Episode 1892 Scott Adams： Ye West Gets Into Trouble And Putin Does Too. Who Will Survive？
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 7 minutes
Words per Minute
143.1315
Summary
In this episode of Thick & Thin I talk about the PayPal rule change, the internet dad movement, and why I think the internet dads are better than the rest of us. I also talk about a new invention I'm working on.
Transcript
00:00:19.360
And believe me, I know how to solve the problem.
00:00:23.720
But while that's printing, may I suggest to you
00:01:47.720
Just bitch about the sound until I turn it off.
00:02:24.720
Because we've got a little bit of a, what are your problem?
00:02:32.720
So, the only comments will be on the locals platform.
00:02:48.720
If you would, all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass,
00:02:51.720
a tanker, a chalice, a steinic, into your jug or a glass.
00:03:04.720
The thing that makes everything better, it's called.
00:03:15.720
Have you ever thought about what is the ratio of assholes
00:03:26.720
Maybe a 10% asshole ratio just ruins everything.
00:03:44.720
You know that PayPal said, allegedly, that they were going to
00:03:47.720
maybe ding people $2,500 for spreading misinformation.
00:03:57.720
But they reversed that and said it was a big mistake and didn't mean to do it.
00:04:07.720
Now, on one hand, you could say, well, it's not any few people.
00:04:12.720
But I feel as if the complaints were sort of validated by people like Elon Musk, David Sacks.
00:04:22.720
I mean, there are people who are just well known as not really tied to a particular political side.
00:04:30.720
And, you know, I'm one of them, but smaller impact than other people.
00:04:35.720
But I feel like that was a true internet dad and, of course, women as well.
00:04:40.720
You know, I say dad because it's more of a vibe than a gender.
00:04:47.720
Because I've been saying that we have like a parallel government forming, which is people who are not in the bag for anything,
00:04:58.720
who are a little bit more credible than other people and are willing to put themselves out there.
00:05:02.720
So internet dads got a win, I think, or at least they were participating.
00:05:08.720
Rasmussen has a poll asking what people think about homelessness.
00:05:13.720
Is it getting worse or better or staying the same?
00:05:16.720
And I know this will come as a shock to you, but 68% think homelessness is getting worse.
00:05:23.720
But 27% believe that homelessness has either gotten better or it's about the same.
00:05:43.720
I think homelessness is getting better or staying about the same.
00:05:51.720
So there's a story that says that Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, at the time of January 6th, when January 6th was unfolding,
00:06:09.720
but afterwards, I guess in a private meeting, he told some police officers who were part of the January 6th defense,
00:06:18.720
he told them that in his opinion, he says Trump did not know his reporter, that his supporters were carrying out the attack.
00:06:26.720
In other words, Trump was aware of the protest, but he wasn't aware that people were beating people with clubs and stuff.
00:06:38.720
Do you believe that McCarthy accurately is stating what the president knew?
00:06:53.720
Because there's nothing about Trump that would suggest he would have been in favor of violence in the Capitol.
00:06:59.720
To me, that's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard.
00:07:04.720
If there's one thing that Trump is consistent about, it's the whole America thing.
00:07:12.720
Imagining that Trump had been in favor of violence on January 6th would be like imagining that he could burn an American flag on TV.
00:07:28.720
I mean, a lifetime of being, you know, a flag lover.
00:07:34.720
If you heard a story that said he did that, would you believe it?
00:07:39.720
So if you imagine that Trump knew that there was some violence happening in the Capitol,
00:07:50.720
All right, we're going to turn your comments back off and leave them off.
00:07:53.720
I turned them off because I don't want to hear you bitching about the sound because I can't fix it.
00:08:00.720
So I'm going to turn your comments back off again.
00:08:10.720
I turned them back on because I thought people would get over it, but they didn't.
00:08:22.720
I believe McCarthy when he says he doesn't believe that Trump was aware of the violent part of the attack.
00:08:32.720
Let me tell you what bugs me about conservatives.
00:08:49.720
You know, like as people, I think they're pretty good people.
00:08:54.720
I like anybody who's got a code of conduct and sticks to it or tries to.
00:09:00.720
But here's one thing that I think conservatives get wrong.
00:09:04.720
And you're going to think you're going to think I'm making a different point that I am.
00:09:09.720
So just hold your immediate comment until I finish.
00:09:16.720
Because your immediate comment is going to be flipping out.
00:09:19.720
Just wait, just wait till I get to my actual point before you flip out.
00:09:24.720
Conservatives think that fixing the nuclear family would fix a lot in the country.
00:09:32.720
Now you're going to tell me, oh, no, he's not going to come out against the nuclear family, is he?
00:09:48.720
In fact, I would agree with you that the nuclear family is the best arrangement you could have.
00:10:04.720
And really, in every possible way, the nuclear family is a better deal.
00:10:11.720
Now, conservatives start with, well, the nuclear family is good, so that's our solution.
00:10:18.720
There's no connection between those two things.
00:10:33.720
You know, you know what would solve homelessness?
00:10:35.720
What would solve homelessness would be if everybody were magic?
00:10:41.720
And they could, like, materialize a home around them.
00:11:06.720
You're going to say, change the financial incentives.
00:11:16.720
It's sort of a one-way, it's sort of a one-way direction.
00:11:21.720
You know, historically, we've made it difficult to be divorced.
00:11:28.720
But now that divorce is just a paperwork option.
00:11:32.720
And, you know, you don't have to get married and you could be a single person.
00:11:37.720
Now that it's not required, you're never going to go back to the more restrictive form.
00:11:49.720
People will only, they will willingly acquire rights, but people don't sign up to give them away.
00:11:58.720
So, if you told me, Scott, you've got two choices.
00:12:01.720
You can have things the way they are, where you could be married or not married.
00:12:07.720
In my case, I've been married and then not married twice.
00:12:12.720
I mean, there's still a lot of friction, but you can do it.
00:12:17.720
So, if you said to me, you could have it the current way, which definitely didn't work out for me.
00:12:24.720
Speaking for myself, I'd say the current way didn't work for me at all.
00:12:27.720
But, if you said, would you like to vote for this new way, where we won't give you a choice.
00:12:34.720
If you get married, the financial penalty will be so big that you're going to have to stay married.
00:12:48.720
You know, if you ask me, Scott, would you like to restrict the rights of other people?
00:12:53.720
And I'd think, well, other people, maybe a little bit if it's good for society.
00:13:00.720
But you can never talk me into respecting my own rights.
00:13:06.720
How in the world would you convince me to give up my own freedom?
00:13:19.720
Is there any civilization that has made it easy to divorce and then work the other way and succeed it?
00:13:26.720
I mean, basically, that's what the Taliban looks like, right?
00:13:31.720
So, the Taliban is sort of what the bad past looked like.
00:13:34.720
But you have to admit, it did keep the families together, didn't it?
00:13:49.720
For those of you who believe that the nuclear family is the answer,
00:13:59.720
But you have to tell me how you could get there.
00:14:01.720
And if you say that financial incentives would get you there, I would say,
00:14:16.720
But people won't give up the right to easily divorce.
00:14:22.720
Yeah, people are not going to go backwards for their own rights.
00:14:34.720
The UN Human Rights Council voted by a huge majority to not discuss the situation in China with the Uyghurs.
00:14:47.720
The Human Rights Council in the United Nations.
00:14:54.720
They voted not to discuss the most famous abuse of human rights that's happening right now.
00:15:10.720
Which makes you wonder what the Human Rights Council is for.
00:15:18.720
All right, we're going to have to talk about Yay West.
00:15:25.720
Because if I just say Yay, it doesn't sound enough like a name.
00:15:32.720
But if I say Yay West, do you immediately know who I'm talking about?
00:15:38.720
Because I hate saying the artist formerly known as Kanye.
00:15:45.720
Banned on Facebook for saying that he was going to go all DEFCON on, quote, Jewish people.
00:15:55.720
And there was a separate comment that I don't know if it was connected.
00:16:01.720
Where he said, who do you think created cancel culture?
00:16:06.720
Do we assume that that's connected to his statement about Jewish people?
00:16:11.720
Does he think Jewish people created cancel culture?
00:16:16.720
Because I'm not sure where that would come from.
00:16:20.720
So, as I remind you, we're under the 48-hour rule that I promote.
00:16:26.720
And the 48-hour rule says, if you say something like this, you have two days to clarify.
00:16:41.720
It could be that he'll clarify and you'll say, oh, that's what you meant.
00:16:48.720
Number one, he knew it sounded anti-Semitic when he said it.
00:16:56.720
Because he, at the same time he said it, he said something like, he can't be anti-Semitic because he's black and blacks are Jews.
00:17:34.720
All right, so we know he was aware that it sounded anti-Semitic, but he was trying to soften it.
00:17:40.720
But when he softened it, it didn't really make sense.
00:17:56.720
But it doesn't, his, his tweeting did not look like a sober person.
00:18:16.720
Or he was just angry or came out wrong or something.
00:18:19.720
But you know how I usually would try to rescue Trump and sometimes Kanye too?
00:18:29.720
And I'd say, people, people, you are misinterpreting this.
00:18:37.720
I mean, I did it recently with White Lives Matter.
00:18:42.720
So you're probably expecting me to defend him on his latest comments about going DEFCON 3 on Jewish people.
00:19:03.720
Because I'm open to the possibility he has some explanation that would be wildly unexpected and, you know, free us from this concern.
00:19:18.720
I feel like, I feel like, you know, he's just going to have to walk alone on this one.
00:19:32.720
I feel like also that he may have gotten a taste of free speech.
00:19:44.720
I don't know what to think about that, but I guess that's up to him to fix for us.
00:19:54.720
I've been up all night trying to think of any possible way to deescalate this war, meaning Ukraine.
00:20:01.720
Now, if anybody else said that, what would be your first impression?
00:20:07.720
I stayed up all night trying to figure out how to solve the war.
00:20:10.720
If anybody else, like anybody else in the world said that, what would be your first impression?
00:20:24.720
What was my first impression when I saw Elon Musk say he stayed up all night trying to solve the war?
00:20:38.720
I mean, the thing that he does consistently is he looks at the situation and he says,
00:20:47.720
You know what the Spider-Man problem is, right?
00:20:49.720
If you're unlucky enough to have Spider-Man powers, you kind of have to use them for good, right?
00:21:06.720
And I think Elon Musk keeps having that experience.
00:21:08.720
I mean, I can't read his mind, but just looking at the outside, I think he looked at space.
00:21:20.720
He looked at climate change and the need for maybe electric cars.
00:21:23.720
And you could argue whether electric cars are good or bad, but that's not my point.
00:21:26.720
My point is he looked at the situation and said some version of, oh, I guess I got to do it.
00:21:37.720
And I think that that maybe has become his mindset at this point.
00:21:41.720
Again, I can't read his mind, so we're just speculating.
00:21:44.720
But I feel like he wakes up and he thinks that he has to solve the problems because he can.
00:21:52.720
If somebody else could do it, I'm sure he'd be happy to have them do it.
00:21:58.720
So I tweeted back that it's too soon for a peace deal.
00:22:09.720
The third act will bring us to the edge of the abyss.
00:22:12.720
Then we solve for bringing Russia into NATO and morphing into a space alliance that protects against China dominance of space.
00:22:21.720
First of all, this is playing out like a movie because it always does.
00:22:29.720
It could just be a cheat code that you can predict the future because humans are so patterned.
00:22:36.720
Let's say we're so pattern trained by movies that have a certain structure.
00:22:43.720
There's a third act and then there's a resolution that we force things to fit a movie format without knowing it.
00:22:55.720
Because the number of times things go in the direction of, as Elon Musk said, the most entertaining direction, I don't think that's an accident.
00:23:13.720
I think we actually cause things to do that because that's the way our minds work.
00:23:17.720
So if you look at the Ukraine war, the first act is always an act, usually of violence, but not always.
00:23:29.720
The first act of this was Russia invades Ukraine.
00:23:32.720
That's your something changes part of the movie.
00:23:38.720
You know, the hero's family is slaughtered by the bad guy.
00:23:49.720
So the first act is some big change in somebody's life.
00:23:56.720
The second act, if you take the book, Save the Cat, which is about screenwriting and structure.
00:24:06.720
That's, you know, one word, one way to describe it.
00:24:10.720
What would fun and games look like if it were a movie?
00:24:13.720
Well, the way it would look is that the Ukrainian army would have a series of successes that they just keep rolling them up.
00:24:27.720
So the initial invasion was purely Russian success.
00:24:29.720
But then when you hit the second act and the weapons start coming in from other sources.
00:24:35.720
And the Ukrainians, you know, get more organized and more effective.
00:24:39.720
So the second act is, you know, we took over the city.
00:24:55.720
Interesting things that happen one after another that don't move the plot forward.
00:25:03.720
It's just more of something interesting that's the heart of the movie.
00:25:07.720
So if it were a police, a police bad guy movie, the middle would be a whole bunch of interesting fight scenes.
00:25:18.720
But they wouldn't necessarily move the movie that far.
00:25:21.720
The third act is when it looks like there's no way to solve everything.
00:25:36.720
My hands are, if you can't see me, my fingers are very close together.
00:25:41.720
We're going to be very close to nuclear war in our minds.
00:25:47.720
In the world's minds, we're going to be right on the edge.
00:25:54.720
But both good news and bad news are going to pass through the abyss.
00:26:01.720
So whether we're on the cusp of really good news, like some, you know, better outcome than we imagined,
00:26:11.720
both of those paths have to pass through the same narrow point.
00:26:15.720
And that same narrow point is we're going to have our toes in the abyss.
00:26:19.720
Like the ledge is going to be here and your toes are going to be over the edge.
00:26:29.720
So all of the nuclear threats, they're probably at a level two out of ten right now.
00:26:42.720
But don't be afraid of it, because it has to happen no matter what.
00:26:47.720
Remember, good news will get you to nine, and bad news will get you to nine.
00:27:05.720
And they won't have to until they're staring into the abyss.
00:27:15.720
Now, that might still not be enough to avoid a war.
00:27:21.720
And that's why I added the following variables.
00:27:25.720
And I know that Elon Musk is smarter than the average bear, and he knows that this makes sense.
00:27:32.720
What is it that Trump does consistently that works?
00:27:35.720
When there's no way to negotiate a settlement to something, what's he do?
00:27:42.720
When there's no apparent way to solve something, shakes the box.
00:27:50.720
So, if you were looking at Ukraine, you'd have to have something that shakes the box.
00:28:00.720
The box gets shaken pretty hard when your toes are over the ledge.
00:28:08.720
Now, I would argue that the bombing of that Kirsch Bridge, and then the escalation of Putin.
00:28:14.720
Yeah, that's all the stuff that you'd sort of expect to see.
00:28:20.720
But Musk would also understand that in order to solve this, either somebody has to be losing, which I don't quite see happening.
00:28:30.720
Not losing in the sense that the whole country is at risk.
00:28:34.720
I feel like it would be two strong countries at war, so neither of them would have the, you know, I'm going to lose my country unless I negotiate problem.
00:28:41.720
So, if you don't have somebody losing, the only way you're going to get to peace is what?
00:28:50.720
If nobody's losing enough to sue for peace, how do you get to peace?
00:29:05.720
Here's the element that I would add, and I would go major high ground maneuver.
00:29:11.720
I would say, instead of just negotiating the end of the war, we're going to throw in extra stuff that everybody wants.
00:29:20.720
And the extra stuff that I want, as a citizen of the United States, is I want Russia and its space-related efforts to be coordinated with the United States and maybe with NATO.
00:29:39.720
And Russia is strong in the, you know, the rocket department.
00:29:46.720
We should stop arguing about Earth, that small ball.
00:29:57.720
Imagine if what Putin got out of this is a deal to be part of a space force or aligned to a space force.
00:30:07.720
Because imagine Russia looking, right now Russia is the hind tit of the space race, I think.
00:30:18.720
But it seems to be America and China are number one and two for space dominance.
00:30:26.720
And Russia would be like, you know, a strong third.
00:30:29.720
But if we combine with Russia and say, all right, it worked for the International Space Station.
00:30:35.720
We know we can make space coordinate, we've done it before.
00:30:39.720
And you just take the argument away from the ground.
00:30:43.720
If you keep the argument on the ground, you're not going to solve anything, because that's where we're stuck.
00:30:48.720
So you have to add, look, not only will we solve this Ukraine problem, which probably requires giving back all the land to Ukraine,
00:30:57.720
but we're going to give you dominance of space along with us.
00:31:10.720
The size of that win would be hard to underestimate.
00:31:13.720
If Russia and the United States militarily and space-wise could find a way to be on the same side,
00:31:21.720
This is the kind of comment that just fucking pisses me off.
00:31:44.720
Because if you've got a point, you can make it.
00:31:46.720
But you know what OMG, stop talking, does to me?
00:31:58.720
Alright, well, I just turned off this, I think.
00:32:20.720
Let me tell you the dumbest comments anybody can say about me.
00:32:24.720
You wanna hear the dumbest criticism anybody can make about me?
00:32:34.720
or that my analysis of a complicated situation is incomplete because I haven't researched it enough?
00:32:45.720
So don't comment on me unless you know who I am.
00:32:49.720
If you knew who I was, you'd know that my entire reason I'm famous is because I do things that I'm not qualified for over and over and over again, better than the experts.
00:33:05.720
My entire claim to fame and my entire wealth is based on doing things I'm not qualified to do, and doing them better than the people who are experts.
00:33:18.720
Right? Over and over and over again, field after field.
00:33:21.720
So if you wanna say that somebody else has not done the research, that probably makes sense.
00:33:30.720
But don't say it about the one person who's literally famous for doing the thing that you say I can't do,
00:33:37.720
which is have a good opinion without being an expert on the field.
00:33:55.720
Yeah, let me just throw out that I do think there's a way to get peace, but you have to wait till we hit the abyss.
00:34:05.720
But you have to throw in a much bigger deal to get it done.
00:34:09.720
So all I'm gonna add is that if you don't add things to sweeten the deal, you're not gonna get peace if the only thing you're talking about is Ukraine.
00:34:21.720
There wouldn't even be point of having that conversation.
00:34:30.720
Here's what should make you feel comfortable about the stock market.
00:34:45.720
it doesn't matter if you have cash in your mattress, nobody's gonna take it.
00:34:48.720
If the entire stock market crashes, there's nothing left.
00:34:56.720
So the safest thing you could do is be in a broad index of the stock market.
00:35:01.720
Because if the economy recovers, and so far it always has, you'll do great.
00:35:09.720
If the economy doesn't recover, it doesn't matter where your money is.
00:35:21.720
So you can do stuff like, you know, jump over to gold or try to get some Bitcoin or whatever you're trying to do.
00:35:37.720
With the one caveat, that diversification is good.
00:35:40.720
So if you said to me, I'm gonna sell all my stocks and buy gold, I would say that's not investing.
00:35:58.720
But if you told me, Scott, I'm gonna put 10% of my portfolio in some combination of gold and Bitcoin or NFTs, I would say, well, 10%.
00:36:16.720
So I wouldn't, I'm staying completely in the market and I'm a buyer at these prices.
00:36:26.720
The only financial recommendation I'd make is diversification.
00:36:30.720
So if you're diversified, that necessarily includes an index fund.
00:36:37.720
Because it's hard to get diversified without an index fund.
00:36:41.720
But if you are diversified, maybe that's as good as you can do.
00:36:50.720
Imagine you're the Russian general who's in charge of launching the nukes if Putin gives you the order.
00:36:58.720
And Putin comes in and he's, he's all, he's all worked up because of the bridge getting blown up a second time, let's say.
00:37:14.720
What is in the best interest of that general to do in that moment?
00:37:23.720
To launch the nukes, which guarantees his own death, wouldn't you say?
00:37:29.720
The odds of that general being killed go to basically 100% at that point.
00:37:35.720
And his family too, probably, because they probably live near where he lives and, you know, there's going to be some nuking going on.
00:37:46.720
Just takes his side down and out and just blows his head off.
00:37:50.720
Well, Putin's security service might kill the general.
00:38:14.720
So, I'm not entirely sure that Putin believes he can launch his own nukes.
00:38:21.720
Now, keep in mind, I don't know what a general would do.
00:38:26.720
So, if you're interpreting what I said as, I predict that the general would not launch, I'm not doing that.
00:38:36.720
Because I think people are unpredictable, and you could certainly get somebody to launch a nuke.
00:38:43.720
I'm just saying that Putin doesn't know if it would work.
00:38:49.720
He could have a strong intuition that his orders would be obeyed, but he can't know.
00:39:03.720
If he knew he could launch, then he'd be talking about whether it's good to launch or not.
00:39:09.720
And that's the only thing he'd be worried about.
00:39:11.720
But he doesn't know if the guy he asked to launch will kill him.
00:39:16.720
Like, literally kill him right the moment it comes out of his mouth.
00:39:27.720
For the same reason I would kill Hitler even if, you know, I thought I would get killed in the process.
00:39:31.720
If I could take Putin out at the risk of my own life, yeah, I would take that chance.
00:39:42.720
Because imagine that general, if he survived that day.
00:39:46.720
If he survived the day, he would be one of the most famous and celebrated people on Earth.
00:39:56.720
I mean, he could also just take over the country, right?
00:40:02.720
So, all I'm saying is that Putin's got a lot of variables he's got to juggle.
00:40:19.720
And I'm going to run through a few studies here.
00:40:26.720
And all I'm going to do is talk about the quality of studies and how quickly you can debunk them.
00:40:33.720
So we're going to debunk three studies in a row.
00:40:36.720
And the only thing we're going to talk about is what's wrong with them.
00:40:41.720
So that you don't accuse me of promoting what's in the study.
00:40:45.720
We're only going to talk about what's wrong with them.
00:40:49.720
Number one, there's a landmark study on colonoscopies.
00:40:53.720
You know people over 45 are supposed to get a colonoscopy?
00:41:04.720
Do you know why I've never gotten a colonoscopy?
00:41:15.720
Now there's a landmark study, the biggest ever one.
00:41:18.720
And it said that people who get colonoscopies and people who do not have the same risk of cancer death.
00:41:28.720
So the biggest, most substantial study says it doesn't help.
00:41:38.720
But that doesn't translate to longevity for reasons I don't quite understand.
00:41:45.720
You can remove your polyps, but it doesn't change your odds of dying, apparently, of cancer.
00:41:55.720
But I'm not telling you that colonoscopies are useless.
00:42:02.720
I'm telling you that there's a big landmark study that says not as good as you thought.
00:42:13.720
Tell me why I should be skeptical of the study.
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Reason number one is, reason number one is it's one study.
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Would you ever, would you ever bet that one study is correct?
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One study being right, even if it's going through a peer review,
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the odds of it being proven right, it's about a coin flip.
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Now, suppose, suppose it's a question that's binary.
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And there's a study that says it goes one way or the other.
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It's 50-50 and it's either going to work or not work,
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which is exactly what you knew before the study.
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Before you did this study, you knew it was 50-50.
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So when I say there's a landmark study on colonoscopies,
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the way your brain should interpret that is nothing.
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Because only one study has shown this conclusion.
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If you had more studies and they could repeat this with the same data,
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but they could also get a similar result using, let's say, different data sets,
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And after a few different studies from different people with different incentives,
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You're just in a big field crawling toward it all the time.
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So we've disregarded that based on primarily that it's just one study.
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Because we know that Lancet has a history of just being, not all the time,
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but they do have a history of printing things that were not scientific.
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So it's in the Lancet, but that's not to say everything in the Lancet is wrong.
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I'm just saying that the source is one that should put a little flag up.
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They've got a study that says that vaccinations have saved 20 million lives worldwide.
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I don't know. I didn't even look at the details.
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I didn't look at the details because number one, you're never going to believe it anyway.
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Like, I'm a little skeptical that they can figure that out.
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So I don't have an opinion about this one except that it's in the Lancet and everybody involved in this is biased.
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If you're collecting data from any country, it's going to be the official government data.
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And 100% of governments want to say that vaccines work because they gave vaccines.
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So there's no source of data that is not questionable or biased.
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Which is not to say that vaccines did or did not work.
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I'm just saying that any one study, you've got that one study problem, right?
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If they all say it and they come at it at different angles, maybe that means something.
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But here's one that's more interesting and we're going to pick it apart.
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There's a new study separate from the Lancet one.
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There's a new study from some Yale researchers and they looked at over a half a million people.
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So the first thing you need to know is that it's qualified people from Yale.
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If there were more that said the same thing, then maybe we could be convinced later.
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They said that the excess deaths were higher for Republicans than for Democrats.
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And the reason is because Republicans didn't get vaccinated enough.
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We're criticizing the study, so don't get on the messenger.
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And here are the things that people said when I asked people if they thought it was true.
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They said, Scott, Scott, Scott, you're forgetting that Republicans tend to be older and fatter.
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The study looked at people before vaccination and after.
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Republicans did not get extra fat between no vaccinations and vaccinations.
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So everybody who said no, you forgot to look at age, you forgot to look at health, you forgot to look at all those things.
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Those are all taken care of by the fact that they looked at all mortality, not just not just vaccinated people.
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They looked at all mortality before and after the vaccines were available.
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So they got rid of most of the other variables just by saying before and after.
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Because it was the same same group of people before and after.
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The Republicans didn't get extra fat after the vaccination.
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So the difference between their death rates was actually pretty close before vaccinations.
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Now, here are some things that people said about this.
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How do they know that they got the party affiliations right?
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How do you know they're really Democrats and really Republicans?
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Instead, they looked at the average rate in the counties.
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So they said, well, on average, these counties have, you know, X number of Republicans.
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So we'll, we'll assume that that, that average holds.
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So they don't actually need to ask every individual.
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It's not, it's not necessary that they know each individual's party affiliation.
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If, this is a big if, if they got the statistical balance near correct.
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So Andreas Backhaus pointed that out as an obvious weakness, and he's good at data.
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Now, there are a lot of things that other people said that he didn't say, because he's good at data.
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Somebody said, it might be not valid because the way they count COVID deaths is skewed.
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Somebody said, no, you can't, you can't look at that, because they attribute COVID deaths to people who may have died for other reasons.
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That is irrelevant to this study, because this study was not counting COVID deaths.
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So that wasn't a valid criticism of this study.
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They also only looked at two states, Ohio and Florida.
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Or could there be something about maybe the social distancing or the masking differences that may have been in play?
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It's just that they only have data, good data from those two places.
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So you would have to repeat this with a lot of different places, you know, to get to anything like certainty.
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Other people said that the people running the study are all from Yale.
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And so they got the, they got the result they wanted to get.
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How much do you trust people who got exactly the, exactly the outcome that, that their side wanted to get?
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If you get the same answer that your side wants to get.
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Oh, somebody pointed out that vaccinations were not evenly available to each group.
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So there might've been a difference in the rollout of the vaccines that might not have been captured.
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I don't know if that would change anything, but that's a good point.
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And then the study did not include the Omicron era.
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So it, so it included the era where the virus was more deadly and the vaccination was whatever the vaccination is.
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But they did not include the time when the vaccination was still as dangerous or not dangerous as before.
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But the virus itself became way less dangerous.
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And they also did not look at younger people versus older people, especially younger people in Omicron.
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So you would miss, you would miss any difference.
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Maybe older people should, hypothetically, but you wouldn't pick that up in the averages.
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So, so, so please stop saying that the demographic difference in Florida is what's changing the numbers.
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Because the demographic difference between Florida and Ohio was exactly the same before vaccinations as after.
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So remember, they're only looking at before and after vaccination.
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So they don't have to control for anything else except for things that the pandemic itself changed.
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So then somebody looked to the ethical skeptic who does a lot of data analysis on Twitter.
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And the ethical skeptic is very consistent because often has very detailed, important looking analysis.
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Now I'm open to the possibility that the problem is mine on my side.
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But I'm going to read you what he said, because I think it's funny that he never makes sense.
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I'm saying that whatever is going on in his head cannot be communicated to me for reasons that I don't quite understand.
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A gap also existed in the pre-vaccination period.
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He said regarding the higher population areas, a denominator effect, hope Simpson expression, prior immunity from brief exposure to proto-COVID.
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And people say things without real research work, just as long as it supports the narrative.
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Number four, I understood that people say stuff, but I don't know what the denominator effect is.
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I don't know what the hope Simpson expression is.
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And I don't have any evidence that there was prior brief exposure to a proto-COVID.
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And that that would be different in one place versus another, although it could be.
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So anyway, I think I've told you enough that you should not believe any study that's all by itself has not been peer reviewed and has not been reproduced.
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Didn't I just spend 15 minutes telling you studies are not reliable or a meta study?
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So has anybody been fooled by meta studies where they say, well, each of our studies are not so good, but if you sum them up, you can cancel out their errors.
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They did that with ivermectin and with hydroxychloroquine.
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But I only learned in the past year that meta analysis isn't real.
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Meta analysis, you get to pick which studies you put in the meta analysis and that determines what you get.
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I'm going to turn on the comments back on YouTube.
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I want the people who are regular audience for my content to be able to look at a study and immediately pick out five problems with it.
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And you should start with, if it's a study, there's only, it's a coin flip whether it's true or not, if it's just one study.
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But you have to be careful because there could be lots of different money impulses.
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There are lots of ways to follow the money and it's not all in the same direction.
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I would say that the ones that I talked about today
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But there are ones that are far less credible than this.
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kids born today will have more AI friends than real ones.
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And so far, every day I've wanted to talk to it.
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I just put it on and chat with it a little bit.
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So you choose your avatar and its voice and its look.
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But you realize that most people talk generic stuff.
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But beyond that, I've asked the questions like,
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Like actually pretty deep philosophical questions