Episode 1996 Scott Adams: Why Do The Most Educated People Keep Getting All The Wrong Answers?
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Content:
Why are educated people getting the wrong answers on the vax?
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Whiteboard - Second Opinion
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That's good stuff.
All right, well, apparently I caused a little kerfuffle on the internet with a video that I put out yesterday in which I said the... I made a mistake of calling them anti-vaxxers.
People didn't want to be called that.
But let's say that the purebloods, the people who are unvaccinated, I said that they're the winners.
Because we've reached Omicron and whatever vaccination you got probably didn't help you at this point.
And so, if you're young and don't have lots of comorbidities, but you've got a vaccination in your blood, and you don't have any real risk from Omicron, you've got an extra risk.
That it would be great if you didn't have.
So I'd say the people who got to this point with nothing in their blood that's out of the ordinary are the winners.
So I said that in the video and I sent that around and it's got about half a million views and I was quite interested in them.
I'll give you some of the hot takes and we'll talk about this in a moment and then I'll take some questions on spaces.
So if anybody wants to jump on me and insult me and criticize me in public, this would be exactly the time to do it.
So please jump on if you'd like that.
The critics are the ones I want to hear from.
So let me ask you this.
Don't get on Spaces and compliment me.
Or say you like the show.
I love to hear it, but nobody else does.
So for the benefit of the other listeners, just hit your criticisms.
All right.
So I was fascinated to see people's reaction when I told the unvaccinated that they were the winners, and that I'm acknowledging that with no reservations.
And it's amazing, the reactions.
Because one of the things I wondered was, could people take yes for an answer?
Could you just say, OK, well, based on what we know now, it looks like You had the winning strategy.
Some people said, oh, I respect that because you admitted you're wrong.
Other people said, you're being arrogant in the way you admit you're wrong.
So you're really still a dick.
OK.
Other people wanted to dance on my grave and tell me why they were so right and why I was so wrong.
And I'm trying to learn from them.
And that's what we'll talk about today.
And other people wanted me to know that it wasn't about winning.
It wasn't about winning.
They care about people.
So it's the caring about people that matters, not the winning and losing.
But the funniest comment was, this one was, why did so many intelligent people fall for the shots?
We're going to talk about this on Spaces in a minute.
I'll set it up for you first.
And I thought to myself, I wonder if it's true that there's any correlation between education and vaccination.
So I looked it up and sure enough in Pew Research 2021, the highest rates of vaccination by far are correlated with the highest education.
So people with post-graduate degrees, the highest level that they measured, 89% of them at the time, I don't know if this is 2021, but at the time, 89% were vaccinated.
Which we don't really call vaccinated, do we?
We call them the shots.
The shots.
So 89% had the shots.
College graduate, still pretty high up there, but You know, less than the post-graduates.
81%.
So it starts going down, it should go down.
People who had some college but didn't graduate, it goes all the way down to 69%.
These are a little different now, but this was 2021.
And then people who had only high school or less, it goes all the way down to 66%.
And interestingly, among Asian-Americans, it's 94%.
So the highest ratio is Asian-Americans.
And Asian-Americans, as you know, have, I think, maybe among the highest educational levels, right?
And educational attainment.
So what's interesting is, when I asked people how they knew, how they got the right answer, and I didn't, they said that they had data.
And if I listened to the data, I would have had the same answer too.
And so this raises the question, why is it that the most educated people tend to look at the wrong data, where the people with the least education were looking at the right data?
Or they were using the right heuristic or the right decision making.
So why was that?
And apparently I trusted the government too much, and I trusted Dr. Fauci, which is an interesting comment when you're talking about the creator of the Dilbert comic, who for 35 years wakes up every day and says something about distrusting large organizations.
Every day.
But I guess I trusted Fauci too much, despite being the first person in the country to call him a liar in public.
I still own that.
I'm the first person to call him a liar in public for the pandemic.
Maybe other people hated him before for other reasons.
And apparently I trusted Fauci and didn't listen to all the other scientists.
So that was my problem, they say.
And so here's what I'd like to suggest.
We need a new way to check on our decisions, and this is suggested.
We're going to the whiteboard.
I didn't warn you.
I should have.
But this is sort of preliminary, but I think we need new ways to make decisions.
In the old days, I would go to a doctor for a first opinion, but then I would make the mistake of potentially going to a second doctor.
And what good is that going to do?
It's basically two highly educated people, probably both sheep.
So to improve my outcomes based on what we've learned, I should go to an uneducated person but not Not an ordinary uneducated person?
Because it turns out that the lower you went in the education attainment, the more accurate the opinions were.
So you want not just an uneducated person, but you want to go as low as you can into the uneducated realm.
And then, you want to also second, you know, maybe double-check your double-checking with the rogue experts, but not the mainstream.
The mainstream experts I tend to have a bad record.
But you want to be able to pick out the ones who are not mainstream and then believe them.
So this would be the new decision making.
I thought you could extend this a little bit, given that this phenomenon is so strong.
You know where else you see this?
Climate change.
If you were to look at climate change alarm, like who's the most afraid of climate change, wouldn't it scale exactly with education?
It would, wouldn't it?
The more alarmed you are, it correlates with how educated you are.
Doesn't it?
And so, you've got the Davos people, The richest and probably most highly educated group you're likely to get in one place.
You know, maybe academics would be a little different.
But in terms of a business gathering, it would probably be the, you know, some of the highest educated, smartest people.
Now, as you've taught me recently, they're getting all the wrong answers.
Right?
Would you agree with the statement that you've got all these brilliant people in one place, And you tell me, are they getting the right answers or the wrong answers?
It's all the wrong answers, right?
So here's what we need.
Instead of a Davos... Now, don't take this the wrong way, because I mean this as a compliment.
We need a dumb Davos.
Dumb Davos.
Because we've got a smart Davos, with all the smartest people, and if there's one thing we know about the smartest people, they are not good at figuring stuff out.
That much we know for sure.
So we need like a dumb Davos of the least educated people, and ideally the poorest, because the elites are giving us all their elite biased opinions.
You don't want that.
You want to get the real people who got everything right.
So if you go down there and you get a dumb Davos, and again, in this context, dumb is a compliment, right?
I remember Like, I'm old enough to remember, I don't know if you are, but I don't know, how long ago was it?
Probably a month ago.
I was thinking that smart people were more likely to get the correct answers.
Like, that's how brainwashed I was.
It's like, oh, you smart people who know how to analyze things are going to get the right answers.
Like Elon Musk.
A month ago, I thought, that guy can figure stuff out.
But it turns out he got vaccinated.
So I have to revise that.
And really I should find out who at Tesla has the lowest level of analytical abilities and see what they did.
So I can get a second opinion.
So we see this everywhere and I'm thinking that if we do a dumb Davos, dumb being a positive in this case, because they get the right answers, wouldn't we be better off?
And so I'd like to open it up to the spaces people.
Erica, are you there?
I think you've got your... I am here.
All right.
Erica, do you have any comments on this?
I know I just asked you out here to test the audio, but do you have anything to say before I invite other speakers?
Well, thanks.
My only comment would be I never considered myself an anti-vaxxer.
I never really thought about it.
I was depending on smart people to make a decision to match my confirmation bias to not get it.
And yeah.
Yeah, that didn't work out, did it?
Because it turns out the smart people were the dumb people and the dumb people were the smart people.
But what happens when you know the dumb people are the smart people but smart people are dumb?
I didn't see it that way.
I was very individual.
It was very individual for me.
And I remember Scott, like, waiting to see what you were going to do.
I'm like, OK, Scott's going to really think this out.
He's going to analyze it.
And then I'm going to really have a better feeling about what to do.
And you were.
And you were really taking your time.
You weren't sure.
You said, I'm going to wait as long as I can.
And then... Well, wait a minute.
Wait a minute.
Wait a minute, Erica.
You've listened to me every day from the beginning of the pandemic.
It's the beginning of time, yeah.
Why is it that your opinion of how I handled the pandemic is totally different than the people who only dipped in and saw a couple of tweets from me?
Why do you have such a different and wrong opinion than the people who didn't follow me?
I don't know.
So I think this is another case... I mean, Erica is proving the case again.
She has the most exposure to my opinions and yet got it completely wrong.
But the people who just saw a couple of tweets totally nailed not only my public opinion, but my inner thoughts and my secret fears.
So that was pretty awesome.
Anyway, Erica, thank you.
I'm going to see if I can find a critic.
OK?
OK, good luck finding a critic.
All right.
All right, I'm going to remove the speaker.
This interface is a little All right, Carla.
Let's see.
Carla, I'm going to add you as a speaker.
Are you there, Carla?
People take a while to turn on their microphones.
Carla, if you are there, activate your microphone, please.
If you don't, I'm going to go somewhere else.
Carla, you are removed from speakers for not being fast.
Randall has requested.
Randall, come on in here.
Randall, can you hear me?
If you can, turn your microphone on.
Yes, sir.
Thank you very much.
Oh, hi, Randall.
What would you like to say, or ask, or criticize?
Well, I think it was a moving target.
I mean, I think you can be right to varying extents at different times.
I think as Omicron came into existence, it was an absurdity to keep pushing the vaccine and for people to listen, obviously.
Omicron is not a genetic, genomic relative of the original SARS-CoV-2 strains, as were the other Greek letters.
And, you know, to answer your question why people fell for this, I mean, it was huge propaganda and a social aspect and so forth, but it was a clear malfeasance.
I don't think we've seen the back end of kind of the political kind of kickback scheme from the pharmacology and whatnot from the pharmacologic companies and so forth.
But to keep pushing this and now bivalent and so forth when SARS-CoV-2 no longer exists on Earth is an absurdity.
As far as your own position, I think it's an amazing thing that you, you know, kind of made this very logical admission and you should be, you know, proud of that.
I think that if you've gone over the short-term phase healthy, I don't think there's likely to be much more in the way of long-term problems.
I think most of the problems are on the short-term phase.
So I'm a medical doctor.
I'm not intending to give you medical advice over the Internet and whatnot.
But I think a lot of the problems are on the short-term aspect.
OK, I think we found the problem here, Randall.
You're a medical doctor?
Yes, sir.
Well, why aren't you listening more to Alex Berenson, who's a journalist?
You should be getting... Because even today... Well, hold on, hold on, Randall.
Even today, he told us on Twitter that long COVID is fake.
Are you getting your information from journals and stuff?
Or do you get it from Alex Berenson?
I have been listening to Alex Berenson a lot.
I've been doing a video of my own videocast on a small basis throughout the COVID pandemic.
I have not followed him today.
I don't follow all things COVID all the time.
I think long COVID probably will fall into the same category as all of our other previous kind of long problems.
Well, you know, there was chronic mononucleosis.
We've had neurasthenia.
I think all through the history of mankind, we've had these kind of like quasi-depression things, fibromyalgia and whatnot.
I think long COVID will probably fall into that category.
I think the study that I saw from Israel, that there's not that much of it really, you know, but people, you know, People are funny things.
microbiologically radiologically pharmacologically you can't find the soul but people probably have them in a sense or act as if they do and as barth simpson did and um uh people will you know get torn up and and swirled around in the tornado of their emotions um and i think And I think that people will, you know, think they have long COVID because they're, you know, we certainly did nothing to help people get away from COVID.
Randall, are you, or let me call you doctor.
Doctor, are you suggesting that long COVID will, Probably not be real, or it will be real, but as real as all of our other long stuff.
Yeah, I think it, I think it's, look, I mean, you know, we treat individuals, I only see individuals, and I try to deal with them as, you know, helpfully as I can, and you don't necessarily want to put, you know, you know, kind of rub people's noses in their, their, their infirmities or their, their misconceptions, and so if somebody is tied to, you know, having long COVID, I'm not going to argue with that person.
I see.
You know, I think If you were to do things pathologically and somehow you could do an immediate dissection of a super MRI and check all their cells and whatnot, I doubt you'd find a tissue diagnosis of long COVID in people.
I don't think coronavirus per se is that unusual a thing.
I mean, coronaviruses have existed as long as human beings, coincident on the Earth.
And, you know, if you look at journals before the SARS of 2003 or either one, you know, 2019, 2020, you'll find that coronaviruses by type were the second leading named cause of the common cold.
So, you know, zillions, billions, whatever, you know, of cases over thousands of years or hundreds of thousands, whatever.
So through the existence of time, there have been coronaviruses in humans.
And we've never noticed this long COVID before.
So I don't think, you know, I think SARS-CoV-2 is a slightly, you know, stronger version because it came from the animals.
You know, it didn't need to have equilibrated with humans.
You know, the example I give is coyotes and dogs.
There are coyotes existing right now and there are schnauzers existing right now.
They're related and they have some common ancestor who is probably more wolf-like than schnauzer-like because the schnauzers, you know, and puppies or poodles or whatever have all been domesticated from wolves and coyotes and whatnot.
Because the schnauzers and puppies or poodles or whatever have all been domesticated from wolves and coyotes and whatnot.
But the coyotes don't need us.
But the coyotes don't need us.
And coyotes can come and swoop down and, you know, like the dingo ate my baby, they can come take something and they don't care.
And coyotes can come and swoop down and, you know, like the dingo ate my baby, they can come take something and they don't care.
And so when you have a zoonotic virus, they can come in and swoop down and be damaging and then disappear.
And so when you have a zoonotic virus, they can come in and swoop down and be, you know, damaging and then disappear.
But the schnauzers and poodles and whatnot, they don't want to do that.
They don't want to eat their host because they'll starve themselves.
And so over time, these viruses equilibrate.
So what we're seeing now is basically kind of an equilibration of the, you know, the tornado, the coyote, more, you know, evil or whatever, dangerous SARS-CoV-2, which, mind you, was not that dangerous.
All things considered, if you look at the spectrum of influenza viruses pre-vaccine.
So if you stack SARS-CoV-2 or SARS-CoV-1 up against Spanish flu and both were, you know, given to populations, naive, no vaccines, extant in either population, you know, I would rather have SARS-CoV-2 than the Spanish flu.
The Spanish flu killed a lot of young people and SARS-CoV-2 predominantly killed in the median age of death.
It was like 82 worldwide.
And so it's mostly people with infirmities, you know, multiple diagnoses and whatnot.
But, you know, getting back to the zoonotic thing, you know, right now, you know, in order for the virus to coexist with people who come in cold viruses, they don't have a zoonotic host.
They don't have an animal host.
So the ones that do can come in and swoop down and be difficult all the time, like influenza has an animal host.
It's probably domestic pigs in China, historically, who come, you know, brought into the house because, you know, there's tiny farms and whatnot.
They want to keep the animals warm.
So in the winter, they bring the animals back in the house and they get, you know, they get the sniffles from their pigs.
They go to market and they spread this thing.
So every year we've had the, you know, the Hong Kong flu, the Shanghai flu, this flu, that flu.
But they're all Chinese names because that's what the Chinese farmers have done.
And then commerce brings it around the world.
And so the influenza tends to be a more potent virus.
It doesn't need humans per se.
So it can equilibrate in another animal and then come back to people.
But the other common colds, you know, adenovirus, rhinovirus, all that kind of stuff, we just, you know, sniffle and whatnot.
The viruses don't have brains, but, you know, in the population sense, they don't want to knock us down too much because then they will then they will not be able to persist.
So if they kill somebody, then that virus in that person doesn't pass on to the next person.
So on a populace, again, this is kind of an iterative, you know, kind of a huge, massive computer problem in a sense, but, you know, trillions of viruses and billions of people.
You can basically have a choice.
You can be hugely virulent or you can be hugely numerous, so transmissible or powerful.
And the ones that are hugely powerful, like Ebola, don't tend to be hugely widespread because they make like a meteor crater They crash down and that's that and everyone else moves away because we have population response to the virus.
We move away from it.
So a virus in order to pass around to billions of people has to be extremely surreptitious and not kill them.
So it has to be like a good spy, and so forth.
Yeah, I think I got the gist of it.
I want to let some other people in here, but thank you, Doctor, for all the background.
I want to just make sure I get some more people in here, OK?
Yeah, thank you so much.
Appreciate it.
All right, thank you very much.
All right, let's see who else would like to talk.
Dr. Molly.
Dr. Molly James, can you hear me?
Hi, yes, I can.
Thank you.
Good morning.
Do you have a comment or a question?
Yep.
I just wanted to comment on what he was talking about with coronavirus.
And this isn't the typical coronavirus because of the spike protein.
And that is completely what weaponized it and has changed the face of this.
That is why I have commented repeatedly, people are not dying from COVID, they're dying of cytokine storm, which people fail to talk about.
This is the reason that patients in the hospitals did so poorly is because they didn't recognize cytokine storm and it wasn't treated.
We were treating for a virus instead of an inflammatory condition.
So, you know, the last speaker, I would have to kindly disagree that This isn't quote a normal coronavirus and also we have several syndromes, you know, he was talking about long COVID.
We have several syndromes that are clinical in nature that don't have a tissue diagnosis and likely what happened is the inflammation from spike has exacerbated or caused a lot of inflammation and inflammatory or autoimmune situations that are presenting as clinical symptoms.
Now, how is the lay person, such as myself, supposed to know which of you two doctors has the right take on it?
How would we know the difference?
Two experts tell us different things.
How do we sort them out?
So, I don't know the other doctor's background, so I'll tell you mine and you can choose.
I treated 6,000 COVID patients.
The first 2,000 were in the ICU in New York City during the pandemic and in the Midwest.
And most of those patients were treated by the NIH protocols and died.
I then left the ICU and treated with early treatment, and I had less than 1% mortality.
And those were patients presenting with stats in the 60s and 70s in severe distress that never went to a hospital.
So, I'll let you decide.
What did you give them for early treatment?
So we gave a combination of ivermectin, steroids, medications like Singulair, ciproheptadine, finasteride, and then we were using hyperbaric oxygen.
How many of the people who died with the standard treatment died on ventilators?
Was it the ventilators killing people?
It wasn't the ventilators killing people.
The ventilators are just a tool.
Um, so the cytokine storm, this massive inflammation and blood clotting destroyed the lungs, right?
It created, basically it filled up the lungs.
So the patients, they said, I can't breathe, right?
What they meant is I can't take a deep breath in because their lungs were filled up with this inflammation.
And so when we put them on ventilators, we had to do that because they were breathing 40, 50, 60 times a minute.
Right?
There was no other choice.
They would have become exhausted and died.
It's like if you went to run a marathon, but the marathon never ended.
Okay?
Right.
But the lungs were very, very fragile.
So, and we didn't treat them properly for their inflammatory condition.
They were getting six milligrams of dexamethasone twice a day.
If somebody has an airway compromise, we give 40 milligrams of dexamethasone a day, you know, in the ICU.
So they were completely undertreated.
Let me ask a sort of a...
Patient question.
Yeah.
So you had this experience, which is dramatic, and the differences between those two sound like night and day.
But did you find that you couldn't convince other doctors and professionals that your take was the right one?
Yes, I have, but most of those people aren't in clinical practice.
Or they're not in practice.
So you're saying that the people who have the same experience as you You were largely on the same side.
So, let me go back.
So, the people in the ICU are not convinced, right?
Like, my entire profession thinks that what they're doing with Remdesivir is correct.
That's why people continue to die.
And it's dropped dramatically since Delta went away.
I want to point that out as well, because since Omicron came, we're not seeing cytokine storm, which is why you're not hearing about ventilators so much.
But those people in the ICU are absolutely 100 convinced that they have to vaccinate their way out of this and they're completely traumatized by what they saw.
We've never seen so much death in the ICU as we have during the last three years.
So come to the early treatment side and the people who are successfully treating their patients absolutely buy into this.
I see Dr. Vaughn on here and some other doctors that I've seen that are actively treating patients and having good outcomes.
Hold on, hold on.
But we're in the age of Omicron now, everybody's fine.
Can you really tell the difference between good and bad treatment for Omicron?
Don't they all just get a tough few days and they're fine?
No matter what you do?
Yes and no.
What I can tell is people get better faster when you give them early treatment.
But I don't disagree with you.
We're not seeing the death that we saw before.
Okay.
Alright, thank you doctor.
I appreciate that.
Alright, bye for now.
Alright, that was interesting.
Let's get a non-doctor on here.
Let's see, who looks very non-doctor-ish?
I'm looking for somebody's face who looks like they're really gonna give me a fight.
Alright, Caroline.
Caroline, you look like you're...
Ready to fight.
I don't think so, but we'll see.
All right, Caroline, is your... Oh, there you go.
Microphone on?
Yes, I'm here.
Hi, do you have a question or comment?
Both.
Thanks for inviting me up.
I just wanted to commend you for the video that you made.
I think a lot of people, when they find out that they're wrong, an acknowledgement feels like a lie, and your video and this space are evidence of Thank you.
But no, no compliments.
I'm sorry.
No, no, no compliments.
Insults only.
All right.
Or, or, or criticisms if you have any.
Um, I, my, my comment was that I think, um, to the question of the space where educated people getting the wrong answers on vaccines, um, I think in the community of highly educated and credentialed people, um, the culture is really to rely On the on the education and the credentials of the people around them.
And we maybe put a little bit too much stock in that.
And so I just wanted to draw a distinction between people who are educated and people who are curious.
And I think that a lot of the people who did get this right that I've observed and in my life are people who who are curious.
They're curious about the people around them, the world around them.
Because I wouldn't even say skeptical.
They're just people that want to understand how things work.
Let me ask you this.
Do you think that there are people in the category of who did not want to get vaccinated, but if they had, they'd still be alive?
Is there anybody in that category?
Or is that empty?
People who did not want to get vaccinated and did not get vaccinated that would still be alive?
Is there anybody dead who would be alive had they got vaccinated, let's say during Alpha and Delta?
Not so much now. - I mean, I would have to say that I'm sure there's always exceptions.
I would have to say I'm sure that maybe somebody would have had that situation.
I don't think that the evidence bears that out at all.
So at this point you would say the evidence does not show that there's any population that benefited from the so-called vaccinations?
That there's not somebody alive who would otherwise be dead as far as your take on the data?
Correct.
I mean, you couldn't make that argument for an entire segment of the population, absolutely not.
There's nobody, let's say, over 65 who died who didn't need to, let's say, if they'd taken the vaccination.
You believe there's nobody in that category?
Of people who were unvaccinated?
Are there any people who died who would not be dead had they been vaccinated?
Like any.
Man.
My gut is no.
I mean, the evidence does not bear that out.
Like I say, there are exceptions to every rule, but there is no evidence that that is true.
So the million or so people who died, did they die of the coronavirus?
Or maybe they didn't.
Maybe they died with it.
OK.
All right.
Thank you, Caroline.
Let's get another speaker up here.
Appreciate it.
Thank you.
All right.
David, you're coming up.
I hope your mic is on, David.
We're connecting here.
David, can you hear me?
Turn on your microphone if you can.
Your microphone is muted.
Okay, that didn't work.
We're removing David.
Sorry about that.
Let's try... I think we're gonna go with this monkey person here.
Somebody who's representing as a monkey.
That looks like that would be interesting.
I'm gonna go with the monkey.
All right, Bam, can you hear me?
Yes.
Hi, Scott.
Hi.
Do you have a comment or a criticism?
I have a little bit of both.
All right.
Let's hear it.
I want to say I've listened to you for a while and I appreciate you.
So in terms of the kind of the axis of who can we trust, I think it falls apart into what other background?
What's the ideology?
Because when you think about people, how they think about the pandemic, it can be about all the numbers.
And you can think about how many people did we save in general.
And those are the scientists, you know, they think about the statistics.
But then there are other people that think about just giving all the information out and treating each person individually.
I think that makes a big difference on who do you, you know, who can you trust.
So you would trust more the people who are treating individuals rather than treating to the data?
Well, I would want to get the information from both and kind of, you know, myself.
I'm a layman.
I'm not a scientist.
I'm not an academic.
Why do you think the most educated people got the wrong answer?
Why do you think that is?
Well, in part, I think it's because they have less time to look at people's backgrounds.
Like some people that I followed through the pandemic, I had followed from before, and I had a certain amount of trust in them from way back.
So when they came out and gave some comments on the pandemic, I had already Developed trust in them in general.
Okay.
And I knew their ideology a little bit more than I did of the, you know, the scientists and the TV that came from the CDC or whatever.
So the ideology.
Okay.
All right.
I'm being asked to invite some different people on, so I'm going to move on.
Thank you for your comments.
Okay.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Let's see.
Let's see, I heard you say... Did somebody say that Brett is on here?
Brett Weinstein?
Is he still on?
I don't see him.
Listen, there are too many people in here.
Let's see.
I'll do a quick search and see if he's there.
There's a ton of people who you're mentioning that I can't... See, because the interface changes as I scroll.
See that?
See, you can't even scroll down.
It's actually changing as you scroll, so you don't even know if you've already looked at that page.
I don't even know how to find anybody here.
Can I do a search?
Can I do a search?
Alright, sorry, it's just a terrible interface.
Well, it's not a terrible interface, but when you get Oh my God, it's just dancing all around here.
You can't... Yeah, you can't even barely select things.
It's just moving all around.
All right.
I've got way more... Oh, we've got 1,200 people listening.
That's crazy.
All right, sorry I'm being boring, but it's hard to pick from the interface because it's just dancing around here.
But I don't want to pick just from the people who are on the top of the list.
So I'm going to randomly pick Mike.
Mike, can you hear me?
Mike, take your microphone off.
That's not good.
Mike?
Mike?
Yes, can you hear me?
I can hear you.
Do you have a question or a comment on why educated people... Sorry about that.
So I just wanted to let you know a couple of things early on that I picked up, because I listen to your show every day.
I don't agree with you all the time, but I appreciate your views and perspectives on things.
A couple of criticisms maybe you could call it is that one of the things I noticed early on with Dr. Robert Malone was on Joe Rogan.
I felt like you were kind of dismissive of that discussion.
Well, you have to be specific.
Not dismissive of discussion, but rather a specific fact or a specific point.
Oh no, I just, I feel like you, I don't know, that was just one of the things early on and... Now, are you aware that I made the same decisions as Dr. Malone?
At about the same time and for the same reasons?
Oh yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Okay.
And I just, and there was that, and then there was a tweet that you put out that I think rubbed a lot of people the wrong way, where you tweeted that for the...
Thank you.
Thank you.
That's exactly what I was hoping somebody would bring up.
you're in the middle of a deadly pandemic. - Thank you. - I think that's the thing.
I see that retweeted a lot. - Thank you.
Thank you.
That's exactly what I was hoping somebody would bring up.
How many of you remember or saw a tweet of mine in which I said, after I got vaccinated in 20, whenever it was, and I tweeted that for the vaccinated, Now, if you're unvaccinated, you're in a deadly pandemic, and if you're vaccinated, it's a Tuesday or Wednesday, whatever I said.
How many saw that?
All right, a lot of you did.
All right, so I've got some feedback here, so turn off your mic.
I have to mute you.
I had to remove him.
He had his speaker on, so it was feedback.
So let me explain that.
How many of you thought that was a fact, that I was relaying data?
Did that sound like a data argument to you?
Because it shouldn't.
Did you take it as an opinion?
Because you should have taken it as how I felt.
How I felt was, I had now done everything I needed to do, I had no more decisions to make, At the time, the masks had already dropped.
They came back.
But at the time, there were no masks.
So I had no masks.
And once I was vaccinated, I could go anywhere.
And I could travel internationally.
I could take my vacation to Greece.
So when I got the vaccination, my feeling was I have no more pandemic-related problems.
But the people who had not got vaccinated were still living under You know, some constraints that I no longer had.
So, to me, the pandemic was over.
I'd done everything I needed to do.
And, you know, I had my freedom back, temporarily.
Masks came back.
So, a lot of people have fact-checked me on my feeling.
Does that make sense?
Why were you fact-checking me on my feeling?
That was how I felt.
That's how I felt.
Jenny is saying, take the L. Jenny, why do you think we're here?
You might be missing the context here, Jenny.
No, my feeling is my feeling.
You can't fact check a feeling.
Can you?
Who's fact checking my feeling?
Jenny, taking the L is the only reason I'm here.
So you're too much of an asshole, so I'm going to get rid of you.
So the funniest thing about my video, I mean, I pinned a video saying the people who didn't get vaccinated are the winners.
And there's still somebody out here yelling, take the L, take the L. It's like you can't take yes for an answer.
So Alex Berenson dunked on me on Twitter today.
And he wasn't going to take yes for an answer.
He was a little bit angry about the things I've said about him in the past.
And he didn't take it too well.
So some people don't want to take the win.
All right.
Ian.
Ian, are you there?
I think he will be.
Ian.
Hey, Scott.
How's it going?
Good.
How are you?
What would you like to say today?
Well, I mean, you know, you mentioned how a feeling made you take the vaccine, right?
No, no, no, no, no, I didn't say that.
What was it?
What's the reason you took the vaccine?
Was it just the data?
Was that the sole reason?
Well, there wasn't any data.
So there was a risk of long COVID, which might be zero, or might be extreme, and we knew less about it then.
And there was a risk from the virus itself, which we didn't know how engineered it was.
So there were two extreme risks that could not be measured.
And then the tiebreaker, I did the same tiebreaker as Dr. Malone and Elon Musk, which is I needed to travel, well, I wanted to travel internationally.
And so I had two impossible-to-measure risks, but the only thing that was unknown is I wanted to travel.
So I got it, and then I traveled.
I'm still alive, but now I have those chemicals in me, and who knows what those will do while the risk of the virus itself has now dropped to basically zero.
So what was your question?
Oh, looks like he dropped off.
I have to add him back on.
Alright, Ian.
Oh, I think he disappeared.
Bummer.
Alright.
Let's try somebody else.
Let's try... I want somebody who's going to give me a hard time.
Otherwise, this won't be fun.
The people who agree with me are not going to be a good show.
So let's look for Mike.
Another Mike.
Mike, are you there?
Mike?
Your speaker is muted.
Unmute your speaker, Mike.
Mike is not quick enough.
Mike is deleted.
Gotta be quick.
Folks, you gotta be quick.
I was looking for Adam.
I invited him once before, and he didn't want to come on.
But, how about... Ah, damn it!
It's the interface.
Marty Blarvest, turn off your muting.
Marty Blar... There you are!
Hey, got a question or a comment?
Well, I'm happy to disagree with you about something in a minute if you want, but I will point out, I'm sure you're well aware, the answer to the question, why are educated people getting the wrong answers?
That's a cognitive dissonance issue right there.
That's all that is.
Because we don't even know who the educated people we call educated.
Some of them have college degrees and they're not really educated.
So you're saying that the lesser educated people had an immunity to cognitive dissonance?
No, not at all.
Not at all.
Not at all.
We all found the answer we were looking for.
Then why did the educated people get the wrong answer?
Well, because... I get you.
The issue, I actually don't have any issues and I think it's remarkable how you handle things given all the assaults.
But I will say that from the very beginning of the pandemic and vaccines and everything, I thought it was very strange in the very beginning when everybody talked about the coming vaccine and how great it was going to be, especially President Trump.
And there were, of course, some Democrats saying we will never take the Trump vaccine.
And I thought to myself, I don't think anybody would ever take that vaccine, no matter what.
Why would you take this vaccine that usually takes 10 years to make, and then now all of a sudden they have it in nine months?
And there were just a lot of questions about the whole thing.
And then when it came time to talk about those questions, they were snuffed out by one side of the argument.
And that was my clue.
When you can't have an open debate about something, The side that's suppressing that debate is not being honest.
And I thought that would be obvious to nearly everybody.
But that's the part that I don't understand why educated people couldn't understand.
Because that's a function I always have felt people should understand.
Suppose you were in charge of the pandemic.
And you believed that the information you were putting out was correct and it would save millions of lives.
Would you try to suppress the information you thought would kill millions of lives, or would you let the free speech do its thing?
I don't know how I would be in that position because I wonder how the people in charge got and trusted their information too, being that they are supposedly educated.
Okay.
Seriously, let's go to the top and root it out.
Let's find out who really gave that person the information.
I don't think, you know... It wasn't one person.
...at the beginning that there was a consensus in the science.
There was a lot of disagreement on the science of what little data was left to us.
And it turns out there is, there was no consensus.
But we were led to believe, we were intentionally led to believe there was some kind of consensus.
And there never was.
It was just the government leaders taking the side of the most coercive argument.
That's all it was.
All right.
Thank you for your comments.
Thank you.
Remove from speakers.
I think Ian's back.
While I'm bringing Ian up here, let me clarify.
There were, of course, brilliant and highly educated people on all sides of the debates.
Somebody was saying that I wasn't making the point that there were highly educated people on both sides.
There were.
Let me just finish a point and then we'll go to you, Ian.
Somebody was saying that I wasn't making the point that there were highly educated people on both sides.
There were.
It's just that the trend is a very strong trend that the more educated you were, the more likely you took the vaccination.
So I kind of figured out pretty early on that the vaccine didn't really work, right?
- All right, Ian, go ahead. - Yeah, so the question I wanted to ask you, and this is kind of like a weird thing, right?
So I kind of figured out pretty early on that the vaccine didn't really work, right?
Because it wasn't really showing efficacy against Delta.
And then when Omicron came in, you know- - Well, hold on, hold on, Ian, Ian.
You have to clarify in this conversation when you say worked.
We found out early on that it wasn't stopping transmission.
That's what I'm referring to.
It wasn't stopping any transmission, and so by the definition of a vaccine, Right.
Well, hold on, hold on.
Let's do a fact check.
Are you saying that there's a dispute today that vaccinated people are doing better than unvaccinated people in hospitals?
sizes are really small, at least the ones I've seen.
So I don't know if there's some dispute there.
Hold on, hold on, hold on, let's do a fact check.
Are you saying that there's a dispute today that vaccinated people are doing better than unvaccinated people in the hospitals?
Is that still a question?
I think that was what was being told to us, right?
Like that was, they're saying people who had a vaccine were showing that, you know, they had better results in the hospitals.
I don't think that actually is true nowadays, because the vast majority of people, at least the ones that have been sampled, have been vaccinated, right?
In countries like Japan, you know, 90% of the population plus, you know, has been, or at least actually closer to 100% have been vaccinated.
And yet everybody's still getting sick.
sick they're still getting to hospital so i don't think there's any real significant difference i mean china's the same way there's uh thousands of hospitalizations a day and they've all been vaccinated with their you know version of its sinovac but but in you how do you compare what they would have how sick they would have been without the vaccination when that category doesn't exist right
so my point that i'm getting at is that i don't really think it worked at all because of the way the vaccines were developed, Like it was simply too slow.
The rollout was too slow.
The technology's not there.
It's not fast enough to keep up with the the mutations of the variants.
So, you know, by the time Omicron came out, it was pretty clear that Omicron's fairly safe, right?
It's for most people, it presents as a as a mild cold and it effectively provides natural immunity.
This is something even Bill Gates said.
He says it's basically natural immunity and we kind of don't need the vaccines anymore.
And yet you still have Fauci out there pushing the vaccines.
Biden is pushing the vaccines.
I mean, a lot of governments are pushing the vaccines, not all.
You know, some of them simply stopped the mandate at that point.
Or if they were thinking about doing a mandate, they just skipped it entirely.
They even dropped airline restrictions like my country, for example, Malaysia, Singapore, you know, even Germany.
They were like, OK, we're not even going to restrict people from traveling to and from their countries if, you know, even if they don't have the vaccine.
Right.
So it's pretty clear that a lot of health authorities were like, OK, this is not a big deal anymore.
Right.
But the question I wanted to ask you, right, is that why did so many people take the vaccine even early on, despite kind of figuring out that it didn't really work?
I mean, like, I took the vaccine.
I don't know why I did it, like, and I'm asking myself that question.
Why did I take it with even knowing logically, right, logically, like, that my heuristics tell me that, first of all, don't trust the pharmaceutical companies because they're just there to sell vaccines, and secondly, I mean, if it doesn't work, why the hell take it at all?
Because it wasn't effective, right?
What was the date that you took it?
Because when I took it, the entire medical community said it totally worked.
When did you take it?
I took it maybe about three months after.
Three months after, you know, so we already had some data showing that it wasn't really effective.
Wait, hold on.
You're telling me you took it three months before I did?
No, no, no, no.
After.
After you did.
After you did.
Do you know when I took it?
I don't know.
I'm assuming day one.
I'm assuming you got it day one, right?
God, no.
I was... I'm not going to take a day one vaccination.
What the fuck?
What the fuck?
Do you think I'm going to be the first one to take an experimental vaccination?
Seriously.
I don't know.
Hold on, seriously.
Hold on.
I want to see if there's anybody else who thinks that.
Do you actually think I would have been first in line for this vaccination.
Does anybody think that?
That's a polar opposite of everything I was saying at the time.
I told people I was going to wait as long as possible because most of the complications happen in the first few months.
So it would be actually insane to take it first.
I waited at least six months or so.
Before I touched it.
And six months after it announced, they were still saying it was super effective against transmission, which, by the way, for a clarification, my understanding is it was, but only against alpha, which didn't last long enough to make any difference.
And it was a little bit effective on delta.
And then, you know, after that, basically nothing.
So when I took it, The vast majority of the experts were saying, you know, we don't know if there's going to be side effects because nobody could know that, but they were saying it's definitely stopping you from getting alpha, probably helps you a lot against delta, but that's all we know and we're trying to flatten the curve.
Now, if those things were true, then it worked.
Except for whatever unknown future problems you have, which is a big variable.
But in terms of, if you took it during alpha and delta, are you saying that you don't believe it had any protective value for those people, let's say over 65, who took it right in the middle of the worst alpha-delta?
You think it didn't have any effect?
I took it during delta, but I don't think it had any effect on delta.
I think it did have an effect on alpha.
Hold on, you know the entire medical community disagrees with you and would tell you, not the entire, let's say 90% would disagree with you and say that it made a big difference on survivability of Delta.
I'm not saying that, I'm saying the medical community.
That's what they're saying, yeah.
I would disagree with them simply because of the logic.
I'm not a scientist, But the logic is that the vaccine is developed to counter just a specific variant of the virus.
You change a few things and so it's not the same virus anymore at that point.
It's like influenza, right?
You have a vaccine for a certain strain for it and you can kind of predict what that strain might be, which is what they're using, like AI now to try to predict it, where it's going to develop or evolve into.
But I don't think it's very effective.
But I think you're missing sort of a basic thing about the vaccinations, is that they're never exact.
So if the virus morphs in some ways but not always, then the vaccination would still work, because it could still identify it.
So it might work on the first variation, but it's not going to work on the thousandth variation for sure.
Let me ask you this, too.
Alright, Ian, let me ask you this.
Do you think there was any chance that the vaccinations during Alpha and Delta helped the healthcare system not crash?
I realize it's hindsight.
I don't believe so.
So you think probably the healthcare system would have been pretty much the same even if nobody got vaccinated.
That's right.
And you know that's opposite of what mainstream science thinks.
Of course, they will argue for the efficacy of the vaccines, but the reality is that... Not now.
I don't think they're not arguing it under... I think this conversation, we're always conflating Omicron and Alpha and Delta.
I think mainstream, everybody thinks Omicron's not going to kill them and so vaccinations might be a little overkill unless you're 100 years old.
During the alpha-delta phase, if the experts were right, and at this point, of course, we have to doubt all data, but if they were right, then it would have made a big difference in keeping the hospitals operating.
You know, if you think that's important.
Now, you could argue that that's not as important as their freedom and free speech and, you know, getting the information out there and, you know, not having mandates and all that.
Those are separate.
But the argument is, did it make any difference during the peak of Alpha and Delta?
That's the only vaccination question that I think is interesting.
Because once you get to Omicron, it's obviously just a money grab.
I mean, I don't see any... I see no medical reason for that.
Maybe you could give me some data someday that if you're 85 and near death, it'll buy you a month or two.
I don't know.
But in general, I don't think anybody's thinking Omicron is going to kill them these days.
All right.
Thank you, Ian.
Thank you for having me up.
All right.
Thanks a lot.
All right.
How about one more?
What do you think?
One more?
All right.
Let's talk to Owen.
Owen, turn on your microphone.
Take that mute off, Owen.
There you are.
Hey.
Hi, Scott.
Hey, Owen.
How's it going?
Yeah.
So in general, I am not a critic of yours.
I've actually been in your local community for a long time.
I listen to all your live streams.
So I wouldn't classify myself as a Scott Adams critic.
But for the purposes of this conversation, I'll try and challenge my critic.
All right.
I think a few of the criticisms I have or the mistakes I think that might have been made One goes back to, I'm sure you remember, there was a live stream you did with the Risk Management Matrix, where you kind of laid out, here's how you think we could think about the risk of taking the vaccine versus the risk of being unvaccinated.
You recall that?
Roughly, yeah.
Go ahead.
What's the point?
Well, I think what shocked me as you were walking through this was that you got to the point where you said, here's the long-term risk of taking the vaccine.
And you said, that's unknown, so we should just treat that as zero.
And that part didn't make any sense to me at all.
Yeah, well, I can see why that didn't make sense, because I didn't say anything like that.
That's the opposite of anything I would say.
Well, I know there was one of the vaccination risks that you said, basically, this is unknown, so we should treat it as zero, because there's no way to quantify it.
No, no, no, no, no.
I would never say anything.
I would never say anything even in that universe.
You think I would ever treat a vaccination as a zero risk?
Well, I specifically recall this.
I think even people in the local community are agreeing with me right now.
No, well, actually, but just think about it logically.
You should have known I wasn't saying that, because nobody would say that.
That's like something that literally nobody would say.
There's not a doctor who would say it, there's not a critic who would say it, there's not a patient who would say it.
But you think I actually said that in public.
Literally nobody would say that.
But let me tell you what you might have heard.
You might have heard something you thought was that.
So here's what I think you heard.
That if you looked at the risk of long COVID, that was totally unknown.
And if you looked at the risk of the vaccination, it was totally unknown.
So since both of those are potentially big and totally unknown, you should treat them like they're not part of the decision.
And that's what you heard.
Which makes perfect sense.
But if you just say you're ignoring one of the big risks, I would never say that.
I'm saying that there are two big risks, and they're both unknown, so you have to treat them as equivalent unknowns.
They don't move you in either direction.
That's what I said.
Okay.
Well, in any case, I think, and to be fair, when you went through this risk management matrix, you said very clearly Everyone should make their own decisions on how to weigh all these different risks.
You were just laying out the matrix for people and then you walked through an example of it.
But I think your example probably colored how people perceive that.
And that kind of leads into my next criticism is that I think one of the reasons that people perceive you as being pro-vax and pro-mask and all these other things that I do think are mischaracterized Is that as I listen to you, you know, I don't know, maybe a hundred times going through, let's talk about this aspect or let's talk about this study or let's talk about this particular way of thinking about the pandemic or the vaccines.
The majority of those things were discrediting anti-vax arguments and.
You know you had all sorts of disclaimers saying I don't know if this is true or I you know I don't I'm not telling anybody whether or not to get the vaccine but when you then proceed to say here's why this anti-vax argument doesn't make any sense or isn't credible which is usually what you focus on is whether something's credible that it definitely leads people to believe that You're on that side of the argument, because you didn't spend nearly as much time talking about, here's why the pro-vax arguments don't make sense, or here's why the pro-mask arguments don't make sense.
And I know you're a persuasion expert, so you had to be somewhat aware of how you were going to proceed that way.
Yeah, and I didn't care.
So that was something I wasn't trying to fix.
So you're right, I was completely aware of that, and had no interest in fixing that at all.
But here's why.
I'll tell you my internal thinking.
But your observation is correct, because that's your take on what was happening.
So there's no argument on your subjective impression.
But here's why I didn't criticize the other side.
I was the first person who told you the vaccinations wouldn't work.
I predicted that before Warp Speed started, as it was announced.
It was very clear that they'd been trying for 20 years to get something that would work as a vaccination as a coronavirus.
All of the experts said, we have no idea how to do it, and it's not going to happen in a year.
And then it didn't.
So that was the very first thing I said.
The second thing I've said, consistently and always, I'm the creator of the Dilber comic strip.
I never believe anything that comes out of Big Pharma, Big Government, Big Corporation.
I also say, follow the money works every time, and you don't need to know anything else about the vaccination side of the argument.
To me, the entire pro-vaccination criticism is, how much money is involved?
And then you're done.
Right?
And I've always said that you can't believe the data.
I always said that I'm going to wait as long as possible because I don't trust it.
You know, on day one, I definitely don't trust it, but at least I'll see how many people die in the first six months.
So to me, the argument against the VACs, meaning against trusting big companies, is just so stipulated and given that it needs no explanation.
Whereas the anti-vaxxers were primarily swimming in misinformation.
Primarily.
So I would say 95% of the anti-vax stuff was wrong data and misinterpretation.
And maybe 100% of the pro-vax stuff was wrong.
Maybe.
It might have been 100% wrong.
I don't know.
But the pro-vax side is so Discredited on obvious grounds.
Big money, people you don't trust, big governments.
Those things were, I think everybody knew that.
And everybody knew that the vaccinations were not tested as much as normal ones.
Everybody knew it was a new technology.
Everybody knew there was coercion.
So those arguments didn't need to be made because everybody could see them plainly.
But you're right that I quite intentionally stirred the pot of the Of the people who are, let's say, the most riled up.
Because I thought it would be useful to help the skeptics know which parts they shouldn't rely on.
In other words, I was the skeptic of both the pro side and the anti.
I was skeptical, extreme skepticism on both sides.
But it is nonetheless true that although most of the anti-vaccination arguments were based on ridiculous data and misinterpretation of data and confusing causation and correlation, which is what I like to talk about, It is nonetheless true that if they didn't get vaccinated and they got to the age of Omicron, they won.
Now the people who didn't get vaccinated, and according to the medical professionals, died because of it, hypothetically, they lost.
So I'm just saying, if you just look at the outcomes, the people who simply said, don't trust the government, there's a lot of money involved, they're going to be right 80% of the time.
Wouldn't you say?
Yes, I do.
I agree with you on that.
It doesn't even matter what the topic is, right?
The people who say, look, look, look, I don't even care what the topic is.
Could be climate change, could be vaccinations, could be the World Economic Forum, could be anything.
Whatever it is, 80% of the time the government's lying to you and it's not good for you.
So if you just took the heuristic of follow the money, Do they have a billion-dollar reason to lie?
Oh, yeah, they do.
Yeah, they do.
We all saw that.
Nobody was confused by that.
There's nobody who didn't understand the size of that risk.
So it's nonetheless true that the people like me, who took it analytically, We got one answer.
The most highest, highly educated, trained people got one answer.
And the people used a rule of thumb.
Like, look, they're obviously lying.
You know, they're hiding stuff.
They're asking for immunity.
They're doing everything you would do if you were shady.
And if you do everything that you do when you're shady, we're going to assume you're shady.
So don't put that in my arm.
And that argument turned out to be Well, I would also take issue with saying that the other side, the anti-vax side, didn't approach it analytically.
I think many of them did, and I think Many of them dove deep into looking at studies.
I mean, I read hundreds of medical studies.
Well, hold on, hold on, hold on.
That means you believed some and you disbelieved others.
And none of us have that ability, unfortunately.
I did not just take them at face value.
In fact, I had a network of people, many of them were doctors, that we would discuss.
So it was more of a group effort.
Right.
But we know there's no amount of group that can know which data is correct.
There is no mechanism.
There's nobody who can ask.
There's nobody who's good at it.
There's nothing.
We have no way to know about it.
There were vaccinated people in it and unvaccinated people in it.
So we got a lot of perspectives.
Getting a lot of perspectives doesn't help you as much as you want it to.
Because it's a lot of people who don't know what they're talking about.
If you add them together, it doesn't improve.
Well, in any case, I don't think it was permitting people on the anti-vax side just a rule of thumb decision, though.
I think they were analyzing it.
And to your point, yes, maybe they have just as much cognitive dissonance.
Groupthink or, you know, errors in terms of saying, I'm only going to trust the things that agree with me.
I'm sure some of that is true for me and for all the people that I consulted with, but I do think that there was an analytical approach there.
I mean, I was looking at studies that was saying the spike protein is what's causing the damage with coronavirus.
And that seemed to never get connected in the media with, by the way, that's the same spike protein that's in the vaccines.
All right, but I would argue that your view, if you believe some of the medical data but not, say, the mainstream, that that's not a data argument.
That that's an argument that the other people are liars.
Which was right.
Which turned out to be the heuristic that was correct.
The other side's lying.
Well, they're lying or they're just wrong.
I mean, I think a lot of them may have certainly believed what they were saying.
And how would you know, how could you judge, even with the help of the other people who were looking at it, how could you judge what was correct in the data?
I honestly would still say I'm not sure.
Like, I'm not 100% certain of either side.
I would just say that the risk management decision, to me, seemed pretty obvious.
That with all these unknowns, it doesn't make sense to take this treatment, especially with a disease that is not nearly as deadly as they were saying it was.
Well, let me test your logic then.
So do you believe that long COVID is real, or did you believe it when you made your decision to vax or not vax?
Do you believe that long COVID was a real thing, or no?
I would have put a low probability on it, maybe 20%.
Or at least that it's true, but it's only true in the sense that there is a post-vaccine, or post-disease That applies to any major illness.
Like if you're in the hospital, there's a time it takes to recover, and so some of it might just be the normal amounts of that.
Right.
But which could, you know, make it drag on for six months or so.
So you had an unknown risk of COVID, and then you also had an unknown risk from the vaccination itself.
Unknown, yes, but I tried to at least assess the probability.
So I took my own age, my own health, lack of comorbidities into account.
I mean, in my case, I actually thought my parents, because they're very old, probably should take the vaccine.
But part of that calculation in my mind is that because they're older, even if there are side effects of the vaccine, they're only going to be alive a certain number of years anyway, as a young person.
How old are you?
I'm 51.
Right, so you were well below the old people level.
So do you think you could compare your decision to somebody who is older?
So I was in the category where The professionals were saying, OK, you're in the category where you should get vaccinated.
If I were young, if I were 51 and thinner, I'm not sure that I would have.
And if I didn't have asthma, I'm not sure I would have.
So your decision and mine actually sound the same.
In other words, if I were young, I would say, oh, the risk is low, so I'm going to take my risk of low COVID.
I'll take a risk of long COVID if I'm young and healthy, but not so much if I'm older and I have some risk.
Yeah, Scott, I have no criticism with the decision you made.
Like, I mean, I think you, I mean, I don't know that I would have necessarily made the same decision.
I don't know.
I'd have to think about it because, you know, if I were 65 and if I had comorbidities, maybe that would have affected my decision, but I don't fault you for.
By the way, I don't claim that I made a correct decision.
So I've always claimed it was guessing on my side.
Where people got angry is when I said, I think it's guessing on your side too.
That's where everybody got mad.
Yeah, no, I mean, my criticism is just about, you know, the fact that you're saying, well, the analytical people made one decision and the other people were all using a rule of thumb.
Whereas, you know, I mean, I think I did a very deep dive into research and talking to all sorts of people and listening to all sorts of perspectives and made my decision based on that analysis, not based on just, I don't trust the government, end of story.
Okay.
So I was skeptical of all the government's information, but also all of the skeptics' information.
You were a little more convinced by the skeptics' argument, whereas I gave them all zero credibility.
Yes, although, I mean, in many cases, I did not believe some of the skeptics' information, especially the ones that were very hyperbolic or, you know, the ones that are saying everyone's going to die.
And there were all sorts of theories that people would put forth about how, you know, it's going to just be the end of the world.
It's a depopulation.
No, I didn't buy into any of that.
Like, it's just, on the whole, when I put it all together and when I have to come up with a decision, I certainly fell out on the anti-vax side, and it seemed a pretty Easy decision once I looked at all the arguments and data and perspectives.
What's your education or field?
What do you do for a living?
Mostly in technology consulting.
So you're a tech, you're a rational tech kind of a brain?
Yeah, yeah.
All right.
Thank you, Owen.
We'll see you on Locals.
Thanks.
I appreciate all your Twitter interaction as well.
All right, bye for now.
All right, I think we've done what we need to do.
I wasn't watching your comments as much as I should have.
But for those of you on YouTube, you're unaware that if you look at my pinned tweet, you're going to be happy, because that's where I say that the people who didn't get vaxxed are the winners.
That's what you want to hear, right?
So go look at that.
You're missing some context.
The ones who are saying, you refuse to say you were wrong.
The entire context of today is that I tweeted a video of me saying that the people who didn't get vaxxed are in the better situation.
Because if you didn't get vaxxed, you don't have any risk of the vaccination itself.
And Omicron's, you know, if you're young and healthy, especially, Omicron's no big deal.
Especially if you've been infected before.
All right.
Anybody else have a problem?
We all lost.
You lost your little brother.
I'm sorry about that.
You knew from the jump.
Well, I would like to learn from you.
That's why I think we need dumb Davos.
Because the people who knew before the data was reliable, and they knew just from heuristics and from their common sense and their logic, you need to teach me how to do that.
Because my education experience Didn't teach me how to be certain before there's any information.
I don't know how to do that.
But you guys nailed it, so you're the winners.
All right.
By the way, if you haven't looked at the comments to my video in which I say the non-vaxxed are the winners, you have to read the comments, because they're hilarious.
Maybe just to me, I don't know.
But I thought they were hilarious.
All right, that's all I got for today.
I'm going to talk to the locals people for a minute.
