Episode 1608 Scott Adams: Let's Talk About All the Things Our Government is Hiding From Us
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
Ghislaine Maxwell sealed evidence
Rep. Massie vs. AG Merrick Garland
Assumption of guilt for government
Germany prefers Russian energy
CNN alleged high-level producers
Red flags and Ray Epps
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Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the best damn thing that ever happened to you.
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Oh, yeah.
Ho, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho.
Well, Rasmussen says 44% of people are planning to make a New Year's resolution.
How about all of you?
Do you plan to make any New Year's resolutions?
Let me start you off with a resolutions advice.
It goes like this.
I would recommend one resolution.
You might have a few more that are unique to your situation.
But there's one resolution probably everybody should have, which is to create a fitness system.
So don't work on a goal.
Don't worry about number of pounds lost or muscle mass or anything like that.
Just work on creating a system that works for you.
And the system would be...
I'll give you some examples.
Let's say your problem is you can't find time to exercise.
So the system would be this.
Make sure that you're active every day.
Doesn't mean going to the gym.
Could be a long walk. Could be cleaning the garage or cleaning the house or something.
But make sure you're active every day.
And that's your only system.
Be active every day.
Now, to be active every day and to have time, I recommend a few things.
Number one, if you can join any kind of an organized exercise group, could be people riding bicycles, could be tennis players, whatever.
If you get into an organized group, it's easier to tell your loved ones that there's a scheduled thing you have to go to.
It happens to be good for you.
It's exercise. But if you say to your spouse, you know, I think I'll just...
Go exercise. And it's not a planned event.
Sometimes you get the, well, wouldn't you rather do something with me?
Naturally, right? So if you don't have a routine that your important, significant others recognize as your routine, you're going to have to negotiate every time you exercise.
Even if you're not talking about it, you're mentally negotiating.
It's like, uh, there's a bunch of stuff that needs to get done, but I really need to exercise.
All of that uncertainty can be eliminated by being the person who exercises every day at noon or every day as soon as you get up or every day as soon as you get back from work.
Whatever the standard is, if you can set a standard...
It helps you manage the other people in your life.
Because if you're in a family, other people are asking you for stuff all the time, right?
Can you drive me here?
Can you do this? Can you look at that?
Help me lift this? You're continually being brought into group activities, and if you let yourself do that, you'll never have time to exercise.
So system one is find a time that you can broadcast, or a system that you can broadcast to your loved ones that says, at this time I do exercise.
Then you've got a much better chance of just conditioning them to say, oh, that's just his routine.
There's no reflection on us.
It has nothing to do with whether he wants to be helpful or not helpful.
It's just his technique.
So that's one. The other is I teach all the time, which is if you don't feel like exercising, because you usually don't, if you don't feel like exercising, put on your exercise clothes, because that's not so hard.
But give yourself permission not to exercise.
Just put on your workout outfit, especially your footwear.
If you put on your athletic footwear and your athletic clothes and just hang around for a few minutes and watch what happens.
The fact that you just associated the clothing...
That usually is associated with being in the mood to exercise can actually influence you.
And next thing you know, you're like, well, maybe I can't go to the gym, but I could certainly reorganize the garage.
You know, I'm dressed for it.
So use these little keys to hypnotize yourself into doing it.
The other thing I do is give myself a reward, literally a treat like a dog.
I give myself a dog treat, except, you know, the human version, after exercise.
In my case, I like to have maybe a protein shake and a protein bar that I really like.
So I get a taste and food...
Like, reward every time I exercise.
Over time, it actually makes a difference because we can be conditioned just like animals.
So you give yourself a reward to make it your routine.
You have a system where there's some time to do it every day.
If you don't feel like it, put on the clothes that make you feel like it.
And then, you know, you might join a gym.
You might find some friends to exercise or a whole bunch of other things you could do.
So my system doesn't have to be your system.
I'm giving you examples, but I would ask you to do this.
Try a few things. Try a few things from my list.
Try a few things you think of on your own.
But see if you can come up with a regular system that protects your exercise requirement.
Got that? If you do that one thing, if you get fitness right, fitness ripples into all the other elements of your life.
So it's the biggest lever.
We treat it like the smallest lever, don't we?
What's the first thing you skip if things get tense?
Like if you're really busy, got a lot to do, what's the first thing you skip?
Exercise, right? And sometimes eating right, because you might have to grab some junk food.
But if you put them as a priority, they ripple through everything else.
It's a real tough thing to do.
It's hard to wrap your mind around making your selfish physicality your preference when other people have demands for you.
It's really hard. That's what the system will do.
It'll protect you from the outside demands a little bit.
That's your tip of the day. Let's talk about Ghislaine Maxwell.
Found guilty on several counts of sex trafficking.
You've all heard it. Looks like we will never see her little black book, and the records have been sealed, and the case is closed, and now that Epstein's dead, and Ghislaine is apparently not under any obligation to tell anybody anything else, everything that they knew is now lost to us.
Maybe we'll find some other way in.
But at the moment...
Everything that they know is lost to the public.
Or is it?
You might ask if there are any kind of secret deals that have been made.
Don't know. But let me ask you this.
In the comments, Can you list how many things are a problem for the public because our government or some element of the government is intentionally and directly hiding information from you?
How many examples of that do we have right now?
Well, we have the election system, right?
Since the election system is not, by its design, fully auditable, you can automate...
I'm sorry, you can audit portions of it.
You can recount ballots and stuff.
But when you get to the electronic part, which is pretty central to the whole deal, we don't have any access to that.
So the government hides from us the mechanisms of the election.
It has lied to us about masks.
We know that. Whether masks work or not is a different question.
But they lied to us about why they said it initially, that you shouldn't have them, etc.
Now we've got the Ghislaine Maxwell thing, and this information is being hidden again.
And recently... Thomas Massey, Representative Massey, was tweeting that he had Garland under oath.
Congress was asking Attorney General Garland some questions, and one of the questions that Representative Massey asked was, how many federal employees were involved with the January 6th protest?
And according to Massey, Garland looked nervous.
Now, that's subjective, so use your own judgment to know how much credibility to put on that.
But in his opinion, Garland looked nervous and refused to answer the question.
What? The Attorney General refused to tell us how many, not if they were involved...
That wasn't the question if, but how many federal employees were involved in either organizing or participating in the January 6th protest?
Now, start to put it all together.
Do you remember the theme that I've been trying to persuade, which is we've all been hypnotized by the concept of innocent until proven guilty, right?
That only applies to citizens because the government's big and powerful and citizens need some kind of protection.
So we have that rule that you've got to really prove it or you can't put us in jail.
Makes sense. Basically, everybody agrees with that rule.
I don't think there's anything in our world that's closer to 100% agreement than innocent until proven guilty as a standard for citizens.
But... Your government has somehow convinced you that that applies to them.
Nope. No.
It does not apply to a government.
A government's the opposite.
If the government is hiding information from the public, the presumption has to be guilt.
Doesn't mean they're guilty.
But the starting presumption has to be guilt, because otherwise you don't have a workable system.
Your citizens should be absolutely obsessed With getting information on transparency about your government operations.
And the government can't hide behind, well, nothing's proven.
No, we don't have to prove it.
You have to prove you're not hiding bad stuff from us.
Because you have the power to hide things.
And if you have that power, you can just hide bad stuff.
And if anybody has the power to hide bad stuff, what are the odds that bad stuff will happen?
100% over time.
Not on day one.
But if it's a big organization with lots of power over people's lives, lots of money involved, and you can hide people's bad behavior, there's not a question about whether or not bad behavior will emerge.
It's guaranteed in the nature of human beings.
You couldn't get any other result.
And yet we act like, oh, that's okay.
We haven't proven it.
There's no direct evidence.
No, that's the wrong standard.
The government has to open the books.
Unless it's a state secret that is a special case.
All right. And until we get clear of that idea, we'll be forever in this little prison where the government can do absolutely anything.
Anything it wants.
Basically, it's an invitation to really bad abuse.
What did all of the people on the left say when the people who believed that the 2020 election was not legitimate, what did they say when people tried to take their case to the courts?
Which, it turns out, were the wrong vehicle for deciding whether an election was accurate.
People said, hey, you have not given us evidence of anything bad, right?
And so the Democrats said...
Presume innocence. If you couldn't prove it in court, I guess we have to presume the election was fair.
No. No, that is a brainwashing operation.
Pure brainwashing.
The assumption of guilt is your starting point, not the assumption of innocence.
If you start with the assumption of innocence for your government when you can't check, you're in big trouble.
And we all know that. I'm not telling you something you don't know.
I'm not telling you something that everyone doesn't know.
It's literally the most known thing in the world.
And we've somehow settled into this zombie-like state where we say, well, the government has...
We have no proof that the government rigged the election.
Therefore, I guess we're done here.
No. No, you're not done here.
That's the start. The star is, where's our damn information?
Where's my auditable election?
Who's working on that?
Who's making it auditable?
If it wasn't before, who's working on it now?
I don't know.
Why don't I know that?
So, we have to be far more brutal as citizens on our government to just get rid of this illusion.
That the government is innocent until proven guilty.
No. No, no, no, and no.
You are guilty until proven innocent.
It's only the other way for citizens.
All right. And so this whole Ghislaine Maxwell thing, I have no evidence that any high-level government people were involved in this in a way that if we knew their secrets, it would be very, very bad.
I have no evidence of that.
But I presume, because my government is hiding it from me, I presume guilt.
I just don't know the names.
But I presume guilt.
You'd be an idiot to presume otherwise, really.
Doesn't mean you're right. A presumption doesn't mean accuracy.
But it's your starting presumption.
It has to be. Otherwise, you're just lost, really.
Well, let's test my predicting record here.
The CDC came out and admitted directly, and Fauci said this too, I think, that taking the quarantine time down from 10 to 5 wasn't just based on medical information.
It was based on how they thought they could manage the public.
And they thought that 10 days was more than the public could handle, but they might be able to get away with 5.
Who is the first public figure who told you that all they were doing is managing the public and it wasn't based on a medical, you know, new medical data?
Who told you that?
Me. Yeah, I think I'm the first person to say it.
Because while I am no expert on virology, and I think that's clear, and in fact I am no expert on a lot of things, But if it's a situation about how a bureaucracy is managing the downtrodden, subservient masses, I'm pretty good at that.
That is my whole career, is looking at bureaucratic decisions and And the real reasons behind them.
So that's pretty much all I do for the last 30 years is look at management decisions and make fun of them.
So this one, when it went from 10 to 5 and they didn't back it up immediately with data, it was just, oh, it's obvious, this new data takes it down from 10 to 5.
It was kind of obvious.
That they were responding to, not the February 1 date, because I don't know if any of them have heard it, but responding to the fact that the dam was starting to break.
You can see it, right?
The public was starting to power up, and still is.
You can feel it in real time, can't you?
Now, I've been telling you that the government gets to lead things...
Until the public says, okay, now you're done.
If they do. They don't always do that.
But you can see that the government's in control.
As it should be at the beginning of any emergency.
But you're watching the public go from...
You're telling us a little bit now.
We're getting a little smarter.
Okay, the monopoly of information you used to have is getting smaller.
We kind of know what you know at this point.
Actually, we might know more than you know because it looks like you're lying to us at this point.
So that's what's happening.
The curves are clearly going to cross.
So when the public feels informed enough, and we're pretty close to it, even though we're poorly informed, if we feel informed enough and we don't think the government is serving us, and it isn't because it's the wrong tool for deciding which citizens live and die in a non-war environment, the public's just going to have to take control, and it's happening.
So I'm way less concerned than a lot of you are about the pandemic lasts forever and it's all some plot to keep us locked down.
Because I would assume that the government had that power.
And I don't see any evidence of that.
I only see evidence that the government has power when the citizens are not terribly involved.
But with the lockdowns and the mandates and stuff, the citizens are very involved.
There's nobody sending this one out, at least opinion-wise.
So when you put that many citizens involved, it's not the government's decision.
You know, I watched with amusement as some European countries were doing their protests.
You saw the mass protests against the mandates in their countries.
And did you wonder why you didn't see that in the United States?
Did anybody wonder?
Why is France all up in arms?
It seems like several other European countries were going nuts.
And the United States, weirdly, had not taken to the streets.
Can you explain that?
Well, I don't have a full explanation, but I'll give you a few variables that would be interesting.
What would that street look like?
Imagine that all of the people who are most, let's say, concerned about mandated vaccinations or mandated anything, if all the people most concerned hit the streets, what would it look like?
It would be MAGA hats and black people.
Right? Because those are two groups that are sort of against mandates, and against vaccination mandates, specifically.
So could you really have a protest that was half MAGA people and half black Americans?
I don't know. I mean, you have to think that there's at least a little bit of friction keeping that kind of activity from coming together, you know, the history, etc.
So that may be one reason, but let me tell you the other reason.
Guns. I think guns are the reason that the United States has not mass-formed some kind of protest the way other European countries have.
And here's my thinking.
Guns make you more confident that in the end you win.
Know what I mean? If you didn't have guns to know that in the end you're going to win, you'd get a little worked up right now.
Like, you'd be all riled up, because you'd be like, ah, shit, we've got to do something.
We've got to do something now. But this is just a hypothesis, so I'll just put it out there.
I don't have a ton of confidence in this one, but I think it's interesting.
I feel that Americans are confident that in the end, when everybody has enough information and it's time to make the final move, Whatever that looks like.
I'll call it the final move, just for conversation.
That whatever the result of all this pandemic stuff is, the end product, that when the American public decide that they're ready to make the decision, they're not going to have to take out their guns.
I don't think that any guns will be brandished in this process.
I just think that we're confident that nobody can take that power from us.
Does anybody feel that way?
Because I looked at the mass protests and other places and I thought, they look like powerless people trying to get power.
In other words, they formed groups to create power that they felt they didn't have individually.
But I just don't know that we feel that way in the United States because of guns.
Am I wrong? I'm looking at your comments to see if anybody's feeling this.
I mean, I can't think of any situation where you wouldn't be more confident if you had a gun.
I mean, you might be worried about shooting yourself or something, but, you know...
Don't you have confidence...
Well, let me ask you this way.
Don't you have confidence that the public will control what happens with the pandemic outcome?
For the most part, in terms of the big stuff.
Do you have confidence in that?
Because I do. 100%.
I don't have any doubt.
You know, it's taking way longer than we wanted, right?
But it took longer with reasons.
It didn't take longer without reasons.
You can argue with reasons, and I do.
We all do, actually.
We all have some part of it we're arguing with, right?
But we also accept that leadership is a flawed process.
And... As I said on, you know, almost day one of the pandemic, we should give our leaders a break in advance because they're going to be guessing.
We need somebody to guess because you can't do nothing, right?
You've got to take your shot, see what happens, adjust, take your shot, adjust, take your shot.
And for that, you need leaders because the public wouldn't know what shot to take, when, blah, blah, blah.
A lot of leaders took a lot of shots.
Some the same, some different.
But they couldn't have known what was the right decision.
There just wasn't always the right information for that.
And so now we're seeing the outcome of that.
Would you say that my initial weird, weird prediction, that you wouldn't be able to tell the difference in leadership By the final day of all of this, if there is such a thing, that you wouldn't be able to look back and say, oh, that was good leadership?
So you could tell that that country did well because of their leadership.
Did anybody believe me when I said that?
Because if you think about it, do you feel how radical that prediction was?
That there were, like, how many hundreds of countries...
And that you wouldn't find any countries that you could identify leadership as the reason that they did well.
Didn't you think that was crazy?
And then you watched that right in front of you.
You watch that develop right in front of you.
Anyway.
So, let's see what else is going on.
Germany is closing...
Three of its last six remaining nuclear reactors.
So the same time that Germany is closing their nuclear reactors, which most other countries and experts, and in this country both Democrats and Republicans, by a majority I think, are pro-nuclear as really the best way to get through climate change risk.
And then some at the right would say, well, it's also just the best energy source that we have going, so climate change is just a bonus.
But you have lots of people who are pro-nuclear, and a lot of that happened just in the last year or two, thanks to a lot of great activism.
Michael Schellenberger, Mark Schneider, you know some of the people who made a big difference, I think, in the least public opinion in the United States.
But at the same time that Germany is shutting down nuclear reactors, They are becoming dependent on Russia for energy.
Am I right? So the two things we know Germany is doing is reducing their own ability to create energy.
You know, they're going to substitute green sources, but we know they're less reliable.
At the same time, they're increasing dependence on Russia.
Am I wrong that that's the worst idea I've ever heard in my life?
That feels so incompetent.
If our government did this, maybe it is.
Maybe it is doing something similarly dumb.
I don't know what to say about this.
You know, I suppose history could prove them correct in the end.
We'd all be surprised. But on paper, it doesn't even look like it's a good play.
You know, I'm always in favor of A-B testing, right?
Well, test it.
You never know. Find out if it works.
If it does, do more of it.
But this is not one of those cases.
I think this just looks like a mistake.
Now, it could turn out that the power plants that are closing down have some special situation.
So before I do what I always criticize other people for doing, which is making a big opinion before you know all the facts, let's not rule out that maybe those three that they're closing have something special going on that makes them a little less economical or a little more dangerous than something else.
I don't know. I'm open to the other side of it.
So CNN was rocked by these sex crime allegations, not just adults allegedly doing things with non-consenting adults.
That would be Cuomo and Don Lemon.
They have accusations against them.
Alleged. I don't know the truth of any of that.
But do be a fact check.
Are there two CNN producers who are alleged to be pedophiles?
Do I have the number right? It's two, right?
Now, you could say two points draws a line.
But here's the thing.
How unusual would it be to have two producers working at one entity who are pedophiles?
Not terribly unlikely, right?
But what are the odds they would both sort of surface at nearly the same time?
That makes it a little more likely that they're not the only ones, wouldn't you say?
It wouldn't be super unlikely for a big organization to have two pedos, would it?
Unfortunately, not. I don't know what the ratio of pedos to the public is, but take a guess.
What would be the ratio of pedophiles to the public?
Under 5%?
It's probably a shockingly big number, no matter how small it is, right?
If I say 2%, it's going to be shockingly horrifying.
Let's say 1%. So if you had 200 people working at CNN, on average, two pedos.
Wouldn't matter what the organization was, right?
So the fact that we found two, by itself, not that important.
But the fact that they were found at around the same time adds a little bit of statistical unlikelihood, if that makes any sense, that it's just a coincidence.
But it still could be. It still could be completely just a coincidence.
So, yeah, there are thousands of people working for CNN, of course, not just hundreds.
But every time that we get closer to something that Q was predicting, it's just worth calling out for the fun of it.
So, as you know, there were, you know, elements of the far right and maybe some Q believers who believed there was some kind of organized pedo ring that had government power of some sort.
Am I saying it right?
Can somebody give me a fact check on that?
Is that roughly the idea that there were shadowy, maybe Democrat, maybe not, I don't know, shadowy people in the government or at least in power, you know, adjacent to the government, And that they were organized, and that there were pedos, and there were a lot of them. Now, as I've said, since that would involve individuals, they are presumed innocent until proven guilty.
That's the standard that we all agree on, as tough as it is.
And, yeah, you know, you have lots of anecdotal...
I know, I'm seeing the Podestas being named there.
Again, these are all allegations, and you have to be careful because most allegations that are that sensational turn out to be false.
If you were to look at sensational allegations in general, unless you have video or something, they're usually false because they're sensational.
There's a direct correlation between how sensational the claim is and how unlikely it is.
Now, the exceptions are you actually have solid evidence of it, and then that's a different situation.
All right. So, there's no evidence that anything is organized.
But let me ask you this.
How many producers at CNN would it take, especially if they're producers for the bigger shows, how many pedo producers would it take...
Before the reason for being anti-Trump looks like it's because Trump was so anti-Peddo.
You have to start wondering.
Now, two is not enough.
But it's close to enough.
If you had two major producers, and I don't know if they were major enough, but if you had two producers on a news program that is anti-MAGA, and MAGA is almost branded as being anti-Peddo, Or at least a lot of the big names were associated with the right, even if they don't associate themselves with the right.
So you have to ask yourself, was CNN's coverage of Trump in general influenced by the fact that pedophiles have some influence on what the news is?
What do you think? Because we don't live in a world where people, you know, analyze the facts and the reasons.
They have emotional reasons for whatever they do, and then they justify it after the fact.
But you could explain everything that CNN has done about his Trump and MAGA coverage by just saying, yeah, that's exactly what you would do if you were a network of pedophiles.
No evidence that that exists, right?
Let me be clear. There's no evidence of a network of pedophiles anywhere.
I mean, not anywhere.
There's no evidence of a network of pedophiles as CNN. There are two alleged cases, just to be clear.
But you can't ignore the fact that the way they acted would be completely predictable if they were run by a rig of pedophiles.
You get exactly the same outcome as what we saw.
Now, there are other reasons, right?
They could just have TDS. That would explain everything, too.
All right. Pat Sajak.
You know Pat Sajak from Wheel of Fortune?
Yeah, he had a funny tweet.
He tweeted today, I'm resigning my position as CNN. I don't actually work there, so it's really preemptive.
I don't know. There's just something the way he worded that damn tweet that made me laugh for ten minutes.
I guess it's this last part.
I don't actually work there, so it's really preemptive.
CNN is so bad that people are resigning before they get hired, even without any chance of being hired.
And so I said, finally, the leader we deserve, Pat Sajak.
And I'm all in behind his leadership, so I, too, would like to announce, and this is an official announcement, I am resigning from CNN. I've never worked there.
But like Pat Sajak, I think you have to be preemptive on this one.
You don't want to accidentally slide into working there.
You want to stop that shit as soon as you think about it.
I met Pat Sajak once.
Interesting story. I was once on Wheel of Fortune.
But it was a local traveling version they did.
It was still Pat and...
Pat Sajak and Vanna White.
So I got to meet them.
It was like a little local celebrity one.
Pat Sajak was nice.
Nice guy. Anyway, just to clean up this CNN point, didn't the CNN coverage always seem personal?
Didn't it have that feel to it?
It didn't even feel like they were talking about the news.
It just felt like it was a bunch of people who were mad at somebody.
And maybe the producers are part of that reason.
So yesterday I had all this happy-sounding optimistic news about this drug fluvoxamine as a treatment, potential treatment, not validated by randomized controlled trials.
But it looks like it might have indication for treating COVID successfully.
And then I hear today that it's really hard to get off it.
So I don't know if 10 days of this drug would give you difficulty in quitting.
But watch out for this one.
Getting off it is hard, apparently.
So that's what I'm learning today.
So speaking of things...
Well, I guess we already talked about this.
Yeah, the Ray Epps thing...
I kind of just watched to see how that would develop in the early fog of war.
I have to admit, I was not a believer...
When people were saying, oh, it's the Feds, they organized this thing.
I certainly knew that that's a thing.
I knew it could be true.
But until I saw some evidence, you know, it was just people talking.
But now that there's enough video evidence and the questions that have been asked have been pointedly and directly non-answered, a direct non-answer to a question also is a red flag.
And apparently nobody's talking about Ray Epps and that Ray Epps isn't talking, not even to make statements or anything, I don't think.
I don't even think he's issued a statement.
But he exists.
People can find him. They know where he is.
And this is one of these cases where, again, you just have to assume guilt.
Until Ray Epps is, that story is flushed out, the assumption should be that it was rigged.
The assumption should be.
Doesn't mean it was. Again, if you're talking about the government, it's not an assumption of innocence.
It's an assumption of guilt if there's all kinds of smoke.
If there's no smoke, then you don't have to be concerned that there might be a fire.
But if there's all kinds of smoke, guilty.
Guilty. Until proven innocent.
Which they can easily do by...
Giving us access to Ray Epps and telling us what they know or having Garland talk about it under oath.
So there are ways to know.
And if we don't know, and we're not going to know, you have to assume guilt.
Assume guilt. Don't assume that you know it's true.
Just assume that that's the system that we have to use.
Just as it's a system to assume innocence of a citizen, it should be our system to assume guilt when the government says, I'm not going to tell you.
Just every time. Now, if they said, I'm not going to tell you because there's a state secret involved, I'd still be a little suspicious, but here's what I'd do.
I'd say, are there people who are both Republicans and Democrats Who do know the state's secret?
If yes, and more than one, okay.
I'll give you a pass.
Right? Would you agree with that?
If both Democrats and Republicans, multiple of them, are on a committee, let's say some security-related committee, and they say, we've seen the information, and yeah, we don't think this is for the public, good.
Good. But short of that, short of an independent, you know, bipartisan group saying this is a secret, if they just say we're not going to tell you, guilty.
Guilty. Furthermore, while they stand clearly guilty by assumption, right?
Not legally. Guilty by assumption.
Does it make any sense to keep in jail the January 6th protesters who have lesser charges and are not out on bail?
It does not.
It does not. And moreover, I would say it borders on illegal, unethical, immoral, unconstitutional.
I don't know how many of those I could prove, but they're all right.
Right? I don't know if I could prove them, but they're all true.
So... So let's put a little more pressure on our government with that standard.
Guilty. Guilty by assumption.
Guilty by assumption.
And don't talk me out of that.
If you tell me you're not going to tell me, and you don't have a bipartisan group telling me it's a state secret, guilty.
Fucking guilty. And don't even ask us to pretend we should consider the alternative.
We should not consider the alternative.
The alternative could be true.
I'm not saying we know that there's some problem.
I'm saying that under these conditions, the government has told us they're guilty by assumption.
If you don't get that, we have no power over the government, and we need to have power over the government to stay safe.
It's just a better system.
So, guilty...
Guilty. Just guilty.
And we shouldn't back down from that.
And we should not treat this as if it's a question we're looking into.
We should take it as a decision.
The government has proven, by assumption, by their actions, that they are presumed guilty.
It's not us.
We didn't do it. It's not my presumption.
I'm telling you that they told you to presume they're guilty.
If somebody says, presume I'm guilty, believe them.
Doesn't mean it's true, but I think the smart move is to believe them.
And the government just basically told you to presume they're guilty.
Now, if the government came up with a reason that sounded halfway plausible, I would reassess.
But if you don't get a reason...
Guilty by presumption, and the government is the one who told us.
It's not us. We're not reading any tea leaves.
That's just direct.
It has to be our system.
Guilty by presumption, and under this situation.
Well, Dr. Robert Malone was banned on Twitter, which caused me to cause some trouble.
But let me give you some background first.
Back in the 90s or so, there were a lot of CEOs who were writing books about how successful they were.
Remember Jack Welsh was famously, you know, touted as a great manager for what he did at General Electric.
Now, and you might know that that whole business book, you know, the expert who tells you how to be successful, that that whole market was huge and then just fell off a cliff.
It fell off a cliff at the same time that Dilbert became a national phenomenon and mocked those kinds of books because they were always bullshit.
What happens is you've got a lot of companies doing a lot of things.
Some of them succeed.
And when one of them succeeds, for whatever reason, the manager says, I'm a genius, and writes a book.
And then all the people who don't understand how anything works say, well, this person managed that company.
That company was a big success.
I will listen to everything this person says.
It doesn't make any sense.
Because what we do know is that GE basically screwed the pooch...
Using the same management techniques that Jack Welch said.
I think there's some story about their accounting and especially the financial part of GE. So that basically everything you thought you knew about Jack Welch's management genius, maybe not so much.
So our idea in the 90s that there was such a thing as great managers who had great technique was completely debunked.
By Dilbert, more than anything else.
Will anybody back me on that?
That the 90s were all about these genius managers, and that Dilbert was mostly, more than anything else, what completely took the piss out of that bullshit.
Right? Okay, I'm seeing agreement on locals, people who are more familiar with my past, I think.
So, just use this as, this is just a primer for the story I'm going to tell.
Just know that when anybody gets lucky in success, they will write a book and tell you that they knew all along that doing these things would cause them to be successful.
It doesn't mean those things made them successful.
It's just an illusion.
Now let's get to the people who were the rogues on the pandemic.
Dr. Robert Malone was one, saying things that were different from the mainstream, and he was just banned on Twitter.
Now, I don't know if it was permanent ban, but he tweeted a tweet, this is the one that got him banned, that the first six months of Pfizer shots caused more illness than they prevented.
So that's what he claimed, and then Twitter banned him for that.
Now, here's a test of your worldview, and I did this on Twitter.
My worldview is that the rogue doctors might be really, really good at their expertise.
It could be virology, cardiology, one of those things.
They could be really good at that, but are not necessarily talented at reading data and knowing if all the dots were put in there.
So I tested my worldview on Twitter and said, I predict that in the comments the idea that Dr.
Malone's interpretation of the data will be debunked.
And then it was.
By credible people who are really good at debunking things.
And they pointed to their work.
They showed exactly what he got wrong.
And it's pretty clear it was wrong.
Now, here's an example of somebody who...
Read the data completely wrong.
So wrong that it got him banned by Twitter.
But was he wrong on the point?
Was he wrong that, let's say, the vaccines are not as good in terms of cost-benefit as we had been sold?
Because his larger claim, and I hate to characterize other people's opinions, that's always dicey, because when people do it to me, they get a lot wrong.
But if we assume that people like Dr.
Malone, let's make it more general so it's not about him.
If they were to say that the vaccinations were not as good as we had been told, But it was based on misreading the data, or at least they did misread some data.
These would be people who used incorrect reasoning, but by luck, just like these managers who look like geniuses because their company did well, by luck they would also be right.
So what do you do with the people who used all the wrong data analysis to get to the right answer?
It's going to be a clusterfuck of all clusterfucks.
Because the people who are wrong about everything and don't have any reasoning skills just said, oh, the government's lying, and they got it right.
Or they said the big pharma is lying.
Now, some people said to me, Scott, you didn't really need to read the data.
Some of you are thinking that right now.
You didn't need to read the data.
You just had to look at the players and follow the money.
How many of you thought that?
Like, you know you can't trust the government.
You know you can't trust big pharma.
You put them together.
Of course you can't trust it.
Right? So did you need any data to reach the opinion that you couldn't trust those entities?
No. You didn't need any data for that.
Those are two entities with a track record of enough bad behavior that you couldn't automatically believe they were telling you the truth.
But let me ask you this.
How many drugs are there in the world that came from, let's say, Big Pharma?
What's your guess? What's the number of approved drugs that one could buy in the market?
Thousands? Two thousands?
I'm seeing weird numbers.
There are 10,000? I don't know.
Let's say thousands. Of the thousands of drugs that are approved, how many of them do you think are actually just fake and don't do anything?
Well, as a percentage of all the approved drugs that are actually on the market, what would you say?
Would you guess what percentage?
Yeah, it's not zero. Definitely not zero.
Now, there are lots that work for some people and not others.
That's a little different. But how many do you think are literally just don't work?
Your estimates are really high.
I'm saying 50%, 95%, 5%.
We don't know, do we?
Do we know? I'm guessing that the system would fall apart unless the number of drugs that got through that don't work is in that, I'm going to say, under 20% range.
Because if it were 80%, it would just be so obvious that nobody could miss it.
But at 20%, you would write it off to individual differences, wouldn't you?
Like, well, this drug works for most people, but damn it, I was in the 20%.
So... I think the people who said, it's coming from Big Pharma, therefore we can't trust it, are accurate.
But what were the odds?
What were the odds?
Because you've got a pretty long track record of Big Pharma getting things approved.
Is it 10% of the time they give you a fraud and it gets through anyway?
Do you know? Because if you don't know that...
You couldn't be too positive that it was a fraud.
You could only know that you couldn't be sure because they have a track record of some bad behavior.
Now, my big company, let's say, guess was that too many people would be involved in the drug trials for them to be too, let's say, too adventurous with their claims.
In other words, there have to be whistleblowers aplenty, or at least potential whistleblowers, when you have a trial that big.
There just have to be multiple people who saw stuff.
So if they could all, if every one of them kept it quiet, Well, that would be weird.
Now, you might say to yourself, well, what about OxyContin and Purdue?
Their salespeople just told doctors complete lies for years and got away with it.
Complete lies. Told them the drug was not addictive when it was super addictive.
Just a complete lie. But the way they did that was by referring to third-party research that nobody had access to.
So Purdue was a special case where they could bury the research by just alluding to it and have an expert allude to it, and everybody just goes, all right, well, somebody knows, so we'll just go with it.
But in the context of the pandemic, when all eyes were looking at vaccines, you have to think that a lot of eyeballs saw the actual data collection process.
Whereas at Purdue, nobody saw it because it actually didn't exist.
They just made it up. So unless you think the trials had only a few points of people who actually knew what was really going on, maybe.
It's possible. It's hard for me to think that they would have done this intentionally when the penalty would be outrageous.
I mean, to be caught as such a bad crime, I don't know if anybody would take that chance.
On the other hand, billions of dollars at stake.
When you have billions of dollars at stake, do people take crazy chances?
Yeah, they do. They do.
Because billions of dollars are at stake.
So, I don't think you could be too confident that just because you said Big Pharma is not to be trusted, that therefore this specific thing could not be trusted.
Because unless you know the ratio of drugs that get produced that work, Versus total frauds, it's hard to say that, well, their track record means that these vaccines won't work.
Because I would guess that almost...
I think at least 80% of the things that get approved probably work.
That would be my guess.
But since I don't know that answer either, you don't know, I don't know, it's hard to say that just knowing they're not completely trustworthy gives you any insight about this one vaccine.
That doesn't make sense.
All you can say for sure is you don't know.
All right. Here are some more...
When I noted that people were going to get the right answer for the wrong reason, I created a whole bunch of cognitive dissonance, and I've got a new tell to give you.
It's the content-free response.
Zuby gave me one of these.
You know, Zuby. Zuby's great, by the way, but he and I will probably have some conversation when the pandemic is winding down.
About what was reasonable and what wasn't.
I hope we do have that conversation.
Zuby's great. But his comment to me saying that people who looked at the data wrong would accidentally get the right answer in some cases, he said, Scott, and then just a laughy face.
So then there was another user, Corona Wu-Tang Virus, that's the name of the user, who just responded to me, how high are you right now?
And then there was Pioner McManus, another user, who just commented, just take the L, Scott.
And then a number of people used it.
I don't know if there's some organized way or they just like this word.
But a lot of people said something like this.
We're reaching levels of cope we've never seen before.
In other words, saying that I'm trying to cope with the fact that I was wrong and I'm finding that out now.
Except... What was I wrong about?
I'm not aware of being wrong about anything.
Was I? I mean, anything important?
So, there are a whole bunch of people who are pretty sure that I'm wrong about big stuff, but they don't have any examples.
They just have this feeling.
Now, I think that this is a tell for cognitive dissonance.
I call it the content-free tweet, where they criticize you, but there's no criticism.
It's like the form of a criticism, but about what?
Something I said?
Like, what am I taking the L for?
Am I supposed to be taking a loss and admitting I was wrong about what topic are we on?
I don't even know the topic.
So there are all these people who are telling me that I should admit I'm wrong without telling me what the topic is.
Now, I think that most of the things that they feel like they disagreed with me on were things that I talked about the odds, and that's it.
I just talked about the odds of things.
So I'm not sure those are predictions exactly.
All right, so you're going to see a lot of that, but you're going to see every...
Here's the thing that will be the funniest.
The Omicron is clearly a less, or it looks like it as far as we know, a less harmful virus.
We'd all agree with that.
Is that clear enough yet?
I mean, that could be wrong too, but at the moment, it looks like it's less dangerous.
There were a lot of people at the beginning of the pandemic who said, This virus is not dangerous.
At the beginning of the pandemic, they were completely wrong.
But because the data changed, the facts changed, and the Omicron came out, they turned into completely right.
Do you think that those people will say, you know, I got lucky because of this Omicron nobody could see coming exactly?
I mean, you could know that it would attenuate, but you wouldn't know when and you wouldn't know if there would be more deltas before it did, right?
So you couldn't have known that.
But now there are people who are claiming they knew all along that if we just ignored it, everything would be fine.
But that only applies if Omicron comes along.
It's a whole different game if we're delta to the max.
So there will be people claiming that they were right all along, even as all the data changed.
Now, my point of view is that when the data was one way, my opinion was x, and when the data changed, I adjusted my opinion to match the new data as far as we know.
And people are pretty sure that I should take the L For changing my opinion when the actual facts changed.
And it's not that our knowledge of the facts changed.
The actual facts changed.
The Omicron is a new fact.
And it's different than the Delta facts.
There's still people saying that the vaccinated are the cause of the variants.
How many of you think that?
How many of you believe...
It's widely going around.
How many of you believe that the vaccinations themselves are a cause of variants?
Yeah. The counterargument to that argument is that variants are caused by more virus.
So if you had a teacup full of virus, it won't create much variant.
If you had a stadium full of virus...
You could be reasonably sure it would create more variants.
So I don't think there's any exception that to the extent that vaccinated people before Omicron, right, had some more protection, probably reduced the variants.
But we don't know. There's no way to know.
Oh, shit. Damn it.
Something bad just happened.
But not to you. Don't worry about it.
It's not your problem.
Like with...
Somebody says masks could be stopping the Omicron.
Well, I doubt it. Now, there are a lot of people who say that we know that masks work or don't work.
Do you believe that? How many of you believe that we now have certainty, or something close to it, about whether masks reduce the odds of transmission?
How many of you think we know the answer to that?
I'm seeing yeses.
I'm seeing more nos.
We still don't know. Yeah, I'm on no, we don't know.
We can definitely say that it didn't seem like any of the variables, except maybe the vaccinations, had any obvious impact.
But we also didn't have any controlled studies, so we wouldn't know.
Yeah, when was the last time you didn't see a used mask on your driveway?
Literally every time I walk into my garage or onto my driveway, There's a disposed mask that fell out of a car or out of a pocket or something.
They're just everywhere. There are so many masks everywhere.
