Episode 1495 Scott Adams: WARNING: This Live Stream Will Change Your Opinion About Vaccination Risk

Everybody, it's time for the best. Oh, not this time. Sorry. Don't I always tell you that this is the best part of your day? But not today. Not for all of you. For some of you, I'm going to blow the top off your head. For many of you, you're going to get really pissed off if you watch this. And some of you might die. Let me say that again in case you thought that was a joke. Watching this live stream could kill you, literally. Because I'm going to say some things today that I do not intend because it would be unethical in my opinion. I do not intend to change your mind about any medical decisions. But the content will do that. It's not my intention. It's just. I'm going to give you some truth about something that maybe you hadn't thought about, and it will have the effect of changing some of your minds. Don't watch this if you don't want a cartoonist to accidentally change your medical decisions. This warning is 100% real, all right? It's not reverse psychology. It's not a marketing trick. I'm not trying to get you to watch it because it's naughty or it's provocative. It actually could fucking kill you. All right? Do you hear that? Just hear that as clearly as you can. Watching this live stream could fucking kill you. Now, I feel like I've done my ethical duty. None of this is a joke. None of this is a joke. Could fucking kill you. I'm not trying to. That's certainly not my intention. But we're just going to try to talk about some truth and see what happens, all right? So bail out now if you don't want to be any part of the vaccination persuasion, even accidentally, and I know a lot of you don't like that topic, and I would invite you to come back tomorrow and I'll talk less about it. But before that, all you need to enjoy this to the maximum extent is a copper mug or glass. A tanker jealous of sinicantine jug or flask, A vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine day of the day. The thing that makes everything better. It's called the simultaneous sip. It makes everything better except the coronavirus. Go. All right, now, I'm going to be easing into the topic, all right? You'll know it when it happens. And I'm going to repeat the warning because people are joining and missed the original warning. But I'LL repeat the warning in a little bit. But first, did you know that today Akira the Dawn's album dropped featuring my vocals? And if that sounds weird, it's not. Turns out it's a new genre genre of music in which Akira the Dawn takes samples from podcasts and uses that as the lyrical part and then he adds the musical stuff in the back. And you would be amazed how well that works because the, the podcast tend to be content that has some meaning because he chooses it for that purpose. And it's not just mine. I think Jordan Peterson's on there some other people. And take. Check that out. You will be surprised, right? You will be surprised. It's. It's worth checking out only because, well, even if you didn't care musically, check it out because it's a new genre and it's worth looking at just for that alone. Well, Larry Elder got hit by an egg by a woman in a gorilla mask when he was campaigning for the governorship California. And as every smart person is asking today, would this be covered by the news exactly the same. If he were a Democrat, wouldn't all the news be, you know, it's a big racist thing. It's a gorilla mask, he's black, throws an egg at him, somebody saying in the comments that the egg missed. Well, if the egg missed, I guess the yolk is not on him. All right. Yeah. You know, this is one of those hypocrisy things that there's not much, there's not much depth to the, to the comment. It's just every time you see an example where the news is clearly just propaganda because the way they treat these things is so different left and right that you just can't even take it seriously in any, in any possible way. All right, here's a fake news alert. Fake news alert. Fake news alert. This comes to me via Twitter and Adam Dopamine. Adam points out that the breathless reporting on Florida's Covid surge seamlessly shifted to stories about Mississippi and Louisiana. Hmm. Why is it that all that talk about Florida, sorta just sort of softly, while you weren't looking, sort of just started talking about two other states because the surge collapsed. That's why the surge collapsed. So whatever Florida is doing, you know, they had, I guess, three surges that are pretty bad, but at the moment it's going pretty well. So watch your fake news. Try to, try to miss, you know, change your direction. So a little case of misdirection. Hey, look at this hand. Look at this hand. Forget about this one look at this one. Look at this one. All right, University of California professor is suing the school system because he says he has natural immunity against Covid, but they're going to require him to get the vaccination anyway. Now how do you lose that argument? Let's say you're smart enough to be a professor at Berkeley, right? So it's a top university. If you're a professor at a top university and your argument is pretty ironclad, which is that if you have natural immunity, you, you're better off than people who have two shots. Now how does he lose that argument? I mean, maybe. Seriously, how do you lose? Feels like that's the most slam dunk argument anybody ever had. Now, maybe it has something to do with. You can't verify easily whether somebody has antibodies. I could see, maybe they'd require you to have an antibody test. Maybe that's not practical because how do you really know somebody had Covid? They could just say they had it and not get the vaccination. So there might be some practical reasons, but this guy's going to lose his job for not being protected against Covid when he is more protected than just about everybody on campus. How does he lose this? I mean, he might. He might. That's the scary thing, right? He might actually lose this. I don't know how you could lose it, but he might. Chris Cilliza over at cnn, he's an opinion guy and he wrote this sentence on an opinion piece. It was kind of shocking to see it. He said, for the last two weeks or so, I have been carrying around an anger and bordering on rage regarding the chunk of Americans eligible to receive the vaccine who continue to refuse it. Have you seen that? I don't think I've run into anybody who would admit to having rage about unvaccinated people. Are you seeing that in your personal bubbles? Because I think, you know, my audience doesn't really have much crossover with cnn, I don't think, but I haven't seen anything like that and I'm pretty sensitive to hate. You know, you can spot it pretty easily. I haven't really seen it, but I'm going to guess there's some of it out there because I doubt Chris Soliza is the one angry person about this topic. Somebody says, I haven't seen it in real life. But you've seen it on social media. Yeah. Social media became the place where the outrage goes to, goes to thrive. Right. All right, so there's that. Let's talk about Biden's six pronged plan. I'm not going to get into the details. You probably looked at it already. But one of the clever things is he's using OSHA to push his mandatory vaccinations for. For at least people in the government, government workers, and he's encouraging private companies to have mandates as well. But OSHA is kind of a clever way to do it. Would I be complaining if Trump had found this clever workaround to get something done? Let's say it was something else, you know, not the vaccinations, because that just becomes political as soon as you hear it. But if I had heard that Trump used this clever workaround and I thought it was good for the country, I don't know if I'd complain. I probably wouldn't. I'd probably say, well, yeah, he did what he had to do, cut through some red tape, used to work around it was good for the country. So I don't think the question about whether OSHA has or has not authority just personally doesn't bother me that much. I know it should. And I get the argument that if you become a dictator and you just start making up laws and finding some rationalization for them instead of using the system, everything could go to hell. But I don't have the same rules during a pandemic. If it's a pandemic, I give my government a little extra power because I want them to have it. If this is one of their little extra powers that they took for themselves, I say that's within the scope of things I'm going to call acceptable during a pandemic. Anything that lasts beyond the pandemic we've got to talk about. And if any of this happened outside the context of the pandemic, I'd be completely opposed to it. But you throw in the crisis part and you could argue whether we're still in a crisis or not. I think that that's a fair argument at this point. But anyway, I'm just telling you it doesn't bother me, but I do see the red flags. So if you're telling me, Scott, Scott, Scott, you're not seeing the gigantic red flag here of the precedent is set. I do see it, but I just don't think that crisis examples are going to be as sticky as maybe you think. But I see the risk. All right, let's. I have to give you my warning once again. I said it in the title. If you don't want to be convinced to get vaccinated, turn this off right now. And I mean it. And it's not reverse psychology. It's not a trick. If you don't want to be accidentally convinced to get vaccinated because that might happen, I'm not going to do it intentionally because it's unethical for me to do that. With my blessing. Those of you who don't want to be part of this, please, please sign off and come back tomorrow. Come back tomorrow. But for those of you who stay, I'm going to blow your head right off. For some of you. Okay, now let me start with this. If I ask you this question, most of you are reasonable people, and I know that you made your decisions about vaccinations or not based on reason and risk and you thought it through, would you agree that all of you, no matter which decision you came by, would you agree with the statement that you thought it through in the comments? Can you please confirm that you thought it through? Right. No matter what it was, you decided you thought it through. And some of you came to different answers. Now, second question. Second question. If I were to alter and you accepted it, one of your biggest assumptions, could it change your opinion? Now, I haven't told you what the assumption is yet, right? So. So you can hold on that. But if I were to change your most important assumption, could it change your opinion? Just yes or no. If I change your assumptions and you agree with that change, you go, oh, yeah, I hadn't thought of it that way. If I could do that, just, just one assumption. I'm not going to give you any new data. No data will be presented. I'm just going to change one assumption. And if that big assumption was central to your decision, could you change your mind? Do you know what I'm doing to you right now? I just primed you, so I made you commit to a change in assumption would change your opinion. If I had not done that, it probably wouldn't because confirmation bias would kick in. And even if I successfully changed your assumption, you would just move to a different argument. It wouldn't change your outcome because people don't really change their minds based on new information. But I just primed you. And if you said, yes, Scott, if you change my most basic assumption, I could. I'm not guaranteeing it, but that would be a condition which could change my decision. Now that you're primed, let's talk about some things and I'm gonna. I'm gonna ease you into it, okay? Now remember, if you're just joining us late, if you don't want to be talked into getting vaccinated, Sign off now because it might happen, right? Seriously, sign off. If you don't want to be talked into it. It would be unethical for me to talk you into it without adding any new information. But I think I will add a new understanding in a minute. We'll get to it. Okay, I'm going to get to it. There are a number of vaccinations that are already required. As most of you know, if you're a kid in the United States and you want to go to school, the things you have to get would be included. By seventh grade, you got to get tetanus, diphtheria, pertussis booster. You got to get your vardicella, that's the chickenpox to get in kindergarten. You're required to have polio, diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis. Your first doses, measles, mumps and rubella. The mmr, hepatitis B vaccination, and chickenpox, of course. So those are all the ones that you're required to get. Now, how many of you. And the requirements vary by state, so there's a big difference in how they're mandated. So I'm not making any argument about them being similar in mandate. So you got that? It has nothing to do with the government mandate. I'm just saying that they are mandated in most states to go to school. Now, apparently there are a number of people who find workarounds that they don't have to get vaccinated. I heard there are 800,000 unvaccinated people in the country who don't even have these vaccinations. So I guess you can get around it. But that's the situation. Now, here's your assumption. Speaking now to the people who have decided not to get vaccinated is one of your assumptions that these other vaccinations. And by the way, if you're anti vax in general, this has nothing to do with you. If you're anti vax for all vaccinations. I'm not even talking to you. Nothing I say will be relevant to you. If you've said no vaccinations, have a nice day. You don't want to watch the rest of this. There's no point in it if you thought the childhood vaccinations are okay because they've been around so long that the side effects are well understood and the COVID vaccinations are newer. So let's say your biggest reason for not getting vaccinated is that the traditional vaccinations have been around long Enough that we would see all of the side effects and we'd have a really good understanding of the long term risks. Because how could you possibly know the long term risks of a vaccination that just came out this year? It's not possible. Right, so you've got the vaccination that comes out this year with completely unknown long term risks. Would you agree? How many would agree with me? The statement that the COVID vaccinations have unknown long term risk. Everybody agree? We couldn't possibly know it. You can't know the future right now. How many would agree with the next statement that we do know the long term risks of the childhood vaccinations? Agree or disagree? We do know the long term risks of the childhood vaccinations. Go. Agree, disagree. Why would you disagree with that? Not really. Not really. They've been around for decades. What do you mean? Somebody says yes, yes. So I'm seeing your answer. Sure. We know the risk. Now. Clearly we would recognize if any of these long term kid vaccinations, if they were giving long term problems, you'd know about it by now. Right, because you look at the database of all the long term problems. What's the name of that database? I'm forgetting, what's the name of the database where they collect all of the long term problems? Not the VAers, because the VAers is more of a short term problem. But what's the name of the database where they collect the problem, say 10 years after the vaccination? What's that called? No, not VAERS. VAERS would be closer to the time you got the vaccination. But let me give you an example. I guess I'm being unclear. When I was 49 years old, I got an exotic voice problem called spasmodic dysphonia. Was my spasmodic dysphonia entered into a database such that people could look at it and say, here's somebody who got the polio vaccination when he was 6 years old or whenever it was and now he got spasmodic dysphonia at age 49. Is that in the database? It's got to be in the database. It's in the database because how in the world could you know that? My spasmodic dysphonia is completely unrelated to the vaccinations I got as a kid. How would you know that without a database? There's no data right now. Which database, which database do they use to test the combinations of childhood vaccinations? Because we know that they test each Vaccination? Extensively. Right. I mean, we all know that they do extensive testing on vaccinations, but which database is it where they do they look at not only the one vaccination, but the combination where they test? What if we give you three different vaccinations that are all required, but we give them about the same time and you're six years old or whatever age. Which database is that in? None. Right. It's not in any database. So your biggest assumption is that we know the risks of those other vaccinations. We don't. And let me tell you what expertise I'm bringing to this conversation. Medical? Nope. Scientific expertise? Nope. Am I bringing my virologist credentials? Nope. I'm the creator of the Dilbert comic strip. If you can find a better expert to predict the likeliness, the likelihood that big corporations are gathering data 40 years after they needed to. Seriously, seriously. Do you think that these big companies are really tracking this data long term? Come on, all of you. All of you people who said I don't want to get the new vaccination because it's not as known as the existing ones. You think you know the risk of the existing ones, do you? No, you don't. Because nobody tracks it. You're pretty sure somebody was tracking that, weren't you? Try to Google it. See if you can find any data that tells you 20 years after you got the, I don't know, chickenpox vaccination. You show me the Data that says 20 years after that, that you can tell what's happened. Here's another problem. Here's another problem. What happens if almost everybody gets the same vaccination? How do you know what trouble the vaccination caused? Because everybody's vaccinated. Almost everybody. Right. You can't tell. Let's take an example. And by the way, this is not. This will just be an example for conversation. I'm not making this allegation. We know, for example, that the average rate, the average levels of testosterone in men has been falling for decades. Right. Has anybody studied whether the lower testosterone that seems to be all through the population could be caused by vaccinations? I don't think that's the cause. Let me be very clear. I don't think that's the cause. But did anybody study it? How about obesity? We've got a crazy obesity problem. Do we know exactly why? Because I've heard different opinions. It's everything from fast food to too much air conditioning to too many video games to whatever. But has anybody studied our weight loss or weight gain and whether you got vaccinated? No. Now, do I think that vaccinations cause weight gain later in life? No, I do not. I have no reason to think that. But did anybody study it? How about my spasmodic dysphonia? Probably 30,000 people got it since I've gotten it. How many of them were asked about their childhood vaccinations? And if they were asked, they would all have the same experience. So you wouldn't know. You would just say, oh, everybody got vaccinated and some subset of them got this problem. Let me tell you what I know with complete certainty. Nobody is studying the long term safety of existing vaccinations. Nobody. So if you made your decision about this vaccination based on the fact that the other ones have been studied for a long time and this one hasn't, you need to check that assumption because it's your main assumption and it's baseless. It's baseless. Now I heard somebody say, but Scott, the new vaccines, at least two of them, are a different platform, different technology, and we have much more experience with the older kinds of vaccinations. And the new one just introduces this new kind of risk, does it? How do you know that? How do you know it isn't safer? It seems to me that the experts are quite unified on the question of if there are going to be side effects. They happen quickly. In other words, if you've watched people for a year, you pretty well have a good, a good idea. But what happens after a year? Right. So we've watched all the vaccines for a year or so, but have you watched them longer? I doubt it. And if you did, did you do it? Right. I mean, even if somebody did study it, would you trust the study? And we know that half the studies are bullshit, somebody saying that the MRNA vaccines are safer. Now, if you happen to be an expert in the field, I could imagine that you would say to yourself, well, the nature of the way we're using this should be safer because we have a pretty good idea what this vaccine grabs onto. And it's not grabbing onto things that look dangerous. But if you could tell just by looking at it that it's not dangerous, you wouldn't need to test it. You don't know MRNA is safer or less safe. It can't be known. Right? You don't know about looking at it. I mean, you don't just look at it logically and say, well, logically this should be safe. You still have to test it because your logic can't get you safe enough. Now let me do a little check on you here. How many people until this moment believe that we did have pretty good information about the long term effects of other vaccinations? How many of you just had an oh shit moment and said oh shit? My main variable is completely just a guess. I'm seeing no's and yeses. I see one. Oh shit, not me. Nope, me. Don't be a crab. Get the jab. Charles says, somebody says, but this was immaterial to my decision. Yeah, if for some of you that wasn't part of the decision. So this wouldn't make any difference to you. All right, let me, let me ask you one final question. Is there anybody here who was anti vax at the beginning of this, or at least anti COVID vaccine at the beginning of this live stream, who, when they realized that they couldn't know the difference between any of the vaccinations with long term anything? How many of you are reconsidering your decision not to get vaccinated based on just this? I'm going to watch comments go by for a moment because I want to see. Now, most of you should not be. That would, you know, 90% should. Should dig in. Yes, I am. I'm considering, let's say, See, just looking at your Rephrase. Please rephrase the question. The question is how many of you are unvaxed and now reconsidering that because one of your biggest variables just fell apart. All right. A sad realization. Yes. Okay. So I am seeing yeses go by now. Remember my warning. My warning was don't get your medical, your medical decisions from cartoonists. Right. And I would encourage any of you to unfollow me or stop following if you didn't like this. Because this is pretty much the kind of content that I have. So yeah, don't follow me if you don't like this. And I'll say again that if you find out my assumption is wrong and there is some kind of magic database, I don't think so. But if there is, then reconsider. All right. Now when we're talking about vaccine persuasion, You convinced me to be more skeptical. All right, that's it for today. I just wanted to see if I would change any minds. It looks like some of you did change your minds. Generally, persuasion does not change everybody right away. A really, really strong persuasion would get 5% of the audience. That would be remarkable. If you could swing 5% of an audience with persuasion, you'd be the best persuader of all time. All right, Well, I'm looking at your comments, and I see them now. Anecdotal evidence of existing vaccines being safe isn't a thing. There's no way you could capture problems just by looking at people and saying, oh, this guy's got a headache and he got vaccinated. And this other guy doesn't have a headache. Oh, but he got vaccinated, too. So you really couldn't tell. All right, that's all for now. I'll talk to you tomorrow.