Episode 1458 Scott Adams： Come Have Some Laughs About the News and Learn Some Persuasion Tricks Too
Episode Stats
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Summary
What do you do if you're the richest man in the world, and you find out you're living in a simulation? Would you share it with the people you're with? And what would you do with it?
Transcript
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best part of your day. Yeah, sometimes you say to yourself, I don't know if it's going to be
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the best part, then you're surprised because it is. And all you need to make this an exceptional
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moment, you know, the real, the kind you remember for the rest of your life. Well, all you need is
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a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or a chalice or a stein, a canteen, a jug or a flask, a vessel of
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any kind. It might be hyperbole, but if you don't try it yourself, how will you ever know? It's
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called the simultaneous sip. Join me now with the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the
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day, the thing that makes everything better. Yeah, simultaneous sip. Here it goes. Go.
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I feel a little bit less COVID in my system, a little bit less. Now, for those of you who think,
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I think everything's already been invented and I'd like to, I'd like to become rich, but I don't know
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how. I'm going to give you a suggestion for at least one of you to get rich. Have you ever tried
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to find a tripod to hold your, either your phone or your iPad? If you have, you may have had the
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experience I've had, which is you buy one after another and they're all made by morons.
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Here's my latest one. And I think I've purchased maybe 15 models over the years and they're all
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terrible. They don't do even the most basic thing you'd want to do, which is, oh, I have an iPad.
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I think I'll put it in here. And you, you know, you just pinch your finger and your brakes,
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just, and I was just swearing at this thing. But, but look at this design. Just to give you an idea
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of how many opportunities there are in the world, somebody actually sold me this. It's an iPad stand
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for my other iPad. And you say to yourself, oh, it looks pretty good, right? Snaps right in there,
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holds it. Okay. But if I turn it around this way, it just falls over. So, so you can't even,
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you can't even turn the, the iPad in the other direction or it'll fall over. Worse yet, when you
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want to type on your iPad, you don't want it facing you. You want it flat and it doesn't flatten and it
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doesn't stay in position. All the things that you tighten become loose, just, just in the normal use
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of it. So I say to you, if somebody can make a stand for either an iPhone or, uh, or for an iPad,
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that actually, it doesn't even have to be great. It just has to be not terrible. That's it. It just
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has to be not terrible. All right. So there are plenty of opportunities. Just look for something
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that's bugging you and make a better one. Um, so this happened to me yesterday. Somebody sent me a
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video in which, uh, I guess Elon Musk was doing an interview about SpaceX and he was talking about
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the bureaucracy within his own company, I believe it was. And he mentioned that he felt like he was
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living in a Dilbert comic and that it felt like he was in a simulation. Um, and just read the
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fucking sign behind me. Okay. Uh, for those of you who've got a problem, uh, and I'm going to start
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blocking anybody who talks about the sound again today. So, so I, so I looked at this video and sure
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enough, uh, Elon Musk was, was joking that it feels like he's living in a Dilbert comic
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and he's in a simulation. Now my comic yesterday was about Dilbert finding out he lives in a
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simulation and it was created by a cartoonist. So I thought that was a coincidence, but I think
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the timing of the interview and the comic was a coincidence. Anyway, so what do you do?
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What do you do if somebody tells you, Hey, the richest man in the world just mentioned something
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you do? What would be the normal thing you would do if you're sitting in a room with some people,
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some people you like, maybe your family or whatever, and you find this out? Would you
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share it with the people that you're with? Would you say, Hey, look, here's a video of Elon Musk.
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He's talking about Dilbert and I make Dilbert. Would you share it? Because I made that mistake
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and I was told that, uh, it was gross and that, uh, my lack of humility and my bragging,
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my bragging was a really bad look. Now, what do you think? Do you think that if Elon Musk
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mentions your work in some kind of a positive way that you could turn to somebody that you know
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really well and say, look, Elon Musk's talking about me? Would that be too prideful? Would that
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be bragging? Or is it just something that happened? And at what point is it okay to share, uh, something
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that happened to you with somebody that's close to you? You know, friend, family member, right? And I
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actually got into this absurd conversation about whether humble people are better than people who
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are not humble. And I actually got somebody to, to argue that this person's humility made them
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superior to me. And they were bragging about it. That's right. I actually convinced somebody to
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brag about their humility without acting ironic. Anyway, I have a hypothesis that the biggest problem
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in the world is that we think our egos are something they're not. You think your ego is who you are.
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And you think you have to manage in a certain way and that, and that, uh, uh, looking, looking good
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to other people requires humility. I don't think there's a more wrong idea in the world, honestly,
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because we, first of all, we misinterpret what people are doing because if I'm showing somebody
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close to me, something that happened to me, I'm not always bragging. It's just something that
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happened to me. If you, if you're an author and your book becomes a number one bestseller,
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do you mention it? Do you mention it? Is that fair? Can you, can you say, oh, my book's a number
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one bestseller? Is it bragging? Or is it just what happened? How do you, uh, how do you deal with
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it? There's a friend of mine who, uh, a few years ago came into a massive amount of money. He was part
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of a startup. And so I think he's a billionaire now, but, uh, he made hundreds of millions of dollars
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on one day when the company went public. And he immediately went from, you know, the average
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person in the neighborhood with a job to one of the richest people you'll ever know. And
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any, the couple asked me for some advice about becoming suddenly rich and how to, how to, how to
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navigate that. And it was, it was fascinating to, to watch the, uh, the transition. And
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I, I, I, I, I gave them some advice. I said, nobody's going to want to hear your good news
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because it's going to sound like bragging and it's just going to be really gross to people.
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So simply talking about your day is no longer fair because this is something I learned when,
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when Dilbert took off and my life went from ordinary to not ordinary anymore. If I simply
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talked about my day, it was kind of gross to people because it would be, you know, better
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than an average day. And so I would, I would teach him and say, you're going to have to be
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a huge phony so that people can put up with you. And the way you're going to have to be
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a huge phony is by pretending that you're having bad luck all the time. Cause if you don't, nobody's
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even going to want to spend a minute with you after a while. You're just going to be really
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grossed out by your relative success. And so I said, keep track of anything bad that happens
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to you during the day and make that your story. If you get together with people say, Oh my God,
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I just got out of my car and stepped in a big pile of dog shit. And I had to walk into
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a meeting and I had dog shit on my shoe and I couldn't get it off. That's the story. The
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story you don't want to tell is how you were shopping for a private jet. Cause that happened
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too. Same day. I've never shopped for a private jet. This is somebody else. Um, I thought you
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can't talk about the private jets. You can't talk about that part, but that's just what you
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did. It wasn't your fault. It's just what you did. Wasn't bragging. All right. So I think people
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need to figure out that their ego is not who they are. Once you realize that your ego is your enemy
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and not who you are, the thing to be protected, then you're free. If you can't learn to embarrass
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yourself in front of other people, you are a prisoner. Forget about your COVID passport or your
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vaccine passport. If the only things you can do in your life are the things you think will look
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good to other people because you need to look humble and you need, you need to make sure other
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people are having a good feeling about you all the time. If that's the world you live in, you're in a
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prison. It's just a prison that you created yourself and your ego is what's keeping you there. You need
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to break free of that. Your ego is your jailer. It's not your friend. It's your jailer. Get rid of it.
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All right. Um, mask resistance for me started yesterday. Uh, for those of you who are new to me,
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um, I thought masks work a little bit and I thought they were worth trying at various times during the
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pandemic. It made sense, made sense to give it a try given that the massive scientists think they
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make some difference, but we're well beyond that point. I'm fully vaccinated and yes, I know I can
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still get it. Yes, I know I can still transmit it, but, um, I don't think masks make sense anymore
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in a world where you can get vaccinated and drive your risk down to microscopic. Now I've told you
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what I plan to do, which is I plan to go into California businesses without my mask and I plan
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to make them ask me to put it on. And when they do, I'm going to be very polite and very compliant.
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So I'm not going to, I'm not going to pick a fight with a person who's just trying to do a job,
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right? It's not their fault that they have to do this. I'm just going to wear them down.
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And if enough people do it, then we can return power to the people and take it away from the
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government in this particular case, because they're making the wrong decision. Now, the reason the
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government's making the wrong decision, in my opinion, is that they're the wrong entity to make
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the decision. The government has to drive death down to zero if they can do it. Human beings have
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to live. We have to live, and that means making choices about risks and stuff all the time. So the
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government, unfortunately, for this specific decision, it's just the wrong entity, and we have to take that
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back. And the way to do it is just by your actions. So I'll give you my experience yesterday.
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First experience was a retail store, big chain, did not wear my mask, shopped as long as I wanted
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around people who are fully masked, and paid for the goods, and nobody ever asked me to put a mask
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on. Now, the retail store, you sort of, you're in the store before anybody notices. You're sort of
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already in there. But then I went to a restaurant at night, a fine dining restaurant. And the,
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yeah, I'm not going to give the name of the store, because I don't think that's fair at this point.
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And I went to a fine dining restaurant, also without a mask. And the host reminded us that mask mandates
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are back in place, and we had to wear a mask. And I, of course, complying, saying, oh, oh,
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I have, I think I have one in the car. But they offered one at the host stand, so we just took
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their masks. And I said, just a clarification, we don't need the masks at the table, right?
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He said, that's correct. You don't need the masks at the table. And I said, I'm just going to put on
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this mask, and I'm going to walk right over there, right? Like right over there. So I need the mask
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just to walk over there and take it off. And he looked at me, and he said, yes. Yeah. I needed
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the mask to walk 10 feet in the same space that I was going to take the mask off for the rest of the
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meal. So I did that. I put on the mask for 10 feet, and then I took it off. Now, I think if enough
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people do what I'm doing, which is being nice and polite to the people, because it's not their fault,
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and just making it a little bit harder, they will give up. Wear them down. They will give up.
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They will. Guaranteed. They will give up. You just have to keep on it. But be polite.
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All right. Apparently, China's having a problem in Wuhan with the worst outbreak of COVID in a long
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time. I guess the Delta variant is ripping through. Well, not ripping through, but they definitely are
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worried. And they're closing travel, and they're getting really aggressive again. And I don't know
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if I've mentioned to you that China's in big trouble. There's some really big problems coming.
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Now, there are a lot of them. It's almost you can't even, it's hard to even think of all
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the problems that are coming for China. China's got a big, big problem coming, a big set of
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problems, let's say. But among those problems is this. It's beginning to look, as Peter Navarro
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has been saying for a while, that China knew about the virus in September, but didn't tell us
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until December-ish. Meaning that we had a few months we could have prepared, but we didn't.
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And Peter Navarro thinks it may have saved or cost us hundreds of thousands of deaths.
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That's just in this country. Now, suppose that's confirmed, or at least people come to believe
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it. How are you going to feel about China? And what happens when your country, let's say
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a, not an ally of China, let's say your country gets all vaccinated and it looks like there's
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not much that can hurt you. You know, yes, people with vaccinations can go still get it and spread
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it, but it's a different kind of problem in that case. But let's say, and let's say
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Do, do, do, do, do, do, do. Where are you? All right. Sorry. Can't find you to get rid of
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you right now. So, so let's say that the world comes to hate China in a way that they've never
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hated them before. It really comes to blame them for the flu and the virus. What happens
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when China is not fully vaccinated and they're still very vulnerable and you have all these
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other countries who really, really hate China? Do you think that there would be any intelligence
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agency and or individual who would intentionally affect, infect China to pay them back? I bet
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you've never heard that thought, have you? I bet you never heard that thought. It's a big
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world. Billions of people. If I said to you, look around your room, is there anybody in the
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room who would be willing to intentionally infect a country and cause, I don't know,
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millions of deaths? You'd say, God, no. There's nobody in my room. I don't know anybody who would
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do that. And if you asked 100 people, do you think you could find anybody who would say,
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yeah, let's kill millions of people, innocent people, just for revenge against the wrong people
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because it was the government who did it, not the people. So almost nobody would, would
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make that choice, right? But it's a big world. Somebody's going to do it. Somebody is going
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to reintroduce the Delta variant into China intentionally for payback because it's a big
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world and there's somebody who would do that. Somebody is going to have the means to do it and
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somebody's going to do it one way or another. So I don't think that China ever had a chance of
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escaping something really, really bad. Could be karma. Could be something else. But
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that's the situation. So I think that China has a gigantic COVID problem ahead of them at about the
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same time other countries, such as the United States, will be getting things under control.
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And that's just one problem. They're going to lose their manufacturing base as that gets moved
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out. It's clear that they're not safe for business anymore. So people in the business world are no
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longer going to make decisions to do business with China in the same way they did. Because if it goes
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wrong now, you can't say you weren't warned. You know, 10 years ago, if you did business in China
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and something didn't go well, you'd say, well, it was worth a shot. You know, nothing, nothing is 100%.
00:19:03.880
Didn't work out. But you wouldn't lose your job. You wouldn't look like an idiot. But today,
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today, if you started business in China, let's say you weren't doing business there already and you
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started to do business and it didn't go well, could you blame anybody else? Could you say you didn't
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know? Could you say I didn't know China wasn't safe to do business in? Now you know. So I don't
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think China has much of a good future ahead of them, at least for the near term. The funniest thing
00:19:36.120
in the news was, and of course, it's based on a horrible event, as all news is, but Governor Cuomo
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denying the charges against him. The independent commission said that, and I quote, we, the
00:19:52.220
investigators appointed to conduct it, blah, blah, blah, conclude that the governor engaged
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in conduct constituting sexual harassment under federal and New York state law. And then later,
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I believe they said it was part of a clear pattern. So it wasn't a one off. Now, the funny part
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about this, if there's any funny, anything funny about massive sexual harassment, which
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isn't funny, but there is a funny part, which is that for Governor Cuomo to defend himself
00:20:29.180
against these charges, this is almost so delicious, it's not going to get out of my mouth. Because
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it'll be so delicious, as I'm starting to say it, that I'll want to like suck it back into
00:20:42.440
my mouth to taste it again. So the first time I try to say this, it might not come out, I
00:20:48.200
might just have to absorb it back in and get a second taste, but I'll try. In order to defend
00:20:56.280
himself, Governor Cuomo is going to have to say that CNN is fake news. God, was that as good to hear
00:21:14.620
as it was to say? I hope you enjoyed that as much as I did. And indeed, he's doing that. Now, the way he
00:21:22.880
says it is that the facts are much different from what has been portrayed. The facts are much
00:21:28.200
different from what has been portrayed. Fake news. CNN. Now, to their credit, CNN is reporting this
00:21:39.780
straight. They're not ignoring it. Going right at it. So I give them credit where credit is due.
00:21:46.520
Right? They're going right at it. Now, you could argue they could do it a little differently or
00:21:51.080
whatever, but they're not ignoring it. And their pundits are going at it hard. And that's fine.
00:21:58.500
But who do we believe? Do we believe the Independent Commission with their fact pattern and all of their
00:22:05.400
testimonies and whatnot? Or do we believe Governor Cuomo, who says the facts are much different from what
00:22:12.580
has been portrayed? Well, as luck would have it, if you were a member of the locals community,
00:22:18.500
you saw a video recently in which a CIA, ex-CIA person, described their technique for determining
00:22:26.140
who's lying. It's an actual technique, a little checklist to determine who's lying. And let's look
00:22:35.980
at Governor Cuomo's denials and see if he hits anything on the checklist for the CIA to show
00:22:45.420
that you're lying. Well, it turns out there is. Here's exactly what Cuomo said. He said,
00:22:53.820
I want you to know, quote, I never touched anyone inappropriately or made inappropriate sexual
00:23:00.280
advances. Which rule does this violate and therefore show you that he is lying? It doesn't prove it by
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itself. Part of what the CIA teaches is that you need a cluster of lies. So if you see one
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independently or one tell for a lie independently, it doesn't mean it's necessarily a lie. So you look
00:23:20.780
for more of them. Thank you. Overspecificity. That is correct. It is an overspecific denial because
00:23:29.440
he's using the word inappropriate both for the advances and for the touching. Now that's a subjective
00:23:37.240
word, is it not? When you say that what is inappropriate to one person would be maybe appropriate to another
00:23:45.300
person. So he's, he's staying solidly in the opinion category, his own opinion, that it was
00:23:52.140
appropriate. But did he ever be, was he ever accused of, quote, inappropriate behavior? No, he was never
00:24:01.620
accused of inappropriate behavior. He was accused of illegal behavior. Illegal behavior, as in
00:24:10.700
one person, constituting sexual harassment under federal and New York state law. So the accusation
00:24:18.120
and the denial don't quite line up, do they? Here's what a denial should have been. An honest
00:24:27.060
denial would be, I've been accused of breaking the laws on sexual harassment under federal and New York
00:24:32.500
state laws. I did not do anything that violates the law. Then you, then you explain what you mean.
00:24:41.680
But when he comes at it with a different defense than the accusation, yeah, you could argue inappropriate
00:24:48.120
covers illegal. But I don't know, does it? Because one's an opinion and one's a legal standard. And even
00:25:00.480
though there's some subjectivity in the legal standard, doesn't feel like he addressed it, the
00:25:05.360
accusation doesn't. Right? So I would say that is lying like. Now, of course, he's a professional
00:25:13.040
politician. So he'd do a better job of covering up his other tells. But the one thing we know is that
00:25:18.800
there's one tell there that's glaring. But according to the CIA, in order to be judged a liar, you would
00:25:26.580
need more of them. So one is not conclusive. You just learned something today. As I watch
00:25:35.360
my number of subscribers on Locals, so people have to pay to be on the Locals platform where
00:25:42.160
they get extra stuff from me that is usually too provocative to put in the public domain.
00:25:47.500
And I've been watching my subscription numbers drop like a rock. And the reasons, people are
00:25:55.300
telling me with quite good feedback. They're saying that I talk too much about masks and vaccinations,
00:26:02.660
which I cop to. By the way, the other thing I get that I am most, let's see, the other thing that I'm
00:26:13.960
most accused of is never admitting I'm wrong. Have any of you ever done that? Have you ever accused me of
00:26:20.940
never admitting I'm wrong? Well, here I am admitting I'm wrong. And so I'm going to take the advice of the
00:26:31.140
audience who says I talk too much about those things, because I definitely do. Now, what I tried to do is
00:26:37.460
talk about them from a risk management perspective, and only if there's something new. But you end up having to
00:26:43.560
in order to talk about anything new, you end up having to sort of, you know, set the stage, and
00:26:49.600
then you're talking about the old stuff again. And I'm pretty sick of it myself. Pretty sick of it
00:26:55.360
myself. And so I want to minimize it, or put it at the end of the show so you can turn it off if you
00:27:01.540
don't like it. But I do think that talking about persuasion is always useful. So I'm going to try to
00:27:11.000
teach you something about persuasion. I'll use the I'll use a case of something that you're familiar
00:27:16.380
with. But it's not really about vaccinations. It's about persuasion. Now, I believe that persuading on
00:27:24.280
the subject of vaccination is probably unethical, which is why I don't do it directly. People say
00:27:31.080
I'm indirectly persuading. But directly, I'm not intending to persuade, because I feel it's
00:27:36.120
unethical. Because I'm not a doctor, make up your own decisions, your risk is different.
00:27:42.700
But suppose you wanted to, I'm going to teach you a lesson on, in my opinion, the most effective way to
00:27:48.660
do it. This won't be done. So you don't have to worry about it. Don't worry about anybody doing
00:27:53.500
this. I don't think there's any chance it'll be done. And it's based on an experiment in which people
00:27:57.980
tried to teach people to save more for their retirement. And what they did was, and what
00:28:06.480
they did was, they digitally aged people's face. And then they showed them in the future.
00:28:14.480
And then they asked them to save money for their future self. And the people who saw themselves
00:28:20.640
digitally aged, now had a visual representation of themselves in the future. And what do you think
00:28:27.320
they did? They saved more money. Because they wanted to be nice to that guy in the future that they've
00:28:34.240
now seen. They've visually seen him. It's like a real person now. It just happens to be you. And you're
00:28:40.320
nice to you. So it's easy to screw your future self and not save enough money. Because it's a
00:28:48.980
stranger. Future you, you've never even met. Literally a stranger. And a concept doesn't even
00:28:56.580
exist. So as soon as you make a digital representation, it becomes real in your mind.
00:29:02.540
There's a real me in the future. And then you act differently. Almost immediately. It's a pretty big
00:29:06.960
effect. It doesn't get everybody, of course. Persuasion doesn't work that way. But it's
00:29:11.620
a pretty big effect. So suppose you wanted to be completely unethical and persuade people
00:29:18.200
to get vaccinated. How would you do it? You would take a Snapchat filter. And you would
00:29:27.580
make a filter that could take any picture of a person and put them in a hospital bed with
00:29:33.400
a ventilator. Dying of COVID. That would do it. If you see yourself with a ventilator
00:29:43.260
dying of COVID, you'll treat your future self differently. Not everybody. You'd probably
00:29:50.680
get, you know, 10 to 20%. But it's really unethical. Really unethical. Because you would be taking
00:29:59.800
people completely out of the domain of rational thought. You would be moving them away from
00:30:05.180
their own opinion of, you know, the odds, which is different for everybody. And you would
00:30:12.040
basically just scare them. You would scare them into loving themselves in the future, and
00:30:17.660
an irrational thing would happen, and then they would change their behavior. Very unethical.
00:30:22.040
But I thought it would be useful as a lesson. Oh, so let's talk about the people being forced
00:30:32.040
to get vaccinations because they need a passport to do something. As Raul Davis pointed out to
00:30:39.760
me today on Twitter, there's a reason that will never work. Do you know what it is? Tell
00:30:48.180
me in the comments, what is the reason it will never work in the long run to have vaccine
00:30:54.680
passports? Well, I'll jump ahead. It's because not enough black people have vaccinated. And
00:31:04.020
if you required the only vaccinated people could shop in a store, you would be racist. Because
00:31:11.960
black people have far lower rate of vaccination. It's racist. And it's unambiguously racist by
00:31:23.100
modern standards, right? You could argue that you don't think you should be. You could argue
00:31:29.780
that you think it shouldn't be treated as racist. But it is. According to our modern standard,
00:31:34.960
if you make a policy or a rule that clearly targets one group, not targets, but disadvantages
00:31:43.100
one group in a really obvious way, it's just racist. It's illegal. So I don't think that
00:31:50.460
passports could last unless everybody got vaccinated at something closer to a similar rate. That's just
00:31:56.620
not happening. All right. So apparently Americans, according to Bloomberg, are talking about a
00:32:07.560
poll that said 65% of workers who said their jobs could be done entirely remotely were willing to take
00:32:15.220
on average a 5% reduction in pay to stay at home. Is that big news? They take a 5% reduction in pay to
00:32:25.820
stay at home. Isn't 5% about what it costs to go to work? That's sort of what your commute costs.
00:32:34.120
It feels like. So it feels like they haven't really said anything except that they'll go where the
00:32:38.880
money tells them to go at the least amount of effort. So again, does money predict things? Yes,
00:32:46.180
it does. Money predicts that people will want to work at home just to save money because commuting is
00:32:51.940
expensive as well as paying the ass. So no surprise there. Remember my 25% idiot rule that you do a
00:33:02.020
poll on any topic and 25% of the people who answer will just be idiots? It wouldn't matter how obvious
00:33:08.920
the right answer is. 25% would still get the wrong answer. It's very consistent. Here's another one.
00:33:13.880
So according to another poll, 74% of voters, this is a Rasmussen, this is a Rasmussen poll,
00:33:25.820
74% of voters support photo ID requirements. 74% support photo ID requirements to vote.
00:33:36.380
That means something close, very close to 25% of the public thinks that you should vote without proof
00:33:47.120
that it's you. Really? Do you think you could sit in a room with somebody who could explain their
00:33:54.000
theoretical and academic argument for why you shouldn't be identified when you vote?
00:34:00.400
Do you think the reasons would sound pretty good when you heard them?
00:34:03.520
25%? 25%. It's so consistent. You could find one quarter of the public.
00:34:13.960
They can't reason their way out of anything. Anything. All right, let's talk about persuasion
00:34:20.940
and AOC. AOC was throwing Democrats under a bus today. So she was, or yesterday, I guess,
00:34:29.140
she was on Jake Tapper's State of the Union and said, talking about the renter's moratorium
00:34:37.860
situation and how the Democrats completely screwed it up. They waited too long. They should have done
00:34:44.920
something. They just completely screwed up the topic. And AOC was kind of brutal. Well, not brutal,
00:34:50.960
but she was frank. She said, there was frankly a handful of conservative Democrats in the House
00:34:56.500
that threatened to get on planes rather than hold this vote. And we have to really call a spade a
00:35:02.580
spade. So she said clearly that the Democrats, they're in charge and they messed up. Now, who does that
00:35:11.340
sound like? Who is a politician who you can think of who is persuasive, who also has, yeah, Trump.
00:35:23.780
If you want to be the president of the United States, you have to go after your own party.
00:35:31.840
You have to. If you want to be a senator, never go after your own party. Because, you know, you're just
00:35:38.860
a team player. But if you want to be president of the United States, you have to go full Trump.
00:35:44.940
You have to tell your own party why it's messed up and how only you can fix it. That's how you get the
00:35:51.500
nomination, first of all. But it's also how you get everybody to, you know, change to be your party.
00:35:59.480
Trump turned the Republican Party into his party by criticizing it. AOC, who I believe is destined to
00:36:07.540
someday be president, not anytime too soon. But I think she's going to have her turn in the
00:36:13.640
presidency. I think it's inevitable. You know, unless there's some scandal that comes out. That's
00:36:18.740
always a wild card. But this is yet again another one of those indications that she's operating at a
00:36:26.720
different level. You know, you need to be able to throw your party under the bus right in front of
00:36:32.000
them, or else you can't go further. You can't go to the presidency. I keep asking, there's this weird
00:36:40.720
thing happening where people keep saying that I quote, got a lot wrong about the pandemic. And that
00:36:48.200
I asked for examples. And the examples are kind of crazy. And I've been trying to figure this out.
00:36:56.860
And I think here's the reason. I think the reason that I trigger cognitive dissonance more than other
00:37:01.720
people. So they actually have false memories of things I've said or done is that my take doesn't
00:37:07.960
map to the binaries. So there's always a binary in every topic, right? People say this is absolutely
00:37:14.440
true, or this is absolutely true. But they don't allow that there might be some gray area. And the
00:37:19.760
binaries here are that master vaccinations either work or don't. If they work, you should use them.
00:37:30.020
If they don't work, you shouldn't use them. Would you say that's generally the binary? People say
00:37:36.160
they work or they don't. And if something works, you should use it. And if it doesn't work, you
00:37:40.220
shouldn't use it. I mean, in this in this case, working means gives you more benefits than costs.
00:37:47.300
But I don't say that. I don't say that. So I think that's what confuses people. I say
00:37:53.540
masks totally, almost certainly work for reducing some amount of risk. But you shouldn't use them.
00:38:02.680
If you're vaccinated. And if somebody who's not vaccinated doesn't want to use them, I don't
00:38:07.140
particularly care because I'm vaccinated. My risk is microscopic of dying anyway. So I don't know
00:38:15.120
anybody else who has that opinion or states it the way I do. They work. Don't use them. Same with
00:38:22.720
vaccinations or similarly with vaccinations. My opinion, which totally could be wrong, because it'll
00:38:29.020
take a long time to know for sure. But my opinion is that vaccinations, at least for people in my risk
00:38:34.500
profile, not necessarily you, makes sense for me. And I don't recommend that you get them.
00:38:42.380
So I think both of them work. Statistically, I think the science is, you know, more toward them
00:38:51.240
working. But I could be wrong. Either of them could end up not working in the end. And I'll tell
00:38:55.480
you that. If it turns out that they don't work, I'll tell you that. And I'll tell you I was wrong.
00:38:59.140
But I don't know anybody who has a nuanced position where they say, yeah, they work. But that's not
00:39:06.920
the question. The question is risk management and blah, blah, blah. So I think that's what's confusing
00:39:11.860
people, is that I don't belong to one of the binaries. And so they're pretty sure that I must be wrong
00:39:18.540
about a lot of stuff. Here's another example. I tweeted that, you know, that if you're,
00:39:29.140
vaccinated, it feels like you're not in a pandemic. But if you're unvaccinated, you're still in the
00:39:33.560
pandemic. And somebody said, well, you got that wrong. You got that wrong. To which I say, how can
00:39:40.540
opinion be wrong? I didn't, my opinion isn't wrong. Because it's how I feel. I'm telling you how I feel.
00:39:48.880
I feel that when I got vaccinated, and somebody else told me this the other day, actually,
00:39:54.620
without being asked, that it feels different. And it feels like you're done with the pandemic,
00:40:00.460
but other people are not. Now, can you criticize me for telling you how I feel?
00:40:06.020
It's just how I feel. It's not right or wrong. It's actually just how I feel.
00:40:14.480
So people are taking stuff like that and saying that I got stuff wrong. No, I'm pretty sure I know
00:40:20.780
how I feel. That's all I'm talking about. And then let me give you an example of how a typical
00:40:27.960
claim about the pandemic goes. So I asked in a tweet, I said, if ivermectin is so good,
00:40:36.020
and we know that a number of countries don't have enough vaccinations to take care of things with
00:40:40.980
vaccinations, shouldn't we see some smaller countries who have access to ivermectin,
00:40:47.200
because everybody does, for the most part, but maybe not vaccinations, shouldn't we see that some
00:40:53.400
of the countries had like totally squashed the COVID just with ivermectin? And how does this
00:41:00.880
conversation go? Have you seen enough of these that I don't even have to tell you what happened
00:41:06.480
next? So I said, give me some examples. And somebody did. So Paul Collider on Twitter said,
00:41:15.320
well, first I asked, why is it that we're not hearing about these successes? And Paul offered
00:41:20.920
these reasons. He said, major media's largest advertiser is pharma. So that would suggest that
00:41:26.280
the vaccination makers don't want you to know about anything that's a low cost solution.
00:41:31.280
Two, the major media sites on the left, that's not a serious question. In other words, he's saying
00:41:36.540
that the news industry is so corrupt on the left that you couldn't expect them to say anything about
00:41:41.880
it anyway. And then three, the major media sites on the right get a lot of their traffic from social
00:41:47.820
media. So they can't say too many things about ivermectin on the right either, because then they
00:41:53.980
won't get traffic sent to their content from social media. Pretty good arguments. Pretty good
00:42:01.440
arguments. So they do provide a reason why it could be possible. And before you ban me, YouTube,
00:42:08.900
wait till the end. You'll be happy in the end, YouTube, if you're watching me and deciding, uh-oh,
00:42:14.240
got my finger on the ban. If YouTube turns off, jump over to Locals. I took the subscription wall off
00:42:22.700
for this video. So if this gets banned on YouTube, just go over to Locals. They don't ban this stuff.
00:42:29.660
All right. Um, so, so we got a reason why maybe, uh, ivermectin could be solving the problem in some
00:42:38.960
countries, and we'd never even hear about it because the media business model is corrupt. Could be,
00:42:44.880
could be. But then, uh, I still asked for one example, and Paul gave me Zimbabwe. All right,
00:42:50.800
so here's the Zimbabwe example. Uh, so Zimbabwe didn't have much in the way of vaccinations,
00:42:56.480
uh, but I guess one, some famous, I guess some politician died of COVID or something,
00:43:02.620
and they decided to try ivermectin. So here's what we know from, uh, from Paul. He says,
00:43:09.320
the death rate, uh, rose sharply in January and peaked on the 25th as 70 deaths per day.
00:43:14.840
Uh, then officials authorized the use of ivermectin. It was granted, uh, toward the
00:43:20.540
end of January. Then one month later, in February, the COVID death rate had fallen to zero.
00:43:28.140
Well, that's what I asked for, right? I asked for, show me one country that didn't use vaccinations,
00:43:34.520
did use ivermectin, and, and just squashed the COVID. And there it was, Zimbabwe.
00:43:41.360
What happened next? Anybody? Anybody? What happened next? You've lived in the world long enough.
00:43:49.720
You know exactly what happened next. Tell me. I'm going to, I'm going to see how long it takes you
00:43:55.340
in the, in the cartoons to tell me exactly what, what happened next. It took about five minutes
00:44:02.420
for Andres Backhaus to find the Zimbabwe death rate and show that if you showed it like a month later,
00:44:12.180
the, the spike went through the roof. So Zimbabwe is an example of ivermectin not working
00:44:19.280
and not working hard. I mean, it really didn't work according to the, according to the death rate chart.
00:44:26.920
So how many of you are surprised? How many of you are surprised that there was a country that was
00:44:34.580
held out, and this is standard, showed you a graph, the graph looked real. In fact, the graph was real.
00:44:40.740
It was a real graph. It just wasn't up to date. How many of you knew it was going to happen?
00:44:48.660
That's the reason I did the tweet. It was predictable as hell. Now in the comments, you said,
00:44:54.260
what about Mexico? What about India? They used ivermectin and they squashed. No, they didn't.
00:45:00.820
No, they didn't. India is spiking. Mexico, that didn't happen. So all of these individual cases
00:45:08.500
you think really happened because you saw a chart, didn't happen. It's either an old chart or a wrong
00:45:15.980
chart or they didn't really use ivermectin or something. But basically the question still stands.
00:45:22.020
If you believe ivermectin works and not only just works, but like really works, like just squashes
00:45:28.800
the virus. If you believe that's true and there are countries who have tried it, why has it never
00:45:35.520
worked? Why has it never worked? Now again, can I conclude based on this information that ivermectin
00:45:44.860
works or doesn't work? No, no. This is the whole reason you need a randomized controlled trial,
00:45:52.640
peer review, and you need to repeat it. Even one randomized controlled trial is not going to be
00:46:00.580
as convincing as you want it to be. There's a reason you don't just look at a chart
00:46:06.040
and decide what works. It's because it doesn't work. You think you can do it and you can't.
00:46:13.560
Do you remember the part about do your own research? Don't be fooled by the powers that be.
00:46:18.560
Do your own research. Well, Paul did his own research. How did it work out? He came to the
00:46:24.760
opposite conclusion of what the data says. But he did his own research. So did he do something wrong?
00:46:31.460
Did his own research? Came to the wrong conclusion? Clearly. At least in Zimbabwe. I don't know about
00:46:39.000
the conclusion overall. So that's a good way to approach these questions about hydroxychloroquine
00:46:50.760
or ivermectin or something. The question you want to ask is what's missing? Here's what's missing.
00:46:58.640
Let me give you another one. If you're trying to decide if masks work or don't, remember I'm anti-mask,
00:47:06.180
so I'm not telling you to wear a mask. But if you're trying to decide if they work or not, here's the
00:47:10.900
question you should ask. Not, can I find a chart that says they work or not? Because doing your own
00:47:19.240
research doesn't work. It's just an illusion that you think you can look stuff up on complicated
00:47:26.860
topics and get it like the right answer. It just isn't a thing. But here's the question you should
00:47:32.800
ask. There are people who do have those skills, right? There are people who do know how to look at
00:47:38.360
medical things and scientific studies and come up to better opinions. Why is it that there's no top
00:47:47.140
medical experts, at least people who have control of decisions in any industrialized country who says
00:47:55.060
masks don't work? Why is that? Is that something about that all of them are suppressed by the system?
00:48:04.080
That nowhere, there's not one country anywhere, an industrialized country where the leadership says,
00:48:09.900
you know, we're looking at all the same data and we say it doesn't work. None? Now, I get the fact
00:48:18.580
that science, like everything else, you know, there's a herd mentality. I get that people don't want to
00:48:24.780
embarrass themselves, you know, by saying the wrong thing if everybody else is saying something else.
00:48:29.400
I get all those forces that are forcing you into the official narrative. But there are a lot of
00:48:35.500
countries. There are a lot of experts in a lot of countries. There's nobody in any of the other
00:48:41.740
countries of, let's say, the industrialized countries, right? You know, the countries that have a serious
00:48:47.480
science, let's say, structure. None of them? Not one? That stretches my, you know, just stretches my
00:48:59.220
imagination to the breaking point that you couldn't get one dissenter out of all those nations. Because
00:49:05.040
it seems like you could get a dissenter for everything. I can't even think of any question
00:49:09.760
you couldn't get a dissent on, but not masks, apparently. Now, let me say it again. Someday,
00:49:18.180
we'll probably know for sure. I don't know, maybe. But we could know for sure that vaccinations
00:49:25.400
worked or didn't, masks were a good idea or a bad idea. And if I'm wrong about any of this stuff,
00:49:31.820
I don't have any problem telling you. No problem. Because I always approach this stuff as a risk
00:49:38.340
management question, right? If I look at the question of masks, I don't tell myself there's
00:49:44.060
a 100% chance they work. I think it's 90% chance. But nothing's 100%. So if you're thinking that
00:49:51.900
I would have a problem telling you I was wrong, don't worry about that. I won't have that problem.
00:50:06.420
All right. Ivermectin is also low risk, somebody says. Yeah. I mean, that's worthy of consideration.
00:50:16.540
Um, Fauci never believed masks work in his 80 years, you're saying. Well, who knows?
00:50:29.040
Um, what is the definition of working? Good question. You know, if I had to put a number on
00:50:35.360
it, without the benefit of science, so it's just everybody's sort of guessing here. If I had to
00:50:41.160
put a number on it, I think the masking makes a 10% difference. In the context of a pandemic,
00:50:46.980
that's worth doing. Especially since the 10%, you know, quickly volumes up because of the
00:50:55.820
viral nature of things. Um, so here's somebody in the comments telling me that India is in fact
00:51:09.780
a proof that Ivermectin works, that the spike was small and didn't last. Um, see the problem?
00:51:19.200
You're all looking at the same data. And some of you are looking at the data and say, well,
00:51:23.420
I did my research. Here, it shows it works. I looked at a chart. And somebody else looked
00:51:28.240
at the same data and said, well, here's proof it didn't work. You're looking at the same chart.
00:51:32.860
It's just an illusion that you can do your own research on this stuff. Uh, masks found
00:51:40.700
to be 3% effective in the CDC in two studies. Look it up. Um, those I believe without looking
00:51:48.280
it up, whoever said that the CDC says masks are 3% effective. I believe that's, um, in
00:51:55.160
a laboratory setting, not in the real world setting. I believe that was the difference.
00:52:01.620
So I don't know that we know in the real world. That's where I'm saying 10%. Um, oh, is there
00:52:10.160
somebody here who, who has boots on the ground in India and says it's a media illusion? What
00:52:15.440
is the illusion? The illusion is that Ivermectin worked or the illusion is that it didn't work?
00:52:20.860
Uh, so I don't know which, what you're referring to. Um, can we talk about non COVID related
00:52:31.180
headlines? Well, we did. And now we're done. And tomorrow we'll talk about some more things.
00:52:38.720
So here's, here's my, uh, semi commitment to you. You can't really not talk about COVID.
00:52:45.720
I'm going to try to minimize it because I know it's, um, I feel the same thing. I did a comic
00:52:51.320
on it yesterday. We're, we're all just dying from the repeat story. Uh, just another year
00:52:56.800
of the same fucking questions, you know, there was slight changes is just, it's, it's awful.
00:53:04.660
Um, it's got countries won't denounce masks because type one versus type two error. Okay.
00:53:14.400
Um, um, let's see what else we got here for comments before I go. Uh, says half the transmission
00:53:26.540
in counties where masks are mandated. Yeah. None of those studies I trust. So in, on YouTube
00:53:32.260
comments, somebody was saying that, you know, the counties that had mask requirements had,
00:53:37.540
you know, such and such a, an outcome. I don't think any of that is conclusive, but yeah, it's,
00:53:44.720
it's worth throwing in the mix, but don't assume that you can conclude anything from that.
00:53:48.820
Um, uh, let's see. My spike observation is not incorrect. India is still ranked 116 for infections. Okay.
00:54:02.880
All right. That's all I got for now. And I will talk to you tomorrow. And let's hope that we have
00:54:13.540
some news that's more fun and we, we won't talk about the pandemic so much.