Episode 1622 Scott Adams: Let's Talk About My Vaccination Regrets and Cognitive Blindness. Lots of Persuasion Lessons Today
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
Whiteboard1: Creating Cognitive Blindness
Voting rights, a Dem diversionary tactic?
Rachel Maddow's signal words for FAKE News
Insurance cost and vaxxx status
China's Omicron options
Whiteboard2: My Vaccination Regret
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topics to build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure.
---
Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scott-adams00/support
Welcome to the best thing that ever happened to you.
It's called Coffee with Scott Adams.
And this morning we're going to do something really special.
It's called the simultaneous sip.
Yeah, you might have heard of it.
It's famous everywhere now.
And it's the way to take a good situation and turn it into a great situation.
And in fact, we have lots of stimulating topics today.
We've got good news, stimulation, and According to Paul, we have good audio.
We're in good shape today.
And so, all you need is a cupper, a mug, a glass, a tanker, a cellist, a canteen, a jug, a flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
It's called the simultaneous sip, and it happens now.
Go! Ah, I've seen some good memes go by on the Locals platform.
By the way, if you're on YouTube, could you hit the subscribe button for me while you're thinking about it?
Assuming you'd like to subscribe to this channel.
And if you want to see more of my content, then you can see in the more censored environment, the Locals platform is where you want to go for that.
Locals. All right.
Here was a tweet that caught my attention.
From Austin Allred.
And he tweeted this. He said, someone I know reported having an incredible year in every way.
And I asked him, what changed?
He said, I just decided I'd try believing in the simulation and behave as if that were true.
See how it plays out.
So as soon as he changed his frame...
From, let's call it standard reality, to a simulation mindset, it doesn't mean that's true.
It was just a frame, a change of frame of how to look at reality, that apparently his intentions started translating directly into reality.
Now, if we are a simulation, I feel there's at least anecdotal evidence that your intentions have some kind of effect.
And I make the difference between the things you want, which are not intentions, they're just things you want.
Things you hope for, that's not it.
Things you're optimistic about, nope, that's not it.
But intention, like you really intend for something to happen.
And it does seem that, at least from a subjective reality perspective, It does seem like your intentions are guiding the universe.
So here's one more report on that.
I'm not going to tell you there's any scientific backing for this.
I will just say that it was absolutely free for this individual to try it.
So if you were to try this reframing yourself, just imagine you're a game player in a game, Doesn't cost you anything.
In fact, nobody will even know you're doing it.
You can actually do it while you're bored standing in line.
Or you're bored in a meeting.
Just say to yourself, what if this were just a video game?
And the challenge is to, you know, like, give something to honor and be happy or whatever.
And what if my intentions could steer it?
It's just something you could play with in your head.
Because you'll find that if you imagine the world is a video game...
It's easier to imagine that your problems aren't real.
Because you know how many of your problems are really just problems because of the way you react to them?
I mean, the outside reality is going to give you challenges, of course.
But the way you react to them is your immediate problem.
And as long as you change the frame to a video game, you'd say, oh, I'm competing.
If you were, let's say, a hurdler in the Olympics where you're supposed to jump over these obstacles, you wouldn't say that the hurdles are obstacles.
You wouldn't call the hurdles problems because it's a game.
You say, oh, that's how the game works.
I have to work through how to jump over these hurdles really quickly.
You can actually reframe your own experience.
This is what I used to do with school.
So if you have a student who has trouble seeing the significance of school, because it's really hard when you're young to see how this all connects to your future, not everybody can do that.
But if you say, well, think of it more like a sport...
Think of it as a competition.
So every time there was a test coming when I was a student, I would say, oh, it's not a test, it's like a competition.
So I'm going to see how I do against the other competitors.
And that made it easy to study.
Because it's not hard for me to practice a sport.
You know, it's not really fun, fun to practice, let's say, tennis.
It's more fun to play a game.
But I still can do it because, you know, I know it's connected to something.
All right. South Korea, there's an entity there that has a fusion reactor that has done its thing for 30 seconds.
Apparently in November, they successfully sustained fusion for 30 seconds.
Now, you might say to yourself, Scott, I'm not impressed.
That's only 30 seconds.
How is that going to help us?
Well, I'm not 100% sure this is true, but it feels to me like a confirmation of something I told you maybe five years ago, that fusion had already been reduced from a scientific problem to an engineering problem.
The significance of that is that engineering problems almost always get solved.
A scientific problem, well, maybe not, you know, because that's pretty basic.
Like, maybe we can make an anti-gravity machine, but maybe not, right?
But when you get to the point where you can maintain something for 30 seconds, you are past the theoretical part.
That was the hard part.
A hard part meaning unpredictable whether you could do it or not.
But in terms of whether you can now engineer it to be more than 30 seconds and become economically viable, that becomes a good bet.
So you just went from fusion being a flying car coming next year kind of perpetual joke to would you bet against it now?
Would you bet against Fusion if you knew they'd done it for 30 seconds?
The thing that was considered impossible?
I don't know. This seems like really good news, and it's not the only Fusion entity that's getting results.
So this is probably the biggest thing, maybe the biggest thing in civilization right now.
Is that too big?
Can I say that?
That what's coming in Fusion, well, maybe robots or AI, Yeah, robots, AI, they're probably as big or bigger.
All right, do you remember Tucker Carlson's weird theory that I have mocked in the past because I couldn't understand it, which was that the Democrats will always accuse you of the exact thing they're doing.
Now, I always mock that because I thought, well, that's just a coincidence, and it's just really, it looks that way because both sides accuse everybody of everything.
Right? So if you selectively decide what you're going to look at, it would look like Democrats are accusing you of what they're doing, but from their perspective, it would look the opposite.
And really, there's nothing there.
That was my original opinion.
I have modified my opinion.
Because there is a mechanism that would explain it as a strategy.
Because you ask yourself, what's up with the fact that it appears, it appears like they do, in fact, the Democrats, do, in fact, blame the Republicans for their own crimes.
Now, could it be coincidence?
Could it be selective perception?
Could it be just politics?
Could it be projection, where they don't know they're doing it?
Like, literally, they don't know they're doing it.
That would be projection.
But you can't rule out a strategy, right?
But if it's a strategy, how the hell does it work?
Like, how does that work?
And that's the part I think I figured out.
Let me explain it to you. Suppose you knew you were going to do an evil thing.
It doesn't matter what it is.
We'll fill in some examples later.
But let's say you just decided, I'm going to do evil thing A, whatever A is.
And... How would you make sure you covered it up?
You would start by accusing your opponent of doing that evil thing.
Let me give you an example.
Suppose you heard the following story.
Somebody accused me of stealing some diamonds from somebody's house.
And let's say you don't know me, so I'm just a random person.
So I've been accused of stealing diamonds from somebody's house.
And I say, in response, that's not what happened.
You stole my diamonds.
You're the stealer of diamonds, not me.
Which one do you believe?
Do you believe the first one who's accused of stealing diamonds?
Or do you believe the one who said, that's not what happened.
You stole the diamonds from me.
Your bias is for the first accusation, because first impressions are sticky in any context.
Whatever is the first idea you get in your head, it's hard to get it out.
So if somebody says, Scott, you stole my diamonds, my protest that, no, in fact, in reality, you stole my diamonds, it doesn't matter if it's true.
People can't see it.
It'll be invisible.
It's like a cloak of invisibility.
And so, if you can get the media to support your narrative, then in fact, it's the opponents who are doing the crime, it becomes a cognitive blindness for their base.
What would be an example of this?
Russia collusion.
Right, Russia collusion.
The best example. We know for sure...
That the Clinton campaign colluded with foreign elements to overthrow, essentially, the will of the people.
We know that for sure.
I don't even think there's any part of that that's in dispute by the left or the right.
And yet, we're completely inactive about it.
What? How could that possibly be?
And it's because this works.
It's because they accused Trump, which allowed them to hide the fact that they were doing it themselves.
The first impression was sticky, so there's even a name for Russia collusion.
But the thing that they were doing doesn't even have a name.
Right? One of them got a brand and a name and a year of coverage.
The other one doesn't even have a way to refer to it.
And yet it's completely true.
Objectively, researchably, factually true.
And the media created the narrative.
Even though some portion of the country understands what happened, we don't act on it.
Because if the media is acting like it's not real, and that includes even Fox News being silent on some stuff, if nobody else is treating it as a big deal, it's hard for you to do it.
But if the media tells you it's the biggest problem in the world, then suddenly you're all activated.
Like you're going to protest and you're going to tweet and stuff like this.
But if they don't tell you it's important, you'll actually act like it isn't.
You might know intellectually it's important.
It's really important. But your body won't do anything.
You'll just go to work.
You'll just do the same thing you were going to do before.
So right now we're watching Joe Biden talking about voting rights.
What do you think is really happening?
Am I right? The real story is that Mark Goliath, the lawyer on the Democrat side, did a really good job, and I'm going to give him just a solid compliment.
This won't be a criticism, because he used the legal system, opportunistically, with other people, to create an election situation, which I understand to be completely legal, I mean, the Republicans could have taken advantage of a similar thing in a different way if they had.
It would have been legal. So through completely legal means, the Democrats have gamed the system to advantage.
They wouldn't want you to know that.
They wouldn't want you to concentrate on it.
So instead, all of the attention is on this voting rights thing, because it ties into racial politics.
And it's a perfect distraction for whatever they may or may not be planning to do in this upcoming election.
So if they can make the only narrative that you care about, voting rights, Effectively accusing the opponent of being the one who's gaming the system in the inappropriate way.
Once that becomes the narrative, it doesn't matter what they do to the elections upcoming.
You're going to be blind to it.
Because the thing in your mind is that Republicans are trying to suppress a vote.
Now forget about the fact...
That the argument that Republicans are trying to suppress votes is close to ridiculous if you're talking about things like requiring an identification.
I mean, I think we could all just laugh at that one, right?
Like, almost every other element of society that has any importance whatsoever, from driving a car to attending college to anything...
Pretty much anything. You need identification.
So to imagine that this would be the exception is just truly absurd.
All right? Truly absurd.
But it doesn't matter.
As long as it's your first impression, as long as the media narrative keeps pushing it, you will be cognitively blind to anything they do with shenanigans in the election.
Now, let me stop short of conspiracy theory and say that I don't know that this is any intentional strategy by anybody.
I don't know that.
I'm just saying if you look at the possibilities, you can't rule this one out because it works every time.
It's a little bit obvious.
I mean, it took me a while to get there, but if you worked in this domain, it probably would have been a little more obvious, I guess, if you were a political operative.
I would imagine a skilled political operative would just automatically know to do this.
It took me a while to figure it out.
But that doesn't mean it's intentional.
It could actually be projection.
It could be coincidence. It could be selective memory.
Who knows? All right.
One of the stories that Democrats think is important is weird.
And it's the fact that on January 6th of last year, Laura Ingram was texting the White House with advice on basically de-escalating the protests.
And I saw, you know, a tweet by Nick Walden Poublon.
And... He's saying that Laura Ingram texted Mark Meadows, telling the White House how to respond to the...
Oh, it's about the aftermath. How to respond to the aftermath of the insurrection, like she was a White House councillor.
And then he goes on to say, can you imagine how enraged the right would be if they found out Rachel Maddow was texting the White House on how to deal with major world events?
Let me add some context here.
There's some, like, seriously missing context.
First of all, if I heard that a Democratic administration had gotten advice from Rachel Maddow about how to deal with public relations, I would have said, that's good advice.
Wouldn't you? I mean, wouldn't Rachel Maddow be a perfect...
Source of advice for how public opinion would be formed around any situation in politics.
Now, hold on.
You can say you don't like her advice, but I'm saying wouldn't it be the most normal thing that somebody who works at the highest level in that exact field forming public opinion about political stuff If that's the person that was asked or even just offered advice, I would think that was appropriate.
I wouldn't necessarily think the advice was good, but I would think it was perfectly appropriate to listen to somebody with that level of intelligence and experience in that exact job.
So when I hear that there's something weird about Laura Ingraham texting Mark Meadows about how to handle the aftermath, which I assume means the politics and the public relations of it, who would be better than that?
I mean, seriously.
Like, if you were going to put together, like, the master group of best people you could ever get advice from in this exact situation, how to handle the politics of a, you know, tough political situation, don't you want somebody who's exactly Laura Ingraham?
Sean Hannity?
Wouldn't you want to hear from Sean Hannity on that question?
Like, if you didn't want to hear from the very people who were at the top of the field, who the hell are you talking to?
Now, here's some more context that I don't know that the left knows.
I think a lot of you know it.
The Trump administration was fantastically good, and we'll never get credit for this, at collecting input outside their bubble.
Did everybody know that?
Trump in particular.
And then I think that maybe that culture spread out.
Now, some of it was because he was inexperienced at being a politician, I think.
But some of it was just smart.
Because one of the things that nobody criticized Trump for, correct me if I'm wrong, but even his critics do not criticize him for this, which is taking advice from a lot of different sources.
Am I right? I don't believe he's ever been criticized for that.
I think that he's generally considered someone who listens, genuinely listens.
Like everybody who's given him advice says the same thing.
Pretty much universally.
And I will tell you the same thing as well.
Because I got to speak to him personally.
And I can confirm he absolutely listened attentively to what I was saying.
And gave it its full due.
You know, I had a different opinion in a case or two.
But gave my opinion its full due.
Now, I'm sure that he treats other people the same way.
And I'm also aware that even pundits such as myself were routinely contacted by the administration for opinions as they were just reaching out to collect lots of different opinions.
Now, did everybody know that?
I'm not going to name names, but you could make some educated guesses.
The blue checks on Twitter that were maybe Trump-friendly, you don't think that they were contacted on a regular basis to get their input about how to handle a thing?
Of course, it happened all the time.
It was the most normal thing in the world.
Now, I don't know if it happens with other administrations.
I'd never been involved in any part of that before.
Well, with one exception, I guess.
Yeah.
So can we say at this point with certainty that Antifa, BLM, and even Occupy Wall Street, in terms of their protest activities, not in terms of their existence, but in terms of their protest energy, that was but in terms of their protest energy, that was all fake.
wasn't it? Can we say that now just as a fact?
Because nothing changed.
They didn't get anything.
I mean, there are a few cities that defunded the police, but not to the extent that any of them would be happy about it.
Do you think that the police stopped shooting black citizens during arrests?
Did that happen?
Or is it possible we're just not hearing about it?
Now, it is possible that they actually changed their behavior.
It's possible. I kind of doubt it, because most of the cases that we've heard about seem like genuine mistakes.
In my opinion, most of the high-profile cases, they just seem like mistakes.
So do mistakes stop happening?
Because they all seem like different kinds of mistakes.
They were all one-offs.
I don't know how you get rid of one-off mistakes, because that's what makes them one-offs.
So, I feel as if we can say this as just a fact, as opposed to a conspiracy theory.
That if nothing really fundamentally stopped, but the protesting stopped as soon as the elections, you know, started to go a certain way.
I don't know. It looks fake to me.
It looks like there was outside funding, or even inside funding.
Um... So I guess Rachel Maddow, to speak of her again, has some kind of story about Mark Meadows being, quote, tied to forged election documents.
Tied to them. What are some of the other tweets on this same topic, and what kind of language do they use for this story that's totally true?
Here are some of the language I pulled out of tweets that Mark Meadows...
That there's some information that, quote, suggests some involvement in forged documents.
Also that Rachel Maddow put the pieces together and also connects to and involved in.
So Mark Maddow might be tied to involved in, there was a suggestion of some involvement, Possibly connected to.
Those are all like glaring signals for fake news.
Am I right? All that indirect connection stuff.
Now, I'm not saying there's nothing there, because...
Who knows? Sometimes accusations are true.
So I don't know what is true.
I'm just saying that if you were going to look for a story that on its surface, at first glance, looked like bullshit, this would be it.
Because it's this kind of language that really, really signals bullshit.
Yeah, there's ties to it.
Do you know what else Mark Meadows has ties to?
Or maybe some involvement in?
Or is maybe connected to?
Everything that happened in the Republican world.
If you're the chief of staff...
Or you have some high-end position in the administration, you're tied to everything, either directly or indirectly.
So this one doesn't seem like it's anything.
All right, you should be following in a Twitter account of Ethical Skeptic.
So just look for that, Ethical Skeptic.
And I would like to call out an amazing visualization that he did.
He does a lot of great data visualization stuff.
But I'm such a data visualization nerd that when I see somebody do like a spectacular job of it, where you can really see what at least the message is.
Who knows about the data, but you can at least see what the message was.
His take on it is this.
I'll just read it. He said, so if Omicron with a 7.7 death rate versus Delta, that means for every 100 people who would die of Delta, you'd only get less than 8% would die of Omicron.
I believe he said that came from the South African numbers.
How accurate is the South African experience and their data?
Don't know. But it's what he had.
So... Take that as an assumption that you could be questioned.
But if you take that assumption, this is what he worked out.
So he says Omicron has been the predominant variant for three weeks now.
And the average day of death...
It's day 18 after detection.
So after you detected with the virus, 18 days later on average, that's when you're going to die, if you're going to die.
Then he says, then we should see a fallen death next week.
Or something is not right.
Now the something that's not right could be the assumption about Omicron, right?
But it also could be something else.
And who knows what?
But the...
If this prediction is right, it would mean February 1st is starting to look good for a back-off of mandates and restrictions.
Because if things are heading down for a week or two, and we know why...
If things are heading down, and we know why, and it looks like that should continue, then the argument for any kind of restriction just falls apart.
I mean, arguably it's already fallen apart, you would say.
You know what would be the handiest thing?
I would love if everybody's hallucination had a URL. Because so many people talk to me about their hallucinations.
Usually I'm in them.
And I can't really see them.
It would help me a lot if we just had a URL for that and I could just connect directly to your hallucination.
I believe this is possible with Elon Musk's company Neuralink.
I believe that someday somebody will say, let me tell you what I think about your predictions, Scott.
And I'll say, hold on, hold on.
I can't see your hallucination.
Can you send that link?
And then they'd use their Neuralink to Neuralink, probably through, you know...
Starlink. And then I would see directly, they'd just send the URL, and I'd say, oh, yeah, okay, now I'm in your hallucination.
Go on. And then I can listen to it appropriately.
Just an idea.
Rasmussen said that Biden's public support, his approval, is down to 39%, the lowest ever.
I think it was Quinnipiac that had it at 33%.
So, Joe, not doing so good.
But Rasmussen also found that democratic voters support harsh measures against the unvaccinated.
And I'm thinking, how many times have I told you that if you want to predict the future, just look at the insurance industry?
Because the human beings who are not in that industry will be yapping and yapping about what you should do and what will happen, and yap, yap, yap.
And then the insurance industry just says, huh, here's my risk.
Okay, here's your insurance policy cost.
It just went up 100%.
And then everybody says, oh.
And then everything happens because of that.
And it will turn out that the only thing that ever mattered...
It was what the insurance companies thought.
Like, that's all that ever mattered.
And sometimes you can just say, okay, forget about all the yap, yap, yap.
What the hell are the insurance companies going to do?
Once we sort of get out of crisis pandemic mode, which we're doing, what do they settle on as how they charge people?
Well, how about this?
If the insurance companies have data in a competitive market where you can get your insurance from whoever you want, and some of them say, you know, we're going to charge more for unvaccinated people, I say, if they can prove it, It's okay with me. Now, you're going to say to yourself, Scott, wait, hold on.
Now you're opening up the Pandora's box.
What about smokers?
What about drinkers?
What about extreme sports people?
What about overweight people?
What about people who don't exercise?
Here's the thing. You can't prove any of that stuff easily.
There's no practical way to prove any of that stuff.
If you could, you would.
Right? If you could.
So the things that you can prove would be somebody's age, right?
You can always prove somebody's age.
Do they use age to determine insurance?
Yes, they do. Because you can definitely determine somebody's age.
There's no ambiguity. How about their...
Well, this one's harder now.
How about their sex?
Yeah, there's sex. Now, that was a little ambiguous because of the trans, but that's, you know, that's in the noise.
Car insurance can be based on your gender because, for all practical purposes, they can be sure what it is, right?
If your vaccination status becomes a matter of public record, well, at least record, that would be something that they would know for sure, at least, you know, they'd have data that they could rely on, to say if you were vaccinated or not.
So when you say to me, Scott, philosophically, if you're going to look at whether you're vaccinated or not, you should also philosophically be looking at lifestyle stuff.
And I say, you're completely right.
If we could, they would.
But we can't. We can't.
It's just impractical to measure people's weight and all that.
You just wouldn't be able to make a market in it.
So I'm not saying that they should or should not do anything.
I'm saying that they will.
Hear me clearly.
I'm not saying that insurance companies should or should not do anything.
I'm not recommending it or anything.
I'm just predicting. I'm predicting if anything that they can measure with certainty...
It's probably going to get in their numbers and probably going to get in their cost situation.
Now, if you're saying to me, but Scott, you've forgotten that there's also a risk of taking the vaccination.
Am I right? There's an unknown long-term medical risk of getting vaccinated because there's no way that we've studied it long-term because it's only been short-term.
So what would the insurance companies do with that?
I don't know. But it doesn't matter to my point.
My point is the insurance companies will decide what's what.
Ultimately, the mandates will go away and it will become an insurance thing, I think.
I think that's where we're heading.
Wall Street Journal is reporting that China's got a big problem.
So I like the way they frame this.
So China has two choices.
They can do harsh lockdowns to try to deal with Omicron.
Which will? Will they succeed or fail?
Harsh lockdowns, like they did with Alpha and Delta, but with Omicron.
Will they succeed or fail?
We all think they'll fail, right?
Because Omicron is just way too spready.
So they have a strategy...
Either they let Omicron rip through China, and keep in mind that they don't have much natural immunity there.
They have vaccinations, but not natural immunity.
So Omicron will rip through their vaccinations.
They already know that. They have weak vaccinations.
And that would be a terribly, let's say, an embarrassing situation for China.
So one strategy is to...
Don't do lockdowns, and then China's going to get widely infected, and it will make China look like basically idiots.
It will make them look like they failed completely on the virus.
But suppose they go the other way, option two, drastic shutdowns.
Then they're going to have drastic shutdowns and lots of Omicron, so they'll fail twice.
Right? So they only have two options, drastic lockdowns or not, but unlike America, both of those paths are a failure for them.
If America said, let's get rid of our restrictions and Omicron went wild, what would we call that?
Failure or success?
If we dropped our mandates and just let the Omicron run, Would we call it a success or a failure in America?
Probably a success.
Because we would say, yeah, a lot of people did, you know, had problems.
It did ruin, you know, our supply chain got degraded.
Yeah, all those things happened.
Sure enough. But we would still say we preferred it because that was the choice we made.
Whereas China, since they've sort of pushed this, we are so capable and you are so incompetent, that all we have to do is shut down and we can control it, but you losers in the West can't, ha ha ha.
They're either going to have to eat crow, or bat, they're either going to have to eat bat, like a lot of bat, or fail the other way.
They only have two paths for failure.
So I always used to say that Trump was all about two ways to win and no ways to lose.
China accidentally is in a situation with only two ways to lose.
They don't even have a winning option.
Am I wrong? I'm not wrong, right?
There is no winning option.
They are in trouble, at least reputationally.
All right. Somebody said on Twitter that they used their gut instinct to make a vaccination decision and that they trusted their gut instinct because it had done well for them in the past.
In other words, their life had worked out well using gut instinct.
I'm going to try to do the Super Chats at the end if I remember and I have time.
And I ask this question. If you think you did well with your gut instinct, what happens if somebody who did even better with their gut instinct disagrees with you?
What do you do? So if you think your gut instinct is really like a valuable asset and that's what got you where you got, but there's somebody else who used their own gut instinct and did even way better, what happens if they disagree with you on the next thing?
Do you go with your gut instinct, which you know to be less good, or at least less successful, or do you go with the other person's gut instinct who has done better at this?
It's a hard standard.
So I don't recommend it as a standard.
Don't trust your gut instinct.
I mean, sometimes it's all you got, so you have to, but I wouldn't imagine it's magic.
So here's the thing that's bugging me, and I'm going to try to make this a lesson in persuasion and not so much just about me, even though I'm the star of the story.
And it has to do with the fact that a lot of my critics have been saying that I'm really displaying my vaccination regret.
How many of you have seen that in me?
Have my actions or words recently suggested that I have a great deal of vaccination regret?
Because my critics are saying that.
They're quite certain. They see it.
Now, in locals, most say no.
I'm seeing some yeses.
Some say no. Well, let me tell you where I'm at in my thinking, and then you can judge.
Because if I'm experiencing cognitive dissonance, it would be something you can see, but I can't.
So, see if you can see it, or if you agree with me that I'm not afraid.
I saw recently that I was suffering the seven signs of death, or whatever it is, where you're First you're bargaining and then denial and then acceptance or something.
But here's my state of mind about my own vaccination.
Nothing that I'm going to talk about has to do with your vaccination.
Can we agree that your decisions were your own and that your situation isn't my situation?
So they're not directly comparable.
So I'm just going to talk about my state of mind for those who think that I'm afraid or that I have regret.
Here's my current state of mind.
As of today, the most recent report is that basically everybody who's having a tough time in the hospital is unvaccinated.
One of the biggest criticisms I got is that when I was vaccinated myself, I said that the pandemic was over for the vaccinated, but not the unvaccinated.
As of today, there are basically zero vaccinated people dying in hospitals.
Not exactly zero.
But it's so low that in my mind it rounds to zero.
Because remember, I'm only talking about my mental state.
So my mental state has rounded the risk of me personally dying after getting vaccinated as zero.
So how much fear do I have of a zero risk?
It's not zero for you, and it's not zero for the public.
I'm saying that in my mind...
It's zero for me.
So am I afraid of a zero risk?
Here's what else we know.
I got the vaccination, and in the first, let's say, four months, I guess, since I got it, or five, in the first five months, I have not had a negative health outcome that I would say was associated with it.
Remember, I'm not making the decision before I got vaccinated.
I'm looking at it after the fact.
So the biggest risk of vaccination, would you agree?
No, the biggest known risk of the vaccination is fairly soon after you got it.
Everybody agree? So even if people are dropping dead from them all over the place, I didn't.
So do I have any regret After having already passed through what I consider the dangerous part.
It's already behind me.
Now, what's ahead of me...
Oh, and here's something that Ian Martisis just found out.
So this is brand new information.
You'll be hearing this for the first time, by the way.
So look for Ian Martisis.
You can see it in my Twitter feed as well.
I retweeted. So he did a study of antibodies, and this is one of the most interesting studies I've seen.
It would need to be reproduced and peer-reviewed and all that.
I think he's going to go through that.
But what he did was he looked at the antibodies of people who got one vaccination, two, boosters.
But here's the interesting part.
He looked at people who got vaccinated first and then infected and looked at their antibodies and then the reverse.
The people who got infected first and then antibodies.
It turns out that the very best combination, just by accident, I mean, it's not like I planned it, the best combination is to get vaxxed first And then get Omicron.
If you do it in this order, according to Ian's numbers, which again, all data has to be verified.
You'd want larger samples, blah, blah, blah, reproduced, etc.
But if his numbers hold out, and by the way, this is my current information.
Because again, we're only talking about my state of mind.
This is my current information.
It looked credible to me.
I've somehow locked into the very best situation in the world.
I got vaccinated, and if I get infected, almost certainly going to be Omicron at this point.
Best case. Now, what about the long-term unknown side effects of the vaccination?
Do they exist? Well, the risk exists.
We all agree on that, right?
It's unknown because it could not have been studied.
But also the effects of getting COVID when you're not vaccinated is unstudied.
So the way I make decisions is that if there's stuff I know, I weight that heavily.
And if there are things that are complete unknowns, unless they're catastrophic, but these two are sort of equally catastrophic, but they're complete unknowns.
I usually discount that to nothing.
All right. So...
Just to be really careful in my choice of words.
I'm not telling you it would be smart for you to get vaccinated or to not be.
Especially during Omicron.
I don't know. Like, I'm not your doctor.
If anybody tells you it's smarter to get vaccinated now...
During Omicron, I would say they'd better support that opinion, but it's not one that I necessarily would want to promote.
I mean, I'm not sure that we know.
At this point, I think it's closer to an unknown.
And while I think it's likely that this will be the best situation, getting vaxxed first, wait, but not boosted.
This is what I think so far.
The boosters, I don't think, are in my personal risk management opinion.
I don't think the boosters have the same risk profile as the first two shots.
Because the first two shots, at least we had a proper trial.
But who tested the boosters?
And there's reason to believe they're You know, there's actually a reason to believe that the boosters might be a problem.
We don't know yet. So, best situation might be stay with the vaccinations you have, because apparently whatever vaccinations you have in one hospital that reported, it didn't matter if you had one or two, and it didn't matter if you were boosted.
That's the important part.
It didn't matter if you were boosted.
You would still survive.
So, one doctor was saying, forget about the boosters, Just make sure that people get at least one shot.
I'm not promoting that view.
I'm just saying one doctor said that.
All right, so I would like to put to bed the idea that I have vaccination regret because while it's still entirely true that I could be wrong and I could drop dead tomorrow from the vaccination itself...
Does it make sense that I would have regret if this is my understanding of the current situation?
It doesn't, does it?
I don't think so. Alright, I'm going to have to go in a few minutes.
Let me close up here.
The weird thing that's going to happen is that the people who are bad at analysis...
are also going to be bad at analyzing whether they were right or wrong in their predictions.
And the weird thing that the people who are bad at analysis are doing is they're saying they were right all along, but their predictions were made during a completely different situation.
The people who made predictions during the Alpha and Delta wave are claiming to be right all along, now that Omicron is here.
And somebody said to me on Twitter, but we knew that the attenuated virus would come.
That was part of our prediction.
If you just wait, all viruses burn out, the attenuated virus would come, just like we predicted.
I would like to question whether you predicted that an engineered virus would escape from a lab and it would be Omicron.
Really? Now, of course, I'm making an assumption, aren't I? That Omicron is engineered, and I am making that assumption.
But if you're telling me that you predicted that the engineered Omicron would escape from a lab also, I'm going to call bullshit on that.
That's bullshit. Because the thing that you predicted, you genetically, generically, the thing you predicted was an attenuated virus.
You didn't predict a genetically enhanced attenuated virus.
Nobody predicted that, right?
So I don't know if it was escaped or released or what.
But I think the smart money says it's engineered.
It's not confirmed.
I don't know if you get kicked off of social media for saying what I just said, but it's not confirmed.
But I think the smart money says it's engineered.
All right, so here are some examples of what people are saying that doesn't make sense to me.
Lewis Pease says, do we mandate other vaccines that have not been...
I mentioned that other vaccines are mandated, but people take that wrong.
And here's the reaction.
Do we mandate other vaccines that have not been fully tested and for which there is no liability on the part of the manufacturer?
To which I say, that's bad analysis.
The people who are bad at analyzing things will get one thing consistently wrong.
They'll compare the wrong two things.
And this is an example of that.
You should not compare anything you did in a crisis with anything you do in a non-crisis.
That would be the most basic mistake of analysis.
So while my only point is that vaccines have been mandated in the past, I'm not saying that that's the reason they should be mandated in the future.
That's not the point.
The point is that if you're talking philosophically about whether a vaccine can be mandated in the United States, that's been asked and answered.
It's already happened for years.
But as other people have pointed out, well, you're talking about limited ways and it's about kids going to school and maybe for some kind of travel and blah, blah, blah.
I get that.
So my point is don't compare the two.
That's my whole point.
You can't compare what we did with other vaccinations to what you do in a crisis.
In a crisis, you take a bigger chance because it's a crisis.
In a non-crisis, you take a small risk because you have the option.
In a crisis, you're probably going to take a bigger risk, and that's the smart thing to do.
So when somebody says, we took a small risk when it made sense, and we took a bigger risk when it also made sense in that case, that doesn't sound like a problem to me.
All right. Let's see.
What else do we got going on?
Did you know that athletes have been dying suddenly for years?
There's a new one. Gene Ramirez, age 28, for the Tampa Bay Rays.
He was a star. And he just passed away suddenly.
And, of course, that gets tweeted around in the context of, is this one of the vaccination deaths?
Now, there's no reported link to a vaccination.
But were you aware that This happens regularly and always has.
How many of you were aware that the baseline of top-end athletes suddenly dying, usually with heart complications, is fairly normal?
Did you know that?
Like, it's been happening since I can remember.
And if you Google it, if you want to check on this, just Google...
Something like, uh, athletes dying suddenly.
I think that's all you need.
Athletes dying suddenly.
And make sure that you do a search that's before the pandemic.
Just limit, you know, make sure your search goes back further.
You'll find it's just a widespread thing.
Now, I'm not telling you, again, to be careful, I'm not telling you we won't find out that some of those deaths are vaccine-related.
How would I know? I'm just saying if you ignore the fact that it's a baseline thing that happens all the time, you're missing some of the context.
All right. The deaths in the field are up five times.
I don't believe there's any data that would support that.
Now, if that's true, that would be a big deal.
But if you... I know that you think you've seen some data on that, but I'm pretty sure it's debunked.
Now, I could be wrong about that.
I literally just said I could be wrong as somebody's mocking me for saying I'm always right.
I tell you, this is my whole fucking experience in life, is people saying that, like, I could hold an apple in my hand and my critics would stand in front of me and say, why don't you ever have an apple in your hand?
And I'd be like, I have an apple in my hand right now.
And my critics would say, that's not an apple.
No. That's an orange you're trying to sell us.
Well, Biden's trying to...
Get rid of the filibuster, and I guess McConnell didn't like that, and turned on him, and he said this.
He said, everything is a...
Oh.
Did he say this? Oh, this is me saying this.
This is my own note I was reading.
I thought it was McConnell. For a moment, I thought, wow, McConnell's really got away with words.
I was reading my own note for myself.
Yes, that's how bad I am.
So... I think maybe all of the filibuster stuff that's related to the voting rights, I think that's all a diversion.
It feels like it's a strategic diversion.
And that's all I have to say about that.
So, I think we can agree this is the very best live stream that has ever, ever happened.
And I need to run.
And thanks for reminding me.
And, oh, let's see if this...
Is there one super chat up there?
Well, it didn't store them.
Damn it. There's supposed to be a little list of super chats that I can tap.
I don't know why it's there. So it's probably a boomer problem, but I can't handle that right now.
