Episode 1366 Scott Adams: How to Decide on Getting Vaccinated, How to Author the Simulation, Propaganda Sightings, and More
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Content:
Facebook upholds President Trump ban
NYT propaganda
Atlantic propaganda
Whiteboard1: COVID Vaccination Risk Management
Whiteboard2: Simulation = Subjective Reality
Better school options could be reparations
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Well, if Twitter is telling me the truth, and why wouldn't it?
At least people on Twitter.
It looks like Facebook has upheld the suspension of Trump on Facebook.
So Trump will not be on Facebook.
I guess they have some semi-independent board that makes this decision to cover their butts.
But here's a question I ask.
Who still uses Facebook?
I swear to God, I just don't know who uses it.
Do you? You know, I have an account, and I do check it, But I feel that of the people I know, 5% actually post things.
And I don't know anybody who's, let's say, a teenager or younger who uses Facebook at all.
How could Facebook survive if teenagers aren't using it at all?
I don't know. I don't think the story here is Trump is not on Facebook.
The story might be, why is anybody on Facebook?
I don't even know the point of it, honestly.
I think it's already past its prime, isn't it?
Is there anything that you need Facebook for?
Alright, I know there are some businesses that require it, but I can't believe...
Well, I'm just going to say it.
You know, one of my BS filters is when observation doesn't match Data.
Now, perfect situation is that the world you observe and the data about that world seem very compatible.
But my observation is that people aren't using Facebook nearly as much as the data would suggest.
So there's a mystery here.
Don't know what it is. Could be just my observations.
Propaganda alert.
Boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop.
There's a story in the New York Times.
This judge, Amy Berman Jackson, says that Bill Barr misled her on how his Justice Department viewed Trump's actions.
Now this was about the Mueller report, etc.
Now here's the propaganda part of this.
So the headlines and the summary of the story is that Barr is a big old liar and he lied about the Mueller report.
Now here's your assignment.
Try to read the article that says Barr lied and figure out what the lie was.
Because I feel as if they wrote it to make it really hard to figure out what's going on when it should have been really easy.
It should have been, this is what he said, this is what was true.
Isn't a story about a lie or a series of lies the easiest story to tell?
Here's what he said.
Here's what's true.
See how they're different.
And yet it's written in this really confusing way where you'll see the headline and you'll absorb the fact that he lied and you'll get lost in the writing and you'll never quite see the argument for what he lied about Or any, you know, mitigating argument about why maybe he thinks it wasn't a lie.
So I would call that pure propaganda, just the way it's being presented.
So be alert for that.
All right. Here's the first provocative part of my live stream, at least today.
I'm going to tell you my decision process for vaccination or no vaccination.
Stop. Stop.
Stop. I know what you're thinking.
I'm not going to tell you you should get vaccinated.
Is that what you thought?
Get your hand away from the cancel button.
I'm not going to tell you you should get vaccinated.
That's for you to decide.
You, your doctor, whoever.
But the last person you want to listen to would be me.
Can we get on the same side on that before you start disagreeing with me?
Because there's going to be plenty of that.
So let's just agree on the part we agree on.
Don't take your medical advice from me, but here's what I would suggest you can take away from this.
You can take away a way of looking at it.
Compare it to your own way of looking at it, and see if there's anything in my way of looking at it that would give you a little way to fix up your own way of looking at it.
Also, look at the comments To anything I say next, because there may be some experts who weigh in and say, Scott, you got this wrong in a number of ways.
So, keep in mind that we're all dealing with incomplete information, right?
Wouldn't it be great if we had great information?
So how do you make a decision in a realm in which your information is incomplete?
Well, that's what I'm going to help you with today.
For those of you who are new to me, I'm mostly known as a Dilbert cartoonist guy.
But I also have a degree in economics, years of cost-benefit analyses in corporate worlds, on lots of complicated decisions.
I've got an MBA. And so risk management and cost-benefit decisions is my expertise, far more than cartooning.
But I'm not a health expert.
So your own decision should come from looking at the mechanism for making the decision, And then putting in your own estimates, right?
So I'm going to show you my own personal estimates.
Yours should be different.
And therefore, your overall decision could also be quite different using the same structure.
So here's where I started with.
Just a little background.
These are the different ways you could get some immunity.
You got the Moderna and Pfizer vaccinations.
That's the two vaccination deals.
The newer technology.
And these are the strongest, longest-lasting protections.
You also have the J&J one, which is one shot, but also natural immunity.
Let's say you'd already had the coronavirus.
These two will give you probably good enough protection.
It might not be as strong on paper as the top two choices, But it will be strong enough to probably reduce your odds of dying from the next exposure to the coronavirus, probably pretty close to zero.
So all of these are probably in the good enough range, and you probably won't get a choice anyway.
But if you did get a choice, just know that there's some difference here.
It might not be a difference that matters to your death rate, though.
So, if you just take the two choices, get vaccinated or don't get vaccinated, and I will look at your comments after I do this, so if you have some good comments, just wait until I'm ready to read them.
My personal odds of death.
Personal odds of death.
This is where you put in your own number.
So your assumption...
About your own risks should be based on your comorbidity, your weight, your gender, your ethnicity, apparently, and all the obvious stuff.
So my personal estimate is that if I were to get vaccinated, my odds of death from coronavirus and my odds of death from the vaccination itself basically round to zero.
It's something way less than 1%, right?
So when things are so much less than 1%, I treat them as zero.
So in terms of decision-making, it might be true that this risk or this risk is five times more than the other one, but they're both zero for all practical purposes.
Somebody says, can't be zero?
In practical sense, you can treat it as zero.
That's different from being zero.
So in a decision-making context, you can treat some things as zero, even though you know it's a little bit more than zero.
So work with me on this, right?
So I think that whether I get the vaccination or I don't, my odds of dying from a vaccination or from the virus, basically zero.
Now remember, this is my personal odds We're not talking about what happens to large populations.
That's separate. What are my odds of getting infected?
Well, even if you get the vaccination, apparently you can get reinfected.
But I do think that the weight of common sense and logic about this is that you have much less chance of getting infected if you've got the vaccination.
Still can happen. So I'm just going to put in a number, and this might be high, and you might want to put in your own number.
So again, don't judge me by what numbers I put in for myself, because that's none of your business.
You put in your own numbers, and that's none of my business.
Do you get that?
I want everybody to be clear.
I'm not telling you to get vaccinated or not.
I'm telling you to make up your own decision.
By putting in your own estimates.
I think if I don't get vaccinated based on how well I can socially distance and what my activities are likely to be, maybe as much as a 20% chance of getting infected.
But what are the risks of the long-haul or, let's say, long-term complications?
And when I say long-haul, I'm going to say that let's say you get the vaccination And somewhere down the line, there's some kind of complication that you didn't know about.
What are the odds of that?
Well, my understanding is that the nature of vaccines, according to the experts, is that if you're going to have a problem, you almost always have that problem right away, meaning the first weeks, first months.
There's very little, if any, history of getting a vaccination and then, you know, five years later, somebody's got a problem.
At least for this type of vaccination, at least according to the experts.
Do you believe them? No way to know, is there?
So this is the problem.
We don't have any certainty about any of this stuff.
So you have to make your own best guess, and that's the best you can do.
I'm going to say that the odds of getting a vaccination and then years in the future having a side effect are really small.
I don't know how small, but just for the purposes of making decisions, less than 1%.
Am I right?
How would I know?
I'm just saying that things like this, vaccinations, are in a class of risks in which the long-term risk is way, way smaller than your risk of something happening in the first few weeks.
And even the risk of something happening in the first few weeks is really, really small.
So I'd discount them to something less than 1%.
But if you don't get the vaccination, there is at least one study, again, it's just one study, who knows how accurate that is, that said that maybe up to 30% of people who get the virus have some kind of long-haul problem.
Now, long-haul means it could last months.
But do you believe that if you had a problem that made you mentally foggy, For nine months, which is a real thing.
This is happening to people.
Do you think that's not permanent?
Because we don't know that it's permanent.
But I can't imagine anything that, let's say at my current age, right?
Because it would be worse the older you are.
But at my current age, if I had nine months of brain fog, do you really think I'm going to come out the other end just as healthy?
I can't believe it.
But I also don't have evidence, one way or another, whether it's temporary or permanent.
But this is the one I worry about.
So I put about zero credibility in my odds of dying, personally, just personally.
But I think my odds of having some long-haul brain fog that is the scariest part, pretty good.
Now, what about the miscellaneous unknown risks?
How do you handle them? One of the miscellaneous unknown risks is, what if Bill Gates put a microchip in your vaccines?
I rate the value of that in my decision making at zero.
Zero. We'll talk about therapeutics.
Because it's a wild and crazy thing, and every decision...
Every decision has a whole bunch of things that could happen.
Could happen. You could get hit by a meteor.
You could explode spontaneously.
There's lots of stuff that could happen.
But I value them all at zero as a decision-making standard.
And I would suggest this for you as well.
Now, every situation is different.
But if you have this wild, well, maybe something could go wrong...
But there's no data to it, and you don't have experts worried about it.
In the situation where experts aren't terribly worried, and they do understand the realm, I give a zero.
What about the risk of long-term complications?
Like I said, probably less than 1%, but not zero.
Certainly not zero.
And what kind of weight do you put on peace of mind?
Well, this again is individual.
Some of you might have better peace of mind by not getting vaccinated.
And peace of mind, that counts, right?
That's a real thing.
It matters to your quality of life.
So if you think that getting the vaccination would make you panicked for years that it might have some side effect, well, take that into account.
My personal anecdotal experience is Was that getting the first of the two shots, I got the Moderna.
But getting the first made me feel better, not worse.
So in my mind, both my rational mind and I guess my irrational mind as well, I feel, and it's just a feeling, right?
Because we don't know the risks exactly, it's just a feeling.
I feel safer.
I feel safer.
Now, would you?
Would you feel safer getting a vaccination?
If you wouldn't, then maybe you take that into consideration.
I wasn't sure I would, but I do.
It's unambiguous in my case, but I can't guarantee that would happen to you.
The other thing is the social good.
So there's one thing to make a decision that is good for you, and you have every right, every right, morally, ethically, just completely, to just make a decision that's right for you without any regard to what it might mean to anybody else's health.
You have every right to do that, right?
Just as you have every right to not join the military.
But we do give respect to people who do.
Because we know that people who do join the military are taking on an extra risk, and a big part of that is for the benefit of other people, strangers, people they've never met, other Americans.
So, this is one of these rare cases where people like me, and your situation could be completely different, so this should not influence your decision, but I've had a good run, meaning I've reached a certain age, and if I died tomorrow, taking on some risk that might have been in a small way beneficial to the country, I'm okay with that.
I feel that's a risk that I'm willing to take.
If you were really young, maybe you would weight things differently.
You'd have more years to live than I do, so your cost-benefit is a little bit different.
But in my case, I did not join the military.
I did not serve the country in that way, which I respect.
But here's a situation where I can be part of maybe reducing the spread.
Maybe I'm a small part of making it safer to go out to eat if you're not vaccinated.
Maybe I can make it safer for those of you who don't want to get vaccinated.
I count that as something useful.
Now, how much weight you give that?
Totally personal, completely personal decision.
Now, somebody asked about therapeutics.
What about therapeutics?
The problems with therapeutics are availability, Do you actually have availability of...
I know some of you think ivermectin works.
Some of you think hydroxychloroquine works.
I'm not a doctor.
I'm not promoting either of those for any reason whatsoever.
I'm just saying that some of you have asked me about them.
I don't know that you would have the availability.
I don't know that you would know to start early enough.
And I don't know what their risk profile is relative to the vaccinations.
I think they're all such a low risk that doing any one of them is probably pretty close to zero risk.
Yes, if you get the vaccine, it doesn't mean that you can't get the virus again, which is what I indicated on my board there.
All right, so I would say that your therapeutic decision you should treat somewhat separately.
If you're not going to get the vaccination, well, maybe you think a little bit more about the therapeutics.
And if you do get the vaccination, maybe that's one less thing you have to worry about.
All right. Is everybody okay with the way I've described this and not giving you any pressure to change your mind?
That's not my deal.
And you shouldn't take any medical advice from me.
But if it helps you think about it differently, that's all I was trying to do.
All right. You want to get weird?
You want to get weird? Come on.
Let's get weird. All right.
I've told you about this thing called affirmations before, where you just focus on something you want to happen to your life, something good.
It's better to have a general affirmation, such as wealth, or finding love, or being healthy, that sort of thing, as opposed to being too specific, as in, I'll get this specific promotion.
And, of course, this is related, or might be, to the idea that we live in a simulation of Or the idea that our reality is subjective, which I'm going to argue today is not really too different from living in a simulation.
Now the simulation idea is that there's some entity or intelligence that programmed us and we're basically software, but we don't know it.
So that's what the simulation assumes.
But suppose that's not the case exactly.
But rather, there's some base reality, but we're not evolved enough to see it.
So we think we can interact with a real reality, but really we just all have little movies in our head that are the reality for us, for all practical purposes.
So, although these are different ideas, they're not so different, because they both require an intelligence that's creating an artificial world.
One is in a computer...
One is in your mind, but your mind is basically just a moist computer.
So I'm going to treat them as though they're a little bit similar because it's a good way to make my point about affirmations.
Now, if we're in a simulation, or, and here's the fun part, or if we just live in a subjective reality that has some base to it, but we don't have access to it, in either case, we might be able to program it.
Through affirmations. Now, this is just a hypothesis, and it's just for fun.
Don't take any of this too seriously.
It's just a different filter on the world.
I'm going to tell you about a little experience after I give you a little more context.
If we're a simulation, or a subjective reality, in both cases, there's probably some computer constraints.
Your brain is only going to be able to hold so many things, and a computer only has so much memory.
So you would have code reuse, which is certain patterns you would see over and over again.
Now, would those patterns start to be more common?
In other words, would you see more coincidences and more reused patterns as the simulation gets populated and filled up and the capacity gets constrained?
Well, I think you would, naturally.
And so you would start cutting corners to save resources.
So you would reuse ideas, reuse code, reuse patterns to create your simulated reality.
You would also, if you had computer constraints, you wouldn't ever see any good pictures of aliens, because you don't really need any aliens.
It would be extra.
You don't want to build a whole world of aliens that nobody's ever going to see.
That would be a waste of resources.
So I don't think we'll ever see real aliens.
It makes sense that the universe is finite in size.
Your brain can't understand that.
It makes no sense.
But we do know that the universe is expanding, And therefore, at any moment, it's a finite size.
How does that even make sense?
It only makes sense if we're a simulation, because the simulation has to constrain how much resources it uses.
And then this is just for fun.
Doesn't it seem like there are too many houses for how many people there are?
If you were going to build a simulation, you wouldn't...
Put people in the houses if people are just going to drive by and not see them.
You would have lots of empty houses because it would seem as though they were populated, but it would be the lowest resource way to create the impression of a large population without having to program lots of people.
There would just be lots of houses.
Now, if you've ever noticed that your neighborhood seems to have way more houses or homes or apartments than there are people walking around, well, Maybe you live in a simulation.
Again, if you're just joining, this is just for fun.
Don't take it too seriously.
All right. What would you see if the patterns are being reused and there's a resource problem?
You'd see more coincidences, right?
Have you noticed an acceleration of coincidences lately?
I want to see in the comments if anybody's noticed this.
In your own life, have you seen an acceleration of patterns being reused...
Just recently, like the last year or two, and coincidences.
Look at the comments.
Now, I see a lot of no's, but look how many yes's there are.
All right, now that's probably confirmation bias, right?
Probably you're just noticing it, but maybe there's no greater coincidence than ever.
But if we're a simulation, You would sort of expect to see more coincidences just because of code reuse and pattern reuse.
So I have this hypothesis that you can author the simulation just by affirmations.
It doesn't mean that you have to write it down or chant it or do anything.
You just have to focus on what you want and put your intentions very clearly into the universe.
And as long as there's nobody who has the opposite intention, who's trying to, you know, program things the other way, maybe you get what you want.
So, Christina and I, here's the freaky part.
Are you ready? We did an experiment in the past few weeks.
And the experiment was to see if we could use affirmations to just focus on an intention for free money to appear to us.
Now, by free money, I mean something that we didn't plan or something that wouldn't be part of my normal work.
So, for example, if somebody had offered me, let's say, a book contract, that wouldn't count.
Because that's sort of my normal routine is that I get contracts.
I don't always know when they're coming.
I'm talking about a weird money from nothing.
Like just magic money that just appears.
That's what we were affirming.
So we start doing this and a few days later my publisher, my syndication company, says, you know, your contract that we've had for 10 years is running out and the new contract specifies that you'll get a signing bonus and we're going to give you this bunch of money.
And I thought, well, I had no idea that was coming.
And it happened just days, just a few days, after we'd started this experiment.
And sure enough, this little unexpected pile of money came my way.
But I said to myself, I don't know if this counts.
Because it was in the contract.
It was, you know, I didn't know about it.
But it was something I did to make it happen, right?
It's something I negotiated years ago.
Or actually, I negotiated recently.
And so we said, let's just keep going, because that one doesn't count, right?
Yeah, that one doesn't count. So then I get an email, just days later, just a few days later, I get an email, also from my syndication company, saying that they couldn't remember if they'd told me, but they noticed in the contract that after 10 years, there was a guaranteed true-up number, meaning that if some goals were not met, they would owe me a large amount of money.
And they had already wired it to me so that I wouldn't be surprised that a large amount of money appeared in my bank.
No idea. I had no idea that 10 years ago I had negotiated so cleverly that under these conditions that happened, I would get a large pile of money.
Does that count?
Nope. Not going to count it.
Not going to count it.
Because I negotiated that.
Right? I just forgot about it.
So that's not really magic, is it?
That's just something I forgot about.
Kind of a coincidence.
So that's like two coincidences, but I would say we don't count those.
So I said to Christina, let's not count those.
Let's just keep going. We'll just try to make some really weird magic money appear.
Yesterday, I decided to sign up for Coinbase and realized that I'd already signed up before.
Now, Coinbase is the place for trading cryptos, etc.
And I signed into my crypto wallet that I hadn't used forever because I don't really play in the crypto field at all.
You know, I've just dabbled.
And I was doing it for a specific thing.
I was actually just moving the money around from the NFT, the Dilbert NFT that just sold on auction.
So I was just, you know, signing up to my accounts to move that around.
And I opened up my account, and there's this really big number there, which is weird because I didn't have anything in my account that I remembered.
But it turns out that some time ago in my past, I don't remember it specifically, I thought to myself that I wanted to buy something with some cryptocurrency.
And apparently I had bought some crypto just to use for some expenses.
I wasn't planning to keep it or hold it or anything.
And you may have heard of it.
It's something called Ethereum.
It turns out, those of you who follow crypto, you're already laughing.
That's right.
I accidentally, completely accidentally, bought Ethereum at the bottom.
I think I put less than a few thousand dollars into it at the time.
It's worth $300,000 today.
$300,000.
Out of nowhere.
Literally, not literally, but just out of nowhere.
It just appeared.
Now, that's my story.
Now, I can only tell you that Christine and I were legitimately testing to see if we could make money appear out of nowhere.
I'm not lying. These things actually happened.
And like I say, the first two, you could say that those were just coincidence and nothing special.
But the Ethereum, I didn't even know I owned it.
I mean, I didn't even know.
And when I did own it, it wasn't worth anything, right?
It was just a few thousand dollars.
So that's my story.
Let's talk about something else.
There's a propaganda article in The Atlantic which is trying to tell us that China is no big problem to us after all.
Now, what do you think about that when you see a story that says, you know, Joe Biden was right.
China's no big deal.
Their military is a paper tiger because they have to use most of their military resources to control their own public, which is a good point, actually.
That their economy is in trouble because there are going to be too many senior citizens, their population may have decreased, and they've got all kinds of problems.
Now, I think all those things are reasonably true, but this article doesn't mention all the fentanyl they're sending us and all the persuasion they're doing by the Internet and stealing of intellectual property, which will be forever, and trying to dominate the Internet and God knows what.
So, I have a mixed feeling here when we see that China isn't the big problem that some people think.
Because if they're sending us fentanyl and killing 50,000 people a year, I feel like that's our biggest problem, isn't it?
And that's just one little thing they're doing.
So I still think they're our biggest problem, but I would agree with The tone of the article that the United States has more advantages than they do, and that might last.
So I won't be too worried about them, but we have to put maximum pressure on that situation.
So big story today.
There are these new emails being released from the Mueller investigation showing the private communications of, let's say, Flynn, Manafort, Bannon, Kushner, etc., And here's the thing.
They don't seem to have any news value.
But they're in the news.
Since when is it okay to just publish people's private email when there's no news value?
Because I don't believe there's even a claim that anything in them has any news value.
This is just disgusting.
Like, what if we become...
That this is okay.
And why is anybody okay with this?
I don't think this has to do with what political side you're on.
I mean, I'd be saying the same if this were Democrats or Republicans.
I mean, why are we looking at private emails?
This is way beyond okay.
So here's a little stuff I learned about the Arizona audit of the 2020 election in Maricopa County.
So... I did not know this.
Did you know that prior audits were statistically valid, meaning that they had enough of a sample that they already audited, that statistically speaking, if there had been a problem that the sample was big enough, that it would have found it.
But would it? I would like to question that.
If you do an audit that only samples, no matter how good your representative sample is, is that really going to catch fraud?
Because it seems to me fraud would be in a pocket, and there's no reason to believe that your random sample is going to hit that pocket, or even if it did, that one bad ballot would tell you there were some massive problems.
Somebody says the samples were curated.
Yeah, the other problem is you never know, right?
You never know, because humans do the auditing.
So all you need is humans who want it to go a certain way, and you're probably going to get it.
But if it's true that the representative sample found absolutely zero problems, which is being reported, Then maybe this will be zero.
So I would say that the odds of the Arizona audit coming out with some massive story about election irregularity probably gets lower every day.
So we're just guessing without any information from our perspective.
But every day that you don't hear a leak, Makes me suspicious.
Because if there were big problems found, I'm positive it would have leaked already.
Even though they want not to leak, even though they're trying not to leak, they really don't want to leak because then we'll get inoculated before they have the big reveal, maybe.
But I just don't think this could not leak.
It's just not in the category of things that don't leak.
It would be too easy to leak.
So if we haven't heard anything yet, I think the odds of that coming up with something get lower every day.
But not zero. And like I always said, whether there was any fraud or not, there will be.
There will be. Because it's a system...
That there's a high incentive to do something with it, and there are enough people who want to, that over time, somebody's going to be successful.
You just don't know if it's happened yet.
All right. I guess the Olympics is banning Black Lives Matter apparel, as well as all political clothing.
And I think to myself...
Why do we have Olympics?
Olympics are just a total waste of time.
There are a few things that I dislike as much as the Olympics because it masquerades as a good thing, but I don't think it is.
I think it's kind of a dark thing because for every few people who win some medals, there are all these people who wasted their entire youth training for something that made no difference at all to them.
So I just don't like the model of it.
But we'll see if they can get away with getting rid of the Black Lives Matter and other political statements.
One of the ways that you know that the news is controlling us is that there are some things that look easy to solve that don't get solved.
It's because the news keeps us on our teams and battling each other.
And one of them is school choice.
Because it seems to me that if black Americans wanted reparations and they also wanted better school choice to fix the schools, they would just pair those two topics and say, look, I know it's going to be difficult to write checks.
It's probably too much to ask for that checks would go out because we couldn't figure out who should pay and how much and who gets it.
But how about this?
How about we all agree that the schools could be better And how about we say that we'll treat reparations as having been solved if you work with us to make the schools for everybody, but it'd be a bigger improvement for the black community because they're in a bigger hole.
If we make the schools better for everybody, we're just going to call that reparations and we'll be even.
Because it's the biggest need, it's the biggest source of ongoing systemic racism, is the Teachers unions blocking school choice.
So this is one of those cases where there's such an obvious path that it has to be that we're all brainwashed to not solve these problems.
And I would say that one of the big problems with especially black leadership, but I guess this would be true of any kind of leadership from any group, so no reason to think it would be especially true in the black community, but the leaders have a different incentive to Than the people who are being led.
The leader's incentive is to keep as much conflict going as possible because that's how they thrive.
What's good for the leaders is to not solve the problem because then there's no reason for a leader if you solve everything.
So as long as we have that situation plus massive propaganda, there will be somewhat easy solutions to problems that just won't be done because we're at each other's necks.
All right, and there's a story about The Intercept.
I think Glenn Greenwald was one of the founders of The Intercept, but now he is no longer with them and is a critic of them.
I guess they're...
And what they did is they somehow got a hold of hacked information from the Gab social media network that they claim has lots of extremists on it, and...
They're going to search through this personal data from the Gab hack to do the FBI's work, as Glenn Greenwald says, to find the extremists.
And I'm thinking to myself, how is this okay?
How is this okay?
Because let's say there are some extremists that they find, and these extremists, let's say, hypothetically, they're really bad people.
Are they as bad as the people at the Intercept?
I mean, really? If you were going to rank people on how much they suck, let's say you really hated the extremists of whatever, and you say, ah, they're a 10 out of 10 of suckiness.
I hate those extremists.
Well, where the hell are the Intercept people who are taking private information from hackers and pouring through it to ruin the lives of their extremists?
That's sort of a 10, right?
I mean, these are both despicable, potentially.
We don't know about the gab people, but that's the allegation.
I don't know that they're going to find worse people than they are.
These are pretty bad people at The Intercept.
Bad, bad people.
All right. This is coming to the conclusion of my amazing, amazing live stream.
And since I wasn't watching the comments as closely as I sometimes do, as I was looking at my whiteboard, I wanted to see where you came out on this one, because it's a little weirder than most.
What happened at the end yesterday?
Oh, so a lot of people are saying that my livestream got cut off yesterday.
But I'm not aware of it.
So on my end, I only saw your comments saying it was cut off, but it was never cut off to me.
So I just completed it as normal, and then afterwards I heard people say it was cut off.
So I don't know anything about it.
It's possible that it was some kind of Decision at YouTube?
Maybe some censor yanked it for some reason?
I don't know. Somebody's asking if I write down my affirmations.
The one rule of affirmations, and this is the one rule that you can never violate.
Don't ask me the details of affirmations.
Because if you ask me the details, it means you didn't understand it.
It's about focus.
If you can focus by, you know, peeing in the snowbank...
Or writing it down, or chanting, or just thinking about it every day, or meditating, telling your friends about it, whatever.
It doesn't matter. I don't think it's sensitive to technique.
I think it's all about focus.
And your focus might be different.
Have I locked myself down again?
I don't know what you mean. Because I got the vaccination?
I mean, I've been socially distancing pretty aggressively.
Trump on Candace Owens' show?
I did not see it, but that sounds fun.
So it's good to know that's there.
You can't focus your way out of cancer.
Well, can't you?
It depends. If reality is just the way it looks, well then no.
But if reality is a simulation, then yes.
There just has to be no conflicting information that you do have cancer or that it will kill you.
Now, I'm not saying don't go to the doctor because you can use affirmations.
That would be dumb. Do you prefer staying at home?
Well, that's an embarrassing question.
I do think that people like me are going to have some trouble adjusting to a post-pandemic world.
Because I've got some serious introvert stay-at-home impulses, and it's not going to be easy for me to be in public again.
I can tell you that in the few cases where I've been out and about where I just had more stimulation, still socially distanced, but having more stimulation around people, it was hard.
I had to run away and just hide at one point.
Just because there were too many people in my day.
I had to go to a quiet room and just be by myself for a while.
So, a lot of people who are sort of in my side of the equation, you know, the people who are, say, less thrilled by social interaction than some of the rest of you, it's going to be tough to go back to normal life.
