Episode 1599 Scott Adams: Help Me Save Jesse Watters From Being Rupared and More

Good morning, everybody, and welcome to Coffee with Scott Adams. The best thing that's ever happened in the history of the multiverse. Well, let's start it off with a little simultaneous sip. Yeah, Something new. And all you have to do is grab some kind of a container. What kind? It doesn't really matter. It could be a copper, a mug, or a glass of tanker's chalice or stein, a canteen, jug, or flask, a vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure. It's the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better, including the pandemic. It's called the simultaneous sip. It's happening now. Oh, God, I needed that. You know, coffee. Sometimes you want it, sometimes you need it. Well, we got lots going on today. My favorite is the Jesse Waters trending story. I think you all know Jesse Waters from Fox News. Well, he's getting Rupar'd badly today in social media by Rupard. I mean, take it out of context. So here's what he said, roughly speaking, at a speaking event. I think yesterday he said that when, if you run into Dr. Fauci, you should give him a rhetorical kill shot, meaning you challenge him by saying, hey, didn't you approve funding for that Wuhan lab? And then you say, well, why should we trust you for anything else? I'm paraphrasing, but the idea was that would be a sort of a linguistic kill shot, and that if any video of that could be presented, Fox News would probably run it a lot. So that's what Jesse Waters said, that if you say the right words to Mr. Fauci and you get it on video, it could be like it could end his importance, I guess. Well, CNN decided to lop off the part about it being words. This is actually happening. It sounds like I'm making this up, but CNN is running this. You know, they're running this major campaign against Jesse Watters now with clips, and they just remove the part where he's talking about words. They just leave in the kill shot part. So Fauci, I don't think he heard the original context, is on video responding to the kill shot part as if somebody had just told all Fox News listeners to go murder Dr. Fauci. Now they're actually reporting this with a straight face, just like, you won't know the difference. The boldness of this is hilarious at this point. You know, they got away with so much so far that I think that they really think they can just do anything. And all evidence suggests that they can, that they can literally just run any news, anything, and get away with it because their audience doesn't check other sources. So as long as they have a locked in audience, they have that locked in syndrome. Watching CNN is sort of like being in a coma, but they gave you a television. You can't change the channel because you're in a coma, but it's just playing at you all the time anyway. So I would like to engage all of you to save Jesse Waters from the public attacks. And all you need to do is show the real, real context and show that he was talking about words and embarrass CNN for their fake news, their fakest of fake news. By the way, I'm continuously amused by CNN and Fox News taking shots at each other, especially when it gets personal, when they're actually calling out individual people, hosts and producers and stuff. Once it gets like that, personal, I can't turn away. I know I shouldn't be interested in it and I know that it's the lowest quality of entertainment. Really doesn't make it less entertaining. I don't know. I like it. So I'm not sure it's good for the world, but I do enjoy it. I told you yesterday that the, the very famous no Agenda podcast, most of you have heard of it and most of you have probably listened to it, in my opinion, misrepresented several of my opinions and then mocked me for the misrepresented opinions. So I wondered what was going on there and I actually contacted one of the two hosts, John Dvorak, I know him the best and basically said, what the fuck's going on? Like what the fuck? I actually was confused. I didn't know what was happening. I couldn't explain it in any way because what you need to know is that these hosts are really rational people who tend to stick to the facts. And so this was just way off their standard play. So I didn't know what was going on. So I asked him directly and John said that, you know, they don't. He wasn't doing research for the segment, so he was just sort of surprised by the topic as they normally are. Apparently they, you know, the is more of a, the podcast is off the top of their heads about whatever the topic is, so you shouldn't expect deep research on there. That's not what they offer. But he said he was just sort of responding to what his co host said, Adam Curry, and so he didn't really know what my views were so he invited me to say what my actual views are, and he would read them out on the podcast. That's about as good as you can do. So have I told you before that I judge people not by their mistakes, but by how they respond to them once the mistake is obvious. Now, there's no effective way to correct something like this. So it's just out there, right? And it can never be corrected. But the one thing you can do is read into the record the accurate thing when it's presented to you. Now, I don't know if I'll ever get busy enough to actually do that for him to write up my opinions, because that feels like homework. I don't like getting homework assignments. Just generally speaking. If somebody gives me an assignment, I just don't want to do it just because somebody told me to do it. So I don't know if I'll do this, but I will give him credit for being perfectly willing to clean that up as much as possible. All right. Saw a tweet from Sherrilyn Ifill, who is the president and director counsel of ldf, which is an NAACP legal defense and educational fund. And she complains that our system seems to be broken because Manchin is having so much of an impact as one person. And she says in her tweet, but what kind of healthy democracy is structured in a way that can allow one man elected by 290,000 votes in one of the least populous states to thwart the agenda of his party and the president, who is elected with 81 million votes. We need structural change. Anybody see any problems with that analysis? I think this is somebody who missed a few history classes. That's the best thing I can say about this because it wasn't one person. It was 51 persons. It was all Republicans. All of them. And if I don't have to remind you, Republicans came very, very close to winning the presidency the second time. And then of course, the more obvious thing, that we are Republic. Hello, we're Republic. It is designed so that you can't get everything you want easily. Meaning the party in power can't just ram stuff through. It's designed that way. It's supposed to stop you from an overreach. This was the most classic case of a system working that I've ever seen. Am I wrong? Joe Manchin stopping with the other senators, of course, stopping the build back, better thing, no matter what you think your opinion of the actual bill is. But the system was supposed to stop this. It was designed exactly to stop this, not this Specific bill, but stuff exactly like this, that's the system. It is meant to do this. And it did it. And it did it. Well, now, it was close. I mean, if I have a complaint about the system, it's that it didn't stop it more thoroughly. It got too close, but it worked. If you're going to go binary about it, it almost didn't work. You could argue it almost didn't work, but it did work. In the end, it worked. Joe Manchin runs the country, in effect, but he couldn't do it unless there were 50 Republicans who leaned that way as well. All right, we learned from Lance Gooden, who's a Texas congressperson, that the amount of fentanyl struggled, smuggled, struggled, smuggled across the border has increased by 300%. I don't know what period, maybe in the last year or so. And he points out that fentanyl is the only thing not affected by Joe Biden's supply chain crisis. Why is it that we could get more fentanyl but less of everything else? They're doing something right. We should get those cartel people to work on a supply chain crisis. But here's my take on this. We need to withdraw all of our diplomats from China until they address this. Because, as you know, the precursors come from China. They're shipped to the cartels, the cartels put it together and then send it to the United States. Now, the cartels are doing it for money, but I don't think China is doing it for money. It's just a war on the United States to weaken us. And it's working to the tune of 79,000 people a year dead, and far more than that, wounded, in the sense that the families that remain are just devastated forever. I can speak from personal experience, and I think we have to withdraw our diplomats from China just over this. You know, we've got lots of reasons to withdraw our diplomats. The Uyghurs situation, that would be plenty. Do you need more than that, really? One word, Uyghurs? Why do we have diplomats in China? There's no explaining that. But when you throw in the fact that they're actively attacking us in a. I would say in a kinetic way. Would you say that the fentanyl attack is a kinetic attack? Does that fit the definition of a kinetic attack? It's yes, right. It's a kinetic attack because there's a physical item, the fentanyl, that is physically sent out in a way that they assume will enter American bodies and kill them. That's a kinetic Attack. We're in a kinetic war with China and we just leave our embassy over there? Oh, let's talk. How about lunch? Fuck you. Fuck you. Government of the United States, withdraw our diplomats now, before the Olympics. Make it stick. Make it hurt. Withdraw them before the Olympics. We can still talk to China, of course. We'd have a million ways to communicate, so it wouldn't be a problem, but as a show. You can't treat them like a normal country anymore. I'm sorry. They're not like the rest of the countries. They're not. They're fucking attacking us with kinetic weapons. Stop it. And while we're at it, we need to drone the cartels, like all of them. Just wipe them out, because don't tell me we don't know where they are. And if that requires taking out some of the elected representatives of the Mexican government, we need to do that, too. If we need to invade Mexico to fix it, we need to do that. It's time. It's just time to do that. Michael Cohen got sent back to jail for talking about his book. What? So he was released because of the COVID danger. So he was on, I guess, house arrest or something, and he was talking about his book and working on his book, and apparently he had some kind of provision for house arrest that he would not speak to the media or pursue a previously announced book project during the term of his sentence. How is that legal? I get the part where if you break the law, there are penalties for the law, right? The penalties are described in the law. Which part of the penalty for whatever crime he was accused of says, you don't have freedom of fucking speech? Seriously? Freedom of fucking speech? We're taking that away from him. Are you fucking kidding me? Now? I don't like Michael Cohen, but can we be real for a second? This was clearly political. Clearly political, and he can't fucking talk. Are you kidding me? He needs to be released immediately. Immediately. The fact that this even happened to him at all. He needs to be completely released now. This is a government political prosecution. I mean, this part of it. And what about all those people still being held for January 6th? What the fuck kind of a country have we become when we have political prisoners? It's obvious. It's not even one situation. Now we have two situations where there are clearly political prisoners in the fucking United States. In the fucking United States, we have political prisoners. Now, I was willing to, like, wait and see how that played out, but this basically tells you the Cohen situation basically tells you that nobody's Even hiding it completely out in the open. Yeah. Roger Stone, you could make the same argument. Exactly. This is completely unacceptable. Completely unacceptable. Cohen should be free. Completely. Now, I think that if a government does this to you, you just have to be set free, Period. How is this not in the fucking Supreme Court? This should be in the Supreme Court tomorrow. Really? We took freedom of speech away from a fucking American right in front of you, and you're like, oh, okay. Worry about what's happening tomorrow. What's for lunch? Good Lord. Rasmon poll says only 31% say Biden represents their views, whereas a far higher percentage say Trump represents their views. Among Republicans. Not so surprising about Trump, as I've often said, the most persuasive person who ever lived. But the Biden one certainly suggests he couldn't possibly win reelection unless a lot changes. Want some good news? I know you do. Omicron is here. Omicron is now the dominant strain in America. I don't know how they know that exactly. I'm not sure they could tell that. But. But as of today, 75% of cases are Omicron. Omicron is here. It is the final battle. Do you know why it's the final battle? Because no matter how it goes, we're fucking done. We're done. And I will suggest that the public needs to now take control. Not as a revolution, not as an insurrection, not as a replacement for your government as an assistant. Our government, which we like to think sometimes is there to help us, sometimes not so much. But at the moment, it needs our help. And if we see this as us against them, we won't be nearly as effective, because it's not. It's not us against them. Our government is stuck in a system which they can't get out of because the system has them trapped. And. And the system is. If you let too many people die, you can't get elected. That's their game. Keep people from dying. Can't get elected if too many people die. We don't have that constraint. We, the public, can make our own decisions about risk management. So our government is not the right tool for getting us out of the pandemic and releasing the mandates. That's the public. But the public must be focused. I heard many people bravely say, six months ago, I dropped all my cooperation with masking or whatever. That doesn't help. One of you doing something by yourself, that doesn't help. That's not going to add anything. It probably won't even help you. You'll just get in trouble it only works if we all do it or enough of us do it. I don't know what the critical number is. Probably 20%. If 20% of the public does anything, something's going to happen big. And so we lack any kind of a leader to negotiate with our government. I know both Greg Gotfeld and I have suggested that, in Greg's word, we need some kind of a hostage negotiator to get us out of the mandates. I think that Greg and I just became your negotiators, which I sure as hell don't want. It's like, literally the last thing I'd want. But on the other hand, if you live in the country and you have a patriotic bent at all, you can't walk away if there's nobody else who's going to do it. Now, I'd rather someone else do it. I don't think I'm the best choice, but here we are. And so I'd like to begin with this, because we really only need one thing. A date. Do you agree? The only thing we need is a date. We all agree. That's all we need. Nothing else. You don't need to march. You don't need to march. You don't need to protest. You don't need to protest the Capitol. You don't need to run an insurrection. You don't need to hate your government. You don't need to curse at them. You don't need to even be unkind. You don't need to be unkind to your fellow citizens about anything. Just need a date. That's it. February 1st. That's the date. February 1st. And I know all the clever people say, oh, it was last year, or February 1st, but let's be serious for a moment. February 1st. Simply make it a thing. Just tell your government that that's your final day for mandates, and just take your mask off now. Lots could change between now and February 1st. Do you all agree. Do you all agree that something could change where we could maybe as a public say, whoa, okay, that's no longer a good idea. But given what we know now and the direction of things, February 1st seems very reasonable because it gets us past the holiday bump that we know we're going to have. If things are heading down in February 1st, and they should be, they should be in terms of death, not infections. Infections might be up while deaths are down, but if deaths are still going down on February 1st, I think we're done. I think we're done. So let's see in the comments. Can I Get an agreement on February 1 as a message to our government that they should respond to. Agree. Okay. I'm seeing lots of yeses on locals. Yeah. And the, the we are all narrating done thing doesn't help anybody. It's the doing at the same time that could help. But doing your own thing doesn't help anybody. Yeah, I was done a year ago. Doesn't help anybody. Yeah, it's nice, but doesn't help anybody. All right, February 1st it is. And the indications are that the Omicron here are the actual symptoms from fever or chills, cough, runny nose, headache or muscle aches, gastrointestinal issues, and loss of taste or smell. In other words, how I feel every day. Literally. The symptoms of Omicron are literally what I feel every day because I have allergies, right? So I hardly go a day without one of these things. I have muscle aches from exercising, gastrointestinal issues from drinking too much coffee. I lost my taste and smell years ago. And, you know, and the news gives me a headache. So I feel like once it gets to the point where you can't tell the difference difference between the pandemic and normal life, that should be the cutoff point. Let's see. My symptoms from the pandemic seem to match perfectly my symptoms of just getting up and being alive. Anyway, I'm exaggerating a little bit, but Omicron's the final battle and we have all the tools now. Our immune systems, our boosted one way or another. A lot of us took vitamin D, got outside, a lot of us exercised. I worry about the extra obesity, but we'll see. All right, big question. Is Ivermectin debunked totally or still in the category of. Well, it might work, so give it a try because there's not much downside. I found the best source I've seen to discuss that. So I tweeted it and I'll probably retweet this every time the conversation comes up. Now, I do want comment on it because even the debunk can be wrong. But the debunk goes through the following points that the Peru experience. Some people say, hey, Peru solved this problem with Ivermectin. That never happened. That never happened. They cherry picked data. But if you look at the actual Peru data now, there's nothing like that. Likewise with India, there's nothing like that. If you look at the real data and if you look at the trials, it is true that there's a whole bunch of trials that indicate Ivermectin works. However, the ones that are the most reliable say it don't or doesn't. So the most credible trials say it doesn't. The least credible trials universally almost say it does. And apparently if you do a meta analysis, the problem is that the biggest trials. Actually the problem was one of the meta analysis did not correct for number of people in the trials, which sounds like a pretty big error. Anyway, the meta analyses were just. Let me explain why a meta analysis doesn't work. I'm sure there are cases where it does, but here's why it doesn't work in this case and probably a lot of other cases. When you're doing the meta analysis, if you just look at all of the studies and you don't try to pick out which are the good ones or the bad ones, you could end up with a situation where the largest studies, if you did it right and adjusted by number of participants, the largest studies, if any one of them are wrong, it's too big of a factor in the whole, so it moves the whole. So in other words, just one big wrong trial could bias your entire meta analysis one way or another. So you think you're looking at a meta analysis, but you're not. You're looking at one trial and it was defective. So lots of times you can think you've proven something with a meta analysis, but you haven't proven anything. Nothing. Literally nothing. You just threw in bad data and got a bad result. Now take a look at that. I'm not the one who's the expert, so I'm not going to claim that this debunk is 100%. I'm going to claim it's just the best presentation of the argument. Okay, if you were to say to me, but you know, there's still so much signal there that I think I'd take it anyway. Maybe, maybe, yeah, I wouldn't, wouldn't say that was unwise to take it anyway, if your doctor agreed. But I would say according to this, if you do the analysis correctly, in the opinion of the people who did this debunk, if you do the analysis correctly, even the meta analysis signal disappears. Hey, Dick, Richard Smith has a comment. Scott, always with the cop out on predictions. Well, Dick, and I am talking to you, Dick, it's not a cop out to put percentages on predictions. That would be called rational thinking. Rational thinking, Dick. So is it just a coincidence that so many of my critics are named Dick? That's their actual name. Why is that so often true? All right, here's A question for you. What would it tell you if you compared states in the United States? We've got enough data now, enough runtime, that we should be able to tell something. Would you agree? Do you agree that at this point you should be able to tell something by how the different states treated things and if they got a good or bad result? Yes or no? You can or cannot tell things from the states yet. Oh, I love the people saying no. I love you with a passion. The answer should be no until it turns yes. That's what I'm thinking. There should be some point at which some clarity starts to emerge, but there's no way it happened early. So first year, no, doesn't tell you anything. Second year, I don't know, it might start to. So let me make a case for the vorb V O R B. Vorb, it's an acronym I just made up, and it stands for Vaccination rate, Obesity, Republicans, and Black. Black, meaning black citizens of the United States. And my argument is this, that the higher your VORB score is, the worse you're doing, the worse you're doing. So I'm going to. And the way you would calculate the VORB is to multiply all these rates so the vaccination rate, just treat it like it's a number, not a percentage. So if it's like 75% in a state, you just say 75 times the obesity rate. Again, change the percentage to just a raw number and the percentage of Republicans in state and percentage of black population. And my argument is that if you've got a high score on two or three of these, you're in bad shape. Let's look at some states, representative states, and see if the VORB score is predictive. Let's look at the worst state and the best state in terms of COVID outcome. Do you think that will tell us something? Well, not by itself, but let's do it for fun. Mississippi is doing the worst. Coincidentally, they have the highest percentage of black population, presumably a high. I didn't check the Republican percentages, but I think we all know which of the red states. So they've got high black population, high Republican population, high obesity, and the lowest VAX rate. So that should predict that they have the worst outcome. Right? And they do. They have the worst outcome. Basically, all four things are negative for them. All right, let's check some others. How about the state that is the best? Now, don't call me racist for saying it's best in this context. I know what you're going to Do Don't Jesse Waters me. Don't Jesse Waters me or Roop Army, I guess would be the right way to say that Vermont has only 1% black population and they have, I think, the highest rate of vaccination, 77%. So Vermont has low obesity, low black population, low Republican population and the highest vaccination rate. And they have the best results, just like you'd expect. Let's take something in the middle. Let's compare a California to a Texas, okay, Because Texas has a higher, substantially higher death rate, but not too far out of the range. 258 per 100,000 in Texas. California is 191. Now, percentage wise, that's a pretty big difference. But they're still in that middle range. 12% black in Texas, 6% black in California. But California has more vaccinations compared to Texas, fewer Republicans. And the obesity rate in California I think is much less than Texas. So if you put those together. So California would be how many is it good on good being relative to this conversation only. But California has a relatively low Republican and black population compared to Texas and a high vaccination rate, low obesity. So you would expect California to do better than Texas and substantially. And it is. And it is. So the VORB works there as well. Let's take South Dakota because you say to yourself, well, South Dakota is going to be an outlier, right, because it's so, so unpopulated. You think the density is pretty low. South Dakota is really high in deaths despite having only 2% black population. But they got some Republicans. They've got the lowest, very low vaccine, lower one, not lowest, but low vaccination rate, high obesity. So the VORB would say, well, three out of four. That should give you a high death rate. And they do. And they do. They have a high death rate relative to the other places. So here's my. So other things you need to throw in. There is age, how they mitigated against in the early part, because remember, these are cumulative numbers. So Florida did better with the senior care than New York did, which may explain why New York is near the top. So New York has a high vaccination rate and low Republicans. But I would say that probably there was a special case there with the senior care. So that might be an outlier. Anyway, I don't think that you can see, I don't think that you can see too much other than these things. I don't see masking necessarily as jumping out as a, as a thing. So I would just propose this to you that if three out of four of these things are bad in your state, you're going to have a bad outcome. So vax rate, obesity, percentage of Republicans, percentage of black. Now, you could also. You could, you could, you could also say that the percentage of Republicans and percentage of black population is really just a proxy for vaccination rates, Right? Kind of. It's a proxy for vaccination rates. They kind of run together. So I think it's going to be obesity and vaccination rate is going to explain everything except an outlier like New York that may have handled senior care worse. That's what it looks like. Now, how many of you think that vaccinations have no correlation to death rates in states? How many of you think that's true? That we don't have any data that shows vaccinations are lowering the death rate. Not the infection rate, that's a different question. But the death rate. Well, we do have plenty of evidence that vaccinations lower the death rate substantially. And the people who can read data, well, such as Andres Backhouse, you can see that. My Twitter feed, if you want to follow up in the detail. But there is very strong data that the vaccinations reduce deaths. I don't know if it'll matter to Omicron. Omicron might blow right through it, but probably won't get you as sick. At least it looks like it. Now, all right, how many of you are bothered by my discussion of either Ivermectin or state comparisons? Is anybody bothered by it? Oh, okay. No complaints. You just want to say vorb. I tell you, the vorb predictor looks pretty strong. Now, of course, I'm only doing it by eyeballing stuff, so, I mean, you'd have to do a lot more work to know if it's a real correlation or not. Might be fake. All right, that is just about what I wanted to say. I'll tell you what doesn't seem to be a factor is density. Density doesn't seem to be as much of a factor. Did you see that coming? Now, you could argue that maybe New York City is a case of density, but they also have international travel and they handle the seniors different and blah, blah, blah. Yeah, all right, well, that's what we think. We know February 1st is the day that we're giving our government. How many of you would agree to allow Greg Gutfeld and I to be your negotiators for your freedom? Is anybody on board with that? And by the way, let me say again, if Somebody else wants to do this? Please do. I mean, I could get killed doing this. I mean, literally, I could get murdered for, you know, for raising my hand in a situation like this. But I'll do it if nobody else is going to do it. Somebody just said in the comments on YouTube that I looked like a geek 20 years ago, but now I don't look as much like a geek. I have to tell you, that was intentional. 20 years ago was in the height of Dilbert's rise. I was doing a lot of speaking engagements and media appearances, and part of the story was that Dilber was sort of me, and so I would actually, I would underdress. You know, I had the resources to dress well. I mean, I could just hire somebody to, you know, make sure that I dress well, but I chose not to. So I actually chose a. An understated nerdish look because it was more compatible with Dilbert and just made the story better. So, yes, there was some. And also, I was working insane hours in those days, so I couldn't exercise. So that makes something of a difference. Can I use a double body double? Well, how many of you think you know somebody who looks like me? Watch this. How many of you know somebody who sort of looks like me? Watch all the yeses. This is part of my theory that there are only 100 people. Yeah, there are only a hundred people, and everybody's one of those hundred. Everybody knows somebody looks like me. How many of you know somebody who looks like me? Watch this. Watch this. How many of you know somebody who looks like me? And his first name is Steve. Go. Looks like me. Yes. Yes. I'm seeing yeses. A lot of people named Steve look like me. Why? I don't know. I don't know. I can't explain it, but I'll tell you, it's true. All my life, when people get my name wrong and they come up to me, they say, hey, Steve. And I'll say, oh, no, it's Scott. And it'll be somebody who doesn't know me at all. It wasn't somebody who got my name wrong. They actually thought I was their friend Steve. So all my life people have walked up to me in like, different parts of the country and said, steve. All my life. I don't know why. I guess it's just a white guy name. That's probably. That's probably all it is. All right, do Guffield show and announce the February 1st. Well, we'll see if. If Greg's on board with us and then we'll take it from there. Steve is a funny name for a cat. That is a funny name for a cat. I am so on board with that comment. On YouTube, somebody said Steve is a funny name for a cat. That's a great name for a cat. A great name. I'm going to name my next cat Steve. She won't like it. All right, that's all I have for today. It was short, but I think you'd all agree the best thing that's ever happened. And if you'd like to see me angry some more, just wait a few more days with nothing happening on Fentanyl because you're going to see it. Have you read the Alexander Marino substack article response to the Ivermectin article you referenced by Scott Alexander? I haven't tweet that at me. I'd like to see it. And that's all I got for now and I will talk to you tomorrow. YouTubers.