Episode 2015 Scott Adams: Vigilante Phase Is Here, AI Deep Fakes Are A Threat To Civilization, More
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
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Content:
Elon shadowbanned
Deep Fakes speaking AI written dialog
America's 2 Constitutions
White Supremacists vs. racists
Personally know anyone vaxx injured or long-COVID?
Meta-Study on mask effectiveness
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Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the highlight of civilization so far.
And don't get used to civilization because it's not going to last much longer.
Well, actually, today is mostly about funny stuff.
A lot of funny stuff going on, so we'll talk about it.
But, if you would like to take your experience up to, well, I don't want to say orgasmic, but something like it, all you need is a cup or mug or a glass of tankard, chalice or stein, a canteen jug or 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, the end of the day, the thing that makes absolutely everything better, except Lady Gaga's show.
And it's called The Sentinel TV Sip and it happens now.
Go!
I only mention Lady Gaga's show because there's some things she's included that's so grotesque, I'm not even going to mention it.
Because if you haven't read about it, don't.
Don't read about it.
Nope.
Do not read about it.
Seriously.
It won't make you happy to find out what she does on stage.
Don't look into it.
If you see an article, just look away.
That's my only advice.
So, what else is happening today?
Let's find out.
If I had a printer, I'd be looking at my printed notes, but I'll have one in a few days.
All right, I saw a meme that might be useful to some of you.
How many of you have ever been referred to, or maybe even you refer to yourself, as Far Right?
Is there anybody here who's ever been called Far Right?
You have, all right.
Here's a reframe.
I didn't make this one up.
This is somebody's meme.
So I guess we don't know who made it up because it's just a meme.
But the reframe goes like this.
You keep calling me far right, but I think you mean right so far.
Right so far.
It's pretty good.
You know what I like about it?
What I like about it is it doesn't take itself seriously.
And I feel like I don't know if we're ever going to leave our teams.
You know, we're always locked into our teams, whatever they are.
But we can at least have a sense of humor about it.
Right.
If you're going to be on a team, you might as well enjoy it.
All right.
I saw a tweet from Ben Collins, NBC News, and I hope the following story is true.
Now, if it's like every other story about something that happened behind closed doors, it's not true.
We'll go private over here.
So I'm assuming it's not exactly true, but boy do I want this one to be true.
Alright, the story goes like this.
That Elon Musk was talking to his engineers at Twitter, and he was complaining that he has more than 100 billion followers, but some of his recent tweets are only getting tens of thousands of impressions.
Now, what do you think?
Does that sound natural and normal?
He has, I think, 126 million followers, and some of his tweets are only getting tens of thousands of impressions.
Now, I don't mean retweets.
Not retweets.
I mean people even saw it.
You think that sounds right?
So, Musk goes to his engineers, and he's asking them to figure out why his impressions are so low.
One of the engineers, reportedly, Reportedly.
I would say I wouldn't put a lot of credibility on this story, but it's a fun story, so I'll tell it to you anyway.
Reportedly, one of the engineers suggested that the reason that Musk is getting less impressions, fewer impressions, is because he's less interesting to the public is because he's less interesting to the public now.
And apparently Elon Musk's reply was, "You're fired.
You're fired.
I think he said it twice.
That's the way it's reported.
You're fired.
You're fired.
I don't know which way he said the two you're fireds, because there's lots of ways to do it.
You're fired.
You're fired.
Right?
Every way you do it's kind of funny.
It's the second you're fired that really sells it.
You know, you're fired.
Straightforward.
But you're fired.
You are fired.
Like all of those are good.
Now, here's why I have to take Musk's side on this story that may or may not be true, which is when Elon Musk interacts with any of my tweets, as he's done a number of times now, Any interaction by Elon Musk on my tweet can get me over a million impressions.
So do you really think it's organic that when he does some minor comment on my Twitter tweets, I'll get a million impressions?
But when it's his own account, he might get tens of thousands.
Does that sound even like slightly possible?
No.
No, there's clearly something wrong.
And I love the fact that he just wasn't willing to even hear the argument that maybe he was wrong about that.
Because he's not wrong.
He's not wrong.
You're fired.
All right.
Well, that was funny.
If you follow me on Twitter, you may have seen Machiavelli's Underbelly, whose Twitter account you should follow.
And he does a lot of deep fakes for entertainment, so you can just see how good the deep fakes are.
Because now the AI can do an almost perfect impression of anybody's voice, and it can do really a perfect rendering of what they look like from any angle, and then it can animate them.
The deepfakes now can talk, and even AI can write some of the dialogue.
So, you know, you can give us some suggestions.
It can write the dialogue, imitate the voice, and show you a nearly perfect rendering of the person.
So there's an example of Jack Posobiec, a deepfake version of him, giving a fake endorsement of me for California Senate.
Now here's my comment on this.
When I look at that version of Jack Posadnik, I would say, roughly speaking, it's 99% perfect.
I'd be interested in your take on it, but to me it's 99% perfect.
Now the good news is, and the good news won't last long, but the good news is that humans can detect a 1% imperfection, kind of easily.
Pretty easily.
It just steps right out, right?
Humans are really good at seeing something that's just slightly off with a human being.
And that's what the Uncanny Valley is all about.
But we've crossed the Uncanny Valley.
So the Uncanny Valley is where the imitation of a person is sort of like a person, but it's not close enough to look like a person, so it looks grotesque.
Like, you get so close to the person that you're like, oh, it's like, is that a monster?
Or did a zombie take over their brain?
It's like a person, but it's not quite.
It's gross.
But when you look at these deep fakes, they've actually crossed that barrier.
They're already in the, yeah, those look like people.
I'm totally willing to say that's a person.
That's not, if you look at the Jack Posabic deep fake, it doesn't look creepy.
It doesn't look creepy.
It actually just looks like, you know, a person talking.
So we're 1% away from not being able to tell the difference.
1% away.
Here's what people don't understand.
As long as we're 1% away, we all know they're fake.
Or we can be convinced they're fake quite easily.
If somebody points it out to you, you can see it.
When it gets 1% better, just 1%, when the deepfakes get 1% better, they're not going to be 1% better.
Does everybody get that?
When they improve the next 1%, It's not going to be 1% better.
All of the other 1%s were 1% better.
When it went from 56 to 57% as good, it was 1% better.
It was 1% better.
better.
When it went from 56 to 57% is good, it was 1% better.
It was 1% better.
But when it goes from 99% like a person to you can't tell the difference, it will change civilization completely.
We don't know how.
We do not know how.
First of all, it could affect employment, because why would you ever talk to a customer service person when you could talk to an AI?
It will affect dating, because we're at the point where AI can write continuous dialogue and have a conversation with you looking like exactly whoever you want them to look like.
A dead relative, dead spouse.
Do you know how many people are going to have full-on relationships with a deceased spouse?
There will be people who couldn't let go.
You know, somebody who was lost early, lost young.
And there will be widows and widowers who are just going to bring them back.
They'll be on the TV, but they'll be there all the time.
Every time you walk into your TV, there will be your loved one.
And they might recognize you from motion capture or something.
And they might say, hey, how you doing?
Good to see you.
Too bad I'm trapped in this computer.
And then eventually, that will be moved to robots and sexbots.
I don't think we quite are ready.
For how big this change is going to be.
And it's also completely unpredictable.
I'm giving you one vision of what might happen, but it could be completely opposite of that.
You don't know.
Something big, big, big is about to happen.
And the only point I want to make is that that last 1% isn't 1%.
It's 100%.
The last 1% is 100%.
Everything's going to be different.
The last 1% is 100%.
Everything's going to be different.
And we might only be weeks away from that.
Do you hear that?
We might be weeks away from, just weeks, away from that 1% being closed.
So get ready for that.
Now, on the same topic, Machiavelli's Underbelly also did the funniest thing that I've seen probably in a year.
I've seen a lot of funny things in the last year.
And it's a deepfake which shows, purports to show, Brett Weinstein and his spouse, Heather Heyer, having a conversation on what appears to be their podcast about themselves.
Now, some of it, some of it the AI wrote with some prompting, human prompting, but it's the funniest thing.
I've never seen.
Because there's like a story, there's the thing they're talking about, but the understory is their personal reactions to each other that's written by the AI with the human prompting.
And their personal asides are so frickin' funny that I was just crying when I was watching it.
I want to be clear, it's not really mocking, you know, in case you think it's mocking the individuals.
It's not really.
It's just having fun with, you know, they have unique personalities.
And I hope that they're not insulted by it because, you know, if it had been me, I would have been laughing pretty hard.
I think they have a sense of humor, so I think they'll like it fine.
Alright, so you have to watch that.
I was going to play a little bit of it, but it's kind of long, and you really want to settle in.
It will be the funniest thing you've seen in a long time.
I promise you that.
Alright, we're entering the vigilante phase of history.
Governor Greg Abbott reports, he tweeted, this is outrageous.
Texas officers broke up a major Houston fentanyl operation that could have killed thousands of people.
But a day after four suspects were arrested, they were released on bond by a Houston judge.
We must end easy bail for criminals.
Now, how many times are fentanyl dealers gonna be released?
Before some parent who lost a child to fentanyl, and also is heavily armed, takes it upon themselves.
I'm not recommending this.
Not recommending it.
Do not take up personal arms against any civilians.
Don't do it.
But it's going to happen, right?
How could it not happen?
I'm kind of surprised it hasn't happened already.
It feels weird.
Like, if we could have a mass shooting three times every weekend, apparently, whatever it is.
We're having a lot of mass shootings.
We have all those angry, crazy mass shooters.
And not one of them is an angry parent.
None of them.
I mean, it just feels like there are too many guns, too many crazy people, and too many fentanyl dealers getting out on bail.
For the good people to completely ignore this forever.
We're moving pretty close to vigilantism.
Now, one good way to judge the quality of your system, you know, your legal system, your constitution, is how close are you to vigilantism?
This is the closest I've ever seen.
Well, maybe... When was...
Was it the 60s with Branson in that movie?
Yeah, Bernard Getz, 70s?
Yeah.
So maybe since the 70s is the closest we've been.
But we have a lot more guns than we did in the 70s.
Death Wish was the movie, right?
So here's the thing I would watch for.
If it happens once and it makes the news, it probably will kick off copycats.
Because that's the problem with the mass shootings.
The mass shootings are all driven by the news.
Would you agree?
Would you all agree that the news drives mass shootings?
Because I don't think they would think of it.
It wouldn't occur to you that that's the thing to do unless you saw it on the news.
Video games are not even about mass shootings.
So it's not really, you can't say it comes from media.
Gun use comes from media, but not vigilantism.
Alright, so I think that's where we're at on that.
Here's where I could imagine it happening.
It might be that the thing that's holding up back vigilantism is that murderers all get caught these days.
Do you think that's it?
In the 70s, you could murder somebody in the street, and you had a pretty good chance of getting away with it.
Wouldn't you agree?
In the 70s, you'd just kill somebody.
Your odds of getting away with murder were pretty good.
But if you were to kill somebody today, your odds of getting caught are really high.
Really high.
So it could be that we'll not see vigilantism because it just can't work.
And people don't want to commit suicide.
They want to kill somebody else.
So maybe that's what's holding you back.
But here's something that might change that.
Three technologies that are almost certainly going to come together.
But I want you to give me a technical fact check on this.
Because there's part of this I think I might be wrong about.
And you'll tell me, okay?
Obviously drones are a big thing.
Anybody can get a drone and drones will be doing all kinds of dangerous military things.
Do you think it's inevitable that individuals will be able to buy drones that can kill people?
Would you call that inevitable?
Now they might have to buy it on, you know, the Silk Road or, you know, buy it illegally, but you can buy every manner of illegal gun.
So don't you think that you'll have drones that are sort of heavy-sized that would be able to shoot a bullet?
Yeah.
I mean, obviously, there will be guns that can shoot a bullet.
Now, do you think there will be drones that have facial recognition built in?
Of course.
Of course.
Do you think there will be drones that have independent operation?
Meaning that you could say, here's the address I want you to go to.
Go there and fly around until you see this person you're looking for and shoot him in the head.
Of course.
It's all doable.
So you just know where the person's house is.
Send your drone over.
Have it hover and wait for the guy to come out to his car.
And then if he doesn't come out while the drone is there, before it runs out of energy, it goes home.
Tries again the next day, because you know when he goes to work, maybe.
So you hang around when you think he's going to be outside.
Do it two or three days, no strikes.
But let's say the last day it picks up facial recognition, shoots him in the head.
Now here's the part.
that I need your technical instructions on.
Is it possible in 2023 to pay for something and not be traceable?
Is that even a thing?
Without cash?
Can you buy something in 2023 even with crypto?
Even with crypto?
Can it all be dark web?
But the dark web you could still trace somebody if you knew what to look for.
All right.
So some of you think that there's a way to do it.
All right.
Here's cash.
I don't know.
It'd be a lot of cash.
Monero.
So there's something called Monero that I've never heard of, but it sounds like a untraceable crypto.
If somebody actually wanted it.
All right.
So here's my prediction that if we keep letting terrible criminals out of jail, there will be a market Where a person can anonymously hire a killer drone, upload a picture, and have it go kill somebody you want.
And then vigilantes will start using them to kill fentanyl dealers as they walk out of jail.
They'll be killed on the steps of the jail.
They won't even get to the bottom of the steps.
Alright, that's my prediction.
I don't know when that'll happen.
Alright, I saw a tweet thread today that just blew my frickin' mind.
Because it reframed something so right that it'll never leave my mind now.
It's a permanent part of my thinking.
I don't know the person who did the thread.
The Twitter name is CatgirlKulak.
So, and the Twitter name is at from Kulak, K-U-L-A-K.
One word, from Kulak.
Now, I followed, I followed, I assume it's her, I followed her as soon as I saw this, because it was amazing.
All right, so here's the basic argument.
It's a very long thread, it's worth saying.
America has two constitutions, and you only know about one.
Are you interested?
Like, right away that's interesting, isn't it?
What do you mean?
Do you think anybody could actually make an argument that there are two constitutions?
Do you think that's even an argument anybody could make?
Oh yeah, you didn't know it, but there's this other constitution.
Well, the other constitution According to this is the civil rights legislation from the 60s.
So the civil rights stuff, it seemed like that was a subset of our existing constitution.
Just something we could do.
We could make laws and stuff.
So that's all within the constitution.
The part that we didn't see coming is that it requires a whole structure of people working in jobs that are spotting discrimination and then deciding what to do about it.
So once you've created a separate structure of people looking for discrimination, the people who look for the discrimination and decide where it is and where it isn't effectively have control of the country.
That's the second constitution.
Because they have control, effectively, of the country.
Because they can just say what you're doing is discrimination so you can't do it.
Where's your constitution now?
They can say that's good and that's bad.
That's what our constitution's supposed to be doing, not them.
So in effect, while this was an unintended consequences, there grew up a structure that is in effect a second constitution.
And as long as we have two constitutions, we're just not effective as a country.
And that we're probably at a point where we have to get rid of that to survive.
Now I've always said the following.
The heavy hand of discrimination laws probably made sense.
Like there was a time when it made sense.
It was smarter to do it than not do it.
It was better for everybody to do it.
That doesn't last forever.
If you succeed in getting your discrimination down to at least within spitting distance, at least you're in the ballpark where, let's say, an educated black man is going to do better than an uneducated white man.
Nothing's ever completely fair or equal, but you're in the ballpark in 2023.
If you're in the ballpark, that second constitution is all bad.
Now, I'm not sure we're exactly there where it's all bad, but it's starting to look that way.
It's starting to look like the more attention we give to discrimination, as much of a problem as it is and has been, then it only makes it worse.
That's probably where we're at.
Yeah.
So, on that same topic, There's a good follow on Twitter, a British fellow named Dr. Joel Brown.
And Dr. Joel Brown is black, and he lists himself as a Christian centrist, critical thinker, staff writer, and medical doctor, and singer-songwriter.
Alright, so just consider those qualifications.
Medical doctor, singer-songwriter, staff writer, Christian centrist, critical thinker, and good tweeter too.
He's a good follow.
And he said that he wants to meet a white supremacist, because he's never met one.
Do you think he can?
Do you think he can meet an actual white supremacist?
Because I had to explain to him on Twitter that they don't exist anymore.
They used to.
There used to be plenty of them.
But now they've evolved.
There are plenty of racists.
Let me be clear.
Plenty of racists.
And plenty of them are white.
You know, they're racists of all types.
Plenty of white racists.
But in 2023, you're not going to find one who says white people do all things better than all other people.
That's no longer a thing.
I'm pretty sure there was a day when a white supremacist would have said, there's no way those black people will ever be good at sports.
Right?
That was actually a thing.
I mean, it sounds ridiculous today.
But there was a time when they thought, now there's no way they're going to be good at sports.
No way they're going to become president.
Well, there you go.
No way there's going to be a famous TV physicist who's also black.
Well, there is.
No way they're going to dominate music and a lot of other You know, entertainment industry is, but they do.
They do.
So my comment to him, and then the good doctor, Joel Brown, asked me, what changed?
Like, why would it change?
What would change it?
Critical thinking?
Better education?
And I said, no, just observation.
It would be impossible to live in the modern world and not notice that black people, not everyone, But plenty of black people are doing better than the white supremacists.
If you're a white supremacist, how can you not notice that black people are outperforming you personally?
You personally are not in the NBA.
You personally did not make a hit record with Ye.
You personally did not become president with Obama, right?
So how in the world could a white supremacist not notice that?
And now to be clear, plenty of regular racists.
Plenty of regular racists.
But the flavor these days are they believe that white people are somewhere in the middle.
Do you buy that?
That the racist in 2023 believes that white people, if you were to rank their performance, would be somewhere in the middle.
I don't think there's any racist who thinks your generic white person is going to be at the top of academic performance, or sports, or entertainment, or anything else.
Am I wrong?
Somebody's saying I underestimate stupid people, but let me make a clarification.
There was a time in history where an educated white person could be a white supremacist and be rational but wrong.
Rationally, they say, well, observationally, we see one group doing better.
They would have been wrong, but it wasn't like crazy thinking.
It was just wrong.
In 2023, you would have to be flat out stupid To imagine that white people are outperforming all the other groups and all the categories or anything like it.
Now, of course, white supremacy gets used in two different senses.
One sense is that there are just too many things that favor white people because of the historical way things evolved.
You can make an argument for that.
You know, I might debate some of it, but you can make an argument for it.
It's not a crazy argument.
You know, that's basically systemic racism.
But the actual individual thinking they're superior to the other individual, that doesn't exist.
Except for extremely stupid people.
And if you're calling stupidity racism, I think that's overthinking it.
It's just stupidity that informs all of their decisions.
Race is just one of the things they're stupid about.
They're also not good at math, maybe.
Right?
So I don't think you should call it stupidity.
Racism.
Racism is just one of the many things that they get wrong because they're stupid.
All right, well, that's what I say.
There's Shinzo Abe, the now deceased and assassinated Prime Minister.
What does Japan have?
Prime Minister, right?
Yeah, right, Prime Minister.
And he had a book that he'd written, but it was not released while he was alive, so his widow allowed it.
And he's got some criticisms of Trump and Trump's approach to North Korea.
And the way it's being reported is that, you know, obviously this is Abe's telling of it, but Abe thought that Trump was too soft on North Korea.
And that the only thing that could denuclearize North Korea is the threat that America would put a tomahawk missile on Kim's house and kill him and his family.
And that would be the only thing that Kim would worry about and therefore, without that threat, nothing would happen.
To which I say, I wonder if Shinzo Abe remembers the past 60 years of that not working.
Did he not notice decades and decades of that not working, being hard on North Korea?
So instead, Trump ignored all of their thinking and simply befriended Kim Jong-un and simply convinced him that we weren't his target.
When was the last time you worried about North Korea?
Because I have to admit, I was concerned during the Trump administration, the first part.
I was concerned.
It looked like maybe there was some real trouble there.
But I would say, I haven't thought about it in a long time.
In my opinion, Trump removed that threat.
Now, you know, they're building up their missiles and stuff, and that's not good.
But that wasn't going to stop, was it?
I don't see anything that the United States or anybody else could have done to stop North Korea.
So Trump did the only thing that made sense.
He made ourselves less of a target.
That was the only thing that ever made sense.
And he did it.
So I hate seeing Abe's book being taken seriously on that point.
I had to tweet today because I realized that a lot of people were accusing me, and maybe you too.
You may have been accused of this too.
A lot of people said that my decisions during the pandemic were because I was afraid of dying.
Are any of you afraid of dying?
Because I've never been afraid of dying.
I don't even understand it.
I mean, I'll avoid it.
I'll do what I have to do to avoid it.
But why would you be afraid of something that removes all your pain?
I don't even understand the concept.
No, you're talking about the process of dying.
Let's agree that nobody wants, nobody's looking forward to the actual moment of death.
I'm not talking about that.
I'm talking about just like being dead.
Are you afraid of being dead?
It removes your joy, but you won't know the difference.
I would be afraid of someone else dying that I cared about, because that would affect me.
Well, I would like to clarify.
I always put maximum attention into not being hurt or disabled.
So being hurt or disabled in this life, I'm definitely going to try to avoid that as much as possible.
But dying?
I don't think I've ever considered that in any of my decisions.
So I realize the most misleading belief about me is that I didn't calculate correctly the risk of dying from COVID versus a shot.
I'm not even sure I put that in my thinking.
Because I didn't think the risk of dying from the shot was very big.
And I didn't think the risk of dying from COVID was very big.
And I didn't really care about being dead.
Like, literally, it's just not part of my thinking about anything.
And not just the pandemic.
Not once in my life.
I actually had to ask my ex-wife, my first ex-wife, I asked her if she had any memory of me ever being afraid of dying from anything.
And she said, no.
It's never even been a conversation.
But fear of unpleasantness during this life?
Yeah, absolutely.
So that's why I was so focused on long COVID.
And from the risk of the vaccinations, the risk is not that they kill me, that they disable me.
So in both cases, it's the risk of disabling from either path.
All right, so I did a super unscientific poll.
I wondered how many of you have personal experience with people who had either vax-related injury, according to them, or long COVID, according to them.
So remember, this is the most unscientific survey.
It's just on Twitter, just people who follow me, people who decided to answer.
So there's nothing scientific about it, but it's still kind of interesting.
So I asked first, I said, how many people do you personally know?
Not people you've heard of, but people you personally know who have a doctor diagnosed, not just a suspected, but the doctor believes that they have an injury from getting the shots, the COVID shots.
So 64% of people answered said they don't know anybody who had even a suspected Vax-related injury.
Is it okay if I call the Vax injury for shorthand if we all agree that they're not really vaccinations?
Will you allow that just as a shorthand?
It's easier than explaining it every time.
But about 13% said they know one person.
13% said they know somebody with a VAX injury.
But 23% said they know more than one person with a doctor-diagnosed VAX injury that they know personally.
Now, if you add together the ones who know one and more than one, So you get 36% of the people who answered this believe they know somebody who the doctor has confirmed, at least in the doctor's opinion, is a VAX injury.
Well, let me ask this question.
I know there are a number of doctors who are watching this.
So those of you who are medical doctors, and especially if you're still practicing, here's what I'd like to say.
I would like to see you answer that you're a doctor, so we know when you answer, you know, I'm a doctor.
Just say, doctor, and then say, wouldn't we notice that all the hospitals were overflowing?
If anything like this were true, would the hospitals not be overflowing?
Let's see, doctors only.
Doctors weigh in.
I might be wrong about that.
No, I did not say hospitalized, but that would be the effect of it.
Injury is vague.
I'm a doctor.
That seems very unlikely, yeah.
Hospitals are overflowing, somebody says, "I don't think they are." Most myocarditis doesn't get admitted, But even if most didn't get admitted, it would still be a jam in the hospitals, right?
So here's one of these things where it's sort of a math intuition.
If you work with numbers a lot, you get sort of an intuition about what's possible and what isn't.
And, you know, it's not really science.
But my intuition says this couldn't possibly be true.
It couldn't possibly be true that 36% of people personally know somebody who had a VAX injury that's, you know, well-established.
Do you think we would still be giving shots if this were true?
I think we would stop if a fraction of this were true.
I might be wrong.
All right, so I asked the same question about long COVID.
How many people do you personally know who have doctor diagnosed, not just they suspected, but doctor diagnosed long COVID?
So 84% said none, but almost 9% said one, and over 7% said more than one.
So you got 16%-ish, 16% of people think they know somebody who had long COVID.
Doctor diagnosed long COVID.
Do you believe that?
Because a lot of you believe that long COVID doesn't exist.
But 16% of my audience, and my audience is mostly people who believe it doesn't exist.
And even among the group of people who are biased or thinking it doesn't exist, still 16% think they know somebody who was diagnosed by a doctor.
Yeah, I'm not going to defend the scientific validity of it.
Don't get me wrong.
Is any of that interesting?
I find this interesting even though it's scientifically invalid.
It does give you a sense of where the public is, or at least the public that's following me.
That's interesting.
It's not science, it's just telling me where your minds are at.
Alright, are you aware that there was a massive mask study, a study of studies, a big meta-study of studies, and they decided that masks might work a little bit, but not enough to have been worth it.
Are you aware of that?
It's pretty big news.
Time Magazine had a big write-up, and Zero Hedge has one, it's on Twitter today.
Now, I saw Brett Weinstein say that I think he might have been wrong at one point, but then he adjusted it to right.
Now, some of you say, you told me so, but you know this is my opinion, right?
How many of you are aware that this was my exact opinion from the beginning?
That was my exact opinion.
So these studies are confirming my exact opinion on masks.
You know that, right?
Do you hate that?
Do you hate that this big new study agrees with me exactly?
So the ones that say, no, it didn't, you're reading the headline, not the study.
If you read the study, it says that the actual benefit might be in the 9% range at most, but that overall, people are sloppy with their mask wearing, and it didn't make any difference in the big numbers.
And therefore, my opinion was, from an engineering and physics perspective, it had to make some difference.
But not enough that you could see, so therefore it was not justified.
And that's what the big study says.
It had to make some difference.
It looks like it did, a tiny bit, but not nearly enough to compensate for all the negatives of it.
Completely right.
Not only was I completely right on that from the beginning, but I'm the only person in the country who spotted Fauci's lie when he said that masks totally don't work, but I knew he didn't believe it.
Now that's separate from the question of whether they work.
The only question is whether he believed he was lying, and he did.
And I spotted that he believed he was lying.
I knew it immediately.
I called it out.
So I'm also the first person in the country to blame Fauci for lying to the public about the pandemic.
I'm the first one.
How did you know?
Because it's obvious.
It's obvious.
It's the same reason I knew that they had to help a little.
All right, let me tell you where I think they would help.
You need a specific example.
Here's where they don't help.
Here's where we all agree.
You sit in a room with somebody with bad ventilation, and you both have masks on, and you stay there for two hours.
Do I think that the mask helps you?
If you're in a poorly ventilated, close area, No, no.
Because over time, there's enough virus that comes out the sides and the top, right?
So that would be obviously doesn't help.
And I've always been on that page.
Because it's very obvious that, you know, if you don't have a good fitting mask, there's air coming out everywhere.
Now, let me give you the most specific, rare situation.
That in my opinion, and according to the studies, I would say the studies back me up, there's the rarest opinion when it might make a little bit of difference.
Outside of this rare, rare opinion, I don't think any difference.
Here's the rare, rare situation.
You have COVID.
You don't know it, but you have it.
You want to say a quick hello to grandma in the rest home.
And Grandma doesn't hear so well, so you end up getting a little too close.
But you're only going to be there for a minute.
You're literally going to be there one minute.
But you want to say, happy birthday to Grandma.
So you go in the room, you're kind of close.
Grandma, happy birthday!
I'm only staying a second, got to go.
All right, goodbye, have a good birthday.
In that one situation, You wouldn't be allowing so much into the room through the sides of your mask that it's likely to make a difference, because it's only one minute.
And let's say it's well ventilated.
But if you had COVID and you were shouting into grandma's open mouth for one minute, could you give her COVID?
Shouting into her mouth your actual COVID from, say, two feet away.
I would say yes.
Somebody says no.
Come on, you're not being honest.
Be honest.
Be honest.
In that weird little one situation that almost never happens, the front of the mask would cause the COVID plume to go sideways and out, where a well-ventilated room could handle some of it.
But if you shouted it directly into Grandma's open mouth, there's more chance she would get COVID.
Now, I want to see somebody argue that, because if you do, you're not being honest.
Go ahead.
Argue that case.
If you're saying it's an outlier, you're agreeing with me.
I'm saying that it has to be true from a physics and engineering perspective.
From a physics and engineering perspective, barriers work.
They just don't work well.
But they make some difference.
If you think you can blow out a candle with a mask on, then I would say that my situation would be the same as every other situation.
Alright, so I'm the rightest person in the country on masks.
And the rightest person in the country on vaccine decisions, because I'm the only one who considered long COVID.
And the people who believe that 100% of what the government approves are bad, are not really serious conversationalists on this.
If you believe that just because the government acted sketchy about the vaccines, there wasn't any chance they could help.
Right.
If you really discounted their benefit down to zero, you're not a serious person.
You're just not serious.
All right.
What is long COVID?
Well, we don't know.
But 16% of the people who, from this very audience, 16% of this audience believes they know somebody who hasn't.
That's a lot.
That's a lot.
Now, they could be wrong.
Right?
I'll agree with you that we still have the possibility that long COVID doesn't exist at all.
Would you agree with that?
Yeah.
All right.
So it feels good to be right about everything and to be finally proved right in the long run.
I thought it was hilarious that a lot of you knew I was pranking when I apologized for being wrong about everything.
You knew that was a prank, right?
I just wanted to see how much energy I could attract my way before I declared victory.
All right, so that was a non-standard way to handle it.
All right, what else we got going on here?
Let me check the news on CNN and tell you what's happening.
So do you believe that Ukraine shot down 61 Russian cruise missiles?
Let's see in the comments.
Now we've been sending them, you know, technology that should be shooting down cruise missiles.
Isn't 61 a lot of missiles?
How many cruise missiles do you think Russia has?
Because they're kind of expensive, aren't they?
Yeah, I didn't, you know, You think they have a million cruise missiles?
No.
I'll bet their cruise missiles are more like 1,000.
What would you guess?
Probably under 1,000, right?
If they shot 61 down, I don't know in what time frame that was, but it's a lot of shooting down.
I don't know.
I don't believe it.
They make more than they use.
And then there's nothing here about a major offensive coming, but I wouldn't be surprised.
So the thing that I...
get the most pushback from is that because it's my way to show both sides of most topics, if you just dip in and only see me talking about one side, you think I'm on that side.
Now, I also realize that I talk way more about Ukrainian victories than the potential for Russia to win in the end.
But the reason I do that is that the potential for Russia to win in the end, that's kind of obvious, isn't it?
How much do I need to talk about the obvious?
It's the non-obvious that I talk about.
So that's why you see me talking about, oh, Ukraine got this right, or Ukraine did this, or Ukraine had a surprising victory.
That's because they're the non-obvious things.
The number of people who think they need to Russia-splain to me, Scott, let me explain to you.
If Russia really wants to win, they can just keep pressing until they do.
I know that.
I get that.
That's totally obvious.
So I don't say the obvious as much as I should.
But let me say it now so you've heard it once.
If it's true that Russia is mounting a major campaign, it might work.
Might.
I wouldn't rule it out.
So if you think that I think Ukraine is just going to march to victory and take back all their land and all that stuff, I don't think that.
My best guess is something like a really painful stalemate that finally creates a situation where part of Ukraine ends up in Russian hands and everybody's unhappy, but they're not at war.
That's probably what's going to happen.
And it might take until it's possible that Russia will stall until Trump is elected.
Actually, I'm going to make that my prediction.
I think I'll make that my prediction.
I'm going to predict that Putin is going to just stay alive and keep pressure on until Trump gets elected.
Because he could deal with Trump, but he knows he can't get a deal that he would be happy with with a Democrat.
So that's a bold prediction I'm making.
It's a bold prediction.
So that's my prediction.
There will be no negotiated end to the war under Biden.
All right?
Everybody hear that?
So my prediction is that Biden will never negotiate the end of it, because Putin will wait for Trump.
Because if you were a foreign observer, wouldn't you think Trump is going to win?
Would you?
Let me ask that.
I'll put that as a question, not a statement.
If you were a foreign observer, if you were Putin, and you were Keeping an eye on our country and you were looking at the polls, wouldn't you think Trump is coming back?
If you didn't, you would only believe it because of dirty tricks.
Which wouldn't be a bad prediction, that dirty tricks will keep Trump out of office.
It worked once.
Yeah, I'm going to say no negotiated end to the war while Biden's in office.
That's my prediction.
Because I think Putin's best play is to wait for Trump.
And then if it's not Trump, at least it's not Biden.
Because don't you think that Putin also suspects Biden of some Ukrainian money laundering?
Wouldn't you love to know what Putin knows about the Bidens and Ukraine?
Because you know Putin's got some information about the Bidens and Ukraine.
And you know what's interesting?
He's never dropped that information.
Isn't that interesting?
That's sort of a dog that's not barking, isn't it?
Now, it could be that that would open up some other can of worms, so he can't do it.
I mean, there might be a good reason for it.
But, kind of interesting that Putin would not be accusing the Bidens of having a Ukrainian nasty connection.
Why would he not do that?
That's such an obvious thing to do.
Isn't it?
It's the most obvious thing to do.
Just to say Biden's corrupt, so that's why he's supporting Ukraine.
So you Americans should stop supporting your corrupt president.
No one would believe it?
Oh, I don't know.
I don't know.
Somebody believes everything.
There's almost nothing that's... Do you remember when the news reported that Russia blew up its own pipeline to Germany?
Do you remember how many people I argued with who said, Scott, Scott, Scott.
Of course they blew up their own pipeline.
That's how they are.
They're just like that.
And I said, um, that's like ridiculous.
Now I'm sure we still don't know what happened, but it's still ridiculous to think that Russia blew up their own pipeline.
That's pretty ridiculous.
But people believed it.
You saw people believe it, right?
I'm not making it up.
You saw a lot of people believed it.
And that was absurd.
So you're telling me that people wouldn't believe Putin if he said he had some dirt on Biden?
Yeah.
Some would.
I mean, I don't know what percentage, but probably 25%.
All right.
The story about SpaceX.
I'm looking at CNN's page.
SpaceX admits blocking Ukrainian troops from using satellite technology.
I don't know.
I'm not even interested in that story.
I feel like it's going to be some just fake news.
Do you ever read some headlines and then you don't read the story because you're like, oh, that looks like fake news.
This one just looks like fake news.
I mean, there might be like an element of truth to it, but somehow I feel like the context is fake.
Without even reading it, I just feel like, oh, that one's going to be fake.
I don't need to read it.
Also on CNN, Russia to cut oil output by 5% as sanctions might.
I wonder if 5% makes any difference to them.
I don't feel like 5% is going to make them quit the war.
What kind of reduction in Russian energy output would signal that they're done for?
Probably 40%?
Would you say?
Like, just off the top of my head, if it went down 40%, they'd have trouble paying their bills.
Because it's pretty profitable.
5% isn't going to move the needle.
Yeah.
Maybe 25% to 40% somewhere in there, everything would fall apart.
So we're not really close to anything like that yet.
All right.
Alright, let's see what else is happening.
Meta is going to put Trump back on Facebook and Instagram.
I don't know if he'll go there.
I guess he will.
Probably will.
And then the Super Bowl is coming.
So are you as excited as I am about the Super Bowl?
I am so excited about the Super Bowl.
Because the teams that are playing are the, the, who, Eagles, Eagles?
I'm so excited to see the Eagles play the, the Eagles would be playing the Chiefs, the Chiefs.
So I can't wait to see the Eagles and Chiefs.
If there are any teams that I love more than them, I can't even think of one.
I can't even think of one.
Eagles and Chiefs, nothing excites me like that.
Also, there will be a puppy bowl.
Florida House gives DeSantis new power over Disney.
That's funny.
Somebody says Medicare and Social Security insolvency is right around the corner.
Oh, Ted Cruz introduced a term limit bill.
That's free money.
All right, so good for Ted Cruz.
So the free money is that citizens love, they just love term limit bills, but it has no chance of getting passed, so he doesn't have to worry about his own term limit.
That's free money.
Free money.
He makes everybody happy because he introduced the bill, and he'll probably argue for it effectively, but it won't pass.
Because Congress wants their jobs.
So he gets all the benefit of having pushed the thing that people want, and he gets to keep his job.
That's a pretty good deal.
That's free money.
It makes everybody else look stupid for not doing it.
Doesn't it?
I feel like all the people doing this smart stuff, it's the same six people.
Am I wrong about that?
There's like six people who are just consistently doing all the smart people, all the smart stuff.
Like Matt Gaetz is one, sees the free money, picks it up, picks it up.
About Matt Gaetz, I realized I didn't quite summarize it the way I wanted to.
Matt Gaetz recognized a situation where he could win But he can't lose.
So he's the most outspoken one, I think, on defunding the Ukraine war.
Now, what happens if the war goes well?
And I don't even know what well looks like.
But whatever you think is well, and Putin backs down and whatever, are people going to remember that Matt Gaetz said, don't do that?
Because you'll never know what it would have looked like if you had stopped the funding.
There will never be a comparison, because you only do one thing.
So you'll know how it worked out with the thing you did, but you'll never know if the other thing would have been better.
So let's say the war rages on for several years, but then we think we won, whatever that is.
Well, we still spent hundreds of billions of dollars.
Tons of people died.
Russia would be our enemy for life.
What does winning look like?
So even if we, quote, won in several years, nobody's going to think Matt Gaetz was wrong.
Because they won't know what the other thing looked like.
But suppose we defund and it goes well, and he gets credit.
So I think he has lots of ways to win.
And I guess the other possibility is he wins.
And so I think where he's safe is that they're not going to adopt his idea.
So he's safe because we'll never know if it was a good idea.
But what if he won?
And people said, all right, you're right.
Let's defund Ukraine.
And then Ukraine got taken over by Russia.
And it was, like, tragic over there.
What would Americans say?
Can't tell the difference.
Can't tell the difference.
In fact, probably fewer Ukrainians would die Per day, if Russia just rolled in and took over.
Now, I don't want that to happen.
I want the Ukrainians to have control over their own fate.
But the fact is, it probably wouldn't affect us at all.
Probably not.
And I don't believe that it would be, you know, the domino that Putin's gonna use to conquer Europe, because I don't think that was ever real.
I think it really was about Ukraine.
That's what I think.
And I think that how Russia feels about Ukraine is not the way they feel about Poland.
It just doesn't, it's just not the same.
So anyway, Matt Gaetz is playing the smart political card.
I don't know if it, I'm not smart enough to know what is the right geopolitical thing to do, but politically he's the only one who's playing it smart.
All right.
And I guess we know that that balloon had lots of sensors and antennas for reading stuff.
So no surprise.
All right.
Is there any story I've missed that is important to you?
How do you balance term limits and institutional knowledge?
Well, usually staffs and the permanent employees have all the institutional knowledge.
So, I'm not sure there's a benefit to all the institutional knowledge, frankly.
Are you seeing all that institutional knowledge really helping out Congress?
Is Congress using all of its institutional knowledge and experience to solve fentanyl?
No.
No.
Are they using all their institutional knowledge to ban TikTok?
Nope.
All of their institutional knowledge is correlated with them being old and out of touch, and they don't even know what their threat is.
Don't even know the threat.
All right.
Institutional knowledge is a problem.
Maybe.
Yeah.
Maybe it's what we know, not what we don't know.
You're right about that.
Yeah.
I didn't cover the Fumunda cheese shortage.
Well, I didn't even know about it.
Dr. Jill and Kamala today.
Yeah, I was saying this earlier on the Locals platform before I signed on to YouTube, but that whole thing about Dr. Jill giving Kamala's husband a kiss, that was a nothing.
Why do you think that's a story?
You know, and we're spending hours talking about whether the kiss was right on the lips or was it like a little off, a little off base.
By the way, have you never had the situation where you went to kiss somebody on the cheek and you missed and you ended up like awkwardly kissing them on the side of the lip?
You've never done that?
Oh, that's never happened?
Well, that's happened to me.
It's definitely happened to me.
Yeah.
Perve.
Never.
Well, it's a thing that happens.
Let's just say so.
I'm sorry that people haven't tried to kiss you more, so you've experienced that.
Apparently people just love to kiss me.
Strangers.
Just anywhere.
Come up in public and try to kiss me.
Now it's not that bad, but yeah, I'm so kissable.
It's a problem.
It's a big problem.
Alright, anything else going on?
I don't think so, huh?
Are we ready to go enjoy our weekend?
Fetterman?
How's Fetterman doing?
Is he released?
I didn't see any ephedic news on CNN, so...
Is he just still being observed?
It's not looking good.
Oh, you think he got out today?
All right.
Any thoughts on having the climate craziness show up in Dilbert comics?
Well, I don't know how to play that exactly.
Andrew Tate, there's no news on the Tates except they're still being held.
Actually, that is the news.
Can somebody give me an update on the Tate brothers?
Have they not been held longer than the 30 days?
Are they still being held but without charges filed longer than they should have been held?
What do you think?
We talked about Project Veritas yesterday.
So I guess we don't know.
We don't know.
But I'm going to stick with my position that they're innocent until... Oh, it was a 60-day hold?
So we would still be within the 60 days.
They extended it.
Okay.
Oh, that's right.
I guess they can just keep extending it.
So there was no deadline, per se.
Because they could just... I'm not going to watch Barnes.
He's an idiot.
Have you ever wondered about the fact that children get the same dose as a 400-pound adult with a vaccination? - Yeah.
Did that ever seem to you like a little sketchy?
Maybe the size of the dose just doesn't make any difference in that domain, which is possible, but I don't know anything else where the size of the dose doesn't matter.
But it feels like there could be some situation where it doesn't matter, like it could be, but it seems unlikely, doesn't it?
How in the world does a 400-pounder and a 50-pounder respond the same to the same dose?
I can't even imagine it.
What do you think about conservatives picking easy fights?
Well, that's the television problem.
There's nothing easier to talk about than Dr. Jill kissing Kabbalah's husband at the State of the Union.
It's just easy to talk about.
So, we do.
Yeah, let's talk about the distraction stuff.
Alright, we keep talking about how this news is just a distraction from this other thing, but isn't it just that people have different interests and different things and a lot is happening?
Like everything is a distraction from everything else.
I do believe that some of it is manufactured as a distraction.
Some of it.
But not most of it.
I think most of it is just there's a lot of news.
All right.
Still political prisoners in DC.
Yeah.
At this point, don't you think Trump should offer to free all of the remaining January 6 prisoners?
Just pardon them or whatever it is.
I think they should all be pardoned.
And that would be the right kind of pardon.
And by the way, I would say the same thing if it were Democrats who were being held in jail.
That's the right kind.
Because there are some pardons which are divisive, and you wonder why they happened.
But there are other pardons where you go, okay, that does seem to have a bring the country together element to it, right?
If you can give me some country benefits, even if it seems unfair at a low criminal level, I'll take the country benefits.
So that's exactly the kind of pardon that I think is a good one.
And again, it doesn't matter if it's Democrats or Republicans, I would say the same thing.
I also Pretty liberal about ex-presidents being pardoned.
I'm big on that.
Same reason.
It's just better for the country.
I realize this is the most unpopular thing I could ever say, but I don't think justice should be equal.
I don't believe in equal justice.
I believe in mostly equal.
Yeah, as good as you can do.
But I do think there are exceptions.
I do think there are exceptions.
And I do think that some of those exceptions might be for our leaders, because we're better off if we're not burdening them with legal problems while they're trying to do the job.
I mean, it's an ugly situation either way.
But I do think there are some cases where the country is better off with unequal justice.
It's very rare, but I think it could exist.
O'Bannon was on the top of the New York Times disinformation list.
I've seen some of those disinformation lists and they're just laughable.
Like somebody's opinion of what was disinformation.
Just laughable.
How many of you saw Bannon's War Room piece about me?
Where he talked about me recently, last week, on Monday I think.
I very much appreciated his characterization of me.
So that I appreciated quite a bit.
I have the same opinion of him.
He's very smart, very capable.
So I guess we respect each other on level of capability.
But I wish he had asked the question.
And this is why watching Dr. Jordan Peterson interview people is a different experience than watching other people interview.
Peterson never forgets the important questions.
He asks the thing that actually makes sense to ask.
The question that I wanted Steve Bannon to ask is, given that even the person he had on to criticize my point of view, that person actually said that I was looking at long COVID, And then he didn't talk about long COVID.
I mean, that should have been, like, jumping right out.
I was expecting Steve Bannon to say, all right, you're saying that Adams was looking at long COVID as part of his decision.
What is your take on long COVID?
But instead he just ignored it like it wasn't a variable and just went on with his presentation like it hadn't been totally debunked by that one question.
YouTube flagged my climate hoax stream.
It's because I used the word hoax, right?
Is that why?
I knew that would happen.
And I'm okay with that, by the way.
I'm okay with that.
I don't mind that at all.
You know, if I say something that's opposite of the mainstream, and then social media puts a warning on it that says, you know, this is the accepted view, This is against the accepted view?
I'm okay with that.
It costs me money, right?
Because it gets demonetized, but I'm okay with that.
That's a conscious decision.
When I'm consciously disagreeing with the authorities, I don't mind that you know that, because I say it in my video itself.
Even I say, this is contrary to the accepted beliefs.
I've never opposed information.
Censoring, I oppose.
But putting information about something that adds to the information, that's okay.
No problem.
Russia is reducing their oil output, but they're gonna raise prices.
Could be.
Could be.
I wouldn't rule that out.
When people can't taste for six months, they have long COVID, by definition.
It just wouldn't be a long COVID that would be much of a problem.
I mean, I lost my sense of spell a long time ago.
Honestly, it's no problem at all.
It's the smallest problem in the world.
All right.
We're going to be finishing up.
Wait, Scott, you missed a variable.
Okay, this is interesting.
Let's look at this.
You missed a variable in your analysis.
Long COVID was always mitigated by the possibility of asymptomatic infections.
Long jab was only mitigated by not taking the jab.
Okay, I'm not understanding this.
Long COVID was always mitigated by the possibility of asymptomatic infection.
All right, I don't understand that point.
I think there's a point there.
So I'm not disagreeing.
I'm not seeing it.
I don't know what that point is.
How do you calculate the risk of unicorns?
Exactly.
But we don't know that it's a unicorn.
How did you know it was a unicorn?
It would be the bigger question.
You understand it?
Long COVID is just COVID injury.
Yeah, of course.
that's what it is alright alright alright How do you calculate the risk of hell?
That's a good question.
The risk of infinite pain?
Well, given that we know the history of how hell was, it's not even in the Bible.
If hell were in the Bible, then there'd be a strong argument, well, God said so.
But given that it's not in the Bible, I don't think I'm worrying about hell too much.