.
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So I'm going to be, today I'll be struggling to try to rein it in and get back to maybe some kind of a normal mental state.
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But come on, you have to agree that me calling out these two doctors as being medically unfit in public continuously for a day and a half
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while the entire frickin' world disagreed with me was kind of gutsy.
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If I'm being honest, if I'm being honest, I can't really tell the difference between gutsy or stupid.
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The only thing I know for sure is that it worked out my way.
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So, as long as it worked out my way, I'm happy.
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Oh my God, I just won't be able to stop laughing about that all day long.
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I swear, I thought I was going to wake up today to another day of yesterday,
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where everybody in the world would be telling me I'm an idiot because I'm trying to overrule these professionals.
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I don't know if you can actually stroke out or have some kind of medical condition that's caused by winning too much.
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Remember the president warned me, he warned all of us really, that we might get tired of winning,
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but he didn't say that it might be medically dangerous.
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This next topic is going to start going into the realm of medically dangerous.
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You know the other thing I've been saying in public that I think everyone disagreed with me on?
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I'll bet every one of you disagreed with me on the following point,
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which is that Sweden doesn't tell you anything.
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Who is the one person in the world who said, no, don't look at Sweden?
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You think you can tell something, but it's a trick because there's just too much that's different there.
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Well, so today's CNN has a story that basically the summary is that the Sweden experiment didn't work.
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So everybody who, everybody who was on the side of, look at Sweden, let's do what they do.
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It goes into detail, compares them to the other like countries in the region, not the United States, but Norway and Finland, etc.
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And it shows that they have a far higher death rate.
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And their death rate is so high that there are professionals, doctors and stuff within Sweden
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who are begging the country to do what the other countries are doing because they're in so much trouble.
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Now, they haven't overloaded any hospitals, and it's still only like 22 out of 1,000 or something like that,
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So it's not like they're crushed, but according to the news, the news says Sweden didn't work
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Now, you can still say the verdict is out, and I'll agree with you.
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That's off the table, if you're being honest about it.
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What you can say is, ooh, Sweden's sort of in dangerous territory.
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but it's not looking good in Sweden, and it's looking a little dangerous over there.
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But you can no longer say, look at Sweden, it's working in Sweden.
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If you say that, you're no longer consistent with the data.
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But you certainly could say it might be better than the alternatives.
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So if you said to me, yeah, you know, all the choices are bad.
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Sweden is not ideal, but they haven't, you know, they haven't gone out of business either.
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So you could keep your argument that we should take the Sweden model,
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There's a story I was going to tell you that I decided against.
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Rob Ryder, you know, I'll know Rob Ryder, big critic, Hollywood guy, critic of the president.
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So he writes, he tweets this, and I only point it out because I would love to know,
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So whoever thinks that somebody could buy me, you're very new.
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For the people who are new, you get immediately blocked for stating in public what my private thoughts are.
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So if you're speculating about my private motivations or what I'm really thinking,
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Because one of the things I learned, back when I was younger and more naive about human nature,
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somebody would misinterpret what I said, and then I would make the mistake of saying,
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no, no, no, you think you're disagreeing with me, but you're actually misinterpreting what I said.
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So you don't realize it, but you're actually disagreeing with your own misinterpretation.
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Let me tell you what I really did say, and then we can have a conversation about my actual opinion.
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If somebody's mistaken, I correct them, and then we talk about the actual correct opinion.
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And finally, I just said, why does this never work?
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Why is it that when somebody misunderstands what you're saying, and you correct them, it doesn't make any difference?
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They'll just replace their old misunderstanding with a new one, and then argue the new wrong thing.
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And then they can move to the new wrong thing and the new wrong thing.
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But the one thing that never happens in all of the public and private debating that I've had over my entire life,
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the one thing that's never happened is that people say, oh, that's what you meant?
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Okay, let's have a conversation based on what you actually meant.
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Now, you say to yourself, well, that can't be true.
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It can't be true that not once that's happened.
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Maybe, you know, maybe I have some false memory and once it did happen.
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But generally speaking, the reason that people misunderstand what you're saying and then argue the misunderstanding is not because they didn't understand it.
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For decades, I thought, why are they acting so irrational?
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So cognitive dissonance is what happens when somebody hears an argument that ruins their worldview.
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So let's say somebody believed, let's say somebody believed, I don't know, that, I'm trying to think of something that we could all relate to.
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Let's say somebody believed that the moon was made of cheese.
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And they believed that their whole life, and then you do a SpaceX, or you do a rocky ship goes up there, takes a sample back, shows it to the person and says, see, it's not cheese.
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It's just this dirt and dust and rocks and stuff.
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Now, if people were rational, what would the person who thought the moon was made of cheese do?
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Well, they'd say, oh, wow, I've been wrong about this cheese thing for a long time.
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The person will say, well, you faked the moon shot.
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They'll say, yeah, but that's not actually dirt from the moon.
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So you can't get somebody who's in cognitive dissonance to find your point because missing the point is the only thing that mattered to them.
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They have to miss the point in order to maintain their worldview.
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So people will just go all over the place to avoid losing their worldview.
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Anyway, I don't even know why I was talking about that.
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So a reasonable question that one might ask is, how did I get so cocky?
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And people have been asking me that a lot lately, and it has a lot to do with me being right a lot.
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So, of course, I'm cockier when I'm more right.
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And when I'm more wrong about things, I tend to tone it down as one should.
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But there was something that happened to me in eighth grade that is part of my story.
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Remember I told you that it's good to have a story that is a story of you, so that there's sort of a personal story that is your brand.
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But it's basically the story that describes you.
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And my story, as I've told you, is that I always win.
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I'm sure I lose probably as much as everybody else.
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You know, if you actually did a scientific study of it.
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And my story is that I can win against great odds.
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Now, I have lots of anecdotal stories that that's happened.
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Probably a dozen different situations in which I beat the odds in ways that just seem weird.
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I mean, the fact that I'm even here talking to you is because I beat the odds in so many ways.
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My eighth grade teacher was teaching the class how to properly answer questions on an upcoming standardized state test.
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And he said, we'll go over some example questions.
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And that'll teach you, you know, basically the style of how to answer the questions, you know.
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And the instructor says, the teacher says, all right, now here's a question.
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And my biology teacher was like, you know, you could tell he was a little put out.
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And I was like, yeah, I hear what you're saying.
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I was in eighth grade, and he was a biology teacher.
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And it was a biology question on a standardized test.
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One assumes that he also had the answer sheet, right?
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So he's a biology teacher with the answer sheet.
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And I'm disagreeing with him in the class and telling him he got the wrong answer on a multiple choice test,
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of which this question was designed to be the easy and obvious one because it's used as an example.
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And this will tell you more about me than anything that you ever,
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anything you would ever need to know about me is in this next part of the story.
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I'm not buying that you're right because you're the biology teacher and I'm the student.
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Because I'm looking at this question and I'm telling you it's A.
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And by the way, I asked him if he had the answer sheet.
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And he said, no, I don't have the answer sheet.
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But let me remind you, I'm a biology teacher with a biology education.
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You would be a student who has not learned this yet.
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A few days later, the teacher comes to me in class.
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And so I hunted down the actual answer to that question.
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Now, I think that ruined me for the rest of my life.
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Because do you know how fun it was to be an eighth grader, have a public discussion with your teacher about the right answer to a biology question,
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and have him have to admit, and he said it in front of the rest of the class,
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and he had to admit that our public disagreement went my way.
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And by the way, the only reason that I knew I had the right answer is because there was something about the way the question was worded,
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and that I, as a good multiple choice question answerer, just sort of deduced it because of the structure of the question.
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I just thought the question was worded differently.
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So anyway, I think that ruined me because it sort of reinforced that thing that I could disagree with authority like an idiot and still come out okay.
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If you ever find yourself in my situation where you want to disagree with the greatest experts in the world, don't do it.
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I mean, I feel like there might be some luck involved here because even I can't believe that I beat the odds so often.
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Those of you who know my story with my voice problem,
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for three and a half years, I couldn't speak intelligently, intelligibly,
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because I had this weird voice problem where my vocal cords would constrict.
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And three and a half years of asking doctors how to solve it didn't work.
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I ended up solving it myself by finding a doctor somewhere in the world who had a solution,
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So there are tens of thousands of people all over this country right now.
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As we speak, there are tens of thousands of people who literally can't speak.
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When they try to talk, it's like nothing comes out.
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And of those tens of thousands of people, the reason that they can't get a solution
00:31:01.520
is because their doctor told them there wasn't one.
00:31:12.140
Could you hear me right now if there were not a surgery that cured that very problem?
00:31:19.060
So all over the doctors, let's say each of these people has at least one doctor.
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which means there are probably 40,000 doctors who got the wrong answer on this question.
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40,000 of them who their patient came in and the doctor said,
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And there's nothing you can do about it except Botox treatments that don't work that well.
00:32:03.500
But I couldn't sing before, so I don't know how different that would be.
00:32:06.380
My vocal range definitely is constricted after the surgery,
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meaning that I can't do an artificial high pitch if I wanted to.
00:32:22.460
But I can go down pretty low, as low as I could before.
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Somebody says, they're in the same position, got a condition the doctors can't solve.
00:32:38.940
I found a patient with the same condition on Google,
00:32:42.360
which caused me to be able to track down the doctor.
00:33:03.660
So the president yesterday let it slip, basically,
00:33:10.100
that he knows what the situation is in North Korea.
00:33:19.260
but he said it with confidence that he's the president of the United States.
00:33:22.640
I think he knows the situation, but he can't be 100% sure.
00:33:26.780
And he said that he hopes that Kim gets better.
00:33:32.680
Now, would you say he hopes that Kim gets better if he thought Kim were dead?
00:33:43.720
He would just say something like, well, I hope North Korea does well.
00:33:49.920
Or, you know, I'm thinking good things for the family.
00:33:55.220
He wouldn't say something about him getting better
00:34:07.400
unique among the intelligence services and governments,
00:34:10.720
it seems that South Korea is the most contrarian.
00:34:15.240
They seem to say, we see no evidence that there's anything wrong.
00:34:21.400
Isn't South Korea the most likely to know what's going on?
00:34:30.620
but South Korea is probably the most in the know about what's happening there.
00:35:00.480
because we're safely on the other side of the world.
00:35:03.340
You know, Kim Jong-un isn't going to come after me.
00:35:06.080
And the president is also being very, very diplomatic.
00:35:28.140
And I would say that North Korea is the best example of that
00:35:31.160
because I think President Trump did things diplomatically there
00:35:34.720
that just probably weren't even possible for someone else.
00:35:39.900
that allows him to do some situations better than other people.
00:35:44.920
You could argue that there are other things he's not as good at,
00:35:49.300
So here's why South Korea would play it differently.
00:35:56.740
broke the news that North Korea had a change of leadership?
00:36:01.200
How would North Korea react to that after the fact?
00:36:48.720
We're intentionally keeping a secret, South Korea.
00:36:53.120
you're the guys we're supposed to be able to work with.
00:36:55.940
You're the guys we're trying to make peace with.
00:37:39.060
because they're going to have a rough transition,