Episode 1576 Scott Adams： The Coming Collapse of China and More Good News
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
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Summary
Have you ever been in a grocery store with a long line at the cash register, and your brain doesn t work? And you can t even have sex because your brain shuts down because it s too cold? Scott Adams explains why.
Transcript
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Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the best thing that's ever happened to you and to anybody.
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Not only in the real world, but in your imagination, the metaverse, and everywhere else you can imagine.
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It's called Coffee with Scott Adams, and it features the simultaneous sip.
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Well, you need a cup or a mug or a glass of tank or a chalice or a stein canteen jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind.
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The dopamine here of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
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All right, I have a weird left-field question for you.
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Has anybody discovered that there's an exact temperature, mostly for indoor living, at which your body shuts down?
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Somebody says 58 degrees, and their brain shuts down.
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Yeah, now, I assume that there's lots of individual difference, but I've been tracking this forever.
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And I can't even, like, I can't even have sex at any age.
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Now, I would recommend, if you've never noticed, that there's a temperature where it just falls off a ledge.
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And here's the interesting thing, at least in my case, it's not like 74 degrees I start feeling it, because I don't.
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It's like 76 degrees I'll be sitting there thinking, I can't do anything.
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And I'll get up and I'll go to the thermometer and check.
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It's always 76 degrees, and has been for years and years.
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And so anyway, I'll just put that out there as a helpful tip.
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If you feel yourself shutting down, just go check the temperature.
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And then check it again every time you feel that feeling where you just can't think, just can't get anything done, can't do anything.
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Yeah, humidity would be part of the answer, too.
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So where I am, it tends to be lower humidity, so maybe my temperature is always more consistent.
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All right, I got a little story for you yesterday.
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Anyway, Christina, my wife and I went to a small Afghan food market locally.
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We got our little ingredients that we're going to make some kind of amazing soup, I guess.
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And Christina gets in line, and I'm just sort of hanging around with her.
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There are two cash registers, but only one of them has somebody attending.
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And the guy indicates that we should move to the other cash register.
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So we didn't really know why, but it doesn't really matter why, because there was nobody in line.
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So we just walk over to the empty cash register, assuming that either that man will walk over and help us,
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Meanwhile, a whole line forms at the other cash register, the one where he just said he's not going to help us.
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And it's one person after another, and there's like this long line, and he's waiting on them.
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We had to be at this other cash register with nobody at it.
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It was a man at the cash register, and Christina's a woman.
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We had to go to the special woman-only cash register.
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And when we were waiting, I was waiting, you know, shoulder-to-shoulder with her, as if either of us were the customer.
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And when I finally figured out what was going on, because there was a woman in traditional Islamic garb,
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And as soon as she did, I looked at the other line, and I realized it was all men.
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Have you ever been in a grocery store with a long line at the cash register that was only men?
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They wouldn't take her money, because she was a woman.
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So now I'm standing at the cash register, and the woman in Islamic garb walks up.
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You know, Christina wasn't carrying her wallet at the moment.
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So I've got to pay, but I can't pay this woman.
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So obviously I gave the credit card to Christina and just, you know, backed away from the situation out of respect.
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And so Christina paid, and everything was fine.
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And I have to admit that I didn't feel put out by it, which is strange, because you would imagine that I would be.
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I just felt that I had entered another culture, and I was actually quite happy to conform to their preferences.
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So I didn't have any problem with it at all, because I understood it to be important to them.
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If it's important to them, it's no big deal for me.
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So it's not my business how they do their business.
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Now, I mentioned that the woman didn't seem to have a problem with it.
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I don't know what her private feelings were, but they seemed happy, so I didn't have a problem with it.
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I imagine if it were more inconvenient, I would.
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But I think people can be people, and we could respect that.
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Anyway, here I'm going to add to my NPC spotting list.
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Here's how you can tell you're dealing with a non-player character, someone who is not capable of independent thought.
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I've told you before that if they mention the Matrix movie or Soil and Green movie, they're probably an NPC.
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But I'm going to add jumping the shark when used in the wrong way, which is anybody who has a new idea, anybody who does anything different, well, you're jumping the shark now.
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Because everybody's doing new stuff all the time.
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I wouldn't even be doing what I'm doing now if I hadn't jumped the shark, right, from cartoonist to, I don't know, whatever I am now.
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I mean, jumping the shark is what you should all be doing, looking to get out of your domain, try something risky, etc.
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I'm going to take a little aside here and give you some advice that will completely change the experience of some of you.
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How many of you have a problem with sadness or, let's say, depression, but maybe not the full clinical kind, for which I don't have any answers.
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But, you know, you're depressed, as you use the word commonly, but let's say not in the full medical sense, where you literally can't get out of bed.
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If you're just in the doldrums, there's just nothing good going on, you just can't find a way to get happy, here's your way out.
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Do something that you wouldn't do unless you knew you were going to be dead tomorrow.
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Live your life like you know you're going to be dead tomorrow.
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Because if you're unhappy, you might as well be dead tomorrow, right?
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The whole point of life is to get some enjoyment out of it.
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If you're not getting enjoyment out of life, ramp up your risk.
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Now, when I say risk, I don't mean physical risk.
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But do the thing that you weren't going to do before.
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Walk up to that person that you were too afraid to ask out, and you get shot down.
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Remember, imagine that you're going to be dead tomorrow.
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Do you mind that you got turned down for a date?
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You can change your frame from, oh, everything's bad and I'm in a bad mood, to,
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wait a minute, I just got a free pass to do all the scary things I couldn't do before.
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The rest of you are wondering, I don't know, would that work?
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You just got a free pass to do things you couldn't do before.
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Have I told you before that when I have a bad day, like, you know, you have these bad
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days, you know it's going to pass, but you're having a really bad day, you just have to get
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When I have a bad day, I fire people that I wanted to fire anyway.
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Now, if you work for me, I'm not planning to fire anybody.
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In general, I do unpleasant things when I'm already feeling bad, because that's the perfect
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I might as well do those things that I knew were going to make me feel bad, because it
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If you're sad, sad, sad, and you just can't get out of it, go do something that you were
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One time out of, I don't know, three or five, something great might happen.
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And the other times, at least you'll wake yourself up.
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Anyway, are you watching the story about Congresswoman Robert?
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So, she told a joke in public that was filmed, in which she suggested that Ilan Omar, you
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Now, she ended up apologizing, but people had some opinions about whether she should have.
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It's a common opinion on the right to say you should never apologize, because then you'll
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just be apologizing for everything all the time, and you're basically giving power to
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I think that's a reasonably good Trump-like strategy.
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You know, I'm big on apologies if the issue doesn't matter, right?
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If you can make a, in your personal life, if you can make something go away with an apology,
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But politically, I think apologies probably are just a transfer of power for no reason.
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Did we conflate our standard for how we treat public figures with how we would treat each
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If a public figure told a joke about you, a private citizen, suggesting that you were a
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terrorist because of your ethnicity, well, that would be pretty bad.
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You don't want your public servants, elected officials, to be, you know, mocking private
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citizens for their ethnicity, even if it's a joke, right?
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There's no joke that's going to be funny enough that it's going to be okay for our elected
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officials to make fun of a private citizen, for ethnicity anyway, right?
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But that's not the standard we use for other elected officials.
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You can say basically anything about an elected official.
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How many times have Republicans in general been called Hitler?
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Because it's the standard for talking about public figures.
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If Boebert, or anybody else, wants to call any member of Congress a terrorist, no matter
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what, because of their ethnicity, because that's why Trump is called Hitler, right?
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If they were not white and male, a lot less Hitler calling, don't you think?
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But to be a lot less of it, and to pretend that calling somebody Hitler is unrelated to
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their ethnicity is a little disingenuous, right?
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Because we don't, you know, call the black leaders Hitler.
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I mean, sometimes, but it's, you know, that'd be the exception.
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So I don't think that Boebert, did I call her Roebert?
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I don't think it's a big deal that she did either, either way.
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But as long as calling Trump Hitler is okay, we can call Omar a terrorist, because she's
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And she has said things that would make ordinary people suggest she has some, let's say, not
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enough disavowing of the terrorists, let's say.
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You could debate it, but it's in the reasonable zone.
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But here's my take on it, just to get you all mad.
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I don't see much difference between the far left and the far right.
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I think both of them are racist ideologies, and I think they're not practical ideologies.
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Now, I would go further and say that everybody on the far left has a far right doppelganger,
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who's just sort of like the same thing, but is racist against different groups.
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They're similarly racist and similarly impractical.
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So you could play this game at home, but I think Boebert is just AOC with a gun.
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Now, I'm pro-AOC as an influencer, as a persuasive person, as a powerful entity in the country.
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Let's say the marketing of herself is pretty strong.
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They're both pretty persuasive in their different ways.
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But, yeah, everybody's going to say it's a bad comparison.
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So if you say, hey, in my opinion, they're completely different, I'm not even going to argue with you.
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It's just, it's literally a subjective opinion.
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You know, Boebert sounds, you know, like she's tough on immigrants, which some people will interpret as racist.
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AOC says she's tough on white people, which reasonable people feel is racist.
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And in some ways, Ilhan Omar is just Steve King, but with better headwear.
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By the way, if I may give a compliment to Ilhan Omar, because, you know, I'm generally a critic.
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And I always advise you that if you can't give a compliment to somebody on the other team, you know, maybe you're not as unbiased as you'd like to be.
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You know, she was always within the, or I don't know if she's always, but within the sort of Islamic, westernized look.
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So I don't see much difference between the far left and the far right.
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And I think that we're being hypnotized into imagining that we should be siding with either of them.
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A Daily Beast columnist named Wajahat Ali, he tweeted that,
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nothing the squad has said or done is remotely as extreme or radical as Boebert, Gosar, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Trump.
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You don't think that they've been as extreme or as radical on the far left?
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Now, again, he's expressing an opinion, and it's subjective.
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So I can't say it's wrong, because it's subjective.
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I mean, they look about equally extreme or radical, but just in completely different ways.
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If you don't follow tennis, you've never heard of this gentleman.
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But Nick Kyrgios, I may be pronouncing it right, wrong, Kyrgios.
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He has been in the top 20, but he's struggling a little bit.
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And part of the reason he's struggling is that he claims he's too horny to play tennis.
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Because apparently he goes on the road, and then he's away from his girlfriend or wife or whatever it is,
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And, you know, allegedly he's not cheating on her, apparently.
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And he said out loud, this is not even my interpretation.
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He basically said it's really, it's getting more difficult to play.
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I was going to say hard, but then you were going to make bad jokes.
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It's getting difficult to play because he's too horny.
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Because most excuses you've heard so many times, and you're like, oh, yeah, traffic was bad.
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Not because you started out late, and everybody knew the traffic was bad, but because the traffic was bad.
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I always have chocolate on the edge of my mouth when I do these things.
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But the reason I'm so happy about this story is that I plan to use this for a lot of different excuses.
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For example, if I fail to meet my comic deadline for Dilbert, and my editor calls me and says,
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you know, you missed deadline, I'm going to say, I know I missed the deadline, but in my defense,
00:21:02.960
It was reporting on a poll that said, Kamala Harris is the top choice for Democrats if Biden doesn't run again.
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The lowest approval in history for a vice president.
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I don't want you to think that the Democrats don't have a deep bench.
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Because here are the other people who also did well.
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And by the way, the top choice only gets 13% support on their own team.
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Bernie Sanders, who will be, I believe, 273 years old when the election happens.
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Now, of this group, I would say that, you know, Michael Bloomberg at least looks like, you know, a serious person.
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Well, somebody will have that number in a moment.
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So anyway, the Democrats have absolutely no bench.
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How in the world is anybody going to keep Trump from being president again?
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There's no way he's going to be beaten straight up.
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This is the weakest bench I've seen in a long time.
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I mean, I feel like you could go down the line and you could find, you know, a reasonable
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Oh, you know, Newsom is interesting because he was not on the list.
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See, you know, we're all critics of, not all of us, but many of us here are critics of
00:24:03.580
So if he got serious about running for president, I think he could make a dent, actually.
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So my favorite NBA player of all time so far is NS Cantor, who has been dumping on China
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And NS, he says, quote, shame on organizations like the International Olympic Committee that's
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setting up an Olympic Games this coming winter in China.
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And China's kind of weak there because of the tennis star disappearance.
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So their top tennis star has semi-disappeared, obviously is under something like a house arrest
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Or specifically talking about getting raped by a member of leadership.
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And I don't think we should attend the Olympics in China or anybody else should.
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In other good anti-China news, China Telecom Americas, which is a telecom services provider
00:25:25.720
So they won't be able to do business in the United States anymore because they have ties
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to China and they lied about where their data was being kept.
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And they have ties to the Chinese government specifically.
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Now, when I heard that America was going to start to dump on Huawei, you know, the big
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Chinese telecom company, I immediately bought shares in their competitor.
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And those Ericsson shares went down, I think, 16% in like just a few weeks.
00:26:04.500
Now, why is Ericsson stock going down when Huawei, I think its biggest competitor, should
00:26:12.940
be almost, you know, approaching extinct in a lot of markets?
00:26:24.280
And if you were to take any based on this conversation, it would be a big mistake.
00:26:28.380
But I don't see why the competition could possibly be down when their biggest competitor is sort of in big trouble.
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There's something I don't know about that market that's happening right now, probably a lot.
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But seeing the United States shutting down Chinese businesses here is good stuff.
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He has some international experience that makes him look qualified to say this.
00:27:00.420
So there's an article talking about how there's a commission that's looking at shutting down investment
00:27:07.460
from the United States in Chinese government-connected businesses.
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He says within a year at most, the U.S. will have shut down nearly all investment money flowing to China.
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Now I'm talking about people investing in their stock market to prop it up.
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I'm not talking about companies moving in with production facilities.
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I don't know if that's slowing down or stopped.
00:27:43.980
Can you tell me why there's no news on what companies in the United States have recently decided to do new business in China,
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Maybe the single most important thing we should know.
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Is there anything more important in the world than knowing how many Americans are still moving into China
00:28:12.900
Because even climate change is going to take a while.
00:28:15.940
But the China problem is a little bit more immediate.
00:28:24.540
And the Jerusalem Post is reporting that apparently there had been some math done at the Peking University
00:28:39.600
about what would happen if China opened up to travel.
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If China opens up for travel, apparently it will be a pandemic disaster in China, according to some modelers.
00:29:04.940
So they're losing their ability to compete in any company that has a government connection in China.
00:29:10.860
They're losing their investment from at least the United States in their stock market.
00:29:15.000
And they can't open up their country, but probably countries will be able to open up.
00:29:23.880
If you were going to build a manufacturing plant in China, you know that you would have to visit it a lot, right?
00:29:31.640
Let's say Apple wanted to open a new or do new business with somebody in China.
00:29:36.440
They would put an American Apple employee like right on scene checking stuff out.
00:29:42.900
If you can't travel, I don't know if you can do new business there, if there's any physical part of that business.
00:29:59.720
So this Omicron variant, do we know if it's more dangerous or less dangerous yet?
00:30:11.240
We're thinking it's more virulent or spreads faster than the normal ones.
00:30:16.380
But we don't know if it's more dangerous yet, right?
00:30:20.460
Because we're seeing some indication, and I would say these would be preliminary reports,
00:30:25.080
that it's way less dangerous than the existing big ones.
00:30:30.620
But then I saw this comment from Dr. Eli David.
00:30:37.000
He was quoting the chair of the South African Medical Association who said about the Omicron variant,
00:30:43.640
that it may be highly transmissible, but so far the cases we're seeing are extremely mild.
00:30:52.680
And then Dr. David says, this makes a lot of sense,
00:30:56.560
because less virulent mutations have greater evolutionary advantage.
00:31:02.600
And this is exactly how the Spanish flu ended, he says.
00:31:07.820
I thought it was still a mystery how the Spanish flu ended.
00:31:19.300
and it was because a variant was more transmissible but weaker,
00:31:31.860
that I was wondering why we don't make a variant of our own
00:31:36.440
that's highly transmissible but gives you extremely mild symptoms,
00:31:40.820
so everybody would just get vaccinated sort of naturally,
00:31:49.520
but you have to wait for it as opposed to engineering it.
00:31:52.400
Right, the tech didn't exist to test the Spanish flu, exactly.
00:31:58.580
So we wouldn't really know what happened with the Spanish flu, would we?
00:32:01.980
Or do we just assume that's the only way it could have stopped?
00:32:06.960
Because I don't think the Spanish flu ever reached herd immunity, did it?
00:32:21.140
Did Dark Horse conclude that the variants, the weaker variants,
00:32:25.620
were the reason that the dangerous variant died out?
00:32:33.160
All right, so I'm going to say that that's still a mystery to me.
00:32:39.080
And then Michael Amina gave us a reminder here,
00:32:42.680
said it's not inevitable that the viruses mutate
00:32:48.580
And he says the idea that viruses inevitably become more infectious
00:32:59.960
So apparently your virus can go in either direction,
00:33:03.060
but wouldn't it be reasonable to assume it goes in both at the same time?
00:33:13.000
wouldn't you see the virus having some variants that are worse
00:33:19.620
Better meaning it transmits, but it doesn't make you sick.
00:33:25.220
So I'm a little confused about what is and isn't happening here with these variants,
00:33:33.860
that there's no other explanation for how any pandemic ends.
00:33:39.000
I feel like the weak variant hypothesis has to be the only way they end, right?
00:33:55.180
But inevitably you would get ones that would inoculate you forever also, right?
00:34:10.220
Because you imagined I said something I didn't,
00:34:21.060
Hallucinating and then dunking on your hallucination.
00:34:26.320
Dr. Jew has been saying this from the beginning.
00:34:43.540
Of all the Democratic leaders saying that the vaccine was dangerous
00:34:47.580
because it was a Trump vaccine in the early days.
00:34:58.940
I mean, how many people have died because of fake news?
00:35:03.360
Fake news is killing people in a variety of ways.
00:35:31.960
He's getting a lot of attention on the Internet.
00:35:40.980
and cause more variants that could be dangerous.
00:36:06.740
that vaccinations create an extra danger of variants?
00:36:15.980
Do vaccinations make the odds of a dangerous variant worse?
00:36:28.480
How could we be disagreeing on such a basic question?
00:36:38.880
I'm not really talking about the pandemic anymore.
00:36:42.260
I'm kind of talking about how we're processing information.
00:36:47.880
But look how many people are on different sides
00:37:17.580
meaning that anything that gets out past the vaccination
00:37:27.700
But here's why it's fake and true at the same time.
00:37:33.800
Because if you had no vaccinations, what would happen?
00:37:41.820
If there are more vaccinations, there are fewer virus.
00:37:45.540
Because fewer people have it for a long period of time.
00:37:49.180
You can still get it, but you get it less often
00:37:56.300
greatly reduce the amount of total virus in the world
00:38:06.760
So if you disagree with that, you're just lost.
00:38:09.860
Yeah, there's one thing that I don't think any experts disagree on.
00:38:18.820
The vaccinations reduce the total amount of virus in the world.
00:38:26.060
Getting the vaccination might create some selection pressure.
00:38:30.640
Not having any vaccinations at all would also create more virus,
00:38:41.360
All the virus in the world raging out of control and all of the variants that that would create.
00:39:05.080
One is the vaccination might make the chances of you specifically creating a variant a little bit higher.
00:39:11.840
But if nobody's vaccinated, the total risk of variants is just off the chart.
00:39:19.980
So it's true that vaccinations can create that pressure.
00:39:23.740
But it's also true that if you didn't get vaccinated, it would be way worse with the variants.
00:39:28.840
That, I believe, is the current scientific opinion.
00:39:32.560
So if you see Dr. Malone say that vaccinations could cause selection pressure and variants,
00:39:46.880
Somebody says, on the other hand, wouldn't we reach herd immunity faster?
00:39:57.400
Shoplifting is out of control in San Francisco.
00:40:02.980
Some security guards have been killed now, defending one of them.
00:40:06.820
And the San Francisco Chronicle runs a story where the headline, at least the tweet, was,
00:40:13.940
we explore what police data, especially numbers from one particular corner in the city, can and can't tell us about what is happening.
00:40:25.340
The San Francisco Chronicle is wondering why the looting is happening?
00:40:34.240
Is there anybody who doesn't know the cause of it?
00:40:37.700
The cause is that the penalties were taken away.
00:40:43.120
It didn't used to be a good business model to steal stuff, because you'd get caught.
00:40:48.840
But now you won't get caught and you won't get prosecuted, or the odds are so low,
00:40:53.020
that now it's just an obvious good thing to do.
00:40:55.440
You really need a newspaper to do research on this?
00:41:01.160
So the Democrats have literally destroyed retail commerce and won't admit it.
00:41:10.720
They've destroyed retail, I think, forever, and won't admit it.
00:41:17.300
How in the world can a Democrat ever get elected president again?
00:41:22.920
I don't see any way a Democrat could win the presidency in this context.
00:41:29.680
I mean, Trump would have to declare war on Switzerland or something, wouldn't he?
00:41:35.340
I mean, what would he have to do to lose this election if he runs?
00:41:39.160
I'm not convinced he's going to run, but if he does.
00:41:52.240
Remember when the vaxxed people weren't going to need beds?
00:41:56.460
So basically, hearkening back to the fact that we were told the vaccinations would be real vaccinations and blah, blah, blah.
00:42:17.380
And what we knew when we started is very different from what we know now.
00:42:21.740
In the fog of war, you're supposed to make mistakes.
00:42:27.500
So if in the fog of war, the government made mistakes, and they made lots of them, that doesn't mean anything.
00:42:36.380
Because of course they were going to make mistakes in the beginning.
00:42:42.060
It does mean you should be very skeptical about your government, but we're already there.
00:42:51.360
All right, so let me talk to Rich, who is obviously a fucking idiot.
00:42:55.360
So Rich, am I moving the gold posts, or did we learn new fucking information, Rich?
00:43:02.060
Rich, if you don't change your opinion when the fucking information changes, you're a goddamn moron.
00:43:10.600
And if you thought that during the fog of war, people were going to make good decisions, well, you're a fucking idiot.
00:43:18.060
Because nobody, no matter how smart, no matter how much they're like you, Rich, they can't make good decisions without data.
00:43:32.160
Do you know what that tells you about the next decision?
00:43:36.660
So grow up, learn that the past is gone, doesn't tell you anything about the future, analogies are not thinking, you're going to have to look at every situation individually.
00:43:48.840
And yes, we all fucking understand that we don't trust the government about everything and every decision, and sometimes they make mistakes.
00:43:56.420
And sometimes it's about money and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:43:58.640
So telling us that they got one wrong doesn't tell us any fucking useful thing.
00:44:16.680
Well, first of all, probably one of the few people who said publicly that I didn't think the vaccines were going to work.
00:44:24.900
I said that the experts say that they've been trying for decades to make a coronavirus vaccination.
00:44:37.120
I said, well, it looks like it's not going to work, but I think our therapeutics will probably be pretty good.
00:44:45.520
So my prediction was that vaccines wouldn't necessarily work, but therapeutics would save us.
00:45:02.240
Now, if I had been wrong, I would have been like everybody else because we didn't have data.
00:45:06.220
Chad asks, why are we not doing wide-scale serology to, I assume you're asking to see how much immunity we have.
00:45:25.380
Has anybody seen a study on wide-scale serology just to see if people already have antibodies?
00:45:53.120
If you're trying to get me to admit that a government sometimes makes mistakes, or even often,
00:46:12.820
If they're arguing something that 100% of the world knows.
00:46:19.960
But, Scott, the vaccinations don't stop the flu or the virus completely.
00:46:44.460
I'm not sure I'm the one who can give you the lesson on that.
00:46:47.500
Because, you know, remember, if you're an energy monster, you look for conflict because it gives you energy.
00:46:57.040
So when I go after a troll, it's part of my business model.
00:47:02.620
If you go after a troll, it's probably just a bad day.
00:47:07.900
Maybe you should ignore them and leave that to the people who have a business model where mocking trolls is actually part of the entertainment.
00:47:20.360
Have you watched, let me give you some TV show recommendations.
00:47:27.700
Curb Your Enthusiasm is back for another season.
00:47:47.240
I think it's off now, but you can see the ones that are on.
00:47:57.180
And then there's another one called Wellington Paranormal.
00:48:07.260
It's about two cops in New Zealand who were put on the Supernatural Task Force, but nobody gets to know.
00:48:24.140
You know, you're used to seeing somebody play the dumb guy on movies and stuff.
00:48:28.800
But he does the best dumb guy since Dumb and Dumber.
00:48:35.520
And, yeah, Ted Lasso, I think, maybe, I didn't finish watching.
00:48:49.060
And if you want a guilty pleasure, I'm embarrassed that I'm even going to recommend this.
00:48:55.740
But if you want one that's like pure empty calories, but entertaining, what's it called?
00:49:14.580
But the show, they keep kind of lively, you know?
00:49:19.840
So I like fast-paced shows where nobody is tied to a chair and tortured.
00:49:24.800
By the way, that's my turn-off-the-movie point.
00:49:29.300
If I watch any movie, the moment somebody is tied to a chair, boop, turn it off.
00:49:37.620
If you have to tie somebody to a chair in your movie, you're a bad, bad writer.
00:49:56.720
Let's see if we can talk less about the pandemic in the future.
00:50:03.240
But I feel as if all the psychological phenomenon is sort of happening in that domain.
00:50:11.380
So the stuff that I'm interested in is way less about the science and way less about the politics.
00:50:17.620
I'm just fascinated by how we're processing the information.
00:50:21.380
Because you saw that, you know, Rich the Troll here.
00:50:36.980
It is the biggest thing in the world and the thing that I find most interesting from the psychology of it.
00:50:43.740
Those of you who want it to go away by not talking about it, well, good luck with that.
00:50:49.960
So, I mean, you can have that dream, but, you know, it's a useless dream.
00:50:57.700
And I also think these are the biggest decisions we need to make.
00:51:00.480
Now, I would like to give you this following reframe.
00:51:09.120
And I've said this often, but the more I say it, the more useful it is, I think.
00:51:20.600
So, if the citizens, you know, are sort of close to split, or even 60-40, that's pretty close to a split, we say, you know, it would be better off if we just let the politicians work this one out.
00:51:34.480
But that doesn't change the fact that the citizens are completely in control.
00:51:39.500
It's only when the citizens don't have an opinion.
00:51:43.100
That's the only time the government has control.
00:51:46.580
So, if you're worried about the pandemic lasting forever, which citizens want that?
00:51:54.640
There are no citizens that want the pandemic to last forever.
00:51:58.200
The citizens will end the pandemic when there are enough of them that want it ended.
00:52:02.920
Now, of course, it is, you know, brainwashing the citizens, and that's part of the problem.
00:52:08.040
But I feel at this point, you know, we'll be able to directly observe, you know, is it getting worse or is it getting better?
00:52:18.800
You know, so I feel like the public went from completely helpless, it's getting more and more informed, taking a little bit more control.
00:52:26.900
And as soon as it reaches, I don't know what the ratio is, 75% on the same team.
00:52:33.260
You know, if we reach a point where 75% of any place says get rid of the masks, do you think the government could keep you masked if 75% of the public said no?
00:52:47.400
So, imagining that the government has control over these decisions is a little bit misleading.
00:52:54.700
If you could get your fellow citizens, whenever I say that, it sounds sexist, doesn't it?
00:53:04.940
If you can get them to change their mind, then the government will change its mind.
00:53:11.240
Do you think that California, or that Governor Newsom is acting the way he is, you know, tighter in California than other places,
00:53:18.300
do you think he's doing that because the, without support of the public?
00:53:23.620
The reason California is different than Florida is that our public is different, not because the government's different.
00:53:32.280
So, every time you feel helpless, you're not helpless because of the government, at least on this issue.
00:53:39.120
You're helpless because your fellow citizens have different opinions.
00:53:41.900
And if you can change their opinions, and you have the ability to do that with social media, go ahead.
00:54:00.960
Oh, you mean the government can take your money in terms of taxes?
00:54:06.400
But do you know why the government can take your money, even at a gunpoint, in terms of taxes?
00:54:15.760
As soon as the citizens don't want it, it goes away.
00:54:19.040
But there are enough people who want it that we delegate to the government.
00:54:23.420
So, and I don't think this is necessarily like other countries.
00:54:28.920
Well, I feel like the government might be in control there.
00:54:36.040
But if the United States said, you all have to stay home for, I don't know, a month?
00:54:48.480
Because you certainly get more than 70% of Americans to say, no, no, we're going outdoors.
00:54:59.940
So, I think that it, well, I'm not worried about the boiling frog syndrome.
00:55:08.680
Meaning that they'll slowly condition us to do more and more.
00:55:13.660
Because the problem is there's nobody who wants it.
00:55:16.820
You would need somebody who's on the side of wanting the public to be locked down and wear masks.
00:55:24.440
There's nobody in the government who wants that.
00:55:39.720
So, their government acts differently, of course.
00:55:45.320
All right, that's all I've got for now, and I will talk to you tomorrow.
00:55:52.960
Take my money, you said, we can deal with the age that might be later.
00:55:56.140
At least we can find happiness in China's poor.
00:56:00.300
Okay, well, I don't know if that was worth $5, but thank you anyway.