Episode 1650 Scott Adams: The Great Clawback Has Begun. Freedom is About to Break Out Everywhere
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Content:
Our bought-off expert class
Trading our privacy for function/utility
President Trump reviewed Maggie Haberman's book?
Ezra Levant's on Freedom Convoy outcome
Inflation is racist
The Great Clawback
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Yeah, it's true. Everybody looks good when I wear black.
I think that's the same. If you hear something that sounds like a little bit of fry in the audio, that might be the shower that's running in the room next to me in a feat of terrible timing.
But it'll be over soon.
Now, yes, I do look great in black.
You're right. You're right.
And how many people are here for the simultaneous sip?
Anybody? Anybody?
Yeah, I thought so. Many of you.
And all you need is a cup, a mug, a glass, a tanker, a chalice, a dine, 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 of the day, the drink that supports the Freedom Truckers.
Anybody? Who's in favor of the Freedom Truckers?
Supporting them? So this is to you, Freedom Truckers.
I hope some of you are watching.
You probably don't have a lot to do up there, sitting in your cold cabs, doing the best you can.
So here's to you, keeping us free, and we'll talk about you a little bit more.
Go! Oh yeah.
You know, in all the time that the critics have tried to paint the truckers as some kind of a rebel right-wing thing, even once did any of the critics think of this pun.
It's a bunch of honkies.
Anybody? Nobody thought of that one.
Alright, well, I don't want to help them.
I don't want to help the other side.
But really? There's nobody who thought of that one at all.
Come on. Alright, well, today's theme, I'm going to call it the demise of the expert class.
Am I right or am I wrong that the most striking part of the last five years is the complete demolition Of the credibility of all experts in everything.
I feel like that alone is the single biggest change in everything.
Now, experts would include people giving you the news.
We never trusted the politicians, so that part's not new.
But I feel like this is a new thing.
And I was thinking about the most natural...
Path or trajectory, I guess, that the civilization would take.
And this is sort of off the top of my head just before I came on here, but I want to run something by you to see if there's a predictable place where this all goes.
Are you ready? So if you go back in time enough, you would go back to a time when typically the leader would tell the people, hey, I was chosen by God.
And that was how the leader got credibility.
I was chosen by God.
Because it probably was pretty hard to protect the leader When nobody had good weapons, right?
Seems like you could just throw a rock at the leader and it'd be kind of dangerous.
So they needed some kind of, you know, authority beyond force.
But, you know, then over time people became more enlightened and communication got a little better, maybe, and education got a little better.
And we stopped believing that leaders were chosen by God, for the most part.
And then you get dictators.
Because if you don't have that cover story about God, you need to use force.
So you've got a lot of dictators.
And what happens when you have a lot of dictators?
Well, as the public communicates better, and over time, communication always keeps improving, right?
Right up to the Internet, and then it went boom.
So people are getting smarter, they're communicating better, and what is the logical thing you'd expect when you have dictators?
You end up with revolutions.
Right? So dictators lead to revolutions.
And then revolutions lead to something like leaders chosen by the people.
Now, what do you get when you have leaders chosen by the people?
Eventually, the people with the money are in charge of the leaders.
Am I wrong? These are just sort of normal things that follow.
Dictators, plus educating the public, plus communications, should lead to revolutions.
The revolution should give you something like leaders chosen by the people.
Once you have that, and you've got it, plus capitalism, you've got it, well, maybe you don't even need the capitalism, but you've got money that's going to control them.
So now you're going to be in a situation where money chooses the leaders.
But what was our only protection from that?
Let's say in Western democracies.
What was our only protection from being abused by the money people and the politicians?
It was kind of our experts, wasn't it?
Well, you can always sort of depend on, well, they can't get away with that much because our experts will ferret out the bad behavior.
You know, the experts in our news industry will find out what crimes they did.
The experts in our financial industry will keep people from doing bad things.
So basically, at least you have the experts watching things.
What happens when the credibility of the experts just disappears?
Like, what's left?
I feel like we're entering that territory.
So can we predict what happens as surely as we can predict that dictators plus education plus communication leads to democracies, which we can predict leads to money taking over, which leads to our only protection being the experts, which leads to the experts being bought off, losing their credibility, which leads to...
Now, doesn't all that seem like it was predictable in hindsight, right?
It's easy to have hindsight.
But is the next phase predictable?
What do you think? If all of those phases were kind of predictable, but really maybe only because we're looking at it from today's perspective, but is there something that would be just as obvious later that we should have said, oh, it's obvious where that's going to go?
Well, let me throw out an idea.
The two things that made the experts sort of worthless is some got bought off, but also our problems are more complex.
If you take an expert on some simple subject, relatively simple, such as, do cigarettes cause lung cancer?
Relatively simple question.
It took a while to know for sure, but a relatively simple question.
Now take climate change.
Completely different story, right?
Totally complicated.
So we're in a world in which a lot of our problems, you know, what is Russia and Ukraine going to do and all the different economic and military ways that this could line up.
So experts can't predict because things are too complicated.
And they've lost their credibility.
So we're kind of lost.
And the question is, how do you have a trust-free civilization?
A trust-free.
Because we don't have trust anymore.
We don't trust experts, governments, people with money.
We don't trust our own intelligence agencies.
We don't trust anybody.
Don't trust the news. And we're not wrong, by the way.
Don't get me wrong. The problem is not that we have less trust.
The problem is that we found out we shouldn't be trusting.
It's nothing to do with the public.
The public's actually in pretty good shape.
The public is sort of waking up to just how bad things have gotten in terms of trust.
So here's where I think is the obvious only place it can go.
Transparency. And I think that that will be, like, incredibly obvious someday, you know, 20 years from now.
And... Fairly soon, the only way we're going to get past this inability to trust anybody about anything is to have just massive sea changes in transparency.
Now, here's the problem.
That's also going to have an impact on your privacy.
And here's something I've been predicting for years that people always misunderstand.
People misunderstand me saying I'm in favor of what I'm going to predict.
I'm not in favor of it.
It's irrelevant whether I favor it or not.
I just think it's going to happen.
And what's going to happen is the continuing evolution where we trade privacy for function, for utility.
So every time we give up a little privacy, as long as we're doing it in some intelligent way, we're getting back some kind of feature.
It makes our smartphones work better.
Basically, all of our technology, everything that makes life easy, costs us a little bit in terms of our privacy.
But think of all the problems you could solve if you got to a world where you didn't have any privacy.
Stop. Stop.
There's something you're all thinking right now.
And I want to stop you from thinking that.
You're thinking of a world in which people have partial privacy.
That's terrible. Here's our world now.
The government knows more about you than you know about the government.
How is that fair?
That's a big problem.
Don't you think that you could solve a lot of problems if you could know as much about your government as your government can know about you?
Right? So if the only change we made is to say, all right, it doesn't look like we're going to get any more privacy back, realistically, but we could at least make the government more transparent, Right?
We can make science more transparent, probably in a variety of ways.
I know science needs...
Science, you know, the community itself knows it needs to fix its credibility problem.
Probably has lots of good ideas for that by now.
So, I'm not saying you should give away your privacy.
I'm just saying it's going to happen as just a side effect of that.
Here's the other way that your privacy is going to completely disappear.
AI. AI. Right now, the only way you can give away your privacy is if somebody hacks you or there's a warrant that they can get into your stuff, or you give it away or something, or you're careless, I guess. But what happens when AI can figure out everything about you without anybody's permission?
If you don't think that's coming, I don't think you know what's coming.
You know how an FBI profiler can look at just a few clues and know a lot about the perpetrator?
And it's almost scary how much they get right?
How well do you think AI is going to do that?
Once it can find out everything about you that's public.
And maybe it can find out everything about you that's not public.
I mean, if the AI is good enough, it'll just hack any system it needs to look into.
So, at some point, AI is going to, guaranteed, take all of your privacy.
But it doesn't mean it's going to distribute that privacy to anybody who wants it.
But the AI itself will know exactly what the frick you're doing.
It's going to know before you know.
You don't think it can predict you before you do it?
You're wrong. It absolutely can predict your actions before you do them.
Not every time. But if somebody had an active social media account and it had access to it, yeah, I'm sure it could pick out a shooter, a school shooter.
I'll bet it could do that.
Maybe not yet. But, you know, it's obvious where everything's going.
So I would say that the obvious place where all this is going is an end of hidden secrets.
And there'll be great transparency going on.
Now let me tell you about a world in which you lose all of your privacy.
Suppose even just the worst stuff that ever happened to you.
Even maybe your kinks, you're just everything.
Just everything you don't want people to know about.
Let's just say it all went out there.
What would happen? Well, if you were the only person who gave up your privacy, devastation.
Everybody who still had their privacy would mock you into, I don't know, something bad.
But suppose you could communicate with anybody in the world and everybody could see your stuff and you could see everybody else's stuff.
All you'd have to do is find somebody who had a similarly bad background.
You could be best friends.
And you could do it instantly.
So instead of saying, oh, I don't want to have a friend because they'll find out about my bad background, you just get on the Internet and say, all right, I need somebody else who's done all these terrible things or something similar.
Hey, look, turns out a lot of people...
A lot of people are just like me.
Let's get together. So I think you would find that if you could find out other people's, you know, let's say badness, and they could find out yours, you would just have more friends.
And it would be impossible to lock you all up.
Because there would just be too many of them.
And here's the best part.
If everybody's flaws were on display all the time, you wouldn't see them anymore.
That's not immediately obvious, but think about it.
If everyone's flaws, just their worst components, were just on display...
Let's say you had AR glasses, you know, where somebody's information pops up just because they walked in the room.
Or maybe you're in the metaverse and it's the same thing.
And suppose you just know everything about somebody.
You would be so exhausted...
By looking at their list of problems, you would just be snow-blind after a while.
Do you know what snow-blind means?
Is snow-blind one of those things that only people who grew up in snow know what it means?
Basically, you just become blind, everything is all whited out.
So... I don't know.
I think the day that we start treating our problems like they're special is the day everybody's got less anxiety and everybody has more friends and it's easier to get a job.
However, there might be no way to get there without going through the worst thing that could possibly be, which is the government knows more about you than you know about them.
And that's where we are.
So... Alright, that's my long-range prediction, is massive transparency is the only way you can have a trust-based economy.
The only way you can have a trust-based economy is massive transparency.
We don't have that. Alright, but we will.
It's inevitable. Favorite story of the day?
You know how Trump has been criticized for his, let's say, his record-keeping systems.
Because some of the important records from his presidency found their way to Mar-Lago.
And I guess they're being shipped back.
It's not like the biggest deal in the world.
But we do know that Trump is not the best in how he handles important documents.
Which leads us to this story.
There's a report that pages from Maggie Haberman's book...
Had been found...
Flushed papers found in clogging Trump White House toilets.
So I didn't know Maggie Haberman had a book until I learned that its pages were in Trump's toilet.
And I'm trying to think...
If you were the publisher...
And you found out that the only publicity you'd gotten for your book in a market that's got a lot of publicity for a lot of books, the best publicity, let's say, that you got for your book was that Trump had used it for possibly toilet paper.
I don't like to be gross, but the story was a little bit silent on the question of whether the paper had been used or just torn from the book and put directly in the toilet.
I think that's an important detail.
That might just be me.
But I think this is like the best...
This would be the ultimate test of all publicity is good publicity.
You always wonder where these little common sense rules, like all publicity is good publicity, you always wonder where like all publicity is good publicity, you always wonder where the limit of that common sense is.
And I think if the President of the United States used the pages of your book to wipe his ass...
That might be the limit of where publicity just turns bad.
Speaking of bad publicity, we live in a world of massive character assassination, as you know.
Do you know what happens if somebody who doesn't know anything about me, me personally, somebody who doesn't know anything about me Finds out about me for the first time by reading stuff on the internet about me.
Do you have any idea what happens?
Because I heard about this recently.
Somebody who wasn't aware of Dilbert, wasn't aware of any books I've written, anything I've done on livestream, wasn't aware of anything.
I just went to the internet to find out, because, you know, my name came up.
I went to the internet to learn about me.
Let me just say, the word horrifying doesn't cover it.
Well, have I ever taught you that, I think I say it too often, that freedom from embarrassment is like a superpower?
because Because I'm not sure the rest of you could even survive this.
But to me, it's hilarious.
At first, it was horrifying to me, too.
Like, my first reaction was, oh, my God!
If you didn't know anything about me, that's the first thing you'd learn, and basically none of it is true.
But the more I thought about it, the funnier it is that there's just this complete caricature of me.
Now, this is, of course, in the context of watching what's happening to Joe Rogan, because you can't really do a live stream today without talking about Joe Rogan's problems.
And watching CNN run a...
A hit piece on him today that was just so messed up.
I mean, just completely messed up.
Yeah, I'm not even going to criticize it.
It was just so messed up.
You think, what a world.
What a world we live in.
Is Joe Rogan trying to make the world worse for anybody?
What did he do to you?
Did he run over your dog?
We're suddenly hating on him like that matters.
He's probably the least offensive...
If you think about it, he might be the least offensive person in the public realm.
Think about it. If you were really serious about it and you really, you know, had watched enough of his content, he might be the least offensive person in the entire public realm.
Because remember, everybody's offensive to somebody.
Everybody. Doesn't matter if you're on the right or the left.
You're offensive to somebody.
But within the list of people who are offensive, which is everybody, I'd put him pretty near the bottom.
Now, that video that came out about repeated use of the N-word, I feel like we need an exception.
And I would say I'm, of course, not the person who can ask for this.
But on behalf of the...
Well, not on behalf of...
But would the black community agree with this standard?
That comedians should be able to use any word if they're talking about the word.
Not if they're using it in a direct, offensive way, of course.
But could we agree that stand-up comics and somebody who does that for a living could just be the exception?
That's the one class of people that we say, all right, all right, we get it.
Your job, that's your job.
Your job is to challenge us with words.
If your actual job is to challenge people's thinking with words, let them use all the words and let them be the exception.
Now, again, I'm not saying an exception if they use the word in the direct, insulting way, but nobody ever accused Joe Rogan of that.
Am I right? Nobody even accused him of that.
In my mind, the problem is with the people who think stand-up comics, or somebody who's even doing a live stream within the context of being a stand-up comic.
That's the same thing, I'd say.
To say that that specific kind of occupation should be treated like all the rest is just nonsense.
Am I wrong? You know, I do think that...
If somebody, you know, some other podcaster who was not known to be a comic, if that person had a compilation of using that word in any context, I'd have some questions.
Wouldn't you? Like, you'd want to know more about that context.
But if you hear that a comic, a professional comic, Use the words, and the one thing you know is that nobody accuses of using the words in an insulting way.
Nobody. That's not even in the conversation.
Why are we even talking about it?
He's the one exception.
I mean, comics are the one exception.
Now, I would not put myself in that category.
I think you'd have to be a...
I would say if you're a professional stand-up comic...
You've just got to have different rules.
It just ought to be that way.
For everybody's benefit, really.
Well, let's talk about the trucker rebellion.
Ezra Levant had an interesting thread in which he has a prediction that the way this will get resolved is that Biden will go first in dropping vaccine mandates for border crossings, and then it will make it a little bit absurd If the border only works in one direction.
You can go one way with the vaccination but not the other.
Or without the vaccination but not the other.
And I think that's a reasonably good prediction.
I do think that if it's between Biden and Trudeau, Biden would probably go first, if it's going to go at all.
So that's a pretty good prediction.
I'll put that out there and see how he does.
All right. On our theme of the destruction of the expert class, I would like to read to you a tweet about the trucker convoy from somebody who has a PhD and is a professor.
So based on the bio.
It's a PhD and a professor.
And this PhD and professor, he's a professor of social political philosophy.
Now, you have to be pretty smart.
And have a lot of credentials to be that kind of a professor, right?
Most kind of professors, but philosophy tends to be high IQ people, so almost certainly a very smart person.
And in his bio, he says he's not afraid to dig deeper.
I deal with causes, not symptoms.
We need intelligent dialogue, not partisan cliquishness.
And I'm thinking, this guy sounds pretty good.
Lots of good credentials, PhD.
And he tweets this today.
He says, "Realize that the trucker convoy and copycat demonstrations are not about vaccines.
They aren't about freedom.
They are classic reactionary tactics to disrupt society and force it toward a return to right-wing power." Hejana...
I just realized I've never said this word out loud.
Hegemonies? Hegemonies, right?
Hegemonies. The end freedoms open inquiry and rule of law.
In other words, the truckers, say this one very intelligent professor, he believes it's really classic reactionary tactics to disrupt society.
It is disrupting society, so that part is true.
But to force it toward a return to right-wing power hegemonies that end freedoms open inquiry and rule of law.
In what universe are the political right associated with less freedom, less open inquiry, what?
And less rule of law.
That literally the three pillars, probably the three pillars of the right would be these three things.
More freedom...
More freedom of speech, which I think the open inquiry gets to that, and more rule of law.
These are literally exactly the three things the right wants, not the three things the right wants to get rid of.
How the hell do you get a PhD and say stuff like this in public?
Am I wrong? Am I wrong that this is literally ridiculous?
So this is just more evidence of the complete destruction of the...
Of the expert class.
If you missed it, he's a professor of social and political philosophy.
And, you know, I'm not even making fun of him as an individual, so don't get this wrong.
This is not about an individual.
This is about the destruction of the expert class.
How in the world do you get a PhD and then put out a tweet like that?
I don't know. Or am I wrong?
Maybe the tweet makes sense and we're all stupid.
I guess that's the other possibility.
Given that we know he's got a high IQ. Or I thought he did.
All right. So, what do you think about natural infection protecting against COVID versus the vaccines?
Well, there's a new paper brought to my attention by Dr.
John Mandrola on Twitter.
And... The new paper, basically it's a stronger evidence because it's a fairly strong paper and a good publication.
And it says that natural infection protects you against severe illness, which basically takes almost everything out of the argument that especially young people should have mandatory vaccines for college and hospitals.
Or the boosters.
Mandatory boosters.
So it doesn't make sense to boost somebody who has natural immunity if the booster itself we know could be a risk, but the natural immunity has already done what the booster is going to do.
Now, isn't this yet another example of a destruction of the expert class?
That we're listening to our experts, and don't you and I, and obviously Dr.
Mandrola, don't we all find this obvious?
I feel like it's pretty obvious that at this point, natural infection should be a perfect substitute for any kind of vaccine mandate.
But the bigger question, of course, is why I have a mandate at all at this point.
All right. And here's another question.
Suppose other doctors, like Dr.
Mandrilla, would have the same opinion, which is that, at least for young people...
All right, we'll limit it to young people and limit it to the question of boosters.
Suppose your doctor told you that was a bad idea, but your college or your hospital employer told you you had to do it.
How do you handle that ethically?
If you're an employer and you ask your employee to do something that your doctor says is against good medical advice, where does that go?
How do you adjudicate that?
Who wins that?
I don't even know where that goes.
Is there any kind of a law that is broken?
You get a medical exemption.
Oh, okay. So I guess the law does handle that.
You get a medical exemption.
But wouldn't everybody have the medical exemption?
So couldn't you get a medical exemption to the mandates just by saying that you have a prior infection?
So give me a fact check on this.
Wouldn't that tell you that the mandates are already unnecessary if you're infected?
Because you could just get a medical exemption?
So that would suggest that the mandates are not really enforceable to anybody who's been infected, if they wanted to get a medical exemption, right?
So I guess I don't know enough about this story.
So maybe it's less of an issue than I think, except for that extra step that seems, oh, maybe the only way you can be sure that somebody has the prior infection.
I don't know if you'd believe just the test by itself.
Anyway... So maybe we need to know more about that.
All right, so in the category of everything is racist, and we're going to mix this with the dog that doesn't bite, or the dog that's not barking.
So how much do you love dogs not barking stories?
I feel like they're fascinating, but I might be wrong.
The dog not barking is the story that should be in the news, but for some reason it isn't.
They always tell you something, right?
All right, here's one. In a context, and I think you would agree this is our context, where everything is called racist.
Am I right? That there's no story that doesn't have a racist element to it?
Just always. If you had a story that conspicuously was missing the most obvious racist accusation, what would that tell you?
Well, it would tell you that your media is probably manipulated, but I guess you knew that.
So here's one that I think, if you haven't heard this before, it's going to blow your mind that the dog is not barking.
And here it is. I tweeted it earlier.
That inflation is a stealth form of systemic racism.
Inflation. Inflation is systemic racism.
In the context that everything is racism.
But the argument applies.
And I'm not being, like, overly clever or anything.
I think it applies directly.
Because when you have inflation, who does it hit?
Inflation hits hardest low-income people, which are unfortunately overpopulated by people of color.
So... Because the rich, you know, they're also going to take a hit, right?
I'm not saying inflation only goes after low income.
But the rich at least have some escapes, right?
Their assets that they own will increase with inflation.
So even though your stuff costs more, your house is becoming more, so there's some balance there.
But, you know, low-income people don't own a house to inflate.
The rich can repay their existing loans...
With cheaper dollars, because inflation makes the amount you borrowed seem like it's less and less every year.
And who borrows money?
Well, it's not low-income people.
Low-income people don't have credit.
They can't borrow anything. So it's only the high-income people who get this benefit.
And then the high-income people are more likely to own a business and be able to pass along price increases.
But low-income people don't own any businesses, and they can't pass along any price increases.
Not easily, anyway. I mean, I suppose they could negotiate for a pay raise.
So here's the dog not barking.
If most of the inflation had been created by a Republican decision or set of decisions, wouldn't we be talking about inflation being racist all day long?
We would, right?
We would be saying all day long, those darn Republicans gave us a bunch of inflation, and that's racist.
We would. So, and to me, the inflation might be our biggest remaining problem.
I think. Because I think a lot of our other big problems are now, you know, at least we have a solution that looks like it's forming for everything.
But not inflation.
Right? Unless you just think, well, tough it out, and that's the only solution.
Maybe it is. Just tough it out.
But... I don't know.
I'm just amazed that we're not making a big stink about it being racist.
It has to be just because the Democrats control the media.
All right. Give me a fact check on this, but I thought I heard the director of the CDC yesterday say that they don't recommend mask mandates.
Am I right? That the CDC does no longer recommend a mask.
I don't know if they ever did.
But they're now saying masking where the local people think it makes sense.
But I thought yesterday when I was hearing that the CDC was still pro-mask.
Do I have this wrong?
Yeah, I thought the CDC said keep using masks where there are high infection rates, but that that would be sort of a local decision what a high infection rate is.
So to me it sounds like the CDC already took themselves out of the game.
Because are they not saying use your masks where the infection rate is high, but they're not telling you what is high?
Therefore, they're not telling you what to do.
They're basically saying use their own judgment, right?
No, I saw the director of the CDC say that they're only recommending them where the infections are high.
She stated the states trump the CDC. That's correct.
Okay. So the CDC is no longer part of the question.
It is now a purely political question even more than it is, you know, anything else.
And I think at this point that the burden of proof for masking has to be required.
If you've watched me for a while, you know that I treated the beginning of the pandemic like a risk management in the fog of war.
Now, in the fog of war, you do everything that might possibly make a difference, if you can.
You just do everything. And then later, as you get more data, you refine your method, Based on what you've learned.
So you don't make the same decisions in the beginning as you make in the end.
But likewise, where I would not have required my government to give me really, really good evidence that masks work when things were hot and fresh and we didn't know as much, I do now.
I do now.
I really require it now.
And if they don't have a study that's Omicron only...
Then they don't have a study.
Am I right? Anything that hasn't tested masks in the real world with Omicron, with vaccinations, with whatever scenario we want the public to go to, if we haven't tested that, there is no data that's applicable to the situation.
If there is no data to suggest that they work, you're taking our freedom and you're not giving us any reason.
Right? Now, I want to be really careful how I slice this.
It is my opinion that masks do work.
Sorry. And that's an engineering decision, based on the fact that a direct plume in your mouth when I'm talking to you has got to be worse than it coming out of the side of my masks and maybe entering the room...
But the viral load would be completely different.
Now, is that difference a 1% difference?
A 10% difference?
Well, I'll tell you what it's not.
It's not a 50% difference.
Am I right? Let me see where I can get you to agree.
We would all agree it's not a 100% difference, right?
We would all agree it's not a 50% difference, because you would see that so easily in the data.
We'd all agree, I think, it's not a 20% difference.
So far? Everybody on board?
It's definitely not a 20% difference, because you would see that.
That would be too big, even with the other confounding variables.
I feel like you'd see that.
So, how about 10%?
Well, now maybe some opinions will start to differ, right?
Maybe 10%? Well, if you can't prove that it's 10% or 1%, I think that's where personal choice, personal freedom, personal responsibility start to kick in as the dominant factors, right? In the realm of Omicron, in the realm of highly vaccinated and highly already infected, etc.
So I think that the burden of proof has gone from you don't need any proof at all in the fog of war to you better frickin' prove it, right?
So... So the public's requirement for proof should be sky high right now.
Because right now we're in what I call the great clawback.
Where much of our freedom has been taken from us, voluntarily, in many cases, voluntarily.
But we've got to get it back.
And governments are bad at giving back.
Good at taking. So we're clawing it back.
And during the clawback period, you're going to have to prove that masks are making more than a 1% difference.
Because if the best you can do is that you're pretty sure they make a difference, I'm sorry, that's not good enough.
Because you still have to balance that against all of your rights and freedoms and other mental issues and everything else.
So if you can't tell us that it's above that line, whatever line psychologically you say to yourself, well, I get that it makes a difference, but it might be such a small difference that I'd rather not do it.
Yeah. So here's what I would say about masks.
If you're listening to scientists about whether they work, you're listening to the wrong profession.
If you're listening to anybody who's not an engineer, you're probably listening to the wrong profession.
And it's because it's an engineering problem, not a science problem.
And the engineer would say, can I blow out a candle with a mask on?
Yes or no? Nope.
That means that it is blocking the forward motion of something.
Is it coming out the sides?
Can I measure that? Yes.
Do we know that viral load makes a difference?
Yes. Is the viral load going directly into somebody's mouth if I don't have a mask?
In many cases, yes.
Would it be better to put the viral load in different directions?
Yes. If you ask the scientists, do you know what they say?
Well, this is the size of a virus.
And this is the size of a water molecule.
And this is the size of the mass coals.
And it's all the wrong questions.
If you talk to a scientist, they will continually ask the wrong questions and give you the wrong results.
You've got to ask an engineer.
Who are you going to ask if your dam is going to collapse?
I hate analogies, too.
But a dam is a little bit like a mask in the sense that it's not so much a science question, is it?
There was certainly science at some phase of developing the tools that could build the dam.
But at some point, the handoff happens.
It's just an engineering question.
So I'm not going to talk to my scientist about whether my dam is well-engineered, and I'm not going to talk to a scientist about whether the mask is stopping my spittle from hitting somebody in the face.
It's just the wrong profession.
All right. I'm exaggerating a little bit there.
Have you noticed how often you can fight fire with fire?
Literally. If you have a forest fire, sometimes you burn the area where it's heading, but you do a controlled burn.
So when the real fire gets there, it can't cross because there's no fuel.
But you haven't made things worse because you controlled the burn you did.
It's called fighting fire with fire.
Well, we saw that, I think, Omicron is what killed Delta, right?
The only thing that killed the virus was another virus.
In the end, I mean, everything helped.
The vaccinations probably. Probably some of the stuff we did help.
But in the end, I think it was a virus that killed the virus, and probably that's the only way it ever happens.
Here's another example where I think this could happen.
We're talking about the fentanyl problem.
So we're looking at, okay, is it the problem of the addicts?
Yes, in the sense that personal responsibility requires the addict to be less of an addict.
But they don't want to.
So we also have a free world where, you know, they don't want to, in many cases.
Then you could blame the Mexican cartels, but it turns out we can't do much about them because the government is basically owned by the cartels in Mexico.
So we're sort of politically, you know, we're sort of trapped.
Now, we'd like to do something about China, but apparently the problem with China is that even though China has changed the laws...
To make it a top offence to sell these precursors to the cartels who then turn it into fentanyl and then give it to Americans, that the Chinese makers of the precursors can just keep moving back a level and either finding a different precursor or something that's a precursor to the precursor.
So they keep finding all these workarounds where no matter what they specifically make illegal, there's always something they can ship that's just as good that's not yet covered.
That's where we are so far.
Now, I say to myself, are you telling me that the government of China can't stop that?
No. That's ridiculous.
The government of China could stop anything.
Because they know the name of the person doing it.
We gave it to them.
The United States actually gave them the name of the person who's doing it, the main person.
And we just said, stop this guy.
And they didn't do it, apparently.
So... And I was just reading an article about where do you find the solution?
Like, what's the base problem?
Because you've got the addict themselves, you've got, you know, the border crossing, the cartels, you've got Mexico, too many moving parts.
And here's my suggestion.
The only way you're going to end fentanyl is with a better drug.
You need the Omicron that kills the Delta.
And we have, I think...
We have the Omicron that kills the Delta.
There is a drug that kills fentanyl.
Do you know what it is?
Mushrooms. Mushrooms do seem to have a strong indication that they can stop addiction.
I'm not limiting it to fentanyl.
I'm talking about alcohol, cigarettes, all kinds of addiction.
Now, that knowledge is slowly becoming mainstream knowledge to the point where mushrooms are being legalized in some limited context.
But I feel like...
In the same way that climate change turned nuclear energy from the dirtiest thing in the world to the cleanest, you notice that, right?
The thing that made nuclear go from, hey, that's the worst thing we could ever do, to that's the only thing that's good, the only thing that's going to save us, is climate change, which had really, in the beginning, it didn't seem to have anything to do with nuclear power.
But it became the overriding thing.
As the number of overdoses approaches 100,000 a year, that's where we're heading.
I think fentanyl's already 64,000 of it.
But overdoses in general are around 100,000 a year in the United States.
That big problem is going to make mushrooms legal.
It's going to accelerate that.
Because as soon as you get a few studies, it shows it works.
Now, of course, if it doesn't work, we would hope science finds that out quickly and we don't have some kind of a problem where people are just doing more drugs.
So this is all contingent on this actually panning out scientifically.
But I'll tell you, everything I've heard...
Everything I've heard in every form is universally positive.
Everything. There's nothing that indicates the opposite direction at all.
So, I propose to you, ladies and gentlemen, that fentanyl has met its Omicron.
It knows its name, but Omicron has not visited its house yet.
And if we ever get serious about stopping addiction...
Which is really the only way to survive against China in the future.
Meaning the competition among nations.
The only way the United States and a lot of Western countries will be able to compete in the future is to get a grip on addiction.
Remember what Naval Ravikant once said?
Ravikant. I almost got demonetized there by mispronouncing his name.
I believe he said something in nature that the future biggest challenge will be addiction.
That once everybody can get anything, that's sort of the case, you can get your video game, your cigarettes, your everything.
You can get any kind of addiction you want.
How you manage your addiction will be the primary factor of success in a way it never used to be.
And so, unless the United States thinks seriously of some kind of a moonshot against addiction, all of it, all of the addictions, unless it does a moonshot against addiction, we can't compete in the future.
And we do probably have the tool already.
We just have to get past the stigma.
So in the same way that climate change just dragged us past the stigma with nuclear power, I think the addiction and overdose deaths are just going to grab us by the neck and drag us past our objections with whatever objections there are with psilocybin and mushrooms and such.
Now, I'm not saying mushrooms are specifically the answer because there are other psychedelics that seem to have the same effect.
But we do have...
I think we have the solution. So let's Omicron that Delta up.
We heard some more about Bob Saget.
The cause of death apparently was an unexplained bump on the head.
They think that he just went to bed without thinking he was serious, and then they had a brain bleed and tragically died at night.
The only thing I would add to this story, and I was surprised it wasn't in the story itself, is that a head injury that bad makes you tired.
Did you know that? Like, you'll barely be able to stay awake.
So he may have had no choice.
It may not have been as much a decision as, you know, if he was already in his pajamas, he may have just said, oh, I could barely make it to the bed.
I mean, it could have been one of those situations.
I'm just speculating.
But it was left out of the story that a head injury might have been so bad that he didn't have the option of thinking clearly and getting help.
All right. That, ladies and gentlemen, is almost the end of my program.
I would like to propose one other thing which I've noticed, and I'm not sure this pattern holds, because there are probably exceptions to it.
Let me ask you.
Would it be true that Republican policies...
With one exception that I can think of.
No, actually not.
You could argue it both ways.
The Republican policies almost always increase your freedom, and Democrat policies almost always decrease your freedom.
Now, immediately I thought of abortion, and I thought, oh, maybe somebody's going to say that's an exception, because it's making something illegal that a lot of adults want.
But if you included the well-being of the fetus, Well, then you would be giving freedom to the fetus, the freedom of life.
Whereas if you take away the fetus's option of being born...
So I guess you could argue that as an increase in freedom as well.
You could argue against it, but there's a strong argument that it's an increase in freedom.
But am I right that that pattern holds?
Or am I just too much influenced by my audience at this point?
You know, if you think about everything from mandates, you know, the mandates take away a freedom, but I suppose the Democrats could argue it's giving other people a freedom, freedom to not be infected.
I don't know. It's not a clean argument, because you can make an argument of freedom on almost every side of everything, can't you?
But my overall feeling is that the Republicans tend to be biased toward freedom, And the Democrats seem to be biased toward protection.
Or biased toward...
Not even protection.
Equal outcomes or something?
I'm not sure what. Yeah, but, you know, Republicans are pretty biased toward safety.
Because that's what law and order is.
That's what strong military is.
That's a bias toward safety.
So it's just a different bias toward safety.
Equity, you think? Equity is a better word?
Yeah, maybe freedom versus equity.
Freedom requires a lack of equity, doesn't it?
Like, I don't know if require is the right word, but you never have one without it.
You could never have freedom without massive inequity.
I don't think you could.
Because part of freedom is that some people would choose not to go get stuff.
Right? The whole point of freedom is you get to decide what to do.
Some people would decide to start a business and become billionaires.
And other people would decide not to.
Or wouldn't have the capability, I suppose.
More likely. All right.
I'm pretty sure that's what I wanted to say today.
And... I dare say, one of the most useful and productive live streams in the history of civilization.
I don't think I've put too much hyperbole on that.
That feels just about right.
And now, without further ado, YouTube, I will see you tomorrow.
