Episode 1591 Scott Adams: Twitters New Rules and my Best and Worst of Year Picks
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Content:
New Twitter rules on COVID information
MSNBC John Heilemann says 30M ready to take up arms
My Best and Worst of the Year Picks
Boris Johnson Omicron comments
Republicans prefer self-correcting systems
Democrats prefer self-destructive systems
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Watch. Go. Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah. Well, here's my first mystery of the day.
Could we have some music?
Mystery of the day!
This is a low-production outfit, so you've got to take what you can get.
Here's my mystery of the day.
I keep hearing from people on Twitter...
That they live in a state in which they've just ignored the pandemic and everything was fine.
Is that true? And if it is true, why didn't I know it until now?
I don't think it's true, but it might be true-ish.
So the states which were suggested were Georgia, South Carolina.
Florida is a special case because we all watched their transition from doing stuff to doing stuff differently.
But is it true that in Georgia or South Carolina, they just basically ignored the pandemic and everything was fine?
Is that true? People are saying yes.
Now, I'm not confused by, let's say, Wyoming or Montana or South Dakota.
If South Dakota ignored the pandemic and everything was fine, I would say, well, that makes sense.
South Dakota.
Wasn't much population there.
But how in the world could Georgia, with its corpulent population...
How in the world can they just sail through the pandemic without their hospitals getting crashed?
I don't know the answer, by the way.
Usually when I ask these questions, I've got some sense of an answer before I ask the question.
I legitimately don't know the answer to this.
Like, honest to God, I don't know if there are major states that just ignored the pandemic and did fine.
I doubt it.
But remember what I said at the beginning of the pandemic is that you would never be able to tell which leaders made the right decisions, which is a wild, crazy prediction, isn't it?
And I said that specifically you wouldn't be able to compare any two countries and learn something.
You'd think you were.
Every time you did one of those comparisons, you'd say, Sweden this and UK that.
But every time somebody tries to copy somebody else's technique, they don't seem to get the same result.
So leadership and even, you know, what processes were used were way less predictive than they should have been.
You know, the experts will still say that all that clearly worked and there's data to show it worked.
And there's data to show that masks and distancing and restrictions all worked.
And vaccinations. But it worked in the sense of decreasing how bad things were.
But if that's true, why isn't everybody doing the same thing?
If we know exactly what worked and what didn't, why are some people just not doing that and getting a good result?
Or are they? Or are they not?
It's just a mystery. If anybody can figure that out for me, let me know.
So I was pointing to the new Twitter rules on what you can and cannot do.
And I think that these rules are so interesting that I'm going to run through them.
Because I think your hair will catch on fire with some of these.
Okay? These are the new Twitter rules, new in November, I guess.
Claims that specific groups or people or other demographically identifiable identity are more or less prone to be infected or to develop adverse symptoms on the basis of their membership in that group.
You can't say that.
Now, isn't that the official government opinion?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the official Government opinion that black Americans are having worse outcomes.
Am I wrong about that?
Did that change?
Now, I won't get kicked off for saying that I'm not sure what the truth is.
So I'll tell you about this.
As long as you're clearly stating an opinion, you're safe.
You can't just state something's true as a fact And then, you know, if it's wrong, according to Twitter.
So, I feel as though this...
I don't even understand this rule.
Because this is the official science, isn't it?
Isn't it? I have to add that, isn't it, so I wouldn't get banned.
Right? If I had said the official science says that black people have worse outcomes, if I were to say that, which I'm not, because I don't want to get banned, I have to throw in some doubt, like it's an opinion.
What am I missing here?
Aren't I missing something?
Why could they say this is banned?
All right, here's another one. False information about widely accepted testing methodologies, such as that PCR tests are unable to detect virus.
How many of you believe that it's true?
That the PCR tests do not detect virus accurately, or that they're detecting too much stuff or whatever.
How many of you believe PCR tests are not accurate?
In the comments, how many of you believe that's true, that they're not accurate?
If you were to say that as a fact, you would be kicked off of Twitter.
Now, here's my belief.
My belief is that Twitter is correct.
Do I know? How would I? It's not like I'm the scientist who tested the PCR test.
How would I know? But my belief, which is different than many of yours, is that whatever you were reading that said that the PCR tests are bogus and behind a fake pandemic, I think that's just misinterpreted stuff.
I believe. I could be wrong.
But I do believe the PCR tests are accurate, so I'll give Twitter that one.
But I could be wrong.
How about this? False or...
You could get kicked off Twitter for this, too.
False or misleading information about preventative measures that one can take to avoid infection, such as claims that face masks cause hypoxia.
If you said face masks cause hypoxia, Twitter would have a problem with that.
By the way, this doesn't mean an automatic ban.
I think you get warned first or something.
And you also can't say that face masks cause bacterial pneumonia.
And you cannot say...
These are just examples. And you cannot say that masks don't reduce transmission.
You can say it, I guess, as an opinion, but not as a fact.
Is your head exploding yet? - Yeah.
It doesn't get any better.
Let me keep going. You can't make false or misleading information, or you can't tweet it, suggesting that unapproved treatments can be curative.
So you can't tweet that ivermectin can be curative.
Not that it is, just that it can.
Is that the same as it could be?
I don't know, that word is a little ambiguous, can.
Does that mean you can't tweet that it's possible?
Or that you can't tweet that it's a fact that it works?
It's a little unclear.
Now, the lack of clarity in here, of course, is alarming, because, you know, humans will be involved making judgments, and God knows how good those judgments will be.
But you can't say that vitamin D would take care of everything, I guess.
So, yeah, I know some of you are not on Twitter, but the point is that this is a major communication platform.
And here's something else you can't say on Twitter.
The vaccines will cause you to be sick, comma, spread the virus, comma, or would be more harmful than getting COVID-19.
You're not allowed to say that the vaccination is more harmful than getting COVID-19.
Are you okay with that? In every case?
Do you think that this is a safe thing to say for everybody in every situation?
That just a blanket statement, that in every case, the shot is safer than the coronavirus itself.
Which, by the way, could be true.
It could be true. I know it makes you uncomfortable.
I don't know how much of a problem that one is.
All right. How about...
So here's the ambiguity in this sentence that people, I think, are misinterpreting.
It says the vaccines will cause you to spread the virus.
So you can't say the vaccines will cause you to spread the virus.
But I think you can say that people who are vaccinated can spread the virus.
Right? Because that's the official word.
But I think that's been misinterpreted as saying you can't say that people with vaccinations spread the virus.
I think you can still say that.
Because that's the official thing.
But it's not the vaccines that are causing the spread.
So again, the wording of this is so important.
A little ambiguity causes a big problem.
You can't tweet...
Any claims that vaccines will alter genetic code?
Will alter genetic code.
You can't do that. What do you think of that?
Do we know that?
Is it a fact or just the current of thinking?
All viruses alter genetic codes, somebody says.
Yeah, I think this one seems like a little bit of a problem.
Because I think it depends on what you mean by altered.
Are there lots of things that damage DNA? If something damages DNA, is that altering it?
And aren't there lots of things that damage DNA? No.
It's not just viruses, is it?
Do viruses damage DNA? Does a vaccine damage DNA? I don't know any of that, but...
Anyway, be careful of that.
Here's something else you can't say.
False or misleading claims that people who have received the vaccine can spread or shed the virus to unvaccinated people.
This is literally the official...
The official government opinion you can't say on Twitter.
Let me read it again.
Am I reading this wrong?
You can't make on Twitter false or misleading claims that people who have received the vaccine can spread or shed the virus to unvaccinated people.
What? What?
Yeah, this is a confirmed fact.
Let's test it out.
We'll see if I get a warning or...
Well, I'm not on Twitter now, so I guess that doesn't count.
I feel like that's just...
There's just something wrong with that, right?
Either the guideline is written poorly or I don't know how to read suddenly or you're not allowed to say what the government says is true.
As a fact. You can't say it as a fact.
That's weird. I mean, there's just something wrong here, right?
What you're allowed to do...
Let's see. Oh, you can't also do...
You can't make strong or misleading assertions of fact.
All right, here are some things you are allowed to do.
So Twitter specifically says they're not going to give you trouble for this.
Personal anecdotes or first-person accounts.
So you're allowed to say, you know, my cousin got the vaccination and X happened to my cousin.
What would be the most misleading kind of information that you could ever have?
What would be the single most misleading information you could ever have on the pandemic?
Anecdotal information.
Now, even though it's true, it's so misleading because people think the anecdote represents the whole.
So it turns out that the least valuable data, first-person accounts, are allowed.
Now, I think they should be allowed.
You know, free speech, blah, blah, blah.
And they're true. I mean, if something's true and you talk about it, that's got to be allowed, I guess.
But it is the least useful thing.
But it's allowed. You're also allowed to have public debate about, you know, the advancement and things changing and blah, blah, blah.
All right. So, I guess everybody's concern is that the rules have enough ambiguity that they could be used to ban anybody for anything.
If they were talking about, you know, the pandemic.
So I saw, I think, at least two people tweeting things that should have gotten them a warning or a ban just this morning.
Just to me. These are people who just tweeted at me specifically with totally bannable content already.
I mean, I assume they're not going to be too tough on enforcement here.
Right? So here's the bullshit of the day that John Heilman, who works for MSNBC, I think?
MSNBC? He's concerned that there are 30 million people...
This is a quote. 30 million people right now who are ready to take up arms...
To restore Donald Trump in office.
And he says, that's not hyperbolic at all.
Those are the facts.
Now, he says those are the facts.
I believe that's based on some kind of survey about the number of people who thought that, you know, under certain circumstances, they might have to take up arms to reclaim the country or take it over or something.
Now, I don't doubt...
That somewhere there is such a statistic in which people on the right are warning of an armed insurrection under certain conditions.
Would you agree with that?
That's probably true.
People said it in a survey.
But, of course, they would be defining what those certain situations are.
It's not like they're going to do it Because they don't like the design of the flag.
It's not like 30 million people are going to storm the Capitol with their weapons because they don't like trans policy or something.
So the idea that these 30 million people are on the edge of being activated because they don't like the election or something, nothing could be further from the truth.
Nothing. Nothing. And here's what I think the left doesn't understand about the right.
And I want to see if you can fact-check me on this, because this is an opinion.
But I want to see if you have the same impression.
People on the right talk about taking up arms against the government like people on the left talk about getting tattoos.
It's just something they say.
It doesn't mean anybody's going to do it.
It's just sort of this continuous warning against our own government, wouldn't you say?
If this were to happen, it's a good thing we have the Second Amendment.
Say conservatives all the time.
It's just sort of a general warning so that it's always in the atmosphere.
Because you don't want anybody to forget That there are 30 million or whatever armed Americans who are willing to try to protect, probably in their way of thinking, protect the country.
Of course they are.
Of course there are 30 million people who would take up arms in the right situation.
In the right situation, would 30 million Americans take up arms?
100 million would, in the right situation.
Maybe 150 million.
In the right situation, let's say a land attack against the United States, yeah, you'd have 100 million Americans with a gun in their hand in 24 hours.
So I think the left, of course, the right gives them this opportunity by the way they use rhetoric, but I think you really have to understand it's just the way the right talks.
Will you give me a yes or a no on that?
Those of you who spend most of your time or are identified with the right, it's just the way they talk.
Now it's turned into this 30 million people with weapons trying to take over the country.
Nothing like that's happened. Like, if you were to make a list of all the things that are possible, that would just be dead last.
I mean, anything's possible, right?
But in terms of likelihood, just dead last.
Dead last. It's a total misreading of the right.
But I would say that if your last name is Heilman, it's safer to be associated with the left, because they're not going to make Hitler jokes about you so much.
All right. There's a story about Mark Meadows, and he had a PowerPoint that he apparently touched it.
He didn't make it, but he You sent it to some people.
He's not even sure where it came from.
It's this long PowerPoint presentation.
This was around the January 5th.
And it had some ideas for stalling the certification of the vote and getting Pence to do this or that that's unconstitutional.
Now, Mark Meadows says somebody gave it to me and I showed it to some other people, but it wasn't anything I was taking seriously.
It's not like he had considered the plan or anything.
Well, I don't know if he considered the plan, but the fact that it was on a PowerPoint had nothing to do with Mark Meadows.
He didn't make it. So the fake news is blowing that into some kind of a Mark Meadows PowerPoint about overthrowing the government, when in fact he's just a guy who saw a PowerPoint.
That's pretty much it.
January 5th was the day that this was happening.
Ahead of the January 6th protests.
So I did get the dates correct.
All right. Here are my best and worst of the year awards.
My roundup. Okay?
Here comes the roundup.
Number one. Best brainwashing play of the year.
The best brainwashing play of the year is...
I tweeted this... One of the best applications of mass brainwashing in modern times, actually, is the idea that the January 6th protesters wanted something other than a fair and transparent election result.
The fact that some gigantic percentage of the country has been brainwashed to believe that that was an insurrection, as opposed to protecting the existing system...
Which is exactly what they asked for.
Let us protect the existing system by making damn sure that this election was not rigged because it kind of looks like it might have been.
Right? That is so far from the way this is being presented as some kind of insurrection.
So far away from that.
But if you're just going to look at the effectiveness of the brainwashing, it was really good.
It was really strong.
So the brainwashing play of the year...
is that January 6th was an insurrection.
Biggest hypocrites of the year, the teachers' unions, for promoting a critical race theory as if the teachers' unions themselves were not the main cause of systemic racism.
The beauty of this hypocrisy is almost breathtaking.
The teachers' unions being the cause of systemic racism in the sense that they are the reason that there's not enough competition in schools and they're the reason that you can't get a good education if you're black and in a bad part of the country.
So they are systemic racism.
They're the embodiment of systemic racism, but they would have you believe that they're teaching it or that they promote teaching it.
It just doesn't mention themselves as one of the topics.
Hypocrites of the year. All right.
Most racist event of the year.
Go. Most racist event.
See if you get the same answer as I did.
What's the most racist thing that happened?
Yeah, it's Jussie.
Jussie Smollett. Now, I don't know what the other possibilities would be if we're just looking at the year, 2021.
I'm going to talk about Kyle.
We'll get to Kyle. Joy Reid, yeah.
But I think that the whole Jussie Smollett thing has got to be the winner.
And that, of course, was racist against white people.
White conservatives.
The political play of the year.
The most clever...
Jesus.
I just saw the most disturbing meme I've ever seen in my life.
People on Locals know what I'm talking about, but just be glad you didn't see that one over there on YouTube.
Oh, that was disturbing.
Anyway, the political play of the year is the Texas abortion tweaks, allowing private citizens to sue the doctors, I guess.
So I didn't see that coming.
And I would say that in terms of just cleverness, That was the play of the year.
But it was so clever that it looks like Gavin Newsom is going to use a similar concept to put more constrictions on assault rifles and ghost gun makers.
So it's like a brand new play that I guess hadn't been used.
And that's the political play of the year.
Worked for both sides.
What is the biggest crime of the year?
Biggest crime of the year...
Presumed. In parentheses.
Biggest crime of the year?
Presumed. Not proven.
Presumed. Go.
SUV attack?
No. Binger?
Maxwell? Uyghurs?
Hedges Lane? Oh, Australian concentration camps.
Well, I was trying to focus this on more American stuff, but I'm going to say the biggest crime of the year is whoever was behind limiting the rapid testing, the cheap rapid testing in the United States.
We don't know who it was or even if there was a person behind it, but all indications are that there's some gigantic crime involved because incompetence wouldn't really explain it.
So there has to be some kind of criminal activity behind that.
So I think that's the biggest crime of the year based on death count.
Because even the Uyghurs are not being killed at the rate of the pandemic.
And I think that having rapid testing early makes less difference now.
But if we had it early, probably would have taken a big bite out of things.
Maybe let us get back to normal a lot faster.
Best persuader of the year.
Who is the most persuasive and successful?
It has to be successful.
The best persuader of the year.
Go. Elon Musk.
I'm not going to say him, but that would have been a good answer.
DeSantis. Very good.
Yeah, I appreciate it if you say me, but that's not what I'm looking for.
Cernovich, he's always toward the top.
Joe Biden, Elon Musk.
The answer is Michael Schellenberger.
Michael Schellenberger. Michael Schellenberger, for convincing, I think, Congress to be pro-nuclear.
And I think he's the primary reason that this is happening.
So that's one of the biggest, most important things that's ever happened.
And essentially, the form of persuasion was reframing things more accurately.
I mean, that's the primary way he persuades.
He just teaches them that they have some older ideas, that they're not updated.
So essentially, by convincing all of Congress at this point, I think, most of it, convincing them that what they used to think about nuclear power is a little outdated, and if they were simply current, they would have a different opinion.
He brought them current, and now everybody's pro-nuclear.
You know, the climate change fear certainly helped, but I think it was Schellenberger who did that.
And now he's focusing on San Francisco and bad management there, and specifically the thing we call the homeless problem, which is really a drug problem, because the reason that they're homeless is they like to do drugs, and they can't do it if they check into some kind of managed facility.
So once Schellenberger is done persuading people that they're not up to date on the information about this topic, and then he brings them up to date, which is what he's doing with his books and continuous communication on this, I think he's going to turn this one too.
And it looks to me like he may have solved, or he's on the way to, I don't want to say single-handedly, because lots of people help, but being the most important character, solving two of the biggest problems in the country.
And it might happen, he might get all of that done in like a five-year period.
I mean, unbelievable, really.
Just incredible. Alright, worst politician of the year ago.
Who is politically the worst politician of the year?
That is right, Kamala Harris.
This one's not even close.
All right, who's the best politician of the year?
Best politician of the year.
You don't have to agree with their politics.
They were just the best politician.
DeSantis by a mile.
Yeah, there's nobody close, right?
Like, who's really second to DeSantis?
You know, Trump is sort of an omnipresent character...
Manchin's special case.
Yeah, Manchin's a special case because he just accidentally got all that power by being flexible.
But I think DeSantis wins hands down for just politicking.
Now, that's different from effectiveness and whether you like his policies.
But just as a politician, wow.
Actually, one of the best...
I would say DeSantis had one of the best years of any politician ever...
That I can think of.
Can you? Can you think of any politician who ever had a better year just as being a politician?
I can't think of one.
How about the most transparent bullshit of the year?
I don't know if this is the biggest one of the year, but it's the one I saw today.
So it just got to me today.
So this is a little hyperbole for me, but the most transparent bullshit of the year.
Boris Johnson talking about the Omicron just, I think, yesterday.
And he said that one person has died with Omicron.
They've died with it.
Does anybody see any transparent bullshit?
There's one person who died with it.
Not because of it.
With it. Now, he throws that in there as if we're not going to notice the with part.
But it gets worse.
That wasn't even the part I was going to go to.
I'm just building up to it.
I'm literally just building up to it.
He said that we should...
I'm paraphrasing a little bit, but this is pretty close.
We should ignore the mildness of the Omicron, meaning the fact that it's not killing anybody that we know of, and that I'll tell you later that there's not any case of a bad outcome.
This is another tweet I saw today, that there's no case of any bad outcome from Omicron, not even hospitalization.
Much less a death. Not even a bad hospitalization.
Are you hearing that?
That's as of some information that got tweeted around today.
You can see that on my Twitter feed if you want to see the source.
But here's what Boris Johnson said about this.
In the face of it being so mild...
He said, we should ignore the mildness of the Omicron.
Again, I'm paraphrasing, not exact words.
We should ignore the mildness of the Omicron and focus on its pace of infection.
What? No, the mildness is why we should be happy about the pace of infection.
I want more infection, not less, if it's true that it's super mild.
And so far, it's looking that way, right?
So you can see that he's trying to keep people panicked so that he can control them in terms of their mitigation strategies.
But here's what he should have said if he was being even a little bit honest.
You know, we might find some surprises from this Omicron that's more dangerous than we think.
At the moment, it looks like it's going to get us out of the pandemic.
But don't relax yet, because I'd give it a good two weeks before we feel confident about that.
When the Omicron reaches 75% as new infections, then we probably need to rethink our entire strategy.
That would be a good leader statement.
Not, we should ignore the mildness and focus on its pace of infection.
You fucking idiot. You fucking idiot.
That is so transparent bullshit.
Can you give us the mild respect of not lying so obviously to our fucking faces?
A little bit of respect, please, Boris Johnson.
You know, the Brits, I always think the Brits are sort of leading us all in politeness.
In terms of, you know, public discourse.
But seriously, a little bit of respect, please.
A little bit of respect.
This is not respectful.
Forget the fact that it's bullshit.
Forget the fact that it's, you know, closer to a lie than an actual honest statement.
This is disrespectful.
This is just flat out disrespectful.
And I don't think we can let that...
You can't let that pass without mention.
Lying to us cleverly, even if it's for our own good or whatever, maybe.
I'll look at that a little bit differently.
But don't disrespect us by lying obviously.
Not obviously. All right.
Here's the most shocking story, but not really, of the year.
So the quality had to be two things.
It had to be shocking, and at the same time, you knew it was going to happen.
Or something like it.
Here's the shocking story, but not really.
The Pfizer asked for 75 years to produce data concerning the Pfizer and Bio vaccine.
That is freaking shocking.
Well, not really. Not really.
Right? Yeah, the Russia collusion hoax, you could argue that that was the biggest revealed hoax of the year.
Probably the biggest hoax of the last five years, but it's the biggest revealed hoax of the year.
I'll give it that. All right, how about the biggest mass murderer of the year?
Here we'll go international.
Biggest mass murderer...
And I'm looking for a person's name.
Biggest mass murder of the year.
Yeah. Yep.
President Xi of China, not even close.
Because you've got the coronavirus, you could argue, you know, whether that should be on the list or not under Xi.
But certainly fentanyl.
The fentanyl is all you need to know about the biggest mass murder.
Whatever they're doing with the Uyghurs, whatever they're doing with the dissonance and taking their organs out and selling them, you put it all together and President Xi, biggest mass murderer of the year.
But a special mention to whoever stopped the rapid testing in America, because that may have been, I don't know, that could have killed 100,000 people.
It's hard to know. But I'd say whoever was the stopper of the rapid tests or whatever group or people may have killed 100,000 Americans.
But that's not even close to what she has done.
Not even close. All right.
Most inspirational event of the year.
Most inspirational.
What made you feel the best?
The most inspirational thing.
Kyle Rittenhouse. Interesting.
That did feel good.
I have to go with Elon Musk's spaceflight.
Now, Bezos gets sort of an also-ran credit, and so does Richard Branson, Sir Richard Branson.
But I think Elon Musk set the standard for this.
And I've got to tell you that it was the one time this year that I just got tingles.
Like, that just made me feel good about everything.
So, most inspirational event of the year.
And of course, Elon Musk is Times Person of the Year.
And I like that pick.
What is the best news of the year?
The best good news?
Now, the rocket launch is inspirational, but, you know, it's the beginning of a A long process of what we hope to be good news.
Space conquest.
But best news of the year.
Somebody's saying Omicron.
That's on my list.
That's third on my list is Omicron is the best news of the year.
So far. I mean, we think.
It's a little too early.
Here are the other ones.
CO2 emissions have been flat for 10 years.
Did you all know that? I believe that's true.
The CO2 emissions from humans have been flat for 10 years.
Now, that's a big deal.
But also advancements in fusion and the turnaround and opinions on nuclear energy.
I think the nuclear and the fusion stories, even though fusion is not commercialized yet, we know it can be now.
Now, this may be the flying car of all flying cars, and it never gets commercialized, but I think the right people are telling us it's an engineering problem now, as opposed to an invention problem.
So I think we can say with confidence at this point that fusion will be here.
Five years, ten years, twenty, I don't know, but it's coming.
I think it's coming. Now, I'm an optimist, so I could be wrong about that.
All right, what is the best disappeared story of the year?
The best disappeared story.
A story that should have been...
A lot of candidates, right?
Waukesha. You've got Hunter Biden's laptop.
Russia collusion disappeared from half of the coverage.
So you've got Ghislaine, you've got the Rittenhouse, the fact that he shot white people instead of black people.
Yeah, there's a lot of competition.
But I think the Waukesha one is the most blatant.
So I think I'll put Waukesha first.
All right. What is the biggest analytical mistake of the year?
Biggest analytical mistake of the year.
Not by any one person, but by people.
What would you say? Biggest analytical mistake of the year.
Bitcoin, somebody says.
Vaccines work. No, that's not what I'm going for.
Global warming, no.
That's not really of this year.
Rigged elections, no.
Inflation, no. I'm going to say comparing countries during the pandemic.
I think the biggest analytical mistake is to think that you can compare two countries and know something.
Now, at the beginning of this livestream, I said, can we compare those other states?
Because that's a little bit better comparison.
Because at least states within the United States, it's a little easier to find a comparable.
Like, you could find something that's a little bit like Georgia, such as South Carolina.
You could find something that's a little bit like Montana, such as South Dakota, perhaps.
But, you know, if you're comparing a European country or America to Sweden, there are just too many different variables involved there.
So I would say that...
Comparing any countries and thinking that that told you something was the biggest analytical mistake of the year.
And last year, too.
All right. VEX mandates?
Oh, actually, yeah.
But I'm not sure that's an analytical mistake.
I think that's a government is the wrong tool for the job mistake.
You know, let me return to a point I used to say a lot.
The government is the wrong tool...
For deciding when to get back to normal.
A government is a good tool for, let's say, defending the country.
You want somebody in charge of the military, a centralized professional group.
So governments are pretty good for that.
But what they're not good at is deciding which citizens will live and die.
Right? Because you can't get re-elected if you decide that some citizens are just going to die.
But that's what we have to do to get back to normal.
So it's not a government kind of thing they can do unless they're a dictator.
If you're a dictator, you can just say, oh, it's time.
Everybody drop the mandates.
But if you're a democracy and you've got to get re-elected, you can't say, all right, we're going to throw old people under the bus.
Everybody go back to normal.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. A lot of old people will die...
Because of the extra risk of this.
But, yeah, we're just going to make this reasonable decision.
The old people, they had a good run, so we'll just let the old people die.
Government can't do that.
Not anything in a democratic, republic kind of situation.
Because they have to get re-elected.
What happens if you're the one who kills all the old people?
What happened to Andrew Cuomo?
For letting the nursing homes be unprotected.
So the problem is that the government just can't make the decision.
And I will tell you over and over again, at least in the United States, and this would be different in Australia, apparently, but in the United States, the people will decide when it's over.
The people will decide.
And the fact that it's not over means that the people have not decided.
Now, the people are somewhat brainwashed by their leaders, so we have to work through that.
But don't lose sight of where the power is.
The government's only power on the pandemic is to brainwash you, which they're doing pretty well.
But you have the actual functional power.
You just have to get enough of you, meaning the public, on the same side at the same time.
But that'll happen. I mean, it's inevitable.
So the slippery slope here is that the public will regain full control if it needs to, to take that control away from the government.
All right. Facebook is being sued by John Stossel for, I guess they said, they did a fact check on some of his climate change information and they said it was false and misleading and so they I don't know what they did.
I don't know if they banned it or labeled it, whatever they did.
But Stossel is suing them.
Because he claims that the facts about climate change that he presented were true.
And there's enough science behind them that they're pro-science.
He's on the side of science.
And here was Facebook's defense...
That their fact checks are mere statements of opinion rather than factual assertions.
So if Facebook's opinion is different than your actual facts, you're in trouble.
And they say it directly.
This is very clear.
They're saying that their fact-checking is, quote, from their lawyers, mere statements of opinion rather than factual assertions.
So if their mere statement of opinion disagrees with your actual science, as apparently was the case with John Stossel, that their mere opinion disagreed with his actual science, then John Stossel's the one who has to pay for that.
Pay in the sense of having his content...
You know, gated.
So, from a legal perspective, I think this was the only way they could go, right?
You know, in terms of a legal strategy, they kind of had to do this, didn't they?
Because how could they defend that they're the keeper of facts?
You can't. It's indefensible to say we do know the facts.
Nobody can say that.
Not in our world. So we'll see.
Let's keep an eye on this. This is interesting.
It sets some precedents, maybe.
Now, I said in a tweet, and people were confused by it, so I'll explain it.
That Republicans are attracted to self-correcting systems where Democrats are drawn to self-destructive systems.
And that doesn't make sense until you hear some examples.
All right, here's a self-correcting system.
The free market.
See what I mean? If there's a problem in the economy, a shortage of something, the free market will eventually fix it by attracting other people to provide the product.
So Republicans vary in favor of a self-correcting system called free markets.
Likewise, democracy itself, the Constitution, the Constitution is a self-correcting system, is it not?
Because it says, oh, when there's a problem, here's the process to fix it.
Could be the court system.
Could be another election.
But it's clearly spelled out in the Constitution that the systems are self-correcting.
And it even tells you how.
It gives you the exact details of how these systems will be self-correcting and self-balancing and all that.
So those are self-correcting systems.
I would say religion is weirdly a self-correcting system, too, because you could be sinning like crazy, get to your deathbed and accept Jesus, and you're all good.
You've corrected. So that works in some cases.
Now compare that to systems favored by Democrats, like critical race theory.
Critical race theory is a self-destructive system.
Because if you teach that people are, you know, victims of other people in their country, it's pretty predictable that it's going to rip apart the fabric of America.
That's a self-destructive system.
You can see it from a mile away.
It doesn't have any self-correcting elements to it.
Right? It is devoid of any element that could be self-correcting.
It's a one-way trip, someplace you don't want to go.
How about full socialism?
Not the kind where we pay taxes so that other people can have health care in some level.
But if you want full socialism, as many would like it, again, you get rid of human motivation.
And human motivation is the key to the self-correcting part.
If you ignore human motivation, you don't have any kind of a system that can self-correct.
It just goes where it goes, which is in the toilet.
How about reparations?
Now, no matter what you think of reparations, is it going to make anything better?
Even if you think it's called for, even if you think it's fair, even if you can make a perfectly good argument for it, it kind of just begs for more reparations, doesn't it?
Like, when are you done? I don't think there's any self-correcting element built into it.
Because the moment you said, yeah, let's do some reparations for people who are no longer alive.
Now this is different, by the way, than reparations for Japanese internment, which I was completely in favor of.
The people who got the Japanese internment reparations were still alive.
These people were in the freaking camps, right?
I knew quite a few people who were actually literally in those camps because I had a relationship with a Japanese-American woman for years and her older brother.
So I actually was in a long-term relationship with somebody whose older brother was in the camps, the Japanese internment camp, because he was much older.
I mean, think about that.
That's my lifetime. My lifetime...
I was in a room full of people a number of times at holiday events, in a room full of people where most of the people in the room had been in Japanese internment camps in the United States in my lifetime.
I mean, that's just mind-blowing.
But yeah, reparations in that case.
But if you start doing it for ancient ills, no matter how bad those ills were, slavery was the baddest of the bad, It's just a one-way trip.
So I would look at that every time you see a difference between the Democrats and the Republicans.
Look for that self-correcting element.
You consistently find it in the right-leaning systems.
All right.
How many of our national problems could have been solved by having rapid tests that were cheap early?
Now, some say it wouldn't have made any difference because Europe, you know, Great Britain has rapid tests for free, as many as you want, and it isn't making that much difference.
But I think it would have made a difference if we did it earlier, you know, right?
So I think the following problems were exacerbated by not having rapid tests.
The budget, would you agree?
That, you know, because of the shutdowns, we had to give, you know, direct payments to people, etc.
So if, it's a big if, but if the rapid tests had been available earlier, could we have evolved a budget blow-up?
Could we have therefore controlled our inflation better?
Therefore, would we have had the supply chain problems?
Probably yes, because it would still be in other places.
Would we have the same crime, pandemic, health care problems?
You know, there was a whole snowball effect.
Snowball effect.
So I think the lack of that...
Instant testing or the rapid testing was a much more gigantic problem than just the fact that it would have been nice to have better testing.
I'm looking at a comment from Michael Myers here.
He says, pair the self-correcting framing with grievance filter framing.
I guess that would be one way to say it, that the Democrats have a grievance filter.
Government creates backwards legislation to make it self-replicating.
Okay, that's a little bit too complicated for me, but I like where you're going with that.
Dr. Funk Juice, you sent me a message.
I'll check that out. All right.
Yeah, you know, the trouble with the grievance filter is...
So here's a persuasion tip.
If you want to say that the systems are better on the right than the left, I wouldn't use that framing of calling it a grievance filter, even though it is.
Because as soon as you say that, that's sort of fighting words.
That's a little bit of a...
You know, as soon as you label it a grievance filter, you've sort of departed reason and you're into...
Partisan talk.
I think you can take all of that out of there by saying that some systems have a self-correcting element built in and some do not.
Because there's no emotion in that statement.
You're looking at it like it's a machine.
You're engineering a system.
You're not talking about it with hyperbole and You know, and all of your partisan stuff.
Just say one has self-correcting nature, one doesn't.
Why would you ever want a system without a self-correcting element?
All right. The best meme of the year?
The best meme of the year had to be, let's go, Brandon.
Wouldn't you say?
What about Russia?
All right.
I think this was my best live stream of all time.
Maybe the best live stream anybody's ever done anywhere in the history of the world.
Oh, I'm going to answer one more question for you, I think.
And to give you a key learning here.
Lots of times when things don't make sense, it's because of insurance.
This is one of the best filters to have on reality.
If you understand how insurance drives business decisions, as in, if you do this, you can't get any insurance, that's a big problem.
Insurance kind of drives a lot of the business processes.
You just don't see it directly.
And somebody asked this, why do you have to wear masks on planes When there are so many other places like restaurants that people just take them off to eat and this seems to be not a big problem.
I mean, I'm not hearing about a bunch of restaurants causing spikes and infections.
Here's why I think liability and insurance and why a restaurant would be different than a plane.
If you take a 12-hour plane ride and you get COVID, you're going to think it's because of the plane ride.
Am I right? You're going to say, somebody on that plane gave me COVID. And you're probably going to be right, and you might even be able to find out who had it.
You know, you can find out who on the plane, in some cases, they can track it down and say, oh, it's the person sitting right behind you, which they've actually done.
But you can't really do that in a restaurant, can you?
Because people who eat in restaurants might eat in several restaurants.
And it would be impossible to identify the specific person who gave you anything because you wouldn't even know if you got it in the restaurant, right?
So suing a restaurant would be next to impossible because you wouldn't be able to demonstrate that the restaurant did something that caused you to get the virus.
You wouldn't even know where you got it.
But if you take a long enough plane ride, you're going to have a much better idea where you got it.
And that's a liability.
So I believe that airplane CEOs, the people running these companies, have decided that they have a very special case where you could identify that if they'd done something differently, you would have a different outcome.
Meaning that if somebody got it on the plane and masks were not required, somebody would do a lawsuit and say, you know, I wouldn't have died, or my relative wouldn't have died, if you had required masks.
And I don't think restaurants have that risk.
So I think...
That the insurance filter is the reason that airplanes, in particular, have to have the strictest...
Basically, they have to do everything.
You've got to be vaccinated, ideally vaccinated, and have a test, and wear a mask, and be six feet apart.
You just have to do it all.
Is there anybody with enough business experience that can validate my assumption here?
Anybody? Anybody?
You could sign waivers.
Good call. Right.
Yeah, they could make you sign waivers.
But I don't know that signing waivers...
I'm not a lawyer, but I don't think signing waivers protects you against an obvious error.
Right? If you do something that's obviously unsafe, you still get sued even if waivers are signed.
Right? Right? If it looks like a mistake, that you could have easily corrected.
You know, it's one thing to sign a waiver for a dangerous sport, because, you know, that's a voluntary thing, etc.
but flying is a little closer to a public necessity.
My business loans would be called if I lost my insurance.
That's right. So it's not just the insurance problem.
It's that if you have any loans out that are protecting the lender, the lender is going to call the loan as soon as you lose your insurance.
So that's the thing, too. All right, so I don't know if insurance is the full reason that airplanes are different than every place else, but that would be the logical place.
Just because you can identify where you got the infection.
So that's just a guess.
And keep that filter, the insurance filter.
It's really useful.
Really. So Stefan says yes, correct.
I think that's right. All right, that's all for now.
