Episode 1597 Scott Adams: My Conversation With a Chinese Operative, and Some Persuasion Lessons
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
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Content:
Ted Cruz & Eric Swalwell nominations dustup
Chinese operative, Chen Weihua
Things we've learned during the pandemic
Does your reality serve a purpose?
Ghislaine Maxwell developments
Biden's Omicron speech Tuesday
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Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the best thing that ever happened to any of you.
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Nailed it. Nailed it.
Can you feel the goodness surging through your body yet?
It might take a while for some of you because of the distance.
But I think most of you are feeling it now.
Tingle? Anybody?
Anybody a tingle?
Hair standing up in the back of your neck?
Anybody? Anybody?
Good. That's exactly how we should feel.
Well, let's get to the important news.
Thanks to Saul of United for alerting me to this news.
According to Sky News, there's a pig...
That has learned to paint.
The pig actually picks up paintbrushes with its little snout pig nose and walks over to a canvas and starts painting away, abstract painting, and will go back and get other paintbrushes.
Apparently it taught itself.
It watched somebody paint and it learned to paint just by watching.
Of course, they are naming the pig that paints Pigcaso.
Picasso, which is a good name for a pig.
And they actually sold a painting for 20,000 pounds.
20,000 pounds.
Which, coincidentally, is exactly what the pig weighs.
No, not really.
But wouldn't it be funny if it sold it for the same amount that it weighed in American talk?
But here's what I thought about this when I saw this story.
Does anybody know if Hunter Biden has a pet?
Does Hunter Biden already have a cat or a dog or something?
Because I have this crazy idea.
Hunter, you don't have to get this pig, because if there's one pig that can paint, almost certainly there are other painting pigs.
Am I right? If there's one pig that can paint, there are going to be more.
It's not going to be like the one painting pig.
So I think Hunter needs to find himself a pig.
Teach it to paint.
You'd automatically get a higher price for the paintings as long as you put that Biden name on it.
And he could offload much of the work, which I understand is grueling.
Grueling. So Hunter Biden, you need to get a pig that can paint.
I'm looking for a pig that can write comics.
But, you know, the search goes on.
I'm thinking I might need a lemur.
More than a pig. I think I need the fine hand coordination there.
Alright, how do you like it when I tell you that I was wrong about something?
How much do you like that?
What if it's something that I sort of made a big deal about and then I found out I was totally wrong?
Would you like that?
Would you enjoy watching me eat my words?
Because that's what's going to happen.
Oh, here's the bad news.
It's going to happen to you, too.
Turns out this is going to be a shared experience, folks.
Are you ready to find out how you got fooled?
Same way I did.
You know that video of Charlemagne de God talking to...
I'm not sure if I'm saying his name right.
I don't mean to say it wrong.
Talking to Kamala Harris.
And do you remember what an absolute train wreck that was?
You saw the clip, right?
You saw it with your own eyes.
You heard it with your own ears.
That was a train wreck.
Am I right? Absolute train wreck.
I mean, embarrassing, really, for the vice president.
Except I saw an opinion on Twitter that was the opposite of that.
That she really nailed it.
And I thought, what?
What? And I thought, you know, this is just the usual people-taking-sides situation, and they must know that she didn't nail it, right?
They saw the same thing I saw, the same thing you saw.
So you couldn't really watch that and say, oh, nailed it.
Don't get ahead of me.
Don't get ahead of me, Mark.
It's part of the story. But it's not the whole story.
So, yeah, so that's the whole story, right?
There it was. And then I saw a comment from Kathy Gordon, who, again, saw a completely different side of it, but I don't think she associates with the left.
So I thought, wait a minute.
What the hell did I just watch?
How could you possibly have a different opinion about that?
So I fired up the clip again to watch it again.
And it was a different clip.
Rupard. Rupard hard.
And you all got Rupard too.
Here's what you missed.
If you watched just the embarrassing clip...
It's just embarrassing.
I think anybody who saw only that might have had a similar experience.
But here's the part you didn't see.
You didn't see her ramping up.
She was just getting up to speed, and she stumbled, in my opinion.
She didn't start out well.
But she ramped up, and she just nailed him.
Now, I don't think that she landed a blow.
But what she did was, for a fairly extended period, she ranted at him in a slapping him down to his level way.
And here's the thing I missed.
I completely missed this.
She didn't cackle once.
She didn't giggle.
It was actually a powerful performance if you don't see it clipped.
I saw it clipped.
My entire opinion was based on a Rupar edit.
They did it to me again.
No matter how...
Aware you are that this is a normal mode of the news now, it still gets you.
Like, I would consider myself pretty high on the awareness scale of fake news.
I mean, I talk about it every day, how much more aware can you be?
And I totally fell for that.
Totally fell for that.
If you watch it again, this is actually the Kamala Harris...
That made me predict that she would go far and actually get the nomination.
Now that didn't happen.
She failed terribly in the primaries.
But I saw her performance as a senator.
I forget who she was grilling, Kavanaugh or somebody, I don't know.
And I thought to myself, wow, she looks like she can really, you know, come with it when she needs to.
But then she turned into this sort of giggly caricature of I don't know what.
And all of her gravitas was just wasted.
And this video completely fooled me.
It was just like the Covington Kids things that I also fell for for 24 hours.
Now, let me give you the standard which I would like you to judge me, by which you should judge me, ideally.
That would be my preference.
But it's the standard that I will judge you by.
All right? So let me tell you how I judge all of you, meaning people.
Not by mistakes, because that would just be exhausting.
We all make mistakes.
What kind of world would that be where we're all just...
You know, banging on each other for our mistakes because we're continually doing things suboptimally.
You don't need them all to be pointed out.
But how you respond to your mistakes is definitely something that I think is worthy of judging.
Did you learn anything?
Did you at least admit it?
So... Yeah, I think that was a case of my bias blinding me, but also just forgetting that if I missed the whole context, it could completely reverse the meaning.
Now, if you're a Democrat and you watch this happen to me, do you ever ask yourself, I wonder if that's happened to me on any other topic?
Where if you just saw the whole video...
It would actually reverse your impression.
It wouldn't just modify it a little bit.
It would actually just turn it backwards.
Like the fine people hoax, like the drinking bleach hoax, like the Covington kid hoax, like the overfeeding the koi fish hoax.
They were all the same. You just cut off the beginning or the end or both, and you can reverse the meeting.
Well, Ted Cruz and...
Representative Swalwell, Eric Swalwell, had a little exchange today of note, both for its persuasion quality and for its drama.
So here's the setup.
Ted Cruz apparently has some position where he can hold up ambassador nominations that Biden wants.
And he was going to use that power to negotiate to get Chuck Schumer to agree to put it to a vote, a separate topic, About the Nord Stream 2 pipeline from Russia to Germany.
Now, Cruz was just asking for it to go up to a vote, right?
He wasn't saying the vote has to be a certain way.
He said, let's just vote.
Can we vote? Sort of what they do for a living.
And he was holding up the other normal business, which is ambassador appointments or approvals, I guess.
Nominations, I guess. And so Swalwell gets in it and he goes, I like it when people use these forms that are just so hackneyed now.
I use them too. I'm sure I'll do this again, but he goes, this period is period, not period, democracy, period.
Ted Cruz is in the minority, and most members of the minority want our ambassadors confirmed.
What the hell do you call a system where one person can bring diplomacy to a halt, says Eric Swalwell.
Ted Cruz responds to him with his own tweet, in which he says, Hush, child.
The adults are working.
Okay. Here's what I have to say about this.
This was either a really good persuasion play, or it was a really risky one that paid off.
I don't know if Ted Cruz knew in advance he was going to get this deal done, but he did.
So the punchline is that soon after this exchange, Schumer and Cruz reached a deal, just like two adults negotiating for something, right?
And it was actually a reasonable deal where both people could get something that I think the public would look at and say, yeah, that looks pretty reasonable.
From the perspective of the public, yeah, let's get some ambassadors.
And let's also have a vote on something that's up for votes.
You know, what's to disagree about that?
So the public is served, and sure enough, Ted Cruz's framing of Swalwell as a child, interfering with the work of adults, He pretty much delivered that, didn't he?
He delivered the work of adults within 24 hours of telling Swalwell to stay at the children's table.
Now, here's my question to you.
Did Cruz know he was going to succeed?
Because you know the old lawyer thing about never asking a question in court unless you already know the answer?
I feel as if Cruz probably knew he was going to get this done from either early indications or private conversations or whatever.
So I'd like to think, because Cruz is very smart, right?
He's very good at this stuff.
I'd like to think that he knew he was going to get this done, and so framing Swalwell this way is just like a devastating reframe.
So I love this. Anyway, my only lesson on here is that if you make that kind of a reframe, Reframing somebody as a child, you have to deliver, and you better do it pretty quickly.
And he did. He did.
So he gets the full benefit.
All right, here's the weirdest thing about the world and communications and my place in it right now.
And believe me, there's a lot of weird things in the world.
So for this to be the weirdest...
So you probably know that China has a number of...
I don't know what you'd call them, spies or operatives or trolls or whatever.
And humorously, Twitter labels them.
So if one of them tweets at you, it's actually labeled a state-sponsored entity or something like that, Chinese.
So you know you're talking to somebody who has a government-approved role to...
Mess with us on Twitter.
And if you're one of the bigger accounts, you know, you haven't got a lot of followers, you're pretty much going to run into one of these Chinese operatives.
So the one that, I don't know if he's assigned to me or just volunteered or whatever, I've talked about him before, Chen.
Chen Weiwa.
Very smart, highly educated guy.
And he's so good at his job that I can't dislike him.
Because, you know, he's in a situation.
He's doing his job, right? So he's supposed to persuade me and, you know, essentially parrot the Chinese view.
But as long as he's there, I figure I can use him, right?
Is there anything preventing me from using him to promote my own messages?
I don't think so.
As long as he's there...
So I tweeted at him yesterday and I said, I'm not intentionally mispronouncing his name.
I just can't do it right. I said, can you tell us if China ever shut down the main fentanyl suppliers in China?
The United States gave you his identity.
That's true. We actually sent the identity of their main fentanyl dealer to China so they could shut him down.
Have you heard about him getting shut down?
Nope. Because it didn't happen.
I assume. I mean, that would be something we would definitely hear about.
So, no. Nothing stopped.
And here's how Jen replied by Twitter.
In his China state-affiliated media, he said, the question that US leaders should ask is why other nations, including China, don't have such a serious problem like in the US. So something must be seriously wrong with the US itself.
Blaming others won't help solve your problems, just waste of time.
Now, I told you he was good, right?
He's actually really good at this.
So he's redirecting the blame to, you know, why is it other countries don't have this problem?
There must be something you're doing wrong in the United States.
So I responded to him by saying, I prefer labeling the people killed by your fentanyl weapons of mass destruction victims and not focus so much on what made them easy to kill.
We get it. Your WMDs target the weak.
So I framed it as, yeah, you're kind of right.
We do have a problem.
And it allowed you to pick off the weakest among us with your weapons of mass destruction.
Reframed. Boom.
But we're not done yet.
Chen comes back for more.
He says to me, you become as toxic as Pompeo.
Toxic as Pompeo.
Good historical reference?
On point? On point.
You become as toxic as Pompeo.
Just think hard.
Okay. Why U.S. is having such horrible drug problem, gun violence, largest prison population, and huge army of homeless people on streets?
50 million COVID cases, 800,000 deaths.
Don't blame China. Blame those in Washington who brainwash you daily.
Strong point. Strong point.
And I responded to him about his good point that we have so many problems over here, maybe there's a better way to do things.
Good point. So I responded and I said, maybe we need a murderous dictatorship with no freedom, like China has.
Chen says it works great.
I think I forgot one of our exchanges, but...
You get the idea. You get the idea.
Now, here's the weird thing.
I'm literally sitting here in my pajamas.
Like, actually, right now, I'm wearing pajama bottoms, as I always do when I'm doing these.
And I'm tweeting with a representative of the Chinese government.
And I'm pretty sure they pay attention to opinions of the United States, especially if they're existential questions of survival.
And I'm pretty sure that they pay attention to anybody that they think needs their own private troll.
If I've qualified for a troll, somebody's watching.
That doesn't mean President Xi is, but somebody's watching.
So I could just sit here in my pajamas and reframe China's dictatorship and do it in public so everybody gets to watch.
And I could just do this.
I could literally try to influence public relations while I'm on the toilet.
And that's not even a joke.
Literally, that's happening.
All right. Here's what Chen doesn't realize about the United States.
He imagines that we don't criticize our own government or that we don't criticize our own people.
I literally was tweeting just before this exchange a bunch of Michael Schellenberger stuff about exactly how to fix everything we messed up with these very problems that Chen is mentioning, which are real, right? Addiction, homelessness, crime, all that.
All real problems. But he imagines that somehow I'm not criticizing my own government.
Jen, have you watched me for even like a minute?
I criticize everything.
This is America.
We can say anything we want.
Well, yeah, until social media cancels you.
But you can certainly criticize the government.
Like, pretty well get away with that.
Anyway, here's something I tweeted today, what we learned in the pandemic.
Now, before I start this, I'm going to tell you that this is a manipulative thread.
I'm using what's called list persuasion, meaning that I'm going to say a bunch of things you agree with, To get you nodding along?
Oh yeah. Oh yeah.
And then I'm going to slip one in at the end.
If I really wanted to fool you, I would have put it in the middle.
Putting it at the end sort of signals to you that, you know, to pay attention to what I'm doing here.
So I wanted to give you at least a fighting chance to know that it was designed to make a point as opposed to, you know, doing it subtly.
So it's overt persuasion.
And by the way, even if you know that it's overt, it still works.
So it won't be any less powerful because I told you I'm doing it and I even told you how I'm doing it.
We'll let you go away.
User, goodbye.
All right. So here's what we learned in the pandemic.
We learned a lot during the pandemic.
For example, we learned that we can't tell the difference between the beginning of a pandemic and the end.
Literally. Are we at the end of a pandemic?
Or are we at the beginning?
I don't know. Do you?
I don't even have a guess.
We learned that our government will lie to us if they think they have a good reason.
Also, they always think they have a good reason.
So, Jen, in case you wondered if I ever criticized my government, read my threads.
We learned the difference between the news and an organized brainwashing operation.
The summary is that there's no difference.
We learned the experts are super helpful.
Because you can find plenty of them to support any position, as well as its opposite.
We learned that the difference between data and guessing is mostly in the spelling.
We learned that we need to bypass the gatekeepers of information and do our own research.
Also, we learned that doing our own research was basically a way to marinate in our own confirmation bias until it congealed into hatred.
We learned that the fake news business can disappear enormous stories, and we learned it's coordinated.
We learned that listening to a highly credentialed expert talking with an independent podcaster seems like a great way to learn what is true about the world, but in fact it is often the opposite.
Just kidding, we didn't actually learn that.
Okay, that's the one I was slipping in there.
Because there's still some holdouts here who believe that if they hear one expert talking to one independent podcaster, that they're more informed.
Maybe. But you can't tell the difference.
That's the problem. Sometimes it might be exactly what you need.
And actually inform you and be all useful and stuff.
But you can't tell the difference.
It could be exactly the opposite of that, and we've seen lots of examples of that.
I don't have to give you examples of where something was wrong that appeared on a podcast and an expert said it.
So I would caution you to have some humility...
About how much you can discern by listening to one expert, even a really good expert, and one independent podcaster, even a really good one.
And by the way, I think any independent podcaster would tell you the same thing.
Do you think that Tim Pool or do you think that Joe Rogan would disagree with what I just said?
I mean, I don't know.
I haven't asked him. But I doubt it.
I doubt it. I imagine that they would say, you know, see it in context with everything else, but, you know, the model's good for getting one side of the equation out there.
But if you don't see it all together and somebody there to ask questions at the same time and fact-check it in real time, it's probably going to be more misleading than not, depending on the topic.
Scott, if you can't trust data, experts, or studies, how do we measure anything?
Well, you have to keep measuring, because if you're not measuring, you're not managing.
If you're not managing, we're just flailing around.
So you have to measure, but you have to learn how to assess the quality of your measuring.
And here's the first thing I'll tell you.
Don't ask an expert who's not an expert on data analysis if the data analysis tells you something.
Ask somebody who's an expert on data analysis.
So if an expert on data analysis says, I don't see any problems with this, doesn't mean it's true.
But if you get enough of those, your certainty should start to harden.
But if you have a doctor who says, I trust this data...
And it's only a doctor who says it's good data, who might not be an expert on data analysis, then I would say that's just sort of an open question.
You better look for some more confirmation.
So you want to look for things that predict.
Things that predict are more likely to be closer to the truth.
Look for making sure that you've heard both sides of everything.
If you see one expert on a podcast, do this.
I do this a lot. Go put in the name of that expert and then debunk.
The word debunk.
You'll always get hits.
Even if the expert didn't say anything wrong, you're always going to get a hit on that, if it's a high enough profile.
So do that.
Make sure you see at least both sides.
And assume that any data is misleading, especially if you know the source.
It could be a biased source.
So you have to have your skepticism a maximum.
That would be my advice.
Make sure you hear both sides, even if you have to go look for the other side.
All right. Here's some...
Persuasion technique from a gentleman, I think, named Still Unvaccinated PhD.
So it's a Twitter account. And he responded to my thread by saying, we learned that some people can be duped into taking experimental vaccines and wear diapers on their face if you scare them with a bad cold.
How's that persuasion?
Good persuasion or bad?
I'll read it again. Just listen to it to see if it's persuasive.
We learned that some people can be duped into taking experimental vaccines and wear diapers on their face if you scare them with a bad cold.
Is it persuasive?
Well, mocking is generally persuasive.
So here's half of my answer, but wait for the other half.
Mocking is really persuasive.
Trust me, as the creator of the Dilbert comic strip...
Well, actually, you just saw a story about that recently.
You saw that Elon Musk says that he uses the Dilbert rule, if I can call it that, to decide what makes sense and what doesn't within his companies.
So he says, if you're doing something that looks like it could appear in a Dilbert comic, maybe rethink that.
So, yes, mocking...
It's so powerful that it could become the operating system for one of the biggest companies in the world.
Like, that actually happened.
Literally, you know, while we're talking, that's happening.
So yes, mocking is really powerful.
But there's one catch.
You sort of have to deliver the goods.
Mocking is good in any context to scare people away from an opinion, but it's better if you have a little bit to back it up.
So if he had, let's say, made the same tweet and then followed it with some links to some studies or some articles that backed it up, that'd be pretty good.
But as it is, it looks like a tell for cognitive dissonance.
Do you know why? Because it's only word thinking.
That's my name for it, word thinking.
All he did was replace the names of things that we normally call them, the normal names, with insulting names.
That's all he did.
He just changed the vaccines into experiment.
Obviously you could argue that point.
Diapers on the face, you know, instead of masks, and a bad cold instead of the coronavirus.
So, here's my response.
I said, if you think one side of the vax-no-vax debate is operating in a fear, and it's only one side that's got all the fear, they're afraid of that coronavirus, you don't really understand humans.
It's all fear. Both sides are afraid, just afraid of different things.
One's afraid of the vaccination and the government and whatever it leads to, control, damage down the line from the vaccination.
And the other side might be afraid of the coronavirus itself more than they're afraid of the vaccination.
But both sides make the decision based on fear, because we don't have data.
If we have data, they could really tell you specifically Which one is better for you?
Or even your class of people.
I mean, unless you're in an obvious class, like 80 years old or something, it's not obvious what you should do.
I'm a perfect example of that.
I would look everywhere to find information that would tell me, in my personal situation, what I should do, but it doesn't exist.
We're just guessing. And do you know what happens when you're guessing?
You generally are biased toward relieving your own fear.
So if you had a fear...
Here's how a brain works.
I'm not talking about anybody in particular, right?
This is just understanding how a brain, a normal brain, works.
If there were a person, not you, but if there were a person who was afraid of needles, they would very easily talk themselves into thinking that it's an experimental vaccine that doesn't work.
And they wouldn't be aware of it.
But that's the part you have to understand.
That the person who was making that argument wouldn't know that the real reason was a fear.
A fear of a needle.
Now I'm not saying that applies to any specific person or how many people that would apply to.
I'm just saying that's a normal way a brain works.
If you think that's the exception, and that that's like a special case, then all of life will be confusing to you.
Because we don't work that way.
And science and hypnosis agree.
Science and hypnosis agree that people are irrational and they rationalize after they make decisions.
And fear is the main reason.
Fear and mating, basically.
You want to satisfy your basic needs, but that is basically what you're afraid of and what you want to have sex with.
And that's it. And then you rationalize it after the fact.
So imagining that there is one rational side of this debate and one irrational side is a tip-off that you're operating at a low level of awareness.
But it doesn't mean you're wrong.
You could be right.
But if you're starting with the point of view that you're right and the other side, or that you're rational and the other side is irrational, you just got lucky.
You could be right, But it would be because somebody was going to be right.
There was two irrational sides, and somebody was going to be right.
So in the end, whoever it is, by Locke, mostly, is going to say, well, you idiots.
It was obvious all the time.
So obvious. So obvious.
You idiots.
I saw it from the beginning.
That's what the people who are right by accident will say after this.
Now, if there had been good data that we all were looking at, or could have looked at, and we didn't see it, like it was right there in front of us, and we just couldn't see all that good data, well, then maybe it would be a case of people being stupid.
But nothing like that's happening.
Nothing like that's happening.
We have no idea.
A month ago, we would have said, well, all the vaccinations are about the same risk.
This month, well, that J&J, not so much.
That's a pretty big difference.
How many months ago would we have said, yeah, these vaccinations are really going to clamp down on this pandemic, and then the Omicron comes along.
So we don't know anything.
I started out by saying that we don't know if we're at the beginning of a pandemic or the end.
We literally don't know.
I don't know. Do you?
Are we at the beginning or the end?
What do you think? In the comments, you tell me.
Are we at the beginning, meaning it's just going to be Omicron all day long, or at the end?
Are you not seeing what I'm seeing, which is completely opposite reporting about the Omicron danger?
I'm seeing reporting that it's no big deal.
Relative to the other ones.
At the same time, I'm seeing that it's going to rip through the healthcare system and crash it.
Both stories are blazing with equal intensity, are they not?
I think they are.
I feel like Omicron is going to be a punch in the face and a kick in the balls.
I think Omicron is going to hit us a little bit harder than we might have expected.
We the public, not the experts.
But there we go, James.
There we go. We're so done with this, aren't we?
Here's one of the things that I love about humans.
I love about humans.
We're flexible until we're not.
I love that about us.
That we have the ability to be just amazingly flexible, like adaptive, flexible, until we're not.
And then once we're not, you better get out of the fucking way.
Because the public hasn't quite made up its mind yet.
It hasn't. You know, I keep telling you that if you're worried that the government...
In America, I'm only talking about the United States.
If you're worried about the government is keeping you down and putting all these restrictions on you and stuff, it's not the government.
It's your fellow citizens.
Because as soon as your fellow citizens were on the same side as you were, the government would be helpless because they need to get elected and all that stuff.
But the problem is that the citizens are divided.
Now, why?
Why are the citizens divided?
It's because the fake news industry does that as their business model.
It has nothing to do with the government.
The fake news has divided the people, and so the government at the moment has all the power because we're divided.
But we also can see it.
And we're also discovering a common enemy.
The people on the left were far more likely to take government advice further.
But they have a limit, right?
The left will trust the government way farther than the right.
But not to infinity.
Not to infinity.
And I think things are becoming a little more clear.
So we also are going to re-evaluate the value of life, I think, if it's not already happened.
I think we're just going to say, yeah, we want to protect everybody, but we don't have that option.
So let's stop talking about it and just go to work.
And we'll do our best.
Now, have I ever told you that the end of a problem and the beginning of a problem can look the same?
It looks like it's your worst day, but it might be just before the best day.
It's always darkest before the dawn sort of thing.
There are two realities forming here, and I... I think we have to push one of them into existence.
I think we have to focus our collective intentions on this simulation and just power ourselves out.
Here are the two realities, sort of like a Schrodinger's cat.
On one is the Omicron is going to be worse than anything we've ever seen so far.
And we're going to be locked down to God knows what, with another variant right behind it.
Maybe. That possibility is forming with such likelihood that it's like one of the possibilities of the cat and the Schrodinger's cat mental experiment.
But the other one is exactly the opposite.
That we've got the COVID pills...
We're pretty good with the treatment now.
All of the weakest humans have already been, I hate to say it, but they've already died.
And there's both natural immunity and, let's say, shutdown fatigue, that we may be very close to the end of it.
If the Omicron rages for a month and our death count doesn't go up too much...
We're done. Am I right?
Because I think we were willing to sit it out through Alpha, and then I think that we were convinced that Delta was worse, and we said, oh, crap, well, let's sit it out.
It's just a few more months.
We can do this.
But Omicron is going to change how we think about it, I think.
I think it's going to change how we think about it.
Meaning that...
We're just going to be done.
And even if it does pack the hospitals, I think the public's going to say, that's the trade-off to get back to life.
Now, all of this depends on how much we learn in the next few weeks about whether we can keep the death count low at the same time the virus is raging through.
Now, let me tell you my anecdotal experience.
You know a guy who went to a wedding recently?
Everybody was vaccinated.
100% vaccinated wedding.
Eight people came home with COVID. Eight people out of a wedding.
And that's the ones we know about.
They were all vaccinated, allegedly.
Of the people I know...
About the same number of vaccinated and unvaccinated.
And then we're seeing some reports that I don't think are verified yet that the vaccination has a modest effect at most on Omicron.
This could be the best possible situation.
Or the worst.
Do you see how you can't tell?
Because if it turned out that Omicron was mild for everybody, except the sickest person in the world, if it's mild for everybody, what would be the perfect situation?
Would the perfect situation be that the existing vaccines stop it?
Or would the perfect situation be that the unvaccinated would use the vaccinated as their vaccination?
In other words, the way you would get the Omicron in the first place is from a vaccinated person.
Thank you very much.
I appreciate the vaccination.
That's possible. Now, I don't know what the odds of that are.
Is there anybody smart enough to say Omicron's going to wipe out our health care versus anybody smart enough to say, oh, the perfect situation just arose and we're just blind to it?
We want Omicron to rip through the vaccinated population as fast as possible.
Get them all. Under that, I'm not saying that that's what I want, because we don't have enough information to say that.
But I'm saying that one of the futures that is not ruled out by anything I've seen, maybe you have, it's a future that's not ruled out and well within contention for a possible future.
Let me tell you how I understand the world.
You ready for the weirdest thing you've heard in a while?
My experience is that if I get...
An envelope. I was going to use a visual aid, but it's too far away.
If I get an envelope in the mail, and I know that the contents of that envelope are going to be either good news or bad, because it's that kind of a letter, you know it's either going to be the yes or the no that you were waiting for.
Either you got accepted, or you didn't get accepted, or you won money, or you didn't win money, something like that.
My worldview is, and I'm not kidding, this is legitimate, that the contents of the envelope are variable until I see it.
Just like Schrodinger's cat.
Now, is it true?
None of it's true.
This whole reality is just a subjective hallucination that each of us have ginned up.
So what matters is...
Does it give me comfort, and does it give me something that I could predict or use?
Is it useful? And here's the way I have used it in my life.
And this may be nothing but a way to feel good, but that's useful, right?
And it goes like this.
What determines the contents of that letter, or what determines the...
The path that this Omicron is going to take us, either to larger destruction or a release, that the path is determined by what?
What determines which way it goes?
Luck? Perception?
Imagination? What will determine?
Will it be physics?
Will it just be cause and effect?
Will it be filters? Will it be luck?
Here's what I think it is.
I think it's intention.
And I think that if the public intends to get out of this, that's the way it'll go.
And if we intend nothing, Then we will be the subject of things that happen instead of the author.
Do you want to be the subject or do you want to be the author?
I always choose author because there's nobody authoring this story.
There's nobody to tell you which path this is going to go.
And so I'm going to tell you that if you author it with me, we'll take us out of here.
Because my intention...
Is to get out of this.
Clearly and unambiguously.
My intention is to use the Omicron as the way out.
The variable that we were waiting for, we didn't ask for it.
Didn't ask for it, but here it is.
Now, is this new age crap?
That would be one way to look at it.
Is it something that I can guarantee you works?
No, we don't live in that kind of reality where something can be guaranteed at all.
Will it make you feel better if you think it might?
For some of you, yes.
If it goes that way and you feel you had a role in it, will it make you feel powerful?
It will. It will give you a sense of control It will.
Now, while it is true that everybody wanted to get out of the pandemic, how many intended?
It's different.
It was a whole bunch of people waiting around and wanting something.
Wanting doesn't move anything.
There's lots of stuff you want.
But you have to decide before it's an intention.
The decision comes first.
So you need to decide right here if you want to be part of this process.
You have to decide that Omicron's the way out.
Or if it's not Omicron, there's something also imminent.
It could be the pill. Something like that.
So I think it's time to decide.
Time to decide. I intend for this to be closer to the end.
By the end, I'm thinking spring is probably going to be the earliest we can get anything done for getting back to normal.
Early spring, March, April.
That's my guess. Because by then we'll know enough about the Omicron to know for sure what's what.
So I say it's a Schrodinger's CAT experiment.
It's an envelope you haven't opened yet.
And you can determine the contents of that envelope.
So, author it.
Author it. Just make it happen.
It's going to feel good if we do it.
So, is anybody following the Ghislaine Maxwell story?
It's kind of hard, isn't it?
Didn't they just lost a bunch of CDs with evidence on it?
Did I see? Lost it.
Just lost it.
And then she didn't testify, so now it's over.
So the Ghislaine Maxwell thing that we all thought would be the opening of the Pandora's box or the secret safe, and we'd find out all the Epstein secrets.
Is there any doubt whatsoever that...
That the Epstein plus the Maxwell situation is being managed by some intelligence agency?
Does anybody have any doubt anymore?
I mean, seriously, does anybody think it's not at this point?
It's so overt that it would be pretty hard to...
Argue against it at this point.
I mean, I don't know which one.
I mean, you could use your own conspiracy theory.
But obviously, there's somebody important who's making things happen.
Somebody who can make something like this go away.
Imagine how much money could be applied to making that story go away.
It's almost unlimited.
All right. Scott, follow the money.
Yeah, I mean, it's sort of obvious what's going on at this point.
All right. Did I miss any stories?
You know, I didn't even look at the news sites today.
Do you all have your Dilbert calendars?
I hope you have them. Don't want to run out.
Trivial compared to the amount of money behind vaccines, yeah.
The entire pandemic was to take out Trump.
I don't know about that.
It was a worldwide pandemic.
Yeah. What's the difference between look for the other side and do your own research?
Well, I like to put myself in the shoes...
Well, here's a test I did, actually, with the Kamala Harris video I talked about earlier.
If Trump had done exactly what Kamala Harris did, which was go hard at a question, I wouldn't have blinked about it.
So I tried to say, oh, if that had been Trump, I would have just said, oh, he just went hard at this journalist or podcaster.
So, you know, if you do that, it sort of opens up your own bias.
You could think, oh, am I just being biased here?
So it's a good practice.
Just watch the entire blunder.
It is clear that it is not a blunder or a mistake.
Well, you mean that it looks like she planned to do something that would make an impact and maybe even, you know, was specially directed at the black audience.
Maybe. I mean, I don't have enough, let's say, cultural insight to know if that's a thing or not.
Um... At SNL, yeah, it looks like we're on the border of another close down.
In California, I think everything's going to shut up.
It's going to shut...
What was the old saying my father used to say?
Tighter than a beaver's ass or something.
He had some homey saying about it.
Tighter than something's ass.
But we're heading in a direction that California is going to close down.
Now, Biden's going to do a speech on Tuesday, right?
And it's about Omicron.
What do you think the Biden speech is going to be?
I think the obvious answer would be he's going to tell us we have to suck it up even harder.
Am I right? Yeah, I think it's going to be...
Batten down and get your shots and get your fourth booster and all that.
I feel like it is.
But that may be partly modified because the new news that came out that the shots are not that effective against Omicron.
So he's going to have to figure out how to dance around that.
But I'll tell you what's not going to happen.
He's not going to say, it looks terrible, but we're not going to shut down.
You know, we just have to power through this now.
I don't think that's going to happen.
Look for a winter of deaths, yeah.
uh Scott, you rely so much on Andres Bekos.
Who do you rely on for the go-to counterpoint?
Well, he is the counterpoint.
He is the counterpoint.
So in other words, he's generally reacting to someone's point, generally criticizing the analysis.
But to your point, even better than hearing the point and the counterpoint would be hearing the point, the counterpoint, and then the response to the counterpoint.
The closer you could get it to an actual jury trial model would be good if you could make it entertaining.
I don't know.
Is anybody pro-mandate anymore?
Thank you.
Thank you.
Do you like Carl Jung?
You know, I'm not sure I buy the Carl Jung stuff, but I also haven't studied it enough to give you a good opinion.
All right, I believe that's all I had to say.
Yeah, Yeah, did you see that some company made a chip you can embed in your arm so somebody can put their phone up and see if you're vaccinated?
That's not scary at all, is it?
Didn't you say lists are bleeding?
No. No, I didn't say that.
I said that lists are usually how people hide the opinion that they're really trying to persuade you on.
They'll put it on a list with some good stuff.
So that's list persuasion.
But, well, there's two kinds of list persuasion.
One is you take a whole bunch of points that individually are terrible, but if you have enough of them, it looks like it forms a pattern.
You know, it doesn't necessarily.
And the other kind is when you have a list that's a bunch of stuff the other side is going to agree with, and you slip in one that maybe they wouldn't after they've said yes, yes, yes, yes.
Maybe. What time did I wake up this morning?
2 a.m. Got a solid four hours today.
All right.
Just reading your comments.
Keeping the pandemic going for 2022?
Do you think that's what's going on?
Do you think the Democrats want to keep the pandemic going for 2022?
How could they possibly win if the pandemic is still going?
I mean, if you're thinking it's about mail-in ballots, maybe.
Maybe. Maybe. There might be some people who are thinking that way.
I'll give you that. I'm not sure that's what's driving all the decisions, but certainly there would be some people thinking that.
Do I nap once in a while?
All right. All right.
That's all I've got for now.
I think you'll agree this was the best thing you've ever seen in your life.
And you can't wait for tomorrow.
Am I right? And we're going to have a great Christmas.
And remember, focus your intentions.
Let's get out of this thing.
And... All right.
Funny comments there. What time did I finally wake up?
