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June 20, 2023 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:04:23
Episode 2145 Scott Adams: Trump Interview, Scientists Who Can't Debate, Loneliness Kills? Woke Oscar

My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com Content: Putin was ready for a deal When scientists won't debate Loneliness kills (or bad science) Trump interview on Fox News Tate brothers charged YouTube bans Woke Oscars ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topics to build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scott-adams00/support

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Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the highlight of human civilization, the thing that's better than everything else.
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Ah.
Ah.
Delightful.
Well, we got some news today.
Today's theme for my live stream will be science.
Science and everything it does right.
Because science is perfect.
You know, it's funny, science has never made a mistake.
No, no, no, that's not the message.
It might be a little closer to the opposite of that.
All right, here's a story from the Wall Street Journal that shows that people who eat a bunch of processed foods, they die sooner.
The more processed foods you eat, the more likely you are to get cancer and other stuff and die.
Now, do you believe that that's good science?
That they found that people who eat the processed foods are the most likely to die sooner.
Do you see any problem with that science?
Just on the surface.
You don't know anything about it.
Do you see any problem there?
I do.
Yeah.
Let me ask you something.
If you were to take all the people who eat processed foods, Put them in one group, and then you took all the people who never eat processed foods or avoided as much as they can, put them in another group.
What would be different about those groups in addition to their diets?
What would be different about them?
Well, the obesity would be caused in part by the processed foods.
So that's true, but that's not what I'm looking for.
Don't you think that the people who avoid processed foods intentionally, Just bear with me.
If you're a person who would intentionally avoid processed foods, isn't it likely that you would also intentionally do everything else that's good for you?
Intentionally.
You'd probably exercise.
You'd probably watch how much protein to carbs you eat.
You'd probably brush your teeth.
You'd probably do every single thing.
You'd probably not smoke.
Yeah, you'd probably not smoke cigarettes.
You'd probably do everything that's good for you and nothing that's bad for you.
And are you surprised that those people live longer?
All right.
Now, I've been doing some personal experimentation with trying to avoid processed foods because I have some kind of weird allergy to something that's in a lot of processed foods, sulfites.
And I discovered that when I stopped eating processed foods, exactly as the Wall Street Journal article says, I lost my hunger.
Isn't that weird?
I lost hunger.
Just wasn't hungry.
I had plenty of food, but I just ate, you know, like a salmon and a Piece of broccoli or something.
So basically no processed foods, and I was not hungry ever.
I would have to eat dinner just because it was time to eat dinner.
Think about that.
Think about going from hungry all the time, which was, I guess that was my default for my entire life.
Most of my life, I don't remember not being hungry.
I was just always hungry.
But as soon as you stop eating the processed foods, it just leaves your mind.
You just don't even think of hunger.
Until you're really, really hungry.
And then you do, of course.
So I would say my experience with processed foods and avoiding them is, I had an immediate, immediate healthier feeling.
And my sinuses cleared up.
So last night I experimented.
With some soy sauce on some sushi.
And my head swelled up and it was exactly like I remembered.
As soon as I added just a little bit of processed stuff, the soy sauce, my head swelled up and it was hard to breathe.
That's it.
So I would give you this following recommendation.
You know, I'm not a doctor, so I don't give you health recommendations per se.
But I will give you experimenting recommendations.
You should experiment with your diet all the time.
Just never stop.
Because you're always learning new things and finding out new things.
So you should always be saying, alright, let me try a week and I'll take dairy out of my diet.
Just to see.
Take a week and take wheat out of my diet.
Just find out.
I also experimented eating Subway subs.
Do you remember when they had the commercials that said you could lose weight eating Subway?
And I thought, that can't possibly be true.
Because it's mostly this big piece of bread.
And all the sauces and stuff.
How in the world could you lose weight eating Safeway?
So I've actually done this experiment.
Where I'd say, alright, I'll replace two meals a week with my favorite 12-inch Subway, so it's not even a small one, it's a 12-incher, and I would absolutely lose weight.
I've tried that experiment several times, and if the only thing I do is replace two meals a week with a Subway, I actually lost weight.
I didn't do anything else different.
So, that's an example of an experiment that could change your whole life.
Experimenting with your diet is probably one of the most effective things you can do for your happiness and success.
Alright, but I'm not sure this specific study was necessarily telling you what you needed to know.
Alright, here's another one.
Loneliness kills.
So there's a study saying there's a very high correlation that lonely people, the most socially isolated, have a much higher risk of dying early.
Is that good science?
The people who don't have friends and are isolated are the ones who die soonest.
All right, now let's do the experiment again.
We're going to take two groups of people and they're going to be standing in a public square.
One group has no friends, but we'll make them stand together anyway because it's funny.
Another group has lots of friends.
You're going to look at those two groups.
Do you notice anything different about them?
Anything different?
Yes, the people with lots of friends will look attractive and healthy.
That's why they have lots of friends.
People like to be around attractive, healthy people who've got something going on.
People who have energy.
Basically, all the things that signal good health are exactly the things that draw people to you.
That's what makes you a magnet for other people.
Because they go, oh, here's somebody who has no problems, they're always in a good mood, seem healthy.
I think I'd like to hang around with that person.
So again, while I do believe that loneliness is dangerous, just like I do believe that processed foods are bad for you, I don't believe in science.
Because the science has too many other things that could cause this bad health, you know?
Do you want to hang around with somebody?
Here's two people in your life.
Hey, Scott, how's it going?
Yeah, it's great, it's great.
I just went for a long run.
Hey, do you want to get together and play some tennis tomorrow?
All right, that's one person.
Now I'm going to be another person.
Hey, Scott, how's it going?
Oh, I'll tell you.
I just came back from the doctor's and looks like I'll have another week in bed.
Who am I going to hang around with more?
Which one of them gets more friends?
Right?
It's the correlation-causation problem again.
But I do think they got the right answer.
I just don't know that the science was valid.
All right, let's talk about the worst prediction I ever made that was close to the best.
So here's a prediction I got 100% wrong, but it turns out it was so close to being an amazing right prediction.
It has to do with my prediction that even though Putin had amassed a war machine on the border of Ukraine, I said until the day they crossed the border, I said he wasn't going to do it.
Now that looks pretty stupid by today's perspective, right?
I mean, everybody else said, everybody, everybody said he's obviously going to attack.
He's got his army on the border.
And then he attacked, just like you do when you put your army on the border.
So boy, egg on my face, right?
Stupid, stupid Scott.
Got that one so wrong.
How could I get that so wrong?
So today we find out, or yesterday, RFK Jr.
was tweeting about it, that in March of 2022, before the invasion, Israel's Prime Minister Bennett went to Moscow to work out a deal.
And he made a deal to avoid the war.
So he made a deal that Zelensky and Putin were both willing to accept to end the war.
And in broad strokes, it looked like Zelensky would agree to not join NATO.
Putin would agree to not murder Zelensky.
They would have some stability about where the current border was.
I guess Crimea would go to Russia.
Basically, they had a deal.
So, I was this close to having one of the most amazing predictions, because I said it wasn't going to happen.
And it turns out that neither Zelensky nor Putin wanted it to happen, even when the army was on the border.
Neither of them wanted it.
And they both had a deal to avoid it.
Do you know how the deal got ruined?
Because the United States and maybe some other countries, at least Great Britain, decided they wanted the war more than they wanted the peace.
They actually wanted the war.
They wanted the war to degrade Russia's capabilities.
And one of the US generals said that directly.
I forget which one.
Said it directly.
You know, the war is good because it degrades Russia.
So, I was so close To getting that right, but what I did not anticipate is that there would be legitimate countries with seemingly legitimate countries that wanted war for the benefit of the war.
The benefit of the war.
Like those words shouldn't even go together.
The benefit of a war?
It's just like crazy talk.
This sounds like it's pretty well documented.
Now, here's what I tweeted to be provocative, but useful.
In my opinion, that's a war that Trump would have avoided.
Who disagrees?
Trump would have avoided that war because he didn't want a war.
Apparently the United States wanted a war, or a government wanted a war.
He didn't want one.
Do you think he could have stopped it?
I say yes.
Alright, here's a second question.
Do you think that any of the GOP candidates who are currently running, any of them, do you think that any of them would have allowed that war to happen?
Any of them?
I say no.
I say there's not one Republican candidate who would have allowed that war to happen, and we have the power to stop it.
We did have the power to stop it.
That seems to be in evidence.
Now I'm going to make it even more provocative.
You ready?
I'm going to take it one level further.
Almost any Democratic president could have stopped that war.
RFK Jr.
could have stopped it.
Almost anybody that you could imagine who was running for president could have stopped the war simply by not wanting it.
That's all it took.
All it took was not wanting it.
That's it.
There were no other obstacles.
You just had to say, I don't want a war, and then agree to the deal that Zelensky and Putin looked like they were agreeing to.
That's all it took.
And we couldn't get it done.
Now you ready for the next level of provocation?
I told you Trump could have avoided that war.
I told you any Republican could have avoided this war.
And I told you just about any Democrat probably would have avoided that war.
Do you know what the conclusion is?
Do you know what the conclusion is?
That during that time, we did not have a president.
That's the only logical conclusion.
Because any functioning president of the United States would have easily stopped the war.
Just hold that in your head for a moment.
Any president, any president of the United States would have stopped that war.
We didn't have one.
We actually didn't have a president.
I feel like that's an evidence now that we didn't have a president, which would indicate we don't have one now.
In other words, Biden just didn't have the faculties to be a real president.
We acted exactly like we didn't have a president.
Am I wrong?
I'm looking at your comments to see if there's any pushback.
We acted exactly like we didn't have a president.
We didn't have a commander-in-chief.
There just wasn't one.
Because the military-industrial complex apparently got everything they wanted.
And that's not what happens when you have an actual president.
Unless the president is so deeply in their pockets, of course.
So, if I were Trump, and I wanted to make that point, that's the way I would say it.
I would say, I would have stopped that war, but you know what?
So would everybody running against me.
So would any democratic president.
We didn't have a president.
We didn't have one.
If you'd like a president, after four years of not having one, I'm offering that to you.
What do you think?
Pretty good, right?
Yeah, Brzezinski?
Yeah.
And then his daughter on MSNBC.
All right.
Alright, so Trump did an interview on Fox News with Bret Baier, and everybody who hates Fox News is hopping mad, and Brit Hume made things worse by mocking Trump's performance in the interview.
And what Britt said was Trump's defense of why he took the classified documents was sort of basically seemed to verge on incoherent.
That's what Britt said.
And he said it was not altogether clear what he was saying.
So I went back and listened.
When you hear something like, oh, a president is saying something incoherent, My mind goes to God Save the Queen and everything that Biden does, where he's just incoherent.
But I thought, Trump was incoherent?
Really?
So I thought, I'm going to have to hear that myself, because that would be big news.
If Trump suddenly started acting incoherent, That would be big news to me.
I mean, that would certainly change a lot about my opinion if he started acting incoherent.
And here's a big news guy, trusted, you know, I have a lot of respect for Brie Hume.
If he says he watched it and it looked incoherent, that sounds credible to me.
But I wanted to see it for myself.
And I didn't see anything incoherent.
Did you?
Did anybody watch the interview and To me it seemed maybe not passing the fact-checking, but that's normal.
But he said something very clear.
I didn't have time to look through the boxes.
So it wasn't that I was resisting, I just didn't have time to look through all the boxes and sort it out.
We were still negotiating.
Now again, I'm not saying it's true.
I'm saying it was perfectly easy to understand.
Yeah, he didn't have time to go through the boxes.
And that it was all declassified by the act of taking him with him.
How is that confusing?
I'm confused about why that's confusing.
It's exactly what he's been saying and we all understand it.
It might not be all of the story and it doesn't mean it passes legal muster.
I'm just saying it's an easy to understand story.
It's pretty straightforward.
So I'm a little puzzled by the pushback on how bad he was.
The only thing I saw that was clearly a mistake was his haircut.
Did you see?
I mean, he needs to fire whoever let him go on camera with that, with the way his hair was combed.
I mean, you know, it's always interesting, but it was just a disaster.
Like, I couldn't not look at it.
I was like, what happened to your hair?
Who did that to you?
All right.
So that was a sort of a story non-story.
Here's something that's blowing me away.
Oh, I guess the one thing that Briz said he did that was a mistake.
I didn't see the clip on that, but it sounds like a mistake.
That when asked how he would win back women, I guess suburban women or something, He complained that he didn't really lose the 2020 election.
I don't think that was the right play.
I think he's going to need more future-looking stuff to get it done.
But according to some polls, Trump is trailing Biden in the general election.
And I asked myself, how in the world is that possible?
How in the world could Biden be beating Trump in a poll right now?
Obviously we're all watching our own little biased news sources, so if that's not the news source you're watching.
But it seems to me that if you were to look at the things that Biden did from blowing the removal of forces from Afghanistan, nobody thinks he did that right.
If you look at the severity of the lockdowns and the rights that he took away from people, nobody thinks he got that right, I don't think.
And if you look at the Ukraine war, I think people would reasonably think that Biden was the problem there, and that the war itself wouldn't have even happened without him being degraded, which is what I believe.
Yeah, inflation.
He would be directly involved in that.
And I just don't understand.
Well, I do understand.
So I'm saying that with hyperbole.
I think what it does is it shows you the power of the press.
That people have been propagandized to the point and brainwashed.
That they think he did a good job because there was a... What did he get passed?
An infrastructure bill?
Has anybody gotten any benefits from the infrastructure bill yet?
Is anybody aware of any, even one thing that's been built because of the infrastructure bill?
I'm not.
Do you know of anything that got built because of the infrastructure bill?
Now, presumably there will be lots of things that get built.
It's just that, you know, budgets will be bigger than they were and it's sort of invisible.
So, Hold on.
Stop everything.
On YouTube, there's somebody who just joined who missed the sip.
We're going to give you a special interstitial sip.
This is just for the people who missed it.
Hurry!
Hurry!
Grab your cup!
Grab it!
Now!
Get it, get it, get it.
Ah.
That was just for you who came in late.
I like to take care of everybody.
You're all my special people.
All right.
So the Oscars have gone awoke.
I saw a tweet by Katherine Brodsky.
So the Oscars have introduced three new eligibility rules.
So you can't get them up.
You will not get an Oscar unless you satisfy these new rules.
Number one.
The lead or key supporting character must be from an underrepresented racial or ethnic group.
Two, main storyline needs to focus on an underrepresentative group.
Underrepresented group.
And then, or, so this one's an or, so you can do that, or, at least 30% of the cast must come from underrepresented groups.
Funny they'd say underrepresented.
You represent an interesting choice of words.
Now, let me ask you a question.
For years, I've been using the Oscars as a guide to what movies to watch.
Have you been doing that?
If a movie won an Oscar, I'd say, well, I'm not going to watch that.
Right?
Am I right?
If it won an Oscar, you're going to say, I'm not going near that fucking thing.
That's like a badge of shame.
If you win an Oscar, it just means that you were woke.
That's all it's meant for years.
For years, it just meant you were super woke and you made a movie about somebody who had a physical disability or some problem with being gay.
That was about it.
That was about it.
Couldn't win otherwise.
So I'm not sure that these rules of formalizing it make much difference to an irrelevant thing.
But I have been using it as a reliable guide to what not to watch.
And I think it's served me well.
So the Oscars as a guide to what not to watch.
Keep on going.
I find that a valuable service.
All right, the big story on the internet is this Joe Rogan wants Dr. Hotez, who's a pro-vaccination kind of an expert, to get on there and debate RFK Jr.
And Dr. Hotez is acting a little cagey.
I don't believe he said flat out no.
I saw clip where somebody asked him about it, and he said he had received the offer.
So all he was saying is he had received the offer, which suggested he was at least considering it.
At least considering it.
And then there was a whole bunch of talk on the internet that the worst way to find the truth would be to have one expert scientist talk to somebody who was not an expert scientists.
And so all the smart people, have you heard of them?
They're highly educated.
Highly educated.
Yeah, all of the smart people who watch CNN and MSNBC, they weighed in and said, oh, well, you anti-science idiots.
You idiots.
How much are you going to learn by having a famous expert talk to somebody who has no training in the field?
Oh, the low educated are so entertaining with their little ideas about Joe Rogan.
Oh, come on.
Come on, get out of here, you pests.
Just get out of here.
Isn't that what you heard?
It was like this immense level.
It was like this layer of arrogance, you know, descended from the clouds and just covered us for a little bit.
I was like, am I covered by arrogance right now?
That there's nobody who can talk to a scientist?
Because that wouldn't be good.
Let me tell you what you smart, educated people... I'm not sure if that applies to anybody here or not, but let me tell you what you're missing in this.
I would rather have a qualified scientist talk to somebody who's good at identifying bullshit Then I would have two qualified scientists debate, and then when they're done, I don't know who did the better job.
How would I know?
Two qualified scientists.
I claim this study is good.
I claim this other study is better.
How do you know?
What good is that going to do?
They're going to both say they have studies.
And then you're going to say, well, what's the good one?
Then one will say, well, yours is weak.
And the other one says, well, yours is weak.
What do you do?
I don't think that the two experts are going to give you exactly what you hope for.
Maybe they would.
I'd still like to see it.
If I could get that, I would very much like to see the two experts.
So absolutely.
But if you give me one expert and one person who's really, really good and has a track record of spotting bullshit, that's the one I want first.
First give me the bullshit versus the scientist.
And if the bullshit guy wins, the scientist needs to go back and examine his life.
Or her life.
Right?
Or their life.
Yeah.
And if the scientist is afraid of the bullshit spotter, which is what RFK Jr.
is, he's a bullshit spotter, doesn't mean he's right.
I'm not saying that he's always right.
I don't even have a good opinion on all of his vaccination claims and whether he's mostly right or mostly not right.
I don't even know.
That's why I'd like to see him debate an actual expert, so that maybe I could learn for the first time, is RFK Jr.
full of shit, or is he the most valuable resource in the country right now?
I don't know.
I actually literally don't know.
I'm not even leaning in one direction at this point.
I'm so non-informed, even though I try to be.
Now, part of the pushback here is that scientists are not persuasive.
They don't learn to be persuasive necessarily, whereas you put them on next to some professional politician or a talking head pundit type, and that's going to be a persuasive person who communicates really well.
So the scientists are like, ooh, it'll only make things worse, because the persuasive person will look like they won the argument even when they didn't, because I had all the science, they had all the bullshit, but their bullshit was so good, it looked better than my science!
So they're afraid to get in the ring with somebody who might be good at bullshit.
To which I say, science without persuasion is useless.
I don't care how much science you have in your head.
You've got to tell us.
You've got to share that stuff.
You've got to get other people involved, right?
To build stuff.
It doesn't matter how much you know privately, in your own little private head.
You've got to get that shit out of your head.
You gotta spread it out there.
Writing a paper, that helps.
But if writing a paper doesn't get it done, as in the public's opinion about vaccinations, the scientific papers aren't going to convince the public, and it's the public you need to act differently.
So if you don't learn persuasion, and you don't get somebody who has the skills and the ability to communicate, your science is wasted.
So I offered today to Dr. Hotez, just on a tweet.
Who knows if he'll see it.
He's probably checking Twitter lately.
But I offered that I would help him persuade.
I'll give him a little persuasion lesson.
Because he needs to know how to handle the laundry list persuasion and also the potential that he's worried about.
The RFK will move the goalposts.
I can tell him how to solve both problems in advance.
And I've told you how to do it.
Here's how you do it.
RFK Jr.
has lots of claims.
If you debunked one, the worry is he just moves to the next one.
And you're like, OK, all right, here's another half hour.
I debunked that one, and then I'll just move to the next one.
And then you run out of time, and the audience is going to say, well, he had a lot of claims, and you only had to debunk for a few of them.
So I can see why you wouldn't want to walk into that trap.
So I've suggested on Twitter and elsewhere that he not take the, don't do the debate unless RFK Jr.
can reduce it to three claims.
Three just because it's more than one, but it's not too many.
Just three claims.
And I'll give you an example.
A claim might be, this set of shots were not sufficiently tested.
Right?
We didn't do enough testing.
That would be a claim.
It's either true or false.
And that would be very useful for me to hear debated.
Because I think the expert would say something, well, we didn't do the usual kind, but the kind we did is good enough.
Something like that.
That would be the argument.
Maybe another one would be that more people died from the vaccination than the COVID.
I don't know if RFK Jr.
makes that claim.
I'm just making up claims.
But that's very specific, right?
I mean, you would look at the data, and they would probably have competing data.
I don't know if that's a claim.
I'm just making up claims now.
Don't assume that RFK Jr.
believes any of this stuff.
I'm just making up stuff.
So, if you take it down to three claims, and then you say to Joe Rogan, Joe Rogan, it's your job to not let him move the goalpost.
He's made three claims.
The moment he starts to stray from those three claims, I need you, Joe Rogan, to say stop, come back to the claim.
Under those conditions, I will debate.
That Joe Rogan guarantees, and says it publicly, I will keep you on topic, so no goalpost moving.
I'll keep you on these three things, and you'll both get as much time as you want.
There won't be a time limit.
You give me those three things, and maybe Dr. Hotez would want me to help him with persuasion, or somebody else, to just give some tips how to handle this scenario.
Because those few little rules in advance, I think, would go a long way to answering his concerns.
Because, by the way, his concerns are completely valid.
Can we say that?
Are you willing to agree with me that Dr. Hotez, his objections, the ones he stated, are completely valid?
That he could get into a situation where the argument just churns and churns and nothing happens and it looks like the other guy won.
I wouldn't go into that situation.
So I agree with him that the situation as first described would not be good.
But what I don't agree is how it would be quite easy to negotiate it into something that works.
I would also insist on a follow-up.
So that once you both argue it out, you both have some time to settle on, you know, the other person's argument and stuff.
Maybe give it two weeks.
Check to see if they agree with you or whatever.
Something like that.
All right.
But scientists need to learn to persuade.
Tate brothers have been charged.
Now, Andrew Tate and his brother are charged with rape and human trafficking.
There are seven alleged victims who say they were recruited by the Tate brothers.
And there were false promises of love and marriage, but then allegedly they got turned into sex workers or something.
So Tate, Andrew Tate, was charged with raping one of the victims.
And his brother is charged with instigating others to violence.
Now, do you remember what the original rumors were about what they were going to be charged with?
Do you remember there's money laundering?
Right?
And money laundering kind of disappeared?
You know, what's interesting is that money laundering is, I think, usually a somewhat objective charge.
If you find the evidence, there was money laundering.
But have you noticed that the things that are being charged with are in those ambiguous categories?
Like, I'll bet you the question of whether this alleged victim was raped Or whether the alleged victim just liked rough sex and wasn't complaining enough, or maybe the communication wasn't right or something.
And so one of them is charged with rape that probably is going to be closer to, what do you call it, a date rape.
Now, date rape, still rape.
I'm not trying to soften the crime.
I'm just saying that there are two categories.
Probably, this is going to be a little closer to a date rape-y situation than a held her down at gunpoint and raped her.
Don't you assume?
Don't you assume it's going to be a little unclear whether there was consent?
I'm sure.
I'm sure it'll be unclear.
Or at least there'll be a defense.
And then how about this other charge for his brother?
Charged with instigating others to violence.
Do you think instigating others to violence is an objective thing?
Where you just look at the facts, well, there it is.
Or is it subjective?
Do you think knowing whether somebody was instigated to violence... I mean, was he like a crime boss?
Did he say, your assignment is to go do some violence?
What does it mean to instigate it?
Is it like Trump instigated an insurrection on January 6?
As in the thing that really never happened?
Is it that kind of instigating?
So, I'm going to double down on my original opinion.
There's something about this that stinks.
I don't know what it is.
And I absolutely am not defending the Tate brothers from anything they've done.
I don't know what they have done, I don't know what they haven't done.
I just know that from, you know, 30,000 feet looking at this, it looks sketchy as hell.
It looks like somebody's trying to bring them down and look for whatever they could do, you know, however they could do it.
It looks like it started either personal or political, and then they're just looking for the reasons.
That's what it feels like.
So, just to be super clear again, I do not support the Tates or anything they've done.
I dislike Andrew Tate specifically.
But this doesn't look like an actual legal process.
There's something wrong with it.
I just don't know what.
And I think we should care about that.
Even if you don't like those two individuals, you should care about something like this.
Because it doesn't look right to me.
All right.
Rasmussen did a little polling about how people feel about the Wuhan leak.
And here is one of the questions.
Do you agree with the statement that China lied, Fauci lied, and people died?
60% agreed with that.
60% of the country thinks China lied, Fauci lied, and people died because of the virus and the Wuhan connection.
32% disagree, so it wasn't even 25%.
All right.
Now, given that Dr. Hotez is in the news and vaccinations and stuff are in the news, and it probably is important to figure out who are the bad guys and who got things right and who got things wrong, I decided to do a, not a deep dive, but just a little searching.
To find out what the, let's say, the mainstream media opinion is about vaccinations as of today.
Because I wasn't really sure.
You know, if you watch the right-leaning, you know, Twittersphere, you would think that every piece of new information that's come out in the last year shows that the vaccinations totally didn't work and they just hurt people.
How many of you would say that's your experience?
In the past year, 100% of any news you saw about the vaccinations suggested that they were bad and ineffective, everybody knew it, and it killed more people than it saved.
How many of you believe you saw that and it looked credible to you?
Because I've seen a bunch of them.
I'm not saying they're true, I'm saying I've seen it.
Now the problem with science is I don't believe any of it.
Science is just not a credible field anymore.
I hate to say it.
It's just not a credible field.
Now, it can find credibility over time with things that people don't care about, right?
If science finds a new battery that works better, that probably is a good thing.
Because nobody had an opinion about the battery.
As long as there's no human opinions or politics involved, it probably works fine.
You know, eventually.
Even though half of all the studies that are peer-reviewed are bullshit.
That's the actual number, half.
Half of all the peer-reviewed studies are bullshit.
That's known from another study that may itself have been bullshit.
Anyway, so I wanted to take a look to see what is the most current news.
Now, I need to ask you a favor here so it doesn't drive me crazy.
Would it be possible for me to simply describe what other people think is true without you attacking me?
Could you do that?
Just for today?
Just don't attack me, because I'm not going to give you my opinion on anything.
I'll just tell you what other people are saying.
Alright?
I just need that agreement.
I'm looking at you, YouTube.
Alright.
I'm looking at you, YouTube.
All right.
So there's a study that says that there's no increase in strokes after your vaccination.
Stay away.
Do not go after me.
I'm just reading it.
I'm just the messenger.
Just the messenger.
So it's a newish study from March of this year and showed that within, I think, 28 days of the How about clots?
How about clots?
Again, this is not my opinion, because I don't believe science.
I'm telling you that if you Google it, the first things that will come up would be that there's no increase in clots, blood clots, from the vaccinations.
I'm not saying I believe it.
I'm not.
There you go.
Goodbye, Angela.
I knew you couldn't do it.
So that's what the mainstream media is telling you.
So if you didn't know anything and you went and googled it and you ask yourself, hey, did those vaccinations cause clots?
The Google would give you an answer that says no.
The science says no.
And if you ask it if it's causing people to have strokes, and you Google it, the answer will be no.
Now, again, I don't believe any studies about COVID.
None of them, because they're all motivated.
But that's what the studies say.
Now, what about long COVID?
So-called long COVID, which I know, you don't have to tell me, I know many of you believe does not exist, or it's actually just vaccination injury in disguise.
All right, crew goes away.
I knew you couldn't handle it.
I knew you couldn't do it.
All right, let me just get rid of the other people who just can't handle this discussion.
Anybody else want to be deleted?
All right.
If you Google it, this is not what Scott's saying is true.
I'm just saying this is Google giving you a result.
It would tell you that the people my age, let's say over 60, who got vaccinated had about a one-tenth of the odds of going in the hospital.
One-tenth.
I'm not saying it's true.
I'm saying that's what result you'll get if you Google it.
That you had a 10 times greater chance of being hospitalized if you were unvaccinated.
Do you believe it?
I don't believe it because it's COVID information and I don't believe any COVID data.
Doesn't matter if it agrees with me or doesn't.
None of it's credible, unfortunately.
Might be right.
I'm not saying it's wrong.
I'm saying that if you just believe it because science said so, that doesn't make sense in 2023.
Not about the pandemic.
So, then I also asked if the vaccination would, based on our best current knowledge, would protect against long COVID symptoms.
Now those of you who believe that the vaccination itself is causing the long COVID symptoms, Then you'd have to explain why the studies show that the unvaccinated people had worse long COVID.
So if you're unvaccinated totally, according to the studies, which I don't believe because I don't believe any COVID studies, there's a big difference.
So the unvaccinated had way worse long COVID.
If long COVID is real, and if the study's real, and I don't believe either one of them, All right.
So here's the bottom line.
If the mainstream media, you know, let's say the consensus that still exists out there is correct, then every decision I made during the pandemic is also correct.
But am I telling you I made the right decisions?
Is that what you just heard?
I hope not.
I hope not.
It's just that my decisions were exactly compatible with the current consensus of science.
Doesn't mean they're right.
Can we agree on one thing?
That agreeing with the scientists on COVID does not make you the right one.
Can we agree on that?
You're not correct just because the science is on your side.
On COVID.
Alright?
We did pretty good.
You did pretty good, actually.
I thought this was gonna be a little bit rougher.
But as long as you know I don't believe the science, you're okay with me being on the same side of it, right?
You're okay with that nuance?
I think so.
All right, and I always said from the start I was largely guessing.
It wasn't like I had some insight about the science.
I was just sort of guessing and doing what I needed for myself.
Now, a number of people in the last two days have been brutal in their criticism of me because I got vaccinated.
Is there anybody here who thinks that my personal medical decisions are any of your fucking business?
Anybody?
Does anybody think my personal medical decisions are any of your fucking business?
That you need to comment about it on social media?
Let me be clear.
Anything I suggested for other people is fair game.
If I told you to take vitamin D, which I did, and it turns out it kills you, well, that's on me.
You should definitely criticize that.
If I gave you any bad recommendations about vaccinations or masks, and it was wrong, and I said you should do this, you should totally criticize me.
But I didn't do any of that.
I didn't tell you to get a vaccination.
I didn't tell you to be safe.
I didn't tell you to work.
I never told you that.
But I don't want to hear from anybody about my personal decisions.
Because do you think you know all my variables?
How would you?
I'm not going to criticize your personal decisions.
Not your personal health decisions.
This guy said to drink bleach.
All right.
Jordan Peterson's video in which he interviewed RFK Jr.
has been banned on YouTube.
I have a mixed feeling about that.
A mixed feeling.
I'm very close to agreeing that it should be banned.
The free speech is still the better argument, but I'm so close to agreeing with YouTube on this.
Do you know why?
Because every time you show one side of an argument, you make things worse.
And that's what that was.
Jordan Peterson talking to RFK Jr.
about his vaccination opinions, without the benefit of the counterpoint, makes the world a worse place.
In a way that's dangerous, in my opinion.
In a way that's very dangerous.
Now, if he'd had So here's my open question.
If Jordan Peterson had had RFK Jr.
on, but also somebody who had a different opinion, showed both opinions, do you think he'd be banned by YouTube?
If both opinions had been there.
I don't think so.
I think YouTube would allow a discussion of both sides.
I think they would not allow, which is obviously what happened, a discussion of confidence in something that's not, let's say the mainstream media doesn't agree with.
Now that's not to say RFK Jr.
is wrong.
This is Peter.
You fucking piece of shit.
Pieter.
Adams has fallen even further.
No respect.
Really?
What the fuck did I just say that you don't agree with, shithead?
One thing.
Just one thing.
Just state it.
Just one fucking thing that I said that you don't agree with.
Go ahead.
Let's see it.
You've got a comment?
Go ahead.
Just tell me one thing I said that you don't agree with.
Yeah, you silent fucking asshole.
You know, I have a real, a genuine curiosity about trolls.
Have you ever met a troll?
Or have you ever been one?
Like this kind of troll who just comes in and insults people?
Have you ever been that kind of troll?
Because I don't know, I don't understand the mental part of it.
Like, is there a dopamine hit that you get Just from being evil?
I guess.
Must be a dopamine hit, right?
So are these people who are literally masochists?
Not masochists, sadists?
Are they literally sadists?
And narcissists?
Is that what's going on with the trolls?
I mean, I've never even seen a theory except that they're narcissists.
But I feel like it's worse than that.
Yeah.
The trolls are sociopaths?
That's probably the whole thing, isn't it?
But even the sociopaths, do they do that stuff for entertainment?
They must get a hit or something.
I don't know.
Well, you're all worthless and you add nothing to the world.
So Andres Backhaus, one of my favourite sceptics, Got a PhD in economics, so I often go to him to debunk studies that look like they need to get debunked.
And he does an amazing job of quickly picking out what's wrong with studies.
But he was mocking me a little bit on Twitter by noting that the vaccination status is correlated with higher education.
So the more education you have, the more likely you got vaccinated.
Now, he was just joking around.
But the implication is that smart people know to get vaccinated.
So I responded to his claim that the more education you have, the more likely you are to get vaccinated.
That's because... I said higher education used to be correlated with better opinions about the world.
Right?
Like when I was a kid, A person with a higher education probably had a more sophisticated and nuanced, complete understanding of topics.
So you would want to pay attention to educated people.
But you know what changed?
It turns out that the news turned into pure propaganda.
And the educated people kept watching it.
And they didn't know what they were watching.
So the so-called dumb people said, hey, that looks like propaganda to me.
I think I'll go do something else.
And all the smart people are like, what?
I've got to wear a mask or else I'm going to die tomorrow?
Sounds good.
So all the most educated people are the ones who watch the news.
Who's reading the New York Times?
The uneducated?
I mean, some, I suppose.
So we have this situation where the smarter you are, well, let's say the more educated you are.
The more educated you are, the more likely you're drinking from the fire hose of propaganda.
So you should expect that the more educated you are, the more hypnotized you will be by The brainwashing.
So the more educated you are, ironically, the less you should trust their opinions.
Because it's not their opinions, they're assigned opinions.
And the people who didn't watch the news and said, basically, didn't watch any news and are like, are you telling me you created a vaccination in six months?
What's it usually take?
Five years.
Five years.
Five to ten years.
Wait, what?
It usually takes five to ten years, but this time they mysteriously got it done in six months?
Yeah, it's totally legit.
And then all the uneducated people said, no thanks.
And all the educated people listened to the scientists.
Science must be true.
That's the science.
So we have this weird situation where the more educated you are, the more likely you've just been brainwashed into something ridiculous that some political person wants.
Or somebody who's trying to make money.
And you don't know the difference.
Because you're educated.
And then it's worse because you say, oh, they're stupid people.
Why can't they know as much as I do?
Now, again, I'm not making an opinion of whether vaccinations helped or hurt.
I honestly can't tell.
My current best opinion about vaccinations, whether they helped or hurt, even me, like even in my specific situation, don't know.
I really don't know.
And I also don't know how to find out.
Because I wouldn't trust any study.
And what else am I going to rely on?
Right?
I feel fine.
If I feel healthy, then can I conclude that the vaccination didn't hurt me?
Not really, because you never feel perfect, and you never know if your organs are slowly rotting from the inside.
How would I know?
I mean, until it reaches some level, I wouldn't know.
Yeah, maybe I dodged a bullet.
So at the moment, if I were to go by mainstream media, if you believed it, which I don't, it would say that every decision I made about when to get vaccinated and how was exactly right.
And even I don't think that's true.
Because if I was exactly right, it was from guessing.
It would have been from guessing.
It definitely would not have been from all my smart scientific knowledge.
But I think maybe there's at least a possibility I got everything right, but just by chance.
Pure luck.
All right.
Did they vaccinate me with processed foods?
Oh, why are all the excess deaths in all vaccinated populations in all countries?
And the answer is that... Do I want to get into this?
Let's see.
I'm going to check my desire for conflict this morning.
Sure.
Yeah, I guess I'm ready for some conflict.
Do you think that the mainstream media's data about excess deaths looks anything like the stuff you're seeing?
Does it look anything like it?
No, no.
Now, if you're a right-leaning person who uses social media, you've seen tons of excess death claims.
The people who read regular media, they haven't seen any of them.
To them, that doesn't exist.
The mainstream media doesn't recognize that as even existing.
Now, they do recognize that there is excess deaths.
But if you looked at the stated reasons for them, it all looks like just normal stuff.
Like the vaccination is not even listed as a potential reason.
It's just ordinary stuff.
Unreliable data, whatever.
I don't know.
I don't know.
My personal view is that I don't have any idea if there are actually excess deaths or what caused them.
Because I don't believe that can be determined by science or data in a way that's credible.
It could be, it's probably possible that you could do it, but even if somebody did it and they had the right answer, how would they ever communicate that to me?
How would anybody ever convince me that they had the right answer on excess deaths?
I've seen, I've probably seen 40 or 50 claims.
I didn't believe any of them.
I didn't believe they were necessarily wrong.
It's just I didn't have a reason to believe them.
Just because it's science and it's data and somebody credible did it?
Not good enough.
Doesn't mean anything to me.
Has no value at all.
Just absolute, just noise.
I wish that were not the case.
I wish science were, you know, credible enough that if enough scientists were on the same side that would mean something.
But it really doesn't.
Not anymore.
All right.
Yeah, apparently a big part of the excess deaths is self-harm.
Were you aware of that?
So I saw one claim that said, oh yeah, excess deaths are up in the United States, but if you take out the self-harm categories, like more suicide, more drinking yourself to death, more drug dose, more drug overdoses, if you take that stuff out, it ends up that the excess shrinks quite a bit.
And I don't know that vaccinations would cause more suicides.
I don't know that it doesn't, either.
All right.
Let me read to you today the Dilbert Reborn comic that's running today.
Now you can only see this if you're a subscriber on the Locals platform, scottadams.locals.com, or if you're a subscriber to the Twitter special subscription site that has the Dilbert comic.
But in it, I've got a character who was introduced in recent years called Dave the Engineer.
So Dave is black, although he identifies as white because he's a prankster.
So Dave just likes to cause trouble, but he likes to do it while acting like he's not.
So Dave is actually based on a real co-worker I had who was not black, but he was hilarious.
It's funny, his name was Red.
That's funny.
But he would go into meetings and he would use corporate talk to sound like he was really saying stuff, but it wasn't really saying anything.
And all of the co-workers knew.
That he was just full of shit.
And we would laugh so hard when he did this.
Yeah, you do a status report like this.
Well, we've got our teamwork up, and the synergy is good.
And it would just be a whole bunch of buzzwords put together.
And when he was done, the boss would just look at him, because we'd be just screaming, crying.
We would just be crying, we're laughing so hard, because he did it really well.
He just put on a little act where he'd say corporate stuff, and none of it meant anything.
And none of us really cared about the status report from the other departments anyway.
So the meeting wasn't even useful.
But he would add lack of usefulness to a useless meeting, which was just so much fun.
You couldn't even believe it.
Anyway, so he became the inspiration for the Dave character.
So Dave, who has been put in charge of the DEI project, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.
And so Dave is giving his progress report.
He says, I've only been in charge of the DEI group for one day and already I've increased our diversity.
For example, today we hired a one-eyed ham radio operator and a woman who hates every kind of cheese.
And the third panelist says, and I have my eye on a Belgian.
And the boss looks at him and says, we need to talk.
I have my eye on a Belgian.
I am more proud of that punchline than any punchline I've ever written.
I have my eye on a Belgian.
I don't know, to me that's funny.
So I remind you that although the Dilbert Reborn comic would be fully unacceptable in newspapers because they have such a tight standard, I'm not making fun of any people.
I don't do that.
So I'm not going to mock any group.
I just want to be clear about that.
I'm not behind a subscription wall so I can say shitty stuff about people.
I don't do that.
That's not my thing.
But I'm definitely going to do things that would get me in trouble if I did them in the free world.
The non-free world, I guess.
So I'll put it behind the subscription layer.
And then anybody who wants to see it can see it.
Nobody will be offended.
All is good.
No complaints, by the way, from anybody who's subscribed.
So that's all good.
Chris, you're a Belgian.
Good to know.
YouTube, thanks for joining.
Hope I wasn't too cranky today.
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