Episode 1360 Scott Adams - Biden Speech, Senator Tim Scott's Rebuttal Through the Persuasion Filter

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Back to episode — Episode 1360 Scott Adams - Biden Speech, Senator Tim Scott's Rebuttal Through the Persuasion Filter

Context —

at an A-plus for insulting tweets. It's not quite Trump level, but it's pretty darn good. We could have just done this by email. It's like the ultimate insult if your address could have been done by email. All right, let's see how the reactions were. Even CNN said that for a first speech to Congress, Biden got the lowest very positive reaction. So here's how CNN described it. Biden had 51%. But T…

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ace theory is the way. Imagine a world with no critical race theory and no media pushing it and no wokism and none of that. Would white supremacists be as dangerous as many people think they are? I don't think so. I think that white supremacists, just like everybody else, respond to the news. So if the news is telling them they're under threat, what the hell are they going to do?

So it seems to me that ignoring the media as the biggest threat to democracy is really a giant blind spot.

Biden said that he promised 100 million COVID-19 shots in 100 days, but he will reach over 220 million in 100 days. Unambiguously good. But here's the thing. Do you think that Trump would not have continued fine-tuning the process and also gotten to the same level? What evidence do we have that this wouldn't have been exactly the same under Trump? Because all this fine-tuning, the things that they figured out and improved, the ways to make more vaccine, the ways to get more people involved, that's all happening at the administration level, right? It's not like the president said get CVS involved, get Walgreens on the phone. Did he? I mean, did either of them? I feel as if we would be in exactly the same place because the president isn't doing any of this. The president is watching and taking credit.

You know, after you get things going, unambiguously Trump was responsible for Project Warp Speed because it's well documented that he forced people to do things they didn't want to do. That's actual leadership. But simply letting your bureaucracy perform exactly the way you'd expect them to, I'm going to say that that probably would have been the same under Trump. I think it would have been, or at least we have no evidence that it should have been different in any way.

But it is nonetheless a great accomplishment. And I remember that I told you in the beginning that you could not predict how well we would do with vaccinations in the final months by looking at anything that happened in the beginning months. I told you that that curve was going to go, and in the final months we'd be just so good at it, getting vaccines to the right people, that it would look amazing. And what happened? Several months into the vaccines, we got so good at it, it looks amazing. I mean, it doesn't even look possible it's so good. I guess half of adults have got at least one shot.

All right. CNN says that Biden is casting vaccines as a way to get everyone back to normal and that it's a key tactic Biden will employ to pressure people to get the shots. Now, he did say some things like that. He talked about parents saying the smiles on their kids' faces because everybody's vaccinated and grandparents hugging their children and grandchildren because they're vaccinated and stuff. So he does do a little of that.

But conservatives, some of conservatives' most pointed criticism is that at least the CDC and Fauci and those people are not doing this. So the criticism

Context —

is that the government is not doing a good enough job saying if you get your vaccination, at least you can go back to something normal. Rather, Biden is still talking about normal, but the actual guidelines are not so normal. So I think the conservative criticism is accurate. But CNN is saying that Biden is doing this. I don't think he is. I think he's doing it a little bit, which is really differ…

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Wisdom from this episode

"White supremacists, just like everybody else, respond to the news. So if the news is telling them they're under threat, what the hell are they going to do? It seems to me that ignoring the media as the biggest threat to democracy is really a giant blind spot."

Extremists of any kind react to the news like everyone else. If media keeps telling them they are under threat, they will act accordingly—so treating media as the primary threat to democracy is a massive blind spot.

"After you get things going, unambiguously Trump was responsible for Project Warp Speed because it's well documented that he forced people to do things they didn't want to do. That's actual leadership. But simply letting your bureaucracy perform exactly the way you'd expect them to, I'm going to say that that probably would have been the same under Trump."

Real leadership is when a president forces reluctant people and systems into action, as with Project Warp Speed. Once the bureaucracy is running, it performs as expected no matter who is president, who then simply watches and claims credit.

"You could not predict how well we would do with vaccinations in the final months by looking at anything that happened in the beginning months. That curve was going to go, and in the final months we'd be just so good at it, getting vaccines to the right people, that it would look amazing."

Early performance on a complex new rollout like mass vaccinations tells you nothing about how optimized and effective it will become months later. The improvement curve makes final results look extraordinarily successful.