Episode 1457 Scott Adams: Sipping and Chatting About the Latest National Nonsense
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
The virus vs. virus policies
Who/what is programming the public?
Inexpensive Chinese drones
Our new state of permanent pandemic
Vaccinations quickly lose effectiveness
We'll all get COVID eventually
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If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topics to build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure.
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Jesus! I'll tell you, my new iPad situation is a disaster so far.
And I'll be with you in a moment.
All right. Everybody good?
All right. Here we are.
And I'm pretty sure that the technology is working.
I'll tell you what problem I have.
I bought two identical iPads so that they're brand new and they have the latest operating system and everything would be good.
Except one of the new ones doesn't work for YouTube or Twitter.
The apps just crashed.
They're all brand new, updated, brand new iPad, latest operating system.
And it can't do YouTube, and it can't do Twitter.
But it's identical because it does both of them fine.
I also can't reboot it.
Looks like they changed how you reboot the new ones.
If anybody knows how to reboot an iPad, it doesn't involve holding down the power.
I found this on the web.
Shut up! Fucking thing.
If you're not going to work, don't talk to me.
Christ, just go over there and shut up.
All right. How would you like to enjoy a little thing I call the simultaneous sip?
All you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or a gel, a glass or a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure.
Dopamine here today, the thing that makes everything better, it's called the simultaneous sip and watch it go.
Now! Go.
So I'm a little bit late this morning because I was compiling an amazing tweet.
And I was just done.
And I'll read it to you and then I'll hit send.
I said, as far as I know, no city, state, or country on the planet has beaten COVID... With ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine?
Lots of places have limited access to vaccines, whereas ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine are widely available.
So how does your worldview explain that?
So I'm not saying it works or it doesn't work.
You get banned from social media if you take any kind of a positive take on those things.
So here's the question.
Your worldview says that those two things...
Let's see, many of you.
Not all of you. But for many of you, your worldview is that those things work.
Why have they not worked anywhere on Earth?
Do you ever think about that?
It doesn't work anywhere on Earth.
Not one place has made that work.
But according to the studies, those things work great, right?
Right? So you'd think that the people who didn't have access to vaccines would be sucking that stuff up and would have cured their problems like crazy.
Or, or, is it possible?
Somebody in the comments says, McAfee died and now we have a new virus.
Coincidence? Maybe.
So, just check your worldview.
If you are a subscriber to Locals, And many of them are watching me right now.
What you learned in the last few days, where you learned my framework and technique for creativity, which you couldn't learn any other way.
You'd have to be on the locals' platform.
And you also saw my explanation of my live-streaming setup that I've taken years to perfect, and if my iPad worked, it would be in good shape.
So that's why you missed just this week, and there'll be a lot more.
Here's a little interesting thing.
Apparently the favorability of nuclear power has reached an all-time high.
How do you like that?
Favorability of nuclear power at an all-time high.
And... That uptick in popularity happened in the last four or five years, and especially in the last couple.
It looks like the biggest change happened after Trump left office, because I think there was just an automatic resistance To nuclear power, if it had a Republican connection.
But as soon as you get Biden in office, I think the Democrats just said, well, if we're serious about climate change, I guess we'd better be serious about nuclear power, because it's the only way to...
probably the only way to get there, although there have been some good advances in batteries and stuff, but we haven't quite seen them actualized.
But here's my question.
I've told you before that...
I have this weird track record that when I'm trying to persuade on any national topic, if you looked at the graph of people's opinions, you would find the point that I entered, and then you would see a sharp change in the curve.
That happened, for example, when I started persuading years ago on the right to die, you know, the ability to have a doctor-assisted death.
And if you look at the Gallup poll...
You see that that trend was like blah, blah, blah.
And then I wrote a viral piece in favor of that right.
And you can see that just at the time I did that viral piece, which went just about everywhere.
I mean, it really... It actually made a big impact.
And you can see that the curve just went...
and changed.
Now, is that because I was persuaded?
There's no reason to believe that, because curves change, right?
Things change. But there's this weird coincidence that whenever I enter a fight, persuasion-wise, the curve just changes in my direction pretty much every time.
I can't think of an exception. But I think it's probably easier to explain it in terms of me joining causes that I know I'll win or that they were going to go in that direction anyway.
So I'm going to say it's less about cause and effect And more about knowing what things need to happen and just sort of joining the parade that's already moving.
I think that's a better explanation of what we're seeing.
All right. But if you'd like to believe that I caused those things to happen, that's great, too.
It's just there's no evidence for that.
Bannon, on his war room, had a...
He continues to be the most interesting content on the Internet.
Am I wrong? Yes.
Whether it's true stuff or fake stuff, I never know what's true and what's not.
But Bannon's war room, he just has the most interesting stuff.
I just never know if it's true.
True in terms of whether the guests are credible or not.
But here's another one. He had a gentleman on who I guess has some experience in military intelligence.
And apparently this fellow can look at demographics and registration.
So demographic trends and registration trends in the country.
And he can determine if your vote...
Looks like it was fraudulent or not.
So if there are more votes for a candidate, then either the demographic change in the four years since the last vote, or the number of registered voters, is that a whack?
There's just too many votes for this situation?
Then he says that's a sign that maybe, not always, but maybe, might indicate fraud.
Now you say to yourself, how likely is that model to work?
Do you think that that really can capture all that?
Because remember, the Trump election is different than any other election because he was a different character.
I'm not sure people acted the same.
And then you had the pandemic, you know, throws all the rules out.
But apparently he predicted correctly all 50 states in 2016, including Florida.
All 50. All 50.
That's right. His model got all 50 states right, he claims.
It seems like that would be something you could check.
But if he really got all 50 states right, and he's using the same model, then the only thing that could be different is the pandemic.
Because it was Trump both times, right?
You know, so... You would think that he'd have a handle on it.
But I think the pandemic did change enough because the way people voted changed.
So I'm not sure the model works.
So I'm going to say that I think that the pandemic and then the legal changes to voting and all the mail-in and stuff, I don't know that any model still works from 2016 to 2020.
But it's out there, so that's some information.
So I did an unscientific poll and I asked, what's a bigger problem for you at the moment?
Is the bigger problem for you personally the virus or the policies about the virus?
What happened?
Of course. As you might imagine, something like 89% said that the government's policies are the problems.
89%. It's not even close.
Now, of course, this is a deeply unscientific poll, but do you think you would get a different result anywhere else?
You know, if I... I mean, obviously, my audience leans conservative, even though I'm not.
But I feel like it would be a vast majority of people would say that the government restrictions are the problem for them personally.
You know, we've all been sort of hypnotized into thinking that what you do with the pandemic is more about the collective.
It's not so much about your personal what's good for you.
But if 90% of the country-ish, or anything over 75%, I suppose, thinks that the bigger problem is the government than the virus, I think that has to inform your policymaking, right?
Yeah. But I'm not sure it is.
So, Rasmussen did a poll and they said, did Joe Biden win fairly in 2020?
What do you think people said?
Well, 36% of the country still says no.
36% of the country thinks we didn't have a fair election.
That's a lot. How do you have a democracy that stays intact when 36% of the people...
I think that something happened.
But here's the good news, or is it?
Depends on your point of view.
Apparently that number is lower than it was just a few months ago, or June actually.
It was 41% in June, but it's trended down a little bit.
Now that makes sense, right?
The longer you go without proof of some massive fraud, the less likely you're going to find it, I would say.
Now, that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
I'm just saying that if the audits were going to produce something that would change all our minds, I know we'd know by now.
Even though they haven't released it officially, we kind of know by now.
So I'm not expecting that to happen.
But how do you live in a world where so many people think they don't even live in a system that's fair?
Maybe that's always been the case.
Yeah, maybe it's always been the case that somebody's pointing out you have to subtract out the 25% who are wrong about everything.
No matter what the poll is, 25%-ish, we'll just be wrong about everything.
And I'm not even sure we should poll dumb people anymore.
There should be some minimum level of paying attention and intelligence before you're even included in a poll.
Because do we need to know what dumb people think?
I guess we do. Because they make a lot of decisions.
All right. Jack Posobiec got things interesting on Twitter today with this tweet.
He said, literally every movie is better than The Last Jedi.
It's one of those provocative kind of tweets.
He's good at doing. You get a lot of comments.
But I'd like to add to that Black Widow.
If you've tried to watch the movie Black Widow that just came out on streaming, oh my god, it's terrible.
It just makes you feel bad.
I'm watching this thing and I think, wait a minute.
I thought I was signing up for something in the entertainment realm as opposed to something that's going to cause me PTSD. One of them makes you happy.
It's called entertainment.
The other one gives you mental illness.
Opposite of entertainment.
Black Widow, if you've got any mental illness, it's going to exacerbate that shit because it's terrible.
It just makes you feel depressed and dark and ugh.
Now, here's the bigger point.
When was the last time you saw a good movie?
It's like they don't exist.
Part of the problem is our attention spans have shrunk.
And was it... Was it Mark Wahlberg?
No, it was... Good Will Hunting...
What's the name of the blonder guy?
Matt Damon. Yeah, Matt Damon was just saying publicly that he doesn't think his children will watch movies.
He doesn't think his children will watch movies, like the industry will just disappear.
Is he right? Yeah, I think he might be.
I don't think it'll disappear.
It'll be like radio, you know, when television came in.
It'll transform in some way.
So I think it'll be around.
But the idea of sitting there for three hours watching something that gives you PTSD just to make you a little happier at the end, I just don't know that anybody wants that anymore.
The whole idea of anybody watching anything at the same time doesn't make sense.
Have you ever done this?
I think I've mentioned this before.
So when I built my house...
Let's say 2008 or so, I was doing the planning.
And back then, it was just a given that if you were building a high-end house, you would put a theater in there.
Because that would be all your movie nights.
You'd have your friends over.
You'd have a couple of martinis.
And you'd sit down and you'd watch this great movie.
It would be something to build an evening around.
When was the last time you tried to get anybody to watch the same movie at the same time?
It's really impossible now.
Because people have either already seen it as soon as it came out, they streamed it or whatever, or they don't want to watch it, or they'll talk during it because they said yes, but they're not really interested in it.
Just the whole idea of putting people in a room and watching a movie, it just isn't a thing anymore.
We're all watching our own content on our phones and we're much happier about it.
So I think movies are going away.
Now here's the interesting part.
You were probably waiting for me to get to the interesting part.
Is there an interesting part about this?
Yes. You might be aware that the CIA has used the movie industry for years to brainwash the public.
To make you more patriotic, for example, or to have whatever traits the government thought you should have.
You know, maybe more family-oriented and blah, blah, blah.
But what happens if movies go away?
Because movies were the dominant way in which...
and TV shows, and I think the argument is going to apply to both of these domains.
But TV shows and movies were how the government created a culture.
They told you what to act like, and then they showed you in movies, and then you just grew up thinking, well, I guess I act like that.
Because we just imitate things.
What happens when...
The programming interface for society disappears.
What good would your computer be if there was no interface?
The computer would still exist, but there wouldn't be any way to program it.
That's happening.
The interface for programming the public into one coherent culture is dissolving.
So what happens?
Who ends up programming citizens?
School... Right?
School. So in other words, the teachers' unions become the programmers of society.
They get the young people. But what about the older people?
Well, social media, right, in the comments.
Social media is the new programming entity.
But here's the question.
Is the CIA manipulating social media?
For the same purpose and in the same way that they manipulated...
We know this now. This is a matter of fact.
It's not speculation. We know that they have historically manipulated movies and probably TV shows.
I think that's confirmed.
Do you think that they're consciously trying to program the public through social media?
Now, certainly they're involved in specific questions.
Maybe the vaccines, maybe something about a war or something.
But do you think just generally they're programming you to know what kind of a life to lead?
Because it doesn't look to me like the CIA is what's programming you.
Let me ask you this. If the CIA wanted to program you to be a good citizen and make the country coherent and feel like it had one dominant culture, would you see what you see on social media now?
No, right? It's the opposite of that.
Social media is ripping apart the structure of America by emphasizing our differences.
That's what it does best.
So although you can imagine that the CIA would move its influence and brainwashing from movies and TV that are collapsing into social media that's the dominant media, but it doesn't look like it's happening to me because it would look completely different.
In other words, social media would be telling you to get a family and be a nuclear family and pay your taxes and be open-minded about stuff, I guess.
But somebody says AI is screwing us.
Yeah, it could be that the social media platforms are driven by AI. The movies were driven by human beings behind the scenes.
So I believe that we're being programmed...
Randomly. For the first time.
Meaning that there's not one dominant program or interface that's programming us as a culture.
We're just taking inputs from everywhere.
Well, what does that do? Does that destroy the country?
I feel like it might.
Like, I don't feel like it's cause and effect and it's obvious that that would destroy the country.
But it might.
Right? Right? I don't think you can rule it out.
Because if the way we think as a country, our dominant beliefs, if those get out of whack, the whole country falls apart.
There's nobody who would doubt that, right?
That if what you think about the world, your worldview, if it gets all out of whack, the country falls apart.
Some would say that the best asset the United States has ever had is its narrative.
The narrative. Meaning the story of the United States.
And if you're not a citizen of the United States, you probably recognize that too.
I think the United States becomes sort of at least one model that people look at to say, do we want to be like that or not?
So we have a weird situation in which we are being randomly programmed for the first time.
What happens? Will there be a dominant force that rises to program people?
Because the network TV seems to be doing that, but it's separating the left from the right, which is all bad news.
So I feel as if probably some solution will evolve just because we need it, but I don't know what that will be.
It's hard to say. I don't know that it will be influencers on the internet who are especially good.
It could be. It could be that people who are seen as independent, there are a few of them, might get a bigger audience and more influence.
I see in the comments that the USA soccer team needs to be programmed or brainwashed, I guess, with the American story.
And I think you're right.
You're right. That's a perfect example.
Watching our Olympic athletes essentially ruin a tradition by turning it into something else.
So you say I should reset my network settings on my iPad.
Well, I would if I could figure out even how to...
Well, I want to reboot it first.
Can anybody tell me how to reboot an iPad, a modern one?
Because it used to be you just hold the power button, but that seems to have changed.
All right. Here's some more stuff happening.
I saw a tweet from Balaji Srinivasan, who you should follow, by the way.
Follow Balaji Srinivasan.
Just trust me. When I give you recommendations of who to follow on Twitter, it's based on this, that if you follow me, you're almost certainly going to like who I recommend, because they're feeding into my worldview in a strong way.
One of them is Balaji. So his first name is spelled B-A-L-A-J-I. Just search for Balaji Srinivasan, you'll find him.
Anyway, he tweeted today that...
And by the way, his tweets would be on a whole variety of topics.
But if you just want to see what one of the smartest people on the planet...
It's worth doing, right?
Because trust me, he's one of the smartest people, like, on the whole frickin' planet.
He knows more about more things than just about anybody you know.
Like, more domains than you've ever seen.
So just follow him. He talks about today in a tweet that China has made drone armies ten times cheaper.
And it's a trend to watch.
There's a company, Avex, I guess it must be a Chinese company, where their top-end drones run for $1 to $2 million a piece.
Now, I'm not talking about, you know, the little handheld drones that hobbyists have.
I'm talking about the big flying ones that look like an airplane and they have missiles for $1 to $2 million.
In other words, I could afford one.
Right? You know, I'm rich enough.
I probably won't buy one.
But I could buy a missile-armed Chinese drone.
I can literally personally afford it.
What the hell is going to happen when the rest of you can afford it?
It's not going to be good.
I think the cost of a deadly drone is going to be sub- $1,000.
Pretty sure. Sub- $1,000.
Now, I'm not talking about the big military-looking drones that are the size of an airplane.
I'm talking about the small ones.
And I wrote about this a long time ago, 20 years ago.
And as soon as you can get...
Could I rent it from you?
That would be a good business.
I'll buy one drone and just rent it out for $100,000 a pop.
Get a lot of customers.
Want to kill your rival?
Borrow my drone.
$100,000 and you can take out anybody anywhere.
All right. So, yeah, we're going to see swarms of small drones that explode when they reach a destination.
There's no way that's not going to happen.
Let me give you some of my arguments that my critics are making about me.
I know you don't...
Let me be honest with you a little bit.
The news is freaking boring, isn't it?
Now, I know that a lot of you have been blaming me for being less interesting lately.
I cop to that.
I'm totally less interesting.
But it's because most of my show is based on the news, and the news, just without Trump...
I mean, I suppose Obama would be more interesting, but Biden just, there's nothing to talk about.
So, I apologize.
I expect that things will heat up, especially as we get into the midterm elections and stuff.
So there will be fun things ahead.
But my subscribers on Locals have started bailing out because any time I mention vaccines and stuff, you're like, ah, stop talking about it.
But it's kind of the only news.
It's the only thing happening.
And so I'm going to mention it a little bit, but I'll try to keep it tight and hit some topics you haven't seen before.
All right. One of my critics, or a lot of my critics say, one of my problems is that I never question the motives of government.
That I assume too often that people have good motivations and that they're not trying to put one over on you.
Does that sound accurate?
Those of you who watch me the most, would you say it is an accurate criticism that I'm too trusting of authority?
I'm seeing people say it's accurate.
But most people say it's no.
Now let me give you some background.
Who was the first public figure to tell you that the CDC who and the Surgeon General were lying to you about masks and the real reason was to keep you from hoarding them?
Who was the first public figure that I'm aware of in the world to say that?
It was me. It was me.
The very first thing I said about the pandemic is all of your authorities are lying to you.
And... What do we know now?
Completely right. Completely right.
All of our authorities were lying to us, and for exactly the reason I told you, that I suspected they had another motive, and sure enough.
All right, who was one of, there were a few of us, but who was one of the first people who told you that our authorities were fucking up by not closing travel to China sooner?
Who told you that they were making their decisions for apparently political reasons instead of medical reasons?
Me. Right.
A week before Trump said it, I said it very loudly, screaming into the live stream that I didn't trust our authorities because they were making decisions for apparently the wrong reasons.
Some kind of political considerations.
And I don't think that there's been any time when I've ever trusted either the science or the government.
So anybody who thinks that's a valid criticism of the most famous skeptic of management, literally 30 years of experience telling you that management is lying to you.
That's what the Dilbert comic is.
It's telling you that you can't trust authority.
It's my brand.
And my critics are saying, well, you're a little too trusting of authority, Scott.
Deep insight there.
How about, I've been promoting vaccinations.
How many times do I have to tell you, I don't care if you get vaccinated.
It's a personal decision.
Your risk profile is not the same as mine.
That's the other thing people say.
Scott, you never mention that people have different risk profiles.
No, I mention it every fucking day.
All right. How about...
Oh, one is that I fail to recognize the things we learned by the Sweden model.
And so somehow I alone am the one person who doesn't understand that Sweden has taught us something.
Let me teach you something.
None of the countries tell us anything.
None of them. There's no country you can look at and say, oh, look at their experience.
So now we know what to do, what works and what doesn't.
That doesn't exist. Not Sweden.
Not Sweden. Not anywhere.
We really don't know why any country is doing anything.
We see them going up and down independent of policy.
We don't know why anything is happening.
So Sweden is just one of the countries that we don't understand why anything is happening.
That's it. And that's your criticism?
Your criticism is that you don't understand that one country's experience doesn't mean anything.
We can't tell anything from it.
We think we can. It's just an illusion.
And then this one.
Somebody said on YouTube yesterday, Scott spends nearly half of every podcast directing attention to vaccines.
Well, that's everybody in the news.
He doesn't try to persuade against lockdowns or mask mandates.
Is that true? Would you say that I don't try to persuade against lockdowns, the new ones, And I don't try to persuade against mask mandates, the mandate part.
Is that true? Well, it may be that it's true in terms of what I talk about the most, but that has more to do with what's more interesting.
It's not what I'm trying to...
It's not my worldview. It's just what's more interesting at the moment.
So let me say it directly.
Lockdowns look like a bad idea to me.
Is that clear enough?
Lockdowns now... And especially anything stopping kids from going to school.
It looks like a bad idea to me.
Is there any ambiguity in that?
To me, it looks like a really bad idea.
And the reason is that when you get to the point where everybody can have a vaccine if they want it, it's just freedom.
It's just a freedom question.
Let me put it in context.
We lose 480,000 people a year to cigarette smoking.
That's how many people die in the United States in one year from cigarettes.
480,000.
Has anybody ever complained about cigarette smokers hurting the capacity of emergency rooms?
No. Because it's just built in.
We just assume there'll be X number of deaths per year, so you build the capacity that handles it.
Maybe, and it's looking like this is the case, we're in a permanent pandemic, meaning that people who don't want to get vaccinated, and even people who do, it's just going to be here forever, or the variant will, or the next one will get out of the lab.
We're just sort of in a permanent pandemic world.
So wouldn't it make more sense to expand our hospital resources, So that we can handle the next pandemic, if not this one, better.
Maybe we have some way to quickly expand and contract.
So I think hospitals are going to have to evolve until it's just routine.
I mean, it might be a routine surge, like they know how to surge quickly for capacity.
That might be the only routine part, but it's fine.
That would work, right?
So my opinion is open everything, try to adjust the hospitals as well as you can.
You've got freedom, you've got people dying, but it was their choices.
It was their choices. So if you think I'm in favour of lockdowns, you're very wrong.
I was in favour of lockdowns for two weeks.
The first time we tried it, it was just an experiment.
And I thought that the cost-benefit of at least finding out if it made a difference was...
You know, pretty favorable.
But then we found that it didn't make a difference.
So now we have new information.
And as far as mask mandates, again, same problem.
I don't think vaccinated people should have masks.
And because I'm vaccinated, I don't care if you wear a mask, whether you're vaccinated or not.
So could I be more clear that mask mandates, not only do I resist, but I actively recommend you resist them.
That That my plan is to go into places that require masks, assuming that that gets implemented where I live.
It hasn't happened yet. Looks like it's close.
But my plan is to not wear a mask in any place that says you need a mask.
And then I'm going to have them ask me to leave or ask me to put on a mask.
And then I'm going to be polite.
And I'm going to do as asked.
Either leave or put on a mask.
And I'm not going to make a hard time for the employee, because it's not the employee's fault.
I'm just going to make it a little bit more friction to do ordinary business.
That's all. Just a little friction.
And if other people do the same, then I think the mask mandate just falls apart.
And it wouldn't take many of us, maybe 10% of us would be all it would take, because the employees would be spending all their time managing mask updates and mandates, and they don't want to do that.
They don't have any authority, they're going to get in fights, and they're not going to sell as much.
I mean, nothing good about it.
So, is there anybody else who's telling you to resist and actually violate the guidelines?
I'm telling you to violate the guidelines directly, in public.
So could that be more clear?
Does anybody have any questions?
I'm telling you to violate the guidelines.
I can't be more clear than that.
All right. Apparently there's more pessimism on solving COVID. It used to be, it wasn't long ago, in June, I guess 89% of people said the pandemic was going in the right direction.
We were getting out of it. But now only 45% say that.
And I think that's the right thing.
Meaning that it makes sense that the public doesn't think this is going to end, because at the moment, it doesn't look like it's ever going to end, does it?
It looks like we're in a permanent pandemic.
Because if it's not this one, it's the next variant.
If it's not the next variant, it's the next virus.
Because this isn't the last fucking thing that's getting out of a lab, right?
Does anybody think, well, I'm glad we fixed that problem of viruses getting out of labs.
No. No, it's going to happen again.
We'll have another, probably lots of them.
So, unfortunately, we're going to have to learn how to live with that.
So it makes sense that people are less optimistic.
But here's a question I have.
And this is a serious question.
Given that we know, here are the things we know, that the vaccinations apparently lose effectiveness a lot faster than we thought.
That's new information.
And we know that it seems that the most lasting protection would be actual infection.
But you don't want to get an actual infection because you might get long COVID and it might kill you.
Right? I mean, it might kill you or you might get long COVID. Or both.
So you don't want an infection under normal circumstances, but what if you know you're going to get an infection?
And I feel like that's where we're at, but nobody's saying it directly from the government.
I feel as if...
We're all going to get COVID. I don't see any way around it, given the current state of information.
Because we don't have a vaccine that would stop it.
And we don't have a way to really run a world without us getting together enough and traveling enough that we'll all get it.
Just all of us. And so if you're all going to get it, here's my question.
Shouldn't we have a strategy that recognizes the obvious?
That we're all going to get it.
Or something has to be invented...
To stop it, which I'm not aware of anything like that.
It's coming close.
Rapid tests would only slow it down.
They do a good job of slowing it down, but the moment you stop doing your rapid tests, you'd be right back where you were.
It looks like. I mean, nobody can predict that with certainty, but I think the rapid tests would get you to just the slower infections.
Now, do you want slower infections or faster infections?
It seems to me that my best personal strategy, which is different from a national strategy, right?
What you do for yourself doesn't have to be exactly the same as what you might want for the country or other people to do.
My personal best thing I could do, I think, and I'm going to ask for a medical fact check on this, because I'm not a doctor, so don't listen to me on medical stuff, but given that I was recently vaccinated...
Given my age and comorbidities, and given the fact that I'm at the peak of my vaccine's effectiveness right now, shouldn't I get infected intentionally?
Because that's the safest way for me to get the virus that I'm going to get one way or the other.
If you only have two choices, get the virus when you're the safest or get it when you're the least safe, Why wouldn't you get it when you're the safest?
Now, that's a question, because obviously if you give yourself, you know, access to the virus, even with the vaccine, could you get long COVID? Could you get some long-term problem?
I don't know. Maybe.
It's part of the risk. Could the vaccination itself kill you?
Yeah, sure. I mean, maybe.
Not likely, but could happen.
So I guess what I don't understand is that the country doesn't have a strategy that's coherent.
If we had a plan to get rid of COVID, that'd be great.
But we don't, do we?
Because we don't have a vaccine that'll do it.
We don't have one on the way that will do it.
Therapeutics won't do it. We don't have a plan for just avoiding it.
So if the only plan is that we're going to get it, Shouldn't they be telling us to load up on therapeutics if any of them work and to get your vaccination and get infected as soon as possible?
Yeah, your government can't tell you to do that, right?
I've been telling you from the beginning that the government is great at some stuff, but one of the things they can't do is tell you to do something that could kill you, unless it's, you know, war.
If it's a war, they can tell you to go to war and some of you die.
But... For lifestyle stuff, the government just has to avoid killing people.
That's it.
They don't care about your freedom, because they're not going to be measured on that.
They're going to be measured on how many people die.
So the government doesn't have the right incentive relative to what the people want to be in charge.
I've told you this before.
The citizens are going to have to take control of the pandemic.
With the help of the government and science and all the information we can get.
But you have to have the right people making the decision.
And at the moment, the right people to make the decision are not the government.
And I think that's rare.
It's hard to think of other examples where the government should not make your decision.
They are, after all, elected representatives-ish.
That's another topic.
They're elected, sort of.
But I think we just have to acknowledge the obvious.
Let's acknowledge the obvious.
The citizens should be in charge of this decision.
And if Joe Biden just took a poll and said, look, the government doesn't quite have the right structure for this decision, I'm just going to look at the polls.
If you guys and people and all of you they's, if you want to go back to work and you want to take the risk because you at least have the option of the vaccine, I'll support that.
And just let the public decide.
Have we ever done that before?
Has the government of the United States ever said, look, it really sort of depends what the public wants.
That's going to be the biggest variable.
So just tell me what you want.
And on this question, I'm going to follow the polls.
I'll follow the science also.
But if the public knows the science as well as I do, and knows the risks and the reward, maybe just let the people decide.
All right. I think there's something called a Trump curse because Kathy Griffin tragically got lung cancer and she doesn't even smoke.
I guess she was addicted to pills after the Trump beheading scandal and I guess she attempted suicide?
That's telling me I need to leave in a minute.
It seems to me that everybody who's a Trump critic and even people who are the biggest supporters have some horrible thing happen to them.
Like, a lot.
So I'm just following that, and that's tragic, and I hope she does well.
How about this? How about we put a warning on unvaccinated status the way you would put a warning on cigarettes?
If cigarettes are illegal and they kill half a million people a year...
Why don't we do the same with COVID if it's here to stay?
You just say this. All right, here's an example.
Now, this is a persuasion example.
I'm not telling you to take the vaccination.
That's up to you. But if you wanted to persuade people, you could put a cigarette warning on it that says something like, not getting vaccinated substantially increases the risk of dying a gruesome death, gasping for air with a ventilator stuck down your trachea.
How about just put a warning on it and say, look, we're going to open.
I'm going to open everything.
No masks. No lockdown.
But look, public, I want you to know how clearly I'm going to tell you the risk.
Let's say this is the government.
Let's say Joe Biden did this.
I'm going to get rid of all the restrictions at a national level.
And I'm going to put this warning label on it.
If you don't get the vaccination, there's a really good chance, I mean, put some odds on it, there's a chance, of dying a gruesome death gasping for air with a ventilator stuck down your throat.
Isn't that fair? Would anybody say that that warning is not accurate?
I mean, you don't say everybody.
It doesn't happen to everybody.
But it's a risk, and it's real.
Now, you might also say getting the vaccination has a risk.
Right? But say that too.
Let the government inform us and we'll make our own decisions.
How about that? Here's your fake news of the day.
Clay Travis tweeted this.
He said, Joe Biden's top COVID advisor just went on CNN and admitted that masks people are wearing don't work against COVID. So that was the tweet from Clay Travis.
But that's not true.
The... The video he showed was Biden's advisor, COVID advisor, saying that the masks don't work as well as other masks.
So not working as well as other masks is completely different from don't work.
So that would be fake news.
All right. That is all I had to say today, except that it would be funny to see if the IQ in America changes after the pandemic, because I think you would agree with this statement.
It's either true that the smart people are getting vaccinated, or it's true that the smart people are not getting vaccinated.
Would you agree that one of those two things is probably true?
Right? Now, you all think you know which way it's going to go, but let's just for this conversation say it could go either way.
Wouldn't you like to know if the average IQ goes up or down the way average lifespan did because of pandemic?
Because if... The smartest people are making the right decisions, the IQ should go up because there are more smart people surviving and dumb people are dying.
But what if it's the other way around?
What if the IQ goes down because the smart people took the vaccination and all died?
I don't think that's going to happen, by the way.
But it could, right?
Anything's possible. So what would happen if all the smart people made the wrong decision on this one?
What are the odds? Pretty good.
The odds that all the smartest people made the wrong decision are pretty good.
