Episode 1582 Scott Adams: The News is Slow But Extra Funny Today. Come Join Me
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
Hollywood people suspect all news is fake?
CNN continues dumping on VP Harris
The Drinking Bleach HOAX, was a double Rupar
NO Regeneron after 7 days of COVID symptoms?
NO Regeneron if you're in a hospital?
Infinite COVID as a business model
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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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And while I do tell you that coffee with Scott Adams is the best thing that's ever happened to you, possibly the best thing that's ever happened to anybody, today, a little extra good.
And I'm not even joking.
I just saw, literally, you know, three minutes ago, The best news I've seen in a long time.
And I don't know if you've seen it yet.
You suspected it was coming.
But are you ready for it?
I'm just going to look at my other computer and just read you the headlines.
Right? Just savor it.
Okay? It goes like this.
Sigh of relief in South Africa.
Sorry, let me put on my microphone.
Here's the good news for you.
Sigh of relief in South Africa as Omicron variant appears to be super mild.
Super mild.
And the death rate is not jumping.
And it says the WHO, WHO, and coronavirus experts are increasingly convinced that the new Omicron variant is, quote, super mild.
I think something good is happening here.
And here's the funny thing.
I'm increasingly convinced that the only way any virus ever ends is that it becomes its own vaccination.
Yeah.
Now, that's a thing, right?
Am I wrong that that's an actual thing?
Some people suspect that's what stopped the Spanish flu, right?
Now, there might be some disagreement on that, but my current view is I can't think of anything else that would ever stop a virus once it reaches pandemic proportions.
What else would do it?
I mean, it's not human intervention.
I don't think so.
And it's not vaccinations.
So this thing may have...
And here's the fun part.
You've got all these...
Oh, God, I'm trying not to swear.
Whew! It was hard to choke that one back.
I could do this again without the cursing.
Deep breath. Think of all the fine, fine human beings.
See what I did there? I could have been swearing there.
But instead, the fine human beings that are preparing to charge us another $10 trillion for vaccinations and medications.
What would happen...
If a variant destroyed their entire business model, trillions of dollars.
It might be happening.
Here's how you know that it might be happening.
The news won't tell you.
I had to look at some weird little news source to say that That the Omicron looks mild.
Now, I would wait for extra sources to say that.
I wouldn't consider what I just read to you to be a highly credible source.
But I think it's coming.
And it could be that all these weasels who have been trying to figure out every way to charge us...
We'll get to the SIPP. Every way to charge us may be thwarted to the tune of possibly trillions of dollars...
All right. How can we take this good news into even better feelings than we already have?
Well, that's something called the Simultaneous Sip.
And all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or a chalice of stein, a tank, a canteen jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid I like, coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the thing that makes everything better.
It's called the Simultaneous Sip.
Here it comes.
Good.
Oh, so good.
Well, Joe Biden is allegedly suffering from a bad cold.
It's not COVID. He's got a bad cold, and his speech was sounding a little different.
In fact, doctors said he had, quote, a frog in his throat.
He had a frog in his throat, which would explain...
Why his speaking, recently, has been so ribbiting.
Yeah, I'll just let that ribbiting.
Now, I thought that was a good pun when I tweeted it, but I was embarrassed and humiliated by this better pun from Alison Arkin, who is a writer, so at least she's a professional.
I hate to be beaten by non-professionals, but if a professional tops me, all right, that's fair.
And here's what she said about Joe Biden having a frog in his throat.
She said about Joe Biden, I think he's been a tad polarizing.
He's been a tad polarizing.
Slow clap.
Good pun. All right, in the CNN fake news category, oh, it's delicious this time, Joy Reid was talking about, he tweeted about the story that Governor DeSantis wants to establish what CNN refers to as a World War II era Civilian military force.
Oh, my God! That not the Pentagon would control.
The CNN article goes on.
But in a nod to the growing tensions between blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And he called it would not be encumbered by the federal government.
Scary, isn't it?
Whoa. And I believe that it was Joy Reid of MSNBC who tweeted and said it was fascist-y banana stuff.
Fascist-y banana stuff.
That's what DeSantis is doing.
It wasn't until the fourth paragraph that CNN acknowledged that there are already 23 states that have such a force.
So Joy Reid is looking at this and saying, oh, it's fascist, it's bananas.
And he would be the 24th state to do it.
No problem yet.
Basically, 200 volunteers.
Now, apparently, Joy Reid and others are worried that the 200 volunteers will be such a well-trained fighting force that they can take on the largest military in the galaxy, the United States military.
So that's what Joy Reid is worried about, and that seemed quite ridiculous even to Sarah Silverman.
who called bullshit on Joy Reid's tweet and tweeted back at her and said, please read the article before you post this stuff.
You're the news outlet.
The truth has to matter.
Now, if you follow politics and celebrity input into politics, you would know that Sarah Silverman is not a friend of the right.
She would be a very, very left, anti-Trump kind of a personality.
But even Sarah Silverman can see clear as day that this was fake news from a news outlet.
Now, it's happening, people.
We're very, very close to the damn bursting.
I've been getting a slow trickle of examples of people on the left who are flipping.
Now, not flipping politically.
They're not becoming Republicans.
Nothing like that. But they're flipping in the sense that they're realizing that the movie they've been watching was always fiction.
They thought it was a documentary.
They thought...
They were watching real news, and they weren't.
They're just finding out that it's not real.
And I have a hypothesis, with no data whatsoever to back it, just based on what I know about people, that I'm not surprised that people in the movie industry would notice this before others on the left.
Because they deal in movies, in stories.
And stories have surprise endings.
And they're just finding out the surprise ending of their own story.
The news was never real.
That's a perfect movie.
A perfect movie is when they realize, wait a minute, are you telling me that for years, for years, none of it's been real?
Not the political stuff.
None of the political stuff has been real, if you consider the context.
The facts are real, often.
Sometimes not. But the context is always narrative.
So the context is never real.
It's always just a story.
And it doesn't surprise me that people who write those kinds of stories for a living would start to recognize the pattern.
Wait a minute. I think Bruce Willis has been dead all along.
Didn't want to ruin any movies there, but you know what I'm talking about.
So look for that.
Look for more people in the movie industry to figure out that their own news has been fake.
Speaking of fake narratives, are you watching the story of the high school shooter whose parents were, let's say, not good parents?
We believe. And they are so culpable, it looks like, if not legally liable, they certainly feel some responsibility, I think.
Well, I don't want to read their minds.
Rather, let me back up.
I won't read their minds.
I'll just say that they They seem to make themselves hard to find for a while, either for their own safety or for whatever reasons.
But the lawyer said it was for their own safety.
But now they're in custody.
And here's the part that's just too perfect.
Their names are the Crumblies.
Their last name actually has crumb in it.
They're white people who apparently like guns and don't take care of them as well as they should.
There are actually white people who are going to be stuck into the narrative of especially white males and guns being the big problem.
Those white males and their guns.
Now, do you get it?
Crumbly. Oh, you got it.
Somebody on Locals got it first.
Crumbly. What is crumbly?
Name something that's crumbly.
A cracker.
A cracker is crumbly.
The simulation actually served up the ideal white people who do everything wrong with guns, and their name is actually based on a frickin' cracker.
Now, if this is not made for...
The ideal narrative?
Nothing is. I mean, these two parents did sort of everything wrong, you know, gun-wise, leaving it unlocked, being chief among them.
So... But let me push back on one element of the story.
Apparently, part of the story is that people should have known that this kid was going to do something because he drew some violent drawings, including...
Including a little, I guess, a word bubble or something that had himself thinking that he can't stop the thoughts that showed him shooting somebody else in the class, I guess.
So if you saw that a 15-year-old boy drew a little comic-type picture that included violence of somebody shooting somebody else, how alarmed should you be?
In the comments, tell me. That's a real question.
A 15-year-old boy drawing pictures of violence, specifically somebody shooting somebody.
How concerned would you be?
I know I did it a lot.
In fact, it was the number one most common thing that people at age 15 drew.
It was violence. It was the number one thing that young boys draw pictures of.
Except for sex, right?
You know, gigantic penis pictures.
That's the only other thing that boys draw.
Giant penises, possibly boobs, and then violence.
Usually somebody being shot in the head.
Am I wrong? I mean, can all the males who are on there just confirm for me that you have drawn violent pictures involving gunfire as a child, or a teen, let's say, 15-year-olds?
Yeah, look at the yeses.
The yeses are just screaming by.
We all, you know, I don't know if we all do it, but it's literally the most common thing.
But you read it in the news, and it's like, you idiot adults, couldn't you tell that this was real?
To which I say, no.
No, you can't tell.
And I put myself in that situation and I say, would I have known?
Would I have known?
And the answer I have to give myself is, I'm not sure.
I can't say yes.
I can say, oh, in hindsight, I know what happened, so yes, I might have been alerted.
But really? Really?
Really? Really, can I tell myself I would have spotted that?
I just don't know.
I don't think I would have.
I'd bet against myself, actually, in this situation.
Yeah, there are lots of questions about this, especially the interplay of what is the parent's responsibility versus the child versus the bullies.
I'm the only one who'll say that.
Yeah. So the Crumblies are the perfect narrative, so we'll see more of the Crumblies and a lot less of Waukesha.
Do you know that this really happened to me?
Yesterday I saw a tweet about somebody who said that Waukesha is already being memory-holded and, you know, we're forgetting that it happened.
And I looked at the tweet and it said, Waukesha.
Waukesha. Which one is that?
That actually happened.
I actually had literally forgotten Waukesha.
And the media made us forget it.
Now, let me see if we can do this the other way.
Let's see if it works the other way.
I'm going to give you a last name and see if you recognize the first name just automatically.
Floyd. Floyd.
Does anybody automatically know the first name of Mr.
Floyd? Yeah, and George, not going to forget that, are you?
So when you see the media directly manipulating your memory, and your memory is the number one thing probably, except immediate fear, your memory would be one of the biggest things that influences your future decisions.
Because you could say, well, it was like this before, so this tells me something, that informs my future decisions.
So when they're manipulating their memory, they are programming it.
They're programming your next decisions.
They're not just erasing the past.
They're programming your next decisions by erasing what they erase and by focusing on what they focus on.
All right. Kathy Griffin is calling out CNN because they let Tubin keep his job for Yankin is Tubin on a Zoom call.
Not on the network, but on a Zoom call.
And... Kathy Griffin lost her gig, her New Year's Eve gig that she would do for CNN, because of her holding up the severed head of Trump, the bloody head, in a joke.
Now, here's my comment on that.
Are those two things exactly the same?
One was done with great intention and planning.
It took a lot of work to get that severed head, to look just right and photograph it.
So one took a whole bunch of planning.
The other one, Toobin, didn't even know what was happening until after it was done.
He was actually literally unaware until afterwards.
Is that the same?
And also, you know, one is promoting violence and the other is promoting self-love.
I mean, if you can't love yourself, who can you love?
So I'm going to say that Kathy Griffin's comparison of those two things is not on point.
I love Kathy Griffin, by the way.
I've met her a few times.
I've worked with her. So I like her personally, just in case that's not coming through in my conversation here.
But I don't think those situations are the same.
But what I love about this is that CNN is being called out for being sexist.
CNN is being called out for being sexist.
Well, I guess you create a standard, you have to live by it, don't you?
So that's the standard that the news on the left creates, and I guess they'll have to live up to it.
I told you that even though abortion, the changes that are being contemplated with the Mississippi case and the Supreme Court, that even no matter how that goes, that the Democrats will use it to rile up the base.
Now, there's some... Some difference of opinion of whether this is enough of an issue these days to rile up the base or not.
But CNN is already trying.
And they're talking about how that issue is going to motivate people, etc.
And that's an example of them making it a priority.
If CNN reports, hey, I think Democrats are going to treat this as their priority, it encourages it, right?
It's like, hey, everybody knows this is a priority.
Get on board. It's sort of like communicating to the base.
There are some people who think this might work, and then CNN's going to tell the rest of them so that they all can get on board on this strategy.
So that's happening right now.
CNN basically working with the Democrats to make sure that this issue can be something that they can talk about going forward.
Speaking of CNN, a lot of news about CNN today.
It's news about the news. But CNN is dumping on Kamala Harris again, and the way they're doing it is shocking.
Here's something that actually appeared on CNN. They're quoting somebody apparently in the Kamala Harris camp.
Saying that if she were a man with her management style doing a TV show, that TV show would be called The Apprentice.
That's right.
CNN is reporting that Harris' own people are likening her to Donald Trump in management style.
CNN's reporting that about a Democrat, about Kamala Harris.
She is so done.
She's as done as you could be done as a politician.
Clearly CNN has the message or is sending the message that she's not the future.
I mean, this is pretty clear at this point.
They blame her of bad management and bullying and more people are going to leave.
It's just a whole cluster of situation over there.
All right, here's some more fake news that I wasn't sure was fake news.
And it's actually fake news about fake news.
So this is going to be a fake news squared.
So there's some baseline fake news.
And then we're going to tell you about The Hill, the publication of The Hill, who corrects the fake news and But adds more fake news by correcting the fake news.
It's like you can't get away from the fake news.
So let me explain the situation.
So the claim that I kind of thought might have been true-ish, you know, I hadn't really looked into it, I sort of believed the left when they were claiming that most of the tax cuts under Trump went to the rich.
Because we've been hearing that repeated and repeated, so I thought, well, it's probably true.
You know, maybe that's true.
And so here's how the Hill debunks that claim.
And what you should do is find the fake news that's in the debunk.
So the debunk, I think, is accurate, as far as I can tell, because it comes from the IRS, so it's probably a pretty good source.
But see if you can tell me what the fake news is.
So this is actually from the Hill.
Quote... A careful analysis of the IRS tax data, one that includes the effects of tax credits and other reforms, so in other words, if you do the math right, it shows that filers with an adjusted gross income of $15,000 to $50,000, so that would be on the lowish end of incomes, enjoyed an average tax cut of 16% to 26%.
In 2018. That's the first year of that tax cut.
But filers who were in the 50 to 100, so now you're getting up to the middle-ish class, received 15 to 17.
So as the income went up, it was a little bit less, but quite significant.
But when you get all the way up to 100,000 to 500,000 a year, The adjusted gross income was cut by 11 to 13.
So just the way you'd want it to be.
You'd want the lowest income people to get the highest percentage and the highest income people to get the lowest percentage.
Apparently that's exactly what happened.
And so they conclude that means most middle income and working class earners enjoyed a tax cut There was at least double the size of tax cuts received by households earning a million or more.
So where's the fake news?
Okay, over on Locals, they all got the right answer.
The fake news is that they reported percentages without raw numbers.
Have I taught you that any article that shows percentages without raw numbers is fake news?
Likewise, any report that shows you raw numbers without percentages is also fake news.
Because real news would show you both.
Because you don't really know anything until you know the raw number and the percentage.
You've got to have both. So anything that shows you one without the other, either one, is fake news.
It's a narrative. Apparently they want you to believe a certain thing, and they're leaving out something that would have completely changed your opinion.
That's right. Locals gets it right again.
So, fake news about fake news.
Although I appreciate that the Hill did get these, you know, got these percentages.
And that did add a lot to the story.
I just wish they'd added some more about the raw numbers to balance that out.
Why is it that I focus so much on the hoaxes?
And why am I going nuts on the hoaxes right now?
Does anybody know? Can anybody tell me What's my strategy?
Because I like to see how transparent I am sometimes.
What's my strategy of going extra, extra hard at the hoaxes right now?
Because you've seen me do it on Twitter, right?
Why now? Well, persuasion, yes.
Attention. I always like persuasion.
I always like attention. But those are sort of baseline.
Yep. Over on Locals, again, correct answer.
Correct answer is, we might be close to a breaking point.
I feel like the last few shoves can push something over the edge.
It's like, it might not break.
Maybe the left's narratives are just too hard and we can't break them.
But it sure feels like it.
I feel like we're getting really close.
Right? And if we can get anybody on the left to understand even one of the major hoaxes was a hoax, I think the dam breaks, at least for that one person.
And then if you can get everybody on the left to believe that at least one of the hoaxes was a hoax, suddenly the dam will break.
And I'm feeling it.
And I want to give you a persuasion technique...
That is about this one hoax that I think is the one that will unlock, you know, basically unlock the door, or to mix my metaphors, you know, the dam will break.
And I think it's the drinking bleach hoax.
Now, two things about that that are interesting.
It's the only double RUPAR that I know of.
Now, a Rupar edit of a video is named after Aaron Rupar.
A Rupar edit is when you take part of a video out and somehow that reverses its meaning.
That's how the fine people hoax was done, how the overfeeding koi fish was done, how the Covington kids hoax was done, and then the drinking bleach hoax.
But the drinking bleach hoax has an extra element that makes it sticky.
It's a double Rupar.
It removes the end of it, but also the beginning.
And if you don't remove both, Then people can still see the context.
But if you remove just one of them, it still works.
So people will say, no, no, no, Scott.
Let me show you the full quote to show you that you're wrong.
And then they won't show me the full quote.
They'll show me a half rupar.
You know, like one of the things deleted, which still keeps the wrong meaning, or at least it's ambiguous that way.
But if you see the book ends it with light, then you'll, oh, he was talking about light the whole time.
So here's what I want you to do if you get into a personal conversation over the holidays with somebody who believes the drinking bleach hoax.
Are you ready? This is a way to unprogram them.
And I tweeted it, but you can use any version of this for yourself.
So if somebody says that Trump suggested drinking bleach...
Get them for a moment. Get their full attention.
Make sure there are no distractions, right?
Because you don't want them to use the distraction to run away from the conversation.
Make sure you have their full attention, and then say this.
I just want to check with you on your thinking process here.
Do you believe that an adult human being with a college education who ran a real estate empire...
And rose to the presidency of the United States that that person believes that injecting a chemical disinfectant into a human body would be a good idea, such a good idea that he would say it in public.
Is that what you believe?
Now watch what happens when your subject starts squirming.
I don't believe anybody will look at you and say, yup, that's what I believe.
I think just asking the question that way, and then if they do say that, just repeat yourself.
Say, okay, I may have heard you wrong, but it's your actual opinion that a real human being who can function in the world and run a big company, run for president and win, that a human being with that level of education and knowledge about the world actually, literally, Really suggested in public to inject a chemical disinfectant into a person.
Do you really believe that?
Watch what happens.
Watch what happens. You're going to shake them to the core.
Because they don't believe that.
Then, suppose they say, but Scott, he said it, he said it, he said it.
You just can't talk him out of it.
Maybe you don't have access to the transcript.
So you're going to say, okay, the president...
Then here's the backup.
Wait for this. You're going to love this next part.
You're going to love this next part.
Say to him, now, do you believe that when the president used the word disinfectant, he was using it in a medical, scientific sense?
Or do you think he was using it in more of a, let's say, a layperson sense, that a disinfectant would be something that gets rid of an infection?
Would you accept that?
That the word disinfectant often is used for a chemical disinfectant, but that if you were just using it casually, you would imagine that anything that gets rid of an infection would be a disinfectant.
In fact, they were talking about light in that context as one of, but not the only one, but one of the disinfectants.
So, do you believe that the president thought there was something you could inject into the body that would get rid of an infection?
Do you see where I'm going yet?
And then your person will say, ha, ha, ha!
There's nothing you can inject into a body that's going to get rid of a virus.
Have you heard of Regeneron?
Have you heard of vaccinations?
Now, vaccinations might be a little different, but Regeneron is the number one most effective thing.
It is injected into the body, and it gets rid of infections.
What would be another word for removing infection?
Deleting an infection.
If you were to get rid of an infection, what would be one word that would capture that?
Disinfectant, maybe. Now, certainly if you were a layperson, would you call something that's a chemical that gets rid of an infection, would you call that a disinfectant?
Well, if you're a doctor, probably not.
You'd call it Regeneron.
You'd call it monoclonal antibody.
But if you're a layperson, could you imagine that there would be something that you could inject into the body They would disinfect it.
Yes, it's the number one thing we use in the United States and around the world to disinfect people who have COVID. It's just not the way that the doctors talk about it.
Now, why did Trump say he was being sarcastic?
I can't read his mind, but what would you do in that situation?
And this is the way to answer the question.
How would you handle it?
What are the alternatives?
Well, I'll tell you, one of the alternatives is to say, it's something that I thought I saw somewhere, but I can't remember.
How does that sound? Well, why did you bring up drinking bleach, would say the news.
He never did that, of course.
But they say, why did you bring up drinking bleach?
Just because you heard it somewhere?
Like, where did you hear it?
Do you think he remembered where he heard it?
Here's the background. At about that time, I was tweeting about a specific trial in which they were using a ventilator-like device to put UV light into a human patient.
And they were considering extending it into the lungs.
Why bring it up at all if he's president?
Because he was talking about the possibilities in an optimistic way.
If you haven't noticed, the president's an optimist.
So when he was in there, he was saying, hey, maybe this would work, maybe this would work.
He was going through things that might make it work.
Remember, that's what he does.
He says that directly.
He's a cheerleader for the country.
He's an optimist. So that's why he brought it up.
That's his job, to be optimistic about the direction of the country, when it makes sense.
So here's what I think happened.
Now, this is a hypothesis, but it's a strong one.
Just prior to the time when he was on stage talking about that, there was some tweets going around that I tweeted personally and mentioned a number of times on my live stream, which is this test where they were injecting UV light into the trachea and then potentially thinking maybe it could work in the lungs itself.
And I tweeted that.
Now, I do know, because I've heard from a number of sources, that the White House would watch this livestream fairly regularly, as in pretty much every day.
And they also follow me on Twitter, which I know because I watch who retweets me, etc.
Now, I know the White House staff knew about this study.
Of injecting UV light into a patient.
I know it because they follow me and I mentioned it, I don't know, five times.
So certainly staff saw it.
Do you think that Trump wanted to tell people it was something he saw on a cartoonist's Twitter account?
Go. That could have been his only alternative.
If he wanted to tell you the truth...
He would have said, I don't remember where I saw it, which doesn't sound good.
Or maybe I saw it on a tweet, which doesn't sound good.
Or maybe I heard it from a cartoonist, which doesn't sound good.
What was he supposed to do?
Trying to just make it go away as a joke?
It wasn't a bad idea.
It just didn't work.
I mean, he didn't have any good choices.
If he had been up to date on it, and he could refer you to the study offhand...
Then maybe that would have been a good play.
But do you think he could have mentioned the name of the hospital and the name of the technology and where it was being trialed?
Do you think he could have just popped that out of his head?
No! No!
Even I can't, and I've tweeted it.
I forget the name of the technology myself.
I've tweeted it like 50 times.
Flip this with ivermectin and natural immunity.
I don't know the context for that.
Yeah. Anyway, so try these two approaches.
Just ask somebody if they really, literally believe that an educated adult thought that ordinary household disinfectants could be a solution to COVID. Yeah, Heal Light is the name of that technology.
Thank you. Heal Light.
All right. Dan Crenshaw tweeted, Why are we still pretending that cell phones and laptops are It can actually affect the airplane.
And I replied to him, channeling my best Stephen Wright pattern recognition.
I said, I once tried steering the plane with my phone, and I think it worked.
But it's hard to tell because I was going to the same place the plane was already going.
Now, I don't think Stephen Wright ever told that exact joke, but I used his pattern.
Actually, people recognized it and called it down.
Hey, that's a Stephen Wright joke.
And they are correct. One of the greatest comedians of all time, and I stole this pattern there.
Here's why they don't let you have cell phones and laptops on airplanes.
Here's why. Sir, would you please turn off your cell phone?
We don't allow phone calls during the flight.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Just one more minute.
Just one more minute. It's an emergency.
Just one more minute. Sir...
You cannot use your phone on the plane.
It bothers the other passengers.
He's not complaining.
And it'll only take me a minute.
So that's how those conversations would go.
And then people would be like, yeah, but it's a quick call.
Yeah, but it's important.
People would be using their phone on the plane if the only reason you said they couldn't is it's a rule and it will bother other people.
A good third of the public doesn't care if they bother other people.
So the reason phones are told, they tell you that phones are going to kill you, is because it's easier to say, if you don't turn off the phone, we will all die in a giant fireball during the crash.
Not even slightly true, but way more persuasive.
Now let's take the laptop.
Why do they tell you to put your laptop away?
It's the same reason they tell you to put all of your other items away.
You don't want heavy things flying around the plane.
That's why. So if they say, put your laptop away, because we don't want it flying around the plane, what does a human say?
Well, I'll just hold on to it really tight.
Because we're humans. We say stupid things.
Oh, if I see any trouble, I'll quickly put it in the back of the seat.
No, you won't.
Humans are crazy.
They will make any excuse to do what they want to do.
So if you don't tell them...
If you don't tell them...
That it's going to kill them.
They're going to do it.
So I, for one, am glad that they have this fiction about these things being dangerous because it keeps me from being bothered and killed by a flying laptop.
How slow is the news today?
I'm going to tell you it's this slow.
A major trending story today was about Seth Rogen smoking weed and listening to music.
Now, the context was he went to an Adele concert and they put him in the front.
He felt weird because he'd smoked a lot of weed.
Now, they didn't ask him to sing.
He wasn't called upstage to sing.
Literally, the entire story is the most famous, well, one of them, one of the most famous pospokers in the world smoked some weed for a change and listened to some music.
That's a trending story today.
All right.
Jeff Pilkington asked today on a tweet, would anyone care if cable news went away?
And the context is that there are so few people who actually watch cable news.
I think it's less than 1% of the country actually watches cable news at any one moment.
But they did the math all wrong.
So if you look at how many people are watching, let's say, Cuomo's old show, if you get 700,000 people, you say 700,000 people, that's all?
That's all that's watching that show?
And of 300, and what are we up to?
What's the population of the U.S.? 370?
370 million or something?
So the thought is that nobody's watching CNN because it's a tiny, tiny number compared to the population of the country.
Is it only 330 million?
340, somebody's saying?
We slowed down. I thought it'd be higher by now.
All right, and it was Cedars-Sinai that was the hospital with the UV light.
Thank you for reminding me.
So here's my take.
If you're looking at the viewership of one show, you're looking at the people who just wandered into it that one day for that one show.
But how many people watch Cuomo if you looked at his whole month?
It's not the same 700...
whatever number it is.
It's not the same 700,000 every single show.
All the same people just come back.
No, it's probably some of them watched it once that week.
And some of them watched it twice that week.
But probably you'd have to take the 700,000 and multiply it by five, maybe, to get the number of people who see it any time during the month.
Now, remember, they repeat their stories a lot, right?
How often was there a George Floyd story on CNN? If you watch CNN only once during the whole month, you would see basically the same stories for the whole month.
So don't look at the number who are watching at the moment.
Watch how many people have come into their universe and been infected by it and then had to find a disinfectant later, which might be me.
So, that's the first error of analysis, is never look at the people who are watching it at the moment.
Assume it's five times that, how many people get exposed to it over time.
Secondly, I don't think CNN's business model is even anything about live TV. Does that surprise you?
How many people are surprised by that?
I don't think that the ratings and the audience on live TV on CNN is even relevant to them.
Yeah, it's an online feeder.
Exactly. Locals, you're so smart.
Locals is the smartest platform.
Actually, I think that might be true.
I was going to say it as a joke, but I think literally it's true that the locals people on average are more intelligent or more well-informed, I guess.
So, yes, I think CNN's business model has evolved to a clip production model.
Where they hope that their clips get sent around, and that sends people to the website.
So the website, I looked it up and found that CNN.com has, let's see, something like half a billion people watch it every X amount of time.
What is X? It kind of matters, doesn't it?
Half a billion people watch it every...
I don't know, because I looked up a source that just said half a billion people watch it, and they didn't tell me if that's per month, which means it's a totally worthless number.
But it's a big number.
It's a big number. So I think that's their deal, is the online stuff.
All right. And also, the other thing about CNN is it reaches the opinion makers.
So if the only people who watched CNN were the people who really, really care about politics, well, they're the ones who tell everybody else what their opinion would be.
So it becomes like a seed that, you know, grows into this whole tree.
So that's also their influence.
So the website is number three in their category.
So it's the number three in news, I guess.
It's number 37 in the USA. And if you're in the top 50, you're a pretty big website, right?
And half a billion people visit every God knows what, probably a month.
All right, here's a tweet that I did that's getting a lot of attention, but I'm going to give you some context to it.
So yesterday I tweeted, I said, a conspiracy of Democrats, fake news, FBI, and the CIA recently framed an American president for Russian collusion.
That much we know for sure.
But our election systems that can't be fully audited are fair and accurate according to the same people.
So stop your worrying.
Now, it's not exactly the same people, but the same groups have some influence on this.
And here's my take on it.
Imagine... Now, correct my timeline, but we found out for sure that the Russia collusion thing was a hoax, or at least the left did.
Found out for sure after the election stuff, right?
Isn't that true? Give me a fact check.
When did we know for sure that the Russia collusion thing was a hoax?
It was after the election, right?
So... Here's what the Russia collusion hoax did, in my opinion, as a persuader with experience.
You can't imagine things until they're within the realm of imagination.
In other words, things are invisible if they're outside your realm of imagination.
Do you remember when, I think it was Jim Jordan and...
Where the other guys early on were saying that, no, no, the Russia collusion thing was actually a Hillary Clinton operation.
Do you remember the first time you heard that?
And somebody's saying, really?
And I listen to that and I'm saying, really?
Really? This whole thing is like a Democrat thing where they've got the FBI in it and the CIA is in it and all the news is in it.
And I'm thinking to myself...
That's not even in the realm of possibility.
That was my opinion.
It was not in the realm of possibility.
And therefore, I considered it probably untrue in the beginning.
Now, as time went by, and I realized that they weren't reporting on the Steele dossier except for the urination part of it, that's it.
I can't name one other thing that was in the dossier except the alleged, obviously not true, peeing on a mattress.
Can you? And I started to think, wait a minute.
If this is all true, why are they only telling me this one part of it that's the most untrue part of it while waving their hands and saying, but the other stuff's probably true, and you're not even, like, mentioning it?
Like, what are those other things?
Right? Well, it's not as if I didn't know that politics can have dirty tricks.
Duh. It's not as if I didn't know that Democrats and Republicans, too, will start untrue rumors to hurt the other side.
Duh. But the extent of it, the extent of it, and the collusion with the media and especially the intelligence agencies...
I didn't even think that was possible, honestly.
That was beyond my imagination.
So it took me a while to get there.
Now, once we found out that was a hoax, what did it do to your ability to imagine hoaxes?
It expanded it.
So if I said to you, hey, there's a wild, wild hoax out there, and the only hoaxes you'd ever seen were small ones, you'd say to yourself, that's too big.
That's way too big.
It's just by its nature.
I'm not going to believe that one because that's just too wild.
The only hoaxes I've ever seen are these little ones.
But now we've seen the Russia collusion hoax.
To my mind, and I would imagine it's affecting other people the same way, this expanded totally and a lot what I would now consider the possibilities of a hoax.
Am I right? Imagine if the order had been reversed.
Suppose you knew for sure, and the whole country knew, that the Russia collusion hoax was a hoax, and you knew that before Trump challenged the election integrity.
What if he knew it before?
Now, Jesse Smollett is just somebody lying about it, somebody saying that's an example.
Thank you. Devin Nunes was the other one calling BS from the beginning.
I think if the order of these had been reversed, people would be a lot more willing to believe that the elections are at least unsecure.
I have no knowledge that they were unfair, but certainly unauditable.
That's easy to prove.
So... And then William Berard on Twitter said, he said there was a good analysis, but he says, now apply this logic to the current medical emergency.
In other words, if you believe that the Russia collusion hoax was even possible, and it happened, what does that say about what we're being told about vaccinations and lockdowns and the reason we're doing everything?
All BS, right? But the thing is, I think that's all individual BS. And it's also harder to coordinate a conspiracy theory across different countries.
It's amazing enough that the Russia collusion thing happened in one country, but maintaining a conspiracy theory across borders to get every single country, basically, except maybe some third-world countries who are resistors, But that would be a hard one.
That's even a level of magnitude higher.
It's an order of magnitude harder than even the Russia collusion one, I would think, just because of too many entities involved.
You can't keep a good secret with that many entities involved.
But, to be fair, I would have said the same thing about the Russia collusion hoax.
I would have said that's way too many people involved...
For that to be a real conspiracy theory.
All right, so here's what I say.
There is definitely a lot of sketchy stuff happening with vaccinations.
Just all of it.
It all looks sketchy to me.
But that doesn't mean it's all untrue.
It can be true that there's a lot about the vaccinations that are sketchy, The data might be faked.
They may have always known that they couldn't get rid of it.
They may have always known it had to be subscription.
I would buy those things without too much trouble.
I could be easily convinced that any of that was true.
But we don't know exactly what's wrong.
So it can be true that there's lots of sketchy stuff around vaccinations while at the same time maybe they're better than nothing.
Those both could be true.
We don't know. No way to know at this point.
All right. How many of you...
I asked this question on Twitter.
How many people knew that you can't get Regeneron?
And I guess it depends on the state.
But in one state, you can't get it after seven days after your symptoms.
Another says 10.
And you can't get it if you've already been admitted to a hospital.
So let's say your COVID is getting bad after seven days.
It's worsening. So you say to yourself, ah, I better go to the hospital.
At least I can get some Regeneron there.
You get to the hospital and they say, one of the criteria is that you can't get Regeneron if you're in the hospital.
Who knew that? And if you had heard that, wouldn't you ask for the Regeneron before you checked into the hospital and took away your own option?
Wouldn't you maybe lie about when you saw your first symptoms if you thought you could get a little Regeneron?
The fact that people don't know that if you don't get it early, you don't get it?
I didn't know that.
So put yourself in the shoes of one individual that I know of personally.
Here's your situation.
You get COVID symptoms...
And they're not too bad.
And you know that 99, whatever, percent of people will just recover.
So your symptoms aren't that bad.
And you do a test.
And sure enough, you've got the COVID. So you say to yourself, well, you know, I'll look at what I should do.
And you take some, I don't know, some azithromycin and I don't know what you're doing.
You know, some whatever.
But you're not doing the serious meds.
You're just seeing if it gets worse.
Day three, it looks like it's getting a little worse and you're starting to worry, but not so bad that you won't want to ride it out.
Because remember, 99% just get better.
Yeah, so you're doing your vitamin D and stuff.
And then the fourth day, you think, I think it's getting better.
Day four and five...
You're like, it's not getting worse, and I feel like in some ways it might be getting better.
So you don't go to the hospital, you don't get Regeneron, because it looks like it might be getting better.
Day six starts to get worse, but not way worse, just worse.
Day seven, you think you're going to fucking die.
So you go to the emergency room, and they say...
We're going to have to admit you because it does look bad.
Then you say, can I get that Regeneron?
I hear that's good. And they say, you just made yourself ineligible.
You waited seven days and you checked into the hospital.
Guidelines say you can't get it.
Now, if that same person had known from day fucking one that he should get the Regeneron based on symptoms, he would have done it right away.
We have an information problem that's actually killing people.
Actually, literally killing people.
It's an information problem, so it should be solvable.
And I would like to see the Biden administration fix that.
Or at least at a state level.
We need some, like, immediate, immediate public information that says, just to be clear...
You don't know how bad your COVID is going to get on day three.
You all know that, right?
It kind of goes up and down for a few days.
Everybody's had that experience who's had COVID. So if you don't know if it's going to get worse, especially if you're in any category that's got a comorbidity, go get yourself some Regeneron.
Don't wait for day seven.
Don't wait until you're checked in the hospital.
That... Am I wrong that that piece of information, that you need to get it early?
Now, everybody knows that earlier is better, right?
So when you say to me, Scott, everyone knows earlier is better.
No, that's not the whole story.
Of course we know that.
But we don't know that it won't work on day four, or we don't know that it won't work if you wait seven days.
I didn't know that. In fact, I thought the opposite.
I thought that if you were really close to expiration, the Regeneron would be just the thing.
Apparently not so much.
I'm going to block Frosty Flake for saying the most obnoxious and stupid comment of all internet fame.
Scott has COVID right now.
Dude, I never had it wrong.
I didn't change my opinion.
It's never changed. There's new information.
When I get new information, I like to incorporate it into my opinion.
What do you do? When you get new information, do you say, no, I'll just keep the old opinion.
No. I have never said I am confident that everybody is doing good work and they have good intentions.
I'm the last person who would say that.
I'm the last person who would think everybody has good intentions.
And it does look like infinite COVID is the business model that is going to drive decisions, I would guess, at this point.
Yeah, John Maynard Keynes says, when the facts change, I change my mind.
What do you do? I use that.
I paraphrase that all the time.
I forgot who said it the first time.
All right. Here's where I get banned forever from social media.
Are you ready? I have a BS detector.
Do not tell me that I'm getting it right for the first time.
Don't say that. Just listen to the story.
Just try to absorb it.
I have a BS detector, a rule, that goes like this.
If science is telling you something is true...
But your own observation keeps seeing it not look like that?
That doesn't mean it's not true, because your anecdotal observations are not that reliable.
But it is a red flag.
It's a red flag.
And definitely is something that tells you maybe you should look into it if your observation is not matching the science.
The example I always use is that cigarette smoking causes cancer.
Now, the science tells us that's true, And every time I hear somebody has lung cancer, I say, smoker?
And at least nine out of ten times, it's a smoker.
So that's a case where my direct observation fits perfectly with what the science says.
So that seems pretty good.
Now let's take vaccinations.
I hear the Jaws music already.
I'm in dangerous waters.
Dangerous waters. When the vaccinations first came out, we heard stories on the internet of blah, blah, blah, people dropping dead from the shot.
And I said to myself, well, those are anecdotal reports, and they're also predictable and guaranteed.
Just because so many people are involved, you're always going to have anecdotes of people having bad experiences.
So I discounted all the anecdotes because they were really predictable anecdotes and not in any kind of number that I should worry about.
However, the longer the anecdotes keep coming, and especially when they get you personally, if you have a friend who's double vaccinated and just got the COVID and put him in the hospital, you start to think, huh, I'm starting to see the accumulation of anecdotes a little bit bigger than I thought.
So I'm going to call the turn for me personally.
Today's the turn.
In my opinion, anecdote and science don't match anymore.
That doesn't mean the science is wrong.
Can I be as clear as possible about this?
I'll still bet on the science.
If you said, gun to head, you've got to put your money on it now.
Are you going to bet that the vaccinations help?
I'm only going to say help.
They're obviously not vaccinations in the classic sense.
But if I had to put money on it, just for myself, and again, I'm not trying to convince you to get vaccinated.
I don't do that. If I had to bet on it, I'd still bet on the science.
But it's a lot closer than it used to be.
Because anecdote is starting to build up.
Right? Now, you're having the same experience, are you not?
That you're hearing more and more anecdotes of double-vaxxed people having a bad outcome?
I still believe...
If I had to bet on it, that the science is still the one that's right.
Because you would also, it's predictable that the anecdotes would reach a fevered pitch as well.
And they are. But there's something about hearing about it personally that changes you.
You know that? We'll get rid of Ben.
Ben, you're kind of an asshole, so I'm going to hide you.
Bye, Ben. All right, so here's what I don't want you to do.
Please do not leave this and say, Scott just turned against vaccinations, because that didn't happen.
Don't think that I told you you should or should not get vaccinated, because I never do that.
I can only tell you my thinking process and maybe help you with your thinking process, but personal decision.
I'm not going to be the one suggesting you jab stuff in your body.
All I'm saying is that the anecdotes have reached a level where I turned today.
Now my suspicion is at the highest level it's been.
Dr. Johnson. Always consistent.
It's good to have a troll who just disappeared.
Can we revisit the topic of unvaccinated and recovered people?
Does anybody disagree on that topic?
I feel like that's a nonsense topic.
Because don't we all believe at this point that somebody who's recovered has better antibodies than someone who just had a vaccination?
Now, they might be similar for, you know, a month or so if you're triple vaxxed.
But I don't think the lasting...
Yeah.
No booster for Scott?
I will get a booster.
And I don't recommend that you do or do not.
Remember, these are all personal decisions.
There's nothing that makes sense for me that's going to make sense for you.
So you make your own decisions.
Do you want to hear the worst reason for making a vaccination decision?
If I've told you anything, it's that people are irrational and they rationalize after the fact.
How many people are with me on that?
That the vaccine decision is an irrational decision that we rationalize as having made sense.
And the reason it's an irrational decision is we don't have good data.
Do you agree? How many of you know what the outcome of the vaccination will be in five years?
Nobody. It's unknowable.
So if we don't have data...
How are we making the decision?
Completely irrationally.
But then we rationalize it after the fact, and we wonder why our rationalization doesn't match the other guy's rationalization.
Yeah, then kids are, of course, a special case.
All right. So I had a really good point before that paid comment knocked me off my path there.
Oh, the rationalization.
So I was going to tell you I have a little bit of awareness of my own rationalization, which is rare.
All right. Here's my own rationalization, and I didn't realize it until recently.
I have an irrational reason for getting the vaccination, and I haven't heard this from anybody yet.
If I don't get the vaccination and I die, compare that to I do get the vaccination and I die.
Which one makes me feel dumber the day before I die?
That's how I made my decision.
And you know what? That's pretty dumb.
Pretty dumb. But it's not dumber than the way you did it.
The way I did it is totally dumb.
The way you did it, just as dumb.
Because we don't have data.
If you had data and you used that plus your good reason, I'd say, well, that's good data, that's good reason.
That's way better than what I did because my way was dumb.
I just said to myself, how will I feel?
How embarrassed will I be to have made the wrong decision on the day before I die?
Very embarrassed. Now, you might feel the opposite.
You might say that if I got the thing and died, that wouldn't be too embarrassing.
But if I got the vaccination and the vaccination killed me, man, I would feel embarrassed on the last day before I died.
So I imagine that on some level, maybe some of you who made the opposite decision were thinking the same thing.
Which one would feel more embarrassing?
I chose the one that would feel less embarrassing the day before I died.
How rational is that?
Not. Not at all.
Not even a little.
Because the day after, I'm dead.
I'm dead. None of it matters.
I've got a reason that could not be a dumber reason.
And it's actually my reason.
And every once in a while you can take yourself out of your biased body and just sort of look at it as an observer.
You know, take an observer's point of view and you look at it and you go, you know, those thoughts about how you'd feel on that last day, they keep bubbling up.
Are you sure that didn't have anything to do with your decision?
And then you have this day where you go, oh, crap.
That was the only reason I made my decision.
And I think it is.
I think it's the only reason I made the decision.
All right.
You're in good health besides asthma.
I saw a study that said if you had asthma, you would have a better chance of recovering from COVID or not getting it.
I forget which one it was.
Now, I don't believe that, but you said it was a big difference.
Now, I think that would be because asthma users use budesonide, typically.
I use it.
And it's one of the treatments for COVID.
So maybe that has something to do with it.
Do you think the government's going to do lockdowns in the United States?
Yeah, when I say that I would feel stupid, it's not that I would feel stupid in terms of a public opinion of me.
That wouldn't matter if it's the day before I die.
But I'd feel just internally stupid.
And that would bug me.
All right.
I think that's just about all.
I don't know.
You know, let me just add one more thing, because I saw a comment there.
Anybody who tells you that your decision about vaxxing or un-vaxxing is based on fear, just say F you to that person, because it's all based on fear.
Every decision for or against getting vaccinated is based on fear.
You're just afraid of different things.
Some are afraid that the government has given them bad drugs and didn't test it.
Some people are afraid of COVID, think the vaccination's a better chance.
But it's all fear. You may be processing it as part of your logical, rational thought, but no.
No, it's all fear.
And one of my fears is how I'd feel if I made the wrong decision.
Crumley's gun was not locked.
Yeah. We don't know about that.
Okay. Best show ever?
I think that's true.
How many would say this is the best show I've ever done?
Do you know why? Because it's the best show every time.
It's an easy question. Best show every time.
All right. You are the best audience every time.
And there was one other thing that I kept trying to remember to tell you, but I think it's gone now.
So I'm going to say goodbye to YouTube.
I'm going to spend a few more minutes with the locals people because they've got a secret project I'm working on.
