Episode 1609 Scott Adams: Mass Hypnosis, Magic Tricks, Hallucinations, and COVID
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
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Content:
Cognitive blindness magic trick
Government has a Presumption of guilt
Impeach AG Garland for refusing J6 question
Trump run on J6 transparency, election audits
Omicron Olympics?
"Immune system fatigue" from booster?
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Well, this morning I'm going to print something out while I'm showing you a magic trick.
And you're going to love it.
Because I've got to print out my notes.
Alright. How would you like to see a magic trick?
Then I'm going to dovetail into a fascinating discussion about hypnosis and...
All weird things. You're going to be amazed.
But first, let me call up all your comments here.
There we go. Alright, let's see if I can make a good view of the table here.
There we go. Alright, I'm going to show you a trick.
Maybe some of you have seen this before.
It's a normal coin.
Some country that's not America, I forget.
And I'm going to make this coin disappear by rubbing it into my hand, or my arm.
So I'm going to rub it into my arm until it disappears inside the arm.
Are you ready? You probably don't think I can do it.
All right. Watch this.
First of all, there's nothing in the hands.
Nothing else here, right?
It's just a coin. All right, so the coin will go on my arm, and then I'm going to rub it until it disappears.
Now, I haven't done this trick in a while, and I'm doing it live without much practice, so I can't guarantee it'll work on the first try, but...
All right, I think I got it.
Watch this. Gone!
All right, well, like I said, it doesn't always work on the first try.
But the second try, watch this.
Watch this. Are you watching?
Watch carefully. Are you amazed?
How about that?
That's an example of cognitive blindness.
The reason you don't know how the trick was done...
Is that I made you cognitively blind, even though I showed you exactly how I was doing it.
If I were to replay this slowly and show you where the trick happened, you could see it right in front of your eyes.
But because I blinded you, and I'll tell you how I did it in a minute, but I'm going to do another trick first.
Do you think I can turn a penny into a much larger coin?
You know, something that...
you know, would be worth more, for example.
So let's take this penny.
There's nothing in this hand.
Nothing going on here. So I'll take this normal penny, and I'm going to change it into a bigger coin, all right?
Just going to rub it, rub it, rub it.
And there's nothing in this hand, right?
Rub it, rub it.
Amazing, right?
Now, here's the trick.
There are two things that I want to teach you.
The second one is about imagination.
The reason that the penny trick works is that you can't imagine how I do it.
If you could imagine it, you'd see it instantly.
But it's a lack of imagination.
And when you look at the news, this is what's happening to you all the time.
The news will say, a thing is happening, and you won't really be able to imagine the alternatives to that story so you believe it.
So a lack of imagination is also behind magic.
Here's how this trick was done.
The larger coin just goes behind it.
So when I show it to you this way, And this way, and this way, and this hand, it's not there.
And then I just go, boop boop, like that.
Now, how does the other one work?
The one where I did this?
Here's how the cognitive blindness works.
I told you that it doesn't work every time, and I also made you focus here, right?
So there are two things I told you that cause cognitive blindness.
One, it doesn't work every time.
So when it doesn't work the first time, you accept that as normal.
You might even laugh because my trick failed.
That's a diversion. The first failure is part of the trick.
That's what diverts your attention.
Now, the way the trick is done is that when I do it the second time...
Did you see the trick?
The trick's already done.
Then all of this stuff is after it's already gone.
Hey, look. It's gone.
Want to see it again? All right.
Oh, it didn't work. My trick didn't work.
Let's see if it works a second time.
Oh, it worked a second time.
Yeah, so all I did was, when it dropped, instead of picking up with the hand I was going to use, you were no longer paying attention because you were diverted by the fact that my trick failed.
So as soon as the trick failed, your attention stopped paying attention, and you didn't notice that I picked it up with this hand, did this, and it was already gone.
Now, what's that got to do with the news?
Well, I'm going to tell you.
So one of the things I often say is that if you have a variety of talents, they can work well together in a way that 1 plus 1 equals 2.
If you add two talents together, sometimes you get three.
Now, having a window into how magic tricks work...
It's really, really compatible with hypnosis, psychology, and politics.
Let me grab my notes and I'll show you.
Oh, damn it.
All right. First, let me...
We're going to get back to the magic tricks.
We're going to cover some other things. So Rasmussen says that 48% of the people they polled say 2021 was a poor year, but not as bad as 2020.
Does that sound about right? Apparently 2021 and 2020 were just the two worst years that people remember.
Does anybody want the simultaneous sip?
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Well, if we're going to do the sip, all you need is a cup or mug, a glass of tank, a chalice of time, a canteen, a jug of flask, a vessel of any kind, and fill it with your favorite liquid.
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watch your antibodies surge I don't think it's technically scientifically correct to call this a booster shot but it is But it is. That's the 25th booster I've had this morning.
Feeling good. All right.
I tweeted this today, and I keep trying to find my footing for this persuasion.
And so this is what I tweeted.
You've heard this concept before, but I'm trying to A-B test my way up to a better way of saying it.
So lots of times I'll say something one way, and if it gets a little bit of a reaction, I'll think, whoa, I got a good reaction on that.
Maybe if I can say it in an even better way, I could get a bigger reaction.
So I've been doing this with the idea that we have been blinded, just like a magic trick, By the fact that we're watching a lot of trials.
So you're watching a trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, and you're thinking to yourself, well, he's innocent until proven guilty.
You watch George Floyd, he's innocent until proven guilty.
And all these other major high-level trials, you know, Ghislaine Maxwell, innocent until proven guilty.
And then the government is accused of something.
What happens when your brain is full of innocent until proven guilty, and then the government does something that looks sketchy?
Do you say to yourself, well, innocent until proven guilty, you know, I'm going to need some evidence.
There's no direct evidence, so government gets a pass.
That is a magic trick, my folks, my audience.
The magic trick...
It's to create a cognitive blindness in you that the government has the same standard as a citizen for innocent until proven guilty.
It doesn't. Only citizens have the presumption of innocence.
Your government has a presumption of guilt.
Meaning, if they can't prove That what they're doing is honest by making it transparent, letting everybody see it, audit it, know what's going on.
If they can't do that, the presumption is guilt.
But you have been fooled by a magic trick, by seeing all these trials of citizens, and innocent until proven guilty is just sort of a recording that runs in your mind and makes you blind to the fact that Attorney General Garland Refused to answer a question from Representative Massey when he asked him how many government employees were involved in the January 6th event.
He wouldn't answer.
And still hasn't.
Presume guilt.
Presume guilt. Because that's fair.
Not only is it fair, it's the only system that can work.
The only system that can work well for citizens is presumed innocent.
But the only system that can work for your government is presumed guilt.
Until they show their records.
Until they open up the kimono and show you what's going on in there.
It can't work any other way.
But we have been magic tricked into being blind to the obvious.
That if you don't tell us What we ask about your potential criminal activity on January 6th, we have to assume you're guilty.
And the Republicans are completely dropping the ball here, because apparently you can start an impeachment process against an attorney general.
Now, I don't think he should be impeached for involvement in January 6th, because we don't know of anything, right?
We have no evidence of that.
But he can certainly be impeached for not answering the question.
Am I right? He needs to answer the question.
At least to Congress. You know, I would make an exception if they wanted to answer the question only to, you know, some bipartisan part of Congress.
But I need our elected representatives to know what's going on.
I don't 100% need me personally to know what's going on.
But if a bipartisan group has access to the same information and they're both happy, I'm probably going to be okay with it.
So I believe that Garland has to be at least subject to the process of impeachment.
There's no chance he can get impeached because the Democrats are in charge.
But there's nothing that stops you from starting the process.
Because it would be in the same way that when Trump went through his impeachment procedures, it was more about the show.
It was more about the public...
I mean, that's why the Democrats did it.
The Republicans should do the same and limit the charge to the lack of answering the question.
If he answers the question, well, just drop the impeachment.
Likewise, our election systems, which are not transparent, at least the electronic part, you can't really audit those, we have to assume that they are corrupt.
I don't know that they are.
But the starting presumption has to be corruption.
And they need to prove that it's not.
And if anybody asks you to believe that the next election is valid, well, I wouldn't trust that person again, ever.
Because that's somebody who either doesn't understand anything about the world, or they're lying to you or something.
But we are being...
Subject to continuous magic tricks that make us cognitively blind.
And the other magic trick was about lacking imagination.
You just can't imagine an alternative.
Here's another cognitive blindness example.
So yesterday I tweeted that I had spent a whole bunch of time trying to figure out how to log off of Twitter.
I could not figure it out.
I googled it.
And of course, if you Google how to do anything, you get all the wrong, the old ones for the old software and the wrong platform.
Even if you say how to log off from the browser, it'll give you all the app log offs instead.
I mean, searching for how to do anything is just useless half of the time.
So I found it with the help of other people.
And it was always right there, right in front of me.
Like, it was right on the page.
But here's what they did.
Let's see if I can give you an example with a blank piece of paper.
Well, I'll just describe it.
You're quite aware of interfaces.
You've used a lot of them.
And you know that if you're looking for how to log off of something, it's almost always in the top right.
Or if there's any other cluster of menus, it'll be in the menus.
Because where else would it be?
All right? The log off command should be somewhere where there are menus.
So you look where the menus are and it's not there.
You look up at the top right hand corner and it's not there.
Here's where they hit it.
And they use this as the page.
So it's supposed to be up here, normally.
That's where your brain expects it.
And then there's some menus along this side.
So it's not here and it's not where it belongs.
They put it all the way at the bottom of the page, all by itself, without anything that looked like a menu.
It was just your icon.
Now, if you tell me that they didn't intentionally put it there so you can't find it, I call you a liar.
Because nobody makes that big of a user interface mistake.
That's not a mistake.
They just intentionally made it hard to log off.
Now, they're not the only company that does that.
That's pretty common.
Now, when people said, Scott, are you blind?
Are you blind? It was right there in front of you.
And the answer is, yes.
Yes. I was cognitively blind because they put it in the wrong place.
Not blind-blind, but it's the same thing if I go in the refrigerator and somebody, you know, put the mustard that is always supposed to be in the door, if somebody put it in the body of the refrigerator.
I'll never find it. Because I just won't look in the body of the refrigerator.
Now, that's a bad example because I probably would look in the body of the refrigerator.
But if you put things where they don't belong, you can blind somebody to the obvious.
They just won't even look there.
So a lot of what's happening to us in the news is that.
All right. I feel like Trump could win re-election by running on transparency.
The transparency for the elections to make them auditable, but also transparency for whatever happened on January 6th.
And he could just run for election and say, look, your government is not telling you who won the election.
I mean, they can't, because they can't audit it.
We don't have access to it.
And they won't even tell you about January 6th, the biggest, apparently shocking event in the country.
And now, if you go to Google and try to find the daily death rate in the United States from COVID... They're even hiding that.
Now, again, when I say hiding, I don't mean literally.
I mean, if you go look for it, you end up in a pile of, you know, a rat's nest of stuff, and then you get a graph.
It's a little hard to interpret for a while, unless you're used to interpreting graphs.
How many people in the United States can accurately interpret a graph?
Half? Half?
Something like that. You know, many of us are the people who pay attention to politics and stuff.
So if you're watching this, you probably can read a graph, right?
Pretty much by the time you're absorbing this sort of content, you can read a graph.
But most of the country can't.
It's like if you just put it on a graph, it's just gone forever.
Now compare that to what they used to do.
Which is the daily death count.
I think it was the daily.
Might have been weekly. Was on the CNN front page.
And I think you would see that single number, how many people died today, with any Google search.
If you just Googled, I think it would come right up.
Today, this many deaths.
But it's clear that the death number is being...
Let's say, de-emphasized, so that you become a little bit cognitively nearsighted for finding that.
It's obviously being de-emphasized.
Now, my personal opinion is that the government and the citizens are largely on the same side about the pandemic now.
And what I mean by that is I think the government is looking for an escape hatch A way to get past all the bad stuff that people don't like, the mandates.
So I think the government wants out of this, both Democrats and Republicans.
I think they all want out, as do the public.
But it's a little harder for them, because they have to do it without looking like it killed people.
So they don't really have a way out unless we help them.
So I was saying this on Locals the other day, but I'll tell the rest of you in public.
I wonder to what extent China watches the biggest critics of China in the United States.
Now, I think I could claim that I'm in the top 25 of China critics.
Do you think that's an overclaim?
Let me check that with you.
Of vocal...
Public critics of China, would you say I'm in the top 25?
Just look at your comments.
Yeah, some are saying, you know, top 10, but let's say top 25.
Now, do you believe that China keeps an eye on, through agents or trolls or operatives or whatever, do you think that China keeps an eye on the top 25 China critics?
Probably. I mean, it would be a normal thing to do, I would think.
Because you want to know what the public opinion is and you want to know who's moving the needle and all that.
So if you assume that somebody in China is keeping an eye on me, that also opens up a channel in which things I say can get all the way to China's leadership.
Now, how many would say that that's...
Possibly or likely true that things I say in public about China could get all the way to some part of their leadership.
Not necessarily to Xi, but somebody in their leadership.
Yeah, most of you are saying likely, and I think it just makes sense.
Don't know for sure, but it makes sense.
And so that opens up the possibility...
That they've given me administrative access to their brains.
Which... I don't think they saw that coming.
Because when they follow me, they're not following just somebody who's a critic.
They're following somebody who can slip a linguistic kill shot past their defenses and get it on the inside and change things from the inside, so to speak.
And so I asked today on Twitter, when did the Omicron Olympics begin in China?
That's right. I went there.
Hashtag Omicron Olympics.
Because... I don't want China to worry about anything except the gigantic surge in infections that they're about to bring to the world.
And so their Olympics will become a national shame and will be called the Omicron Olympics, at least by some of us.
Omicron Olympics. Now, I'd like China to really, really think about what the world is going to think about them during the Olympics.
Kind of bad luck that the pandemic and China's Olympic Games happened at the same time, but my guess is that this is going to be a nightmare for China's leadership because the reason you do the Olympics is for public opinion.
Am I right? That's the only reason you do it, isn't it?
Give me a fact check on that.
Because it's not really economically viable.
I think the country that hosts often loses money, right?
Give me a fact check on that.
Does hosting the Olympics make you money or lose you money?
I thought it lost money.
And I thought that you do it...
Yeah, people are saying lose.
And I think that you do it for esteem, right?
And this is going to be a disaster.
It looks like there's a disaster coming for China in terms of public relations.
I think the Omicron Olympics, the gold medal is going to go to Omicron.
I think the silver medal will go to Delta, Delta variant.
And then the poor Alpha will medal, but, you know, only the copper.
Only a copper. So that's the first message I'm going to slip past the sensors, is that the Omicron Olympics are really about a giant disaster and not so much anything to be proud of.
Have you heard the news that there's some suggestion that getting the booster shots might, and I don't think this applies to every person, but cause immune system fatigue?
Which would be a layperson's explanation for, well, I don't want to get all doctor and technical with you, because I can't.
So I don't know what it means to have immune system fatigue.
But smart people like Ian Martisis knows what that means.
And apparently it's a risk.
It's one that people were worried about from the beginning.
Now here's my question.
We know how vaccinations were tested, right?
We know that, what were they, 40,000 people tested, and we know about when they were tested, and we know at least what they tell us about the outcome.
Now, we don't know the long-term effects of anything, but we do at least have what the pharma companies told us was the data for what they tested, whether you believe that's true or not.
But let me ask you this.
Did anybody test the booster?
Did I miss a whole phase where boosters got tested?
Now, I get that the booster is one of the things that's been tested, but nobody tested that amount, right?
Nobody tested a third or fourth booster shot.
Would we not be taking the drugs in a way that is untested?
It's one thing to say we tested it in the short term, because most of your problems actually happen in the short term.
It doesn't eliminate the long-term risk, but it reduces it a little bit.
But it seems to me that the boosters have never been tested, have they?
Can you fact-check me on that?
Because I don't know that that's true.
But I'm pretty sure they didn't do a 40,000-person randomized controlled trial of boosted versus non-boosted.
And if they did, oh, they didn't.
So I'm not boosted at the moment, and I can't imagine that I would get boosted unless I could imagine some life event where I just had to, and I was like, ah, I don't like these odds, but I'm going to do it anyway.
Because I have some trip or something I have to do.
I can imagine that pushing me over the edge.
But at the moment, it doesn't make sense for me to get a booster until I see how Omicron plays out.
Does that sound unreasonable?
That since it's only going to be maybe, I don't know, two weeks, I'm guessing two weeks we'll know everything we need to know about if Omicron's going to totally take over for Delta.
And... So I don't think that the risk-reward favors the boosters in the next two weeks.
Now, two weeks from now, we might learn something else.
Yeah, somebody said asthma is a risk for me, but there's something weird about the asthma risk that might actually...
I've seen data that I'm not sure is reliable, but the asthma risk might actually be the opposite way.
Because one of the meds that you use for asthma, this budesonide, has been shown to be protective against COVID. So I actually take a preventative every day, but I'm doing it for asthma, and I don't even know if the risk is higher for asthma.
You know, I realize that the original data said it was, but I think updated data has a suggestion that that's unclear at this point.
But wait is certainly a comorbidity.
So that's my risk-reward.
I'm going to wait at least a few weeks before I even make a decision on boosters, unless some life thing gets in the way first.
I hope not. Is the death rate in America getting close to the point Where we started opening up things last summer.
So you remember last summer when things started loosening up?
It's because the death rate hit a low enough level.
Now, we're not quite all the way back down to there, but if you adjust for the fact that we're in the winter, it's looking pretty good.
It's looking pretty good, death rate-wise.
Infections are through the roof because of Omicron.
And... Do we need to grade on a curve because it's winter?
I don't know if the fact it was summer had anything to do with loosening up because everybody, you know, people around the doors and stuff.
But I wonder if we're not right getting near the level where at least we could be as open as we were last summer.
Important thing, many of the children are hospitalized with Omicron.
That may be true, but we're still at close to zero deaths.
Can you fact check that?
For children. We're close to zero deaths for children, am I right?
We don't know about long COVID, but anyway.
So there's a meme being used mostly against me, it seems.
I guess other people too, but I feel like it's mostly against me.
I don't know if it started on Reddit or wherever, but the word is cope.
And the idea is that a lot of people, including me, actually almost especially me, are coping with By finding a way that they were right after all, when in fact they were wrong all along.
Now in my case, this is based on a mass hallucination.
And I can tell you how the mass hallucination was formed, because now I have a good idea for it.
So if you look at my Twitter traffic, you can see that people have all kinds of hallucinations about my opinions.
Now, if you've watched most of my content, the people and locals have, if you've watched most of my content, you'll know that the opinions they say I have are just not my opinions.
But they're really, really sure that I held those opinions and that I was very wrong.
And some of them are actually crazy.
Like, one of the opinions I heard today that was assigned to me is that I trust big institutions to tell me the truth.
I'm literally the creator of the Dilbert comic strip.
I might be the most famous person in the country for doubting big institutions.
Give me a second name of anybody in the United States, of 360 million people, and of 360 million people, name one person more famous for doubting the quality of data from big organizations and their honesty.
Name one person.
Who is more famous for doubting data from big organizations?
Nobody, right? Out of 360 million people, I'm...
Alex Jones. Okay.
But I would argue I'm more famous than Alex Jones.
Alex Jones is more famous than I am within the realm of people who watch this kind of content.
But in the country, I'm way more famous for doubting data from big organizations.
Am I wrong? Seriously, am I wrong?
That I'm literally like the most famous person who doubted data.
Now, if you watched me talking about the vaccine data, was there any time that I suggested that you should trust the data from the big pharma companies?
Did I ever say anything like that?
Because I'm pretty sure I said the opposite.
Lots of times.
And now, why is it that people have this?
And in fact, yesterday, James Lindsay was coming after me on Twitter, and he actually dropped what he called a linguistic kill shot, laughingly, because he doesn't believe any of this stuff it sounds like, or at least he's skeptical about the persuasion predictions I've made about Trump.
But... He gave me the nickname, Vax Adams.
And then, you know, laughingly said, is that a linguistic kill shot?
And here's the thing.
It is. It is.
Yeah, my reputation and career might be ruined by that.
A pretty high likelihood.
In fact, it will take all of my energy to prevent that from happening.
Because it is such a good linguistic kill shot.
And, you know, it's out there in public, so I'll tell you what it is.
Because I'm going to spend a lot of time seeing if I can reverse it, but I don't know if I have that power.
I don't know if I have that power.
Now, if you heard that nickname and you heard other people talking about me as opposed to hearing what I say, you would easily come to the opinion that I'm the biggest vaccine promoter in the United States.
And nothing like that has ever happened.
Right? Very much closer to the opposite has happened from the beginning.
In fact, I think I'm the only person that I know of who predicted, at least a non-scientist, I'm the only non-scientist I know of who predicted that the warp speed vaccines wouldn't work.
Publicly, I predicted that.
Then people asked me, quite reasonably, they said, well, why'd you get the vaccination?
How could you predict it won't work and then get the vaccination?
Very easily. There's no conflict in that at all.
Now, how many of you see that?
That there's no conflict there?
I predicted they wouldn't work, and then I got them.
Let me give you another example.
I've also predicted that it's unlikely that Ivermectin makes a difference, and I would take it if I got COVID. Is that incompatible?
It's unlikely.
I predict that ivermectin will be shown not to be a big deal.
At the same time, if I get COVID, I'll take it right away.
Assuming my doctor agrees and, you know, I'm not doing the horse-paced version.
Now, why is that? Because a risk management decision is not like a prediction.
They're just two different things.
And if I can predict that the vaccine won't work, let's say I'm predicting 75% chance it won't work.
But if there's a 25% chance it does work, there may be a situation, if you're a certain age or comorbidity or whatever, that it's worth a shot.
It still makes sense.
So there's no conflict there at all.
And also we had lots more information by the time I got the shot.
So I also waited, I think, six months from the first availability of the shot to get as much data as I could.
Why did I wait?
Because I didn't trust the data.
Somebody says you were paid.
I wish. How much would they have to pay me to get vaccinated if I didn't want to get a vaccination?
What would be my price tag for that?
Do you have any idea how much that would cost?
That would cost a lot.
I don't know if anybody would pay that.
So... So, wildly through the internet, and I think part of it is that whenever you want to win an argument, you want to win it as somebody's expense.
So we like to put names and faces on our arguments.
So somehow my name and face are being tacked onto the pro-vax side...
When that's highly misleading.
Highly misleading.
But yes, in fact, the Vax Adams linguistic kill shot, if that became like a growing trend, would actually take me out of the game.
Because every time I said anything about anything, somebody would say, well, there's Vax Adams.
You know, he was wrong about all the vaccinations.
In fact, I have the best prediction record of the pandemic by far.
Now, I make that claim because I hope somebody will challenge it someday.
But my public claim is that nobody made better predictions than I did in the pandemic.
Not even close. Now, did I guess I'm wrong?
Yes, of course.
Everybody who predicts lots of stuff gets things wrong.
Because you can't really predict the future.
That's not a thing.
I mean, you could try, but nobody has access to it.
It's not like you get it right every time.
So let's see what happens.
Anyway, it looks like I will be the sacrificial attack dog for all the people who were sure the government was lying.
Now, I also asked the question, and I got, so far, zero answers.
I asked on Twitter, name one thing that you're sure the government or Big Pharma lied about relative to COVID and the pandemic, besides masks, because they've already admitted that.
But besides masks, what has the government or Big Pharma lied about?
Not being wrong, but lied about.
No vaccines. There's no evidence they lied.
Now, I'm not saying they didn't lie, right?
So let's be careful. I'm not saying the government didn't lie, and I'm not saying that pharma didn't lie, because they're both entities that lie a lot.
They're very lying entities.
But do you have an example of something that isn't clearly a mistake?
The lethality of ivermectin.
You don't think that the ivermectin is just a different opinion?
Because that's all I think it is.
I think it's just a different opinion.
For most people. Now, it could be that Big Pharma is funding studies that make ivermectin look bad or something.
But in terms of a lie, what would be a direct lie?
Now, don't go back to Tuskegee.
We're talking about just COVID. No.
So all of the examples are things that they thought were true and they were just wrong.
Do you actually believe that the government didn't know, or let's say, do you believe the government knew from day one that they would do boosters?
Do you think they knew that?
But there's no evidence of that, right?
So here's the...
getting back to my original standard.
If the government is suspected of something, do you presume innocence or presume guilt?
You can presume guilt.
So those of you who are saying, the government told us one thing, but then we found out a second thing was true, it's fair to presume guilt, but there's no evidence of it.
Would you give me that?
It's fair to presume guilt, because the burden is on them to prove it, but there's no evidence of it that I'm aware of.
Now, if there is evidence that somebody in the government or pharma lied about the knowledge that boosters would be even likely, tweet that at me, because I've not seen anything like that.
When they said that hydroxychloroquine was not safe for children, they lied.
Or was that a different opinion?
Because you can imagine that if somebody said, I believe, right or wrong, but let's say a doctor believed that hydroxychloroquine had zero use for COVID, but every drug has at least some risk for somebody, then you would say it's too risky for children.
That sounds like an opinion.
It doesn't sound like a lie.
Because I don't know who would have the reason to lie about that.
No vax passports.
See, everything here is about bad predictions.
I do believe that the government wouldn't want to do vaccine passports, but may have, you know, evolved into that position.
So I don't think you can say they're lying if they have one position in one situation.
You get more data and they change their position.
That could be incompetence.
It could be lying. It could be just being wrong.
It could be predicting badly.
How do you sort that out?
I'm with you on the presumption of lying.
Can we meet in the middle? Can we meet in the middle and say that I 100% agree with you that if you start with a presumption of guilt, that's a better system than a presumption of innocence until proven guilty?
Does everybody agree with that?
It's just a better system.
Presume the government lied to you until they prove they haven't.
Could they? I don't know if you could prove that.
It'd be tough to prove. But you should still have the transparency.
So maybe this is where many of you who have been quite uncomfortable with my position, maybe this is where we can come together.
I'm kind of adamant about not drawing judgments without evidence.
And a lot of the claims against the government are evidence-free claims, based on history, based on not trusting them.
But I'm completely with you on the history of not trusting them.
And I think where we can meet in the middle is we just agree that the burden is on them, and you have to start with the assumption of bad intention.
That's fair. There's no presumption of innocence for the government.
There's also, in my opinion, no direct evidence that somebody lied about some of these big things.
There is direct evidence they lied about the masks.
All right, let me list some of my predictions that I think I got right about COVID, and then you can tell me some I got wrong.
On the list of things I got wrong, there were, at different times, I had different estimates of ultimate death rates.
So as the data changed, or what we knew changed, I changed my opinion about the death rates.
So if you wanted to mark me as wrong in my initial ones, because when we did the two-week lockdown, I thought, whoa, if the experts think we can get through this with a two-week lockdown, The death rate's going to be less than the regular flu.
Should be... Maybe we even save lives.
But that was based on the assumption that the two-week flatten the curve had a chance.
So that failed completely.
And not long after that, my estimate of death was over a million.
I think you can check this in my record.
Now, it looks like we'll cross a million pretty easily.
And my biggest disagreement was with people who said it would be under 100,000, which would put it in regular flu range, say some.
Not me, but say some.
And I always said that the death rate would be way more than...
Once we got going, after we got past that two-week period and it looked more serious.
To me, it looked like...
Scott, you said real death count is closer to 225.
Find me the source of that.
Because I know that during the course of the pandemic, I've revised my death counts a number of times.
So here's what I'll say.
The correct predictions that I'll claim are that it was not a regular flu.
Some of you are still back in regular flu territory.
But from the start...
I said, this is not like the regular flu, and the risk of it is much higher.
You will remember that I was, I think, one of the first one or two public figures, Jack Posobiec was there early, too, to call for China to close travel, or for us to close travel with China, at least a week before the president closed it.
So if you go back to my original close the border, you can see that I was concerned that this was not the regular flu.
Until we do, right?
It was the fog of war.
So it just seemed, you know, closing the border until we knew what was what just made sense.
There was a time, and I have to give you a confession, that I did lie to you.
I did lie to you.
It's kind of hard for me to say.
During the pandemic, I told you a lie that was a whopper.
Like a really big one.
And I told it a lot of times.
A lot of times.
Do you know what it was? Does anybody know?
Now, not about masks.
I was right about masks from the start.
Or it seems.
I mean, maybe we could.
Not about the vaccine.
Nope. Not about the vaccinations.
Not about the origin.
Not about the golden age.
I think we are in the golden age.
We're looking good for that.
You got the virus?
No. It's way worse than that.
All right. Let me give you some background.
I'm going to open the kimono a little bit here.
When the original, and you've heard parts of this maybe, but this was pure dishonesty.
This was pure dishonesty.
In the beginning of the pandemic, I heard from some of the smartest people in the country that we were totally fucked.
And that civilization had a few weeks left in it.
And that it wasn't so much that the virus would kill us, but the disruption in all of our systems would crash the entire system.
In other words, the psychology of the pandemic would destroy civilization.
And I believed there was a really good chance that that would happen.
Because the argument for it was pretty damn good.
That the virus would be bad, but the reaction to it would be far worse.
And that as soon as you introduce friction into all these systems that are interconnected, the interconnectivity of it would just crash the whole system.
And that's what I believed was very likely for the first few months of the pandemic.
And I lied to you.
I lied to you. I told you everything would be fine.
I told you that we would work it out and that the human ability would overcome all of these problems.
And every day I came on live stream and told you, you know, you're going to be fine.
We're going to work this out.
And I lied to you.
Now, I lied to you for a purpose, and the purpose was that if mass psychology was the big risk, that somebody needed to turn that ship.
You will recall that a great many people in the media, well actually you don't know this, but a lot of people in the media have said to me privately that I kept them sane.
During that period. Because I think I was the most, let's say, calming voice that we could get through this that I heard.
I didn't hear anybody else telling you every day that we know how to fix this.
Like, we'll figure it out.
We'll get through this.
And I did that because that's how you get through it.
That's how you get through it.
And by persuading people that they would be fine, you could reduce maybe the hoarding, because the hoarding could have taken us down, right?
The hoarding of goods alone could have crashed civilization.
It could have.
And I needed to help at least take the edge off.
Just take the edge off.
And so, while I was more afraid than anything I've ever feared in my life, In the early parts of the pandemic, I lied to you and said, it looks fine.
We're going to be good. We'll work through this.
Now, that's my confession.
Now, I like to think that I lied to you for a good purpose.
And that it had a utility.
And that that utility was good for me, right?
Everybody has a personal interest in everything.
But primarily to keep the world running.
It was mostly about keeping the damn world running.
I think I even told you you wouldn't run out of toilet paper.
I think I told you that.
We came close to running out, but we didn't.
Now, let me promise you this.
I'll make you a promise.
If there's ever another situation in which I have this choice again, where I can either be honest...
Or I can try to save your life.
I'm going to lie to you again.
Because I'm still going to try to save your life.
I'm not going to put honesty over your damn life.
So, I apologize.
This is my formal admission of lying to you all.
Big lie. I mean, that's a big lie.
There's no way to sugarcoat that.
But I did it for that purpose and that intention.
And I think it worked.
I think it worked.
So if it worked for you, thank you.
Apology accepted. Yeah, the big lie.
And, you know, I did have two competing thoughts, you know, to be honest.
My competing thought was that we would get through it.
But, you know, it was really competitive with my thought that we're really, really close.
Really, really close to something bad.
Now, having had a test run with a pandemic, what's going to happen if another pandemic hits?
Well, it won't be as bad.
I mean, you can imagine the virus itself might be worse.
But let's say it's another pandemic of this scale.
I feel like we could just paddle right through it.
Just like a hot knife through butter.
So we're definitely in better shape than we've ever been.
Let me make my argument for the golden age.
You've heard it before.
Nuclear power is back.
Climate change, in my opinion, is largely solved in the sense that we know how to build enough solar panels and batteries and nuclear power plants to have all the energy we need.
So we do know how to do it.
And we do know how to mitigate against the warming that there will be.
We do know how to reforest the deserts.
We can reforest deserts.
That's like real. We can do that now.
And so...
Ah, you're lying again.
Somebody says. No, actually, this I believe.
So this stuff, I believe.
I believe that the mRNA platforms will end up being used for curing cancer and a variety of other things.
I think that one of the weird side effects of the pandemic...
I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but what happens when you take all the medical experts in the world and you give them a reason to communicate with each other and the medical scientists?
I feel as though the connections that were made at the top level of the medical community are, oh my God, valuable.
Like, maybe nothing more valuable has ever happened...
You know, in recent civilization.
But it's sort of invisible, because it's just a bunch of people who have met each other.
Like, that's all you know.
It's like, oh, all the experts know how to contact each other and share information now in a way they never could before.
That's sort of like Silicon Valley is formed.
Well, they haven't done much yet, but all the really smart technical people seem to be moving into the same area of the country.
Let's watch and see what happens.
Now that they all know each other and they're in the same place.
So that's a big deal.
My biggest problem is inflation, but that ends up just being a stealth tax, and I think we can survive taxes.
Is this my way of doing year-end review?
Yeah. I'm trying to give you the optimistic view that the...
I guess the weight of the pandemic makes us blind to other things.
This is another example of cognitive blindness.
Because our attention is being put on the, you know, COVID, COVID, COVID stuff.
And you can just miss the fact that, well, here's one.
Manufacturing will probably be migrating back from China.
And that's something that happened this year.
That's gigantic. That is so big.
Um... Elon Musk put a rocket into space and now he can retrieve his rockets and reuse them.
So space travel just made a gigantic move forward on economics alone, not just feasibility.
And So we've entered space like we've never done.
We've got nuclear like we've never done.
We're this close to curing cancer and the common cold.
We are so swimming in good news, but it's invisible.
It's invisible because we're focusing in the wrong place.
We have massive crime waves and stuff like that, which is even affecting my neighborhood, by the way.
I live in about the safest place you can live in the United States, short of some really rural place.
But my neighborhood is full of crime now.
We're organizing...
As well-off neighborhoods do.
We're organizing the neighborhood watch.
We're putting up video everywhere.
We'll have video of every inch of the neighborhood pretty soon.
And we're talking about hiring our own security.
As probably a lot of neighborhoods are.
You know, that's how bad the crime has come that it reached my neighborhood.
I moved to a place where there would be no crime, right?
I mean, I picked this town in large part because, well, there'll never be a crime wave, but there is.
So... Anyway, I think that psychedelics will be approved more so than the beginning.
I think that the mental health crisis in this country is about this close to being solved.
Do you believe that?
Massive mental health problem in the country.
About that close to being solved.
With hallucinogens.
See, if you're not up on this topic, you don't know how powerful this is.
There are people who have, you know, quit addictions and lost a lifetime of depression on one psychedelic experience.
And it's fairly common.
And apparently it's reproducible.
So, big pharma won't allow it?
Yeah, they will. They'll just get in on it.
Big pharma will find a way to make some money on it.
So you can doubt it, but there are certainly strong indications that that's going to happen.
How to make things worse?
No, I think the psychedelics will be used within a medical context.
We just need to get that approved.
Pushing more drugs.
Well... We are a drug-addled world.
I think the biggest problem with modern society is social media.
I think that broke us all.
You're all showing your true colors in the comments, Jake says.
Yeah, the people who are having a bad reaction to the idea of psychedelics, do some research.
Do some research. If you look at what we've learned in the last just few years, you'll be amazed.
You'll be amazed. A lot of that stuff was demonized, and maybe you should demonize it for purely recreational uses.
But within the medical context, it's going to be a miracle drug.
It's going to be a big, big deal.
All right, yes, government-infeared.
Stopping child trafficking.
Well, that's a tough one. I don't know that that's going to happen right away.
What do you say about research?
What about it?
Be more specific.
Oh, when somebody says I became vax-atoms when I said, I got vaxed and I don't care if you die.
I think that's...
Okay.
But that was agreeing with him.
So they're mad at me for agreeing with them that I'm 100% in favor of their freedom to do whatever they want.
So they're mad at me for agreeing with them really hard.
I think that's what's happening.
You should see the number of people who are agreeing with me angrily.
Do you get that? I don't know if this is just a Something that happens because of the way I argue with people.
But people will get real mad at me while agreeing with me.
That's a weird thing.
Yeah. Yeah, are you following the story of Mike Cernovich was stalked by a guy?
At one point he was being stalked by some guy.
And that guy just became a mass shooter.
That's some scary stuff.
I immediately looked at the name to see if I'd had any interaction with him, but I don't think I have.
Oh, yeah.
Somebody says Vax Adams won't stick because I'm the Dilber guy already.
Well, you know, I think you can have more than one nickname, unfortunately.
Um... It's cute.
Alright, that's all I got now.
And is everybody ready for...
Is this New Year's?
It is, right? Is anybody doing anything tonight?
It's New Year's Eve?
Like, New Year's Eve is usually the one I ignore.
I can't really get excited over a random date on a calendar.
Random date! Yay, random date!
Yeah? I don't drink.
So New Year's Eve without alcohol is just a way to be tired in the morning.
All right. Well, that's all I got for now.
Not much news happening.
I'm sure we'll have a big year coming.
I can't wait for the 2022 election cycle, which starts tomorrow.
And... I hope you got something out of this today.
