All Episodes
Dec. 18, 2021 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:17:35
Episode 1596 Scott Adams: I Will Fix Your Mass Formation Psychosis Problem Today

My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com Content: Gavin Newsom proposes helping police Omicron is vaccination resistant? CNN's alleged sex criminal employees CNN Rupar's a couple Trump stories Mass formation psychosis Charlamagne tha God interviews VP Harris ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topics to build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scott-adams00/support

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the best thing that ever happened to you.
And anybody you know, people you haven't even met, people who haven't even been born, this is the best thing that's ever happened to them.
And if you'd like to take it up a notch, and I'm pretty sure that's the kind of people you are.
I can tell from here.
Smarter than average. Sexier than average, obviously.
And a little bit more go-getter than the average person.
So let's take it up a little bit higher.
All you need is a cup or a mug or a glass of tank or chalice this night.
A canteen jug or a flask or a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure.
The dopamine hit of the day.
It's the thing that makes everything better, except the Omicron variant.
It's called the Simultaneous Sippin' Happens Now.
Go. Oh, I was wrong.
I was wrong. It actually helped with the Omicron variant, too.
I don't know. It surprises me every time.
Well, let's talk about Nicholas Sandman.
You remember him. He was one of the Covington kids, and he was the one that the fake news business acted as though he was some kind of a horrible racist, but in fact it was just a fake video that fooled me for about a day, too, that made it look like he was the aggressor, but in fact he was not.
It was the opposite. Well, he just won.
He won a settlement from NBC for the, I guess, the misleading way in which he was characterized on their network.
Now, he tweeted today, Nicholas Sandman did, that at this time I would like to release that NBC and I have reached a settlement.
The terms are confidential.
Damn it. Confidential.
Is there any way we could find out what range this confidential agreement is in?
Well, I tried to solve this for you.
I tweeted at Nick this morning, and I asked if he would be willing to purchase an automobile.
I'm sure he's in the market.
If he'd be willing to purchase an automobile that told us how much he got without telling us how much he got.
Do you feel me? For example, if he were to show up in a new Prius, I'd say to myself, huh, Looks like he got under $100,000.
If he were to show up in a high-end Ferrari, I'd say to myself, oh, we're talking millions.
Talking millions. Oh, I'm asking, Nick, don't violate the terms of your settlement, but please, just buy us an automobile that tells us without telling us, if you know what I mean.
You know what I mean? Wink, wink.
All right. Well, Ghislaine Maxwell did not testify in her defense because she says the defense rests.
There are no revelations and there's nothing else to say and the case was not made, so she doesn't even need to testify.
Well, I think Mike Cernovich was noting that if there's a cover-up involved, it has worked very well.
Were you expecting some kind of revelations to come out of the trial?
Nope. Nope.
Apparently no revelations about any famous people that we didn't already know about.
Okay? And so people are wondering, what kind of deal did Ghislaine Maxwell work with whoever to not testify and not give up any names of famous people?
So apparently she is not, I would guess...
It looks like she's not given up any famous people for, you know, leniency or anything like that, as far as we know.
My guess is that she did negotiate, but the best deal she could get was for a painless suicide after she's in jail for a few weeks.
So she may have a suicide, but she may have negotiated to make sure it's painless, not so much the choking kind.
So we'll see. Time will tell.
I'm going to guess drug overdose.
I'm going to go with drug overdose, and nobody's going to know how those drugs got into there.
How did those drugs get into that jail?
Nobody knows. She just went to sleep.
Didn't wake up. I think that might be what's happening.
Well, over in California, where everything woke turns to shit, Gavin Newsom is joining, I would say, in effect, Joining London Breed, the San Francisco mayor, who's decided that maybe they should do something with a little more law enforcement to stop the wave of crime.
But Newsom is proposed spending $300 million to help law enforcement.
What? Funding the police?
What? California.
Stepping up to fund those police.
Because it turns out that defunding the police wasn't the brilliant idea that it seemed like at first.
Oh sure, on paper, taking away all the incentives for criminals to not do crime, that seemed like, how could that go wrong?
But then in the real world, you get this surprise, and it didn't work out.
So California politicians are trying to claw that back before they all lose their jobs, which they should.
So Gavin is going to put this money toward crackdowns on the smash-and-grabs, which are believed to be organized crime rings.
So it looks like they'll be able to RICO them or something.
But good for Governor Newsom.
Is he preparing for a run for president?
I'd be surprised if he doesn't.
I would put him as the most capable on that side.
We have lots to criticize him about, but the Nat is, I think, he's their most capable person.
I don't know if a white male can win for a Democrat side.
You know, I mean, Biden won, but wasn't he a special case?
Feels like he was a special case.
I don't know. So CDC has come out with some new data, and if you look at it carefully, you will learn that fentanyl is now the number one cause of death among Americans from 18 to 45.
Yes. That is roughly one-third of the public...
Is that true? Is that one-third of the public?
I'm just guessing. From 18 to 45, is that maybe a third?
Something like that. So for one-third of the public in that age group, young adults, number one cause of death.
It'd be down car accidents and COVID. No surprise there.
So naturally, since it's the number one cause of death for people who have the relatively long lifespan ahead of them, except for that, of course that means that the administration, the Biden administration, is doing everything it can to stop the flow of anything across our southern border,
because if things were flowing easily across the southern border, that would certainly be Contributing to the biggest cause of death.
So let me check the news and see that the Biden administration has shut down the...
What? Google again, probably...
What? Okay, it turns out that the Biden administration has pretty much opened up the border to let the fentanyl in, and then I think we're making that a little bit worse in California by letting people out for any arrests.
So, we're basically doing every possible thing wrong about fentanyl.
Not only the way we treat the people who are addicted, but the way we don't try to stop it from coming in.
As you know, the precursors are created in China.
They do this clearly as part of their total terror war against the United States.
And then the Mexican cartels buy that from Mexico and ship it into the country, the United States.
And it's the biggest cause of death.
And we're doing absolutely nothing that works.
So we're doing absolutely nothing about our biggest problem.
What? What? You know, if Trump had not been similarly completely useless on fentanyl...
I mean, I think he tried.
But in terms of success, nope.
Nothing. Not even a little bit.
And I think we should withdraw all of our ambassadors from China until they stop sending fentanyl.
And we can confirm it.
Is that unreasonable?
To me, that's just the most reasonable thing in the world.
It would be a huge embarrassment for China, for the United States to withdraw its ambassadors, but I think you've got to take this up a notch, right?
If you're losing a war, you don't just keep doing the same damn stuff you were doing.
You've got to take it up a notch.
If we're going to boycott, at least diplomatically, boycott the Olympics, why do we even have any diplomats there at all?
Like, you know, I get that we need to have a continuous conversation, but we could probably do that without formal diplomats, right?
Because I don't even know why we're talking to them.
That should be the...
I would think the opening bid for even having a conversation is stop killing us.
Stop killing us, and then we'll send some ambassadors over.
No, no, we would like to kill 79,000 Americans a year and act like it's not happening.
Just business as usual.
Just send your ambassadors over.
Just business as usual.
Fuck no. We should withdraw our ambassadors from China right away.
And not even consider going back until the fentanyl deaths in this country go to, you know, almost nothing.
Now, here's the funniest part about the Olympics.
My understanding is that the reason any country would want to host the Olympics is...
In the comments, what would be the reason any country would want to host the Olympics?
The benefit they would get from that would be...
Somebody says economic, but I don't think it is, actually.
I don't think it's tourism.
I'm not even sure that Olympics pay for themselves.
I don't think it's economic.
I think it's prestige. Yeah, it's country branding, it's nationalism, it's patriotism within the country, etc.
Propaganda, etc.
So China is thinking that it's going to get this big propaganda brand benefit.
Boy, did they get wrong.
I think the Olympics are going to turn into a gigantic PR nightmare for China.
Am I wrong? I don't know that this could go another way.
What will be the American viewing of the Olympics on American TV, which I understand is the primary financial source for the Olympics, is American TV. Who's going to watch the Olympics in China on American TV? I'm not.
I mean, I'm going to unplug my TV so I don't accidentally go past that jail.
Yeah. Yeah. So you have to assume that the main financial incentive is going to probably tank 30% because conservatives are just going to bail out on this.
Or they should. And everybody should, really.
But I think China has made the biggest branding mistake anybody's ever made.
I mean, at the time they were negotiating to get the Olympics, it probably seemed like a really good deal.
Really smart. But now it's going to be just the biggest black guy.
Because all we'll talk about is China has the Olympics and look at all China's bad things they're doing.
Those stories are just going to be paired now all the time.
So the biggest...
I would say China's making the biggest political mistake that, I don't know, maybe any country's ever made.
It's pretty big. Why are we tolerating fentanyl, the number one cause of death for Americans between 18 and 45?
Let me tell you why.
Because it was gradual.
I mean, it's picking up speed at the moment, but fentanyl started as a thing you hadn't heard of, and then a thing you heard of once in a while, and then there were some high-profile people.
My stepson, for example, dying of overdoses.
And you think, oh, anecdotes.
People die of overdoses all the time.
And it just got bigger and bigger.
It was just like boiling the frog, right?
We just got used to it.
You can get used to anything.
If the pandemic, the coronavirus, had come on as slowly as fentanyl, would we have any restrictions on our day-to-day life?
Exact same virus, but let's say it was just a very slow growth over 10 years.
We wouldn't even do anything differently.
We just know that a lot of people were dying extra.
We'd just get used to it, amazingly.
So that's what happened with fentanyl.
Alright, here's some fake news from CNN. Oh yeah, we'll talk about CNN. There might be some CNN-related stories coming up, if you know what I mean.
I think you do. Oh, well, we'll get to that in a minute.
So, here's the latest on Omicron.
How many of you believe Omicron is milder?
How many think Omicron is milder than regular?
Well, it turns out that's maybe wrong, according to a study by Imperial College of London.
According to them, the Omicron is just as bad in terms of how sick it'll make you.
Just as bad, but it has a 5.4-fold higher risk of reinfection.
In other words, it's going to tear through the vaccinations.
And the vaccinations are apparently way less effective against Omicron, and Omicron is just as dangerous.
But, does that make sense?
Because here's what we've all been seeing.
We've been seeing evidence that it's not dangerous, right?
And of South Africa. And I think UK was reporting that they weren't seeing it.
They weren't noticing the uptick in deaths that you would expect.
Here's what I think might be happening.
It might be just as dangerous, but all the weak people have already died.
And the vaccinations are working somewhat.
And I think it might be nothing but the weak people are already infected or dead.
I think we've just...
Reduced the amount of damage the virus can do by reducing the number of targets.
Am I wrong? So I think we may, tentatively, so this is not a firm opinion, but it looks like we may have been lulled, as we often are, by anecdotal and poor data quality reports.
If South Africa, for example, was not having a big problem with it, How do they really even know who was dying of Omicron and who was dying from something else?
Turns out they don't really test.
You know that, right? Somebody goes into the hospital, they've got a virus, they just treat it like a virus.
It's just one of the coronaviruses.
So the hospital doesn't know who's dying of Omicron.
Nobody's collecting that data.
I'm not sure we know anything about Omicron.
But if you think you know that it's safer, I changed my mind today.
Until today, I thought the weight of information was biased toward this virus is going to be like a vaccine.
It might be.
I'm not ruling that out yet.
But either the news industry has decided to scare us with some fake data, Which is very possible.
Very possible. Completely within the realm of normal things we've seen in the last two years.
Just completely making up a bunch of data to sell to the public to get them to conform.
Would that be unusual in the last two years?
Nope. They did it with masks.
They lied to us about masks to get us to act a certain way.
So we know it can be done.
We know it's within the ethical toolbox of who's in charge.
And by ethical, that means subjectively.
So at this point, I'm going to go 50-50 that Omicron's good news versus bad news.
What do you think? What do you think are the odds that Omicron is really weak?
Because we are getting both, right?
I think we're simultaneously getting two completely different messages.
One is that it's weak, and one is that it's completely the same as the others.
Yeah, Imperial College has some issues, you're saying?
I hear what you're saying.
All right. So, I was reading Chris Saliza, an opinion piece on CNN, and he was saying that he's getting back that COVID panic.
Are any of you...
How many of you are feeling sort of...
Flashbacks or PTSD from the original months of the pandemic.
I'm seeing nothing but no's on both platforms.
Do you think this is only happening to people who are politically leaning left?
Why is it that nobody's panicked?
So the news just told you that you should panic, and none of you are panicking?
Oh, damn, you're good.
Well, I have never been more proud to be a part of this, whatever this is.
I have never been more proud to be associated with all of you.
Because you're good.
You're good. That is exactly the correct answer.
And let me tell you, I had my security blankie here in case you gave me the wrong answer.
If you needed some swaddling, I was going to do it.
But apparently, this crowd is well beyond the simultaneous swaddle, which was essential in the beginning of the pandemic.
But now, I think we're a little bit wiser and tougher.
Are we wiser or just tougher?
I feel like we're tougher.
I don't know if we're any wiser, really, honestly.
But I feel like we're tougher.
I think we went from, hide, hide, run away, to, oh, fuck it.
Bring it on. I mean, I think intellectually, we've all decided that we're going to go through it and not around it.
Are you right? I mean, my mind is made up.
I'm going through it.
I'm not going to run away from it.
We're going through it. Now, I'll do the usual mitigation stuff to postpone it, but...
No, it's game on.
It's me versus virus now.
I'll get it on my terms, as prepared as I can be.
I'd like that new COVID pill to be available before I get it.
But no, I'm going after it now.
At this point, avoiding it is not even in my mind.
All right. So CNN has an interesting business model.
Apparently their business model has sort of evolved into one in which they accidentally hire sex criminals to produce fake news.
Now, on the surface, you'd say to yourself, well, that doesn't sound like a startup I would invest in.
Here's my elevator pitch.
We're going to hire mostly alleged sex criminals.
By the way, if you're not aware, there was yet another breaking news about this time Jake Tapper's producer being a pedo.
Alleged. Alleged pedo.
So that would be two alleged producer pedos who were working there recently.
Then you got Don Lemon's allegations alleged.
You got Chris Cuomo's allegations alleged.
So they got issues.
And by the way, that's the stuff you know about.
Let me just say that CNN feels like the VAERS database of criminal sexual activity.
You know what I mean? Yeah, it is anecdotal, and it's based on voluntary reporting, but one assumes that the actual number is five times bigger than the VAERS database, if you know what I mean.
You know what I mean? You know what I mean?
So, they got issues.
But how will they deal with their PR nightmare?
Well, we saw a little bit of a preview of that today.
They're trying to shift the focus, which is good strategy.
You know, if there's a lot of attention that's negative, you want to shift the focus.
And they're trying to shift their focus to Fox News, good strategy, good strategy, a competitor.
And they're attacking Fox News for being too protective of Christmas, right?
So, on the CNN side, it appears to be a cesspool that was designed to breed sexual criminals, but they're diverting you from that by saying that Fox News is a little too protective of Christmas.
A little too protective of Christmas.
Two things roughly equal.
You know, roughly. Cesspool of breeding fake news and sexual criminals.
Some of them sexual criminals against children.
That's bad.
But then also, being overly protective about Christmas.
Well, that's a crime in itself.
So, I mean, you can judge them, but to me those seem very, very similar.
Protecting a valuable American tradition.
Sex crimes.
All right. Speaking of CNN and his fake news, here's their fake news of the day.
Fake news of the day.
Let me tell you how CNN characterized President Trump's quotes, and then I'll tell you how they Rupard them.
Yes, Rupard.
Taking them out of context or removing some part of what somebody said to reverse its meaning.
Reverse its meaning.
Matt Shaw says, I bet Jeff Zucker thinks Brian Stelter is a loser because he's failed to sexually assault anyone.
Yeah.
Including his wife, if you know what I mean.
No, just joking. I don't like to pile on the Brian Stelter stuff.
Although I'm amused at the back and forth between the Fox News and the CNN stuff.
When they do it, it's funny.
When Fox News makes fun of CNN and vice versa, I always think that's entertaining.
But when the public jumps on and we just start calling Brian Stelter fat, I'm not really on that train.
I don't do fat shaming.
So, you know, because it's a health issue, nobody chooses to be fat, or I guess some people do, but, you know, I'm sure that he's not any happier about it than you are.
So, anyway, what was I saying?
Oh, here's the fake news on President Trump.
So, here's what CNN characterized what he said.
So here's their characterization of it.
See how bad this sounds. Former President Donald Trump, in a newly released interview, claimed that Jewish Americans, quote, either don't like Israel or don't care about Israel, unquote, while also suggesting that evangelical Christians, quote, love Israel more than the Jews in this country.
Oh, wow.
That's some anti-Semitic troping there.
Whew. Wow!
The president seeming to suggest that all Jews are alike, which is bad enough, and then claiming that they don't care or like Israel.
Ugh! God, what an ugly, ugly anti-Semitic statement from the father of a Jewish woman and grandfather of Jewish children and beloved Jewish grandson.
So a horrible thing that the president said.
Or did he?
Or did he say that?
Well, these are exact correct quotes, but they are a little bit Ruppard, meaning they left something out.
What did they leave out?
Well, they did include it, to be fair, in the same article where they leave it out in the front of the story.
You know, the only part anybody reads, the front of the story.
You've got to go way down, way down into the guts of it.
But if you can stick with it, You'll find that this additional priming quote comes before what President Trump said.
Quote, it's a very dangerous thing that's happening.
In other words, he disapproves of anybody being anti-Israel, no matter who they are.
Right? No matter who they are.
It's a dangerous thing.
And he says, as he claimed that Jewish Americans have turned their back on Israel...
Now, he goes on, quote, there's people in this country that are Jewish and no longer love Israel.
Trump said, I'll tell you, the evangelical Christians love Israel more than the Jews in this country.
First of all, let's fact check that.
Fact check it.
Do the evangelical Christians love Israel more than the Jews in this country?
True or false?
Well, my understanding is that for the evangelical Christians, their support of Israel is baked into the religion, right?
It's just part of the religion.
So I would say that the evangelicals are probably pretty unified in their support of Israel.
Now, could you expect someone who does not have it as their religious prime thing that they would have...
A unified opinion about anything.
Since when does anybody expect American Jews to all be on the same side about anything except maybe the Holocaust?
I mean, isn't every group of people full of different people?
Have we learned nothing?
It's like nobody has the same opinion except the Holocaust.
So I would say that this is just a perfectly true statement But it's a weird comparison because the evangelicals are probably close to 100% support.
It's just a weird, odd situation that that exists.
But I think it does exist.
I think it's true. You would expect that just like Americans, some criticize the country, some love it.
I mean, people are all over.
So why wouldn't American Jews have different opinions about what Israel is doing at any given moment?
So when Trump says it's a very dangerous thing, he's basically saying he wishes that American Jews and presumably everybody else loved Israel as much as he does.
So that's his anti-Semitic thing, that he wishes that even the American Jews were as supportive of Israel as he is.
That's anti-Semitic?
Are you kidding? That's not even close.
That's like literally the opposite.
He's trying to figure out, you know, how can we get them all on the same team?
CNN. So funny.
I wonder what happens during the holidays when one of the CNN producers who has not been accused of any heinous crimes, what happens when they meet like the in-laws for the first time?
Or, you know, the other side of the family?
Do they lie about what they do for a living?
Hey, nice to meet you.
What do you do for a living?
Where do you work? I work in the information field.
Really? Really? Who do you work for?
I work for a big media company.
Really? Really?
Big media company?
Which one? What do you do for a living?
Looks like it's snowing outside.
Merry Christmas. I've got to fill my drink.
I feel like it's going to go that way.
All right, Sam Harris, as you know, no fan of President Trump, but if you take that away from him, one of the most rational people in the country.
I know, I know, you don't like his politics.
He did suffer from TDS, many of us believe.
I think he's even said the same.
But if you take politics out of it, And just say, hey Sam, can you tell us what's rational and what isn't?
Well, he would be the best. One of the best in the country for telling you what's rational and what's not.
He's... Recommending that we look at a video by ZDogg, MD, who you should all be following, by the way.
Follow him on Twitter, but especially on Locals.
He's on Locals as well.
And ZDogg is an MD, but he sort of specializes in helping people think about these topics.
In much the way I do, but with more qualifications.
I try to help you rationally Look at the news.
He does something like that but better because he's, you know, an actual doctor.
Peter McCullough, which some people have criticized the takedown of maybe claiming, maybe misrepresenting what McCullough said or over-representing it, you know, before Before commenting about it.
And I think there's a little bit of that going on.
But I refer you to it so you can look at it.
Now, as far as I know, the only places that I disagree with Dr.
McCullough, because there's a whole bunch of stuff he says that looks perfectly reasonable to me.
So I would say everything I heard, except for the few exceptions I'll talk about, sounded pretty reasonable.
My exception is that I think he's not good at evaluating data.
So when he says that some countries have good experience with ivermectin, that's just false.
My understanding is that there's no evidence of any country who had any success with ivermectin.
So one of his biggest claims, based on data, I think is credibly falsified.
And so then you have to say to yourself, all right, but what does that say about the rest of the things he says?
So what about the rest of it?
Now, of course, if you get some big thing wrong...
That should make the observer say, okay, if something big got wrong...
Those of you who are naming countries, those have all been debunked.
You can just Google it.
Just Google, you know, did this country, whichever country you think had a good experience.
Say, did they have a good experience with ivermectin or some Google term like that?
You'll see all the debunks.
They'll pop right up. There's no data to support any of that.
But people think there is.
You just look for it and you find it doesn't exist.
Or it's explained in some other obvious ways.
So we got that.
But in terms of, and I'd like to say again, that I think the good doctor, Dr.
McCullough, is on the side of the angels in terms of, as far as I can tell, we can't read minds, but everything about him screams wanting to help.
You would agree with that, right?
That highly qualified and looking like he's working tirelessly trying to help.
Would you all agree with that?
I'm seeing suggestions that if you use DuckDuckGo, you might find more debunks of stuff.
So try it both. What's that say?
Okay, I don't understand that comment.
So here's the other thing that I have a problem with.
So Dr. McCullough talked about some other expert's concept of mass formation psychosis.
How many of you heard that argument?
That we're experiencing a mass formation psychosis.
And the idea is that much like what would explain the rise of Nazi Germany...
That if a certain set of situations are in place, you end up where we are.
And a lot of people have been promoting that as a very smart representation of what's happened and a good filter to understand everything.
My opinion is it's complete bullshit.
This is sort of my area.
As I say too often, I'm a trained hypnotist.
I've been studying persuasion all my life.
I write about persuasion all the time.
So in terms of people who are hypnotists and trained in persuasion, I'm not so sure they see it this way, but I can't speak for anybody else.
I'll just talk about myself.
Here's the assumption that is wrong with mass formation psychosis.
The assumption is, it's sort of built into it, that people are sort of mostly rational under the right side of circumstances.
But if those circumstances change, and we'll talk about what that change is, those rational people can be nudged into a mass formation psychosis.
In other words, they'll start having delusions that they believe are true.
Here's where that assumption is completely wrong.
It imagines we were ever rational and then something changed.
Let me tell you what every hypnotist learns during the process.
Nobody's rational. We rationalize things after we make decisions.
Now, the minor exceptions are in physics and math and balancing your checkbook.
If you're doing really narrow, limited things that are just math, then yeah, we're rational about that.
But as soon as we try to understand the world, No.
No, we're not rational about that.
We can't even understand our relationships.
We don't even know what our spouse is thinking half the time.
We are so far away from being a rational species that to imagine something happened to us, oh, we were going along pretty great for a while.
We had a good run of 100,000 years of being rational, but suddenly, suddenly the pandemic made us all irrational.
Is that what happened?
Here's the problem. It's very true-like, and as a filter, it might even be successful in predicting some stuff, but I'm going to give you a better one in a minute.
So I'll walk through some of the assumptions that go into mass formation psychosis, and let's see how many of these apply.
Oh, before I do that, here's the other tell that it's bullshit.
If you didn't catch this one, You should feel ashamed of yourself.
If you read about the mass formation hysteria idea and you didn't catch this obvious tell that the whole thing is bullshit, you should feel bad for yourself when I tell you what it is.
The biggest part of this is it's being compared to Nazi Germany and Hitler.
Are we done? Are we done here?
That's all you have to know.
If I just told you one thing, hey, there's somebody who's got a theory of why we're drifting into a Hitler-like situation.
That's all you know. You don't even know what the theory is.
Do you believe it? No, the answer is you shouldn't, because that's a gigantic flag that is bullshit.
In other words, it's a gigantic flag that somebody is reasoning backwards.
They're saying, hey, we're drifting into a dictatorship.
Let me come up with a theory that explains it.
It looks like backward reasoning.
Do you know why I say it's backward reasoning?
Because it all is.
All of our reasoning is backwards.
We just don't know it. We feel like we made decisions and then acted on them.
We can prove that that doesn't happen.
We can actually find that the decision-making part of the brain doesn't get involved until decisions are made.
So here's what the claim is for mass formation psychosis.
You should know about it because there's something to learn here.
All right, number one of the four things that could cause that situation, a lack of social bonding, social isolation, and we would agree that there's more social isolation now, right?
But how do you measure social isolation?
On my phone, I communicate with more people than I've ever communicated at any time until I got a smartphone every day.
I have more meaningful communications with more people today and during the pandemic than at any time in my life, but not in person.
But I have more communication on more richer topics than I ever would just in person.
So do we have a lack of social bonding?
Yes, in person.
But social isolation?
I don't know that that applies in the internet age, does it?
I don't feel isolated mentally.
I feel isolated physically.
So I'm not sure that this is exactly on point.
It looks a little bit like making the data...
You know, jamming it into the theory.
But here's the next one. But you could also easily agree with this.
It would be easy to agree that we're more socially isolated.
Easy to agree with.
I just don't know it's true, but it's easy to agree with it.
So that's your first...
That's another red flag.
It's a red flag if...
You could look at it and say, I don't know if that's necessarily true, and yet I agree with it.
That should worry you, right?
Why do you agree with it?
Because I agreed with it. I don't have any data that would support that.
It just looks like it's true.
How about the second one?
Seeing life as meaningless, purposelessness, and senseless.
Is there more of that than there ever was?
Do we see life as purposeless and senseless more than any human did in the past?
Maybe, because there's less religion, right?
Religion has decreased, and people are not just assigned a purpose of life where you have to work hard or die.
A lot of us don't have to work hard or die.
So that usually is a way to focus your purpose.
I just got to stay alive, feed my family.
So yeah, I would say we maybe have drifted into more meaningless, purposeless existence, but we always had a lot of it, didn't we?
How about this? Widespread free-floating anxiety and free-floating discontent.
Again, did the pandemic make it worse?
Maybe. I don't have any data to support that.
But I thought everybody always had free-floating anxiety and free-floating discontent.
When did that ever turn off?
I don't remember any time we didn't have that.
How about widespread free-floating frustration and aggression?
Oh, that's different.
No, it's not.
That's not different. So here's my take.
All four of these things are baseline.
They're just baseline everyday human existence.
Here's what I think caused Nazi Germany.
People don't like to blame themselves for their problems.
They like to have something else to blame or somebody.
Hitler was really good at focusing their thoughts into that thing.
And then people got in line because people will do anything that they're told.
You don't really need a big old mass formation psychosis if you have an actual Hitler.
So the situation was, you know, people wanted something to focus on that sort of made them feel good, I guess.
Oh, McCullough lost me when he said that Trump told people to drink bleach.
Oh, my God. Was that in the interview?
Or was that in the Joe Rogan interview?
Did that really happen?
Give me a fact check on that.
Really? McCullough actually believed that Trump said to drink bleach?
Oh, man.
And did I hear also that...
Oh, I see wrong. Well, I see no's.
Not true. All right.
Well, I'm seeing no's and yes's.
I would think that he mentioned diluted bleach.
Oh... Okay.
He was talking about gargling something that was an antiseptic, which is different.
All right. But...
But in the essence of that, did he seem to believe that Trump...
Yeah, he... No, I think I saw that.
Didn't he say that Trump was right?
But I don't think he meant that Trump was saying that at the time.
Just that if he had said that, it was right.
I'm not sure that...
Yeah.
So I don't think we need any new words called mass formation psychosis.
I think that we're always...
There are always going to be people who lack social bonding.
There's always going to be people seeing it as meaningless and purposelessness.
Yeah, there's always free-floating anxiety.
There's always free-floating frustration and aggression.
I mean, when has that ever been different?
So I think if you just take the fake news...
And say, hey, we entered a world in which we found out, thanks to Trump, really, that nothing we were being told is true.
And then the pandemic happened, and it was really reinforced that the experts are wrong a lot.
So I think that what happened is we figured out that we can't trust any of our sources of information.
I feel like that's the main thing that happened.
And then once you have the fake news, then the fake news is just feeding the delusions into their side, and that's the whole story.
The whole story is that the fake news is feeding misinformation to their two sides, and the people don't know it's fake.
You could take away all of these conditions, and you get the same outcome.
If you took away the pandemic and you took away whatever anxiety and discontent that caused and aggression that caused, and there's plenty, we would still have plenty of that stuff.
The pandemic did make it worse, but, I mean, it was all here.
It was like adding air to air, right?
Or like putting water in the ocean.
Yeah, yeah, the pandemic put some extra water in the ocean.
But you're not going to notice it on the beach because the ocean was already so complete and big.
So my take is that this is a...
I'd see it as a way to frame the situation or maybe a filter for understanding it that I don't think predicts.
Here's what I do think predicts.
That after the pandemic is over, we will still act exactly this irrational just about other stuff.
Right? So who do you think will predict better?
Because this would predict that if the pandemic passes, that these conditions which are causing the mass formation psychosis would therefore be resolved, and therefore the mass formation psychosis and all the craziness we're experiencing would decrease.
That's not going to happen.
No, as long as there's fake news, it will increase.
Because there will be more delusions being fed to us every day, and we'll buy into them because it came from our side.
All right. I think I've got a persuasion success, but it's a limited success.
Most of you know that I've made it my Don Quixote mission in life to debunk the fine people hoax.
And the drinking bleach hoax as well.
And the reason that I focus on it obsessively is that I've called it the Rosetta Stone for opening the left's minds.
If we can get them to understand how they were duped by the fine people hoax, that pattern of how they did it can then be applied to the drinking bleach hoax, because it was the same way it was done, the same way they did the Trump said something anti-Semitic.
They just, you know, lop off some context.
Once the left learns that that's what's happened to them, And that it's not just this, that all the news is fake.
The political news.
Pretty much all of the political news is fake.
And then the pandemic stuff is just wrong.
It's not intentionally fake.
But the political stuff is intentional.
And obviously.
And that's why I spend so much time on it.
Because it's so important. But, so Biden once again spouted the fine people hoax.
And that clip went around the internet.
And here's the good news. Once I tweet that he's at it again with that hoax, the comments just are filled with people pasting the actual transcript.
And the transcript is marked so you can see which parts the news cuts out.
And then other people are showing the full video, etc.
And it used to be...
Do you remember how alone I was?
Does anybody remember when I started debunking the fine people hoax?
I was completely alone.
You remember that, right? How many of you would see me say that and even the right would say, well, we're not even going to get into this one?
I think he did say it, even the people on the right.
Yeah, I'm seeing lots of confirmation.
I think that Steve Cortez and, yeah, Joel Pollack and I primarily...
The three of us, I think we completely moved this battleship.
It just took about five years to do it.
Well, how many? 2018, right?
Three years. So it took three years to move the battleship.
But damn, we never quit.
Yeah, Jack Posobiec, he was on it too.
I think Cernovich was on it.
A lot of people, you know, boosting the message.
But the three of us were just maniacs.
We won't let this alone for a second.
We're like pit bulls.
There it is again. But while I don't know how much of a dent we've made in the understanding on the left, here's what I tweeted, and I want to teach you some persuasion.
So here's some persuasion built into my tweet on this topic, and I'll read it first and tell you what the technique is.
I tweeted, by now even well-informed Democrats know the fine people hoax was concocted with a video edit.
So notice the first thing I did is go right to how it was caused by a video edit.
So I've given them something that they can check or not check, but it's like a clean claim.
It's a simple claim. It's a video edit.
But did you see the trick?
Did you see the trick?
I said, by now, even well-informed Democrats know this.
Who wants to be a poorly-informed Democrat?
There are lots of poorly-informed Democrats, and Republicans do, but nobody wants to be one.
So instead of just telling them what's true and what's not, I tell them that the smart people among them have already made the move.
Think of how persuasive that feels.
So imagine it of your own group.
Let's say it was some other topic and I said, you know, all the smart conservatives have already moved to X. That would pull you, wouldn't it?
Because if you said to yourself, well, I'm a conservative.
Wait, what? What? All the smart ones are on the same page and it's different from me?
Wait, what? There's no way that wouldn't influence you.
You would absolutely be...
Not completely turned, but you would feel the tug, the persuasive tug of that.
So it used to be that I was sort of pleading with people to look at the facts and come around to the right conclusion.
We've now reached the point, and this is because of the help from all of you, we've reached the point that the detail of how things were...
How the hoax worked are in the comments.
So every time the topic comes up, the comments are just filled with the debunks.
So now I don't have to debunk it.
You freed me.
You freed me from the details of the debunking.
So now I can just use pure persuasion because you've done the base work, right?
So now I can just say, by now, even well-informed Democrats know this is a hoax.
That's the final turn.
We got the final turn.
Now, there's not much else you can say.
This is sort of, you know, the end of the persuasion, but it's probably good enough, at least to get some people to turn.
And if you get some, maybe they'll bring it up at holidays, or maybe not.
But I feel like this was a persuasion success, a partial success.
Yes, and Erica over on Locals is pasting the Everybody seems to have the same copy of the transcript that's got the red boxes showing the parts that were cut out.
And I had been prompting people to save that.
So that was part of the persuasion.
I would say, save this, save this.
So you can paste it every time somebody does this.
And people are doing it.
So a whole bunch of people made a special effort to save the debunks and just pop them out on demand.
And it makes a difference.
It really is just destroying these narratives where you see them.
Now, the Democrats don't necessarily see the narrative being destroyed because of the bubbles.
But I think you can get a few.
And maybe a few will be enough to see the change.
All right. I saw a tweet by Kyle Kashuv who tweeted that...
I guess there's an article.
I don't know where it's from because it was just a pasted headline.
That more men won't date woke women.
In your observation, is it true...
That single people are making a decision not to date woke women.
Now, I think it would go both ways, right?
Woke people. But since the article was about men...
Yeah.
I feel like that's a thing.
I feel like that's a thing.
I've heard it, by the way.
I have heard single people talk about avoiding woke people.
Have you? Now, I imagine that there's something like that that was going on with...
Trump supporters. There's probably a lot of people who say, never date a Trump supporter.
So it happens both ways.
But yeah, there definitely seems to be an interest to move away from woke women.
Let me ask you this.
Do you know any single men who don't want to date women who were born in this country?
Have you seen that?
Single men who don't want to date any women who were born in this country?
Look at all the yeses.
There's some no's, but the yeses are the more instructive ones in this case.
Because if you haven't heard it, you just haven't heard it.
It doesn't mean it's not happening. But the ones who said yes means they've heard it.
Yeah. Oh, I've heard it.
Now, do you know why? Do they ever give reasons why they don't want to date somebody born in this country?
Somebody says spoiled.
I can't even read out loud some of these.
Some of these.
Yeah, the basic part is that they're not indoctrinated to hate men, basically.
That women who are born in other countries, my experience, is that they have a more positive view of men in general.
Let me ask this question just...
Stop your other answers...
One question. Is it your observation that women born in other countries have a more positive view of American men than women who were born in this country?
All right, let me read the answers as they're going by.
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
Yup, yup, yup, 100%.
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
I think we have an answer.
So here's some advice to pass along to the young women in your circle who are wondering why they can't get a date.
It's because they don't respect men.
And the men know that.
And it's pretty obvious that there's no respect at all.
And men know that.
We can feel it. It's pretty obvious.
But when you meet somebody who was born in another country, you feel it right away.
You feel immediately that there's some kind of different feeling toward you.
Immediately. Andrew says it's a case of weak men.
Do you think that's the case?
Do you think it's the weak men who can't stand up to these strong women?
No. I think that's some of it, right?
There's some of that baked into it, just like there's some of everything baked into everything.
But no, I think it's just a preference.
It's just a preference. Why do you want to fight with your spouse all the time?
It would just be a preference.
All right. I will say that Christina was not ruined by any of that indoctrination.
So... She is wonderfully not like most people.
All right. That is all I had today.
I'm certainly not trying to dump on women because I don't think it's...
It has nothing to do with women.
It has to do with the system, right?
So if the system trains you to be a certain kind of person or want a certain thing, well, that's what you're going to want.
It has nothing to do with being male or female.
And how many people accept my argument that the mass formation psychosis is realish It's real-ish. It just isn't really anything you need to think about.
It doesn't help you. It doesn't add anything.
Now, I can't tell...
If this is sarcasm, Bill is saying Scott is waking up.
Now, since I can't tell, I'm not going to block you because that might be a joke, but you do know that I block everybody who says I'm finally getting it or waking up.
Just so you know that that's an instant block.
Jennifer says you missed the point of it.
I'll bet I don't. What's the point of it, Jennifer?
What is the point of it?
because I told you an alternate hypothesis that explains everything, you see.
Systems is the one...
Word thinking on mass formation.
That... Somebody said, the comment from Marusha is that I'm word thinking on mass formation.
In other words, using definitions to make an argument instead of an argument.
But I think that's my argument.
I think your argument is my argument.
That mass formation isn't anything but word thinking.
In other words, it's things that have always been here, always will be here, and you just need a trigger for things to go the way they go.
Hitler was a trigger in Germany.
Here's the fake news.
I just don't think you need any extra words and call it mass formation or anything.
Scott, you just told me to wear a mask last month.
I'm sure I didn't do that.
Is that a delusion?
McCullough said Trump did a poor job of articulating that gargling a few drops of bleach solution is beneficial.
Yeah, okay, so that's the confirmation I was looking for.
I couldn't remember which doctor said that, but it was McCullough.
So McCullough was telling his own story.
About maybe there's some kind of thing to gargle that would be good for killing the virus in your mouth.
Which we already know.
And he tried to relate that to Trump, but his mistake was sort of misinterpreting what Trump was doing.
But I don't think that's the worst crime.
I'm not going to hold that against him.
Like I said, it's weird, but I have a very positive opinion of Dr.
McCullough. Do you?
You know, like I have my disagreements with his data interpretation, but not his risk management.
I think he does risk management just right.
Not his criticisms of the bureaucracy.
I agree with those.
I don't know. I think just his data analysis and maybe this mass formation thing he puts a little bit too much weight on.
But those are small.
Those are pretty small complaints.
Yeah, he's very credible, but the thing that we should all be careful about is whether his qualifications are the ones that are good for data analysis.
And I think that what happened is that when he was talking about everything within his domain, he was nailing the hell out of it.
Let me see if you buy this characterization.
That when... When Dr.
McCullough was talking about things which he states would be within his range of expertise, that it was really good.
And the moment he left his realm of expertise, let's say to do data analysis, then that's where problems happened.
And I don't think he claims to be an expert in psychology.
So when he talked about mass formation psychosis, he was really referring to somebody else's theory, Saying you should take a look at it.
And that's fair. That's fair.
Saying you should take a look at it, too.
So I agree with them. Whether that's the explanation that's the good one is a separate question.
Yeah. So I guess I would say be critical about what he says about data, especially about hydroxy and especially about ivermectin.
I think if I had to predict, he will turn out to be wrong about the efficacy of those.
But I don't know.
I don't know. If you said to yourself, I think I'll go with the doctor on this one, you wouldn't be crazy.
But, you know, just so I can be on record, I believe that when it's all said and done, and I don't know, maybe it'll be five or ten years from now, when we revisit and we really know if these drugs worked or not, the ivermectin and the hydroxy, I think that we'll find that they had small effect.
Or zero. I think small would be fair.
So I think that he will be wrong about that.
But his thinking that we should have tried it anyway is right on.
I agree with that. I'm hunched over.
Somebody's making fun of my posture accurately.
Same as masks.
I think we'll find out that masks helped a little bit.
Which is... What we assumed.
If you think that masks don't work, I call you a plume denier.
A plume denier.
How does that work?
Now, because to think that masks don't work, you pretty much have to say that plumes don't make a difference.
Don't you? If you believe that the way people get it is because it's just ambient in the air and it's all sort of spread in the air and if you walk into a room there's going to be some of it in the air and you might get some.
That's true, as far as I know, that you can get it just from being in a room that's got a lot of it.
But we do think that the plume is the primary transmitter, don't we?
Talking directly to you.
I'm pluming it right into your mouth from my mouth.
So if you think that masks don't work because all of the air gets out or most of it gets out, which I think is true, I'm not disagreeing that most of it doesn't get out some way or other.
I'm saying that if you remove the plume, you remove the biggest risk.
So if you remove the biggest risk, does that mean that masks eliminate the chance that you can get it?
No. It just means it might knock a few points off the odds.
That's all. So, since I believe the plume theory passes all common sense and is widely accepted by the medical community, I look for these two confirmations.
One is, do the experts say it?
And two, does it make sense logically?
Yeah, both. So, would I be shocked to someday find out that masks made no difference?
Nope. Nope. Nope.
I wouldn't be shocked, because we've been surprised about so many things.
But I would tell you that you have to deny plumes in order to be saying masks don't work, which is completely separate from whether or not they should be mandated, right?
So I'm not a mandate guy.
At this point in the pandemic, I don't support the mandates.
But... I think we'll find out that they made some plume-related difference.
That would be my prediction.
Data from spread in states doesn't show a difference.
There's one thing that you should all know by now.
You can't compare the one variable and then see what one state did compared to another.
So you know that's not a thing, right?
There's just too many variables.
So there's nothing that can be learned if there's a state with masks and a state without masks.
You can't compare them. Because there are too many other things that are different about them.
You would never know what the variable was that made the difference.
All right, here's the worst advice I'll get today.
I have to call you out on this because I tell you so many times, in so many ways, not to do what you're doing right now.
Alright, here's the comment. Listen to Megyn Kelly's interview with Atlantic Magazine writer who tore about the masked BS. Do I think that somebody who's a writer for the Atlantic, literally the least credible entity on Earth,
and not a scientist, that the writer For the least credible entity on earth, talking to Megyn Kelly, who's neither, she's not an expert in any of this stuff, that that conversation, you think that's going to tell me something.
Have you learned nothing?
One expert talking to somebody who doesn't know anything is misleading.
It's not useful.
It's just a way to generate fake news.
One expert with somebody on the other side, fact-checking, talking to a host, could be very good, as long as it's not time-limited, more like the Joe Rogan thing where they can go as long as they need.
That could be useful. But 100% of the time you tell me, listen to this one person talking to the one person who didn't know anything, 100% of the time I'm going to tell you I'm not going to do that.
Because that's how you get stupid.
Listening to that model of information makes you stupid.
It doesn't make you smart. It makes you dumber as you watch.
Now, sometimes that one person will be right, and then you got lucky.
You sound like my mom questioning why I bother listening to a cartoonist.
Well, tell your mother that she's ignorant.
Tell her I said that. And that if she were to look at my resume, she might find that the cartooning is the worst thing I do.
Of all of my skills, cartooning might be the worst thing I do.
Even I believe that.
On Locals, somebody's posting a picture of Ghislaine Maxwell with one of the Atlantic publishers or editors or something.
Yes, the Atlantic is the least credible entity, and certainly a writer who did a bunch of research about masks.
No, I'm not going to believe any of that.
None of that. Why don't they have a saliva test?
That's a good question. I don't know.
It must be that the amount of virus in your nose is just much greater than in your mouth.
I would guess. Oh, Steve Jobs' wife owns the Atlantic.
That's right. God, that's...
Boy, Steve Jobs really has to be criticized for one thing, which is giving his widow that much money, and she's apparently not using it well.
They do have a saliva test in Germany.
Interesting. Interesting.
Oh, good comment here.
As I've said many times in public, if you're not measuring results, then you're not managing.
Right? If you can't tell, well, we did this and we got this impact, you're not managing.
But likewise, if you don't have an endpoint, you're also not managing.
What are you trying to accomplish?
Are we trying to accomplish zero deaths or are we trying to get back to work?
You can't do both. So as long as there's no, let's say, deadline for getting back to work or there's no hard objective, like when we reach this quantitative measure, the masks come off.
As long as your leaders are not giving you targets, we know that not everybody hits a target, but if they don't have targets...
It's not a managed situation.
You could say it's a completely unmanaged situation.
I want a target. Now, I don't mind if we miss, and I don't mind if things change, because they always do.
But I want my government to say, look, we're going to put balls to the wall to open up, I don't know, January 15th.
Pick a date. And we're going to open up on January 15th, even if it hurts.
We're going to do an Afghan withdrawal.
You know the Afghan withdrawal method?
If you can't figure out how to do it right, do it wrong.
Because you need to get the fuck out of there.
Right? So, same with the pandemic.
If we don't know how to open up right, do it anyway.
Do it wrong. Right?
Because that's where we are.
We're at the point where if you don't know the exact right way to do it, don't even be in the conversation.
We're going to do it wrong if you can't tell us how to do it right, and we don't have a better option.
And like I said, And I continue to say, the public will decide.
Well, Charlamagne Tha God had a great interview with Kamala Harris.
You have to see this. Now, I'll tell you, I had never been a big fan of Simone Sanders, her political skills.
But I saw...
I think it was Dana Perino was complimenting her and how much potential she had and how good she was.
And so that, you know, because Dana is very smart, and so I thought to myself, oh, I'm going to reconsider this.
And my first impression was she just didn't have the goods, but, you know, she did Biden's president and, you know, something must be working.
But then this happened.
Charlamagne Tha God, on a Zoom-type call, is talking to Kamala Harris and says this, quote, I want to know who the real president of this country is, Joe Biden or Joe Manchin?
At this point, Simone Sanders jumps in.
She has an audio capability.
She jumps in to stop the interview, saying that the audio stopped working and Kamala can't hear him.
Now, here's the funny part.
It was obvious she could hear him.
And even Charlemagne, the god, he just turns to his staff and he just laughs.
He goes, she's pretending she can't hear me.
Oh, my God.
Oh, my God.
That was one of the great interview moments of all time.
I've got to give it up for Charlemagne because that was some good interviewing right there.
The fact that he didn't even ask the question because it was so obvious that she was lying.
He just smiles and he turns it aside while the video is still going.
He talks to somebody off camera saying, they're pretending they can't hear me.
And then... Kamala Harris, realizing that she's busted, she realizes that she's going to have to answer this question.
And here's the part where my respect for Simone Sanders just went to a higher level.
She botched the question.
Oh, my God!
It was such a softball question.
And she botched it.
She got all angry.
It was gesticulating. Oh, let me tell you!
And just went completely mental.
I mean, it was really a bad look.
And here's the question that is fascinating me.
How did Simone Sanders know that she couldn't answer that question?
But she did.
Simone was trying to stop her from answering that question because somehow she knew that she couldn't answer it.
And she was totally right.
Totally right. Now, I couldn't have seen that coming because the question was such a softball.
Here's me answering the question.
Who's running the country?
Joe Biden or Joe Manchin?
Well, obviously, Charlemagne, Joe Biden is the president.
I'm sure you haven't missed that.
But we do, unfortunately, have a situation where Congress is so close that Joe Manchin has more power than he ought to have.
And that's why all the Democrats should go out in 2022 and vote.
Because you don't want Joe Manchin to have this kind of power.
The system was never designed for that.
So if you'd like the Democrats in Congress and Joe Biden to have the ability to do their jobs the way they were elected to do it, do your job on 2022.
Now compare my answer To what you see Kamala Harris do.
And you'll know why Simone Sanders stopped it.
Stopped it right in the...
Or she tried to, but she failed.
If you can't answer a softball, you can't answer anything.
All right. That's all I got for today.
I believe this might have been the best live stream anybody's ever done.
I believe that the world is a better place.
Some of you are healthier. And several of you, I notice, are even sexier than when we started.
And you are already starting from a pretty high level.
Pretty high level. Yeah, best ever.
Best ever. Let's fact check it.
Fact check that. Best ever.
Fact check it. All right.
I will see you all tomorrow.
Export Selection