Episode 1402 Scott Adams - Rainbows and Warm Summer Nights Are My Decoy Topics Today

hey everybody it's time for coffee with scott adams and yeah the rumors are true what you've heard is true i'm afraid this will be the best coffee with scott adams of all time pretty sure i'm going to nail it today and uh i want to give you an update on my quality of my broadcast get a lot of complaints about the quality of my sound fair enough but it turns out that there is a gigantic market opportunity because it turns out if i use my ipad which i'm using now i get really good video but you can't do much with the sound there's no microphone you can attach to it there's nothing you can do there's an internal problem with the ipad so with the ipad you can have good video but not good sound if i go to my mac laptop i can get better sound if i uh connect a good microphone but it's got a back camera that's not very good so i have two choices good sound or good video now you're saying to yourself scott there are lots of people in the world who have figured out both of those things they have somehow figured out how to have good video at the same time as good audio to which i say have they no they haven't i don't think so because uh if you're live streaming it's hard to do those things now if you're doing a recorded version you can you can do everything in high quality it doesn't matter if your technology is a little uh little uh you have some hitches in it because you just fix it and then record it you're fine but if you're live streaming everything has to work just has to work so i always make the decision to go for what is simple over what is complicated now the complicated solution would be to get an external camera an external microphone figure out the connections because nobody makes a good microphone that just plugs directly into your laptop apparently so you can get little toy microphones that plug into your laptop but if you get a nice professional one you gotta get a mixer or something to connect it so there's a gigantic market opportunity for someone to make a simple device that has good video and good audio and it works every time nobody makes that imagine what a big market that is given that everybody's zooming and and stuff nobody makes that product it's kind of fascinating right because it's literally the number one thing that people would want right now good video and good audio nobody makes one it's just astonishing that apple doesn't have a product for that anyway i know i could piece it together with various parts but when i do those things will start breaking so probably one in five live streams just wouldn't work something like that something like a 20 failure rate as soon as you add just a little bit of complication to what i'm doing here the failure rate would be about 20 way above acceptable well if you'd like to enjoy the broadcast today in this maximum potential i think you need to enjoy the simultaneous sip and all you need is a cup of margaret glass i'll take your chelstein canteen jug flask wrestle with any guy filled with fairy liquid i like coffee and join me now for the unparalleled pleasure the dopamine of the day the thing that makes everything better everything everything everything it's called the simultaneous set but it's going to happen now go savor it savor it good good all right we've got lots of fun news today um did you see the videos of vice president kamal harris saying to the immigrants in central america in a speech she said and i quote do not come do not come so that happened separately but related to the same trip she gave an interview in which she was talking to somebody and she has an interesting hand gesture have you noticed that you notice all the politicians have different hand gestures there's there's a trump the trump is the thumbs up closed fist well we're gonna do this we're gonna do this right with the with that motion then you've got the you know the hands open version that's one way of talking blah blah blah um kamala harris has the most unique hand gestures i've ever seen now i can't reproduce them because i don't want to become a meme so i'm going to describe it for my listeners without producing it visually imagine if you will that you are holding a fist in front of you roughly about the height of your own chin and let's say that your hand was in a slightly closed position as if you were holding a rake yeah say you were holding a rake and your hand was sort of about where your chin is now imagine that instead of just staying in one position your hand which is grasped grasping an imaginary rake sometimes goes up and sometimes goes down from that position in a rapid motion from up to down and then down to up now imagine if you will that the clip of that interview in which he made the motion fairly a number of times with the hand going from low to up and up to low at the same time somebody took that and made a meme in which her quote do not come do not come was overlaid with the visual now i'm not saying that a meme maker should do that i'm just saying it'd be funny if they did that's all i'm saying i don't mean to encourage it but i certainly tweet it uh fake news alert fake news alert latest fake news you would be amazed to learn that the story about trump allegedly in his administration clearing lafayette park so he could hold a bible photo op never happened that's right the entire news cycle that talked about trump clearing this park just so he could have a uh clearing it up protesters just so he could have a fake photo op never happened so investigation looked into it and found out that the clearing did happen but it happened before the president decided about this photo op and it was going to happen anyway it was just a general security thing and it was completely fake news from top to bottom reported as a fact for what a year and a half or however long it was a year maybe reported as a fact that never happened just wasn't a fact right so keep that in mind once again another example of the news being absolutely made up just completely made up in related news there's a poll new polling from morning consult and politico found that a third of republican voters believe trump will be reinstated by the end of this year what are you serious how many of you think that in the comments since i probably have more conservatives than anything else on here how many of you think that trump is going to be reinstated i see one yes sir i seen i do somebody says mostly knows so if you're listening to this is mostly knows 99 knows it looks like but uh so do i just have a smarter audience because i'm pretty sure my audience skews pretty republican but uh you're overwhelmingly you're saying no i'm just seeing a sprinkling of yeses so my audience is nowhere near one-third think he's going to be reinstated you do know that there's no provision for that right the the constitution doesn't have a redo clause in it once it's certified it's just done there's nothing you can do so well for those of you who think it could happen i'll just say this there's no mechanism for it to happen so thinking that trump would be reinstated would be similar to thinking that a train might run across your front yard even though there are no tracks you can't say it's impossible i suppose but there are no train tracks in your front yard it's not really likely a train is going to go by likewise there's no system no process no law no rule that would reinstate a president who has been certified correctly or incorrectly has been certified to have won the election you can't get there from here there's no way to get there so that's not going to happen but a third of republicans believe that i guess according to an article in the hill who would you think is more trusted the trump administration back in its time or the news media according to an emerson college uh study or poll and you would not be surprised that the trump administration was considered truthful by roughly half of registered voters now it's no surprise that that would be almost entirely republicans of course but half of the public well actually if it's 49 it's a lot more than republicans so half of the country thinks the trump administration was truthful which seems like a high number doesn't it for a politician i'm not saying anything about trump here just for a politician half of the country believing they're honest that feels high i don't know um but of course the numbers split along party lines nine out of ten republicans uh were saying that uh whereas three out of four democrats said the opposite of course now the poll also found that 69 percent of democrats think the news media is truthful what how could 69 percent of democrats still believe the news is truthful even if they believed that their news was truthful and they believed that you know right leading news was not truthful how could they have not noticed that the news is not the truth how do you not notice that whereas 91 percent of republicans consider the fourth estate untruthful that feels closer to being right doesn't it how do you if you were going to say hey let's see which group is the smart one the fact that 91 percent of republicans don't trust the news kind of suggests they might be the smart ones at least in this one question i'm not going to say they're always always on the right side but on this one question it's sort of obvious but this is amazing now i would imagine that cognitive dissonance is a lot of the reason for this democrats need the news to be true to support their version of reality so if they believe the news was fake then they wouldn't have any supporter for their version of reality so probably this is just a psychological phenomenon meanwhile independents think that both the trump administration when it was in power and the news media are untruthful um i wonder if this is this might have been an older survey i'm wondering if i saw the date wrong on this somebody tweeted this today but it's probably an older survey during the administration now that i think about it i i hate it when somebody tweets at me an old article because i have a bad habit of forgetting to look at the date when i retweet them i might have done that here but i doubt the numbers have changed much since then president biden signed an executive order reversing trump's uh trump tried to ban tick-tock and wechat because they're chinese apps and biden is trying to be more of a thoughtful thoughtful careful systems guy i like i like the systems part but they're trying to come up with some criteria for any apps so sort of a broad criteria so that it's not just about tick tock and wechat but it's just about any app i guess maybe any chinese app and some you know objective way to say whether it should be banned or not i would like to add to that conversation by saying i would like to give you a criteria for whether to ban these apps or not and it goes like this does china have any control of your data does any of your data go through chinese assets that's it that's the whole story if any of your data goes through chinese-owned infrastructure it's it's vulnerable is there really any argument about that do you think do you think because it's uh encrypted they can't get at it i don't know if it's their app i would think that they could encrypt it and unencrypt it they own the encryption so if you send encrypted data across a chinese internet when china owns the encrypting asset and also therefore logically they own the unencrypting asset on the other end you don't think that they could unencrypt that in the middle you think it has to get all the way to the end and that's the only place you can unencrypt it if you have the technology to unencrypt it anywhere if you get the signal you cannot encrypt it so yeah maybe there's a backdoor or whatever i got a feeling this whole tick-tock wechat thing being reversed makes me wonder if the biden administration is competent in terms of technology now you have to assume that they got plenty of experts right but does this reflect what the experts would have recommended because it's sort of this space that's half technical and half political right so it's a little bit of both but this doesn't look like a technical recommendation because i think the technical recommendation would be dead simple does it go through any chinese assets yes or no i mean i don't i just don't know how this can be a big question what am i missing are they going to come up with some kind of argument that says oh yeah the tic tac tic toc and wechat traffic it does go through all these chinese assets but it's so well encrypted then nothing would happen are we going to believe that right and is that the only uh issue let me tell you how they have completely ignored the big issue are you ready it's not about data privacy data privacy is a big deal and we should certainly hope that china is not stealing all our traffic but there's a much much bigger deal like much maybe 10 times as big just to put a size on it maybe a hundred times as big i don't think that would be out of the question a hundred times bigger problem than the date of privacy is influence if they can turn a knob and turn some tick tock meme from a you know thing that nobody would notice into the major thing trending on tick tock then that jumps over to snapchat and jumps over to instagram jumps over to facebook they can control what we think through apps mostly tick tock wechat would stay and you know stay in the chinese language mostly i believe but tick tock is how china can actually control opinion in this country why do we let china control american opinions through this influence machine so i didn't see the biden administration even mention it like it's even an issue but in terms of sizing and risk it's probably 10 to 100 times the danger of just losing some you know data privacy i mean data privacy is real important but nowhere nearly as important as the influence it's not even in the same same universe well we've got some new uh interesting stuff on both hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin which i hasten to note are not approved uh medications in this country um at least not for the covet but they're approved for other stuff now hydroxychloroquine got a new observational study published by madrix whatever that is and they've found that the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine log was inc could increase the coronavirus survival rate by as much as 200 if distributed at higher doses to ventilated patients who are severely ill now what do you make of that well if you look on the internet you see people dancing in the streets and saying i told you so i told you so i told you i told you but do you think that they should really be so happy about this well first of all it's number one an observational study how do you rate the credibility of an observational study which basically is looking backwards versus a controlled study where you're you're designing a study in advance and then you do the then you get the data so which is more credible the one where you're just looking at what happened on its own or where you're setting up a controlled randomized study where you're looking at data in the future not even close right the the observational study will not be in the same same league with a controlled study do you think that the fda approves medicine based on observational studies i don't think so i'll take a fact check on that but i don't believe any drug has ever been approved in the united states i probably shouldn't say any drug but i don't think that's the process i don't believe the process says you can be approved with this kind of a study so how excited should you be about a study that i believe the fda would not even use secondly what do you make of the fact that it was published in madrix vous i think that's a pre-print place isn't it i don't think that means it's been peer-reviewed so this would be close to the the lower quality of study right so does this tell you something you didn't know not really because we had stuff like this before so i would say this is more of the same which is not saying that that this drug works or doesn't work i'm not telling you either one i'm just saying that it's just more low quality data that you need to be pretty skeptical about you should be pretty skeptical about it doesn't mean it's wrong it's just this just not that credible but what about ivor mechtin well um if you're following the the brett weinstein um he's making an effort to sort of raise the the issues that the public can see that although the studies on iverbectin are not the gold standard type that is nailing it down with some near absolutes but there are lots of studies and if you did a meta-analysis of them most of them but not all of them suggest that it works now so keep in mind there are studies that show it doesn't work did you know that so they don't all show their works but mostly they do but you know a majority solid majority say it work now all of the studies have a pretty wide degree of uncertainty so wide that it could go from it works to it doesn't work that's pretty it's a pretty big wide uncertainty in a number of them and of course the idea of using a meta-analysis has been criticized and let me give you some a specific idea of why a meta-analysis which is basically taking all the all the lower quality studies and looking them looking at them as if they were one big study and the idea is that any errors in one study would be sort of averaged out and cancelled by the other studies so as long as they had different errors they might sort of cancel each other out but let me give you an idea of what kind of problems that runs into number one merck who actually makes ivermectin who you would normally expect would be very pro their own drug right but this is what merck says in february so it's just february not that long ago about their own drug i think there's probably been more information coming out since february so this might be a little dated but they haven't updated it yet so they say about their own drug no scientific basis for it as a therapeutic against covid from what they call pre-clinical studies so they say there's no scientific basis from pre-clinical studies uh i guess that means the observational stuff so the people who are looking at those same studies say oh it totally works and merck the company that makes the drug is looking at the same studies at least the ones that were that were there up to february i think there'd been some more after that but at that point they're saying no i'm looking at those and it doesn't work they also say there's no meaningful evidence for clinical efficacy which is really just saying the same thing and then number three uh concerning lack of safety data in the majority of studies okay but you'd also think that probably they have a pretty good sense of the safety of their own drug because it's been used for years so do these do these reasons strike you as convincing because there's a problem here with merck so they make ivermectin but they seem to be dumping on their own drug but wait it turns out that they're coming up with this they're trying to promote a new drug um called uh monument monoperfear it would be a oral antiviral and they already have procurement agreements with the government of the united states in other words it's pre-sold all they have to do is show that it works and they get a big check a really big check like a god-awfully big check from the government and they just have to show that it works and wouldn't it be great if it worked better than this ivermectin that might not be as profitable it's kind of sketchy isn't it so this is what brad weinstein pointed out that uh isn't this interesting that the company is trashing their own drug which these these some of these studies would indicate it works at the same time they're pushing one that would be far more profitable if they could get this through the system huh so now anatoly lubarski who is one of my favorite skeptics he's good good with the data and good with the logic unusually good and uh he noted that uh malnu pirovara was part of operation warp speed which means it had been contemplated for quite a while probably before we had a lot of information about ivermectin and uh and in it uh and meanwhile it failed the trial for hospitals hospitalized patients and i guess merck had two vaccine candidate dates that failed imagine being merck when your other pharmacy pharmaceutical companies are making a gazillion dollars during the pandemic and poor merck has two vaccine candidates that have failed it's the difference between like many billions of dollars and no dollars that's a really big difference how much does merck need a win how much does merck their management need to get some money out of this pandemic pretty much right i mean they got a lot riding on this because other their competitors have made money uh but anatoly thinks that the uh the ivormectin decision by merck is unlikely to be related to what they're doing with their new drug just because the the timing of it now i'm not sure that any of this is uh any of this you could take as a definitive but there's an open question whether merck is being uh completely objective about this or if it's a money grab and you can't really tell but it's terrible that we have to ask the question isn't it it's terrible that we have to ask the question because that would be sort of putting merck in a bad light and have they ever done anything that would suggest that they could do something this unethical well let me tell you about a drug called vioxx that merck also had in which there were a number of doctors who were against it but of course if if they could get this drug approved it would make lots and lots of money and so murk drew up what they called a doctor hit list where they tried to discredit and criticize anybody who said their drug was bad doctors they actually had a hit list of doctors that they were going to discredit just for saying bad things about their drug so if you could do that could you do the other thing there are different things but if if you believe that this is apparently there's good evidence of this if you believe that they had a hit list of doctors to discredit just because they had different opinions about the value of this drug do you think that they wouldn't push one drug over another even if people died do you think they wouldn't do that i'm not saying they did i'm saying that if you have people who act one way unethically you kind of have to assume that at least they're flexible in this ethical domain so here's my uh and then i was looking at some comments by andres backhouse who was looking at the meta analyses and i'm just going to read you his tweet because i think if i try to uh summarize it myself i'll get it wrong but here's what he says about one meta review so this is a review of the individual lower quality studies about ivermectin and andres points out that going through the bryant uh adele meta review the mortality effects for patients with mild to moderate or severe covet are insignificant in six out of eight checks much seems to hang on one rct randomized controlled trial that bunches different patient types and isn't peer reviewed so although it's a you're looking at a bunch of different studies what happens if one of them is sort of bigger than the other if there's one that's really big it's gonna sway your your result right what if the big one's the only one that's wrong that's the problem right now i'm not saying the big one is wrong i'm saying what if it is what if it's the only one that's wrong it's the biggest one well there goes your whole meta-analysis and what if you said to yourself well i won't include that one because i think it's wrong can't do that because that is not a it's not a proper analysis as soon as you decide what's in and what's out it's not a study anymore it's just you deciding what's in and what's out and then that will give you the result you want so if you're deciding what's in and what's out i'm not sure it's science or math or anything it's just you making some opinions but if you put it all in and say okay i'll just dumbly put them all together then you've got this one big one that may have made the whole thing irrelevant because what if the big one's wrong now i'm not saying it's wrong but to andrea's point the big one bunches different patient types which seems like something you should be concerned about and it isn't peer-reviewed which also seems like something you should worry about and also separately andres is pointing out that the the margin of of error on these things is pretty big all right so bottom line uh do i think ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine work and my answer is i don't know i don't know if you're positive that they work that's not a good opinion could be right you might be right but it's not a good opinion because the the science isn't there if you're positive it doesn't work that's not a good opinion that's a terrible opinion because there's plenty of evidence they both work they're just not quite good enough evidence so anything that looks like certainty either direction seems like a bad play but if you were to say to yourself should you take them well that's a different question because let's say that you were 70 years old and didn't have access to vaccine for whatever reason you know would you take it in that case let's say you had the covent you're 70.

let's say there's some reason you can't take the vaccine or can't get it whatever yeah yeah might make sense as a risk risk management thing all right biden is talking to putin i guess pretty soon and uh when asked what he would talk about i believe that he said something along the lines of uh what was he gonna do he was gonna tell him what he needs to know that's what biden said i'm going to tell him what he needs to know so i guess we're okay with russia because biden's going to tell him what he needs to know i've got a feeling that biden will not be moved by biden or that putin will not be too moved by biden telling him what he needs to know what exactly is biden going to do threaten him somebody says are you serious about what uh am i serious about what put put a topic in there all right so anyway i'm not expecting much end of the the biden putin meeting uh but uh we'll see now do you think that biden will come out of that acting too friendly to russia because remember when trump seemed too friendly to putin that was a lot of criticism so how is biden going to be biden without being too friendly like what's that look like i feel as if you know if they have a joint press conference at the end like trump and putin did it's probably a mistake he probably shouldn't do that but if they do seeing putin and biden side by side how's that going to make you feel are you going to feel like yeah my team's looking pretty strong look at that biden look at him go he's sharp he's gonna show uh show that putin what for if you're biden's handlers do you let him stand side by side with putin and talk you know one after the other in front of people i don't think so so we'll wait to see but i'm going to predict there is no side-by-side putin biden press conference after it what do you say i say no we'll see well eight years after my book had failed almost everything is still when big was published it's it's actually gaining in popularity eight years later and when i wrote it i actually thought that would happen i thought that it would be a minor success when it was published and that it would grow in power over time as people read it and tried the tried the techniques and then recommended it and i swear every single day i'm seeing memes about it and i don't see that about other books i've written a lot of books but this one is a meme almost every day almost every day somebody's tweeting about eight years later and if you look a lot of a lot of other self-help books you'll see its influence has gotten into a lot of other books at this point i won't name names but you can figure out which ones there so uh i would take a look at that if you want to know what makes a book more popular eight years after it's written and growing in popularity actually it's it may have it's so this is one of its biggest years um i was i told you i was having a uh this weird i don't know if it's a debate but conversation about uh masks usefulness versus uh social distancing and i was talking with donald luskin who i only know from twitter but apparently he has some data analysis skills and he says that his analysis shows that masks definitely work the numbers seem to show that i i don't know if i can get christina on here michael she she's not crazy about this kind of stuff um and i was trying to figure out why donald was saying that according to his numbers it's very clear that social distancing doesn't work now what do you do when your obvious common sense differs from the data which would you which would you believe certainly there's no i don't think any of you would argue that if you're standing on one side of the world and i'm standing on the other side of the world and you've got the virus and i don't you can't really give it to me because the virus can't travel now it probably can't travel too well more than six feet right maybe even just three but how could it be possible that staying away from each other physically doesn't work does that make sense to you is there anybody here who thinks it could make sense that social distancing doesn't work and i was kind of going back and forth thinking am i crazy because it's obvious it works it couldn't not work there's no mechanism by which this doesn't work now you might say you tried to do social distancing and everybody cheated if that's what you're saying oh okay that's not really social distancing that's people pretending to social distance of course that doesn't work but here's i believe i solved the mystery i believe that uh lockdowns and social distancing were being used as a similar thing i don't believe there's evidence that lockdowns work but i do believe that distance works because you could have lockdowns or no lockdowns and still do plenty of social distancing so i think the problem is that donald was probably and i think this is true he was looking at lockdowns not working which i totally understand if you told me lockdowns don't work and the data proves it i would say oh okay i mean that makes sense to me because the the difference between the lock down and the no lock down was not that big because even if you didn't lock down you probably socially distance within the store or basks within the store did more curb pickup more take out right so yeah lockdowns probably didn't work especially if you calculate in the economics but social distancing that has to work there's no way it could not work you know i i don't know how much data you would have to show me to tell me social distancing doesn't work but i'm not going to believe any of it i wouldn't believe any of it so all right here's a cnn talking about the experts apparently they showed a video that's amazing of some some medical doctor who is testifying in some place that the vaccinations have some kind of metal in them so much so that people are magnetized such that they could put a key on their forehead and it would just stay there and i don't have to tell you that there apparently is no way that the vaccinations actually magnetize you so uh but this was a doctor right do you know what people tell me all the time scott you're not an expert in this field don't give us your stupid cartoonist opinion because you're no expert why can't you be like a doctor if you were a doctor we'd listen to you well the doctor says you could be magnetized by a vaccination now this is obviously not representative of doctors in general but you got to be careful about believing you're experts just saying if you're believing experts just sort of automatically because they're experts don't do that another case in point two members of the fda have quit from from an advisory panel because a drug got approved for alzheimer's that they think should not have been approved so if you're believing the experts do you believe the experts who quit because they were so angry that something got approved they called it a sham process like they they act their accusation is that it was approved before it was even looked at in other words it was sort of pre-approved in people's minds and they they basically just approved it without looking at the data or something this is a pretty big claim from experts so now you've got one expert saying that vaccines will magnetize you two experts saying and these are high-level experts this is one of these guys who quit david duffman he's a neurologist at the mayo clinic he's a neurologist at the mayo clinic they don't hire jerks right in the mayo clinic they probably look at your resume before they hire you this is a qualified guy dis disagrees with the other experts um have i told you before that once you understand how narcissism is not just feeling you're great but narcissism is a constellation of specific behaviors that apparently applies to entire news networks cnn has a personality now collectively which is narcissism and let me let me uh give you an example so one of their analysts stefan collinson who is one of my favorite to read i read almost everything he writes and it's only because it's such a blatant propaganda you know it's opinion piece so opinion pieces look like propaganda but uh he's always humorously so far into the ridiculous that i read it for entertainment and that's not a joke it always entertains me because it's just so over the top uh let's see um here's what he says so collinson says the most extraordinary feature of biden's trip is that he's not an american president going out to confront tyranny abroad that's happened before he's huddling with u.s allies at a moment when the greatest threat to democracy comes from within the united states what what the greatest threat to democracy comes from within the united states from where now i assume he's talking about the you know the january 6th riot and the belief that white supremacists are climbing everywhere but one of the characteristics of narcissism that's in this constellation of behaviors is projection projection blaming somebody of the thing you're guilty of what is the biggest threat to democracy in the united states in your opinion so so if you don't count the external world and of course this is just crazy talk obviously china is the biggest threat but if you take out the rest of the world and you're looking at the greatest threat to democracy that comes from within what do you think it is i think it's the fake news isn't it i'm pretty sure it's the fake news because if we had real news we'd make good decisions we'd keep our democracy we might even make it stronger but if you have fake news you're doing the wrong stuff because you don't know what the problem is this is projection cnn is the biggest threat and and other you know fake news the fake news is by far the biggest threat to democracy is there's nothing even close nothing even close so you see it right this is the projection part where they are the biggest threat to democracy so they say you are that's how it works that's how that's how narcissists work they always tell you that you are the thing they're doing here's something else they do they act arrogant like they're better than you does cnn ever act like it's better than republicans yeah that's their whole act their entire act is that cnn is better than republicans not just different not just disagreeing they're better it's the whole act is that we're better than you that's it that's narcissism how about misdirection when they get caught does the cnn uh directly address criticisms when they don't run the story or they get something wrong well sometimes they might run a correction but they don't really do that they kind of go after the other team and say but you did worse look at what you did misdirection that's a narcissist trick how about blaming the messenger not the message do they go after the people or do they go after the ideas they go after the people now the right does that too but the right almost always also goes after the idea right you know the idea that uh marxism works you know it doesn't have the right incentives for example so the right does go after people as well but they always include the motivation the system you know that's the real criticism the fun part is going after people but i believe on the left they just sort of go after the people they never say the system would work better if they just go after people it feels like all right and lots of lying lying is part of narcissism too here's chris salisa uh also opinion piece on cnn and he says today everywhere you look within the republican party these days there is an effort to forget and to minimize what happened at the u.s capitol on january 6.

um a senate report released this week and i guess must have been republicans behind this aimed at examining the security blah blah about the riot and they left the word insurrection entirely out except when quoting somebody talking about it the reason aids also steered cleared of language that could turn off some republicans including not referring to the attack as an insurrection so cnn opinion guys eliza is saying that it's it's bad that republicans are leaving out the word insurrection do you know why why would they leave out the word insurrection could it be because they know that you can't conquer a country by occupying a room for a while that's not an insurrection it's not even close to an insurrection that would be as close to an insurrection as mowing the lawn is to a haircut right that's really not even in the general neighborhood of an insurrection that's not in the solar system of an insurrection and cnn is actually criticizing them for not using the word that is completely inappropriate and and the way they talk about it is like well you can see it too right isn't it obvious to you that they stop using this word insurrection so they don't even make arguments anymore they just act like it's obvious it's obvious well yeah they should have used the word insurrection it's obvious i don't need reasons don't ask me about the reasons it's just obvious all right uh that is right i'm reading your comments and you're all right um my daughter thought we mowed the carpet when it got too long okay uh the fake news is responsible for 2020 maybe maybe they were i feel as if the fake news causes almost all of our activities really we just don't know at least in the the political domain all right that is all i had to say today and i'm pretty sure this was one of the best coffees with scott adams of all time until tomorrow wait until tomorrow it's going to be so good you won't even believe it but for now that is all and i will talk to you tomorrow

hey everybody

it's time for coffee with scott adams

and yeah the rumors are true

what you've heard is true i'm afraid

this will be

the best coffee with scott adams of all

time

pretty sure i'm going to nail it today

and uh i want to give you an update on

my quality of my broadcast

get a lot of complaints about the

quality of my sound

fair enough but it turns out that there

is a gigantic

market opportunity because it turns out

if i use my ipad

which i'm using now i get really good

video but you can't do much with the

sound

there's no microphone you can attach to

it

there's nothing you can do there's an

internal problem with the ipad

so with the ipad you can have good video

but not good sound

if i go to my mac laptop i can get

better sound if i uh connect a good

microphone but it's got a back camera

that's not very

good so i have two choices

good sound or good video

now you're saying to yourself scott

there are lots of people in the world

who have figured out both of those

things

they have somehow figured out how to

have good video

at the same time as good audio

to which i say have they

no they haven't i don't think so because

uh if you're live streaming it's hard to

do those things now if you're doing a

recorded version you can

you can do everything in high quality it

doesn't matter if your technology is a

little

uh little uh you have some hitches in it

because you just fix it and then record

it you're fine but if you're live

streaming everything has to work

just has to work so i always make the

decision

to go for what is simple over what

is complicated now the complicated

solution would be to get an external

camera

an external microphone figure out the

connections because nobody makes a good

microphone that just

plugs directly into your laptop

apparently

so you can get little toy microphones

that plug into your laptop

but if you get a nice professional one

you gotta get a mixer or something to

connect it

so there's a gigantic market opportunity

for someone to make a simple device that

has good video

and good audio and it

works every time nobody makes that

imagine what a big market that is

given that everybody's zooming and and

stuff

nobody makes that product it's kind of

fascinating right

because it's literally the number one

thing that people would want right now

good video and good audio nobody makes

one

it's just astonishing that apple doesn't

have a product for that

anyway i know i could piece it together

with various parts but when i do those

things will start breaking

so probably one in five live streams

just wouldn't work

something like that something like a 20

failure rate

as soon as you add just a little bit of

complication

to what i'm doing here the failure rate

would be about 20

way above acceptable well if you'd like

to enjoy the

broadcast today in this maximum

potential i think you need to enjoy the

simultaneous sip and all you need is a

cup of margaret glass i'll take your

chelstein canteen jug flask

wrestle with any guy filled with fairy

liquid i like coffee

and join me now for the unparalleled

pleasure the dopamine of the day the

thing that makes

everything better everything everything

everything

it's called the simultaneous set but

it's going to happen now go

savor it savor it

good good

all right we've got lots of fun news

today

um did you see the videos of

vice president kamal harris saying to

the immigrants in central america in a

speech

she said and i quote do not come

do not come so that happened

separately but related to the same trip

she gave an interview in which she was

talking to somebody and she has an

interesting hand gesture have you

noticed that

you notice all the politicians have

different hand gestures there's there's

a trump the trump is the thumbs up

closed fist

well we're gonna do this we're gonna do

this right with the

with that motion then you've got the you

know the hands open version

that's one way of talking blah blah blah

um

kamala harris has the most unique hand

gestures i've ever seen

now i can't reproduce them because i

don't want to become a meme

so i'm going to describe it for my

listeners

without producing it visually

imagine if you will that you are holding

a fist in front

of you roughly about the height of your

own chin

and let's say that your hand was in a

slightly closed position

as if you were holding a rake

yeah say you were holding a rake and

your hand was sort of about where your

chin is

now imagine that instead of just staying

in one position

your hand which is grasped grasping an

imaginary rake

sometimes goes up and sometimes goes

down

from that position in a rapid motion

from up to down and then down to up

now imagine if you will that the clip of

that interview

in which he made the motion fairly a

number of times

with the hand going from low to up and

up to low

at the same time somebody took that and

made a meme in which

her quote do not come

do not come was overlaid

with the visual now i'm not saying that

a meme maker should do that

i'm just saying it'd be funny if they

did that's all i'm saying

i don't mean to encourage it

but i certainly tweet it uh fake news

alert fake news alert

latest fake news you would be amazed to

learn

that the story about trump allegedly

in his administration clearing lafayette

park so he could hold a

bible photo op never happened

that's right the entire news cycle that

talked about

trump clearing this park just so he

could have a

uh clearing it up protesters just so he

could have a

fake photo op never happened

so investigation looked into it and

found out that the clearing did happen

but it happened before the president

decided about this photo op

and it was going to happen anyway it was

just a general security thing

and it was completely fake news from top

to bottom

reported as a fact for

what a year and a half or however long

it was a year

maybe reported as a fact

that never happened just wasn't a fact

right

so keep that in mind once again another

example of the news being

absolutely made up just completely made

up

in related news there's a

poll new polling from morning consult

and politico

found that a third of republican voters

believe trump will be reinstated by the

end of this year

what are you serious

how many of you think that in the

comments

since i probably have more conservatives

than anything else on here

how many of you think that trump is

going to be reinstated

i see one yes sir i seen

i do somebody says mostly knows

so if you're listening to this is mostly

knows

99 knows it looks like but uh

so do i just have a smarter audience

because i'm pretty sure my audience

skews

pretty republican but uh you're

overwhelmingly you're saying no

i'm just seeing a sprinkling of yeses so

my audience is nowhere near one-third

think he's going to be reinstated you do

know that there's no

provision for that right the the

constitution doesn't have a redo

clause in it once it's certified it's

just done there's nothing you can do

so well for those of you who think it

could happen

i'll just say this there's no mechanism

for it to happen

so thinking that trump would be

reinstated

would be similar to thinking that a

train

might run across your front yard even

though there are no tracks

you can't say it's impossible i suppose

but there are no train tracks in your

front yard it's not really likely a

train is going to go by

likewise there's no system no process

no law no rule that would reinstate a

president

who has been certified correctly or

incorrectly

has been certified to have won the

election you can't get there from here

there's no way to get there

so that's not going to happen

but a third of republicans believe that

i guess

according to an article in the hill

who would you think is more trusted the

trump administration

back in its time or the news media

according to an emerson college uh study

or poll

and you would not be surprised that the

trump administration was considered

truthful by roughly half of

registered voters now it's no surprise

that that would be

almost entirely republicans of course

but half of the public

well actually if it's 49 it's a lot more

than republicans

so half of the country thinks the trump

administration

was truthful which seems like a high

number doesn't it

for a politician i'm not saying anything

about trump here just for a politician

half of the country believing they're

honest that feels high

i don't know um but of course the

numbers split along party lines nine out

of ten

republicans uh were saying that

uh whereas three out of four democrats

said the opposite of course

now the poll also found that 69 percent

of democrats

think the news media is truthful

what how could 69 percent

of democrats still believe the news is

truthful

even if they believed that their news

was truthful

and they believed that you know right

leading news was not truthful

how could they have not noticed that the

news is not the truth

how do you not notice that whereas 91

percent of republicans

consider the fourth estate untruthful

that feels closer to being right doesn't

it

how do you if you were going to say

hey let's see which group is the smart

one

the fact that 91 percent of republicans

don't trust the news

kind of suggests they might be the smart

ones at least in this one

question i'm not going to say they're

always always on the right side

but on this one question it's sort of

obvious

but this is amazing now i would imagine

that cognitive dissonance is a lot of

the reason for this

democrats need the news to be true to

support

their version of reality so

if they believe the news was fake

then they wouldn't have any supporter

for their version of reality so

probably this is just a psychological

phenomenon

meanwhile independents think that both

the trump administration

when it was in power and the news media

are untruthful

um i wonder if this is this might have

been an older survey i'm wondering if i

saw the date wrong on this

somebody tweeted this today but it's

probably an older survey during the

administration

now that i think about it i i hate it

when somebody tweets

at me an old article because i have a

bad habit of forgetting to look at the

date

when i retweet them i might have done

that here but i doubt the numbers have

changed much since then

president biden signed an executive

order reversing

trump's uh trump tried to ban tick-tock

and wechat because they're chinese

apps and biden is trying to be more of a

thoughtful thoughtful careful

systems guy i like i like the systems

part

but they're trying to come up with some

criteria for

any apps so sort of a broad

criteria so that it's not just about

tick tock and wechat

but it's just about any app i guess

maybe any chinese app

and some you know objective way to say

whether it should be banned or not

i would like to add to that conversation

by saying

i would like to give you a criteria for

whether to ban these apps or not and it

goes like this

does china have any control of your data

does any of your data go through chinese

assets

that's it that's the whole story

if any of your data goes through

chinese-owned

infrastructure it's it's vulnerable

is there really any argument about that

do you think

do you think because it's uh encrypted

they can't get at it

i don't know if it's their app i would

think that they could encrypt it

and unencrypt it they own the encryption

so if you send encrypted data

across a chinese internet when china

owns the

encrypting asset and also therefore

logically they own the unencrypting

asset on the other end

you don't think that they could

unencrypt that in the middle

you think it has to get all the way to

the end and that's the only place you

can unencrypt it if you have the

technology to unencrypt it anywhere

if you get the signal you cannot encrypt

it so

yeah maybe there's a backdoor or

whatever i got a feeling

this whole tick-tock wechat thing being

reversed makes me wonder if the biden

administration is

competent in terms of technology

now you have to assume that they got

plenty of experts right

but does this reflect what the experts

would have recommended

because it's sort of this space that's

half technical and half political right

so it's a little bit of both but this

doesn't look like a technical

recommendation

because i think the technical

recommendation would be dead simple

does it go through any chinese assets

yes or no

i mean i don't i just don't know how

this can be a big question

what am i missing are they going to come

up with some kind of argument that says

oh yeah the tic tac tic toc and wechat

traffic

it does go through all these chinese

assets but it's so well encrypted

then nothing would happen are we going

to believe that

right and is that the only uh issue

let me tell you how they have completely

ignored

the big issue are you ready

it's not about data privacy data privacy

is a big deal

and we should certainly hope that china

is not stealing all our

traffic but there's a much

much bigger deal like much

maybe 10 times as big just to put a size

on it

maybe a hundred times as big i don't

think that would be out of the question

a hundred times bigger problem than the

date of privacy

is influence if they can turn a knob

and turn some tick tock meme from a

you know thing that nobody would notice

into the major thing trending on tick

tock

then that jumps over to snapchat and

jumps over to instagram

jumps over to facebook they can control

what we think

through apps mostly tick tock

wechat would stay and you know stay in

the chinese language mostly i believe

but tick tock is how china can actually

control opinion in this country

why do we let china control american

opinions

through this influence machine so i

didn't see the biden administration even

mention

it like it's even an issue but in terms

of sizing and risk it's

probably 10 to 100 times the danger

of just losing some you know data

privacy

i mean data privacy is real important

but

nowhere nearly as important as the

influence it's not even in the same

same universe well we've got some new

uh interesting stuff on both

hydroxychloroquine

and ivermectin which i hasten

to note are not approved uh medications

in this country um at least not for the

covet but they're

approved for other stuff now

hydroxychloroquine got a new

observational study published by

madrix whatever that is

and they've found that the anti-malarial

drug hydroxychloroquine log was inc

could increase the coronavirus survival

rate by as much as 200

if distributed at higher doses to

ventilated

patients who are severely ill

now what do you make of that well if you

look on the internet you see people

dancing in the streets and saying i told

you so

i told you so i told you

i told you but

do you think that they should really be

so happy about this

well first of all it's number one an

observational study

how do you rate the credibility of an

observational study

which basically is looking backwards

versus a controlled study

where you're you're designing a study in

advance

and then you do the then you get the

data so which is more

credible the one where you're just

looking at what happened on its own

or where you're setting up a controlled

randomized study

where you're looking at data in the

future

not even close right the the

observational study will not be in the

same

same league with a controlled study

do you think that the fda approves

medicine

based on observational studies i don't

think so

i'll take a fact check on that but i

don't believe any drug has ever been

approved in the united states

i probably shouldn't say any drug but i

don't think that's the process

i don't believe the process says you can

be approved with this kind of a study

so how excited should you be about a

study that i believe

the fda would not even use

secondly what do you make of the fact

that it was published in

madrix vous

i think that's a pre-print place isn't

it

i don't think that means it's been

peer-reviewed

so this would be close to the the lower

quality of study right so

does this tell you something you didn't

know not really because we had stuff

like this before so i would say this is

more of the same which is not saying

that

that this drug works or doesn't work i'm

not telling you either one

i'm just saying that it's just more low

quality

data that you need to be pretty

skeptical about

you should be pretty skeptical about it

doesn't mean it's wrong

it's just this just not that credible

but what about ivor mechtin

well um if you're following the the

brett weinstein um he's making an effort

to sort of raise the

the issues that the public can see

that although the studies on iverbectin

are not the gold standard type that

is nailing it down with some near

absolutes

but there are lots of studies and if you

did a meta-analysis of them

most of them but not all of them suggest

that it works

now so keep in mind there are studies

that show it doesn't work

did you know that so they don't all show

their works but mostly they do

but you know a majority solid majority

say it work

now all of the studies have a pretty

wide degree of uncertainty

so wide that it could go from it works

to it doesn't work

that's pretty it's a pretty big wide

uncertainty in a number of them

and of course the idea of using a

meta-analysis

has been criticized and

let me give you some a specific idea of

why

a meta-analysis which is basically

taking all the

all the lower quality studies and

looking them

looking at them as if they were one big

study and the idea is that any errors in

one study would be sort of averaged out

and cancelled by

the other studies so as long as they had

different errors

they might sort of cancel each other out

but let me give you an idea of what kind

of

problems that runs into number one merck

who actually makes ivermectin who you

would normally expect

would be very pro their own drug

right but this is what merck says in

february so it's just february not that

long ago

about their own drug i think there's

probably been more information coming

out since february

so this might be a little dated but they

haven't updated it yet

so they say about their own drug no

scientific basis

for it as a therapeutic against covid

from what they call pre-clinical studies

so they say there's no scientific basis

from

pre-clinical studies uh

i guess that means the observational

stuff

so the people who are looking at those

same studies

say oh it totally works and merck the

company that makes the drug

is looking at the same studies at least

the ones that were

that were there up to february i think

there'd been some more after that

but at that point they're saying no i'm

looking at those and it doesn't work

they also say there's no meaningful

evidence for clinical efficacy

which is really just saying the same

thing and then number three uh

concerning lack of safety data in the

majority of studies

okay but you'd also think

that probably they have a pretty good

sense of the safety of their own drug

because it's been used for years

so do these do these reasons strike you

as convincing because there's a problem

here with merck

so they make ivermectin but they seem to

be dumping on their own drug

but wait it turns out that they're

coming up with this

they're trying to promote a new drug um

called uh monument

monoperfear it would be a oral antiviral

and they already have procurement

agreements with the government of the

united states

in other words it's pre-sold all they

have to do is show that it works

and they get a big check a really big

check

like a god-awfully big check from the

government

and they just have to show that it works

and wouldn't it be great

if it worked better than this ivermectin

that might not be as profitable

it's kind of sketchy isn't it so this is

what

brad weinstein pointed out that uh

isn't this interesting that the company

is trashing their own

drug which these these some of these

studies

would indicate it works at the same time

they're pushing one that would be far

more profitable if they could get this

through the system

huh so

now anatoly lubarski who is one of my

favorite

skeptics he's good good with the data

and good with the logic

unusually good and uh he noted that uh

malnu pirovara was part of operation

warp speed

which means it had been contemplated for

quite a while

probably before we had a lot of

information about ivermectin

and uh and in it

uh and meanwhile it failed the trial for

hospitals

hospitalized patients and i guess merck

had two vaccine candidate dates that

failed

imagine being merck when your other

pharmacy pharmaceutical companies are

making

a gazillion dollars during the pandemic

and poor merck has two vaccine

candidates that have failed

it's the difference between like many

billions of dollars

and no dollars that's a really big

difference

how much does merck need a win

how much does merck their management

need to get some money out of this

pandemic pretty much

right i mean they got a lot riding on

this because other their competitors

have made money

uh but anatoly thinks that the uh the

ivormectin decision by merck is unlikely

to be related

to what they're doing with their new

drug just because the

the timing of it now i'm not sure that

any of this is

uh any of this you could take as a

definitive

but there's an open question whether

merck is being uh completely objective

about this or if it's a money grab

and you can't really tell but it's

terrible that we have to ask the

question isn't it

it's terrible that we have to ask the

question because that would be sort of

putting merck in a bad light and have

they ever done anything

that would suggest that they could do

something this

unethical well let me tell you about

a drug called vioxx that merck

also had in which there were a number of

doctors who were against it

but of course if if they could get this

drug

approved it would make lots and lots of

money

and so murk drew up what they called a

doctor hit list

where they tried to discredit and

criticize

anybody who said their drug was bad

doctors

they actually had a hit list of doctors

that they were going to discredit

just for saying bad things about their

drug

so if you could do that

could you do the other thing there are

different things

but if if you believe that this is

apparently there's good evidence of this

if you believe that they had a hit list

of doctors to discredit just because

they had different opinions

about the value of this drug do you

think that they wouldn't

push one drug over another even if

people died

do you think they wouldn't do that i'm

not saying they did

i'm saying that if you have people who

act one way unethically

you kind of have to assume that at least

they're flexible in this

ethical domain so

here's my uh and then i was looking at

some comments by andres

backhouse who was looking at the meta

analyses

and i'm just going to read you his tweet

because i think if i try to

uh summarize it myself i'll get it wrong

but here's what he says about one

meta review so this is a review of the

individual

lower quality studies about ivermectin

and andres points out that going through

the bryant

uh adele meta review the mortality

effects for patients with

mild to moderate or severe covet are

insignificant

in six out of eight checks much seems to

hang on one

rct randomized controlled trial that

bunches different patient types

and isn't peer reviewed so

although it's a you're looking at a

bunch of different studies

what happens if one of them is sort of

bigger than the other

if there's one that's really big it's

gonna sway your

your result right what if the big one's

the only one that's wrong

that's the problem right now i'm not

saying the big one is wrong i'm saying

what if it is

what if it's the only one that's wrong

it's the biggest one

well there goes your whole meta-analysis

and what if you said to yourself well i

won't include that one

because i think it's wrong

can't do that because that is not a it's

not a proper analysis

as soon as you decide what's in and

what's out

it's not a study anymore it's just you

deciding what's in and what's out and

then that will give you the result you

want

so if you're deciding what's in and

what's out i'm not sure it's science or

math or anything

it's just you making some opinions but

if you put it all in and say okay i'll

just dumbly put them all together

then you've got this one big one that

may have made the whole thing

irrelevant because what if the big one's

wrong now i'm not saying it's wrong

but to andrea's point

the big one bunches different patient

types

which seems like something you should be

concerned about

and it isn't peer-reviewed which also

seems like something you should worry

about

and also separately andres is pointing

out that the

the margin of of error on these things

is pretty big

all right so bottom line uh do i think

ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine

work and my answer is i don't know

i don't know if you're positive that

they work

that's not a good opinion could be right

you might be right but it's not a good

opinion

because the the science isn't there if

you're positive it doesn't work

that's not a good opinion that's a

terrible opinion

because there's plenty of evidence they

both work they're just not

quite good enough evidence so anything

that looks like

certainty either direction seems like a

bad play

but if you were to say to yourself

should you take them

well that's a different question because

let's say that you were

70 years old and didn't have access to

vaccine for whatever reason

you know would you take it in that case

let's say you had the covent

you're 70. let's say there's some reason

you can't take the vaccine or

can't get it whatever yeah yeah might

make sense as a risk

risk management thing all right biden is

talking to

putin i guess pretty soon and uh when

asked what he would

talk about i believe that he said

something along the lines of

uh what was he gonna do he was gonna

tell him what he needs to know

that's what biden said i'm going to tell

him what he needs to know

so i guess we're okay with russia

because biden's going to tell him what

he needs to know

i've got a feeling that biden will not

be moved

by biden or that putin will not be too

moved by biden telling him what he needs

to know

what exactly is biden going to do

threaten him somebody says are you

serious

about what

uh am i serious about what

put put a topic in there all right

so anyway i'm not expecting much end of

the the biden putin

meeting uh but uh we'll see

now do you think that biden will come

out of that acting too friendly to

russia

because remember when trump seemed too

friendly

to putin that was a lot of criticism so

how is biden going to be biden without

being too friendly

like what's that look like i feel as if

you know if they have a joint press

conference at the end like

trump and putin did it's probably a

mistake he probably shouldn't do that

but if they do seeing putin and biden

side by side how's that going to make

you feel

are you going to feel like yeah my

team's looking pretty strong

look at that biden look at him go he's

sharp

he's gonna show uh show that putin what

for

if you're biden's handlers do you let

him stand side by side with putin

and talk you know one after the other in

front of people

i don't think so so we'll wait to see

but i'm going to predict there is no

side-by-side putin biden

press conference after it what do you

say i say no

we'll see well eight years after my book

had failed almost everything is still

when big was published

it's it's actually gaining in popularity

eight years later

and when i wrote it i actually thought

that would happen

i thought that it would be a minor

success when it was published

and that it would grow in power over

time as people read it and tried the

tried the techniques and then

recommended it and

i swear every single day i'm seeing

memes about it

and i don't see that about other books

i've written a lot of books but this one

is a meme almost every day almost every

day somebody's tweeting about eight

years later

and if you look a lot of a lot of other

self-help books you'll see its influence

has gotten into a lot of other books at

this point i won't name names but you

can figure out which ones there

so uh i would take a look at that if you

want to know what makes a book more

popular eight years after it's written

and growing in popularity actually it's

it may have it's

so this is one of its biggest years um

i was i told you i was having a uh this

weird

i don't know if it's a debate but

conversation about uh masks

usefulness versus uh social distancing

and i was talking with donald luskin who

i only know from twitter

but apparently he has some data analysis

skills and he says that

his analysis shows that masks definitely

work

the numbers seem to show that

i i don't know if i can get christina on

here michael

she she's not crazy about this kind of

stuff um

and i was trying to figure out why

donald was saying that according to his

numbers

it's very clear that social distancing

doesn't work

now what do you do when your obvious

common sense

differs from the data which would you

which would you believe

certainly there's no i don't think any

of you would argue

that if you're standing on one side of

the world and i'm standing on the other

side of the world

and you've got the virus and i don't you

can't really give it to me

because the virus can't travel now it

probably can't travel

too well more than six feet right maybe

even just three

but how could it be possible

that staying away from each other

physically doesn't work

does that make sense to you is there

anybody here

who thinks it could make sense that

social distancing doesn't work

and i was kind of going back and forth

thinking am i crazy

because it's obvious it works it

couldn't not work

there's no mechanism by which this

doesn't work

now you might say you tried to do social

distancing and everybody cheated

if that's what you're saying oh okay

that's not really social distancing

that's people pretending to social

distance of course that doesn't work

but here's i believe i solved the

mystery

i believe that uh lockdowns and social

distancing

were being used as a similar thing i

don't believe there's evidence that

lockdowns work

but i do believe that distance works

because you could have lockdowns or no

lockdowns and still do plenty of social

distancing

so i think the problem is that donald

was probably and i think this is true he

was looking at

lockdowns not working which i totally

understand

if you told me lockdowns don't work and

the data proves it i would say oh okay

i mean that makes sense to me because

the the difference between the

lock down and the no lock down was not

that big

because even if you didn't lock down you

probably socially distance within the

store

or basks within the store did more curb

pickup

more take out right so yeah lockdowns

probably didn't work especially if you

calculate in the economics

but social distancing that has to work

there's no way it could not work you

know

i i don't know how much data you would

have to show me

to tell me social distancing doesn't

work but i'm not going to believe any of

it

i wouldn't believe any of it so all

right

here's a cnn talking about the experts

apparently they showed a video

that's amazing of some some medical

doctor

who is testifying in some place that the

vaccinations have some kind of metal in

them

so much so that people are magnetized

such that they could put a key on their

forehead and it would just stay there

and i don't have to tell you that there

apparently

is no way that the vaccinations actually

magnetize you

so uh but this was a doctor

right do you know what people tell me

all the time

scott you're not an expert in this field

don't give us your stupid cartoonist

opinion

because you're no expert why can't you

be like a doctor

if you were a doctor we'd listen to you

well the doctor says you could

be

magnetized by a vaccination now this is

obviously not

representative of doctors in general but

you got to be careful about believing

you're experts

just saying if you're believing experts

just sort of automatically because

they're experts

don't do that another case in point two

members of the

fda have quit

from from an advisory panel

because a drug got approved for

alzheimer's

that they think should not have been

approved

so if you're believing the experts

do you believe the experts who quit

because they were so angry that

something got approved

they called it a sham process like they

they act their accusation is that it was

approved before it was even looked at in

other words it was sort of pre-approved

in people's minds

and they they basically just approved it

without looking at the data or something

this is a pretty big claim from experts

so now you've got one expert

saying that vaccines will magnetize you

two experts

saying and these are high-level experts

this is one of these guys who quit

david duffman he's a neurologist at the

mayo clinic

he's a neurologist at the mayo clinic

they don't hire jerks right in the mayo

clinic

they probably look at your resume before

they hire you this is a qualified guy

dis disagrees with the other experts

um have i told you before that once you

understand how

narcissism is not just feeling you're

great

but narcissism is a constellation of

specific behaviors

that apparently applies to entire

news networks cnn

has a personality now collectively which

is narcissism

and let me let me uh give you an example

so one of their analysts stefan

collinson who is one of my favorite to

read i read

almost everything he writes and it's

only because it's

such a blatant propaganda

you know it's opinion piece so opinion

pieces look like propaganda

but uh he's always humorously

so far into the ridiculous that i read

it for entertainment and that's not a

joke

it always entertains me because it's

just so over the top

uh

let's see um here's what he says

so collinson says the most extraordinary

feature of biden's trip

is that he's not an american president

going out to confront

tyranny abroad that's happened before

he's huddling with u.s allies at a

moment when the greatest threat to

democracy

comes from within the united states

what what

the greatest threat to democracy comes

from within the united states

from where now i assume he's talking

about the

you know the january 6th riot and

the belief that white supremacists are

climbing everywhere

but one of the characteristics of

narcissism

that's in this constellation of

behaviors is

projection projection blaming somebody

of the thing you're guilty of

what is the biggest threat to democracy

in the united states

in your opinion so

so if you don't count the external world

and of course this is just crazy talk

obviously china is the biggest threat

but if you take out the rest of the

world

and you're looking at the greatest

threat to democracy that comes from

within

what do you think it is i think it's the

fake news

isn't it i'm pretty sure it's the fake

news

because if we had real news we'd make

good decisions

we'd keep our democracy we might even

make it stronger

but if you have fake news you're doing

the wrong stuff because you don't know

what the problem is

this is projection cnn is the biggest

threat

and and other you know fake news the

fake news is by far the biggest threat

to democracy is

there's nothing even close nothing even

close so you see it right this is the

projection part

where they are the biggest threat to

democracy so they say you are

that's how it works that's how that's

how narcissists work they always tell

you that you are the thing they're

doing here's something else they do they

act arrogant

like they're better than you does cnn

ever act like it's better than

republicans yeah that's their whole act

their entire act is that cnn is better

than republicans

not just different not just disagreeing

they're better

it's the whole act is that we're better

than you that's it

that's narcissism how about misdirection

when they get caught

does the cnn uh directly address

criticisms when they don't run the story

or they get something wrong

well sometimes they might run a

correction but they don't really do that

they kind of go after the other team and

say but you did worse

look at what you did misdirection that's

a narcissist trick

how about blaming the messenger not the

message

do they go after the people or do they

go after the ideas

they go after the people now the right

does that too

but the right almost always also goes

after the idea

right you know the idea that uh marxism

works

you know it doesn't have the right

incentives for example so

the right does go after people as well

but they

always include the motivation the system

you know that's the real criticism the

fun part is going after people

but i believe on the left they just sort

of go after the people

they never say the system would work

better if they just go after people

it feels like

all right and lots of lying lying is

part of narcissism too

here's chris salisa uh

also opinion piece on cnn and he says

today everywhere you look within the

republican party these days

there is an effort to forget and to

minimize

what happened at the u.s capitol on

january 6.

um a senate report released this week

and i guess must have been republicans

behind this

aimed at examining the security blah

blah about the riot

and they left the word insurrection

entirely

out except when quoting somebody talking

about it

the reason aids also steered cleared of

language

that could turn off some republicans

including not referring to the attack as

an

insurrection so cnn

opinion guys eliza is saying that it's

it's bad that republicans are leaving

out the word insurrection

do you know why why would they leave out

the word insurrection

could it be because they know that you

can't conquer a country

by occupying a room for a while

that's not an insurrection it's not even

close to an insurrection

that would be as close to an

insurrection as

mowing the lawn is to a haircut

right that's really not even in the

general neighborhood of an insurrection

that's not in the solar system of an

insurrection

and cnn is actually criticizing them for

not using the word

that is completely inappropriate

and and the way they talk about it is

like well you can see it too right

isn't it obvious to you that they stop

using this word insurrection

so they don't even make arguments

anymore they just act like it's obvious

it's obvious well yeah they should have

used the word insurrection it's obvious

i don't need reasons don't ask me about

the reasons it's just obvious

all right uh

that is right i'm reading your comments

and you're all right

um my daughter thought we

mowed the carpet when it got too long

okay

uh the fake news is responsible for 2020

maybe maybe they were

i feel as if the fake news causes almost

all of our activities really we just

don't know

at least in the the political domain

all right that is all i had to say today

and i'm pretty sure this was one of the

best

coffees with scott adams of all time

until tomorrow wait until tomorrow

it's going to be so good you won't even

believe it but for now

that is all and i will talk to you

tomorrow