Episode 1468 Scott Adams: Fake News of the Day and Delicious Beverages. Join Us!

Date: 2021-08-14 | Duration: 38:22

Topics

Find my “extra” content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com

Rough Transcript

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Transcript

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• COVID babies, significantly lower IQ?

• CNN’s persuasion by anecdote

• COVID, obesity and age

• Mike Lindell’s Cyber Symposium

• COVID deaths and hospitalizations matter

• COVID variants and vaccinations

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[0:02]

favorite part of the day I just can't wait to see all of you it's actually true I know I have my my lighting optimized today but I'm kind of liking this low light situation I've got here makes it more intimate don't you think well for those of you who are obsessed with my audio quality on locals today I took the electronics out going directly into my iPad with a lavalier meanwhile on YouTube I'm going through a road caster so you're getting different audio if you like one of them well watch the one you like I don't know if there's any difference really but I'll know later when I look at it and if you'd like today to go up a level get a little bit better I think you do all you do is a copper bug of glass a tanker challenge the canteen jungle flask a vessel of any kind fill it with your favorite liquid I like coffee and join me now for the unparalleled pleasure the dope media of

[1:02]

unparalleled pleasure the dope media of the day the thing that makes everything better everything accept my lighting it's called the simultaneous sept and it goes like this go
well funny thing happened yesterday people on locals already heard this story because they're special but yesterday I was threatening to throw my HP printer around the window because I was having some trouble with it well it turns out that if you do a popular live stream and you threaten to throw a product out the window you will get a call from the people who make that product so I got a call from uh Hewlett Packard they have an executive rapid response team for exactly these social media situations and they asked me if there was anything they could do could they possibly uh help me get my product running or if there's something they could do to

[2:02]

if there's something they could do to maybe discourage me from throwing it out a window on live stream which I understand would be bad for business bad for business so I'm not going to throw my HP printer out the window and I will say uh let me say for those who sort of uh were missing the fun part of this uh HP is a great company and they make really good products Great American company and I had already ordered an upgraded HP printer so every three years or so you have to get rid of a printer they're mechanical it's a mechanical device it's not going to last forever it was time to upgrade anyway so I've got a new HP printer on the way but uh HP was on it I gotta say when you see a big corporation uh says we've been played no I actually did plan to throw it out the window if any of you are thinking that I was bluffing about that not at all no I was

[3:05]

bluffing about that not at all no I was actually I was only looking for the right time of day and you know I was trying to figure out how to film it right everything I was totally gonna do it
it just for fun but I also didn't want to clean up all the shards so that was part of it anyway fake news of the day great news of the day
day we got a lot of it today New York Post is reporting that there's a information coming out that new study says babies born during covid the pandemic have lower IQs and not just a little bit like really really lower IQs now true or fake news the explanation given is that is not biological rather it's uh has to do with the situation and the thinking is that maybe the parents were all frazzled and stressed and staying home too much and there wasn't enough

[4:05]

too much and there wasn't enough stimulation for the kid do you believe any of that does any of that sound true do you believe that babies who were raised in the situation where everybody's home around the baby that they get less stimulation than if everybody's going to work and you leave the baby with the with the caretaker or I don't know where whoever takes care of the baby or if one of you goes to work and one of you stays home with the baby that baby is smarter because there's only one of you home are you telling me that a baby with a house full of people is going to get less stimulation and be less smart than a baby that stays home with one person all day
I don't know I would say at the very least the explanation with which they hypothesize doesn't sound right to me I mean just on this surface it doesn't set right and then I think some of you are asking in the comments how exactly do you measure

[5:07]

the comments how exactly do you measure the IQ of a newborn
can you even do that how old does the baby have to be before you can get a good read on its IQ
yeah how do you measure that now I imagine it's something like you know does the baby you recognize a sound or you know does it turn toward a thing or it doesn't know that the the toy is under the cup I don't know something like that but I got real questions about the accuracy of this study if it's true it's the biggest news in the world
right if this were true it's the biggest news in the world because this would indicate you can totally manipulate the IQ of your baby by what's happening the first year if that's true we can turn all of our babies into Super Babies by figuring out what was different about the pandemic and then you do more of the stuff that's different from that

[6:08]

different from that you got super babies and all the people in other countries who are competing against well they'll just have normal babies and their babies will never compete with our super babies but I'm going to say uh because it's not the biggest story in the world that the experts are maybe not buying this because if they were I mean correct me if I'm wrong if if our baby is born during the pandemic we're really noticeably Dumber we wouldn't be talking about anything else it would be by far that would be the biggest problem so apparently other people are not buying this story but here it is all right here's some more uh CNN fake news and this is fake news by intentional lack of context so there are lots of ways to fake the news here's one of them So Adam dopamine found this and on Twitter and uh this is CNN in a written written piece uh they talked about Alabama hospital who says we're seeing a

[7:09]

Alabama hospital who says we're seeing a lot of children that are very very sick admitted to our Hospital we have almost twice as many right now as we did at the previous worst part of the pandemic pretty bad and
and so uh so how bad is that it's twice as bad
bad What's missing the number what about the number okay it's twice as bad
I don't know do I care because if it was one person last year and there's two people today do I care that it's twice as bad I kind of need a little context well somebody else on Twitter found another local source for I think the same story but uh local Source said 33 children are hospitalized in Alabama with covet 33. so let's say the number went from I don't know they say almost twice

[8:11]

don't know they say almost twice so let's say it's uh I don't know 15 extra children
so let's say 15 extra children is that enough to change your National policy because of the 15 most of them won't die right so there might be 15 extra children maybe five of them will die anybody dying is a tragedy and you know extra so for if it's a child so not to minimize the fact that these are real people not just statistics five people being a tragedy of course one person being a tragedy but we do need to manage the country to these risks and I don't believe that they've been given to a straight by CNN tell us the number next time all right um and then here's another one from CNN quote some Hospitals now report their intensive care units which are usually reserved for the most critically ill patients are full some hospitals

[9:13]

some hospitals how many is some hospitals how many hospitals are there are there let's say ten thousand hospital I don't know does anybody know how many hospitals there are in the country a thousand ten thousand what would be anybody just tell me the number of hospitals do do a fact check but what are some hospitals have uh are impacted what what if there are 10 000 hospitals and five of them or somebody has a number here 1500 770. there are about four thousand acute care hospitals well your numbers are all over the place people but let's say it's in the low thousands if you have hospitals in the low thousands how many of them are impacted some some three what would be some three or four how big is this problem we're literally being managed and manipulated because they don't want us to know the number obviously it'd be

[10:15]

to know the number obviously it'd be easy enough to find the number how hard would it be for CNN to say there are you know say 5 000 hospitals in the world whatever it is in the country and uh seven of them are impacted and we think and you would also say your prediction seven of them are impacted we think there could be uh uh bing says there's 6090 hospitals all right so let's say you say there are six thousand hospitals and seven of them are impacted that would tell me something and maybe we think there'll be 100 impacted and if they're in the big cities of course that's a bigger deal um so now we're seeing the stories about the people who had medical problems because their surgeries Etc were delayed let me tell you my story just so you can add an anecdote and it's dangerous to add anecdotes to your knowledge that when you're trying to make decisions because they're too influential but I'll give you one example last year during the pandemic I was

[11:16]

last year during the pandemic I was scheduled to get sinus surgery now a sinus surgery to remove some polyps now sign the surgery is not the biggest deal in the world but
but because it got delayed I had to be on Prednisone for way longer than normal to keep things managed until the surgery and I would say that there's a good chance that that ruined my life now I won't give you the details but let's just say that it caused a series of events directly from the delayed hospitalization that I think may have ruined my life you know through a series of related events now not health-wise health-wise I'm actually fine but you can really up your life by being six for sick for six months that you didn't expect so for six months I could barely walk up the stairs after I got off the prednisone because you get addicted to it so that was a problem so I lost I lost six months of my life um you didn't notice so much because I

[12:16]

um you didn't notice so much because I could I could fake it on camera pretty well but I was in bad shape for about six months and it had a you know a consequence in my life so these are pretty pretty big um things going on with people delaying hospitalization it's a big deal and I can I can confirm that um now of course CNN is trying to persuade us by anecdote let's see how they're doing
um one of the things that CNN is doing is they're sending Don lemonau he went to uh I think he was raised in Alabama and you went to Alabama hospitals and and he's talking to somebody who's like in the intensive care I might be on oxygen I'm not sure but uh Don Lemon asked this coveted patient about not getting vaccinated and says do you regret it do you regret it so so see the scene in your head Don Lemon in the hospital

[13:17]

your head Don Lemon in the hospital talking to a guy who's you know in bad shape from the covid and he says do you regret getting the vaccination now if you were to evaluate that as news that's a failing grade all right as news it's a failure because it's showing you an anecdote that will mislead you about things without the statistics statistics would be good that would be news and we certainly know if the news says there are lots of people in the hospital we know what that looks like but if you show one person on camera suffering with regret I didn't hear the answer but I imagine there was some regret there um that's persuasion that's pure persuasion now how much good persuasion is there you've got visual because it was actually video of a guy in the hospital that's that's a plus visual you've got fear because it's the fear you put yourself in that person's

[14:17]

fear you put yourself in that person's place and you say uh that doesn't look good fear is visual and then the last thing is you can put yourself in it's personal you can put yourself in the scene so even though it's about somebody else you pretty easily put yourself in the bed right your brain just does that automatically so how good is that for um manipulation a plus a plus if you were to give that a grade for propaganda persuasion and manipulation a plus now let me uh let me correct myself I I just made a terrible mistake that I'd like to correct I called it manipulation is that fair not by my own definition so this is what I'm going to correct myself in it's manipulation if you're trying to make somebody do something that's good for you and bad for them that's my definition if I try to get you to give me money and it's not going to

[15:18]

to give me money and it's not going to be good for you but it's going to be good for me well that's manipulation if I can convince you to do that like it's your own idea or something but what if I try to convince you to do something that's good for you let's say exercise and E right if I if I use persuasion to get you to exercise and eat right and you wanted to do those things am I manipulating you or persuading now I would call that persuasion because that's a good intention and everybody's on the same page manipulation is when you're trying to change somebody's mind and they don't want to change their mind and they don't see what's good about it best manipulation and that's what that's what CNN was doing CNN was changing your mind and you're not sure that's good for you it might be I'm not saying it's not I'm just saying you're not so sure so that that gets into the manipulation but my guess is that CNN is not intending for a bad result I don't think they intend a bad result

[16:19]

I don't think they intend a bad result I think they want people to have good outcomes so I actually believe that they're sincere in the sense that they would like people to have better outcomes so maybe that's not manipulation the way they see it it might just turn out to look like that
um how many non-obese people in the United States died of covet today anybody anybody can you give me a number what would be the most useful data you could have you you should have a number of number of people who died number of people who were hospitalized was you know intensive careless say uh you need to know that but after you knew that don't you need to know how many were obese and their age their age would be good but I'll bet the Obesity is just as just as important because your risk and how you run your life will depend entirely on how many people are getting hurt if it's a tiny tiny number are you going to do one thing if it's a big number you'll do another and if you're not

[17:21]

you'll do another and if you're not obese and the only people who are getting bad outcomes or mostly are the obese well you'd make different decisions Maybe so here's a question I asked online I said imagine a President Who persuaded people to get fit to protect themselves and protect the country at the same time um
um I don't know if we can handle that right at various times we've had you know presidential and you know physical fitness initiatives and stuff but yeah like JFK Etc but they didn't really go very far did they now we've had Obama who was a smoker very sub-optimal we should never have a president who's a smoker in my opinion I think that's just such a bad look uh then we had uh Trump who literally doesn't exercise it needs fast food we've got Biden who um let me give him some Kudos Baidu is

[18:22]

um let me give him some Kudos Baidu is very fit always has been I believe he's a runner or has always been a runner so Biden is actually at least a good role model but he doesn't do anything about persuading people to get fitter and I think an excellent president would do that hey today is the one year
all right well I'll just finish up on YouTube here
and so the Cyber Symposium isn't going too well uh Mike Lindell tried to show his his evidence but there was a CNN expert there who said I didn't see any he he didn't say the evidence was wrong um
um he just said he didn't see any so we've gotten to this point where Mike Lindell has done all this work and at least according to CNN they didn't agree or disagree with his evidence they didn't see any

[19:25]

um all right
I was suggesting today that we need something like a supreme court for fact checking and of course as soon as I said that then all of the well I won't insult people but there there's a certain type of thinking uh
uh was it uh who called this snap to grid Eric Weinstein snapped to grid thinking where if you give anybody any Nuance about anything they can't handle the Nuance so they have to snap it to the closest grid that's something they do understand so I think I'm not sure if he uses it in the same context but I like that analogy um
um so a lot of people said wait a supreme court for fact checking you mean like the ministry of Truth Scott you mean like the ministry of truth that's really what you're recommending to which I say no that's what we have now the the ministry of Truth is the current

[20:26]

the the ministry of Truth is the current situation where the the powers that be tell you what's true and your side says oh yeah I guess that's true and then the other side says it's not true so we have the ministry of truth but there are two of them there's one for the left and one for the right so it's the opposite of anything useful so imagine if you will a supreme court for fact checking something that we wouldn't have needed in the past and so the founders would never would have imagined that they needed a special department for it but imagine if you had facts that were presented by let's say the media or even the public and they could they could just submit stuff for fact checking and imagine if you will that the process for arguing the facts was public so you'd see the the people on both sides arguing their facts you would see the members of the fact-checking Supreme Court ask them questions and then when it was done they would issue a ruling and there would be a Minority Report The Minority Report is really important

[21:28]

The Minority Report is really important and certainly we don't have anything like that wouldn't you like to see seven justices say well we looked at the data and were let's say we're trained economists or we're trained in statistics or whatever and seven out of nine of us say yes this is true but you should know that two out of nine of us weren't so sure and here are their reasons wouldn't that be way better than nobody trying to figure out what's true or partisans figuring it was true now imagine too that you had life appointments which is one of the things that makes the Supreme Court work life appointments so nobody has to answer to anybody and you make it a high-paying job prestigious so that people don't need to take bribes so whatever it is that makes the Supreme Court work we could borrow a lot of that to make some kind of a not Ministry of truth but a supreme court for facts and don't reject it out of hand just

[22:29]

and don't reject it out of hand just because you can't think of the exact way to do that um just think that everything that's wrong right now is because we don't have this let me say that again everything that's wrong with the country is because we don't have a supreme court for fact checking We can't agree what to do now some of the some of the things we can't agree on our strategy and nobody really knows the future so you can't tell if strategy is a good idea usually but
but facts we ought to be working on the same set of facts so let's fix that it's fixable you just need a better system birth rate is following falling since 2007 and I guess a big part of the problem is that children or parents don't want all the responsibility and all the work here is another case where we have drifted into a world that doesn't work at all and we should just tear it down and start over the the average way that parents raise

[23:30]

the the average way that parents raise kids in the United States is so messed up it's not good for the kids it's definitely not good for the parents it's just sort of what we do let me give you an example uh I might spend two hours a day driving kids to school two hours because everybody drives out here and there's gigantic lines you got to go early you know it's across town uh you know there's just all kinds of complications to it that's just every day
day now that's all just completely wasted time completely wasted time because you should build a town where kids can walk to school when I grew up we just walked to school it wasn't close I mean not that close but it was close enough well imagine building a town where there are bicycle paths and it's safe and lighted and they're say video cameras and any kid even the young ones can just

[24:31]

and any kid even the young ones can just leave the house with their little lunch box and walk on the path and just walk to school to be big kids there and you know everything would be safe enough so you can imagine like a hundred different ways the classes would be better they would teach better things they could get back and forth easily there wouldn't be all that paperwork you wouldn't have these after school activities that don't really help anybody uh you there's just a million things you could redesign so we've actually got our systems for raising children so here's the the major point the system for raising children is so bad
bad that women won't do it it's just too inconvenient and I actually agree with them if I look at what it takes to raise a kid today versus what it took you know when I was a kid they're completely different and we were raised almost like you know like feral you know free-range chickens you know we leave you know at a fairly young age

[25:33]

you know at a fairly young age we were allowed to leave the house let's say the summer in the summer you could leave the house on your bike and your only requirement was to be home for dinner five o'clock that's it that's the that's the next time your parents would see you is when you sat down at the dinner table now I'm not saying that's a good or bad system but I'm saying that our system for raising children is completely broken and if we don't fix it our birth rate is just going to fall through the floor because having a child having a child today is just really not a good deal compared to what it was um here's a provocative statement I made that uh the the least credible thing you can see on the internet is the Rogue Doctor Who disagrees with all the other doctors now this could be a tough conversation here I know the Rogue Doctor Who disagrees with all the other doctors and there's a viral video now you're thinking of specific

[26:34]

video now you're thinking of specific ones in your head right now right it's not about a specific one it's about the category because part of your risk management decision is to look at the category so let me give you an example somebody tells you that they have figured out how to make nuclear uh Fusion work in their garage with components that that they bought at the hardware store now that's a category of claim that's always untrue so you don't need to look at the details I mean you should probably yeah maybe you should look into them a little bit but you don't need to to know if it's probably not true right there's some things that are in that just category of probably not true and the the Rogue doctor who sees what nobody else can see only I have seen the truth and all the other experts in my field have not seen the truth and let me

[27:35]

field have not seen the truth and let me tell you I've treated 15 people and so I know what the randomized controlled trials do not know because of my 15 anecdotal examples all right now um yeah forget about the fact I called them Rogue let's say they're the the ones disagreeing with the mainstream whatever you want to call that uh in my experience I can't think of a single time that the lone doctor with the viral video has been right in the end can you now I know you can think some of some examples from all of history so for example you'll say well for every big change there was somebody who got there first so yeah for everything that we didn't have right in the past but now we do there was a rogue doctor Somebody went first but how about the last 10 years in the last 10 years how many videos have there been of the

[28:37]

how many videos have there been of the Rogue Doctor Who was the only one who sees everything the way it is how many of them turned out to be right you're once enough time had gone by that we know if they're right or wrong none none right the so the odds of the Rogue doctor being right are close to zero they're not zero though they're not zero so the trouble is that they're very convincing very convincing and somebody says Rand Paul uh that's a special case I I Rand Paul's a politician who also is a doctor I don't know if I would count that one that's sort of a special case so anyway um I would just say this if you believe that that doctor you saw in the video whichever doctor it was and whichever video it was if you believe them when they're disagreeing with all the other experts

[29:37]

the other experts they could be true it could be true but I'd say the odds of it are under 10 percent let's just say does anybody disagree with that by the way does any disability disagree with the sort of General notion that nine out of 10 of these doctors who have the secret and nobody else has it not even attend or right so to keep that in mind uh here's a interesting thing that happened on the internet today there was a Ken calanian who works for NBC News he tweeted that at least 125 000 fully vaccinated Americans have tested positive for a covid 125 000 fully vaccinated Americans still got coveted so what would that lead you to disagree to imagine about the vaccinations I sort of suggest they don't work that well doesn't it now here's Fox News

[30:38]

now here's Fox News they reported that of vaccinated people uh the total number of vaccinated people who died were .001 of the total that's called context good context how about hospitalizations .003 percent of all the hospitalizations for covet were a vaccinated people now that's data so and and the comments were fascinating because anytime Fox News is is on social media especially Twitter uh the all the anti-fox news people will come in and say Fox News is wrong about everything except this time that didn't happen this time the critics of Fox News and the comments said uh oh did Fox News just get this right with the accurate context and NBC News is misleading us even the people who don't like Fox News said oh this is right they got this right so uh of course I don't I can't speak to

[31:39]

so uh of course I don't I can't speak to the accuracy of any data but the way Fox News reported it was exactly the way the public wants to see this right we do also need to know that 125 000 vaccinated people got uh coveted so that's a big part of the story but if they're not dying that's the bigger part of the story so the other day I was saying that this is exactly how the news should report it they should tell us the deaths and hospitalizations and Fox News got it right now I'm not saying that I had anything to do with that I'm just saying that um they got it right now I've told you this before this is sort of a big deal um you could argue all a day about CNN and MSNBC and Fox News and you know which one's the bad one but Fox News is continuously better produced you can talk about the on-air Talent all day long who you like who you don't you

[32:41]

day long who you like who you don't you do or you don't like Tucker Carlson whatever but the just the quality of the uh back route what we do call them the support staff The Producers uh every part of the design of Fox News is really well done like substantially better done than their competition so if any uh Fox News producers are watching you guys kill it all the time I mean just consistently you're just killing it and I'm not sure if the public can tell how much of the quality of your work you know makes it up on the screen because you know the on-air Talent tends to get the credit so that was my news of the day somebody says Fox News is right wing propaganda well unfortunately we have a news business that does cater to its individual audiences so it can it can turn into that yes let's see what's to say um

[33:46]

I think they care well okay I'm just looking at some of your comments here for a minute
Scott appear on gutfield guffel Joe please I will do that I took several months off from appearing on other media because I just needed to get some other stuff done um
um let's see proof that Dominion election machines in Detroit had Wi-Fi connections go to this page nope nope I'm not going to go to that page because I don't believe that there is I don't believe it's true I don't believe that the evidence exists so I I do not believe that we have proofs that Dominion machines were connected to the internet I do believe you could prove that it's technically possible but proving that they were connected during the election or during any other time before or after

[34:48]

um so the question about whether the vaccinations themselves are causing the variance I don't really understand that argument
um don't understand it at all because wouldn't you get just as many variants with or without the vaccination if the vaccinations somebody do me a fact check on this all right I'll give you my dumb guy not a doctor not an expert thinking through it let's say you've got a you've got a big population and variants happen on their own right so the vaccination doesn't trigger the variant it's just one part of the filtering system that some people imagine allows more variants to break through but
um so viruses mutate but don't they view mutate exactly the same whether you're vaccinated or not

[35:48]

same whether you're vaccinated or not why would it change you remember the even the vaccinated people get the virus so in theory the vaccination shouldn't make like I don't see the mechanism that would cause a vaccination to increase the number of variants because the number of variants I just don't see it seems like it would decrease it like my common sense says if the if the vaccination causes fewer humans to have bad outcomes it will cause them to spread it less there should be less variance right just because there's less virus I would think that the only thing that causes variance is the total amount of virus and if the vaccination reduces the number of humans who have a virus doesn't that reduce the variance I guess somebody needs to explain them better let's see if there's somebody who knows this on the comments so it says the vax filters out only

[36:50]

so it says the vax filters out only leaving the variants well but those variants would be there anyway right so here's the mechanism so the mechanism that is suggested that I don't think is true so so this is just suggested by a commenter is that let's say the vaccination stopped all the normal virus but it couldn't stop a variant and the variant would break out but the variant was going to break out anyway right because if the variant exists and it wasn't it wasn't the vaccination that caused it right nobody says that we're saying that the vaccine vaccine simply allows it it doesn't cause it so if it's simply allowing something that happened anyway wasn't it going to happen anyway because it happened anyway it didn't have anything to do with the the vaccination the vaccination simply failed to stop it how does failing to stop something create more of it

[37:51]

create more of it it only fails to stop it and with or without the vaccination that would have failed to stop it too right so I guess we need more information on this uh I see Ada Ade variance forever the virus competes yeah I don't think any of you know how to explain that either so I'm not saying it's not true I'm just saying I don't understand how it could be true which is a little different all right that's all I got for now and I'll talk to you tomorrow