Episode 1587 Scott Adams: Everyone Except You is Crazy and I'll Tell You Why. It's About the News
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
Jussie Smollet's defense strategy
Zuckerberg election money
Record setting trans swimmer
Homeschooling advantages
Reality denial is becoming a thing
COVID vaccine risk assessment
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Welcome to the best thing that's ever happened to you in your whole stinking life.
It's called Coffee with Scott Adams.
I think you'll all agree that by the time this is over, your life will be better in a whole variety of ways.
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Watch it go. Go.
Oh, that's so good.
Well, the news is hilarious today.
I'll start with the fun stuff.
Keith Olbermann, who has been my critic for decades, decided to come in on me on my Fox News Christmas tree joke that I tweeted.
Now the joke, I told you the joke yesterday, but just so I give you some context, I tweeted yesterday, I don't know who lit the Fox News Christmas tree on fire, but the two white guys who attacked Jussie Smollett are still out there somewhere.
Now that got 1,000 retweets, which is, you know, big for my size accounts, and 10,000 likes.
So, can you conclude that it's funny?
1,000 likes, which is high.
And 10,000 likes.
Apparently people like Keith Olbermann have not learned that art and humor are subjective.
No, it's true, Keith.
It's the first time you're hearing this.
But it turns out there's no universal objective standard for humor.
No, there isn't.
And so, Keith, if you don't find something funny, but 10,000 people did, what do you conclude?
Use your big old brain there, Keith.
10,000 people laughed, but you didn't.
What did you conclude about the humor potential of that thing?
Well, Keith Olbermann concluded it wasn't good because he decided that he would weigh in with this valuable comment on my joke, referring to the two white guys who attacked Jussie Smollett, he retweeted me and said...
Do they write your material too?
Zing.
Gotcha.
Yeah.
Gotcha! Oh, I felt that like a dagger through the heart.
I woke up this day feeling good, only to find that Keith Olbermann does not approve of my commercial humor.
Well, so I replied to him and said, I didn't know Keith Olbermann was still alive.
I stole that from Elon Musk.
You probably recognize that one.
Yeah, I said, I don't know.
I didn't know Keith Olbermann was still alive.
To which Twitter user Kathy, also known as Mustang Girl 3, replied, only on the outside.
He's only alive on the outside.
Which I laughed about for about 10 minutes.
He's only alive on the outside.
I'm still laughing about it.
Well, in the...
Well, I think I'll talk about this later.
No, I'll talk about it now. Jonathan Turley, who you should all be following and reading his stuff, probably the best writer, well, on a lot of stuff.
He's one of the best writers.
He's just a great writer.
But he's also a lawyer, and so his takes on things are extra fun to read.
And he's got this great take on Jussie Smollett's defense strategy.
And I hadn't really kind of seen it this way until he laid it out, and I liked it, which is that Somala is trying for jury nullification.
Meaning he's not even going to convince them about the facts.
You know, he's going to say the facts are all untrue.
But beyond that, he's got nothing because the facts are clearly true.
There's plenty of evidence for them.
So instead of doing something normal, like, oh, your evidence is not as good as you thought, which would be a normal defense, he's basically just putting himself on trial against the world and saying, If you don't like the injustice in the world,
I represent that. So he's putting himself as sort of a martyr who represents the injustice against black people in the system in general, trying to find at least one juror who says, you know, he is guilty as hell, but I'm still going to say he's not, because I don't like the way black people have been treated in this country.
Do you think he's going to get away with that?
Maybe. It's not the worst play I've ever seen.
Because how hard would it be to convince one person to just do something that's non-standard?
Probably not that hard.
So I don't know if he's made enough of a case that he's really the victim in this, but it's a bold strategy.
Not one I would have used.
But I don't know that this would have made sense in any other world.
We've reached the point where everyone agrees the facts don't matter anymore.
Remember when people argued about that?
There was a time when I kept saying, you know, the facts don't really matter.
And that what you hear about the facts are everything.
That's never been true.
Never been true, never will be true.
The facts... Matters sometimes in science, you know, over time.
But in any moment, the facts are usually lies.
We can't tell what's true and what's not.
So the facts don't really rule our existence and never will.
So I guess this is, in a weird way, Jussie Smollett's approach, the defense, is a high-awareness defense, meaning he understands the world maybe better than most people because he knows the facts won't...
Won't be relevant. And I think he's trying to make them certainly not relevant by creating a framework in which you're judging the system itself.
You're not even judging Jussie.
Now imagine that you're on the jury and you do have sympathies in that direction.
Do you think that Jussie Smollett should, I don't know, go to jail?
For staging a hate crime hoax that inconvenienced law enforcement, but not so much other people?
Well, most of you do think so, because it's clearly a crime.
I mean, there's a reason it's a crime.
They don't just make crimes a crime for no reason.
But imagine you're on the jury and you didn't like the police.
Would you care that the police did extra work?
No, no, not if you didn't like the police.
You wouldn't care at all. And you would say, you know, all he did was a joke.
It was a hoax. You know, so what?
So he gets away with a hoax.
It ruined his career, ruined his reputation.
He's already paid the price.
Do you see how easy it would be to rationalize voting not guilty?
You could get there so fast.
So I think Jonathan Turley is kind of on to something that the Smollett defense...
Might be a lot stronger than you think, even though it has nothing to do with whether he's guilty.
The mind-boggling thing is that he's not even going to deal with the question of whether he's guilty.
I mean, he says he's not guilty and it's not a hoax, but he can't prove it.
And he can't even hurt the evidence against his case.
Anyway, in more interesting news, over in Saudi Arabia, there's a camel beauty pageant And 40 camels were disqualified for receiving Botox injections and other cosmetic enhancements.
Now, I didn't mention what the other cosmetic enhancements were, but I'm assuming hump enhancement surgery.
Because there are some camels that have really no fault of their own, but just naturally small humps.
And they do get teased by the other camels.
The other camels will be like, hey, flat back.
Hey, flat back.
And then a lot of camels will say, you know, I'm just going to get the hump enhancement surgery.
But apparently that will disqualify you from the beauty pageant in Saudi Arabia.
Must control myself.
Do not make culturally insensitive joke.
Must move on to the next topic.
Okay. Got it.
That was close.
I almost didn't get out of that without getting cancelled.
Make your own jokes at home.
That has nothing to do with me.
You are culturally insensitive.
I am not. Let me give you an argument that sounds like I'm disagreeing with you, but I'm not.
Can you handle that? I'm going to give you some nuance.
All of you binaries, please leave.
Anybody who can't handle the idea that some argument has more than two positions, just go away now.
Leave now. Because I'm going to be confusing you if anybody doesn't get that things can be complicated.
Here's the thing I've been noodling on, which is that one of the big things that people say against mandates, and you must understand I'm against mandates, Because the next thing I say could be misjudged as being pro-mandate.
Everybody okay with that?
I'm completely opposed to mandates.
Completely. But the next thing I'm going to say is going to sound like I'm on the other side.
Can you handle that?
Of course you can. You're not only sexy, but you're open-minded and beautiful in a lot of ways.
So I'm going to trust you with this.
It goes like this.
Most of the good things we have in society are because we restricted freedom.
I'll just let that sit there for a moment.
Most of what's good in society happened because of restrictions on freedom.
Yes or no? Do you need an explanation of that?
Well, let me give you an example.
Did we win World War II because of a volunteer army?
I don't know. Maybe we could have.
But we didn't. Do you like the fact that criminals can't do anything they want?
Do you like a world in which criminals are, at least most of the time, sent to jail?
There's a police force to keep people from doing stuff, taking their freedom away.
How about the freedom to make a business deal and then just break it?
Well, we have courts that will make you pay for that, right?
So everything about capitalism is a restriction on freedom that if you restrict it in a smart way, what's left, the unrestricted part, becomes more powerful.
So anybody who thinks restrictions are bad and taking your freedom away is just bad and giving you freedom is just good, what world do you live in?
Because there's nothing like that going on.
The world that you live in is mostly restrictions and mostly intelligent restrictions that you would be completely in favor of.
If I asked you one at a time, okay, a legal system.
Does anybody want a legal system?
Which vastly decreases your freedom.
Of the criminals, anyway.
Maybe not yours. Your freedom would increase.
Because you got rid of the criminals so you could do more stuff in more places, right?
So to increase some freedom, there's usually some freedom taken away somewhere else.
So I think it's sort of a cartoonish view of the world that don't take my freedom.
And that's the end of the story.
Nobody wants to give away their freedom.
Not me. Not you.
But if you come to me with a proposition that says, I've looked at the costs and the benefits, and I'd like to propose this.
I'd like to take away a little bit of your freedom.
But I think the net effect will be to give you more freedom in an area that you care about.
So can we get away from the weird cartoon idea that we don't routinely restrict our own freedoms voluntarily all the time for good effect?
Now, that has nothing to do with mandates, meaning that I'm not telling you mandates are a bad idea or a good idea.
Personally, I don't like them.
I'm opposed to them. But this whole freedom-not-freedom thing is just a bad argument.
The question is whether the cost-benefit makes sense.
That's the argument. As long as you say, nope, freedom taken away, slippery slope, done.
What world are you living in, really?
The entire civilization is the accumulated effect of freedoms taken away from you to give you a pretty good outcome because it increased your ability to stay home in your living room and have a good time any way you want.
Otherwise, you'd be hunting and gathering all day.
So, again, I'm anti-mandate.
I think we're at the point of the pandemic where the mandates just don't make sense anymore.
You know, in the balance of freedom versus risk.
That's my personal view.
But I'd like you to up your arguments if you agree with me.
Let's see. We've got lots going on here.
Do you know a Twitter user named Anomaly?
Many of you are familiar with him.
And I asked this question on a Twitter poll because of something he said to me.
He likes to prod me about whether I have second thoughts about my vaccine decision.
And he seems to delight in the possibility that I might have a bad health outcome from my decision.
And so I asked, just before I got in here, I did a Twitter poll to find out how many people would be delighted if I were to die because of my vaccine decision.
Let's see how many people would agree with the notion.
I'll just look at it right now.
Let's see how the poll came out.
Here it is.
I asked, "How happy would you be to see me die from a COVID vaccination, either to prove how right you were to not get vaxxed, or just because you know I have it coming?" 5%. 5% of the people who saw my tweet would be delighted with an exclamation mark.
They'd be delighted if the vaccination killed me.
Or maybe just because I have it coming for whatever the hell else I've done.
So I think Anomaly might be in that 5%.
I can't read minds.
I can't read minds, so I can't be sure.
But his actions suggest that he would be delighted to watch me struggle and die because it would make him write.
So, I don't know.
CNN has an article by Zachary B. Wolfe, which is a great name.
B. Wolfe.
Anyway. Here's the good things that are happening, according to CNN. Now, I don't know if this is going to be part of a strategy for 2022, where CNN will be telling us that Biden is really killing it and things are going well.
We'll see if there's more of that coming up.
But he says gas prices are falling.
Has anybody seen any gas prices falling?
As of a few days ago, they were at an all-time high where I am.
I haven't seen any gas falling.
Certainly haven't noticed it.
Oh, yeah, Wolf Blitzer is a B-Wolf.
All right, so I would say that's one that might be technically true.
I'm not going to debate the data, but I haven't noticed.
And if it went up 100% and then came down 5%, are we supposed to be happy?
I'm not sure how happy I'm supposed to get about that.
All right, here's another one. CNN's opinion piece here by Zachary Wolf.
While it's still early, the Omicron variant does not appear to be as dangerous as public health officials initially feared it might be.
What's left off of that?
This is their optimistic take.
But what's left off...
Is that there are actually qualified virologists and experts saying, you know, it's too soon to say, but this might be like a vaccine.
That's the good news.
The potential good news is that it might be like a vaccine.
They don't mention that because that would...
That would hurt their narrative more than they want, I suppose.
And then they say that the supply chain kinks are starting to get worked out.
You'd probably still some problems for Christmas, but that's not going to kill us.
And... Is that true?
Feels like it, right? The whole biggest problem in the world, we just gave it some time, and then human ingenuity...
Basically, it's just going to work it out.
Now, remember I tell you that the Adam's Law of slow-moving disasters has pretty much a perfect track record?
Meaning that if we can see a disaster forming with enough time, we can always adjust.
We can always adjust.
And I told you that this supply chain thing was sort of an edge case, because it did kind of crop up somewhat suddenly, but still we had months And months can be a long time for some problems.
And so I speculated that this might be just another one of those.
Something that fits in the Adam's law of slow-moving disasters.
Which is, on day one, you can't see how you can solve it.
But by day 7, a smart person comes up with an idea.
By day 10, you're testing some ideas.
By day 15, you've got a good idea of what works and what doesn't.
Maybe you've got a new idea.
So... So I did predict that this would be an edge case, which is different from predicting which way it would go.
And I'm now happy to say that the Adams law of slow-moving disasters might be even more applicable than I had hoped as a prediction mechanism.
Well, there's a story about Zuckerberg.
And elections that I'm still trying to sort out.
Because I can't tell if it's a big deal or a little deal.
Are you following the story?
Just sort of broke recently.
So it has something to do with Zuckerberg and his wife giving grants for election reasons.
But maybe the grants were given for COVID safety.
But maybe once the money was given, they got repurposed for canvassers and stuff that might have helped Democrats get elected.
Now, I don't know that any of it is illegal, is it?
Because I haven't seen that alleged.
Has anyone alleged that Zuckerberg himself did anything illegal?
I haven't seen that, right?
But it would certainly come close to satisfying Trump's claim that the election was rigged, because you could call it rigged without it being illegal.
Is that a thing? What would be the definition of rigged?
Let's see. Define rigged.
You'll probably have it in the comments before I can do it.
Define rigged.
Rigged. Okay.
They've got all the wrong definitions.
Manipulated or controlled by deceptive or dishonest.
So dishonest could be an or.
So manipulated or controlled.
I would say that would be called rigged, wouldn't you?
Am I wrong? Now, I don't like to do word thinking, so I don't want to change your opinion by the word that I put on it.
If, in fact, you put the word rigged on it, that shouldn't change your opinion of what happened.
But if Trump were to say this is rigged, and the Zuckerberg story turned out to be true, which I think is too early to know what's true and what's not.
We'll get more about this.
It's still fog of war, period.
But if that panned out, and if we could reasonably claim that it made a difference, at least in some localities that mattered, wouldn't that be rigged?
And let me ask you this.
Has Trump ever claimed...
That the election was based on something illegal.
He probably uses the word fraud.
What's the definition of fraud?
Does that have to be something illegal by definition?
Or could it be...
Let's see, define fraud.
Because I'm really interested if Trump has said anything that can't be demonstrated to be true.
So fraud is defined as wrongful or criminal deception.
So fraud would be...
A non-legal word, but used in the normal way that people speak.
It would be correct.
Now, under the condition that the Zuckerberg story turns out to be true the way it's being laid out.
I think it would be legal, because I haven't seen any allegations of illegality.
Could come later, but I haven't seen any.
But fraud would be a correct word, because it would be wrongful.
I mean, that would be an opinion, but it wouldn't be incorrect.
It would just be an opinion based on observation.
And rigged.
I think you could say rigged and fraudulent.
Am I wrong? Would anybody disagree just how the words are defined?
I think Trump's in actually pretty safe territory.
Because if he keeps on his, let's say, the MyPillow approach, that there was some kind of direct changing of votes, I don't know that he's going to look good with that.
That would be a bad way to enter an election.
But if he entered the election saying, look, we could argue all day about what did happen that can't be audited, Let's agree we don't have any way to check because there's a lot of parts of the election that can't be audited by their nature, mostly the electronic parts.
And he could come out and say, look, no matter what you think about illegal activities, we can prove for sure, and this is hypothetical based on the Zuckerberg story panning out, we can say for sure that there was fraud and that it was rigged.
And that would actually just be technically an accurate statement based on reporting.
Interesting, isn't it? So I don't know if that gives him a path to get back into the presidency without as much friction as he could, but Trump likes friction, so he'll probably go for the most provocative way.
Alright, here's a story that you hate and I love.
It's about the trans swimmer who's breaking all the female records for swimming in college.
Now you hate it because it's ruining women's sports.
Which it is.
It is definitely ruining women's sports.
Definitely bad for women.
Or women who were born women, I guess, if you want to be woke about it.
But everything about this story is it makes me laugh for all the wrong reasons.
Here's the part that I love more than life itself.
So there was an interview with some of the players on the team.
And here's the actual quotes from one of the players who remained anonymous for obvious reasons.
Quote. This is one of the women on the team.
Pretty much everyone individually has spoken to our coaches about not liking this.
Our coach just really likes winning.
He just really likes winning.
He's like most coaches.
I think secretly, everyone just knows it's the wrong thing to do, the female pen swimmer said during a phone interview.
And then she goes on, quote, when the whole team is together, we have to be like, oh my gosh, go Leah.
That's great. You're amazing.
It's very fake, she added.
I don't know.
I could talk more about this.
But it's so funny that it's hard for me to, like, empathize with the fact that they're real losers in the story, right?
The people who train for these train to be on the team and, you know, maybe it'll hurt them in some way in the future.
So I do feel bad for them.
But I love the fact that this...
This newly female swimmer is not only beating the records, but by beating them by like half a minute.
One of his swimming races, he won by half a minute.
That's not even close.
That is so ridiculous that this whole thing is just hilarious.
Now, here's what I like about it, I guess.
That wokeness is eating itself.
The reason that there's a women's team at all is because women said, hey, that's not fair.
And they were right. It wasn't fair at all.
And so they got some fairness.
And then the trans people said, hey, that's not fair.
And then they went to get some fairness of their own.
And then the people who got that fairness in the first place, the women, say, hey, we want to keep our fairness.
We don't want to give up some fairness to you.
And so the wokeness is eating itself.
And it's bad for women, no doubt about it.
But it's good for this trans athlete.
So I would say the number of people who won and the number of people who lost were roughly even.
One woman lost the top spot.
And one trans athlete, also a woman, according to the new rules, won.
So there's one person having a better day and one person having a worse day.
That's what sports is all about.
Sports is not about just winning.
It's about losing with grace.
It's about being a good sport.
Are these women being good sports and taking their loss with grace?
No, they're not.
Actually, they are. Because according to this, when the whole team is together, they're clapping and saying, you're amazing, Leah.
Anyway, just the whole thing makes me laugh.
I saw a review in the New York Times about Yoko Ono and her role in the Beatles based on this new special, the documentary about a documentary about the Beatles.
And it's called Get Back is the name of the show.
And it's terrific. I said before, I'm about two-thirds through it.
I just love it.
It's just mind-blowingly fun if you're a fan or even a student of the Beatles.
I think I'm a fan and a student trying to learn what works and what doesn't.
And here's what the New York Times said about Yoko.
And the Beatles get back.
Yoko Ono is always there.
First it's unnerving, then dazzling, as if she is staging a marathon performance piece protesting the cult of male artistic genius.
And that's actually pretty close to the take I had when I was watching it.
Now, I saw a number of people say, what did Yoko do?
If you watch the show, she's just sort of sitting there minding her own business.
I mean, she's sitting right in the circle.
So she's, you know, shoulder to shoulder with Lennon as he's trying to create music and trying to work.
But she's not doing much.
I mean, she's not throwing in her opinion.
Kirby says, in five years, the WNBA will finally be watchable.
It'll be all men. Not nice, Carpe.
Very unwoke.
I disapprove so strongly for your sporting preferences.
But back to Yoko.
As a person who creates things for a living, let me give you some advice.
How much do you think I could have created if my wife and or girlfriend were sitting right next to me while I was doing it?
Do you have any idea how much of a pressure that would be?
Any idea? So here's the problem.
The point of having a spouse is that you're putting them first, right?
I mean, that's sort of baked into the whole deal of a spouse.
If you take the person that you put first into a situation where it's a collaborative situation, you're done.
You're done. Because John can't say anything that he knows in advance will cause him a problem at home.
And if he goes home and Yoko says, you know, John, I like that one thing you did today, but I like that other thing a little bit less.
Does John say, no, this is my thing, and I will completely ignore your opinion, the most important person in my life, whose existence is so important to me, I don't want you more than an inch away from my body at any time.
Do you think he can say no to Yoko?
Well, yes. I mean, he could say no.
But he's going to be very, very strongly influenced by not only what she does, but what she might be thinking.
Try to create something under that environment.
Good luck. So Yoko had the freedom to be in on this.
Do you think she should have had less freedom and the world would have been a better place?
Nobody knows. Now, let me defend John Lennon and Yoko.
So let me say as clearly as possible, it was their marriage.
If they decided that that worked for them and the cost of that was maybe the Beatles breaking up, but they knew it and they made that choice, Good for them.
The world does not have some right to Beatles music or something, right?
But he has a right to have whatever relationship he wants with a wife, and she has the same.
So I definitely do not find fault, not even a little bit, with what John Lennon and Yoko did.
None. I find no fault.
It was their life.
They can do what they want. And the rest of the Beatles just have to do what they want.
They just have to deal with it.
But I can guarantee it hurts their creativity, because I can't imagine.
Imagine? I just saw your word, imagine, come by, and I guess that's not a coincidence.
Yeah, I can't even imagine that they could be as effective with or in the room as with or not in the room.
I can't even imagine it. So...
Here's what peak pandemic looks like.
You know, everything starts out well-meaning, and we're all confused, and at first it's a fog of war, but as we work things out, you start getting more and more reasonable, and now your policies and things make more sense, you know?
We're not washing our groceries that are being delivered.
You know, we're not going crazy anymore.
We're not wearing gloves everywhere.
So you get smarter and smarter as time goes by.
But then I think there's this point where you start getting stupid again.
Here's our current situation.
Number one, the attenuated, meaning weakened, Omicron virus, it appears to act like a natural vaccine, and there's some important people saying that now.
And it's probably, maybe almost certainly, the only way to end the pandemic would be an attenuated virus.
Now, experts are saying that's the only thing that stopped the Spanish flu, was a variant that...
You know, over-competed and it wasn't as bad.
So while we have this Omicron that looks like the only way out of the pandemic, at the same time, the experts are talking about how we can stop that variant in its tracks with vaccines that we would have to take presumably forever.
Those two things shouldn't be happening at the same time.
Or at the very least, the people making the vaccinations should be saying, we're doing this just in case.
Just in case we find out something we didn't know about Omicron.
But if they're saying we're going balls to the wall to stop the Omicron, they need to be stopped.
That would be basically criminal negligence.
I mean, that would be one of the worst things that ever happened in the history of humanity.
If they're going to stop the thing, that there's a very good chance it's our only way out.
It's our only way out.
And they're going to try to stop it.
That's really happening. I'm not even making that up.
Now, the part that's in question, of course, is whether the Omicron really would be like a vaccination.
And I realize I'm being too optimistic.
But it's starting to look that way.
Every day, it's starting to look that way.
There's a new study that says, it's a retrospective study, so not the high-quality kind, but it says that asthma might reduce your COVID risk by a lot.
So too, allergies and eczema.
So if you've got eczema, allergies, or asthma, and let me tell you how lucky I am, All three.
Oh, you suckers.
A lot of people don't have any of these things.
But me, I got all three.
So I'm about as safe as you can be from the COVID. Except for one thing.
I don't believe this study is anything but bullshit.
Looks like bullshit to me.
However, if it's not bullshit, I would suggest that there's a reason why people with asthma and allergies do better.
Do you know the reason?
Here's the reason. People with asthma take a COVID medicine every day.
One of the things they give you for asthma is a COVID... I'm sorry, one of the things they give you for asthma is this inhaler, a certain kind of inhaler.
There are two of them, one's for emergencies and one's for everyday.
But the everyday one that you do to keep your asthma under control is also what they give you if you have COVID. Now, what is one of the biggest things that triggers asthma?
Well, one is exercise.
And one is, you know, irritants like smoke.
But another one is allergies.
And I think allergies are maybe the biggest cause.
So if you have allergies, there's a good chance, you know, your Venn diagram overlaps with asthma.
So people with allergies are probably taking asthma meds fairly frequently because it's a trigger.
So, and then the eczema thing, I don't know, maybe that's just a general correlation with people who are allergic to stuff because it's like a skin allergy or something.
I'm getting all the medicine parts wrong, so don't listen to any of that.
Yeah, oh, prednisone would be Also good for COVID, I understand.
Anyway, so I don't believe this study.
It's a retrospective study.
Those are a little lower quality than, say, a randomized kind of thing.
But I'd like it to be true.
But how can asthma be a comorbidity at the same time that it prevents you from having problems?
The official word is still that asthma is a comorbidity, right?
If I wanted to get a vaccination ahead of the line, I would just say I have asthma, and I would go to the front of the line.
But apparently asthmatics are safer than you are, if that study is right.
I don't think it's right. In other news, Corey DeAngelis, who's doing an amazing job going after school boards and their silliness, tweets today that 27 state school boards, associations, Have at least distanced themselves from the National School Boards Association.
So the whole idea that the school boards should have this much control in our lives is being rejected by 27 states so far.
And 18 of those states that are purple, I guess, meaning neither red nor blue, have discontinued membership, participation, or dues because of the National Board's actions.
And Do you always worry about the slippery slope?
I always tell you that I'm less worried about the slippery slope than most people are.
This is why. Because the slippery slope created this unintended consequence which might be the greatest boon to homeschooling of all time.
By the way, how many of you who don't do homeschooling think that homeschooling is one kid sitting at home with one of the parents who has to stay home?
How many of you think that's what homeschooling is?
Because I don't think many people actually even know what it is, right?
Yeah, it's pods and top teachers in many cases, not all, of course.
Here's what I think the world needs right now.
And, Corey, if you're listening to me, or anybody else, I was watching a tweet thread by Joshua Lysak, and he was talking about how apparently he must be homeschooling.
That was what I got out of it.
I guess their class of homeschools, their pod or whatever, visits the workplace of the various parents...
Of the different kids. So they can see different jobs and how different businesses work and stuff.
And I thought to myself, well, that's probably more valuable than just about every class that a kid in public school took today.
Probably more valuable than every class they took.
Maybe, you know, except for reading and writing and stuff.
You know, some basics. But if that's the sort of thing that you can do in a homeschool, homeschooling really needs some PR. Right?
I would love to see whatever is the smallest package to describe what homeschooling really looks like.
Here's my bigger reason for that.
I think homeschooling has to be the future.
I mean, it almost has to be.
But there'll be better versions of it, right?
You know, homeschooling presumably has gone from crude to fairly sophisticated, I would assume, right?
Somebody can confirm that.
And I would imagine it started out maybe worse than public school on day one, on average, not for every person.
But probably at this point, it has exceeded public schools in every level.
Would that be true? Can somebody tell me if you have enough experience with the With that topic, would you say that homeschools have already exceeded every level of social and educational safety quality on everything?
Is there anything that a homeschool doesn't do better and unambiguously better than a public school?
Is there anything? Interactions with other kids.
Okay, that's my next topic.
I have a hypothesis that I want to run by the parents here.
All right? So I'm only talking about people who are parents of kids right now.
So if your kid grew up in an earlier time, you know, just watch the comments on this one.
Those of you who currently have a kid who uses social media, so not the young, young ones, but they use social media, Have you found that the obsession with social media has spilled over into the real world where the only thing that a kid can talk about is how many friends they have and what happened with their friends and who's making fun of them?
And there's actually nothing else that matters to them.
And I think the social media did that, and Snapchat in particular.
Snapchat makes you only think all day long about how many friends you have following you and what they're saying, mostly about you and about other people.
Now, everything I know about brains...
And persuasion and hypnosis, etc.
Everything I know about that tells me this.
And there's no argument on the thing I'm going to say.
The thing you focus on the most is what's the most important to you.
But not because...
That's not the reason you focused on it.
Sometimes it is. Of course you're going to focus more on important things.
But social media is an addiction.
So it forces you to focus on something that's not that important.
But the focus makes it important.
And the model of social media is friends, friends, friends.
Friends, friends, friends.
What are your friends saying about you?
Friends, friends, friends, friends, friends.
What are your friends saying about you?
That's it. Complete obsession.
And now here's my question for the current parents.
Do you find that when they come home, all they can talk about is their real life friends, friends, friends, and who's talking about them?
Just watch the comments for a minute.
I want to see if this is really something or just a weird idea I've had.
Yes, I'm addicted to social media.
That is correct. Constantly on their phones is what's causing it.
But do they also talk nonstop about their friends in the real world, the real world friends?
So I'm seeing some yeses, but a lot of noes.
Some yeses and some noes.
Okay.
There are pressures of them into the cult.
Your kids aren't on social media.
Interesting. Nope.
Yes, real world. Okay.
So I'm seeing more people who disagree with my hypothesis, or at least they don't observe it happening.
But I think it is happening, because I think it can't not happen.
It's just the way your brain is wired.
Whatever you focus on just becomes the most important thing.
There's no way around that.
So I think that homeschooling is probably the only way you can get social media away from kids.
And at this point, I think homeschooling is approaching a crisis requirement level.
I mean, public school is, I think, a crisis level.
The school shootings are the canary in the coal mine, but it's not just because there's some crazy people who have access to guns.
It's that the public school is destroying children's lives, and some of them are acting out on it.
Let me ask you this.
How long is it going to be...
Before one of these smash and grabs happens at the same time that somebody with a high-powered weapon is in the vicinity and they just decide to kill everybody involved in the smash and grab.
That's going to happen, isn't it?
What do you think? I don't hope it happens.
But if you could take these two trends and put them together, the number of people who have, let's say, concealed carry, isn't it just purely chance...
Purely chance that none of the smash and grabs have run into a concealed carry person who was in a bad mood that day.
Because the concealed carry person, if they see somebody actually get injured, let's say there's a smash and grab and they take out a security guard as part of it.
I feel like somebody's going to start shooting at all the people in masks and is going to take out 10 of them.
I feel like that's going to happen.
No, I'm not trying to influence the simulation.
I think it's just predictable.
That if you just combine these two trends, eventually they're going to bump.
But we don't want anybody to get killed.
PolitiFact is fact-checking.
A rumor, which is apparently untrue, that Kamala Harris was on a phone call and once referred to unvaccinated Americans as, quote, dirty Trump people.
Apparently that never happened, according to the fact-checkers.
But I love the fact that PolitiFact has to tell you what the rumor is before they fact-check it.
Dirty Trump people.
Why is that so funny to me?
I think it's funny because if you had never heard about the deplorable story, you wouldn't have believed it on its face.
But we've reached a point where so many things have happened that you didn't think could happen.
That having a vice president call 40% of the country or whatever dirty Trump people was well within the believable realm.
I don't think it happened.
But it was well within the believable realm.
And that's new.
All right. So reality denial is becoming a thing, not only in the Jussie Smollett case, where he just denies reality and said, nope, nope, wasn't a hoax, did not happen, despite all of the evidence that it totally did.
And that seems to be more of a thing now, that people will deny reality no matter how much reality is sitting on their head.
And here are some examples.
So AOC is denying the crime wave.
How could you possibly be alive and deny the crime wave?
But that's pretty bold.
Now, she hasn't walked it back.
And it was plainly ridiculous to deny it.
But denying things that are right in front of you is sort of a new thing, isn't it?
All right. Here's another one.
Climate change doesn't look to be as bad as we once thought.
Do you see anybody saying, oh, phew, thank goodness.
Turns out that whole thing was not as bad as we thought.
What I mean by that is apparently for the past 10 years we're not increasing the amount of carbon we put in the atmosphere.
Still too much, according to the experts.
That would still raise the temperatures.
There would still be lots of climate disruption, say the experts.
But... Could be just as much good as bad.
You know, we could be growing more while losing a little beachfront.
Could end up ahead.
So who's telling you the story that the most current knowledge about climate change is, eh, looks like we'll be okay.
Right? That seems to be the actual reality, but I think that's being denied by basically everybody who's been, you know, climate change alarmists from the beginning.
Yeah, so you hear people like Michael Schellenberg telling you what's actually true.
But most of the world is just sort of acting like that's not true.
We'll just pretend that's not the case.
By the way, Elon Musk came out with a tweet unambiguously in favor of keeping and not closing nuclear power plants.
That's Elon Musk.
The number one competitor to nuclear power.
The number one competitor to nuclear power just told you we have to keep those nuclear power plants.
That seems like a big deal, because he's pretty good at risk management, right?
And if he looked at him and said, yeah, the risk is worth the reward, well, maybe you should listen to that.
Maybe you should listen to that.
The other reality denial is I keep hearing from people that say that vaccinations are not slowing the spread and are not keeping people out of hospitals.
I'm not going to argue with you on that.
Because anybody who believes that, I'm not going to change their mind.
But are you aware that zero experts agree?
Is there anybody who holds that opinion?
Is there anybody who holds the opinion that vaccinations are not slowing the spread and it's not even keeping people out of hospitals or keeping them alive?
Does anybody believe that? Because you'd expect you'd have at least one rogue doctor, right?
No rogue doctors on this one.
I think there are zero rogue doctors saying that vaccinations don't work.
They just might not like the, you know...
Might not like the side effects or something.
Speaking of rogue doctors, I was pointed to yet another rogue doctor who said that the COVID vaccinations would never have been approved under normal standards for vaccinations, meaning that the signal, or the number of people who had side effects, was already well over...
The number that would stop a normal vaccination or, I guess, any med trial.
And therefore, you should not be taking these vaccinations because they have not been tested the same way all other vaccinations have been tested.
What do you think of that?
What do you think of that rogue...
I'm not even going to give you his name.
The rogue doctor's opinion that we should not trust the vaccinations because they were not...
Actually, we already know for sure...
That more people died than we would ever allow a regular vaccination to go forward with.
What do you think? Here's my take.
These rogue doctors, I have decided, have one characteristic that you need to understand.
They seem to really, really know their topic.
Number one. So if you think that I'm arguing that something they said is incorrect on some medical or scientific front, I'm not doing that at all.
I'm telling you that they're bad at reasoning.
Real good at medicine, but bad at reasoning.
This is a perfect example.
Here's how you should reason during a pandemic.
Compare the risk of the vaccinations as best you can to the risk of the virus itself.
And you're done. And you're done.
That's it. This rogue doctor is telling us we're all idiots, and then he compared what you do in a pandemic to what you do in normal times when you have all the time in the world and millions of people are not potentially dying.
And he didn't know the difference.
He acted as though that was a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
And I have to tell you that he was talking to...
Brett Weinstein. And Brett did not call him on it.
He didn't call him on that.
I don't know why. I'd love to ask him that question.
Like, why he didn't call him on the wrong comparison?
Because that's a really big problem.
That's the biggest problem you could ever have.
Comparing the wrong things is, like, the worst analytical problem you could have.
And he did that. He compared the wrong things.
So let me ask you this question.
Suppose you knew, and we don't know this, right?
This is purely hypothetical.
Suppose the vaccination people had told you, and since this didn't happen, you don't have to treat this like it's real, right?
Suppose the vaccine people had said, well, bad news, people.
We can tell already, it's easy to tell, that these vaccinations are going to kill tens of thousands of people.
Normally, we'd hope to keep that under 1,000.
We would never approve anything we thought was going to kill more than 1,000 people.
I'm making up the numbers. These are just made-up numbers to give you a sense of the argument.
But because it's an emergency, and because we think the downside risk is 100 million deaths, again, whatever that number is, if they said to you, we're going to give you a vaccination, but I've got to tell you, tens of thousands of people are likely to die from this.
But there's a really high chance we're going to save $100 million.
If you're one of the 10,000, it was a wrong decision for you, no doubt about it, and we won't sugarcoat it.
If you're one of the unlucky ones, you would have been better off with COVID, probably.
It's just true. But these are not normal times.
This is war. You know, it's a pandemic, it's a crisis, and in this one situation, we offer you this proposition.
We can give you something that's way safer than getting the virus, and it looks like you're all going to get it.
You're all going to get that virus eventually.
It'll be way safer than the virus itself, but also way more dangerous than any vaccination we've ever given.
How would you receive that?
In the comments, would you say, fair enough.
You have disclosed exactly all the information.
I will now choose to get it or not get it, but I'm good with you.
That's my only choice.
I'll make a choice.
What do you think? Fair or no?
Because I think that's what happened without the disclosure.
I'll give you my current best thinking subject to modification, right?
So if you come back to me later and say, Scott, you were wrong about that, I'll say, yeah, I thought I might have been.
I thought I might have been.
Here's what I think. I think that these vaccinations we always knew were substantially more dangerous than normal approved medicines of any kind.
How many of you would agree with the speculation there?
It's just speculation because I don't have data to back that up.
But would you agree that the experts did know early on it was substantially, maybe even ten times, you know, whatever substantial means to you.
I'd say maybe even ten times more dangerous than an ordinary medicine.
And that the proposition is it's still better, way better, in terms of overall risk management.
Not for an individual, and this is important.
For the crowd, right?
So it still might be worth it for the crowd and for the nation, but for an individual, you're going to kill yourself in some cases.
Yeah, and of course, the trade-off is completely unknown because you don't know the long haul, you don't know the long haul of the vaccination, you don't know the long haul of the COVID itself.
All of our data is sketchy.
Who knows what the variants are going to do to you?
Who knows what having these vaccines are going to do to you?
So in the context of all those unknowns, if the only thing you were confident of is that the vaccines would kill tens of thousands, but probably save 100 million, would you be okay with it?
I don't think any of you would be okay with it being forced or mandated.
But I'll bet a lot of you would be okay with it as a voluntary thing.
Now, I get mocked quite a bit by the anti-vaxxers for choosing to get vaccinated.
And sometimes I, you know, I fight back more aggressively because it's my opinion.
It's, you know, my choice, not yours.
Everybody's different, blah, blah, blah.
But one of the larger reasons that I decided to get vaccinated was a public good.
That I could maybe, and again, we're all guessing because we don't know for sure, but my best guess is that I could maybe, on average, would reduce the load on hospitals if I got vaccinated.
Now, I'm at a certain age where if I die tomorrow, I'd be okay with that.
I feel like I had a good run.
You know, I'm reaching the age where you say, well, you know, If it happens now, it happens.
So very much a big part of my decision was not personal.
I felt like it was a World War II, join the army situation.
Is joining the military good for you individually if you're a soldier?
Probably not. You got duped.
Cassandra, you're an asshole.
I'm going to block you. Because if you know I got duped, Cassandra, I'm going to get rid of you.
I'm going to put that user in timeout.
You're just an asshole. Now, you could suspect that I got duped, and you could be right.
I wouldn't even push back on that.
But if you say, you got duped, well, you're just an asshole.
That's just asshole behavior.
That's not an opinion. That's not new information.
That's just being an asshole.
So go be an asshole like Anomaly.
Join his live streams, then all the assholes can be in the same place.
Ukraine is looking dangerous.
So we've got 200,000 Russian troops poised there, looking like they're going to invade.
I still say they're not going to, because it would be suicide.
Not only for the troops...
What kind of weapons do you think Ukraine would instantly get if there were ground troops?
What kind of air cover would they get?
I don't know. Maybe there's no way to do that if they're outside of NATO. But I would not want to be a Russian ground troop entering Ukraine.
That seems like a pretty risky thing.
But some people are giving Joe Biden trouble for saying that we would never...
He ruled out sending US ground troops to Ukraine.
He ruled it out. What do you think of that?
Should we ever rule out military options?
Some of you say we should not rule it out.
I disagree.
Because we rule out all kinds of options.
We ruled out a chemical attack.
Haven't we? Haven't we ruled out a chemical attack?
We have, right?
Have we ruled out a nuclear strike on the civilian populations in Russia?
Well, yes.
I mean, unless something happened after this.
Yeah. Yeah. The military is all about ruling stuff out.
It's the most ordinary thing in the world.
But you want to rule out the things that are definitely not going to happen.
You don't want to rule out nuclear strikes, because they might.
They might happen. A nuclear strike might happen.
It's rare. We don't want it, but it might happen.
But ground troops?
What do you think are the odds of ground troops, American ground troops, in Ukraine?
It's actually zero. I mean, nothing's really zero.
But that's as close to zero as you can get, I think.
Because the public just wouldn't be in favour of it.
It just isn't going to happen. So I don't fault Biden for taking that off the table.
I think even Trump might have.
Because if we wanted to punish Russia, we wouldn't do it that way.
Right? If you have better ways to punish them, you would use those.
You wouldn't use the bad way.
The way that it's going to ruin the United States, too.
So if we had a choice of losing Ukraine, which would be bad, because they're an ally, that would be very bad.
But it's not as bad as losing Ukraine and the United States, because that's sort of what would happen if we sent ground troops.
I mean, the country itself would be so torn apart by that that it would be hard to put us back together.
So I don't see ground troops happening, but I also don't see...
Russian ground troops making much of an entry into Ukraine.
I will not be surprised if they enter Ukraine.
So let me be clear.
If they enter Ukraine, that won't surprise me at all.
Because he might be just ratcheting up.
See how far he can get.
But a full ground invasion where they go and hold territory?
I doubt it.
I doubt it. All right.
This is when we should just try to convert Russia to an ally against China.
And if we're not doing that, we're idiots.
Let's see. Biden has moved to squeeze Iran more, to tighten the sanctions on Iran.
Who does that sound like?
Who would tighten sanctions on Iran?
Hmm. Oh yeah.
Trump. So yet again, yet again, you see Biden having to retreat to a Trump position.
Just like most of the important stuff.
So there's that.
Tucker Carlson is very worried that the burning Fox News Christmas tree is an attack not just on Christmas, but on Christianity itself.
To which I say, that's sort of a feature of Christianity, isn't it?
Modern Christianity.
You know, not the old style.
But modern Christianity has a lot in common with...
Democracy and the way the country is organized.
Here's the analogy. I don't think I saw any Christians get upset about a tree that was lit on fire by a homeless person.
Did you? Like, I haven't talked to anybody who was actually upset about it.
Now, if this had been a symbol of a different religion, I don't have to name names, do you think people would have been militant and upset about it?
Well, I think so.
I think so. So I would say one of the great things about Christianity is you can burn up our...
I'll say ours because I'm sort of on the team even though I'm not a believer.
But you can burn up that Christmas tree and next year, Christmas tree.
It's like the flag. I've never understood people who are being mad at flag burning.
I mean, you could not like it viscerally, like it doesn't feel good viscerally.
But do you want a flag that can't be burned?
You want to live in that country?
You want to live in the country where you can't burn a flag?
Here's the magic thing about the flag.
Do you know the national anthem?
One of the lines is, and the flag was still there.
That's like the coolest line in the national anthem.
And the flag was still there.
You can burn the flag and then wake up on July 4th still there.
Right? It's the only thing you can burn.
You can just burn it all day long.
You can take millions of them.
You can collect them all up.
You can collect every flag in the country and burn it.
And in a month, it's right back.
It's still there. It's unburnable.
That's its feature.
So every time I see one getting burned, I go, yeah, that's my flag.
That's my flag.
Indestructible. Christianity?
Indestructible. You can burn a Christmas tree.
Next Christmas?
Christmas tree.
In fact, Fox News is already putting up a replacement.
Presumably with better security.
So you can burn it all you want, as far as I care.
China has experimented...
Apparently there's some information that said they experimented with making it rain, which you do by flying planes around and spraying some kind of material that will seed the clouds and make it rain.
Now, they did that allegedly...
To reduce the pollution before some international games, I guess, happened there in 2008.
And apparently they've been experimenting with this technology.
Now this is a known technology, right?
Cloud seeding, it's been around.
But also there's talk separately about hacking the ocean.
Apparently there are several ways you could modify the ocean to get it to, you know, suck more carbon out of the air.
Now that one scares me.
The one about making it rain by putting microscopic stuff in the air, that is a little less scary to me than anything with the ocean.
And here's why. I don't believe we'd try it unless we knew that whatever it is we were putting in the air didn't last there forever.
And we would certainly try it in one location first.
So I don't think you would like seed the atmosphere of the planet just to see if it worked.
I do think you might seed a city.
And see what happens, you know, five years from now.
So I do think, maybe not a city, maybe you pick something that's less populated.
But it does seem like something you could test, and I would be interested if we can have some certainty about how long stuff stays in the air and what the health impacts if you breathe it and all that stuff are.
I think that might be in the realm of testable.
But you know what's not testable?
Messing with the ocean. I don't know if you could test that.
Could you? I don't know that there's any reasonable way you'd be happy that you didn't start some chain reaction that ended life on Earth.
But I do imagine that some of those problems are solvable.
A lot of stuff that seemed impossible at one point are possible now.
So I wouldn't say that we can't do this, and it's certainly on the table.
But yes, we're all scared to death of geoengineering, and should be.
Rasmussen says 67% of the people they polled support Biden's diplomatic boycott of the Olympics.
Two out of three people are in favor of the United States boycotting China for the Olympics.
That's encouraging, isn't it?
And 47% say Biden's done a poor job on China.
All right. That is about everything I want to talk about today.
It went a little long. Didn't mean to.
Homeschooling persuasion. Your kids will visit you more often when they grow up.
I'll bet that's true.
I'll bet that's true.
What happens to human behavior when they think they have more protection than they actually do?
Well, I think you know the answer to that.
And was today the best live stream you've ever seen?
Yeah, it was. I don't even have to ask.
It's obvious. So...
Yeah, football helmets was a good example.
Football helmets is another example of taking your freedom away.
But it's the only way you can have football.
So we take freedom away all the time.
Um... Get moronic.
I don't know what that means.
Yes, it was the best one ever.
You're confident that 98% of people with COVID will survive?
Well, here's the other good news I forgot to mention.
In some places, the Omicron has already taken over.
So apparently 75% of the cases in South Africa are Omicron already.
Have you heard of anybody dying of the Omicron yet?
Even one? It must be happening, right, because everything kills somebody.
But have you heard it yet?
Have you heard of one confirmed Omicron death?
Even one? It's a little early, so it's possible that they're dying like crazy and we just don't have the data.
It's very possible. But I feel like we would have heard it by now, right?
Because the news is all about scaring us.
So if even one anecdotal report was available, you would have seen it.
You would have seen it.
All right. But this is a little too early.
It's possible it's out there. We just haven't seen it.
