Episode 1579 Scott Adams: Today's Show Will Be Epic. You Might Love Me or Hate Me After We're Done
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
Humans Are Horrible, tragedy entertainment
SCOTUS hearing Mississippi abortion case
SF Police unions blame the ACLU
Social media bullying and school shootings
Chris Cuomo's CNN suspension
Elon Musk: we need better mental firewalls
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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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Good morning everybody and welcome to what will surely be the highlight of your entire life, if not a highlight of civilization itself.
Yeah, it's called Coffee with Scott Adams and I don't think anything has ever been better.
I know you like sunshine and money and all those things, but really they pale in comparison to what we're about to experience here, and we can take it up another notch.
All you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or a gel or a canteen jug or a flask.
A vessel of any kind.
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.
Except... The vaccination.
It's called the simultaneous sip, and it happens now.
Go. Oh, I was wrong.
I'm sorry. I was wrong. It made the vaccination better, too.
Oh! I'm not saying you should take it.
I'm just saying it makes everything better.
Satan, he got a little bit better when we took that sip.
So it's really everything. Well, let's talk about the news.
Now, because we live in a simulation and the creator of this simulation clearly has a sense of humor, we can look for this sense of humor in many things that we think are coincidence, but really, it's just a simulation having a sense of humor.
For example, on the trending news column today on Twitter, two stories that seem to be unrelated, or are they, were lumped together completely by chance.
The following titles appeared right next to each other.
Number one, Tubin.
So there's some news about Jeffrey Tubin.
And number two, a story that says sperm is being used to make dishware.
Now, I don't know that those two stories are connected, but my first thought was I don't think Tubin can handle that kind of volume.
That's my only question. I don't know if he can handle the volume.
The most unusual thing that could ever happen in the history of the universe happened recently.
Listen to this. You won't believe this.
This is one of those things you would say to yourself, well, that could never happen.
And here's what it is.
Ben Shapiro admitted he was defeated in a debate.
What? Have you ever...
Did you ever think that was going to happen?
Now, it turns out it was kind of a special case.
So it wasn't so much a straight-up debate.
But here's what happened.
Apparently... So Ben Shapiro himself admits he just got destroyed in the debate.
But it wasn't so much a point-by-point thing, but rather he was being interviewed by someone he didn't know, who he misinterpreted to be showing the antagonism of a political leftist.
So believing that he was being sort of set up and attacked by somebody who was just a lefty, He reacted as though that's who he was talking to.
And, you know, I think he ended it before he was done and blah, blah, blah.
So it seemed more like it was a hit piece.
And then I guess Ben Shapiro just reacted as though he had been invited to a sabotage.
But it turns out it wasn't.
It turns out it's just an interviewer who asks hard questions.
He wasn't a leftist at all.
And so Ben, I give him total credit for, in defeat...
He's a winner anyway.
That's right. In defeat, meaning he admits he lost the interaction, but by being smart and quickly admitting that he lost and why, he wins.
So believe it or not, he actually won by losing.
That's a real thing. This actually happened.
Imagine being so good at debating that you can lose and still win.
That's how good Ben Shapiro is.
All right, this is part of my series that I call Humans Are Horrible.
Humans are horrible.
That includes you.
Yeah, you're human.
Includes me too.
Because we're going to find entertainment in tragedy.
Not all of you. But some of you will find some entertainment in tragedy, and that means that you're horrible people.
Well, here's the story.
Anti-vaccine Christian broadcaster, somebody named Marcus Lamb.
That's right, there's a Christian broadcaster whose last name is Lamb.
Marcus Lamb.
Is that a real name? Can somebody tell me if he was born with the name Lamb?
You know, because Lamb...
Christ, right?
You all know your Bible stuff?
Was that really his name?
That's just a coincidence, right?
I don't know. My mom just confirmed name.
We're all lambs.
Okay. By the way, that's his name, but that's not the story.
The story is that he was an anti-vaccine crusader, and he just died of COVID. Now, of course, the news is dancing all over this because, you know, it's another way that they can promote vaccinations.
So the left is being very, very bad.
Very, very bad.
And seems to be enjoying the death of this person because he's a political opponent that they think did bad things.
Now, here's the thing that is most alarming to me.
He was exactly my age...
And it looked like he's in good shape.
At least the recent pictures.
He didn't have any obesity problem that was apparent in any pictures.
64 years old.
And he looked like a young 64.
It looks like he took care of himself.
Now, apparently he did take ivermectin and vitamin D and I think hydroxychloroquine too, maybe.
I'm not sure about that last one.
But he died anyway.
Now, as I tweeted, and a lot of you know, I'm not a believer, personally.
But I have a great respect for religion because I think it helps people in a whole variety of ways.
So I'm very pro-religion, I'm just not personally a believer.
But somebody has to tell me here, because I'm not a believer, so I don't know how these things work.
Does God ever express an opinion of this directly?
Anybody? When you see something like this, do you say to yourself, well, that's a sign from God?
Or do you say, no, you can't tell what God is thinking.
You know, he's mysterious.
Things happen for various reasons, and it doesn't mean it's a sign from God.
Well, let me ask you this.
If this had gone the other way, would you think it was a sign from God?
In other words, if the direction of this story was one that you expected or believed or wanted to be true, would you have said, well, that's a sign from God.
That's a pretty clear sign from God.
I'm seeing those.
Very good. Very good.
Now, I'm not sure you're all right about that, But the fact that you're all aware that you would not treat it as meaningful, no matter which way it went, is a very encouraging sign.
We're going to talk about critical thinking in a moment, but so far I'm impressed.
Okay. So people are horrible, but apparently not the people watching this live stream, because many of you are beautiful and smart and unusually sexy.
I don't know if you've noticed that.
The people who watch this live stream.
If you meet somebody else who watches the live stream, just check them out.
Extra sexy. I don't know why.
It doesn't even matter what they look like.
But there's just some kind of animal magnetism that comes out of people who watch this show, and I can't explain it.
China's birth rate looks like it's in decline.
They just registered the lowest birth rate since it's been recorded.
Wow. What is behind that?
If you had to guess...
And I'm sure smart people have weighed in on this.
What is behind China's low birth rate?
What do you think? Because the government doesn't want them to have a low birth rate.
Economic growth?
Yeah, whenever the economy improves, birth rate goes down.
Especially if you don't have immigration.
So answer me a question.
We have so many smart people watching this.
Somebody will know this. Would the birth rate in the United States, or let's say the population decline, would the population be declining in the United States if we didn't have immigration?
Anybody? Would the population in the United States be declining if we didn't have immigration?
I see only yeses. Do we know that?
Do we know that for sure?
I see one no, but almost all...
Well, a few no's. Some people are not sure.
Yeah, it might be close.
Well, almost everybody's saying yes.
I think we got 95% yeses.
So, I don't know.
Some of you do say no.
So I'm going to say it's not settled, but it looks like there's definitely some correlation going on there.
All right. Here's what I think.
I'm just going to put this out there.
Do Chinese parents want to bring a child into a police state?
Is that a thing? Can we identify that when the government is the most repressive, the birth rate goes down?
Is that a thing? I don't know if that's a thing.
I mean, one would assume. So Buzz is saying this might be mind-reading.
No, speculation is fine.
Mind reading is when you're sure you see something in there.
If you say, I wonder what people are thinking, and you speculate that it might be this and for this reason, that's perfectly fair.
But the moment I think I know I see it, well, that's mind reading, right?
And then you're in crazy town.
But speculating is fine.
Well, I would think, based on everything I know about human beings and economics, that people would make their decision at least a little bit based on what they're bringing into the world.
Now, you are aware that there are a number of people afraid of climate change in the United States who don't want to bring a child into the world, right?
Are you aware of that? How many of you knew that that's becoming a thing?
People who don't want to have kids because of climate change.
Well, if climate change would cause birth rates to change, and I think this is more anecdotal, the part about climate change causing people to have fewer babies, I think that's only anecdotal.
But we're seeing it.
I mean, it's a thing.
I don't know if it's more of a thing than the people having extra babies, but it's a thing.
So why wouldn't...
If it's a thing for some people, and we know that, because we can talk to the actual people who have that opinion...
Why wouldn't it be true in China?
I mean, people are people when it comes to stuff like that.
Yeah. But here's the other possibility.
You ready for this? I'm going to blow your frickin' mind right now.
There's one other possibility.
It's us. The United States.
Because don't you believe that all the major countries have persuasion campaigns going against their competitors?
If they don't, they should.
Don't you think that China and Russia are trying to influence American opinions?
Probably. What would be a way to destroy China in the long run?
To persuade them not to have babies.
Could somebody in the United States, let's say an intelligence organization, could they, or would they, have the ability or the power to persuade Chinese citizens to have fewer babies as a long-run plan to destroy China's growth?
The answer is yes, emphatically.
Now, I have no evidence that anything like that's happening.
I just want you to know that if we wanted to do that...
And if the United States intelligence agencies brought the right people into the mix, they probably could reduce the birth rate in any country they wanted.
Do you believe me? How many think that's a reasonable thing to say?
That a country could influence another country to change their birth rate?
I see some no's.
I've seen lots of nos, a mix of yeses and nos.
So you're pretty mixed on this one.
I see some absolutelys, some yeses, some nos.
All right, so it's unknowable, I guess, by its nature, since we haven't done it and we haven't done a randomized controlled test.
I would agree it's unknowable.
But I would tell you from my personal decades of experience as a trained hypnotist, And an influencer, it would be in the easier category of things to do.
Some things are really hard to persuade.
This would not be.
You could move 10% of a population if you tried pretty hard.
And 10% might be a lot, right?
It might make the difference between growth and not growth.
All right, so I have no reason to believe that's happening, but I'd be surprised if it isn't, because it's such an obvious play.
All right, um...
I've heard that the birth rate in China is getting so bad that the government is actually considering not murdering dissidents and selling their organs.
That's how bad it is.
So, keep an eye on that.
The Supreme Court is looking at an abortion case that I have to admit, I'm a little bit surprised.
I didn't expect that even with the changes in the Supreme Court that Roe v.
Wade would be this threatened.
And again, I'm not giving you any opinions on Roe v.
Wade. I abstain from that because I don't have babies and never have.
So to me, women can work that out.
The rest of you men can certainly weigh in.
I have no objections to men weighing in.
Of course, it's a democracy.
It's only my personal decision not to have an opinion on that.
But Mississippi is arguing...
To keep their ban on abortions after 15 weeks, which would effectively, you know, come close to banning abortions in the state.
And the Supreme Court decided to look at it.
So... I didn't expect that.
Now... I remember telling you that...
You shouldn't, not you, but people probably should not predict that Roe vs.
Wade would fall because any state that got rid of it would no longer be competitive.
In other words, you couldn't attract top talent to your state if something like half of them said, I'm not going there because of that abortion stuff.
So I predicted that it wouldn't be sweeping the country, you know, banning abortion because it would make your state uncompetitive.
But Mississippi was never competitive in the first place.
So I'm not sure that my prediction made any sense.
If you're talking about one of the bigger states, you can make that argument.
But I'm not sure Mississippi even cares.
It's not like they're tearing it up to be the next tech...
So I will revise my opinion, and I would say it's looking slightly more like Roe versus Wade will fall, or at least be constrained so much in some states.
Obviously the red states, the blue states will stay the same.
But this is one of those things that's really going to make that red state, blue state thing, which is already bad, the division, it's going to make it...
Pretty different. And I've also argued that the United States would never separate.
I mean, you can't say never in a thousand years.
But no time soon do you have to worry about some part of the United States separating from some other part.
But then I saw this abortion thing, and I thought, what happens if all the red states ban abortion and all the blue states don't?
That feels like that would be the first time that there's, like, a really significant...
Choose your country kind of situation there.
I'm still going to predict we're not going to separate while I'm alive during my lifetime.
But this definitely makes it more likely.
It looks like. And I'll be interested to see how the court rules.
I don't even have a prediction on that.
Remember I told you to follow the money even when it doesn't make sense?
You can predict the future by looking at who's going to make money and how.
And I told you I added something to that.
Now, everybody knows that, right?
Follow the money. It's the most basic thing that every adult knows.
Oh, somebody's making money.
That's why everything's happening.
But I'm going further than that.
I'm adding something to that, which is that even when there's no mechanism that seems obvious for why money should make the decision different, it always does.
Even when there's no reason.
I'm not sure it's causation or coincidence, but if you simply predict that whatever the money suggests is going to happen, you're going to be right most of the time.
Let me give you an example.
Moderna and Pfizer have announced that they're already looking at Omicron-specific vaccines.
So... Do you think that there will be someday a big push, I don't know if it'll be mandatory, but a big push to get you a second kind of vaccine, one for the regular one and one for the Omicron?
Yes. Yes.
And it doesn't matter if the science makes sense.
It doesn't matter if there's nobody in it for the money.
Well, yeah, which would be hard to imagine.
But even if...
No one was in it for the money, and you could put a lie detector on them and read their minds, and there was just nothing in there about money.
It's still going to go the way of the money.
Now, let me extend that.
Take every mystery and inconsistency you know about COVID from the official data.
Is there one thing that would explain all of it?
Is the one thing that would explain everything that's happened that we've observed with the coronavirus?
I see corruptions.
I see money. I see China.
And I see vitamin D. Which one of those explains everything we see?
From those choices, which one would explain everything?
Money? Some say money would explain everything.
I'm going to give money and vitamin D both an A, because they work together in this case.
So I think money is the right answer, but vitamin D has to be in the mix for the money part to make sense.
Because when we look at what countries are having good and bad results, I told you there was a study recently that showed there was a very high correlation for vitamin D. People with good vitamin D did better than the others.
Now, what explains Africa?
Well, they're younger, they're less obese, there's that.
But I've got a feeling it's going to turn out to be vitamin D, spending more time in the air.
I also think ventilation is going to be One of the biggest variables that we didn't talk about enough.
Can somebody answer this question for me?
In most of Africa, so it's sort of a general statement, do they keep the windows open indoors all the time?
Can anybody answer that question?
In Africa, when you're indoors, are the windows open all the time?
Yes, because no OC, one would assume.
Because it never gets cold there, right?
So don't they just leave the windows open all the time?
If they have windows?
I think even in the cities they leave the windows open, do they not?
So, obviously they would have some air conditioning in the cities, but I think even in the cities there would be a lot of windows open.
North Africa gets very cold, somebody says.
Yeah, I think vitamin D and ventilation are going to be two of the biggest variables that made a difference, but you can't make any money on opening windows.
And you can't make any money, I mean, if you're big pharma, you can't make any money on a generic vitamin.
So I think money...
It's going to be explaining everything, but not without also vitamin D and not also without ventilation indoors.
I think indoor ventilation is just going to be the thing along with vitamin D. And then the reason that we're not all completely informed that those things are the big variables would be, what would keep us from being informed that indoor ventilation and vitamin D are really the biggest factors?
Money. The money.
Right? That's what would keep you from being informed.
Now, I've drawn a picture that I cannot tell you is true.
Right? I'm not going to tell you that vitamin D will make you invulnerable from...
I'm not going to tell you that supplementing would make you invulnerable.
I do think that having good vitamin D levels are positively correlated with good health in every possible way.
Or most possible ways, including coronavirus.
But that's different than supplements will help you.
I think they might. Good chance.
But I think we're not quite there to know that scientifically.
However, if you put money, vitamin D, and indoor ventilation together, I think they explain every inconsistency.
Am I right? Can anybody give me a mystery about the coronavirus that's not explained by one of those variables?
Thank you, Brian.
I appreciate that.
Just being thinner works.
Do you think that weight is the variable that kind of explains it all?
Because actually, that's a good point.
Because you're seeing that our governments are not encouraging us to get healthy.
I mean, not really. They may have mentioned it a few times.
But where is your government telling you to get fit?
The most basic thing you'd say.
Well, nobody makes money from that.
So almost every inconsistency and mystery of why anything's happening the way it is seems to be explained by just a few variables that nobody makes money on.
All right. Doesn't mean it's true, it just means that it's a hypothesis that fits all the observations.
San Francisco is hoping to have a good holiday season and sell a lot in the retail stores, which is being somewhat hindered by the fact that the windows are boarded up because of all the smash-and-grab robberies.
If you go into Union Square, which is sort of the high-end shopping part of San Francisco, The windows are boarded up.
Can you imagine going to a festive shopping excursion into a place with boarded windows?
Oh, my God. The whole city is ruined, in my opinion.
And police union leaders are blaming the ACLU for essentially making it possible for all the smash-and-grab robberies to be unpunished.
And... I ask you this question.
This is an experience that a lot of people in the cities are going to have.
They're going to go shopping.
They're going to find out that it's so criminally...
There's so much crime that they can't even go shopping the way they used to.
And I ask this question.
How bad would you have to be as a Republican candidate to lose an election in 2022 or 2024?
I feel like you would have to be the worst politician in the world to lose in this context.
And, you know, I know that sounds like hyperbole, but how in the world could you lose?
I mean, really.
You would have to be just awful to lose an election in this context.
One way you could do it is just stick to your far-right opinions and just never budge.
I mean, that could lose you the election, sure.
But if you had any, like, political savvy, you would go soft on your right-leaning stuff a little bit, and you could win any blue state you wanted, any blue election.
I'm pretty sure, if I didn't have my baggage of my history, I'm pretty sure I could enter any blue state election as a Republican and win the election.
Except for, you know, people would dig into my history and find out about all my massive crimes and whatnot.
Um... Anyway, so if you see a Republican losing an election, that is really a bad, bad candidate, in my opinion.
It'd have to be a real exception.
All right, there's another school shooting.
I'm not going to talk about any of the details.
I'm not even going to tell you where it was because I don't want to encourage this stuff.
But I have an opinion that school shootings are mostly caused by social media.
Now, right away, your critical thinking should say, what?
And that would be correct. You should say something like that.
You should be saying something like, wait a minute, there are lots of causes for that.
There's not one cause.
Nothing has one cause.
You are correct. Nothing has one cause.
Remember that because we're going to talk about it again today.
Nothing has one cause.
Sometimes there's the last straw, but the last straw is not the heavy one.
It's just the last one.
It's just the last thing that happened.
So the way our limited brains are organized, we think the last thing that happened is the cause.
No, it's probably just the last thing that happened, and it's random like that.
So like with coronavirus, is it the coronavirus that's killing you if you have five comorbidities and you're 100 years old?
Well, that's what the documents are going to say.
But no, all of that stuff had to happen for you to die.
Coronavirus was just the last straw.
So keep that in mind.
Whenever we talk about the cause of anything, it's never really the cause.
It's just sort of the last thing that happened that triggered it.
So there are triggers, no pun intended.
And in my opinion, the trigger...
And sort of the last thing that will happen before somebody, at least a student, starts shooting, is social media bullying.
And here's my hypothesis.
The hypothesis is that in the past, people were bullied in person, and that was pretty bad.
Being bullied in person is really bad for you.
But it was a small group, and it was private.
Have you ever seen the movie Carrie by Stephen King?
Have you ever seen that? In the movie Carrie, there's a young girl who ends up killing a lot of people, but the trigger for it was not all of the bullying that happened sort of on the baseline.
It was that she got humiliated in public in front of a big crowd.
So it was the public part that turned Carrie from an angry, bullied person into a mass murderer.
Now, that was a movie, so don't take too much for movies.
But I think that it's the public part of it, the social media part of it, that has taken the high school bullying to the Carrie level.
And that, under this scenario, it should produce lots of Carrie's.
People who have been bullied to the point where they're at their breaking point, but then it becomes a social media thing, and then they break.
Because once it's public, you don't have anything to live for, do you?
If you're a student, and you are publicly shamed, so there's no place you can go because they've already heard of you, it's not going to feel like you have anything to live for.
Now, you do, and nobody should kill themselves over bullying in school, because if you get out of school, everything gets better.
So just sort of wait it out would be my advice.
But you can certainly predict it, and you can certainly understand it.
And in my opinion, social media should be regulated like alcohol and firearms, because it has a similar risk for young people.
Let's see in the comments how many of you would agree that social media has a risk...
Profile that's at least as dangerous as alcohol and firearms and cigarettes.
Same class, wouldn't you say?
Because one is, you know, the others are more of a physical health problem, whereas the social media is a mental health problem, but it's a massive problem.
Massive problem. So, mostly yeses.
Now, of course, You know, most of us are over 21, so it's easy for us to say we'll regulate other people.
We're all in favor of regulating other people.
We just don't like to regulate ourselves.
Somebody says not firearms.
Yeah, I think you could make an argument for a younger age for firearms.
In some cases, yes.
All right. Chris Cuomo was suspended from CNN from the new information about the extent to which he was helping his brother, the governor, who was accused of sexual improprieties.
And when you see that Chris Cuomo is suspended, of course you know that Fox will be enjoying this, but there was a Fox headline that I just laughed because I love this little rivalry between CNN and Fox.
And if you say you don't enjoy that, I don't know.
You have to enjoy that, don't you?
I mean, I enjoy it in both directions, watching the back and forth.
It's very entertaining, and I like that both of them do it, because it's a way to...
You know, be a check on the other, I guess, the excesses of the other.
But here was Fox's headline about it, about Chris Cuomo being suspended.
This is so diabolically humorous without going over the top.
Just listen to how funny this is coming from Fox News.
Quote, CNN punishes its only star.
Come on, you have to appreciate that headline from Fox News.
You know, being like a way to prod the competitor.
CNN punishes its only star.
What makes Chris Cuomo their only star?
Now, I understand he has the highest ratings, but that might have to do with the time slot, right?
He's clearly not their only star, but the fact that Fox frames this as CNN only has one star, and he just had to be fired for bad behavior.
Oh, that's funny.
Anyway, I continue to support most of what Chris Cuomo did for his brother for the same reason that CNN kept him on until now, which is that people helping their brother You know, you just got to be understanding of that, right? You know, that's just a special case.
But he may have gone too far.
That's what the new information suggests.
So that's what they're looking at.
And I think it's responsible for them to suspend him at this point.
It's just good for the brand, I think.
But here's what we've learned about the Jeffrey Toobin situation and now the Chris Cuomo thing.
If you put it all together, we've learned that...
CNN will keep you employed.
You can be a dick, like Don Lemon.
You can yank your dick, like Toobin, but you can't help your brother if your brother's a dick.
So we now know the standard.
You can't be a dick, but you can yank a dick, and you can't help your brother if he's a dick.
So that's sort of the dick rule at CNN, and they're very consistent about that.
that.
I'll give them the credit.
There's Reuters fact check in which it's a video of Jill Biden reading to children and some wag added, layered on some extra video of a child who, quote, appears to shout a profanity towards the U.S. First Lady.
Now, have any of you heard the video?
I haven't heard it. Because, you know, the fact-checkers don't show the video.
But... Every time somebody...
I assume this is somebody on the political right did this.
But every time somebody on the right doctors a video, it just makes me so happy.
Because every time the left sees that a video has been doctored, It should give them a little bit of just a slight little grain of salt hesitation about the videos that they believe.
Because they're up to how many hoaxes have the left believed because they think they saw it on video?
Fine people hoax, the Covington kids, the koi fish feeding, the drinking bleach.
They're all fake videos, meaning that they were edited to reverse their meaning or whatnot.
Somebody needs to send me a link to the doctored video because I've got a feeling it's pretty good.
Anyway, so Democrats normally didn't get to see all the RUPAR videos, but now they're seeing doctored videos and it might make them think that.
Well, on the bad news front, war has begun in space, which I was not aware of.
It turns out that according to U.S. officials, military officials, Russia and China are attacking our space assets, quote, every single day.
Now, I think their attacks are non-kinetic, meaning it's hacking and digital and jamming and stuff like that.
But did you know that war in space is already on?
And that China's launched their hypersonic missile and we're gearing up.
Let me give you some bad news.
What are most wars about?
Go. What are most wars about?
Anybody? Land and resources.
Mostly land, right? Even more than resources, at least in the modern world.
In the old days, it was land and resources.
In the modern days, it's mostly land and, you know, yes, resources.
You know, Kuwait, for example.
Territory, right? You know what the problem is with space?
Yeah, you do. It's all new territory.
The odds of having a superpower war in space...
What are the odds of a superpower war in space?
It's 100%.
It's 100%.
Because while we might not want to start a war terrestrially...
Because that means that everybody dies.
If it becomes nuclear on Earth, everybody dies.
But there's a 100% chance we're going to be fighting like crazy in space.
Here's another one.
It's not just territory, it's the high ground.
The reason that anybody would conquer any territory that they don't already own...
In today's world, sometimes resources, but usually defense.
They're taking over a neighboring country to bolster their defense.
In other words, the high ground, exactly.
Golan Heights, what's the importance of the Golan Heights?
It's the high ground, right?
And space is the ultimate high ground, right?
Because it's hard to shoot things up, but it's easier to shoot things down.
And I imagine there'd be a variety of advantages to owning space.
Especially the satellites, right?
Whoever can protect their satellites gets to have a good life on Earth.
Whoever can't protect their satellites...
They lose. So, yeah, there's going to be war in space, and it looks like it's already started.
It's just not kinetic yet.
But you know that everybody's working on kinetic weapons for space, right?
I mean, how hard would it be to take out a satellite?
It seems like you'd need a bullet-sized projectile that had some navigation ability, and that's it.
That's all you need. Something the size of like a large bullet with some navigation ability.
Goodbye satellite. It just has to be launched from space.
So you just put it up on your rocket and release it with some instructions and boom, goodbye satellites.
Yeah, that would be possible now.
Yeah, we have all the technology to do what I just described.
I asked this poll.
This is the worst poll I've ever done because, you know, it's the wrong choices and it's non-scientific and everything else.
So don't take too much from this.
But I asked, who is most responsible for the January 6th protests at the Capitol?
My choices were Trump, fake news, the CIA via Q, That's just sort of a cheeky one.
And Congress. Now, some people said I should put the protesters themselves, or maybe Nancy Pelosi and Muriel Bowser for denying the Capitol Police the backup.
And those are good things to say.
Now, if I put the protesters themselves as one of the choices, it wouldn't be any fun.
Because that would have won, right?
I think if you put the protesters themselves, I kind of think they would have had 80% of the vote.
And that wouldn't tell you anything? So I wanted to see, besides the obvious fact that the people who went there are obviously in charge of their own life, you know, who beyond that?
So Trump got, last I looked, about 11% of the votes.
Fake news got about 47%.
As the cause of January 6th.
The CIA via Q or QAnon, 24%.
And Congress, about 18%.
Now, here's my take on it.
So I think the public got this right.
The biggest result was fake news.
I believe that when you say, hey, the protesters are themselves responsible, if you're talking about legal responsibility, 100% correct.
The people who go there and do the act are legally 100% responsible.
Just as I would apply that same standard to Alec Baldwin.
Even though he has a perfectly good reason why he did what he did, the armorer was in charge, blah, blah, blah.
He's the one who did it.
Right? He could have checked...
To make sure he didn't have a live round.
He could have not pulled the trigger when it was just rehearsal.
There are a lot of things he could have done.
So it's the same standard for legal reasons, or in the case of gun control, more of a gun rights or a gun safety reason.
But here's my view of the real world.
People don't have free will.
You're all programmed by outside sources, including me.
If you believe that humans are largely just programmed entities and the programming is assigned to them from external sources, some of it from their friends, some of it from the media, some of it from the fake news, some of it from social media, that's how I see the world.
Now, I'm not asking you to see it the same way.
I'm describing a framework or a frame to see the world, and you could say that it either predicts or it doesn't.
So the way to say your worldview is good or not is predict or doesn't predict.
And I would say, if you say to yourself, the fake news has programmed people to the point where they distrust the government...
And the Democrats plus the news entity, which all seems the same at this point, that's a pretty accurate worldview, to think that the faint news programmed people to make the choices they made.
Now, from a legal perspective, it always has to still be the person who did it, not the person who influenced them.
But if you want to understand the world, as opposed to assigning blame, which we have to do for practical purposes, if you want to understand the world, Okay, that totally worked, Erica.
All right. I'm going to now look at the video of Jill Biden being shouted at.
Or am I? Damn it.
Bug. Just crapped out.
All right. Well, thank you.
Alright, so I blame fake news for programming the public, and not just the left, but the right.
If the news had ever been real, would there have been a protest?
Let me ask you this.
Suppose the news had always reported this.
The courts have found no fraud...
But you have to understand the courts are not the right entity to look for fraud or to find it.
They can only judge the things that people have standing for, and nobody has standing.
And they only accept cases that would make a difference.
And if it's after the election, sometimes they say it doesn't make a difference.
So if the news had accurately reported...
That the election system can't be audited fully.
It's not an option.
We don't have a system that can do that.
You can only audit some things, so you'll never really know.
If the news had told you that...
If it had told you that probably the biggest difference was that the Democrats did a good job of manipulating the election laws because of the pandemic, it was all legal, but they did a good job of it.
If the news had told you straight what happened with the election, even if they still criticized Trump for going too far about claiming fraud, even if they completely criticized him, do you think there would have been a protest?
I feel like not. Because I feel like the protest is, in large part, and again, lots of different variables, and they all had to happen the way they did for it to happen.
But I think one of the big variables is that the news isn't real.
And that without that safety check, people feel exposed.
If you tell me that the news is looking into all the corruption in the government, I say to myself, okay, let them handle it.
The news business is going to go find that corruption.
They're going to uncover it, and then justice will be had.
I don't need to get involved.
But what if you think the news is colluding with the corruption?
Which it is. It legitimately is.
I mean, we know that for sure because of the Russia collusion thing.
So if you believe that the news has gone corrupt and has joined the corrupt government in their corrupt plans, I think you'd go to the streets.
Not everybody, but it would be a predictable outcome of fake news.
So given that there's no such thing as a cause for anything, calling Trump the cause is absurd, calling anything else from Q to anything else as the cause is absurd.
Let me ask you this.
If Congress had a rating over, what, 11% or 13% approval, do you think the people would have marched on the Capitol?
Suppose the Congress had a 50% approval.
Do you think that people would have marched on the Capitol where the Congress was?
I don't think so. I don't think so.
I think people would have said, you know, we're really mad.
Oh, we're not really mad at those guys.
We're really mad at what happened.
You know, maybe the election.
But not necessarily so mad at Congress.
If that had been the case, they wouldn't have been there at all.
So all of this what is the cause of the protest is just brainwashing bullshit.
There's no cause.
There's a whole bunch of things that had to happen, including Pelosi and Bowser denying Capitol Police, including the protesters' own personal decisions.
But if you're ignoring what is probably the biggest variable...
Don't do that. Probably the news is the biggest variable because we feel exposed and unprotected by not having a legitimate news industry anymore.
All right.
Let's see what else is happening.
Oh, here's some fun. So there was a tweet by somebody named Mike Solana who has enough followers that I think he must be...
Well-known for something.
Maybe investing. His profile is...
Says he's the mayor of San Francisco, which he isn't, so I don't know what else to believe on there.
But he's somebody of substance, apparently.
And I say that only because Elon Musk replied to him.
So Mike Solana tweeted this.
Seems like we should all be a lot more concerned about the fact that hypnosis is a real thing?
Mind control?
Real. Basically.
Why does this not matter?
Is that a good question? If hypnosis is real, it is, and then mind control is real, shouldn't we be worried about this?
Why aren't we? Well, I answered that the best hypnotists are invisible because they operate outside the realm of imagination.
If you knew what hypnotists were capable of doing, you could see it.
If you don't know what they're capable of doing, it looks like a coincidence.
And I gave this example.
If I went on live TV and changed the world right in front of you, you would think it was a coincidence.
You would. Because your imagination could not hold the possibility that I just changed the world right in front of you.
It's just not imaginable.
So the best hypnotists are completely invisible.
They operate without any attention.
I could tell you directly what I'm doing, and you just can't see it.
Unless you're another hypnotist.
Other hypnotists can see it pretty easily.
So Elon Musk replied this way about the mind control, etc.
He said, the overarching problem is that we need better mental firewalls for the information constantly coming at us.
Critical and first-principle thinking should be a required course in middle school.
Who wrote the software in your head, he says.
Are you sure you actually want it there?
So this is Elon Musk asking, who wrote the software running in your head?
Are you sure you actually want it there?
It's the same thing I just told you about the January 6th protests.
The people who went there had some software running in their head.
Who wrote it? It wasn't them.
You don't write your own software.
Other people write your software.
Always. Elon Musk knows it.
I know it. And you're learning it.
Some of you are learning it.
Some of you knew it. But what do you think?
Should we teach critical thinking and first principles in middle school?
I say yes.
Good suggestion. But...
It is woefully lacking.
It's good, but it doesn't come close to what we need.
Here's what we need. Here was my response to Elon Musk's comment.
I said 75% of the best critical thinkers in America fell for five to ten obvious major media hoaxes in the last five years and still don't know it.
We also need to teach bullshit detection.
That's different. Bullshit detection is completely different than critical thinking.
Critical thinking would help you, let's say, look at a study claim and see if they were a randomized controlled trial.
You could look at sort of scientific-y things and maybe even legal things and say, okay, that's logical or not.
If you're an engineer, you need those critical skills, thinking skills.
But if you're looking at the news, do you think your critical skills are helping you?
Let me tell you what the Amazing Randy has claimed.
Now, the Amazing Randy is a debunker of fake frauds, but also a famous magician himself.
And the Amazing Randy says that the easiest people to fool are...
Do you know the answer to this?
The Amazing Randy, a professional magician of note, you know, a famous one, says the easiest people to fool are...
scientists.
And smart people.
Yeah, smart people. Do you know why they're the easiest to fool?
Because if they don't think they know any other answer for what they're observing, they say it must be one of the things they can imagine.
So the scientist will look at a situation and say, well, it could be this or it could be this, but those are the only things I can imagine.
So it's one of those.
You can fool them every time.
Because here's the first thing I'd teach somebody that probably is not in your critical thinking course.
It should be, but I'll bet it wouldn't be.
That your imagination is your limiter.
Your imagination. If you can't imagine something, you can't see it.
Your imagination doesn't go there.
First, your imagination has to accept it.
If you can't do that, you're never going to think of it.
So the scientist is easy to fool with a magic trick or with a fake psychic because they think, well, I've looked at all the possibilities and there's nothing left, but this is a real psychic.
Whereas James Randi comes in and says, no, there's a couple of other things you haven't considered and that's why I can debunk them and you can't.
Scientists are not the ones who always debunk the frauds.
Sometimes it's magicians because they know the tricks.
So we need a bullshit detection.
And my book, Loser Think, tries to do that.
I think that should be required reading in schools.
Speaking of critical thinking, I will give you a lesson in critical thinking right now.
I asked this question on Twitter.
How confident are you that your getting vaxxed or not getting vaxxed decision was the correct one for you?
Now, key words are for you, right?
Forget about the rest of us.
Was your vaccination decision the right one for you?
So the people who said they're 100% confident was 41% last time I checked.
41% were 100% confident in their own decision.
25% had high confidence, 22% medium confidence, and 11% said low.
My own would be medium, medium to high, That's how I would have answered it.
Here's your critical thinking lesson for today.
Most of the people who said they're 100% confident do not have critical thinking skills.
Some of them were probably already infected.
So if they said, oh, I was already infected, therefore I didn't get the vaccination, well, you could be pretty close to 100% sure on that.
But I don't think most of these 40% were necessarily already infected.
You could also say, well, there's some people with 10 comorbidities and they're pretty close to 100% sure.
But for most of these people who are 100% sure, if you're 100% sure about this, then unless you're one of those special cases, then you don't have basic critical thinking skills.
Because this is not the kind of decision...
That you should be 100% sure of.
This is a risk management decision.
The moment you think it's binary, you know, where it's one or the other and it's 100%, you have missed a lot of critical thinking and training in your life.
Now, is that because you're dumb?
Are the people who have 100% confidence and they're not one of those special cases, are they dumb?
No. Nope.
They are not. There are people who have just not been exposed to a specific skill.
You don't learn critical thinking just by waking up in the morning and being all smart, right?
Can anybody confirm that?
I don't want to be the only one saying this.
Those of you who have gone through some kind of critical thinking training, whether it's economics or whatever it was, can you confirm for me that this is a learned skill?
It's not something natural.
I mean, natural helps.
Natural definitely helps.
You'd be naturally smart.
But you need to learn technique.
And people imagine that they don't need it if they just sort of have good common sense.
And so I would say to you that if you answered 100%, I'm not going to criticize you for that.
So I'm not going to criticize anybody who said 100%, even though I believe it's a pretty strong signal that they haven't studied critical thinking.
Because here's the thing.
All of us have some gaps in things we've studied.
I've got lots of gaps.
Tons of them. So if you say, Scott, you don't know about physics because you didn't study it, I'm not going to say, oh, you've insulted me for my lack of physics understanding.
I'm going to say, well, that's true.
I have not studied physics.
So I'm saying to you, if you haven't studied critical thinking, you might not know what you're missing.
All right. Rasmussen asked this poll, still in the context of critical thinking here.
How much do you trust Big Pharma?
I'm paraphrasing the question.
6% said they trust Big Pharma, quote, a lot.
What? 36% said somewhat.
57% said they don't trust Big Pharma very much or they're unsure.
I think unsure means you don't trust them, right?
If somebody says, do you trust somebody and you say you're unsure?
What the hell does that mean? If you don't trust them, you don't trust them.
You're unsure, you don't trust them.
So I just lump those with don't trust.
So what do you think of that?
Do you think people have good critical thinking?
6% don't, because they trust big pharma a lot.
I think that's an irrational opinion, given what we know.
And then Rasmus said, do you think that big pharma is more interested in profits or making customers' lives better?
25% answered that big pharma's main interest is not profits, but rather making customers' lives better.
Huh. 25% think pharma is more interested in our well-being than their billions and billions and billions and billions of dollars of profit.
25%. If you're new to the live stream, you might not know that it's an ongoing joke that 25% of the public will get every poll question wrong.
I don't know if it's the same 25%, but yes, trillions actually.
It's literally trillions of dollars for the pharma companies.
That's correct. And then this question.
Do pharma companies have too much influence on the government?
70% said yes.
Huh. 70% said yes.
Big pharma has too much influence on the government, which leaves 25-ish percent probably unsure if you take out the uncertains.
Once you see it, you can't unsee it.
The 25% thing.
I mean, it's not exactly 25% every time.
But it's so consistent, it's hilarious.
All right. That is my incredible show for the day.
I think it's the best thing you've ever seen in your life.
I'm going to have to go do some other things.
Today's the day that my cat gets her feeding tube taken out and her life goes back to normal.
And I can't tell you how happy I am about that.
It's the best thing ever.
And Boo is doing great.
She's climbing and jumping and purring.
She's very hungry this morning because I have to keep her unfed for a while because she has to go under to get her tube out.
But she's doing great.
And I'm doing okay myself.
So I hope I made your life a little bit better today.
