Episode 1605 Scott Adams: Let's Fix Most of Societies Problems and Have Some Laughs Too
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
VR Metaverse, currently primitive but amazingly good
Fear, safety, convenience based decisions
Everyone is someone else's weirdo
China, laser-focused on self-interest
Follow the money and the pandemics origin
Michelle Tandler questions progressive policies
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If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topics to build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure.
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Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the best thing that's ever happened to you.
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It's cold, the simultaneous sip, and it's going to happen now.
Go! So good.
I don't know. I can't be positive, but I think that's the best one ever.
Well, before I forget, an interesting thing is happening on Twitter this morning.
So some people got for Christmas, and Adam Dopamine is talking about this this morning on Twitter, talking about getting an Oculus set, one of the 3D fantasy metaverse kind of tools.
And let me tell you, you're going to be hearing this a lot from people who make the transition from real life to the metaverse.
You can't believe how good it is.
And here's the weird thing.
It's still primitive.
Did I ever tell you that the best way you can tell something will be big is if the bad version is popular?
In terms of the metaverse and virtual worlds and 3D virtual realities and all that, in terms of virtual reality, we're basically at the fax machine level compared to the Internet, roughly speaking.
And already people who have tried it, and you can see some of the comments this morning, people got VR equipment for Christmas in many cases, and people will tell you, if you haven't tried it yourself, you don't know what's coming.
Now, I've told this story before, but I think this sums it up.
Several years ago now, it was maybe three years ago, I got a VR set.
Imagine how much better they are three years later.
And one of the virtual worlds had a cliff.
And although I knew I was standing in a room in my own home and no danger could come to me, I couldn't tell myself to move my leg to what would make me fall off the virtual cliff.
And it was the damnedest thing.
I couldn't talk myself into it.
Even though I knew it couldn't possibly be dangerous.
Because the thing I'm trying to explain here is that your brain and your body will treat this as real.
Even though you know it isn't.
Now that's the thing people don't get.
If you don't get that knowing it's not real doesn't matter, you're missing the biggest part of this.
You will feel it like it's real.
Here's the weirdest part.
If you do a ride in virtual reality, but in the actual world you're just sitting in a chair, and your chair is not moving at all.
Tell me if some of you have done this, so you can confirm this.
Do you feel...
Like the motion even in your stomach, do you feel it even though it's not happening?
Every person says yes.
Everyone. Somebody says no.
Really? If you say no, you haven't tried the right games.
Because if you don't do the right one, you're not going to get that effect.
But the ones that really make you feel like a roller coaster or a flying one, you feel it.
You feel it like it's real.
And here's the bigger point of this.
I've been telling you since the dawn of Trump that Trump would change more than politics.
That he would change how we view reality itself.
And he did. Specifically, we saw that our sources of trusted news were bullshit in a way we'd never seen before.
And that was Trump. Trump did that.
And I could see that coming from a mile away.
That's why I predicted it before he was even elected.
I said, whoa, he's changing reality.
He's not just changing politics.
And then you add the metaverse.
And then you add how we'll feel about the virtual realities.
Now, put those two...
Put together the fact that nothing we thought was true was true, which we're learning that all of our news sources and experts and data are all really biased and subjective.
Put that together with the fact that you can experience a world as if it's real within something you know isn't real.
What's going to happen to our understanding of reality itself?
Now, add on top of that, the richest and one of the smartest people in the world, Elon Musk, is a non-apologetic proponent of the simulation being our actual experience.
Now, those are three separate things, right?
Trump and fake news and learning that all of our experts are foolish yet.
The metaverse, sort of just a cool technology that has a lot of future.
And then the idea of the simulations.
All those three things are happening at the same time.
And it's not a coincidence.
Reality is about to get a reboot.
We're going to have an awakening that will be one of the great ones of history, really.
When you realize the limits of your own rational abilities, Everything will look different.
Everything will look different.
Now, I can say that as someone who's made this journey from thinking I was a rational creature and then thinking that other people were irrational, but at least I'd figured it out.
That was my trip.
My trip was, what is wrong with all of these other people?
Why is it that I keep getting the right answer and all the other people are wrong all the time?
And then about the time I learned hypnosis and started studying about human psychology, I realized, wait a minute, maybe I'm wrong too.
And then once you're open to the possibility that we're all wrong all the time, meaning that we're creating subjective little worlds and just living within them, once you realize that, you can't go back.
You can't go back.
And I'll tell you, a lot of people are there already.
So, you know, I'm not alone.
I got a tweet this morning from somebody who's sort of risen to that level and can see the whole field, and I had to ask him what his background was, because he didn't have it in his bio, and I thought, who the hell are you?
There's something you know that other people don't know.
I haven't gotten a response yet.
All right, as part of this theme, I did a troll challenge today.
I like to do this once in a while.
To demonstrate the weakness of our subjective experience.
And what I do is, I said in a tweet, name one thing you think I believe that is different from what you believe.
That's also true.
And what of course happens is a whole bunch of people imagining something that they think I believe...
Then writing it down and then I say, nope, nope, I don't believe that.
Or you left down some context so it changed the meaning or something like that.
And you can see that dozens if not hundreds of people immediately present themselves who have undeniable, undeniable hallucinations about who I am and what I believe and what I've done.
And you can see it plainly because I know my opinion So when somebody says, you believe X, and I say, no, I believe Y, I get that right every time.
You know why? Because I actually know my opinion.
I'm not guessing. Everybody else is guessing.
But I know it.
So even though you can't fact check the other people, I can.
Because I know what's happening in my mind, even if I'm wrong.
Presumably I'm wrong a lot.
All right, yes, we're all irrational.
Once you learn that, you'll be in good shape.
Now, one of the things that people did call me out on, on opinions that they disagree with, I'll give you a few examples.
One person trying to be funny, a troll said, when I said, name one thing you think I believe that's different from what you believe, a troll said, Dilbert is funny.
The implication being that I think Dilbert is funny, but Dilbert is not funny.
And I actually addressed that one.
Because even as a troll, they failed.
It was like a failed troll.
Because I don't believe Dilbert is funny.
I mean, even that assumption was wrong.
What I believe is that Dilbert is created to appeal to a certain part of the public, and that group of the public likes it a lot and laughs.
And they like it so much they pay for it.
That's all I know for sure.
And I'm 100% sure that other people, lots of them, don't find it interesting at all.
So when somebody says that I think Dilbert is funny, I say, no, that doesn't even make sense.
Nothing is funny.
Nothing is funny. All there is is just...
Some people like some stuff.
That's it. Here's another one.
People complain that I said everybody's vaccination choice was based on fear, but that the fears would be different.
Some people feared the vaccination.
Some people feared the COVID. Some people feared government control, etc.
But others said, no, no, no, Scott.
Our decisions were absolutely rational.
Because we looked at the costs and the benefits, and we were never afraid.
We never felt any fear.
We just looked at the information as it existed and made a call.
Now, that's actually accurate.
I would say that's an accurate push back to my point, and I will only offer this clarification.
When I said everybody makes their decision based on their fears, fear to me is a very large category.
I'm not talking about the fear that makes you quake in your shoes, although some people probably had that about the virus.
I'm talking about the kind of fear that says, oh...
I don't want to go to the DMV. I'm talking about the kind of fear that says, ugh, I have to see my in-laws for Christmas.
I like my in-laws, but, you know, talk about other people.
So, yeah, you can say that's not fear.
But when I'm talking about it, I'm talking about a, let's say, a willingness to...
Pick the path that's best for you as opposed to the less good path.
And so it was suggested on Twitter, and I take this suggestion, that a better way to reframe my opinion so it would be less confusing and more persuasive, I suppose, as well, is that instead of saying that everybody made their decision based on fear, you could put it in a positive way.
And the positive way would be we all followed our own illusions of safety.
Meaning that we all did a cost-benefit analysis.
I didn't say we didn't.
But we all had a different opinion, which I'll call an illusion because we can't know, right?
If we could know for sure the outcome of every person based on every decision, well, then it wouldn't be an illusion.
But if you're just predicting based on guesses and variables that we can't measure, that's kind of an illusion.
I may be overstating it for your preferences, but it seems that way to me.
Anyway, so I'll reframe that and say that everybody's decision about the vaccination was based on an illusion about their own safety, and then I'll add, or convenience.
So it's based on an illusion about their own safety or convenience.
Now, the convenience part is more objective.
If you had to do it to travel or keep your job or make your spouse happy or something, I'll give you that that wasn't fear-based.
Except, will you give me that being afraid of your spouse's response is a little bit of fear?
But it's not big fear.
It's like fear with a little f.
It's not big fear where there's a home invasion.
That's the big fear, capital F. But little fear.
There's a shame you want to ignore or you want to avoid.
Let me make this offer to you.
Apparently Biden is going to be talking to the governors today.
Can you confirm that? I think I saw that.
So Biden's going to be talking to all governors today by phone, and I think he's talking about COVID. That's the topic.
Give me a confirmation that's happening today.
All right, I see a confirmation.
Now, this is when...
I think we have to get serious about the idea that we should ask not what the country can do for us and ask what you can do for the country.
Because this is the point where I'm sure, I'm very confident that the governors and Biden want the restrictions to end.
They just want to do it in a way that they protect their jobs and presumably the public as well.
I think we need to help them right now.
And I'm hoping that the February 1 idea, the idea that we should have some kind of a target that our government should tell us about, even if they adjust it later, based on data.
But treat us like adults and say, well, we're going to shoot for February 1, but this assumes that the death rate stays low and keeps dropping.
Would that be fair? So I hope the February 1 date got through because this is exactly the time that Biden and the governors should get together and say, all right, everybody, let's shoot for February 1.
All right. Rasmussen has a new poll.
It says that Biden is at his...
He's tied for his low in approval at 40%.
So, how many of you think Biden wants to continue the restrictions?
How many of you think that he actually wants that because it'll be good for him in the election or something?
I'm seeing some people say yes, yes.
Well, so weigh this for me.
If Biden could claim he ended all the restrictions, wouldn't he get more votes...
Than if he simply kept the restrictions in, but that gave him some benefits with mail-in votes.
Which of those strategies is better?
I feel like solving the biggest problem in the world is always the best strategy.
Isn't it? Do you think that keeping the biggest problem that we have in place is how you get re-elected?
When you could...
Do you have the tools to remove it?
I have a feeling that claiming success would be the smart play.
So I see your point.
I see your point that, you know, there might be some mail-in or other advantage if he keeps things locked down.
But I don't know if there's enough lockdown.
If it's just the blue states that are locked down at that point, what's the difference?
The only ones locked down will be the ones that he was going to win anyway.
He's not going to win Florida because they're not locked down.
All right. Apparently, also, most Americans, according to Rasmussen poll, side with J.K. Rowling that there are only two genders.
Now, are you surprised that I don't talk about this topic more?
Like, every once in a while, somebody asks me, State your opinion.
How many genders are there?
Well, I'm not even sure this is a real debate.
Because if you put people in the same room, I don't know that they would disagree.
Except for what word to put on things.
And I suppose the word you put on it can determine policy and stuff.
So it does matter. But it's such a silly thing.
Because the people who say there are only two genders because, you know...
If you can have a baby, you're female, and if you can produce sperm, I suppose you're male.
Those are my own definitions, I guess.
So I would say that if you want to use those definitions of biology, then there are exactly two sexes.
And if you want to use a more socially focused one, then people are all over the board about what they prefer, but that has nothing to do with whether they can have babies or not.
That fear is holding you back, Scott.
I don't know if I have any fear about this topic.
Generally, you can always be safe if you say, as long as everybody's following the law, they should have as much freedom as they can get, short of bothering other people to the point of ridiculous.
So I think you can have both.
I think we can say there are two genders if you're talking about biology and still say, but socially, the way people think of themselves and want to be treated, let them have the freedom to do that.
Which doesn't tell you anything about what bathrooms they should use or what sports they should play.
Those are all separate decisions.
All right.
All right.
Best and worst predictions of 2021.
So here's a little progress report about where we are in terms of our ascent to a higher level of awareness.
So this will be a little marker of how close we are to really understanding our inability to be rational.
The prediction...
One of the best predictions for 2021 is also the worst prediction for 2021...
Which was my prediction, that Republicans would be hunted.
Now, I did a poll, and of course there are thousands of people who say, oh yeah, they're definitely being hunted.
Let me give you five examples.
But of course, Politico just did an article that said my same prediction, the one that thousands of people would say, well, that's one of the best predictions I've ever seen.
You nailed it. According to Politico, it's one of the worst predictions because nothing like that happened.
Now, what could be more perfectly, let's say, a perfect summary of where we are as a thinking species?
The perfect summary is that we can't tell the difference between the best prediction and the worst.
One of my favorite quotes from Mark Twain is that people can't tell the difference between good news and bad.
The first time you hear that, you say, that's not true.
And then you keep seeing examples of it.
We actually can't tell the difference between good news and bad lots of times.
Lots of times. You just can't tell.
And we also don't know the difference between something that's starting and something that's finishing.
Take the pandemic, for example.
We can't tell what's smart or dumb.
So we don't know the best prediction from the worst.
We don't know what's good, what's bad.
We don't know what's evil, what's good.
We don't know who's helping, who's hurting.
We don't know who's being selfish.
We don't know who's being generous.
We don't know anything. That's where we are.
But once you realize that, you get to go to the next level of awareness.
All right, here's a trick I use to predict things.
And you could use this, too.
It works every time. If you want your predictions to be accurate, predict something that's already happening.
And then you'll look like a genius.
So here's my prediction.
I said, prediction, in 2022, Big Pharma will convince experts there is a mental condition that one might call over-wokeness, and there will be a pill for it.
That's my prediction.
Do you know why I'm confident in that prediction?
Because it's already happening.
It's already happening. You don't think that lots of people are getting antidepressants because of how they're dealing with...
I'll call it social sensitivity.
So I don't think this disease will be called over-wokeness, but it might be called hyper-social sensitivity.
If I told you there was a new condition...
Called hypersensitivity to social pressure or whatever.
Would you say that doesn't exist?
Or would you say, oh, that totally exists and it's messing with people's minds?
You would say it existed, right?
You might not think you have it, but you would say that, oh, other people certainly have this problem where they're so sensitive about You know, race and being insulted and who's being put down and what's unfair that has become an actual mental disorder.
Now, I don't think there'll be a new pill for it.
I think they'll repurpose existing pills.
But, yeah, you know, they're going to give people Xanax and God knows what else for their social oversensitivity.
Does anybody want to argue with that?
Because I'm pretty sure it's happening right now.
Well, let me ask the question. How many of you think it's happening right now?
Is there anybody you know who has become so woke that they had to seek therapy and that they're on pills because of it, some kind of pill?
Over on Locals, the answers are yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
Yeah.
So that's how you make a prediction with high likelihood of being right.
You simply predict what's already happening.
Makes it a lot easier. Predicting what hasn't happened yet is hard.
I don't recommend it at all.
All right. I made this following suggestion, based on all this, that schools should teach kids how to deal with criticism as an actual lesson or a class.
And specifically, how to be free from the embarrassment or shame or social pressure of what everybody thinks about you.
Because I think what social media did is take the idea that was already a problem, which is what do other people think of you, and turned it from one of those problems you deal with into the biggest problem.
Now for kids, the biggest problem is what people think of them, especially what they say on some kind of digital media about them.
So I think that we need to give kids a class.
And I think that class should be called, perhaps, Everyone is Someone Else's Weirdo, so that you would just get comfortable with being weird.
And when people made fun of you, you'd think, well, what does it mean to me that a weirdo is calling me weird?
It doesn't mean anything. If there was somebody perfect who called you weird, you might feel bad about it.
But there aren't any perfect people.
There are only weirdos. So if a weirdo calls you weird, should that bother you?
Now that would be sort of what a lesson would look like.
You could also call it the...
The basket case theory, the idea that everybody's a basket case, or a weirdo, if you got to know them well enough.
So here are some of the things I would teach.
I would teach kids how to develop a talent stack, because if you're good at something, anything, then you know you can be good at something.
And that's really good as a protection when you get criticized for other things.
If you get criticized and you're not good at anything, that's got to sting.
But imagine you knew you were good at, I don't know, a sport, playing music, being kind to people, you know, whatever it is.
But you know you're good at something because you practice more than other people and you just became good.
I recommend that just as a protection against criticism because you've got one thing to hang on to, at least.
I saw this quote as I was thinking about this on Twitter.
I don't know who said it first or if I have the words right, but it's something like this.
You would care less about what others thought of you if you knew how little they think of you at all.
That's like one of the best things I've ever learned.
That you would care less about what people think of you if you realize how little they even think about you at all.
You're not even meaningful.
I'll tell you where I learned that.
I've told this story before. Years ago, I had some laser work on my face to get rid of some spider veins.
And with the old laser treatments, it would make your face purple for weeks.
Like, it would look like you had a terrible accident or you lost a fight or something.
Or you got in an MMA fight but you'd never been in one before.
And for the first few days, I thought, man, I'm not going to go out in public.
Because I don't want everybody looking at me and judging me and wondering what's up with me.
And then finally, I just got such cabin fever, I was like, oh, screw it, I'm going to go to the mall.
I remember walking around the mall with a face that looked like I'd just lost to an MMA fight.
And I would look at people to see how they were being horrified by my existence.
Nobody cared. Nobody even looked twice.
Nobody stared. Nobody asked me about it.
Nobody cared.
And was that a special case?
No. People don't care.
I could have walked around naked, except for it being illegal.
People wouldn't care.
They might talk about it, but they wouldn't care.
So once you learn how little people actually care...
Then their opinion about you should be put in the same box that they have it, which is it's unimportant.
It's the least important thing in their life.
Don't make it important in your life.
It didn't even matter to them.
And then, of course, there's the Dale Carnegie method for learning how to deal with shame and embarrassment.
And the Dale Carnegie method essentially just makes you practice being embarrassed.
So you do things you know will be embarrassing, such as giving an embarrassing speech in front of a crowd, which is one of the exercises.
Or doing something embarrassing in front of a crowd.
It doesn't have to be a speech. All right.
So those are some of the things that could be in the class on handling criticism.
Machiavelli's Underbelly, a Twitter account, Machiavelli's Underbelly, asked this provocative question.
If you think that following the money is predictive, this is my setup for the question.
He asked this question.
Following the money, how has China's economy fared relative to the rest of the world?
Did they significantly benefit financially from the pandemic relative to the rest of the world?
Or did it seriously hurt their economy to the same extent?
So I assume that the intent of this is to make us wonder if China did it intentionally.
And the idea is that if you follow the money and China somehow gained from it, then maybe they did.
But if they did not gain from it, well, then maybe it wasn't a plan.
It maybe just got out somehow, the virus.
Here's a better question that I added to that tweet in the comment.
I said a better question would be this.
When adjusted for risk, could China ever have reasonably expected it was a good play to release a pandemic?
What do you think? If you go back in time...
Was there any reasonable way that China could have said, from a risk-reward perspective, because you don't know how big the risk is, right?
You assume it's pretty big.
But could China have reasonably done this intentionally if they thought through the size of the risk versus the size of the benefit?
Could you imagine that follow the money would have brought them to the point where they would release it intentionally?
Tom says, can I read minds?
No, you can't read minds, so I'm asking you this.
Is there anybody that you could put in that position who would have thought it was a good idea?
Just any human.
You don't have to be Chinese.
You don't have to be a Chinese leadership.
Just any human.
Would any human make that decision?
Now... There are a lot of different humans.
So somebody says, yes, Hitler.
Hitler, right. So crazy people would.
Do you think that the government of China could be best described as rational or crazy?
What would best describe China's leadership?
Many of whom are engineers, by the way.
I don't know if you knew that. But they have a very high percentage of engineers in leadership.
Well, I don't think that China is run as a crazy country.
I think it's run as a country that is laser-focused on self-interest, and we can respect that.
I mean, you don't have to like it, but you can respect it.
Because people do operate on self-interest.
Countries actually probably work well that way, to operate on self-interest.
But they are a very rational decision-making country, and you don't see much irrational stuff happening, do you?
It'd be hard to think of irrational Chinese policies.
There are cruel ones, there are ones that you don't like, but not irrational ones, if you look at it through the lens of what's just good for China.
So I would say the follow-the-money hypothesis argues strongly against, not in any 100% way, but it argues strongly against the idea that anybody would have done this intentionally.
There's nobody who understands economics who would have done this intentionally, unless they were crazy.
So let me say that again.
There's nobody who understood economics who would have thought this was a good play, because the risk is...
So big and so unsizable.
Yeah. And of course they had to look at economists.
They wouldn't have done this without that.
All right, there's a moderate liberal named Michelle Tandler who's realizing that maybe everything she believed about progressives was wrong, meaning that if you want to be nice to people, progressive policies might get you the wrong outcome.
Scott, they did it for economics.
Did you miss the entire conversation?
Nobody would have done this for economics.
There's one category I can speak of with some confidence.
I do have two degrees that are relevant to this question.
Nobody would do it intentionally for economics.
Now, if you're not an economist, you should talk to one.
Because if you could find anybody...
Let me ask you this.
Find somebody who's got an MBA from a good school or a degree in economics and ask them if it looked like a good financial play for China to release a pandemic.
You're not going to get anybody to say that.
But if you're talking to an artist or something, they might say that.
Um... Short-term, maybe.
Well, the point is that you couldn't calculate the short-term or the long-term impact.
All right. Anyway, this moderate liberal, Michelle Tandler, did an interesting tweet thread.
And she says, here's what confuses me about San Francisco.
We have the most liberal left-wing government and population in the country.
We have a $13 billion budget, and we have 80,000 people sleeping in the rain this week.
Can someone please explain this to me?
And then she goes on in the thread, talking about how her prior impression that the progressives would be better for the underclass...
Appears to be wrong.
And that maybe some, you know, these are my own words now to try to capture the theme of it.
But there may be some tough love more close to what the right would suggest.
Might be a little closer to the kindest thing you could do.
So if being kind to people is what you want, the progressives may have the wrong solution.
Now, I don't know if she's factored into this, how many people actually don't want to be in a home because they want to do drugs instead.
But seeing her awaken like this is interesting.
And you get toward the end of the tweet thread, and you find out that she's reading...
She's reading Michael Schellenberger's new book, San Francisco, which is a huge bestseller.
And so you can see her being persuaded in real time.
You can actually watch her being transparent about her thought process being modified by that book.
Did I tell you that Michael Schellenberger is persuasive?
You're seeing it everywhere.
He's very persuasive.
And part of his appeal is that you can't tell what political side he's on.
It's just unfathomable, because he just does things that make sense and have some kind of data or scientific backing, and you can't tell what he's up to, because it just looks like a bunch of good ideas backed by solid argument and data.
Let's see. Here's a thought.
Big Pharma is creating an economic agenda to make all humans forced to be consumers of their products.
How much more financial incentive do you need?
Well, that would be the pharma companies.
But we're talking about China's government.
So if you're asking me, do I trust Big Pharma?
I think Big Pharma should be a category in which we assume guilt until proven innocence.
For big pharma, I think you should assume guilt until proven innocent, whereas I wouldn't say that about most things.
But I think given the size of the risks with any kind of medication and the history of the industry, it would be irrational to think otherwise.
And that's, of course, why you do the randomized controlled trials.
Yeah, the pandemic caused every strong economy to shut down except China's, but it also turned people against China.
So as much as anything, it will be the reason that the United States starts to migrate its manufacturing out of there.
So I don't think they could have known that was a good idea.
They would have known that was risky.
And China is not the super risky country, right?
China tends to not take risks, right?
So does it make sense that the country most famous for not taking risks took the biggest risk anybody had ever taken as a country?
I mean, maybe Hitler took a bigger risk, but special case.
Yes, in order to get rid of Trump?
No, I don't think that was a big enough reason.
Why do you keep saying randomized controlled trials are the only method capable of demonstrating causality?
Well, actually, I don't say that because even the randomized controlled trial doesn't demonstrate causality.
Does it? Check me on that.
A randomized controlled trial doesn't tell you causality, right?
Does it? It tells you correlation, doesn't it?
And then you have to use your judgment or something like it to determine whether it was causal or causality was involved.
Hasn't a randomized controlled trial ever been duplicated?
The answer is yes, but it's a funny question.
Um... Randomized trial is about causality.
I know that the point of a randomized controlled trial is to determine causality, but it doesn't do that.
It just gets you close, right?
I guess all I'm arguing is it doesn't complete the distance.
It just gets you close enough that your judgment has to suffice for the rest of it.
All right.
So that's all I got for today.
No doubt the best show that's ever been broadcast anywhere at any time.
And when does Trump stop making news again, I'm being asked.
I think that no matter what, whether he runs for office or he creates a platform to influence politics, his instinct is to stay in the news, and he's good at it.
Scott, plenty of people chose the option they're more afraid of that is less convenient.
Yes.
Right? They did a cost-benefit analysis.
Everybody did that.
All right, metaverse.
I talked about the metaverse, so thank you for reminding me, but I said what I wanted to say about that.
Yeah, I just wanted to tie the metaverse into the simulation and into the virtual reality stuff.
Trump is compromised by Big Pharma.
You know, I doubt that. I doubt that.
I feel like Trump might be one of the few people you could depend on not to be compromised by Big Pharma.
Only because he's never had an association with him before that I'm aware of.
And it would be obvious, and I don't think he's a fan, and he's a skeptic.
What's that in all caps there?
You're yelling at me. Would it be a good business move for Big Pharma to support Omicron spread?
Well, the problem is, you don't want to be the one who says that Omicron's safe.
You know, unless you're me, right?
Unless you can handle the blowback.
But I don't think if you're somebody official, like an expert, you don't want to go so far as to say it's safe or even to recommend it instead of a vaccination.
That would be risky, I think.
What about the iodine nose spray solution discussed on Joe Rogan?
Well, I don't know about that, but I do know that the idea of Spraying something into your nose to kill the virus that's obviously there.
That's been talked about a lot.
But I don't know that unless you were doing it on the regular, wouldn't all the virus repopulate pretty quickly?
Maybe that's a question for a doctor.
I'll ask that question when I talk to Dr.
Drew. I think I'm scheduled to talk to him tonight.
So look for that.
I don't think it's bleach.
But it does make sense that clearing out your nose would get rid of some virus.
I just don't know if it lasts an hour.
You know, is it back in an hour?
I don't know. So I use a mouthwash several times a day.
Probably overuse it.
Usually related to My other habits.
But I wonder if you did a test of people who used just a regular mouthwash five times a day.
I'll bet their odds of COVID are lower.
Or better outcomes because their viral load was lower.
Is God the author of the simulation?
You would only need God for the original species.
And after that...
Everything else would be people.
So even if there is a god for the simulation, it's unlikely that you're in one of the ones created by the god directly.
Why do they work so hard to withhold ivermectin?
You know... Let me ask you in the comments.
I just want to see where your heads are at.
So before I give you my updated opinion, how many of you think that in the end we will learn that ivermectin would have worked if we'd gone gung-ho and done it early and all that?
How many think that it would have worked?
I'm saying mostly yeses.
Some no's, but mostly yes's on locals.
How about over here? On YouTube, I'm seeing a mix.
Got real quiet on YouTube there for a minute.
More no's than yes's.
No, actually, about even.
Um... Here's somebody, I never saw this coming.
Scott likes masks in China.
I don't know what fucking thing you were watching, but I'm going to make you go away.
Goodbye. All right.
So I'll give you my most current take on ivermectin.
I don't rule it out.
If anybody says to me there was a global conspiracy to suppress something that worked because it was cheap and it let people sell vaccines, I would say there's nothing about that that's impossible.
Because there's a mechanism for it.
And the mechanism would be that the pharma companies would only have to get to a few experts Which we know they can do, and have done, and it's a routine thing.
You get to a few experts, you have those few experts define what is real and what is not, and then everybody else just falls in line.
Because most countries were just following the United States, weren't they?
So, remember one of my initial objections was, are you telling me that there's no country anywhere...
Where they've tried it, and then we could know for sure if it worked.
Nowhere. There's not one place that they tried it and it worked.
And then people come up with all the places that it was tried and it didn't work, but they believe it did, including India, Peru.
There's a few more that people imagine worked, but if you actually look at the current numbers, there's no indication of it.
Now, that doesn't mean it doesn't work.
I'm just saying that the country examples were not real, but they look real.
A lot of people... Japan is another one that's not real.
So all of the country ones are not real, but you'd have to...
If you want to test that for yourself, just Google the country and ivermectin and debunk.
All the debunks pop right up.
And it's just data.
Just look at the data.
It's not there. Now, my current take is, although it is completely possible...
That Big Pharma suppressed ivermectin and that maybe it did work.
Totally possible. I think every day that goes by that there isn't some rogue city, country, county that believes the same thing a lot of you guys do, which is it definitely works and we're being fooled.
You don't think there was one hospital, one city, one county anywhere in the world Where somebody had the same opinion that almost all of you have?
Which is that we're being fooled and it probably works?
I don't think that's possible.
I think you could get 90%, like you could suppress it 90%.
But given that most of you think it's bullshit, the suppression of it, I think the majority of you said that you don't believe that it doesn't work.
Given that, I don't see any chance we could have gotten to where we are Without at least one hospital using it and saying, hey, it's been two years and nobody's died here.
Seriously? Not one hospital?
Now, there are individual doctors who have tried it, but that's not a standard I would use.
Because 99% of the doctor's patients are going to survive, right?
No matter what they do.
as long as it's not dangerous.
Why are doctors still prescribing it?
Well, they're prescribing it for the same reason that I'd be tempted to take it.
Because you don't know.
There's plenty of studies that are not quite as high quality as you'd want that indicate it might, and the risk is low.
So there's no mystery about why doctors prescribe it.
It's just risk management.
But that doesn't tell you it works.
Yeah, no one died is too high a standard for it worked.
Yeah, I mean, you shouldn't take that as an absolute no one.
Yeah, all the stories you hear about there's a country that solved their problem with X, none of them are true.
If any country had solved their COVID problem by doing X, whatever X is...
It'd be over. We'd just all be doing X by next week, and it'd be over.
So, no, that didn't happen.
Scott, people shouldn't be banned from talking about it.
Yeah, you know, I don't know if it worked, though, because there's two questions.
I would agree with you that free speech requires that those things not be banned.
What I'm not sure of is if it worked from the perspective of the people who banned it.
In other words, did it make it more likely that you would avoid it and get the more approved treatments?
I don't know. It might have.
That doesn't mean you should do it, but it might have worked.
What is the vaxxed survival rate?
Better than 99.8?
The last numbers I saw is that the vaxxed survival rate is something like 90% better than the unvaxxed.
Once you get to that...
But that's after you're already pretty sick, I think.
I think that's how that works.
How do we know that?
Well, data, which we don't trust.
Blake Jameson says, you disappoint me more and more every day.
All right, Blake. Let me give you a little test here of your cognitive dissonance.
I want Blake, Blake Jameson, I challenge you now.
In your next comment, state what you think I believe that you disagree with.
Go. Blake, you're on.
It shouldn't take you long. If I miss Blake's comment, alert me to it.
Go. Now, the challenge is to say something that's not obviously cognitive dissonance, which would be you stating an opinion for me that I clearly don't hold.
See if you can do that.
But you can't. Now, there's a reason why you can't.
Did he just disappear, or is there a delay here?
Have you ever read The Forgotten Man?
No. Why are most African countries and many in Eastern Europe totally ignoring COVID? Well, the lack of comorbidities would be my guess.
So the average age in Africa, let's just pick Africa, the average age is way younger than normal.
The average weight, way younger.
The amount of time they spend in the sunshine, way more.
So if everything was exactly the way we expected, Africa could look exactly the way it looks without any...
Without any mystery there at all?
I missed Blake's comment.
Okay. Let's go back.
Blake, Blake, Blake. Blake, Blake, Blake.
Damn it, where are you?
All right. You believe that your thinking is above others.
No, Blake. No, Blake.
I don't know how much more clear I could be that we're all guessing, or how many more times I could say it.
Anyway, did I make my case?
When you see the people who say stuff like, you disappoint me, and you're wrong about everything, they almost never have a clear understanding of what my opinion is.
And Starseed says, sorry, Scott, he was right about that.
So when I say that we're all just guessing and making rational decisions, does that not cover everything?
Now, I did write a book on how to think well, which is very critically praised.
So if you're telling somebody that they're not good at thinking...
You should probably talk to somebody who didn't just write a best-selling book on how to think better.
That would be a good start.
So, no, do I think that I think better than other people?
I think that I think it, meaning that you can see lots of examples of it.
