Episode 1614 Scott Adams: Let's Talk About Taking Control Back From Teachers Unions and Government
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
Max Boot and Joe Lockhart turn on Teachers Unions
Our alleged elected representatives
Bloomberg article supporting nuclear power
Dr. Malone and COVID protocol in Uttar Pradesh
Placebos increase in effectiveness over time
Can Intention rewrite the simulation?
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I'm not sure, but I think I just developed complete immunity from the Omicron variant.
It feels like it.
I don't know. Time will tell.
Well, how would you like me to talk about something different for a change?
Yeah, I hear you. I hear you.
Do you know, I want you to know that I'm as tired of talking about the pandemic as you are.
So we're only going to brush on it toward the end, but not really talking about the pandemic so much.
More about psychology.
But let's talk about some other things.
My favorite topic is when CNN and Fox News fight.
I could not be more entertained by their little, uh, their conflict.
So here's a good one.
I saw this in a tweet from Versha Sharma.
And he's quoting CNN's Oliver Darcy.
And Oliver Darcy of CNN said, quote, I'll reiterate that it's time for actual news organizations to stop calling Fox a news network.
It's not. It's a right-wing talk channel that has spent the past year misleading viewers about January 6th with a flood of lies and conspiracies.
So this actually happened.
CNN actually accused Fox News of creating fake news about the insurrection that didn't happen.
In other words, the fake news, CNN is accusing another news organization of spreading fake news about CNN's fake news.
I'm not positive.
Can somebody help me with the negatives of the negative situation?
But I think it all canceled out and we got truth.
Because if...
Help me out here.
If it's fake news, but if there's fake news about the fake news, could it cancel it out and accidentally give you real news?
I know that's a little optimistic, but maybe.
Maybe we accidentally got news.
So, yes, CNN's belief is that there's absolutely no evidence, no evidence of some kind of government conspiracy, no evidence of that having to do with January 6th.
I would like to agree with CNN. I have to agree with him.
I would also agree that there is no, what I would call, confirming evidence of FBI involvement in January 6th.
Does anybody want to disagree?
I say there's no confirmed evidence.
Plenty of suspicions, right?
There's the Ray Epps thing, there's the guy with the bullhorn, there's the people taking down the fence that, you know, for some reason there's all these unindicted co-conspirators.
But I'm going to agree with CNN that, to the best of my knowledge, there's no proven, let's say proven evidence, you know, make up a term, that the FBI was involved.
Would you agree? Or no?
No court has found they were involved.
But here's what CNN gets wrong, and they get it very wrong, criminally wrong, disastrously wrong, wronger than anything could ever be.
And it goes like this.
If the Attorney General won't answer the question that Representative Massey asked under oath, how many FBI, or actually how many government employees, were involved in January 6th?
If the government won't tell you the answer to that, the right answer is to presume guilt.
The government doesn't have a presumption of innocence.
What are you talking about? CNN has like the most basic thing about life, backwards.
Individuals have, individuals, citizens are innocent until proven guilty, not governments.
If the government is telling you it's hiding something, they are guilty until proven innocent.
Is there anybody who would disagree with that standard?
If the government says, I am not going to tell you this important information about an important topic, is the assumption innocence?
Are you fucking kidding me?
No, CNN. The assumption is guilt.
The government has to prove they're innocent.
I mean, if you have this many flags, if there were no, let's say, hints or indications or suspicions...
That they had been involved.
That would be different. But there are plenty, plenty of hints, suggestions, concerns, very well short of anything that I would call confirmed proof.
But there's a lot of it, and wherever there's a lot of it, doesn't matter if it's true, doesn't matter if it's false, doesn't matter if the public is crazy, doesn't matter how we got here, the burden of proof...
It's on the government.
They are presumed guilty until proven innocence.
Under the specific situation that there's plenty of smoke, so you worry that there could be fire, and they refuse to answer the questions.
They refuse to answer the questions.
Under that situation, you have to assume guilt.
Does anybody disagree with that?
Is there even one person who would disagree with that standard?
Even one? I'll bet not.
I'll bet not a single one of you disagrees with that standard.
And yes, CNN acts as if that's not the standard.
Because to them it's not.
To them it's actually not the standard.
Now, I am way more supportive of Fox News' approach on this.
Well, I think they might, you know, the opinion people get ahead of the facts.
There's no disagreement on that, right?
Wouldn't you agree that on Fox the opinion people get ahead of the facts?
Opinion people do that.
I mean, it's almost kind of built into the pundit job, trying to predict, right?
But have you ever seen Fox News get ahead of the facts and then turn out to be right?
Can you think of an example of that?
What would be an example where Fox News was way ahead of the facts And then turned out to be right.
Russia collusion.
Fox News reported from the jump that the Russia collusion story was bullshit.
From the jump.
And they were right.
How many people were accusing Fox News of getting ahead of the news and being fake news?
A lot, right? And they were completely right.
Absolutely vindicated.
Completely vindicated.
You see, Fox News goes hard at Fauci, right?
Fox News goes really hard at Fauci.
In the beginning, I felt that was illegitimate.
I didn't feel like attacking him was exactly the right move.
In other words, it felt like the opinion people were ahead of the facts.
Were they right in the end?
Yeah, they were right. The Fox News opinion were way ahead of the facts on Fauci, but as we kept watching him, oh, they were totally right.
Totally right. Now, I don't mean about any money connections.
You know, that's unproven.
But in terms of him as a leader during this thing, I think they were completely right that there were some credibility issues that were just in the past but went forward.
They predicted it right, I would say.
Yeah, the Whitmer kidnapping scandal.
I don't know the details, but did Fox News get ahead of the news on that?
I think so. So, it's entirely legitimate to criticize any of the news organizations for getting ahead of the facts, but it has to be noted that some people do a...
Wuhan lab, there you go.
Was Fox News all over the Wuhan lab before the data...
Yes. Yes, they were all over the Wuhan lab.
And they were right.
What has Fox News been saying about the election security of, let's say, 2020?
I feel as if a lot of the Fox News hosts, not all of them, but some of them were ahead of the news, wouldn't you say?
They were ahead of the news.
Well, we don't know if they were ahead of the news because the news has not matched them.
So it could be that they're just wrong in this case.
It could be that this would be the time that they got ahead of the news and they were wrong.
Maybe. But you have to look at...
It's exactly the same people...
Just to blow your mind for a little bit, all of those people who are, I would say, rightly being criticized for being ahead of the data, that's a fair criticism.
Would anybody disagree?
It's not an unfair criticism to say that opinion got ahead of the data, is it?
It's almost just a description of opinion.
I mean, it wouldn't be opinion if the data had confirmed it.
So how do we ignore the fact...
That the very same people who got it...
Jussie Smollett. There you go.
There's another one. Fox News was way ahead of the data, and they were right.
So how many more times do the same group of people...
Because it's the same pundits as Fox News.
Covington kids, probably.
I don't know the details in that one.
But how many times do they have to be right...
Before you say, well, I get that they're ahead of the data, but this is a group of people who have been, like, crazy right.
Not all the time.
Not all the time, by the way.
So I'm not suggesting that Fox News has a 95% opinion getting it right before the data.
What would you say would be the percentage?
If you had to guess...
The Fox News, just the opinion people, right?
You know who I'm talking about, just the Hannity's and the Laura Ingram's and Tucker.
You could add the five to that.
So I think your number out here will depend on...
So I'm seeing 70%, 90%, 70%.
I would have guessed...
I think I would have guessed...
70%.
Which is pretty good for opinion.
I'm not even sure that you'd say that's a bad grade, would you?
Because remember, opinion is fact-free.
It's just starting to sense the facts developing.
Yeah, I think they actually do pretty well, Fox News.
If you could hit a 70% prediction...
By opinion alone, just reading tea leaves and being smart and knowing how things work and stuff like that, that would be amazing, 70%.
But 30% is a big problem, isn't it?
If the people you trusted because they got it right on all those other things, what happens if they get a big one wrong?
What if Fox News was so right that you kind of said, okay, they keep getting it right, but what if they got a big one wrong?
That would be pretty dangerous, wouldn't it?
If it were, let's say, about health, the pandemic, that would be pretty dangerous.
So I would just say, be cautious about everything you listen to on any platform, but I don't think it's fair to say that Fox News is wrong when they have a track record of anticipating correctly.
Pretty well. Pretty well, I'd say.
Way better than chance.
All right. Rasmussen has some polls, some new polls about Biden, and apparently he's weighing the crapper on the economy and national security, so much so that Rasmussen had to do some research to find out if it was the worst ever.
Biden's numbers are so low that Rasmussen had to go back and check, is this the worst it's ever been in any president ever?
Now, it turns out it's close, because I guess Obama had some bad polls on some of the same stuff.
But at this point, the number of Americans who were rating him poor, let's say, was it half or something like that?
Some gigantic number rating him poor on both national security and economics.
How in the world could he win an election?
Doesn't it just seem like...
Does anybody believe he could win an election?
It's funny that he's pretending he's going to run.
All right, let's talk about the teachers' unions.
You may have heard that the Chicago teachers' unions have voted by some big majority, 73% or something, to not go back to class.
And I guess they're going to do some remote...
Work action or something like that.
So they're worried about the coronavirus, don't want to go back to class.
Now, here's an interesting thing.
Does everybody know who Max Boot is?
If you don't, just know this.
There's nobody who's more of a Democrat than Max Boot.
If you were to look up Democrat...
In the dictionary, it would be like a little picture of Max Boot.
By that I mean you can depend on Max Boot to say whatever Democrats, whatever their message is, just period.
Here's a guy who's never going to get off the path.
He's going to be Democrat message all the way, every time, no doubt about it.
Here's another one that would be like that, Joe Lockhart.
If you've watched him, again, you don't need to know him deeply.
I'll just tell you that you've never seen Joe Lockhart say anything publicly that wasn't exactly what Democrats say.
There's no amount of data or information that's going to make Joe Lockhart or Max Boot turn on the narrative.
Am I right? Would you agree with that?
Those guys are not going to turn on the Democrat narrative.
Until, until you fuck with their kids.
And guess what happened?
The teachers unions are fucking with our kids.
And that was the limit.
Here's what Max Boot tweeted today about the Chicago Teachers' Union's action.
This is outrageous.
These teachers need to teach.
These teachers need to teach.
Kids come first, and there's no real danger to the teachers as long as they have had all three vaccine shots.
That is Max Boot turning on a teachers' union.
Why? Why?
Because they fucked with kids.
That's too far.
That's too far.
What did Joe Lockhart say about Max Boot's tweet?
He said, I've supported unions my entire life.
I was a member of a union.
But Max Boot is right.
These teachers are playing politics with COVID, which is damaging our children.
You can't criticize the right for outrageous behavior and then support these teachers.
Finally.
What did I tell you was going to happen?
and Probably pretty soon.
You know, I've said, you know, if you get in trouble, you don't want mom to find out.
You know, because mom will punish you if you get in trouble.
It's like, oh no, mom found out.
I broke the vase or something like that.
So you really don't want to piss off mom.
But you don't want mom to call dad, right?
Now, I'm talking about classic 50s family here.
I know it doesn't apply so much in 2022.
But I feel like dad just got called on this school stuff.
Joe Lockhart? I'm just guessing.
I assume Joe Lockhart and Max Boot are probably both dads.
Am I right? Anyway, can you confirm that?
I assume they're both parents, right?
Just guessing. But...
They reached their limit.
Now it's time for dad.
So it looks like the dads probably are the ones that are going to have to end this.
If all the women in the world formed together and protested anything, they might get it.
If women protest as a group, they can be pretty strong.
But if you really need to break something, like if you just need something to just get broken...
Call Dad. He'll break that shit.
If you need to go extreme, Mom isn't the right choice.
If you need to threaten violence...
I'm opposed to violence, so I don't promote it.
But if you need the threat of it, you've got to call Dad.
And we're approaching the point where the Dads have not ruled out violence.
Somebody says, you clearly don't know my mom.
Yeah, there are definitely exceptions.
And I'm not suggesting violence, etc.
But when things get extreme, you know, in terms of when the public is extremely abused, at the point where the public is suffering extreme abuse, we're not talking about talking anymore.
Right? There is an implied violence that comes with male activity.
Right? Would anybody disagree with that?
Just getting a lot of men involved brings violence with it.
So to the extent that dads get interested in any topic, and I think they'll get a lot interested in this whole school closing stuff, there is an implied violence that doesn't have to be spoken, that just comes with large male activity.
Right? Right? So nobody has to say it, and I definitely don't think anybody should do it.
Like, I don't want to see any violence about this.
But we're at a new level now.
And I've told you before that the public is the only tool for ending a pandemic or ending these restrictions or for getting past the teachers' unions.
The public is going to have to do this by a solid majority, something like 75%.
Do you think that we're close to a 75% majority, public majority, of getting the kids back to school and ending...
And let's extend this maybe to ending mandates, but let's talk about the school right now.
I think we are. I mean, if you could get Max Boot and Joe Lockhart on the same team with the staunchest Republicans, I feel like we're pretty close...
Okay, Max has confirmed a father.
I thought so. It's time for the public...
To take control. Does anybody disagree with the concept that we don't have to have a fight with the government?
Because it's not a fight.
Ultimately, we're on the same side.
The government needs an assist.
An assist. It needs the public to power up, which is happening, and to just break some log jams.
And sometimes you've got to call Dad.
It looks like Dad got called.
So I feel like something amazing and good could be about ready to happen.
Meaning that I would be really surprised if the teachers' unions don't back down pretty quickly.
What do you think? Do you think the teachers' unions will go ahead as if the rest of the world doesn't matter?
Or do you think that turning Democrats against them, and the dads especially, do you think that'll make a difference?
Yeah, I don't know. I would bet that the teachers' unions will get enough pressure to back down.
Now, they have some competition over in Arizona, according to Corey DeAngelis, who's the biggest name in the teachers' unions' conversations.
By the way, if you're not following Corey, you need to.
That's a requirement.
LAUGHTER If you watch me on livestream, one of the best people to follow is Corey DeAngelis.
Just Google him, he'll pop up.
Anyway, Doug Ducey, governor of Arizona, announced that eligible families will be able to take their children's education dollars elsewhere if their public school closes.
There we go. That's how you do it.
That's how you do it.
You don't have to break the union.
You just give them competition.
Because it's the last thing they want.
The last thing the teachers' unions want is competition.
So let's give it to them.
You don't have to make a law to ban them.
But what if we did?
Let me ask you this.
Do you think that the military should be allowed to form a union?
It's a volunteer army in the United States.
Do you think soldiers, the Marines, etc., do you think that they should be able to form a union to make demands of their leaders?
No! No!
It's not going to be a very good military if it's got a union.
No! It's an obvious exception.
Right? Now...
How many of you are pro-union, by the way, just sort of in general?
That doesn't mean applied to every situation.
But how many of you are generally positive about unions historically, let's say?
A lot of conservatives are saying no.
We've got some yeses, but a lot of noes.
I understand the anti-union argument.
The anti-union argument is, you know, let the free market work it out.
But I would say historically the free market has too many imperfections for that to lead to a public good.
I think that the unions may have destroyed some companies.
There's no doubt about that.
But I do think the unions balance power in a way that is more productive than not.
In effect, the union is competition, isn't it?
Basically, the union forms a sort of a competition with the owners, and I like competition.
So while you might disagree with unions because they seem to slow down, I don't know what, the economy, I like situations where there's a balance of power.
So I like giving employees some power.
Doesn't work in every situation, though.
And I would suggest that for the same reason we don't allow military people to unionize, we should not allow teachers to unionize.
How many of you would agree that the military and teachers would be categories that could not unionize?
Almost complete agreement.
Now, remember, I'm pro-union.
I'm pro-union.
And, however, I would accept as an alternative more market options.
I think the free market can produce education better than the public market.
But not yet.
I mean, if today you just said, all right, you don't have to go to public school, you can choose yourself, there wouldn't be enough structure to compete.
But in the long run, I don't think there's any doubt that private education would be better than public.
I don't think there's any doubt.
Because competition just gets you there over time.
It just would take a while.
Alright, so I would say we should push for making teachers' unions illegal unless we do the Governor Doug Ducey method of making sure that you can take your money elsewhere.
I see a lot of talk about the election rules and Democrats want to have a bunch of new legislation about election integrity.
And of course the Republicans want, they're still talking about the past elections, etc.
And nobody can agree on all that stuff.
But here's my take. I don't consider any of our leaders legitimate in America.
I don't consider any of our leaders legitimate, not Democrats, not Republicans, not Independents.
None of them are legitimate because we don't have a transparent election system.
Now, I'm going to go with the flow.
I'm not going to start a revolution because for some reason things are cooking along okay, relative to how they could be.
But I refuse to consider any of our elected leaders legitimate because legitimate would...
Infer that we knew they were elected with a system that worked.
We don't know that. We know we have a system that can't tell us that.
All we know is something goes into a black box, or votes, and then what comes out is a politician.
But we don't know what's happening inside the black box.
So we can certainly say that the system has decided that they are in that job.
That's true. The system did what the system does, and somebody sits in that office and does that work.
So we can acknowledge the reality that the system is selecting leaders, but I don't think that any of us should consider those leaders legitimate, because we would have no way of knowing if they had actually been elected.
I mean, just think about this.
Given the non-transparency and non-auditable nature of our elections, you can't audit all of it, you can just audit some pieces of it.
Given that, why would anybody be legitimately elected?
So I think I'm going to start using that kind of language.
I'm going to talk about people who are allegedly elected.
Because I think we need to talk about the elections the same way we talk about people who are accused of crimes.
There are alleged criminals, and we have alleged elections.
We can't confirm that an election happened.
Think about that.
We can't even confirm if an election happened, much less who got elected.
You know, we're one decision away from even knowing if the right person got elected.
We don't even know if we had one.
We literally don't fucking know if we had an election.
We only know that somebody told us we had one.
We don't know what happened.
And as long as that's the case, they are alleged leaders, and that's it.
And by the way, I'll say the same thing if there's a Republican president.
You know, as long as the system is not transparent.
So our alleged leaders...
Anyway, let's talk about something else.
Michael Schellenberger is pointing out that Bloomberg, the publication, has now...
Accepted after being very big on green energy.
So you'd expect the Bloomberg publication being left-leaning, that it would have a lot of green energy and solar power, you know, yay, yay, yay kind of stuff.
But as Michael Schellenberger says in his tweet, he says, but now one of the biggest boosters of natural gas and renewables, media giant Bloomberg, Whose owner, Michael Bloomberg, is directly invested in natural gas and renewals, has published an article conceding and substantiating almost every single point we made over the years.
Now, we meaning Michael Schellenberger and his group of advocates there.
And here's what the article says.
It says, Europe has sleepwalked into an energy crisis that could last years.
Screams the headline. The article concludes that the crisis was years in the making because Europe is, quote, shutting down coal-fired electricity plants and increasing reliance on renewables.
So suddenly, it's all obvious in hindsight.
So from the very beginning, the Michael Schellenbergers and lots of other people were saying, if you replace reliable sources of energy with unreliable sources, you might get unreliable energy.
Weirdly, that was disputed.
If you replace reliable stuff with unreliable stuff, by its nature, it's not even an opinion.
Like, that's something that nobody would even disagree with.
Is solar power, does it work at night?
Nobody says yes to that.
How about that wind power?
Does it work when the wind isn't blowing?
Again, nobody says it does.
So you have a situation where people intentionally and aggressively switched from reliable power to unreliable power, knew they were doing it, and when they were done, they said, oh shit, our power is not reliable.
So, but we're at least seeing a turn in the opinion makers, the Bloombergs of the world, realizing that a lot of the green push was based on overtly impractical ideas.
Things on the surface were impractical.
Like just describing the plan tells you it won't work.
You know, if you have a plan that you know won't work because the not working part is built into the description of the plan, you really have a problem.
Hey, let's replace our reliable energy with unreliable energy.
Did you need to debate that?
Because the plan is the debate.
The plan is telling you it's not going to work.
Let's cure our headaches by shooting ourselves in the foot.
I mean, you know from the plan it will work.
You don't have to do research.
You don't have to go too deep on that one.
All right. Short update on what I call the causeless anger that people have had against me.
Now, I'm not even going to talk about the pandemic stuff.
I'm just going to talk about the psychology and people's reaction to me.
And I got the best hypothesis about what was behind it.
Now what's really behind it is there's this mass formation psychosis thing that people are all flipped out and crazy and they're not thinking well.
And so because I have non-binary opinions, meaning I don't map to one extreme or the other on pandemic stuff, that a lot of people assume I'm on the other side.
And then they get mad without knowing anything about my opinions.
But they're pretty sure they're mad at me.
They just don't know why.
And so for the last 24 hours, I've been asking people, could anybody explain just anything, anything that you disagree with that is making you concerned?
And the experiment was fascinating because nobody could.
You would think it would just be like a straight sentence.
You said X. X is wrong.
I hate you. Nobody could do it.
It was all stuff like, I guess, Brett Weinstein used an Alice in Wonderland quote and just said that my situation was curiouser and curiouser, to which I said, what situation, what topic, what are you talking about?
And then somebody else backed him up Backed him up?
I don't even know what the topic is.
What are we even talking about?
I know people are disappointed, annoyed, turned off, angry, all kinds of emotions, but literally nobody, literally nobody can even tell me what it's about.
And then I heard a hypothesis today that I feel like might be the right one, and I'm going to run it by you.
See if this sounds like why people are mad at me.
And this came from Twitter user Metal Balls, who's probably watching right now.
Hello, Metal Balls.
And this explanation sounded pretty good.
She said, it sounds like you are shaming people for something they wouldn't be able to control either way.
Ordinary perception versus hallucination.
After you intentionally ferret out these reactions, you demean people for having them.
It's hard to watch.
How does that sound?
Does that sound...
sound about right?
I feel like it's not 100% of the story.
Some people just disagree on facts.
But I feel like this is true.
And you've all noticed me blaming my critics of hallucinating, right?
You've all seen that? That I continually tell my critics they're hallucinating?
Now, here's the problem.
It's literally what's happening.
When I say somebody's hallucinating, that's not hyperbole.
I mean actual, literal hallucination.
That they have a memory or a belief in something that just doesn't exist in the real world.
Now, here's the problem.
What should I say when somebody's hallucinating?
And it's obvious, and I'm interacting with them, so our opinions of each other are relevant.
What should I say?
Here's the problem. I don't think the problem is exactly the way I'm saying it.
I think the problem is it's uncomfortable.
How would you feel if somebody told you you were hallucinating on something that you were pretty sure you weren't hallucinating about?
How would it feel?
Like, really shitty, wouldn't it?
It'd feel really bad.
And wouldn't you be mad at the person who called you out for hallucinating in public?
Because remember, I do it in public.
Wouldn't you be mad?
I imagine I would.
I imagine I would if somebody said it about me.
In fact, people have said it about me.
I don't like it at all. Yeah, somebody says the problem is your delivery.
Now, keep in mind that because I do this publicly, here's a nuance that maybe not everybody's aware of.
Do you know that I'm aware that I annoy people?
You know that, right?
Do you know that I do it intentionally?
How many of you know I do it intentionally?
And you know that I could modify my approach, right?
Right? It wouldn't be hard.
It's not like I'm locked in.
If I wanted to just be Mr.
Rogers every day, just say everything's fine, everything's good, I could do that.
It'd be easy. In fact, I'd do that with Dilbert.
For 30-some years, or whatever, I've published a sarcastic comic every day that doesn't seem to make anybody mad.
Nobody's mad at that.
Because it's easy.
It's very easy to be non-provocative.
But you know I do it intentionally, right?
Do you know why? Do you know why I do it intentionally?
Attention? Attention's almost there, but there's like a deeper level of insight.
It's the X factor, right?
The reason you watch me is not because you agree with me.
If all you did is get on here and agree with me all day long, well, you know, maybe I could have a show like that.
But it's not one I'd be interested in.
And it's not what I do.
So what I do is cause you what I'm trying to do, and I think successfully, unfortunately, for a lot of you, what I'm trying to do is make you uncomfortable with your existing opinion.
I'm not trying to make you agree with me.
I'm trying to make you uncomfortable.
Now, for some people, that discomfort is actually a plus.
They like being knocked off their balance point just to see if they can get back on.
And then there are other people who just really don't like that feeling.
They like the feeling of just being confident in their opinion and go with it.
So I would recommend that if you're one of the people who don't like your existing opinion challenged, this is really the wrong content for you.
But if you like to feel challenged and uncomfortable, that's what I'm trying to deliver.
So I do give you opinions with attitude.
The attitude...
It feels like insulting my base.
And I'm aware of that, and I do it intentionally.
For effect. Because if you're insulted, you're going to pay attention and you're going to fight back.
And that's what I want.
I want you to fight back.
Because it's the fighting back that gets you to wrestle with your own opinion as well as mine.
By the way, one of the best advices...
Pieces of advice you'll ever hear is if you want to clarify your opinion, write it down to show to somebody else, you will be amazed how often your opinion can't be written down.
And the reason is because it doesn't make sense.
I learned this when I was writing business cases for a big corporation.
So it'd be my job to take the leadership's argument that we should do X or Y and boil it down to a summary so it could be spread to other people.
And sometimes when I would go to write down the leadership's opinion, it couldn't be done.
It couldn't be written because it didn't make sense.
But you didn't really realize it until you had it on paper.
You're like, wait a minute. Now that I'm looking at it on paper, this doesn't even make sense.
And actually, some projects you just have to, like, stop.
You're like, I don't know.
I don't have an argument. This doesn't even make sense.
So what you'll find is that the process of making you reply to me, which is what getting you angry does, those of you who don't just sign off, but those of you who get angry and feel like you have to reply are now forced to put your opinion in a tweet.
And for some of you, but not all of you, the process of writing down your opinion and looking at it probably has an effect on you.
As in, oh, I just wrote down my opinion and that doesn't look so convincing at all.
So, here's what you need to know.
I don't dislike you.
That's not why I do any of this.
I actually love my audience.
I don't know if that ever comes through.
But part of the reason that I spend so much time doing this is that I get a genuine joy from the interaction.
It's not just about attention.
It's about the interaction. I like attention.
There's no doubt about that.
But it's not about all that.
So, should I challenge you by saying that you're hallucinating?
Just know this.
It's not personal.
It's never personal.
And if it's personal, it's because I want to help you.
It's because I want you to wrestle with your own opinion.
Maybe you can improve it.
Do I imagine that all of my opinions are correct and my critics are wrong?
Do you think I think that? You've watched me talk with my characteristic overconfidence, and I've told you directly that I project more confidence than I have, intentionally.
Because it's good technique.
No, I don't think I'm right all the time.
I'm not even close to that.
In fact, my entire thesis is that the people who think they're right can't tell.
Why would I be different?
But what we can do is bash ideas against each other until we all get smarter.
I think that's happening.
And I'll say it again.
I believe that my audience for these live streams...
Not so much for the Twitter stuff, because that's quick takes and just making people angry usually.
But for the longer form stuff, I will say with great confidence, my characteristic overconfidence, that this is the most well-informed audience in America.
That's what I think.
What do you think? I think you're the most well-informed audience in terms of how to think about stuff.
Not just the data, but how to grasp, grapple with it, how to wrestle with it.
That's what I think. So anyway, metal balls, good input.
I think that is what's happening.
I think the word hallucination is real triggering, but I'm not going to stop doing it.
Because I would prefer your anger...
Over your disinterest.
If I may be honest.
And I think the real problem is that the truth is shocking.
The truth is that we hallucinate so easily, all of us, me included, we hallucinate so easily that facing that reality is really painful.
And I sort of make people face reality that they literally imagine something about me.
Dooley says, Adams was mind-reading when he said Rob was having fun killing Bin Laden and owes an apology.
Well, if that had been serious and also wrong, I would apologize.
But my mind-reading of what it would feel like to shoot Bin Laden multiple times, you should assume that that was how I would have felt in the situation.
Don't assume that that's mind reading.
That's more just talking.
Craig says, you used to be entertaining, and then you stopped.
That's disappointing, not angriving.
Well, I think what you're seeing is that when you take Trump out of the headlines, that the news becomes less entertaining.
I would imagine that I'm about the same, but the news itself is just way...
Have you seen the ratings for the news?
The news itself, the ratings are through the floor.
Right? Just through the floor.
So, yeah, the entertainment value of the news just dropped when Twitter was out of it.
All right, well, let's get to something interesting.
I would like to give you one point to consider about Dr.
Malone, and then we'll be done with him, okay?
Okay. My understanding, and I'll take a fact check on this, Andre Speckhouse says this about Dr.
Malone's appearance on Joe Rogan, that apparently Dr.
Malone claimed that ivermectin and some secret, unknown early treatment package that included ivermectin, presumably, totally crushed COVID in Uttar Pradesh, a state in India.
How many of you have heard that, either from Dr.
Malone or not?
Now, oh, don't get ahead of me.
Don't get ahead of me. Some of you are questioning whether Andres Bacchus is a good source.
You don't have to for this.
You don't have to. I'm not going to tell you he's a good source or a bad source.
That's irrelevant. Here's all I'm going to ask of you.
Let us put our disagreement, if we have any, about Dr.
Malone into this one question.
First, fact-check it.
So we'll start by fact-checking it because we don't want to make a judgment on something you didn't say.
Would you...
Is it a... Is it fair to say that Dr.
Malone said that ivermectin was a major cause of utter Pradesh crushing their COVID? Did he say it?
Lots of people say he didn't say it.
Interesting. A bunch of yeses and a bunch of nos.
So the ones who say he didn't say it, did he say something on this topic?
How do we not even know that?
So a lot of people are saying he said it.
But let's deal with that, okay?
He said he did not know why.
Okay. But did he say that they used an early treatment package that may have included ivermectin?
All right, well, I want to give you a little bit of insight as to why it might be That it seemed like the COVID deaths went to zero in Utter Pradesh.
Here's a little background information.
And here's what I suggest.
Find out for sure what Dr.
Malone said about that. All right?
So whatever you think he said about that, just find out for sure.
And if you think that he said ivermectin or some early treatment worked in Uttar Pradesh, it doesn't matter if it was ivermectin for this next point.
Simply ask yourself this.
Just Google a fact check.
Google Uttar Pradesh, U-T-T-A-R, P-R-A-D-E-S-H, and then COVID and then fact check.
Just Google those things.
Now, did I just tell you that the fact-checkers are always right and the expert doctor who's one of the top in his field is wrong?
Nope. Nope.
He said unknown protocol.
All right. So let's take...
Can we agree with that? Does everybody agree that Dr.
Malone referred to an unknown protocol that crushed COVID in Uttar Pradesh?
Would everybody agree with that?
I think maybe the confusion is he may have mentioned ivermectin and then also mentioned that, so maybe they got conflated.
All right, so it doesn't matter, for my purposes, it doesn't matter what drugs they used, okay?
So the claim is that there was early treatment and that that could be related to crushing the COVID. Am I okay so far?
I want to make sure that my claim is compatible with what he actually said, and I'm not paraphrasing.
So I think I'm on...
There was an early treatment protocol.
We don't know the details.
But that his claim was, apparently, it worked.
Right? Okay, I think we're on the same page now.
So we'll take the ivermectin out of the story, because it wasn't important for the point I'm going to make.
Just that there was an early treatment.
Here's another fact about that same state.
Apparently there were many regions within the state who had zero deaths during the same time.
Not zero deaths from COVID, but zero deaths.
So during the time that they were taking the unknown early treatment protocol, they also had zero car accidents and zero suicides.
They didn't have any cancer, no murders, Now, these were areas that typically would have all of these things, and lots of them.
But for the exact same time that this early protocol was eliminating deaths from COVID, it also eliminated deaths from all other causes.
Now, that's a good protocol.
That is a good protocol.
Because, you know, I'd be happy if the early treatment protocol just fixed COVID. But apparently, based on the data end of Uttar Pradesh, it can also stop car accidents, homicides, suicides, and every form of medical morbidity.
That's pretty good.
So I think not only is Dr.
Malone right...
He's more right than anything I've ever seen.
I've never even heard of an early treatment protocol that could stop car accidents.
But that's pretty good.
So, what do you think happened here?
Could it be that India has a data problem?
Could it be that those areas that for months reported zero deaths of any kind...
Maybe that might be behind why we think that the early treatment was so good.
So here's my point.
If you look at the fact checks and compare it to the claim, I don't believe that you'll walk away from this thinking that the claim is stronger than the fact checks.
Now, I'm not going to tell you it's true.
I want you to do it.
And I would like you not to have any conversation with me about Dr.
Malone, period, until you've done this one thing.
Can we agree? And if it turns out that on that one point there was an early protocol treatment that really worked in this Uttar Pradesh region, then I would say that Dr.
Malone's supporters are right.
I would say that they're right.
Now, Mike says I'm misreading this.
Say more, Mike, because you could be right.
I would like to pause now so that you can all notice me being less confident...
You don't see it a lot.
You can notice me saying I could be wrong.
Because when people are saying you're misinterpreting it, I take that very seriously.
Because everybody misinterprets everything.
So somebody says, watch the interview.
Why is it that you can't answer that question, but you think that if I watched it, I could?
What makes you think that?
If all of you collectively who watch the interview can't tell me this simple statement, did Dr.
Malone say that he believes an early treatment protocol substantially lowered the COVID problems in that state?
That's a pretty specific claim.
You can't tell me if that happened on the video?
Some people say he did, but others are agreeing with Mike that I'm misinterpreting.
Can you give me just a little bit...
I think you might be right, by the way.
Can you give me just a little bit more?
Whoever said I misinterpreted?
Why is it a big deal? It's a big deal because there's one thing we can check with enough confidence that we could say, is the doctor giving us accurate or inaccurate information?
Oh, if somebody says Dr.
McCullough did, all right.
But that's different. Uh...
But nobody can give me a reason why I'm misinterpreting it.
He disclaims, like you, countries are not comparable.
That is correct. I've watched most of it.
But if...
Let me...
I have to push back on something.
If you think that my watching it is going to help as much as you think, I think you're wrong.
Because we just watched...
All of you watched it, and you can't even agree what you saw.
I mean, you're seeing that in real time, right?
You all watched it, and you don't even know what you saw.
You're not even agreeing on whether he said that fact or not.
Now, I know that the third hypothesis is that the ivermectin knocked down some worms that people would have, and that would allow their own body to recover better.
So there could be some of that in the numbers, too.
The from COVID part was implied.
Scott is implying what Malone said and arguing with what he didn't say or.
Well, that's what I'm trying to avoid.
But wouldn't it be easy for you to tell me Dr.
Malone either said early treatment worked in utter pradesh, or he said it might have.
You can't tell me that?
You all watched it.
You all think that if I watch it, I could get that answer.
But why couldn't you get that answer?
You watched it. All right, Paul, I'm just going to get rid of you for being an asshole.
Like, we all get that I said I'd watch it.
I've watched some of it. I haven't.
So if that's all you can hammer on, you're not really doing anything useful here.
So just go away. He said the U.S. got involved, didn't know why.
Huh. Uh...
Malone said Biden met with Modi and the utter Pradesh info was suppressed.
So he was suggesting that there might be a conspiracy, but he wasn't committing to it, right?
All right. Let's talk more about parasitic worms.
Yes. He specifically said he doesn't know the protocol, which doesn't matter to me, right?
It didn't matter to my point.
All right, I'm going to end the Dr.
Malone conversation by saying, if you check that one claim and you believe that he got that right, then I won't have any more problems with Dr.
Malone. Agree?
If he got this one claim right, whatever he claimed...
I will go watch it, by the way.
But whatever he claimed, if he got it right, then I will agree with you that Dr.
Malone is an expert, and he should be listened to.
But would you agree with me that if this claim was wildly off base, then maybe you should question some of the other things he said?
Fair enough? Let's just put it all in this one question and walk away, and then we don't have to talk about it.
And the claim was that Uttar Pradesh defeated its COVID with an unknown protocol of early treatment.
I say it didn't happen.
He says it did.
Allegedly. I don't want to...
But, you know, I'm getting enough pushback on what he did say that I'm not entirely sure.
But give me a video clip on just that part and maybe you'll save me some time.
But I will listen to the rest of it.
Honestly, I don't know how anybody listens to three hours of content on anything.
How do you listen to three hours of talking from one guy?
How do you listen to me?
I don't know. Let's talk about placebos.
Do you know why placebos work?
Anybody? Does anybody know why placebos work?
I'll bet you don't.
Give me some ideas.
Do placebos work because we think they work?
Well, it turns out that it's a little bit confusing.
I was doing a little research this morning.
One of the reasons that placebos appear to work Anyway, this is the best part of the show.
Glad you waited. The reason that placebos appear to work might be that you think they worked and they didn't.
And one example would be asthma.
If you give somebody an asthma placebo and ask them if it worked, they'll say yes.
But if you measure their actual oxygen, it didn't.
So part of why placebos seem to work is people say they feel better, but nothing's actually different.
It's just an imagination. But there's a weirder category where people's body will actually be measurably better.
For example, if you give somebody a placebo blood pressure med, it can actually lower the blood pressure and you can measure it.
So the second reason is that the brain actually somehow, for those things that the brain can directly control, it just has to know what its intention is and then it just does it.
But is that the only reason?
So some of it is the brain actually corresponding to what you think it should do.
And then there's this weird, weird result that I'd never heard before, which is that the longer you use the placebo, the better it works.
Have you ever heard that before?
So if you had a placebo and you said, all right, we're going to give you this placebo for, I don't know, blood pressure, and everybody thought it was real, if you started measuring their blood pressure on day one, Maybe a few people would actually have better blood pressure.
And you'd say, well, there's that placebo effect.
But allegedly, if you came back in a month, even more people would have even better blood pressure.
And if you came back a month after that, even more people would be better.
So somehow a placebo increases in power over time.
What?! What?
How is any of this possible?
All right. Let me add a hypothesis that is not included in WebMD, where they tell you what causes...
Oh, and the other possibility is that placebo will reduce your anxiety.
So if you believe you're being helped, the lowering of your stress...
This response could make you just get better because your body would be better at healing itself because you would reduce your stress over your own problem.
Also possible.
Here is my own interpretation to add to the mix.
If we are a simulation, as I expect we are, And I've told you before that intention appears, don't know for sure, but it appears to rewrite the simulation.
If you take a placebo, and you're a group of people, let's say, a group of people take a placebo, you could count on some of those people to say, because people are all different and weird, some of those people would say, I don't know if this placebo or this pill is going to work or not.
And then they would get exactly that result.
They would say, I want it to work, but I'm not confident.
And then nothing happens.
So there would be lots of people who would take a pill and say, I don't know.
I don't know if it's going to work. Would those people have an intention of getting better, or would they simply want to get better?
I would say those are people who want to get better, but they don't trust that there's any mechanism for it to happen.
And maybe they don't get better.
But suppose... We're good to go.
And at that point, does it actually just change the simulation?
In other words, are people who take placebos using the placebo as just a, let's say, a technique to change their own intentions, and then the intentions change the simulation, and the simulation just gives you back your health?
I'm not going to say that's what's happening.
I'm going to say that it would explain everything we see.
Which doesn't mean it's true.
But as a filter for explaining the world, you should take the one that explains everything and predicts.
So, that would explain every part of the placebos.
That you're just making it happen because that's how things work.
You want to get weirder? Here's my hypothesis with no science behind it, right?
This is just a speculation.
I've never quite bought into the mechanism for evolution, meaning that it's just chance and mutation and time, and that things that are more adaptive are more likely to survive.
There might be some of that going on.
But I really, based on everything that I see about how intentions appear to actually just change reality, Would you suspect that if a giraffe could not reach the leaves that are higher up on the tree, that its intention, which would be very clear, to reach the leaves at the top of the tree, but they can't?
It's not like the neck is going to grow in real time, right?
We don't have that capability.
Could that giraffe, by its intention alone, intention alone, very clear, want to reach higher leaves, Could that translate into the child?
In other words, could it change which child the giraffe has?
Could that child then, on average, have a longer neck?
Now, there's no scientific mechanism for this.
I'm quite aware of that, right?
Epigenetics means that you're trying to do the thing and the attempt moved to the next generation.
But that... I think epigenetics...
Give me a science lesson here, fact check me.
I think the idea for that is, let's say, if your father lifted a lot of objects and had big muscles, that the child would more likely have big muscles, which I don't believe has any evidence to support it, right?
Am I right on that so far?
But that's not what I'm talking about.
I'm talking about a pure mental process in which intending something translates into which children get born.
Now, again, I want to say as clearly as possible, there's no evidence for that.
None whatsoever. But if we are a simulation for which the argument is very strong...
If we are a simulation, it does suggest that intentions can change things, and that maybe that's behind placebos.
It's just an intention play.
Could be. Anyway, Lamarckism, yeah, all those things are not what I'm talking about.
Epigenetics and Lamarckism are not what I'm talking about.
Right? Right? Definitely not talking about those things.
But apparently most of you will just say, I'm talking about those things, and then that'll be the end of it.
I know I can't win this.
As soon as you're reminded of something else, then your brain goes there and you're done.
So Hitler's parents wanted...
Well, no, I'm not suggesting it works for every person in every situation.
I'm suggesting that it would be a statistical difference over time.
All right. And that is what I wanted to say, except that if you extended this to its natural conclusion, and this is a Twitter user, GFODOR, that is either GFODOR or girlfriend odor.
G-F-O-D-O-R. I hope it's his last name or something.
I hope his girlfriend doesn't have odor.
But anyway, he tweets...
He's got a theory.
He says a clinical trial might show that if you're a Trump supporter, ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine would work because of the placebo effect.
What do you think of that?
Do you think that if you did a trial of Trump supporters versus non-Trump supporters, you'd find that the Trump supporters actually did get value from ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, possibly the placebo, but you would find that the Democrats would not because they would be sure they wouldn't work?
That could actually be tested.
I mean, I don't know if it's ethical or anything, but you could test it, right?
Robert's asking, why don't masks work?
Robert, we're so done with masks.
So done with masks.
Yes, so, could it be...
Let me take you further. You want to get weirder?
Do you remember that Dr.
Zelenko had the Zelenko protocol?
And he was saying that he was curing people with hydroxy and some other drugs in combo.
What if he was? What if he was?
What if the doctor's confidence, because he projected himself with great confidence, what if his confidence actually convinced his customers in a way that other patients were not convinced by their doctors, what if the doctor convinced them it was going to work?
Simply because he had that doctor confidence.
Do you think that... I'm sorry, Zelensky.
I'll take the correction.
It's Dr. Zelensky.
I pronounced his name wrong.
Do you think that Dr.
Zelensky could make hydroxychloroquine work for his patients, but not for other people?
Yes. That's the weird thing.
I'm not saying that's what happened.
I'm not saying that that's what happened.
I'm saying it's actually possible.
You could have a charismatic doctor who could cure people with placebos.
In fact, I imagine witch doctors did that all the time, right?
They just convinced people that they were fixed and then they felt better.
Yeah, so...
It would be easy for me to imagine that there's a world in which ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine totally work...
But only for people who think it will.
Remember, the placebo effect isn't small.
The placebo effect could be anywhere from 15% to, wait for it, 70%.
The placebo effect is so big, potentially, in any given situation, is potentially so big that if the people who believed these drugs would work took them, It would look exactly like it was a wonder drug.
So the weird situation is that we can't rule out is that ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine both work and also don't work.
That's entirely possible.
That they completely...
You know, they work so well that they might make a gigantic difference in mortality...
And not have any medical efficacy whatsoever.
That's completely possible.
Somebody says vaccines, but I think you would catch that in the data a little bit faster.
You may have an indica sativa imbalance causing random thoughts.
No, I don't need anything to have random thoughts.
Um... If we're in a simulation, we won't be able to create a simulation like the one we were residing in.
I'll tell you, I have a hypothesis that if we are a simulation, there is a way to know it.
And the way to know it is that over time, there are more and more hints until you realize you're in a simulation and then you wake up.
Or the game's over.
Can the opposite be true?
That if you told people it wouldn't work, that it wouldn't work?
Yes. Actually, the opposite has been tested.
So you can make people sicker with a placebo or healthier, depending on what they believe will do.
That actually has been tested.
All right. Yeah, we're not going to talk about masks anymore.
The thing with masks is there was a time when that conversation made sense, but not now, obviously.
Now the only conversation that masks is, what time is it?
Have two weeks passed?
In two weeks, everything's going to be different.
Maybe worse. Maybe better.
But any conversation about the details in the next two weeks is a waste of time.
Because the whole pandemic landscape is going to be completely different in two weeks.
By the way, Scott Gottlieb said that.
And he's been a pretty straight shooter on the COVID stuff.
And he's basically saying it looks like Omicron will blow through in two weeks.
So February 1 is looking pretty strong as a time for the public...
To exert its pressure on its government and say, now's the time.
Now's the time to drop the mandates.
Is Scott Gottlieb behind the curtain?
I would guess so. I would guess so.
so.
I don't know for sure, but I would guess so.
Star Painter says, you are my placebo.
Well, allow me to be all of your placebo.
And by the way, this is real.
Do you know I tell you every day that the simultaneous sip is making your antibodies stronger?
That's not for nothing.
Statistically speaking, I would place a very strong bet that for the regular listeners, your antibodies are stronger than the average.
Would anybody take that bet?
Would anybody take the bet?
That my regular listeners have stronger antibodies.
Forget about the vaccinations, but have stronger antibodies than the people who don't listen.
I'll bet they do. Because every day they hear a message that says that their antibodies are getting stronger.
And while you say to yourself, well, that's not going to talk me into it, cartoonist on a live stream, if you hear it enough, it just becomes part of your programming.
So that's why I do it so often.
All right, and that, ladies and gentlemen, is the end of the best show you've ever seen in your life, possibly the best experience that anybody's had anywhere on any planet in any dimension.
And I think that that's a good high point on which to end this.
I am going to take your guidance collectively, if you don't mind.
I'd like to take your advice.
And to turn my attention less to this fighting about COVID stuff and more about some things that are fun and useful and just anything else.
Just anything else. But I'm personally done with masks and stuff like that.
I think that in two weeks or so the public will take control.
I never believed that we would be doomed and I think we're going to be in good shape.
