Episode 1445 Scott Adams: Biden Jokes, Long Haul and Vaccination Mysteries, Genetics and COVID

Well, well, well. Welcome to another amazing episode of Coffee with Scott Adams. Absolutely the best part of every day for every person in the universe and beyond. And if you'd like to take it up a notch. And why wouldn't you? Really? All you need is a copper mug or a glass of tanker gels or styna canteen, jug or flask, vessel of any kind, fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. Join me now for the unparalleled pleasure. Unparalleled. The dopamine. End of the day, the thing makes everything better. It's called the simultaneous sip. Why is my video so bad on YouTube? Something's up with that. All right, go. Got some kind of a brightness problem going on here. Maybe because my other screens are too bright. Well, have you heard of all the news? I'm going to start with the most important news of the day and then we'll work down to other stuff. Okay. I see some people are having some international issues with YouTube today. I've got the paywall down for just this video on locals. So look at my tweet. If you want to see this same show without the commercials, you want to see it live, look at my tweet. It's got a link to go over to locals and there you can see it without commercial breaks and get a little sample of what the. The subscription service is like without the subscription. Just for today, most important news of the day. This was from the Daily Mail and I hope you didn't miss this. Very, very important. There was a. According to the Daily Mail, there was a single Japanese man, age 51, who almost masturbated himself to death after suffering a stroke moments before he ejaculated. Now here's the best part of the story in the Daily Mail they'll give you the headline, but between the headline and the detailed story, they'll put bullet points. They give you the summary of the story and in the bullet point summary of the single Japanese man almost masturbating himself to death. The daily mail. I'll be laughing about this all day. The Daily Mail describes the man as a. A right handed man in Germany. They had to tell you he's right handed because, you know, good writing, One of the. One of the elements of good writing is that you make the picture a visual. I guess they didn't want to leave it to chance that you would imagine the wrong hand. So they told you he was right handed, but they should have gone further because if you're right handed, This is something a girlfriend told me when I was, I think, 19. She didn't make it up, but she said, use your left hand and it'll feel like a stranger. This right handed man almost jerks himself to death. All right, so to the Daily Mail, whoever writes their summaries. That was the funniest summary you'll ever see in your life. A right handed man. Oh, I have to hope the rest of this is as funny as that. Sorry, this was just about me amusing myself. There'll be a portion of this later where I try to entertain you too, but it won't happen right away. All right, sorry. So Victoria's Secret has announced that instead of their old business model where they would have the angels, you remember the angels were the attractive models who would come out in scanty attire. But they're going to abandon that entire model, maybe after this year. And instead of having attractive women scantily clothed to sell their scant clothing, they're going to go with trailblazing women. Trailblazing women, including trans women and at least one lesbian. And they've sort of. They've decided to drop the whole attractiveness angle. And here's the thing. I think we all understand if somebody is just totally sexist and says, hey, I'm going to sell you some, you know, lingerie or whatever, and we're just going to use sex to do it, and it's all about, you know, sexy, hetero people, I guess they don't have to be hetero, but that part's optional. But just go for it. I think we would all understand that, right? We'd say, okay, maybe that's not for me, or that doesn't address my community or something. But at least you'd understand it. Just the way you'd understand it if somebody said we have some other kind of theme. But does it make sense that you're selling sexy clothing and you've abandoned the whole sex appeal angle to just sort of go for a generic women are awesome and trailblazers? I feel like they're gonna have a messaging problem here. A little bit of messaging problem. Now, I'm not saying I'm against it because it's their business and they can do what they want, of course. And being more inclusive, perfectly good impulse. So wouldn't you like to see more people being open to all people? So that part's good. The thing is, do you take this concept, which is good, being nice to all people and being as inclusive as you can be? I love that part. But does it have to be everywhere? Literally? Everybody's got to do it? I don't know. Just leave that to your opinion. We have more information coming out that Covid has a genetic component. There are boring studies which are barely understandable to people with my background, but it looks like some meta analysis has determined that there are 13 genetic signatures that will determine whether you get a bad outcome. And then there was another study I saw on the same topic that seemed to show that different ethnic groups around the world have very different outcomes. Now, a question I asked that I didn't see an answer to is if you saw my tweet on this this morning, did the study say that China would have the least problem with it because of their genetic situation? Can somebody give me a confirmation of that? Because there's a gigantic problem with scientists trying to communicate. For whatever reason, scientists need to communicate in the way that's hardest to understand. Now, you could say to yourself, but Scott, that's just because you don't understand the terms of art and you're not in the industry. But if you were a scientist, you could certainly read their writing and you would understand it because, you know, you'd have the technical training to do that. No, no, no, no and no. The reason I can't understand it has nothing to do. Well, has something to do with my lack of training in the field, but it's just bad writing. It doesn't have to be the way it's presented in these technical publications. Clearly they're doing it to look confusing, so it looks smarter, I guess. But there, there is no. There's not even a hand wave to being comprehensible. These are completely incomprehensible written things. On top of the fact that you don't understand the language, it's just poor writing. So the one thing I wonder, and if somebody could look at that, what I tweeted this morning and give me an opinion if you're better at discerning what they say, can you tell me if that's telling me that this virus coincidentally does not affect Chinese ethnic people as much? I think it said that, but you just can't tell the way it's so poorly written. So let me know. I saw a tweet by a gentleman named. Well, I don't want to pronounce his first name incorrectly, but. But it's spelled a nas. Now, I like to be respectful about people's names and a couple of ways I can think to pronounce this. His last name is Alhaji, I think. But let's say that you pronounce a Nas as Anaz, let's go with Anaz, because anus sounds wrong, but we'll go with Anas Alaji. And he noted in a tweet that under Biden, the amount of coal we're exporting to China has gone through the roof. Now, I think it's probably not as high as it was under Obama, but it's way higher than it was under Trump. So this green Biden administration maybe is using less coal in the United States. We're just shipping it to China, and then China is just burning it, and it gets in the same atmosphere either way. So this is yet another case where this whole green or not green situation is hard to. It's hard to analyze because most of it is smoke and mirrors. Here's a question for you. If I saw this in a Michael Shellenberger tweet, let me switch go down to that. So as, yeah, Michael Shellenberger was tweeting that the share of renewable power in Germany's situation is. Let's see, the renewable power is down 43% in the past year. So Germany was big on renewable green energy, but they got way less of it this year. And the reason is unfavorable wind conditions and fewer sunshine hours. Now, here's my question. If you know that the climate is changing, and if the climate is changing, couldn't you assume that that would affect wind patterns? So that, for example, you had a place that was excellent for windmills, but what if the climate changes is the place that you put all the windmills suddenly no good for windmills because you can't put a windmill anywhere? You have to find the right wind situation. So could it be that climate change will make green technology less effective? So that wherever you put the windmills, they just stop being good places for windmills and then other places become good places for windmills, but there are no windmills there? Is that a thing? Because it seems to me every bit of logic about any of this stuff says nuclear energy is the only solution. So I just asked that question. Did Germany get bitten by climate change by putting in the technology that's right for climate change, green technology, but then the climate change made the green technology not work. Did that just happen? I'm just speculating here. That's not a. That's not a claim, but it looks like it might have happened. Maybe. All right, let's talk about long haul Covid. So Adam Dopamine on Twitter asked a good question, which is if, as the experts say, something like a quarter of all people who get Covid have some kind of long haul symptoms. Shouldn't you and I know some people with long haul symptoms by now? That's a pretty good question because one of the bullshit filters I teach you is that if science is telling you one thing, but your observation, your direct observation is telling you another thing, you need to figure out which of those is true. And it's at least a flag that you should maybe be a little skeptical about the science. Now, the science could be right. Science could be right, and your direct observation could be what's the illusion? But if those are in conflict, then you need to ask some more questions. And that's a fair question. So I put down a little unscientific Twitter poll and I think something like, last I checked, I think 17% of the respondents said they did know somebody with long Covid. Now, given the tens of millions of Americans who have had Covid, 30 million, I forget the number, but it's tens of millions have had it. The question was, wouldn't you know somebody who's had long Covid by now? Because you'd almost certainly know somebody who had Covid, and then a quarter of them would have long Covid, theoretically. So wouldn't you know some. But does it make sense to you the 17 of the respondents do know long Covid? Yeah, Dr. Drew had long Covid, as you saying in the comments. So I know, I think I know three or more people who have had long Covid. But here's another interesting question which came to me from a doctor who shall remain nameless unless he wants to be named later. But how do we, how do we get statistics for long Covid? How do you know you had long Covid? Is it because you had some problems after you got the COVID Because if all you're doing is looking at what happened to you after you got Covid, you could say that 100% of people who've had Covid will die eventually. It might be 40 years. But a lot of coincidences are going to happen. After any event, how many people got really sick after the super bowl and continued to be sick for months? Lots, probably hundreds of thousands just by coincidence. So how do you actually know if somebody has long Covid? I believe there are no biomarkers. In other words, you can't do a test on somebody, say, oh, yep, there you go. We see that long Covid in you. We've got that on our slide in our microscope, looking at some long Covid there. There's nothing there. All you have is people reporting that they have symptoms so do you think that people imagining symptoms could inflate that number of people who have long Covid all the way up to 25%, when really maybe it's a lot less? Maybe that would be a reasonable skepticism. Now, speaking of that, there was a British study which I think I wrote down, showing that the number of long Covid people. Oh, here it is. In Great Britain, they did a study of long Covid, and they found that 6.2% of adults may have experienced long Covid since the start of the pandemic. And that includes, you know, like 40% of them are only people who are unsure. So of the 6%, a large chunk of the 6% weren't even positive. They're just like, well, I think maybe I had long Covid, or maybe I just had some problems that came after the COVID So does that number sound more real? Do you think it's 25%, which would be. Oh, God. Or is it 6%? Or really not even 6% because some of them are unsure? Maybe 4%, something like that. Which sounds. Which sounds more true to you, based on your observation? Just living in the world and knowing people who've had Covid, et cetera. I don't know. It doesn't seem like 25%, does it? But 6% seems low. I feel like it's somewhere in between. But there's some question on that. That's all you need to know. All right. I saw Karl Rove take down the Texas Democrats who left town so that they would remove the quorum and there couldn't be a vote about the election reforms that Texas was hoping to do, which the Democrats call voter suppression. And so Karl Rove challenged the Democrats. He appeared on Fox News, and he sort of challenged them on a point by point of the new proposed Texas law to explain to him and the world why they are voter suppression. And I watched Karl Rove just go through each of the Texas law proposed changes, and none of them look like voter suppression to me. In fact, they all look like voter protection or voter increase. And I thought to myself, why is it that Karl Rove has to come on Fox with his little whiteboard and he's just a pundit, right? Karl Rove is not the news. Karl Rove is somebody the news invites on to talk. So why does Karl Rove have to be the person to tell us what the law says and to show us that there's no correlation with voter suppression? And do you believe it if the only thing you've seen is one pundit Giving you their argument, which seems pretty airtight. Should you say, well, I'm done. I know everything. I know now because Karl Rove just explained it to me. Nope. Now, I do think that Karl Rove is probably more credible than most pundits. Right. I think he would be toward the top of people who, if they say something on tv, it's probably true. Right. So even though he has high credibility, in my opinion, you should never, ever believe one person giving one point of view. Do the notifications work on locals? As far as I know they do. I mean, I haven't read any complaints. That was a question on YouTube. So where is the show in which you have a Karl Rove type person saying, here are all the law. Here are the details of the law, and you can see clearly that they do not cause any voter suppression. Where's the other person sitting next to him, a Democrat, let's say, who says, no, no, no, Karl Rove. I see what you're saying, but you're misinterpreting this one, or you're leaving one out, or you're not seeing the real reason behind this one. Where's that? There's no news today. There's no news today. It's only people talking. And that's not news because there's no context. You cannot figure out, even if it matters. So I will give a big standing ovation to Karl Rove for being the first person I've seen to even attempt to explain what the fricking law says so that we can make up our own mind. If the Democrats are being reasonable, we need that someday somebody's gonna make that show, and probably it's gonna be on the Internet and not on a network. Cause I don't think the networks can give you any kind of balance to anything. But if I had a little bit better technology than I have now. Cause what I'd wanna do is livestream it and have multiple guests. And right now, I'm not aware of any technology that's quite good enough to do that. There's technology to do it, but it's not good enough. There are issues that I don't want to go into, but we're close. As soon as we get to the point where I could just easily call people up and say, all right, you're a guest on this side, You're a guest on the other side. I'll be your referee. Then I'll do that. Somebody says, just ask Viva and Barnes how they do it. They do not have three people on. They have two So I would need to see a model with at least two guests. But I think those are all recorded. They're not live, and I'd want to do it live. Apparently, we learn now that The FBI had 4,500 tips about Brett Kavanaugh and his alleged sexual improprieties for which there is no evidence whatsoever. But there are 4,500 tips. And Democrats, of course, are using this as evidence that the investigation into him was not complete or even valid. But how many tips do you think would be the right amount you would expect of fake tips? Given the size of the Kavanaugh story and its importance, how many tips would you expect to get? I would expect to get about 5,000 tips that were just bullshit. So do you think the FBI is good at knowing what kind of tips look reasonable and which ones do not? Well, they're better than us. Probably better than you and I could do, but I don't think the FBI looks into tips, do they? Do you know how many tips law enforcement gets about everything? What percentage of tips can any law enforcement look into? A few. I mean, none. I don't know that anybody really looks into tips except in strange situations. Yeah. How many tips came in on Biden? Exactly. So put some context on this. How unusual is it that thousands of tips would be ignored by the FBI? I feel like it's normal because they would just look at them and say, no, I don't think so. Probably not. All right. I guess the Biden administration is looking at including having women sign up for the draft or register for the draft. Now, we don't have a draft, but the registering is just in case. And I guess men ages 18 through 24 have to register for the draft. And here's my question to you. How many of you men registered for the draft? I'd really be interested in that. So I know a lot of you are watching this are older, and I think at some age many of you did, but maybe I should ask it the other way. How many of you did not register for the draft but should have legally? I feel like I asked the question wrong. I should have just asked how many did not, because those are the ones that are interesting. It's illegal not to register. It's illegal, but I think the penalty is something like you can't get student loans or something like that. It's not a big penalty. Oh, most states auto register when you get a driver's license. Oh, okay. I didn't know about that. Can you get a security clearance? Good question. Probably not. Yeah. Well, I know people who did not register for the draft and had no consequences whatsoever. But I won't name names. So Biden was asked on a viral video that's going around today. Somebody asked him, are there Democrats who want to defund the police? Now, is that a good question? Is that a reasonable question to ask Joe Biden? Are there any Democrats who want to defund the police? No, that is a dumbfuck question because every large organization, be they Democrats or be they Republicans, have some of everything. Don't you think there are some Republicans who want to defund the police? I mean, I've never met one, but probably, probably because there's somebody everywhere. Do you think there are any murderers, rapists or racists who are Democrats? Of course. Are there any of those people who are Republicans? Of course. Of course. Are there any people who are pedophiles and ex convicts who are Democrats? Of course. Are there any Republicans who are. Yeah, of course. Every group has everything. So asking Biden if there are any Democrats who want to defund the police is just a dumb question. So Biden's answer was, and I'm paraphrasing, are there Republicans who think Democrats want to drink the blood of children? Now, I saw a number of people tweeting this around like he was just sort of random and crazy, as if it were a brain dead response. It wasn't brain dead at all. I'm going to try to be objective about Biden, as I was as best I could about Trump. He's harder to be objective about. But objectively speaking, this was a great answer. It's just that for some reason Republicans didn't see it that way and subjectivity is pretty strong. It was a good answer because he was brushing it away as ridiculous and essentially said what I did, which is you can find somebody in every group. Are there any Democrats who want to defund the police? Of course there are. Do you need the President to tell you that? You can observe it directly. What good would it be to have Biden answer that question? Because you already know the answer, but he makes it ridiculous and wipes it away by saying, are there any Republicans who think Democrats want to drink the blood of children? Well, there are. There are not many of them, but they exist. So I'm going to say that the, the call on that, that, you know, it shows that Biden has some brain damage or something. I say it's the opposite. I say this was a very quick and clever response and it became viral. So he gets, he gets points for that. Too. So I'm going to go against the grain there and say that was a good Biden response. All right, what else is happening these days? Here's a question for you. So more and more we're hearing that people who are vaccinated can get the virus. And there's some thought that maybe in Israel, I think maybe in Great Britain, I'm not sure that we're already seeing a reduction in the effectiveness of, I think mostly the Pfizer shot, but I'm not sure about that either. And here's my question. Once you've accepted that people who have the vaccination can still quite easily get the virus, they have lower symptoms, of course, but they can get the virus and also spread it. Once you've accepted that, is that a vaccination? Is it? Or wouldn't you call it a, a therapeutic? Because if there's a chemical you put in your body that reduces the symptoms of something but doesn't prevent you from getting it the way a normal vaccination prevents you from getting smallpox, it doesn't treat, prevents you from getting it. So is this a vaccination? Well, I take you back and I saw in the comments somebody got ahead of me a little bit. You remember that one of my predictions that I considered as semi right and maybe a little bit more wrong than right was I said that we would develop therapeutics faster than anybody imagined. And I thought that vaccinations might be years off. Does anybody remember me saying that? So I considered that a bad prediction because the vaccinations were not years off. They came pretty quickly and then the therapeutics seemed to take a while before they kicked in. A little slower than I thought, but still faster than maybe we would have expected. It seems to me that the vaccination is just a therapeutic and that we did in fact develop an ass kicking therapeutic. If you looked at the vaccinations as a therapeutic, they're great. If you look at it as a vaccination, I'm not even sure they qualify as a vaccination, do they? So we may have to develop a new category or a new word for something that's not quite a vaccination. But you wouldn't quite call it a therapeutic because you take it prophylactically. So what is it? It's a vaxapeutic. Let's call it a vaxiputic. There you go. Are you just word thinking? Yes. But it gets to the question of whether a vaccine was in fact developed for Covid. I don't think we made a vaccine. I think we made a therapeutic that's just really, really good. And whoever said that's word thinking. Your comment is accepted because I don't think it matters. It. It is what it is. So you can call it whatever you want. All right. That is pretty much what I wanted to say today. And did I leave out any important topics? It's a leaky vaccine. Somebody says it's a Theravax. Yeah, Theravax. What would happen if we just. What happens if we all just started calling it a therapy and calling it a therapy for long, A therapeutic for long? Covid, what if you called it that? Would more people get it? If you said, well, it's not really a vaccine per se, more of a therapeutic and it's preventing long haul, which maybe you have a between 6 and 25% chance of getting, would that make more people take it? And do you care? You know, when I see the numbers of people dying who are vaccinated being like, so small that you can ignore them. I mean, unless it's your family, then you can't. I don't feel like I'm in a pandemic. I feel like other people are in a pandemic, but I'm not. And what's going to happen when the people who are vaccinated realize that society got closed down again because of the people who are not? Do we have a problem coming? Is it going to be like sheep and cattle where the vaccinated and the unvaccinated have to fight to the death? Because if you're unvaccinated and it feels like you're the cause of me having to wear a mask in public or not being able to shop, I suppose, I don't know. Does that give me an attitude about you, or do I just say, well, you made your choice, I made mine, we'll both live out our choice? Because I feel like your choice is affecting my choice right now. My current opinion is that it's not up to me whether you get vaccinated, and I don't give a fuck whether you do or not beyond that. I also don't care if you die now. I mean, I have normal empathy for humans and tragedies, et cetera, but in terms of decision making, it's not part of my decision making whether you take the vaccine or not, because your risk and your life are for you to manage, not for me to manage. But what happens when your choice starts managing my life? Because that's what's going to happen right here. I am with no real risk that doesn't round to zero. And my life will be completely determined in the next year by what you do. Am I wrong about that? That my life will be completely determined by what other people do? That's true. Wouldn't you say now to take the leap? I'm not taking the leap. I'm not taking the leap that says and therefore you need to get vaccinated like me. That's too far. That would be unethical for me to make that claim. But if it is nonetheless true that your choices, you unvaccinated people, will completely determine my life. However, my choice of getting vaccinated will have no impact on you except good. It will reduce the odds of lockdowns and whatever. But I want to see a counter to that. So one crothers says wrong and that you're a sheep. Am I a sheep or are you a fucking asshole? Because one of those are probably true. Now I would say that if you look at the cost benefit of something and you make a personal decision about your cost benefit, that calling that person a sheep would make you just a fucking asshole. Because people do make cost benefit analyses and make decisions. You're a sheep. All the people who are so fucking dumb to think that anybody else want to take a run at and show us how stupid you are. Because there are some things that are just opinions. And I don't get down on people for their opinions, even if they disagree. But if you think that making a cost benefit decision in a pandemic and it happens to be the same as the medical community, if you think that makes you a sheep as opposed to somebody who analyzed something and made a decision, you're a right. Don't, don't think that's an opinion. That's a comment about yourself, right? That's how you scream to the world. I'm a. Because I think that people who make different decisions are small wool covered animals. No, we're just people who made a different decision than you did. Maybe our risk is different, maybe our concerns are different. But if you think that makes you a sheep, you're a fucking asshole. All right? So just live with that. Somebody says maybe it will be the other way around and the vaccinated will decide the lives of the rest. If there were enough vaccinations, that would be true because then the vaccinated people would cause us to open up. What about natural immunity? What about it? Why would a vaccinated person need to wear a mask? Because they can still. Seriously, why are you still asking that question. Sometimes I'm just amazed at how the information about the pandemic is not universal. You might be required to wear a mask when you're vaccinated because vaccinated people do catch and do spread the virus. Did you not know that? Is there somebody here who didn't know that by now? Now, I'm not saying you should wear masks. I think you shouldn't because your risks are so low if you're vaccinated, and also your risk of spreading it, I think are low. But we'll find out more about that. So, no, I don't think I'm going to be wearing masks if I can avoid it at all. But there's a reason. You just have to decide how big that reason is. Why don't we need polio booster shots? Because the ones we have work. Obviously. We don't have a vaccination. We have a therapeutic. So if you're asking me why do you need more than one shot, it might be the same reason you need more than one of every therapeutic. Is there any therapeutic that you take once and you're done? Probably not, right? You probably have to take a pill every now and then or get more than one IV. Maybe the IVs are just once. I don't know. See, last week you were ridiculing. Hold on. Let's say this ridiculous call, these are therapeutic in an MRI and not a vaccine. What happened to change your mind? Well, that never happened. So whatever you hallucinated I was doing didn't happen. I was not ridiculing anybody who called it a therapeutic. That simply never happened. Have I ever told you that almost all of the things I get in trouble with, indeed, almost every problem in my life, both personal and professional, is based on people believing I did something or said something that never happened? Is that unique to me because I'm a public figure? Because even in my private life, most of my problems are somebody who believes I said or did something that never happened. In my marriage, for example, nearly all of my problems are based on things that didn't happen. All right, Somebody says, my late wife did that to me all the time. Told us more than a few times. I don't know what you're talking about. Wow. Someone with the same problem. Yeah, I guess I have told you that. That's right. You're right. I have told you more than a few times. All right, Government determined not a HIPAA violation to ask vaccine questions. Yeah, I don't see how that's not a hipaa. Violation. But in the pandemic, I guess all rules are off. Your definition of the jab has already changed because the data changed. What do you do? You don't change your mind when the data changes. Like what? How do you play it? When I get new information, I sometimes revise my opinion. It's not a violation to ask because you don't have to answer. Okay, technically, I guess that's true. What's that about? The Locals app. Oh, predictions about kneeling teams now that the Olympics begin. Well, I've always said that teams that kneel should perform worse than teams that don't. Don't we have enough data on that? Because there should be enough professional games that we would have a pretty good look at that. But I don't know if you would know exactly how a team should have performed. Is there a way to tease that out? Because maybe only bad teams did it. I mean, that's a possibility. Wouldn't our energy be better served figuring out where this came from and punishing the bad actors? I don't think there's any way to punish the bad actors. I don't. Alright, that's all for now and I will talk to you on YouTube tomorrow.