Episode 1458 Scott Adams: Come Have Some Laughs About the News and Learn Some Persuasion Tricks Too
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
Mask compliance...wear them down
Peter Navarro: China knew in September
Big problems looming for China
Tells for lying vs Governor Cuomo
Vaccine passports are racist
AOC disses Democrats
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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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Best part of your day. Yeah, sometimes you say to yourself, I don't know if it's going to be the best part.
Then you're surprised, because it is.
And all you need to make this an exceptional moment.
You know, the kind you remember for the rest of your life.
Well, all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or a chalice or a dine, a canteen, a jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind.
It might be hyperbole, but if you don't try it yourself, how will you ever know?
It's called the simultaneous sip.
Join me now for the unparalleled pleasure.
The dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
Yeah, simultaneous sip.
Here it goes. Go. I feel a little bit less COVID in my system.
A little bit less. Now, for those of you who think, I think everything's already been invented.
And I'd like to become rich, but I don't know how.
I'm going to give you a suggestion for at least one of you to get rich.
Have you ever tried to find a tripod to hold either your phone or your iPad?
If you have, you may have had the experience I've had, which is you buy one after another, and they're all made by morons.
Here's my latest one.
I think I've purchased maybe 15 models over the years, and they're all terrible.
They don't do even the most basic thing you'd want to do, which is, oh, I have an iPad.
I think I'll put it in here.
And, you know, you just pinch your finger and your brakes.
And I was just swearing at this thing.
But look at this design.
Just to give you an idea of how many opportunities there are in the world...
Somebody actually sold me this.
It's an iPad stand for my other iPad.
And you say to yourself, oh, it looks pretty good, right?
Snaps right in there, holds it.
Okay. But if I turn it around this way, it just falls over.
So you can't even turn the iPad in the other direction or it falls over.
Worse yet, when you want to type on your iPad, you don't want it facing you, you want it flat, and it doesn't flatten.
And it doesn't stay in position.
All the things that you tighten become loose, just in the normal use of it.
So, I say to you, if somebody can make a stand for either an iPhone or for an iPad, that actually, it doesn't even have to be great.
It just has to be not terrible.
That's it. It just has to be not terrible.
All right. So there are plenty of opportunities.
Just look for something that's bugging you and make a better one.
So this happened to me yesterday.
Somebody sent me a video in which, I guess, Elon Musk was doing an interview about SpaceX...
And he was talking about the bureaucracy within his own company, I believe it was.
And he mentioned that he felt like he was living in a Dilbert comic and that it felt like he was in a simulation.
And... Just read the fucking sign behind me, okay?
For those of you who've got a problem.
And I'm going to start blocking anybody who talks about the sound again today.
So... So I looked at this video, and sure enough, Elon Musk was joking that it feels like he's living in a Dilbert comic, and he's in a simulation.
Now, my comic yesterday was about Dilbert finding out he lives in a simulation, and it was created by a cartoonist.
So I thought that was a coincidence, but I think the timing of the interview and the comic was a coincidence.
Anyway, so what do you do...
What do you do if somebody tells you, hey, the richest man in the world just mentioned something you do?
What would be the normal thing you would do if you're sitting in a room with some people, some people you like, maybe your family or whatever, and you find this out?
Would you share it with the people that you're with?
Would you say, hey, look, here's a video of Elon Musk.
He's talking about Dilbert, and I make Dilbert.
Would you share it?
Because I made that mistake and I was told that it was gross and that my lack of humility and my bragging, my bragging was a really bad look.
Now, what do you think?
Do you think that if Elon Musk mentions your work in some kind of a positive way, That you could turn to somebody that you know really well and say, look, Elon Musk's talking about me.
Would that be too prideful?
Would that be bragging?
Or is it just something that happened?
And at what point is it okay to share something that happened to you with somebody that's close to you?
You know, a friend, family member, right?
Right. And I actually got into this absurd conversation about whether humble people are better than people who are not humble.
And I actually got somebody to argue that this person's humility made them superior to me.
And they were bragging about it.
That's right. I actually convinced somebody to brag about their humility without acting ironic.
Anyway, I have a hypothesis that the biggest problem in the world is that we think our egos are something they're not.
You think your ego is who you are, and you think you have to manage in a certain way, and that looking good to other people requires humility.
I don't think there's a more wrong idea in the world, honestly.
Because, first of all, we misinterpret what people are doing.
Because if I'm showing somebody close to me something that happened to me, I'm not always bragging.
It's just something that happened to me.
If you're an author and your book becomes a number one bestseller, do you mention it?
Do you mention it?
Is that fair? Yes.
Can you say, oh, my book's a number one bestseller?
Is it bragging? Or is it just what happened?
How do you deal with it?
There was a friend of mine who a few years ago came into a massive amount of money.
He was part of a startup. And so I think he's a billionaire now.
But he made hundreds of millions of dollars on one day when the company went public.
And... He immediately went from the average person in the neighborhood with a job to one of the richest people you'll ever know.
And the couple asked me for some advice about becoming suddenly rich and how to navigate that.
And it was fascinating to watch the transition.
And I wonder...
Yeah, it's not really bragging if it's true.
It's just something that happened.
And I gave them some advice.
I said, nobody's going to want to hear your good news because it's going to sound like bragging.
And it's just going to be really gross to people.
So simply talking about your day is no longer fair.
This is something I learned when Dilbert took off and my life went from ordinary to not ordinary anymore.
If I simply talked about my day, it was kind of gross to people because it would be better than an average day.
And so I would teach them, say, you're going to have to be a huge phony so that people can put up with you.
And the way you're going to have to be a huge phony is by pretending that you're having bad luck all the time.
Because if you don't, nobody's even going to want to spend a minute with you after a while.
They're just going to be really grossed out by your relative success.
And so I said, keep track of anything bad that happens to you during the day and make that your story.
If you get together with people, say, oh, my God, I just got out of my car and stepped in a big pile of dog shit.
And I had to walk into a meeting and I had dog shit on my shoe and I couldn't get it off.
That's the story. The story you don't want to tell...
It's how you are shopping for a private jet.
Because that happened, too.
Same day. I've never shopped for a private jet.
This is somebody else. I thought, you can't talk about the private jet.
You can't talk about that part.
But it's just what you did. It wasn't your fault.
It's just what you did.
It wasn't bragging. All right.
So I think people need to figure out that their ego is not who they are.
Once you realize that your ego is your enemy and not who you are, the thing to be protected, then you're free.
If you can't learn to embarrass yourself in front of other people, you are a prisoner.
Forget about your COVID passport or your vaccine passport.
If the only things you can do in your life are the things you think will look good to other people, because you need to look humble...
And you need to make sure other people are having a good feeling about you all the time.
If that's the world you live in, you're in a prison.
It's just a prison that you created yourself.
And your ego is what's keeping you there.
You need to break free of that.
Your ego is your jailer.
It's not your friend. It's your jailer.
Get rid of it. All right.
Mask resistance for me started yesterday.
For those of you who are new to me, I thought masks work a little bit.
And I thought they were worth trying at various times during the pandemic.
It made sense. It made sense to give it a try, given that the mass of scientists think they make some difference.
But we're well beyond that point.
I'm fully vaccinated.
And yes, I know I can still get it.
Yes, I know I can still transmit it.
But I don't think masks make sense anymore in a world where you can get vaccinated and drive your risk down to microscopic.
Now, I've told you what I plan to do, which is I plan to go into California businesses without my mask.
And I plan to make them ask me to put it on.
And when they do, I'm going to be very polite and very compliant.
So I'm not going to pick a fight with a person who's just trying to do a job, right?
It's not their fault that they have to do this.
I'm just going to wear them down.
And if enough people do it...
Then we can return power to the people and take it away from the government in this particular case because they're making the wrong decision.
Now, the reason the government's making the wrong decision, in my opinion, is that they're the wrong entity to make the decision.
The government has to drive death down to zero if they can do it.
Human beings have to live.
We have to live, and that means making choices about risks and stuff all the time.
So the government, unfortunately, for this specific decision, it's just the wrong entity, and we have to take that back.
And the way to do it is just by your actions.
So I'll give you my experience yesterday.
First experience was a retail store, big chain.
Did not wear my mask.
Shopped as long as I wanted around people who were fully masked.
And paid for the goods.
And nobody ever asked me to put a mask on.
Now, the retail store, you're sort of in the store before anybody notices.
You're sort of already in there.
But then I went to a restaurant at night.
A fine dining restaurant.
And the...
Yeah, I'm not going to give the name of the store, because I don't think that's fair at this point.
And I went to a fine dining restaurant, also without a mask.
And the host reminded us that mask mandates are back in place, and we had to wear a mask.
And I, of course, complying, saying, oh, oh, I think I have one in the car.
But they offered one at the host stand, so we just took their masks.
And I said, just a clarification, we don't need the masks at the table, right?
He said, that's correct. You don't need the masks at the table.
And I said, I'm just going to put on this mask and I'm going to walk right over there, right?
Like right over there. So I need the mask just to walk over there and take it off.
And he looked at me and he said, yes.
I needed the mask to walk 10 feet in the same space that I was going to take the mask off for the rest of the meal.
So I did that. I put on the mask for 10 feet, and then I took it off.
Now, I think if enough people do what I'm doing, which is being nice and polite to the people, because it's not their fault, and just making it a little bit harder, they will give up.
Wear them down. They will give up.
They will. Guaranteed.
They will give up.
You just have to keep on it.
But be polite. Apparently China is having a problem in Wuhan with the worst outbreak of COVID in a long time.
I guess the Delta variant is ripping through.
Well, not ripping through, but they definitely are worried.
And they're closing travel and they're getting really aggressive again.
And I don't know if I've mentioned to you That China's in big trouble.
There's some really big problems coming.
Now, there are a lot of them.
It's almost you can't even...
It's hard to even think of all the problems that are coming for China.
China's got a big, big problem coming.
A big set of problems, let's say.
But among those problems is this.
It's beginning to look, as Peter Navarro has been saying for a while, that China knew about the virus in September but didn't tell us until December-ish.
Meaning that we had a few months we could have prepared but we didn't.
And Peter Navarro thinks it may have saved or cost us hundreds of thousands of deaths.
That's just in this country.
Now, suppose that's confirmed and Or at least people come to believe it.
How are you going to feel about China?
And what happens when your country, let's say not an ally of China, let's say your country gets all vaccinated and it looks like there's not much that can hurt you.
You know, yes, people with vaccinations can still get it and spread it, but it's a different kind of problem in that case.
But let's say...
And let's say...
Here, I'm going to get rid of you.
Where are you?
All right. Sorry.
Can't find you to get rid of you right now.
So let's say that the world comes to hate China in a way that they've never hated them before.
It really comes to blame them for the flu and the virus.
What happens when China is not fully vaccinated and they're still very vulnerable and you have all these other countries who really, really hate China?
Do you think that there would be any intelligence agency and or individual who would intentionally infect China to pay them back?
I bet you've never heard that thought, have you?
I bet you've never heard that thought.
It's a big world.
Billions of people. If I said to you, look around your room, is there anybody in the room who would be willing to intentionally infect a country and cause, I don't know, millions of deaths?
You'd say, God, no.
There's nobody in my room.
I don't know anybody who would do that.
And if you asked 100 people, do you think you could find anybody who would say, yeah, let's kill millions of people, innocent people, just for revenge against the wrong people, because it was the government who did it, not the people.
So almost nobody would make that choice, right?
But it's a big world.
Somebody's going to do it.
Somebody is going to reintroduce the Delta variant into China intentionally for payback.
Because it's a big world, and there's somebody who would do that.
Somebody who's going to have the means to do it, and somebody's going to do it, one way or another.
So I don't think that China ever had a chance of escaping something really, really bad.
Could be karma. Could be something else.
But that's the situation.
So I think that China has a gigantic COVID problem ahead of them at about the same time other countries, such as the United States, will be getting things under control.
That's just one problem.
They're going to lose their manufacturing base as that gets moved out.
It's clear that they're not safe for business anymore.
So people in the business world are no longer going to make decisions to do business with China in the same way they did.
Because if it goes wrong now, you can't say you weren't warned.
You know, 10 years ago, if you did business in China and something didn't go well, you'd say, well, it was worth a shot.
You know, nothing is 100%.
It didn't work out.
But you wouldn't lose your job.
You wouldn't look like an idiot.
But today?
Today, if you started business in China, let's say you weren't doing business there already and you started to do business and it didn't go well, Could you blame anybody else?
Could you say you didn't know?
Could you say, I didn't know, China wasn't safe to do business in?
Now you know. So I don't think China has much of a good future ahead of them, at least for the near term.
The funniest thing in the news was, and of course it's based on a horrible event, as all news is, but...
Governor Cuomo denying the charges against him.
The Independent Commission said that, and I quote, we the investigators appointed to conduct it, blah, blah, blah, conclude that the governor engaged in conduct constituting sexual harassment under federal and New York state law.
And then later, I believe they said it was part of a clear pattern, so it wasn't a one-off.
Now, The funny part about this, if there's anything funny about massive sexual harassment, which isn't funny, but there is a funny part, which is that for Governor Cuomo to defend himself against these charges, this is almost so delicious it's not going to get out of my mouth.
Because it'll be so delicious, as I'm starting to say it, that I'll want to suck it back into my mouth to taste it again.
So the first time I try to say this, it might not come out.
I might just have to absorb it back in and get a second taste, but I'll try.
In order to defend himself, Governor Cuomo is going to have to Oh, it's delicious.
He's going to have to say that CNN is fake news.
God, was that as good to hear as it was to say?
I hope you enjoyed that as much as I did.
And indeed, he's doing that.
Now, the way he says it is that the facts are much different from what has been portrayed.
The facts are much different from what has been portrayed.
Fake news. CNN. Now, to their credit, CNN is reporting this straight.
They're not ignoring it, going right at it.
So I give them credit where credit is due, right?
They're going right at it. Now, you could argue they could do it a little differently or whatever, but they're not ignoring it, and their pundits are going at it hard, and that's fine.
Who do we believe? Do we believe the Independent Commission with their fact pattern and all of their testimonies and whatnot?
Or do we believe Governor Cuomo, who says the facts are much different from what has been portrayed?
Well, as luck would have it, if you were a member of the locals' community, you saw a video recently in which a CIA, ex-CIA person, described their technique for determining who's lying.
It's an actual technique...
A little checklist to determine who's lying.
And let's look at Governor Cuomo's denials and see if it hits anything on the checklist for the CIA to show that you're lying.
Well, it turns out there is.
Here's exactly what Cuomo said.
He said, I want you to know, quote, I never touched anyone inappropriately or made inappropriate sexual advances.
Which rule does this violate and therefore show you that he is lying?
It doesn't prove it by itself.
Part of what the CIA teaches is that you need a cluster of lies.
So if you see one independently, or one tell for a lie independently, it doesn't mean it's necessarily a lie, so you look for more of them.
Thank you. Overspecificity.
That is correct. It is an over-specific denial because he's using the word inappropriate both for the advances and for the touching.
Now, that's a subjective word, is it not?
Wouldn't you say that...
What is inappropriate to one person would be maybe appropriate to another person.
So he's staying solidly in the opinion category, his own opinion, that it was appropriate.
But was he ever accused of, quote, inappropriate behavior?
No. He was never accused of inappropriate behavior.
He was accused of illegal behavior.
Illegal behavior, as in constituting sexual harassment under federal and New York state law.
So the accusation and the denial don't quite line up, do they?
Here's what a denial should have been.
An honest denial would be, I've been accused of breaking the laws on sexual harassment under federal and New York state laws.
I did not do anything that violates the law.
Then you explain what you mean.
But when he comes at it with a different defense than the accusation, yeah, you could argue inappropriate covers illegal, but I don't know, does it?
Because one's an opinion and one's a legal standard, and even though there's some subjectivity in the legal standard, doesn't feel like he addressed it, the accusation, does it?
Right? So I would say that is lying-like.
Now, of course, he's a professional politician, so he'd do a better job of covering up his other tells.
But the one thing we know is that there's one tell there that's glaring.
But according to the CIA, in order to be judged a liar, you would need more of them.
So one is not conclusive.
You just learned something today.
Okay. As I watch my number of subscribers on Locals...
So people have to pay to be on the Locals platform where they get extra stuff from me that is usually too provocative to put in the public domain.
And I've been watching my subscription numbers drop like a rock.
And the reasons...
People are telling me with quite good feedback.
They're saying that I talk too much about masks and vaccinations...
Which I cop to. By the way, the other thing I get that I am most...
Let's see.
The other thing that I am most accused of is never admitting I'm wrong.
Have any of you ever done that?
Have you ever accused me of never admitting I'm wrong?
Well, here I am admitting I'm wrong.
And so I'm going to take the advice of the audience who says, I talk too much about those things, because I definitely do.
Now, what I try to do is talk about them from a risk management perspective and only if there's something new.
But you end up having to, in order to talk about anything new, you end up having to sort of set the stage and then you're talking about the old stuff again.
And I'm pretty sick of it myself.
Pretty sick of it myself.
And so I want to minimize it or put it at the end of the show so you can turn it off if you don't like it.
But I do think that talking about persuasion is always useful.
So I'm going to try to teach you something about persuasion.
I'll use a case of something that you're familiar with, but it's not really about vaccinations.
It's about persuasion.
Now... I believe that persuading on the subject of vaccination is probably unethical, which is why I don't do it directly.
People say I'm indirectly persuading.
But directly, I'm not intending to persuade because I feel it's unethical.
I'm not a doctor.
Make up your own decisions. Your risk is different.
But suppose you wanted to.
I'm going to teach you a lesson on, in my opinion, the most effective way to do it.
This won't be done, so you don't have to worry about it.
Don't worry about anybody doing this.
I don't think there's any chance it'll be done.
And it's based on an experiment in which people tried to teach people to save more for their retirement.
And what they did was...
What they did was they digitally aged people's face and then they showed them in the future and then they asked them to save money for their future self.
And the people who saw themselves digitally aged now had a visual representation of themselves in the future.
And what do you think they did?
They saved more money.
Because they wanted to be nice to that guy in the future that they've now seen.
They've visually seen him.
It's like a real person now.
It just happens to be you. And you're nice to you.
So it's easy to screw your future self and not save enough money.
Because it's a stranger.
Future you, you've never even met.
Literally a stranger.
And a concept.
It doesn't even exist. So as soon as you make a digital representation, it becomes real in your mind.
There's a real me in the future, and then you act differently.
Almost immediately. It's a pretty big effect.
It doesn't get everybody, of course.
Persuasion doesn't work that way.
But it's a pretty big effect.
So, suppose you wanted to be completely unethical, And persuade people to get vaccinated.
How would you do it?
You would take a Snapchat filter and you would make a filter that could take any picture of a person and put them in a hospital bed with a ventilator.
Dying of COVID. That would do it.
If you see yourself with a ventilator dying of COVID... You'll treat your future self differently.
Not everybody.
You'll probably get 10 to 20%.
But it's really unethical.
Really unethical.
Because you would be taking people completely out of the domain of rational thought.
You would be moving them away from their own opinion of the odds, which is different for everybody.
And you would basically just scare them.
You would scare them into loving themselves in the future, and an irrational thing would happen, and then they would change their behavior.
Very unethical. But I thought it would be useful as a lesson.
Oh, so let's talk about the people being forced to give vaccinations because they need a passport to do something.
As Raul Davis pointed out to me today on Twitter, there's a reason that will never work.
Do you know what it is?
Tell me in the comments, what is the reason it will never work in the long run to have vaccine passports?
Well, I'll jump ahead.
It's because not enough black people have vaccinated.
And if you required the only vaccinated people who could shop in a store, you would be racist because black people have far lower rate of vaccination.
It's racist.
And it's unambiguously racist by modern standards, right?
You could argue that you don't think you should be.
You could argue that you think it shouldn't be treated as racist, but it is.
According to our modern standard, if you make a policy or a rule that clearly targets one group, not targets, but disadvantages one group in a really obvious way, it's just racist.
It's illegal. So I don't think that passports can last unless everybody got vaccinated at something closer to a similar rate.
That's just not happening.
All right. So apparently Americans, according to Bloomberg, are talking about a poll that said 65% of workers who said their jobs could be done entirely remotely were willing to take, on average, a 5% reduction in pay to stay at home.
Is that big news?
They take a 5% reduction in pay to stay home.
Isn't 5% about what it costs to go to work?
That's sort of what your commute costs.
It feels like. So it feels like they haven't really said anything except that they'll go where the money tells them to go with the least amount of effort.
So again, does money predict things?
Yes, it does. Money predicts that people will want to work at home just to save money because commuting is expensive as well as pain in the ass.
So no surprise there.
Remember my 25% idiot rule?
That you do a poll on any topic and 25% of the people who answer will just be idiots?
It wouldn't matter how obvious the right answer is, 25% would still get the wrong answer.
It's very consistent. Here's another one.
So according to another poll, 74% of voters...
This is a Rasmussen poll.
74% of voters support photo ID requirements.
74% support photo ID requirements to vote.
That means something close, very close, to 25% of the public thinks that you should vote without proof that it's you.
Really? Really?
Do you think you could sit in a room with somebody who could explain their theoretical and academic argument for why you shouldn't be identified when you vote?
Do you think the reasons would sound pretty good when you heard them?
25%. It's so consistent.
You could find one quarter of the public...
They can't reason their way out of anything.
Anything. All right, let's talk about persuasion and AOC. AOC was throwing Democrats under a bus today.
Or yesterday, I guess.
She was on Jake Tapper's State of the Union and said, talking about the renter's moratorium situation, And how the Democrats completely screwed it up.
They waited too long. They should have done something.
They just completely screwed up the topic.
And AOC was kind of brutal.
Well, not brutal, but she was frank.
She said, there was, frankly, a handful of conservative Democrats in the House that threatened to get on planes rather than hold this vote, and we have to really call a spade a spade.
So she said clearly that the Democrats, they're in charge and they messed up.
Now, who does that sound like?
Who is a politician who you can think of who is persuasive, who also has...
Yeah, Trump.
If you want to be the President of the United States, you have to go after your own party.
You have to. If you want to be a senator...
Never go after your own party.
Because, you know, you're just a team player.
But if you want to be president of the United States, you have to go full Trump.
You have to tell your own party why it's messed up and how only you can fix it.
That's how you get the nomination, first of all.
But it's also how you get everybody to, you know, change to be your party.
Trump turned the Republican Party into his party by criticizing it.
AOC, who I believe is destined to someday be president, not anytime too soon, but I think she's going to have her turn in the presidency.
I think it's inevitable. Unless there's some scandal that comes out.
That's always a wild card.
But this is yet again another one of those indications that she's operating at a different level.
You know, you need to be able to throw your party under the bus right in front of them, or else you can't go further.
You can't go to the presidency.
I keep asking...
There's this weird thing happening where people keep saying that I, quote, got a lot wrong about the pandemic, and that I asked for examples, and the examples are kind of crazy.
But... And I've been trying to figure this out, and I think here's the reason.
I think the reason that I trigger cognitive dissonance more than other people, so they actually have false memories of things I've said or done, is that my take doesn't map to the binaries.
So there's always a binary in every topic, right?
People say this is absolutely true, or this is absolutely true.
But they don't allow that there might be some grey area.
And the binaries here are...
That masks or vaccinations either work or don't.
If they work, you should use them.
If they don't work, you shouldn't use them.
Would you say that's generally the binary?
People say they work or they don't, and if something works, you should use it, and if it doesn't work, you shouldn't use it.
In this case, working means it gives you more benefits than costs.
But I don't say that.
I don't say that. So I think that's what confuses people.
I say masks totally, almost certainly work for reducing some amount of risk, but you shouldn't use them if you're vaccinated.
And if somebody who's not vaccinated doesn't want to use them, I don't particularly care because I'm vaccinated.
My risk is microscopic.
I'm dying, anyway. So I don't know anybody else who has that opinion or states it the way I do.
They work, but Don't use them.
Same with vaccinations, or similarly with vaccinations.
My opinion, which totally could be wrong, because it'll take a long time to know for sure, but my opinion is that vaccinations, at least for people in my risk profile, not necessarily you, make sense for me.
And I don't recommend that you get them.
So I think both of them work.
Statistically, I think the science is more toward them working, but I could be wrong.
Either of them could end up not working in the end, and I'll tell you that.
If it turns out that they don't work, I'll tell you that, and I'll tell you I was wrong.
I don't know anybody who has a nuanced position where they say, yeah, they work, but that's not the question.
The question is risk management and blah, blah, blah.
So I think that's what's confusing people, is that I don't belong to one of the binaries, and so they're pretty sure that I must be wrong about a lot of stuff.
Here's another example.
I tweeted that, you know...
That if you're vaccinated, it feels like you're not in a pandemic, but if you're unvaccinated, you're still in the pandemic.
And somebody said, well, you got that wrong.
You got that wrong.
To which I say, how can an opinion be wrong?
My opinion isn't wrong, because it's how I feel.
I'm telling you how I feel.
I feel that when I got vaccinated...
And somebody else told me this the other day, actually, without being asked, that it feels different.
And it feels like you're done with the pandemic, but other people are not.
Now, can you criticize me for telling you how I feel?
It's just how I feel.
It's not right or wrong.
It's actually just how I feel.
So people are taking stuff like that and saying that I got stuff wrong.
No, I'm pretty sure I know how I feel.
That's all I'm talking about.
And then let me give you an example of how a typical claim about the pandemic goes.
So I asked in a tweet, I said, if ivermectin is so good, and we know that a number of countries don't have enough vaccinations to take care of things with vaccinations, shouldn't we see some smaller countries who have access to ivermectin, because everybody does, For the most part.
But maybe not vaccinations.
Shouldn't we see that some of the countries had totally squashed the COVID just with ivermectin?
And how does this conversation go?
Have you seen enough of these that I don't even have to tell you what happened next?
So I said, give me some examples.
And somebody did.
So Paul Collider on Twitter said, well, first I asked, why is it that we're not hearing about these successes?
And Paul offered these reasons.
He said major media's largest advertiser is pharma, so that would suggest that the vaccination makers don't want you to know about anything that's a low-cost solution.
Two, the major media sites on the left, it's not a serious question.
In other words, he's saying that The news industry is so corrupt on the left that you couldn't expect them to say anything about it anyway.
And then three of the major media sites on the right get a lot of their traffic from social media.
So they can't say too many things about ivermectin on the right either because then they won't get traffic sent to their content from social media.
Pretty good arguments.
Pretty good arguments.
So they do provide a reason why it could be possible...
And before you ban me, YouTube, wait till the end.
You'll be happy in the end, YouTube, if you're watching me and deciding, uh-oh, got my finger on the ban.
If YouTube turns off, jump over to Locals.
I took the subscription wall off for this video.
So if this gets banned on YouTube, just go over to Locals.
They don't ban this stuff.
All right. So...
So we've got a reason why maybe ivermectin could be solving the problem in some countries, and we'd never even hear about it because the media business model is corrupt.
Could be. Could be.
But then I still ask for one example, and Paul gave me Zimbabwe.
All right, so here's the Zimbabwe example.
So Zimbabwe didn't have much in the way of vaccinations.
But I guess some politician died of COVID or something.
And they decided to try ivermectin.
So here's what we know from Paul.
He says, the death rate rose sharply in January and peaked on the 25th at 70 deaths per day.
Then officials authorized the use of ivermectin.
It was granted toward the end of January.
Then one month later, in February, the COVID death rate had fallen to zero.
Well, that's what I asked for, right?
I asked for a show-me-one country that didn't use vaccinations, did use ivermectin, and just squashed the COVID. And there it was, Zimbabwe.
What happened next?
Anybody? Anybody?
What happened next? You've lived in the world long enough.
You know exactly what happened next.
Tell me. I'm going to see how long it takes you in the cartoons to tell me exactly what happened next.
It took about five minutes for Andres Bacchus to find the Zimbabwe death rate and show that if you showed it like a month later, the spike went through the roof.
So Zimbabwe is an example of ivermectin not working, and not working hard.
I mean, it really didn't work, according to the death rate chart.
So how many of you are surprised?
How many of you are surprised that there was a country that was held out, and this is standard, showed you a graph.
The graph looked real. In fact, the graph was real.
It was a real graph.
It just wasn't up to date.
How many of you knew it was going to happen?
That's the reason I did the tweet.
It was predictable as hell.
Now in the comments you said, what about Mexico?
What about India? They used ivermectin and they squashed.
No, they didn't.
No, they didn't. India is spiking.
Mexico, that didn't happen.
So all of these individual cases you think really happened because you saw a chart didn't happen.
It's either an old chart or a wrong chart or they didn't really use ivermectin or something.
But basically the question still stands.
If you believe ivermectin works and not only just works but like really works, like just squashes the virus, if you believe that's true and there are countries who have tried it, why has it never worked?
Why has it never worked?
Why? Now, again, can I conclude, based on this information, that ivermectin works or doesn't work?
No, no. This is the whole reason you need a randomized controlled trial, peer review, and you need to repeat it.
Even one randomized controlled trial is not going to be as convincing as you want it to be.
There's a reason you don't just look at a chart...
And decide what works.
It's because it doesn't work.
You think you can do it, and you can't.
Do you remember the part about do your own research?
Don't be fooled by the powers that be.
Do your own research.
Well, Paul did his own research.
How did it work out?
He came to the opposite conclusion of what the data says.
But he did his own research.
So did he do something wrong?
Did his own research?
Came to the wrong conclusion clearly.
At least in Zimbabwe.
I don't know about the conclusion overall.
So that's a good way to approach these questions about hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin or something.
The question you want to ask is what's missing?
Here's what's missing. Let me give you another one.
If you're trying to decide if masks work or don't, remember, I'm anti-mask, so I'm not telling you to wear a mask.
But if you're trying to decide if they work or not, here's the question you should ask.
Not, can I find a chart that says they work or not?
Because doing your own research doesn't work.
It's just an illusion that you think you can look stuff up on complicated topics and get it like the right answer.
It just isn't a thing. But here's the question you should ask.
There are people who do have those skills, right?
There are people who do know how to look at medical things and scientific studies and come up to better opinions.
Why is it that there's no top medical experts, at least people who have control of decisions, in any industrialized country who says masks don't work?
Why is that? Is that something about that all of them are suppressed by the system?
That nowhere, there's not one country anywhere, an industrialized country, where the leadership says, you know, we're looking at all the same data, and we say it doesn't work.
None? Now, I get the fact that science, like everything else, there's a herd mentality...
I get that people don't want to embarrass themselves by saying the wrong thing if everybody else is saying something else.
I get all those forces that are forcing you into the official narrative.
But there are a lot of countries.
There are a lot of experts in a lot of countries.
There's nobody in any of the other countries, let's say the industrialized countries, right?
The countries that have a serious science, let's say, structure.
None of them? Not one.
That stretches my imagination to the breaking point that you couldn't get one dissenter out of all those nations.
Because it seems like you could get a dissenter for everything.
I can't even think of any question you couldn't get a dissent on.
But not masks, apparently.
Now, let me say it again.
Someday, we'll probably know for sure.
I don't know. Maybe.
Maybe. But we could know for sure that vaccinations worked or didn't, masks were a good idea or a bad idea.
And if I'm wrong about any of this stuff, I don't have any problem telling you.
No problem. Because I always approach this stuff as a risk management question.
If I look at the question of masks, I don't tell myself there's a 100% chance they work.
I think it's a 90% chance.
But nothing's 100%.
So if you're thinking that I would have a problem telling you I was wrong, don't worry about that.
I won't have that problem. All right.
Ivermectin is also low risk, somebody says.
Yeah, I mean, that's worthy of consideration.
Fauci never believed Basque's work in his 80 years, you're saying.
Well, who knows? What is the definition of working?
Good question. You know, if I had to put a number on it, without the benefit of science, so it's just everybody's sort of guessing here, if I had to put a number on it, I think the masking makes a 10% difference.
In the context of a pandemic, that's worth doing.
especially since the 10% quickly volumes up because of the viral nature of things.
So here's somebody in the comments telling me that India is in fact proof that ivermectin works, that the spike was small and didn't last.
See the problem? You're all looking at the same data.
And some of you are looking at the data and say, well, I did my research.
Here, it shows it works.
I looked at a chart. And somebody else looked at the same data and said, well, here's proof it didn't work.
You're looking at the same chart.
It's just an illusion that you can do your own research on this stuff.
Mass found to be 3% effective in the CDC in two studies.
Look it up. Those, I believe, without looking it up, whoever said that the CDC says masks are 3% effective, I believe that's in a laboratory setting, not in the real-world setting.
I believe that was the difference.
So I don't know that we know in the real world.
That's where I'm saying 10%.
Oh, is there somebody here who has boots on the ground in India and says it's a media illusion?
What is the illusion? The illusion is that ivermectin worked or the illusion is that it didn't work?
So I don't know what you're referring to.
Can we talk about non-COVID-related headlines?
Well, we did. And...
Now we're done. And tomorrow, we'll talk about some more things.
So, here's my semi-commitment to you.
You can't really not talk about COVID. I'm going to try to minimize it because I know it's...
I feel the same thing.
I did a comic on it yesterday.
We're all just dying from the repeat story.
Just another year of the same fucking questions.
With slight changes, it's just...
It's awful.
Countries won't denounce masks because type 1 versus type 2 error.
Okay. Let's see what else we got here for comments before I go.
All right. It says half the transmission in counties where masks are mandated.
Yeah, none of those studies I trust.
So on YouTube comments, somebody was saying that the counties that had mask requirements had such and such an outcome.
I don't think any of that is conclusive.
But, yeah, it's worth throwing in the mix, but don't assume that you can conclude anything from that.
Let's see.
My spike observation is not incorrect.
India is still ranked 116 for infections.
All right. That's all I've got for now.
And I will talk to you tomorrow.
And let's hope that we have some news that's more fun.
