Episode 1436 Scott Adams: A Hypnotist Explains the Psychology of Pandemic Fear
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
5 things that control your mood
12 FBI informants?
The facts about Texas voting law changes
Voter suppression?
Vaccination psychology
Fear based decisions
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Hey, everybody. Welcome to another day of Coffee with Scott Adams, which is, yes, that's right, the best hour of the day, sometimes even when it's not an hour.
Sometimes I'll be done in 35 minutes, and it's still the best hour of the day.
How do I do that? I don't know.
I don't know. It's just like magic.
But if you'd like to take it up a level, and you do, right?
Don't you want to take it up a level?
There's an op-ed piece today by Jason Reilly in the Wall Street Journal.
Somebody says I should check that out.
All right. But before we do that, all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tanker, a chalice, a stein, a canteen, a jaguar flask, a vessel of any kind, except the kind that have holes in them.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
Join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes...
Everything better. It's called the simultaneous hip and it happens now.
Go. I'm going to give you now, because I love you all so much, I'm going to give you one of the most useful tips you've ever had in your whole life.
If that sounds like an exaggeration, well, wait till you hear it.
This might change everything.
Because it did for me.
This is one of those, I guess, reframes or different ways of looking at the world.
For me, once I saw it, I can never unsee it.
And now everything is filtered through this filter.
And I'm going to give you the filter.
Like most of these tips, they don't work on everybody all the time.
But for some percentage of you watching this right now, This is going to blow your frickin' mind.
But it won't happen right now.
The mind-blowing happens later.
Once it sort of sinks in, have I built it up enough?
Here it comes. Keep track of your good days versus your bad days.
You know, the days you're happiest versus the days you're not.
And then track the following things.
And ask yourself, which of these happened in the last 24 hours?
Did you get good exercise?
Just track your mood within 24 hours of exercising, especially the same day.
If you exercise in the morning, it probably sets you up pretty good.
So track your exercise.
Did you learn something useful?
Did you learn something?
Watch how often, on a day when you learn something useful, you're having a good day.
How about intimate relations?
Did you have some intimate relations with your loved one or somebody else, I suppose?
And watch how often you're in a good mood that day and maybe a little bit the next day as well.
How about food and sleep?
Did you eat healthy food or did you eat a bunch of crap?
Check your mood after you've eaten well that day or the prior day.
And then look at your sleep.
Did you get enough?
If you track just these five things, you're going to learn something about yourself that will blow your head off, which is that your moods are almost entirely created by these five things.
Now some of you might want to add a category, right?
There might be something you do that totally changes your day.
For example, my wife, if she goes flying, like yesterday and today, she gets so much joy about being in the air that it makes her whole day good for about 24 hours.
So find out those five or six things.
Which, you know, influence your life.
And then just track it.
And you're going to find that your good days that you think are about what's happening, you know, to you today, not much relevance there.
It's mostly these five things.
Did you exercise? Did you learn something?
Did you have some close personal relationship that is meaningful?
Did you eat right?
And did you get enough sleep?
Just do those things.
Somebody's saying in the comments, did you accomplish something significant?
Now, I think we all know that that makes a good day, if you accomplish something significant.
But I don't think it's necessary.
Because if you've learned something, you feel like you're on the system, right?
You feel like you're moving somewhere.
And if your body and everything else are good, and you've got a good relationship, and you've exercised that relationship, if you know what I mean, Once you learn that these things are controlling your thoughts, you'll realize that your thoughts and your experience are just one unit.
You tend to think of your brain as this physical thing that's over here doing its thing.
And then there's your environment that's off doing its thing.
And sure, that environment influences your brain.
But think of it as just one big brain.
And if you're sleeping, That's good for your brain if you're exercising, etc.
Alright, that's your most useful tip for the day.
Something like 10-20% of you just experienced the beginning of a substantial improvement in your life.
Like, really big.
About 20% of you.
The rest of you maybe already knew it.
Alright. There was a funny tweet today that I believe this person is admitting was not entirely original, but Asia Flyer tweeted today, at this point in time, I would feel safer if the coronavirus held a press conference to advise how to protect myself against the government.
That's a pretty good line.
I don't know who thought of it first, so Asia Flyer's not taking credit for it.
Yeah, let's have the coronavirus tell us how to protect ourselves from our own government.
I wish that didn't make sense, but it kind of does.
All right. New news about the FBI. Apparently, they allegedly used it.
There were at least 12 informants in that situation where there were a bunch of people who tried to release a plan to kidnap the governor of Michigan and try her for, I don't know, some imagined crimes.
So there were 12 informants, and the question is...
Did the informants make it happen?
Were they contributing to the fact that maybe it wasn't going to happen unless the informants were goading them a little bit?
And the answer is we don't know.
But here's the bigger context.
Is the FBI even on our side anymore?
Have you noticed how many stories will...
Show the FBI or some intelligence agency from the United States not always looking like they're on our side.
Right? It's a little bit confusing.
We'll talk about...
Giuseppe, we'll get to your point here in a minute.
All right. So how many cases do we have the FBI and intelligence agencies being questioned?
We could go back to Russia collusion...
When we first learned that our intelligence agencies absolutely can't be trusted.
Or was it really the first Iraq war with the weapons of mass destruction?
Not the first one, the second one.
What about that?
What about the weapons of mass destruction?
Intelligence agencies failed.
What about the riot slash insurrection, as some call it, on the Capitol?
Did the intelligence or FBI have anything to do with that?
Don't know. Do they have anything to do with our election security?
I don't know. I don't know.
But it's kind of sad that we're...
Yeah, Epstein, etc., Iran-Contra...
There's a pretty long list of things that our own intelligence agencies are at least implicated in or suspected of.
Yeah, I'm seeing all the...
Yeah, Haiti.
Were we behind Haiti?
What about Cuba? Is the United States behind the Cuban protests?
Probably, right?
Don't you assume that even if they didn't start it, they at least got involved a little bit?
Why wouldn't they? Yeah.
So we definitely have a different situation with our own intelligence agencies, which is, if you're trusting them...
Maybe you shouldn't.
Maybe you shouldn't. There was an Instagram star, an influencer, who liked to take pictures of herself poised on dangerous cliffs.
She fell into one of those cliffs and now she's dead.
This is one of my fears, because you might know that my wife Christina takes a lot of selfies for her Instagram page, and she does sometimes stand in very dangerous places to get the best picture.
And I've got to say, this is my nightmare scenario of her falling, trying to take a picture.
So there's nothing funny about this, except we've reached a point where Vanity is worth more than life itself.
That people will take the risk of literally dying.
Literally dying.
And somebody says, my wife does that garbage, pisses me off every time.
Yeah, because it feels like risking their life and your life too for a picture, doesn't it?
It feels like, you know, you're sort of, you know...
If somebody who is a loved one falls over a cliff, it's not like it just affects them.
You know, I'm thinking it's like me on the cliff, right?
It doesn't even feel like it's someone else.
It just feels like it's you on the cliff.
All right. Biden made a speech on voting rights, and there's a clip that came out of it that I'm having trouble believing is real.
I assume there's some context left out.
But have you seen the video of Biden saying that it's more about who counts the votes than it is about the votes?
Which is sort of a call back to...
Wasn't it Stalin who said that?
That it's who counts the votes that matters, not who votes?
Yeah, it's a Stalin quote.
And there's a clip of Biden saying it yesterday.
Basically saying it with his own words, not a quote.
And I thought to myself, were we missing some context?
Was there something else that would have made that sound not as bad as it sounds?
It's as if at least the Democrats are making two simultaneous arguments.
One is that the election was fine, and the other is that elections are never fine.
Right? Doesn't it feel like that?
They're trying to take two positions that are opposites?
Yeah, this election was totally fine.
Everything was good about this election.
Also, all elections are not fine.
I feel like you've got to take a stand.
Either they're all fine or they're not.
And if they're not, we should be able to question it.
And if they are, well, make your case that they're all fine.
I suppose you can't prove a negative, so I guess you'd have to prove that they're not fine.
That would be the more fair way to do it.
But certainly it seems that Biden is admitting that our voting system has problems.
Can't you take that away from it?
Yeah, binary theater, exactly.
Binary theater is where you act like it's all one thing or all the other thing.
So this next piece will give you a real feeling about how bad our news situation is.
You ready for this? So Greg Abbott, who wanted to respond to Biden saying that Texas in particular is trying to pass a bunch of laws to make it harder to vote and to suppress the vote from presumably Democrats, presumably black Americans, which would be the accusation, And of course, Greg Abbott says, you're lying, Biden, basically.
I'm paraphrasing. And he said that the Texas legislature is passing a law that, quote, expands early voting hours and prevents mail-in ballot fraud.
So which one is true?
Oh, if you're watching on Locals and you're only getting a black screen, it's working fine.
You may have to try a different browser or restart your browser or something.
But it's working fine for everybody else.
So who's lying?
Is Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, lying?
That the rules being contemplated won't make it harder to vote and won't be voter suppression?
Is that a lie?
Or is that true?
And is Biden lying?
Is Biden taking something that is nothing but normal protection of an election process and somehow turning that into something that it isn't?
Which one's lying?
Let me ask you this.
Show me a link to the publication that lists each of the rule changes that Texas is contemplating and then judges each of those rule changes to be either a standard practice that's just good for an election, keeps things secure, or could have no purpose other than suppression.
Find me that article.
I'll bet you can't.
And here's the mindfuck.
I'll bet you can't.
Because isn't that the biggest story in the country?
The biggest story in the country should be, here's the list, each bullet point, for the things they want to change.
And here's the analysis that says, okay, this one just makes sense.
This one looks a little sketch, because I don't think this one is going to make anything more secure, but it might suppress the vote.
This next one looks good.
This next one could be either way.
Right? If you were going to write the story, and you were not a partisan, and you just wanted to objectively write the story about the Texas election rule changes, isn't that what you would do?
You would just list them all, and then you'd say, that will suppress, or that will just make things better.
Right? Where's that?
Good luck. Good luck finding any article that gives you information that you could use.
Every article will either take a position that there's nothing here to see or that it's voter suppression.
The news completely stopped being news.
I guess maybe you already knew that.
But there used to be at least some pretending, right?
At least there was some pretending.
Now I don't believe there's even one publication who's even made the slightest attempt to tell you what the actual news is.
You know, what are the facts?
How do we see these facts?
Nobody. Right?
And I'm looking in your comments because if somebody had seen such an article, you'd be saying, oh, read the Washington Post article or read the Washington, you know, the Wall Street Journal.
You know, I haven't looked for every source, but I'll bet you, I'll bet you the news doesn't exist.
All right, Henry Cruz says the New York Times had loads of facts.
Did they? Did they?
How did they organize them?
Did they organize them the way I said, which would allow you to understand them?
Or was it in a dense narrative in which by the time you were done you weren't quite sure of the pluses and the minuses?
I'll bet you it was in a dense narrative and it was not just a bunch of bullet points and a few words about each one.
Because that would tell you what's happening.
Anything else is just propaganda.
All right. So here are some of the counterpoints that I saw just on a tweet that made me think of this.
So it doesn't matter who tweeted it, but some rando tweeted about Greg Abbott's complaints that there was nothing about voter suppression here.
The counterpoint was, and do a fact check on me here.
So each of these things I'm going to say, I don't know them to be true.
It's just something I saw on Twitter.
Is Texas banning 24-hour early voting?
Is that happening? Is Texas banning 24-hour early voting?
Now, the governor says they're expanding early voting hours.
But is that the same topic?
Or is expanding early hours the same as 24-hour early voting?
Because I think there's just word games going on here, right?
So I don't even understand what's happening.
So, I'm seeing in the comments what I think is the case, which is that the day of voting, you could vote earlier, which would be good, good for everybody, but maybe you can't vote the day before.
Is that what changed?
Could you not argue that getting rid of voting the day before would suppress votes?
How would you think otherwise?
Somebody says, what does suppression mean in this context?
Well, suppression could mean that for some people with some kinds of jobs, it's harder to get away to vote.
So if you give them more options of times they can vote, you increase the odds that somebody who's having trouble scheduling it can make it happen.
Dave Rubin said the National Review, of all places, had your bullet point list.
If somebody could send me a link to that, not here, but you know where to find me.
Send me a link to that on Twitter.
I'd like to see it. Alright, but in any event, it's certainly not a common way that it's being portrayed.
Alright, here's another one. Is there banning drive-through voting?
Is that happening? Is somebody banning drive-through voting?
I'm not even sure what drive-through voting is exactly, except I guess you don't get out of your car.
Now, why would they be banning that?
What exactly would be the problem with drive-through voting?
So, all right, I'm seeing a lot of people suggesting Dave Rubin handle this, so I'll go check that out.
So I don't know why they'd ban drive-through voting.
There must be more to that story.
How about asking for voter ID for mail-in ballots?
I feel like that's kind of fair.
Are you telling me that we didn't require any kind of indication of identification for a mail-in ballot?
Is that true? I didn't even know that was true.
Was that always true?
That you could just mail in your ballot without any photocopy of your ID or anything?
So it does seem to me that that would suppress the vote, for sure.
Makes it a little harder.
But it also makes it harder to cheat.
So would it be fair that this is a case of voter suppression, or would it be a case of just making an election more secure?
Well, it looks like both, doesn't it?
But if it suppresses and also makes things more secure, which way do you go?
Do you say, well, making it more secure is not worthwhile?
I guess it depends how unsecure it becomes.
Oops, hold on. That's what the whole mail-in voting thing is about, identifying who are suddenly men.
You know, I always thought that there was at least some way to check that they were real.
And maybe not.
Maybe not. Okay.
So, and are all the other items even important?
Or is this having ID for mail-in votes?
Maybe that's the only one that matters.
Do any of the other things even make a difference?
They checked my ID, but I had no confidence my vote went through, somebody says.
Somebody says that they checked your ID... ID and signature matching are all that matter.
So they do a signature match?
I don't know how good that is.
When was the last time you signed your name the same way?
Am I the only person who signs their name different every time?
When you're signing your, let's say, your credit card thing or whatever, do you use the same signature?
Yeah, I just do a scribble.
I mean, for the last ten years, I don't even try to do my name.
I just go... Right?
But some of you actually sign your name the way, like, a regular signature works.
Yeah, I haven't done that for years.
I don't think you could find two of my signatures in the last ten years that are even close.
All right. Well, okay, we've got lots of questions on this.
The news is not serving us well.
All right, I caused some trouble yesterday, and I remind you that when I talk about the topics of the pandemic, I'm sort of into now more about the psychology of it.
And the psychology of it is infinitely interesting to me, even if you're over the pandemic itself.
So if you're talking about masks work or vaccinations work or whatever, I'm not into that conversation so much.
Let's just talk about how people feel about stuff and how they make decisions.
And I'm going to start with a little poll that I did on Twitter.
I said, if you're unvaccinated...
Well, here's how I started off the controversy this morning.
I said, if you're unvaccinated, you're in the middle of a deadly pandemic.
But if you're vaccinated, it's just Wednesday.
Now, this is a statement of my own psychological situation, meaning that your opinion may vary, of course.
But to me, being fully vaccinated once it was done, I didn't feel like I was in a pandemic anymore.
You are. You know, a lot of you are in a pandemic, but I'm not going to die from it.
I mean, my odds are so low now that it's just something I'm not thinking about.
And I don't wear a mask anymore.
I haven't had a mask on for a while.
If I traveled, I'd wear one, but I decided not to travel until I don't need to wear one.
So for me, the pandemic's sort of over.
Now, a number of you, of course, said, but I already had COVID, so it's over for me.
And other people say, I'm not afraid of it because it's such a high survival rate, so it's over for me, too.
But here's the thing.
I'm going to give you the hypnotist's filter on all these decisions.
And it goes like this and you're not going to like it.
Everybody who made a decision about getting vaccinated or not vaccinated made their decision based on fear.
That's the hypnotist's filter.
Because we don't have enough information to make a rational decision.
We don't know the odds of one thing versus the odds of another.
We just don't have the information.
So we're making the decision based entirely on what scares us the most.
And if you're doing that and you're accusing other people of making the decision based on fear, you're operating at a lower level of awareness than you will be when I'm done with you.
All right? The low level of awareness is that you made your decision based on the data, but other people, maybe who made different decisions, made their decision based on fear.
That's a pretty low level of awareness.
It's the common one, probably the most common one, but it's a low level of awareness.
The higher level of awareness, where the world starts to make sense to you, is that everybody, including you, Including me, no matter how rationally I talk about it, we all made our decision based on fear.
Then we rationalized it.
Now, some of us are better at rationalizing, right?
I'm a professional author, so I could probably rationalize better than you can, meaning I do it for a living.
I put words together to sound persuasive.
It's what I do. I'm a professional.
So I could probably rationalize my fear decision better than you could.
But does that mean that my decision was based on logic and data?
Nope. No.
I was just better at rationalizing it.
It might look like it was based on logic and data because I'm so good at rationalizing.
But no. The hypnotist knows that only irrational processes were at work.
For me, but also for you.
So let's walk through this a little bit.
Which of these fears scares you the most, or risks, let's say?
Are you more afraid of a rapidly approved vaccine?
I asked this in a Twitter poll this morning.
So what is scarier?
You can tell me in the comments.
You can play along. What is scarier?
A rapidly approved vaccine.
Now I'm going to use rapidly approved Instead of the words I hear on the internet, like untested or experimental or guinea pigs.
I could have used any of those words, but I'm just going to say rapidly approved because that sort of captures the risk, don't you think?
So what is scarier to you?
A rapidly approved vaccine from your government, which has lied to you for years.
Now, of course, it's from private industry, but the government is involved.
Or would you be more afraid of an engineered deadly virus made by China?
So those are your two choices.
A rapidly approved vaccine or an engineered deadly virus.
Which one is the bigger risk?
The answer is, you don't know.
You don't know.
You have no way to know if either of these could damage you in the long run.
No way. Now, I observe that the people who are afraid of the vaccine more than they're afraid of the virus itself, tend to rationalize by ignoring long-haul risks.
So if you see a rationalization that says, but the survival rate is 99%, and then they're done, 99% survival rate, that's all you need to know.
That person is rationalizing.
If they were using data and facts, they would have used data and facts.
They would have said, for example, well, there's a 99% chance I'll survive, based on my demographics, but there's also this long-haul risk that is hard to calculate, and a lot more people have that, and Maybe even more people have it than even know they have it.
There might be people thinking they're suffering from other problems, but really it's the long haul.
Maybe a little inflammation in the brain, maybe a little inflammation in the organs, maybe.
Now, does the long haul risk turn into any kind of a permanent problem?
I don't know. Does the coronavirus infection, once you've fully recovered, is there anything lingering?
Remember, it's an engineered virus.
So if you're comparing it to every seasonal flu, maybe you're leaving it at risk.
Because this thing was engineered, right?
Probably. I think we're still in probably zone that it was engineered.
So if the only thing you knew was that you had a choice of a rapidly approved vaccine, it's scary.
Or an engineered deadly virus from China.
That's pretty scary.
You see where I'm going, right?
All of your decisions, all of your decisions, including mine, about whether we got vaccinated or not, had nothing to do with data.
It had nothing to do with logic.
It had nothing to do with how well you can interpret the science.
It had nothing to do with agreeing with science or disagreeing.
It had nothing to do with your personal freedom.
It had nothing to do with trusting the government, per se.
It was just what scared you the most.
That's it. It's what scared you the most.
Now, you know my relationship with China, right?
Not so good, to say the least.
China, me, we're not friends.
We're not friends at all.
So, am I influenced by the fact that this thing came out of China?
Absolutely. Could I tell you exactly how I'm influenced?
Not really. That's not how it works.
I just know that I must have a bias.
Because if you put this much pressure on me in this situation...
I just assume there's a bias.
What do I think about American scientific capability?
Pretty good. Pretty good.
Which is not to say that there aren't lots of scientific studies that get debunked.
Something like half of them, I think, that are peer-reviewed get debunked.
But here's my bias.
I'm biased in favor of American technology.
Not for a rational reason.
I just have that bias.
I'm biased against China, because they shipped fentanyl into this country, and my stepson died of an overdose that included fentanyl.
So I have a permanent hatred of the Chinese government, not the people, of course, but the Chinese government.
So when I evaluate my fear, am I more afraid of the engineered Chinese virus Or have I just put all my bias into that bucket?
I don't know. I can't tell.
That's how it works.
Maybe you can tell, because on the outside looking in, it might be a little more clear.
But on the inside looking out, I can't tell.
I don't know how much bias I'm applying to any of this.
But I will tell you that in my immediate family, we're all vaccinated.
Should I tell you to get vaccinated?
I think if you've watched me closely enough, I have never told you to get vaccinated.
Can you fact check that for me?
If you've watched me long enough, I have consistently said, it's not up to me to tell you to get vaccinated.
And in fact, if you want to not get vaccinated, I'm 100% okay with that.
No problem whatsoever.
Personal choice. We've just sort of turned into two different countries.
Some vaccinated, some not.
But I can live in mine. I don't have a problem living out my choices.
As long as you're happy with yours, then we're both good.
I don't need to convince you to go from totally happy to something else, right?
If you're unvaccinated...
You're probably totally happy about that.
What am I going to go talk you out of being totally happy and then give you something to fear that the vaccination might corrupt you somehow in the future?
Why would I add a fear to something that you've got completely handled?
If it's handled, it's handled.
If you're happy, I'm happy.
We're good.
I don't need to change your life to make it less happy.
Be happy.
All right, so I'm not trying to change your mind, and I was asked if I'm stealthily trying to do that.
Does anybody think that?
Does anybody think I am stealthily trying to persuade you to get the vaccination?
Because in my mind, that would be unethical.
It would be completely unethical.
Because I'm not a doctor.
If your doctor tries to persuade you, fine.
But I'm not. And I'm also aware that we're operating on fear, so that's no way to make a decision.
All right. You may know a user named Anomaly.
His Twitter handle is Legendary Energy.
And I believe he's a well-known vaccination opponent.
And when I tweeted on this topic, he responded this way about my comments.
He said, if you are Scott Adams, you are low IQ. Have brain damage, or you are purposely lying.
So he believes that my opinion about whether you should get vaccinated, or whether I should get vaccinated, I guess, or not, is based on either low IQ, brain damage, or purposely lying.
Now, if we are good at reading comprehension, we probably believe that he is intending to say that I'm lying, or that I'm stupid, I guess, about the topic.
And he goes on to say, if you read the data or are an even below-average thinker, you know he's full of shit.
So Anomaly believes that a citizen of average intelligence can read the data and come to a decision that's a logical decision that is sort of free of our biases and stuff.
What do you think of that?
Do you think the ordinary citizen can read the data and then make a good decision?
That's one of the dumbest fucking things you'll ever hear in your life.
Let me tell you, if you've fallen for the myth that the average person can do their own research and come to a decision on a scientific or even financial decision, that's one of the dumbest fucking things in the world.
You really can't.
I have a pretty high opinion of my abilities.
Would you agree? If you've watched me long enough, would you say it's true that I, Scott, have a high opinion of my abilities to, you know, analyze things and figure out what's true from what's not?
Right. I have a very high opinion of my abilities.
I can't read the data and come to a decision.
That's not even close to what I could do.
And I think I'm more capable than a lot of you.
If I'm being honest, it may not be true.
But if I'm being honest, I think it's true.
I think that I have lots of elements of my talent stack, from being an economist to a business experience.
I've got an MBA. I've learned persuasion, etc.
So my talent stack should put me in pretty good position to do what Anomaly says anybody can do.
Just read the data yourself.
That's the lowest level of understanding.
So I would say Anomaly is suffering from the problem of youth.
Not lack of intelligence, for sure.
Smart guy. Smart guy, for sure.
But I believe there's a lack of experience that may be fixed just by time itself, that if you believe you are capable of looking at the data...
Let me talk here to user...
TGI Ozzy, who says in all caps, fix your volume!
Fix your volume! Fix your volume!
No! No!
There's nothing wrong with the fucking volume.
Alright? I'm just going to say it once.
There's nothing wrong with the fucking volume on Netflix.
It's a Netflix bug.
The problem's on your side.
Go fix your fucking volume.
Or get off the stream.
Right? Just fix your volume or just fucking fuck off.
Just leave. Right?
Maybe I got triggered a little bit.
So anyway, my situation here with Anomaly, who's a smart guy but operating at a pretty low level of awareness at this point, still thinks that an average person can read the data and come to a rational conclusion.
Doesn't understand that all of us made our decisions based on fear and fear alone.
We didn't use any data because we couldn't understand it if we looked at it.
But here's how you tell if one of us is in cognitive dissonance.
Are you ready? What is the trick?
Have I ever taught you this?
Have I ever taught you that you can determine which of two people is experiencing cognitive dissonance if it looks like it's one of them I mean, it could be both, I suppose.
But it looks like one of them has cognitive dissonance and the other one doesn't on this topic.
How do you know which one it is?
Attack the messenger.
That's a good clue, but not as good as the one I'm going to be talking about.
Yeah, the personal attack can be a tip-off.
But there's another thing there.
Look for the trigger. Thank you.
Yes, look for the trigger.
There has to be a trigger. You don't get cognitive dissonance if the world looks exactly like you assumed it would look.
What does my world look like?
Many of you have seen my opinions for the entire pandemic.
Does my worldview right now, was it broken?
In other words, is there something I thought was true that now science or experience has shown me is not true?
Because if that happened, that would be the trigger.
And I might not be aware of it.
However, let's say if you were anomaly and you were anti...
I think this is fair.
If I'm mischaracterizing him, which is easy to do, if I'm mischaracterizing anomaly, somebody will let me know.
But I believe he is a skeptic about the usefulness of the vaccinations relative to the risk.
Is that fair? How's he doing?
How is his world, his worldview that the vaccinations are maybe not a good idea, how's that looking compared to actual experience?
Would you say that the data supports his view that it was a bad idea to get vaccinations?
Or does the data support the idea that it's a good idea and that it's working fabulously at the moment?
Which do you think? He is skeptical of the pandemic.
So he's skeptical of the seriousness of the virus.
Would that be accurate?
If he's skeptical about the seriousness of the pandemic itself, then that would extend to being skeptical about the need for vaccinations.
So I hope I'm characterizing him right.
I'm not trying to mischaracterize him.
Well, I would say that my worldview, the vaccinations add some risk, but that it's a good risk management trade-off for most people.
I would say that my worldview is being supported by the data and the entire scientific community.
When I say entire, I mean mostly consensus.
How many of you would agree with the statement That my worldview as it has developed, hasn't changed that much, but as it has developed is still consistent with everything we observe.
Would you say that's true?
Because if that's true, then I don't have a trigger.
But is Anomaly's worldview that the pandemic wasn't really real, in the sense that it wasn't as dangerous as purported, And that the vaccinations may be an overreaction with an extra risk we don't need.
Is that backed up by the science?
And the...
Yeah.
I don't think it is. So I think this is one of those cases.
But again, I'm not the one who can judge it, right?
Because I could be seeing something that just isn't there.
Because I'm in the situation.
That's how cognitive dissonance works.
But you, my friends...
Are not in the situation the way he and I are, because we're having a conversation about it.
So you can be the judges.
Which one of us has a trigger and which one of us does not?
And which one of us has a keener understanding of how humans make decisions?
I feel like that's me, but I could be wrong.
I could be experiencing confirmation bias.
All right. That...
Is pretty much what I wanted to talk about today.
But let me ask you this, since we brought up the point.
I'm going to ask you, which is scarier to you?
Because I didn't see all your answers.
I'd like to see this again, just as a wrap-up.
Which is scarier to you?
A rapidly approved vaccination or an engineered virus that comes out of China?
Which is scarier in the long term?
Because in both cases, you're really talking about the long-term risk that's unknown, right?
Wow. Okay.
Over on locals, it's all China.
Engineered virus. And somebody says both.
Both is no fair. You can't be equally scared of both, are you?
See, a few people say the rapid vaccination.
Now, one difference, of course, is that whoever made the rapid vaccinations was trying to help you.
Whoever made an engineered virus, maybe they were trying to help you.
Maybe. That is a BS comparison.
No, it's not. Who thinks it's a BS comparison to compare?
Maybe you're talking about something else.
It's not a BS comparison to compare which one scares you the most, because that's how you made the decision.
I'm afraid of this binary choice.
All right. They engineered a virus to sell vaccines.
You know, I always worried about that with McAfee.
Did you ever wonder if McAfee ever created a virus so he'd have a reason for his company to sell antivirus stuff?
I'm not saying it happened.
But you have to assume he thought of it.
You have to assume that at some point he thought to himself, you know, the more viruses there are out there that I can fix, the richer I'll be.
Now, again, I have no reason to assume he did that or anybody else did that.
But, man, that risk would be...
I mean, you could do it and get away with it so easily.
It feels like that'd be a pretty big risk.
Yeah, I have no reason to think he would do that.
So that's not an accusation.
All right. Somebody says, virus made by incompetence versus a vaccination made by incompetence.
Are they incompetent?
I don't know. The rapidly approved vaccination, that's just as competent as you can be in a short time frame.
The problem is the time frame, not the competence.
It's totally real, just engineered and released.
Now, why are we not hearing about a booster shot being needed for the Moderna?
Is that because we know that Moderna lasts longer or because they just haven't tested it as well?
I'm still waiting to hear if I'm going to...
Oops, there's something about Moderna.
Yeah, the mRNA stuff holds a lot of promise, right?
You know, I think the biggest accidental outcome of the pandemic is going to be the golden age.
Imagine this. Do you think the golden age could happen without the pandemic?
Because think of the things that the pandemic changed.
It changed, you know, commuting patterns.
It changed maybe, you know, where we live.
But one of the things that the pandemic changed is that we sort of rapidly got pregnant with this mRNA stuff.
How far could the mRNA technology have gone without the pandemic?
Because the pandemic took a thing that was promising and turned it into, you know, a gigantic thing, which can now be extended, apparently, the technology platform, can be extended into curing a whole bunch of previously uncurable stuff.
And a lot of that's in the pipeline they're testing.
Would we have been so far along, and would the public be as willing to try an mRNA thing on some other disease if we had not gone through the pandemic?
So one of the outcomes of the pandemic might be a gigantic improvement in lifespan.
Maybe that's bad too, but at least we're trying to get that.
I feel like the mRNA stuff could be just a world changer.
Maybe not, but it has that potential.
Yeah, decoupling from China.
If the pandemic helped us decouple from China, is that good or bad?
Probably good. Yes, and the pandemic also exposed the problem we have in our school systems.
You know, the problem of the lack of choice and the school teachers' unions, etc.
We aren't decoupling dicks yet.
I agree with that statement.
The amount of decoupling we've done from China so far is trivial to none.
But I feel like we stopped the momentum toward more coupling.
So maybe that's first. Yeah, COVID was persuasion for the mRNA technology.
Well, not intentionally, but it worked out that way.
Yeah, I think we have more awareness of things made in China, for sure.
And I definitely would make a decision based on that.
For every product I could buy in China, I would pay more for the American version.
Now, I'm part of the stupid rich, so I can do that.
I wouldn't ask you to do it.
But I would pay more.
I don't know how much more.
It depends on the item.
Let's say it's a household item.
You're just going to buy a new sponge for the kitchen.
I would pay 20% more for the American sponge.
I don't know if I'd pay 20% more for a house or a car.
I might start to get a little selfish at that point.
But, yeah, if I'm buying...
I don't know. I think this cable may have come from China, or at least some of the cables I bought recently came from China.
If I could have bought this same cable for 20% more from an American company, definitely.
No hesitation.
20% more for an American product every time, yeah.
And it wouldn't have anything to do with quality.
I don't even know if I'd get quality.
Yeah, some things are only made in China.
You know what I'd also like to see is a list of things that are made in China that the United States would like to encourage being made here.
Wouldn't you like to see that?
It's like, these things are made only in China.
I'd like to see that list.
What is made only in China?
Because that would be the best business you could ever start.
Let me give you a startup idea.
Find a product that you could make in America, ideally with robots, because that's what lowers your cost, the employment cost.
If you could find anything that's only made in China, and then you make a robot version of it in the United States and sell it as only made in the US, that's a real good business model right now, right?
E-bike motors and batteries, yeah.
I don't know how many batteries we make in the United States.
That's a problem. But wouldn't battery manufacturing be robots?
If you made a battery manufacturing plant, that'd be all robots, right?
Oh, so Giuseppe says you'd be hesitant.
Yeah, you know, when we're talking about the vaccination risks, if you're younger, it's a different calculation.
I think we all agree with that.
All right. I'm going to close down YouTube for now.
Thank you YouTubers for watching.
By the way, before you go...
YouTubers. Hold on, locals.
Talking to the YouTubers for a moment here.
Could you hit the subscribe button if you'd like to get notified of this?
I never ask you to do that because it's a pain in the ass and it slows down the show.
So I don't like asking at the beginning, where most people do.
It's just terrible for the flow.
But as long as you're here and we're done with the content, if you could hit the subscribe button before you go, it would help me out.
Because the bigger this grows, the better it is for me.
But it's also good for the world, I like to think.
Let me ask you this.
Am I a good force for the world?
Do you feel that if somebody watches me, they come out ahead?
Because that's what I'm trying to do.
I'm trying to go beyond entertainment.
If all you're getting out of this is entertainment, I would be disappointed because I'm shooting much higher than that.
Oh, thank you. Now, the people and locals, of course, there is a subscription service, so more people are going to say yes.
Oh, good. I'm getting lots of good comments on YouTube as well.
So that's good to know.
By the way, this is the reason I do it.
I mean, I could do a lot of things to make money.
And I could do a lot of things that would be, you know, maybe useful.
But the only reason I do this is because it's helping.
And, you know, when I did my personality test the other day, one of the things that came out of it was that I have some kind of genetic need to be useful.
Which I don't think is universal.
Apparently it's a personality trait.
But if the only thing I did was found a great way to make myself happy, it would make me unhappy.
It just wouldn't last.
The only thing that has a lasting, like, real benefit is if you can do something for other people.
And maybe that has some lasting benefit.
Calvin says he has a genetic need to be high in a hot tub.
Well, I share that need with you.
That's happened a few times lately.
The nightly COVID talks were awesome.
Yeah, you know, I feel as though...
I've said this before online.
It's something I'll say at the end of the broadcast.
Is that I always thought that my future...
I had sort of a vision of my future all of my life.
And that vision included that when I reached this exact age...
There would be a global disaster that I would have some role in, in terms of communicating.
And I always had that vision in my head since I was a kid, that my entire life arc was about building the credibility or whatever it would take, such that when I reached exactly this age, I would be useful In a global problem.
I didn't know what that global problem would be, but I feel like the pandemic delivered it.
So now the pandemic is my fault.
I like to think I predicted it, but maybe I manifest it.
I can't rule it out. All right.
Did you do it so?
I don't understand that question.
All right.
Just looking at some of your debate.
it I should debate or converse live with Anomaly.
Would that really help? I mean, it would be entertaining.
But I'm going to tell you...
This is terrible, but I'm going to say it out loud anyway.
Here's a little trick for you for writing, as well as doing what I'm doing.
You know, doing anything in public.
If you can do something that makes it sound dangerous or provocative, that'll stick in people's minds and they'll want to watch you.
Here's the reason that I would not be interested in debating anomaly.
I hate to say this out loud, but it's true.
It wouldn't be fair.
I don't consider him peer-ready.
In other words, I think he's smart enough.
Definitely smart enough.
But he's also young.
And I feel like he needs a little seasoning before that would be a fair fight.
And it would have to be a fair fight or it wouldn't be any fun.
I don't want to just be clubbing a baby harp seal on livestream.
Now obviously he would think that's not going to happen.
But I don't think he's quite ready for that.
And by the way, I don't want that to sound like an insult.
If you looked at me at his age, you know, if you could reverse me back to his age, totally fair fight.
Basically, he's me.
He's me at that age, basically.
So debating me at that age, if it's me at this age, that wouldn't be a fair fight.
So... Should be ignored.
Are you planning to have guests?
Well, my understanding is that at least the locals platform is going to allow some guest access.
If YouTube did a better job of that, maybe I'd do that too.
So I have to figure out how to do that platform-wise.
I've tended not to do guests because I find those shows to be slow.
Does anybody else have that experience?
We like guests, so I'm sure I'll have some on here, but don't you notice that those shows are slower?
Is that just my impression?
I'm going to look at your comments here, because I will actually decide based on your comments.
Mostly boring, yeah, screw guests.
Well, yeah, I did have Naval Ravikant on here.
He's not like a regular guest, if you hadn't noticed.
Anywhere Naval goes, it becomes more interesting.
So he would be the exception.
Okay, I see you recommending Atomic Habits by James Clear.
Is that because you think I should interview him?
Because if I interviewed him, I think he'd say he got some of his ideas from me.
I think he has said that.
Or at least that they're compatible with my stuff.
So we'd be basically talking to ourselves, because we just would agree on everything.
Oh, he says it in the book?
Okay. I would like you to be a guest on Viva Barnes.
How many of you are watching the Viva Barnes podcasts?
They're really good. It's becoming my favorite podcast.
And I think he's on Rumble as well as YouTube.
They're on Locals as well.
If you haven't watched Viva and Barnes...
I think it started out as a good concept, but they didn't quite have the execution down.
And now the execution is looking really good.
And so now that they have the great execution, they have the great, you know, two great personalities, and they do great topics.
I would say one of the strongest podcasts actually in the whole internet right now.
It's one of the best things out there.
And you won't see the same old opinions.
They're fresh every time.
And you'll see stuff that you hadn't seen before.
You'll see references to facts you hadn't heard on the mainstream media.
And I would say top, top shelf, Viva Barnes.
So do a Google on that.
You can see the name spelling in the comments.
Just Google it. Most of the talk is about legal stuff, but it turns out that almost everything in the news has a legal element to it.
Lately, anyway. The political news.
And they do just a great job on it.
Yeah, just do a search, just do an internet search on Viva and Barnes, B-A-R-N-E-S. It'll pop right up.
Highly recommend it.
And if you subscribe, you can see it on Locals, and I think you'll see some extra stuff.
