Episode 1584 Scott Adams: On the Plus Side, China is Finally Uniting Americans. And More News

Well, good morning everybody. What a great day. Yeah. You don't know it yet, but it's, it's just getting better all the time. How about we take it up a notch? Anybody? Anybody want to take it up a notch? Of course, of course. What does that take? Well, I think you know. I think you know. All you need is a cup of mugger, glass of tanker chalicente, a canteen jug of flask, a vessel of any kind, Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. Join me now for the unparalleled pleasure that dopamine. The day the thing makes everything better. It's called the simultaneous sip. And things are going pretty well right now. So this will make it better. Go. Yeah. Any kind. That's right, Nick. Any kind. Well, how many of you have watched the Beatles special? I think it's only on Disney. Plus it's called Get Back. Oh my God. It's good. Now I'm a super Beatles fan. Not only their music, but their process. And so I've been watching this thing, I'm two thirds done. I've been watching this special and learning how the Beatles operated in terms of systems versus goals. Oh my God, I'm learning a lot. And I'm compiling it and I'll share it with you what I'm learning when I'm done. But watching how they, they run things like a system as opposed to having a specific goal. I mean, you know, obviously they have goals on deadlines and stuff, but the systems that they employed completely explain their success. You know, they're talented, of course, but the systems really just describe what makes them so great. Anyway, I'll share that more with more about that when I finish it. So I asked this question, why is the gas price where I live in California approaching $6 a gallon? I saw $5.85 in California, not in my town, but somebody sent me a picture from Southern California. In my town we're over $5, well over $5 now. And it's, it's approaching $6 a gallon for the, the high end gas in Southern California. So I asked why is that when it's cheaper in other states? Because I couldn't understand why market forces were not working. And I have to confess, I don't pay too much attention to local, state, anything. So it didn't take long for people to answer my question. Yeah, somebody saying it's $2.99 in Texas, half the price. And the answer is a combination of two things. Number one, we don't have that many sources of gas because we don't have pipelines, so we don't have oil pipelines. So we have to get it maybe from limited sources, because the gas line, I think, would get more competition. But the other is that apparently we, California, can only buy California special gas, which I just learned today. Apparently our gas has to be refined in some special way to make it greener, I assume. So we don't have market competition the way other places do. So that probably explains it. So it's been a few days now since that alleged racist group called the Patriot Front staged their protest at the Capitol. Now, almost everybody that tweeted about it that I saw said, that's obviously fake. People said, that looks like a bunch of FBI guys pretending to be a racist group. I'm not even sure if they're a racist group or what they are. They don't call themselves conservatives. So maybe that's part of the reason we're not hearing much about them. They don't fit the narrative. But why is it that both the right and the left news ignored this? Do you know why? Because that's still a mystery. Right? It certainly makes sense that, you know, maybe Fox News would cover it and then, you know, be done with it, because it's not really good for, you know, their side of the narrative. But why did. Why did CNN and MSNBC just drop it? Why do you think? Is it because it was too obviously fake? Because look how we've changed. Let me give you a thought experiment. If the Charlottesville march happened today, would you think it was real? Would you? In the comments, I want to see your actual answers to that. If the Charlottesville march happened today, is your first instinct that it was real or fake? Your first instinct would be that it was fake, right? If it happened today. But that's kind of what we learned. And I'm not making a comment about Charlottesville. I do think there was something terribly fake about it, but it actually happened. And I'm sure that there were members there who were just as racist as they looked. But there's something about it that we don't know yet. Right? Because I still say the lack of follow up with all those people who had no masks on. Remember, they didn't have masks. They were widely filmed and didn't have masks, and yet it still kind of died. I think there was like some minor follow up of a few members who may have had some subsequent problems or something. But why is it that the January 6th crowd is all being hunted down and their identities found, but the Charlottesville crowd, we have the same tools, plus photos of all of their faces and nobody's sort of looking into it. There was something about that Charlottesville march that definitely was racist. You know, I'm not saying it didn't happen or that somehow it was completely misidentified, but there was just something about it. There was a little extra, don't you think? A little extra as in who was backing them? Who encouraged it monetarily, anyway. And so now we fast forward to this week and this Patriot front does this march, which would have scared the bejesus out of us in normal times, but I think everybody on the right anyway looked at it and said, well, that doesn't look real. But why did the left think that? That's a mystery, isn't it? Why did the left not try to make a daily story out of this? Because it would have been so, I think, so perfectly fitting their narrative. A bunch of white people looking scary. There's something going on here, isn't there? Something very unexplained about this. Don't know what it is. Well, maybe the news on CNN will get less fake and also on msnbc. Here's why I say that. So Chris Cuomo, as you know, famously has been released for a number of scandals, a number of. A variety of scandals. Who knows how many of them are true? In today's world, it's hard to know what's true. But we do know he helped his brother. And if that was enough, well, I guess that would be enough. But he's being replaced, at least temporarily, by smirkanish Michael Smurkanish. Now if you watch my live streams, you know that I've called out Michael Smurakanisch as being not, not like the rest of the CNN hosts. He's not the crazy conspiracy guy who's taking every bit of information and twisting it to be bad for the right. He's way more down the middle and way more down the middle than Cuomo was or is. So I wonder if this will signal a change. Now he's temporary, so he may not be the permanent replacement for that time slot. But if he were, that would signal in my mind, maybe some intention on CNN's side to be a little more evenhanded. But does that get good ratings? If they put somebody in that time slot who is even handed or even more even handed, would that do well for ratings? I doubt it. Because people don't watch CNN for even handed treatment, do they? Or Fox for that matter? I mean people, people watch the news source that agrees with them. I don't know that they could make a business model out of being fair minded, but maybe they'll try. Likewise, Rachel Maddow is out of a job. Well, I mean she's moving on by her own accord and by her own preference. But that means her job is up for grabs. Who would be more, let's say, provocative than Rachel Maddow? At least in terms of attacking the right. It'd be hard to find somebody who is both as effective. You know, people want to watch that person, but also that, you know, biased. So maybe they can find a person who's like that. But maybe things are getting better just sort of on their own. Keith Olbermann that's funny. Now this is of course the most optimistic take they could. You know, both these, both these jobs will probably be replaced. You know, the spots will be filled by people who are just as provocative in their own way. But I'll be optimistic until something changes. So I tweeted this today as sort of a thought experiment. Imagine a journalist, you know, high end journalist, somebody who would be published in any of the, you know, know, big news publications. Imagine if a journalist wrote a great investigative piece that outlined all the major hoaxes that have been in the media left and right. You know, don't, don't focus on one side and just did a real good job of showing the hoax and how it was perpetrated and what people believed and what was true. It could be the greatest investigative piece really making the last five years make sense for the first time. You know what would happen. It would get buried, wouldn't it? I don't think you could publish it or at least you couldn't publish it with much success because who's going to talk about it? Is CNN going to have you on to talk about all the hoaxes that they perpetuated? They can't. No news entity would be able to run the story about somebody who did an excellent investigative piece and found all the hoaxes. So we've developed a system that can't police itself. Great, great. A non self correcting system. One of the great things about capitalism and about, about democracy is that in many cases they're self correcting. If there's an imperfection, the system will get rid of it over time. Not as fast as you want, but over time. But how do you get rid of the fact that a journalist could not write an honest investigative piece? That's a pretty big, pretty big deal, isn't it? Well, I'd say that's trouble. So Dean Obadiah Obadiah, who you may recognize his name because he writes a lot of opinion pieces for cnn. But typically he had been focusing on anti Trump hit pieces. But when Trump's less in the news, he's got to go after other Republicans. He decided to go after Thomas Massie, who had a family, a hubris, I'm going to call it, that's my interpretation. Humorous, but also making a point, a serious point. Christmas card of the family. And they're all here holding, you know, pretty serious weapons. Legal, legal weapons, but pretty serious looking ones. And, you know, they're all smiling, holding their weapons. And the caption was something about hoping Santa brought ammo. Now, this is, this is what Dean Obadiah, how he characterizes this, because he's shocked and shocked and deeply concerned about this horrible, horrible situation here. And he wrote this quote to Massie, it seems this is all fun and games. Is that vile? Yes. Surprising? Unfortunately, no. Massie is displaying a combination of cruelty, heartlessness and extremism that has come to define today's gop. Really? Is that what you saw when you saw the Christmas card of his smiling family with their totally legal Second Amendment firearms? You saw that, you said, well, there's some cruelty and heartlessness and extremism going on there. Was that your interpretation or did you just say to yourself, thomas Massey knows how to make a point? That's all I thought it's like, oh, he's pretty good at making a point. Well, if that's who they're going after, they're running out of targets. Speaking of running out of targets, I heard on some news program yesterday that at least some smart people are thinking that Pete Buttigieg is the most likely person to run against whoever the Republicans run, you know, presumably Trump, but maybe not. What chance would Pete Buttigieg have in a national election? Can I point out that he's white and male? Now, I know what you're gonna say, but he's gay. But he's gay. How's that gonna help him with the black vote? How's that gonna help him really, with anything? Do you know what? The whole country is over Gayness, gayness. Is there anybody. Let's see in the comments. Is there anybody here who would make a voting decision based on somebody's gayness or lack of gayness? Is there anybody? Maybe you would. Oh, I'm seeing some yeses, but you have to talk for yourself. Don't talk about other people. You have to say, would you personally vote against him for being gay? All right, I'm seeing some yeses. I'm actually seeing some yeses, mostly no's, but I imagine the yeses have more to do with some role model y sort of thing. Is that what you're thinking? I can't, I can't imagine that being gay would be an advantage because I think we're over it. Right. You know, you'll always have your lingering people who feel it's I don't ruin their children or something. So I don't see how it could be a positive because I just don't think enough people will vote for it who would not have been voting Democrat tickets, straight ticket anyway. I mean, isn't the gay population 90% democrat? They're just going to vote that way anyway. But if you throw a, a white gay guy into the election, does he win the black vote? I mean, probably by a majority, but it's not going to be enough. I mean, that seems like the worst thing he could do. So he's not going to be bringing in the women, he's not going to be bringing in the black vote. How do you run as a Democrat if you can't win the black vote and the woman vote or at least be the strongest person for those two votes? I don't know. I don't see him competitive at all. And he's the number one choice. And by the way, I like him. You know, a lot of people give me a hard time, but I think he's too political in the sense that he might depart common sense to do what's right for Democrats, I guess. But he's definitely smart enough. Can you at least give me that? Can you at least. Let's see if you can do this in the comments because I know most of you are lean rights or anti Pete Buttigieg, but in the comments, can you at least give me this, that he is a high intelligence person? Harvard. I want to see if anybody disagrees with that. Okay, okay. Most of you are going to give me that. And I would say that's true for most of our presidents. We don't really, we don't really elect dumb presidents. Okay, all right. So people at least giving him intelligence. I think that's fair. We should give them that. Meanwhile, another development that makes me very happy. Jake Tapper apparently went very hard at China the Country in his closing of the State of the Union. I guess it is the thing he does on the weekends. And let me compliment Jake Tapper here. All right, so he and I have disagreed on a number of topics. So you may know My history about that. But here is somebody, I believe he has Jewish background, right? Jake Tapper. Is he Jewish? Does he identify that way? I don't know who identifies as what anymore. But I've been saying that anybody who takes the phrase never again seriously, they can't be okay with China and what's happening with the Uyghurs. Now, although the Uyghurs are obviously not Jewish, it's kind of similar. I mean, at least should raise some flags. And so Jake Tapper remains consistent and that has to be pointed out. He is consistently. Obviously wouldn't want the Holocaust to happen again, but here it is happening in China in some form and he is pressing them hard on it, went really hard at it. So good for him. And what's weird is it looks like China is the thing that will unite America. Isn't that weird? China will unite America? Because I couldn't agree more with Chuck Schumer. He's pretty tough on China. Couldn't agree more with Jake Tapper going tough on China. So you're going to find that this crosses the aisle like nothing else does. So good on Jake Tapper for that. And he's also putting some pressure on the International Olympics Committee. I mean, that's going pretty far, right? And I'm going to put a little more pressure on them in a little bit. But I'd like to point out that World War three has already begun. For all practical purposes, China is already attacking us every day in a digital sense, in a hacking sense. They're attacking us every day in a persuasion sense. We know that. And they're even hacking our satellites every day or trying to. Or trying to jam them, trying to damage them. And of course, as we go into space, once that territory is up for grabs, then it's a territory fight. So World War 3 is on. Looks like it will continue into space. I don't think anything could stop it from happening. And at least Jake Tapper is sounding the alarm just as he should. Here's a anecdotal story. I want to see if you have any of your own. How many of you know somebody who's, let's say a CEO or in charge of manufacturing and is manufacturing in China. So this is for. I'm going to ask you for a comment in a minute to see if you can match this comment that I heard, but I heard that of a specific CEO who does have manufacturing in China. And the quote is he was, quote, desperate to get manufacturing out of China, to get his own company out of China. Desperate Desperate to get out of China. That's an interesting word, isn't it? How many of you know a CEO who is also desperate to get out of China with their, with their manufacturing? Anybody? What's preventing him? It's just practicality. You've got to spin up a new factory, you've got to figure out how to make it work. He probably has long term leases or long term agreements, I don't know. So you see some disagreements. So I don't see anybody agreeing with that. So maybe this is an exception. So most of you know CEOs who are compromised. Tim Cook? No. Oh, here we go. I work for a manufacturer and we've moved most of our manufacturing out of China into India and Thailand, but probably not recently. Right. But Tim Cook is. He's not. How hard is he going at this to get out of China? I don't know that he's going that hard. Anyway, let's talk about the. Joe Biden's administration is thinking about having a diplomatic boycott of the Winter Olympics that will be in Beijing. Now, a diplomatic boycott would still allow the athletes to compete. Still allow the athletes to compete. Is that enough? Because I'm imagining this conversation someday in the future, if we imagine that our athletes, American athletes, compete and they usually do pretty well, so they probably win some medals. Here's a conversation that will happen someday in the future. So where'd you win your gold medal? Can we change the subject? Imagine if you won a gold medal in Hitler's Germany because somebody did, right? Somebody won some gold medals in Hitler's Germany. When they talk about it, do they say, yeah, I got one of those Hitler gold medals, or do they just say, yeah, I did well in the Olympics. Let's move on. Move on. Next topic. Yeah, yeah, I got some medals. Next topic. Next topic. Yeah. Jesse Owens, of course. So it's going to be a little embarrassing to get your gold medal in China, but people probably going to go anyway. I saw some pushback saying it was terribly, terribly unfair to ask the athletes to suffer who had, you know, prepared their entire life for Olympics and it wasn't their fault that it's in China. Right. Nobody asks them, so why should they suffer for some political point to which I say, who said life is fair? Was that in the Constitution? Life needs to be fair. If somebody makes a terrible life choice and it doesn't work out, what do I owe them? Some reparations? Because I saw the suggestion that maybe they should be compensated if they don't get to compete. No, if you Make a bad life choice and it doesn't work out. I don't owe you money because I didn't make a bad life choice. Do you know what would have been a good life choice? Preparing for a variety of situations. If all you did is learn some obscure Olympic sport for the last 10 years so you could get a gold medal. I don't care. Why should I care about your gold medal? It's not like you were doing something to help the world. It's not even helping the country. I don't want them to compete in Beijing doesn't help me. So if you did something that was strictly for your own interests and it was a bad idea from the start and it didn't work out just the way you would imagine most of them wouldn't, because most people are not even going to make it to the Olympics, much less win a medal. I don't owe you any money for making bad decisions. Sorry. All right. Rasmussen did a poll and asked this question. Do credit cards tempt people to buy things they cannot afford? How do you think that came out? Do credit cards tempt people to buy things they cannot afford? 74% said yes and roughly 25%. Actually, it was 26. But roughly a quarter of the people said no or they're not sure. 25%. 25%. That's right, 25%. Actually, 26 don't understand what a credit card is even intended to do. The point of a credit card, I mean, it has several advantages owning a credit card, but one of the big ones is buying stuff you can't afford, meaning you can't afford it at the minute, but hopefully you can afford it over time. Yeah. 25. A quarter of the public doesn't think that people are tempted to buy things because they have a credit card. Buy things they can't afford. Yeah. Yeah. And likewise, 33% say they need to cut back on how much they use credit cards. So I guess people do spend more than they can afford. All right, let's talk about vaccine justice. Dr. Maria van Kirkhoff of the World Health Organization is concerned because the rich countries are hogging all the vaccinations. And she thinks that before we get boosters to the rich countries, we should give at least the first and second shot to the poor countries, the developing countries. What do you think of that? Is that fair? Is it fair that we rich countries would hog all the good vaccinations and keep them from the poor countries? Is it fair? Well, what do I say about fairness? Anybody? Can somebody quote Me on the topic of fairness, anybody put it in the comments. You know what I often say? Life isn't fair. That's one thing I often say, quoting my mother. Here's what I say. Yes, fairness is a concept that was invented so that children and idiots would have something to talk about. There's no fairness in the universe. Fairness isn't a thing. Fairness is just something that people say to argue because there's no objective standards for what's fair. Take this very question. You can make an argument that it's fair to spread the vaccinations around and you might even make the argument it's good for the first world countries because if you vaccinate the world, maybe there's less pandemic risk for everybody. But here's another way you could look at it. Shouldn't America be vaccinating its obese people 100% before we give it to anybody? Should we give a vaccination to a 18 year old African boy who weighs 110 pounds and gets plenty of sun and has ventilation like crazy? Should that person get a vaccination over our 60 year old obese people? Some of you would say yes, because you know, the obese person brought it on themselves or whatever. But point is, you can't agree on what's fair. There's no standard for fairness. That's not a thing. Shouldn't we save all of our senior citizens before we give it to, you know, young people in another, I mean, you could just go on this all day long. There's no fairness standard. So while I understand what this representative of the World Health Organization is saying, it's just not a standard. You can manage to do vaccinations work. I'm going to ask that question here. Give me. And I won't even define what it means to work. Okay, I'll just say do vaccinations work? I just want to see your answers in the comments and then I'll tell you what I think and I'll read off the answers I'm seeing. Some don't know yeses, mostly yeses, some maybes maybes. Locals is always a little faster. I'm saying nos and yeses, kind of yeses, Nos. Well, we all agree there's no argument that they're not vaccinations in the classic sense of just stopping it. So we all know that. But given that we all know that, do they work? All right, here's some information on that. Did you know that the most vaccinated big counties in America are having the best outcomes. So the most vaccinated counties are having the best outcomes with coronavirus. So that means vaccinations work. Right? Anybody doubt that? So we have good data now, lots of it, that show that the more you're vaccinated, the better your outcomes. That's very clear. So therefore vaccinations work, right? Right. Isn't that a science? If the data says that the more vaccinated you are, the better your outcomes. And that correlation is really clear now. Vaccinations work, Right? What could possibly be wrong with that? All right, let me tell you what could be wrong with it. I don't know. But what would vaccinations also correlate with? Income. Am I right? Income. The higher your income, the more likely you're highly vaccinated. Would you agree? How about whiteness? How about whiteness? Don't you think there are more white people in, let's say, a blue place? Don't you think more white people are vaccinated? Because that's what the data says. The black population is less vaccinated. Also the Republican population is less vaccinated. But who is the highest? Who has the most vaccinations? The blue counties. Right. So you find a blue county with high vaccinations, you're probably finding a bunch of rich, thin white people. What would you expect would be the relative outcome of thin, rich white people with good health care and well informed about everything? How would they do on the pandemic compared to somebody who is not rich and white and thin? Not as well. Right. So I worry that the correlation of vaccinations means good outcome is a. Could be at least. At least a partial false correlation. Let me give you another one. Do you think that vaccination rates in this country correlate to vitamin D levels? I'll bet they do. I'll bet they do. I'll bet you somebody who takes the time to get vaccinated is also supplementing with vitamin D. I'll betcha how many of the black citizens of the United States who don't want vaccinations are also in a high enough income group where buying supplements makes sense. Like that's a priority, buying, you know, vitamin D supplements. Well, there's a big income difference, right? So there should be a big difference. You know, you can't buy optional stuff if you don't have money. So I would bet that although there's a high correlation between vaccination rates and good outcomes, that the vaccination rates also follow vitamin D levels. What do you think, do you think those thin, rich white people who are supplementing with vitamin D levels, do you think that they have more vitamin D? Well, they have more vitamin D than black citizens because apparently black people have trouble getting vitamin D in the same setting as somebody else. So although the data would seem to overwhelmingly suggest that the vaccines work, and here work means not eliminating the virus, but rather keeping the death rate really, really low, I have questions. I don't think they've teased out the vitamin D correlation, and that would be my biggest problem with it because we know that vitamin D is highly correlated with outcomes. I think vaccinations are highly correlated with vitamin D levels. Could it be. Could it be that the vaccines never worked at all and that wherever you have the highest rate of vaccinations, you have also have the highest rate of vitamin D? It's just a correlation. I doubt it, because it feels like there are enough ways to test a vaccination that you wouldn't be fooled by that correlation. But certainly when you look at the big picture, it's hard to tease out the vitamin D part. So here's my. So those are my questions. I'll tell you my opinion. My opinion is that vaccinations work in the short term sense, that they reduce problems. If you're asking me do I know what happens in the long term, I'd say nobody does. So good luck making your decisions because you don't have the data you need. All right. All right. So speaking of that, also, I would refer you to a article on Substack that I tweeted so you can find a link to it in my Twitter feed this morning. Article by Maxim Lott, who you should follow on Twitter. His last name is spelled L O T T, first name Maxim. And you should follow him because he's, he's one of the better skeptics of just looking at the same thing you're looking at and then telling you why it's not really what you're looking at. All right. That stuff's good stuff. So along with, you know, Andres, Backhouse and Anatoly, you should follow Max and Lot if you want to understand the world better. Now, that doesn't mean everything he says is right. Right. So I'm going to tell you something that there may be a problem with his analysis, but it's a great romp through the myths of the vaccinations and the pandemic. Maxim is spelled M A X I M and then his last name is L O T T. Give him a follow Tell him I sent you anyway. You should read the whole article. It's one of the best, maybe the best. It might actually be the best thing I've seen written about the pandemic, looking at the myths and what. And then the realities. But I will bring you to one fact in particular. Two facts, actually. Number one, Maxim claims that the current data says that there were not more suicides in 2020. What do you think? Didn't all of you believe there were more suicides in 2020? I believe that, but according to Maxim, the most current data says no, I'm not sure that's true. So I'm going to, I'm going to put an asterisk next to that. I'll just say that I think, you know, Maxim is credible, so he's probably looking at some good data, but that doesn't mean it's real. It might come from a good source, but don't trust any data these days. All right, here's the other thing. He said that Australia and New Zealand are interesting to compare to the United States because Australia, New Zealand and the United States have similarly high vaccination rates. But Australia and New Zealand have practically no, no deaths because they have such a good, I'll say good, but effective job of tamping down with the lockdowns, et cetera, that it's a good comparison. And why is that important that Australia and New Zealand have the same vaccination rate as the U.S. but no, actually, you know, very little or no problems with deaths is because you can compare them and find out if the lockdowns themselves are killing people. Because in New Zealand and Australia you've got the lockdowns, but without the actual Covid messing up your statistics. So you can look at them and say, did your normal baseline number of deaths go up with the lockdowns or down? What do you think in the two countries, Australia, New Zealand, where they had pretty rigorous stuff but no infections, did more people die from the lockdown itself or fewer? Well, according to Maxim's numbers, fewer people died because of the lockdowns, which is what I predicted when we did our first two weeks, the two week lockdown, I was in favor of that. You know, just to ab test and see if anything was working, then it sort of didn't work. But so here's the provocative claim. The United States has a huge increase in deaths, but Australia, New Zealand is actually below their baseline. Not only is there no increase in those two countries, it's below the baseline. So that would strongly suggest, strongly that it's actually the COVID that's killing people in the United States and not the lockdowns. What do you think? Do you buy that now? It's like all data, you got to put an asterisk next to everything. Yeah. I don't think we could quite conclude this with certainty, but it's very provocative. It's definitely something to look at. All right, here's my problem. I think there might be other variables in here that we haven't teased now. So Maxim only goes so far as to say that it suggests the vaccines are what's helping people and not a source of death. But suggesting is not quite certainty. All right, so read that, read the whole bunch of myths that he debunks and judge for yourself. See if you think it sounds credible. In related news, there are two doctors in the UK who say that heart disease is spiking because of the lockdowns, not because of the coronavirus. Although one might ask, how can you tell the exact source of a coronary problem? Can you tell it's because somebody had Covid and recovered but they had some long term problems, or can you tell that it's really from the lockdown and the social isolation itself? I don't think you can tell, can you? I don't think you can tell. There's only two doctors and it's in the UK and they say that up to 300,000 people in the UK are facing heart related illness due to, and this is their opinion, post pandemic stress disorder. And research suggests that patients with symptoms of depression are 64% greater risk of developing coronary artery disease and blah, blah, blah. So there seems to be existing science to suggest that depression makes you more likely to have a heart attack or a coronary event. Depression drops the vitamin D levels. Somebody says, interesting. And so what do you think? Do you think that in the UK there are 300,000 people extra who are going to die because of the lockdowns? Because the New Zealand and Australia suggests that that's not a thing. So these are conflicting bits of data. The UK would seem to suggest that hundreds of thousands of people extra will die because of the pandemic itself as opposed to the virus or the pandemic, you know, the lockdown. Don't you think that you would have seen that many people extra dying in the Australia and New Zealand examples? I think you would have. So yeah. Somebody in the comments is saying it looks like a myocarditis. Am I saying it right? Myocarditis cover up? It does look like that. It looks exactly like that, doesn't it? How in the world. Permission to swear. Permission to curse. I need permission. I'll keep it limited, but permission to curse. Okay, I have permission. Send the children away. Well, I don't know if I want to curse about this. Yeah, I'm going to curse about this. How the fuck do you write an article about heart related illnesses in the pandemic and not even mention the possibility that the vaccinations are one of the causes or the cause? How the fuck do you leave that out of the article? Now, I'm not the one who says that vaccinations are causing any problems. I don't know. Maybe. Maybe yes, maybe no. I have no way to know independently. But how the fuck do you leave it out of the conversation? I mean, seriously, you're turning somebody who is a skeptic into a believer by doing that? Because this looks like an obvious cover up to me. Or just bad judgment. One or the other. That doesn't give me any confidence in medicine either. If these doctors simply have terrible judgment, well, that doesn't make me feel like I need to go get their advice again. All right, here's a question I asked. Shouldn't we figure out if the Omicron virus is so mild because that's the early indications we're getting. Not confirmed. So mild that maybe we should not vaccinate against it? Because if we did, we would be vaccinating against a vaccination. Because if the Omicron is this mild and this spready, it should act as a vaccination. It will still kill people, probably, but it might save more people than it kills. So what are we going to do? Follow the money. Follow the money. Let me say you to the person who asked that question on YouTube, because you're pissing me off. So there's somebody here who's challenging me to how many shots I'm willing to get personally. You. You for caring about my decision, for my health. I don't give a. About your health. I mean, your health decisions. I do care about, you know, people not getting sick, but I'm not going to bother you about your fucking health decisions. All right? Don't bother me about them. Like, just. Just give me the same courtesy I'm giving you now. I'll probably tell you because I do this publicly, but don't. Don't ask about it. Like you're making some fucking point. Right? Here's the fucking point I want you to make. Leave me the fuck alone. I think I'm channeling Jordan Peterson right now. I will make my own fucking decision. And I don't care what you think, and I don't care if you jab yourself a hundred times and die. I don't care if you don't jab yourself and die. I don't give a fuck about your personal health decision. Don't give me trouble about it. You can agree and disagree on the data and you know the arguments and stuff like that. That's all good. I like that stuff. But if you're going to talk to me about my personal decision, fuck you. Can I be clearer about that? Just fuck you hard. If you're. If you're going to talk to me about my personal decision. If I talk about it, that's different. All right, so that's going on. Here's what I think. And I saw Andres, Becky, I was saying the best risk management would be to prepare the vaccination, which I agree with. We should definitely be preparing a vaccination for the Omicron because maybe it is worse than we think, maybe our data is bad, maybe has some long term, whatever, who knows? But apparently it'll take at least 100 days before we would have such a vaccination available. At that point, we would have a lot more information and maybe that would be the go, no go point. Let me ask you this. Follow the money. Do you think there's any chance we won't have a vaccination that's mandated for the Omicron? Here's your test case. Maybe this might be your test case. Because it could be that it will be obvious to every citizen that we should not vaccinate against the Omicron. It's too early to say that. But it could be. I mean, we could know in two months that vaccinating against the Omicron is the worst decision ever made in any medical setting. Do you think that that would prevent us from doing it anyway? Because there's like a trillion dollars at stake for vaccinating against the Omicron. I think we're going to vaccinate against it no matter what. Because that's what the money says. The money says we're going to vaccinate against it no matter what. It's just too much money to not do so if we know at the same time we shouldn't vaccinate against it while it's mandated. We're going to know exactly what's going on. I mean, that's the point where you go, oh, okay, now I see it. This has nothing to do with public health. We could get there. We're not there is very premature to say anything like that. The Omicron could turn out to be dangerous. You know, our data is so sucky that it could be, you know, slaying tens of thousands of people every day. And I don't even know if we'd know it. All right, so let's not have a vaccination against the vaccinations. Please, let's not do that. Any, oh, any word on taste and smell with the Omicron? I haven't heard anything like that. Has anybody heard of even one Omicron death that's under age 80? Even one? Literally? Does anybody know of even one omicron death under 80? I haven't heard of one. Don't you think we would have heard of that? You know what, don't you think that the news would have. That anecdotal thing. She got two vaccinations and a booster, but the Omicron still took her out. Where are all those stories? Because we heard Delta every day, right? Yes, viruses mutate and get weaker. That is true. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't have vaccinated. Because vaccination was a stalling tactic until we could come up with a better idea. So if we stalled millions of deaths until the Omicron came around, it would have ended up to be a good play. As long as the vaccines themselves don't kill anybody. Scott, where's the study on reinfection you were talking about yesterday? I don't remember. Generally, I don't keep my sources. I would imagine you could Google that. But we all know that everybody gets reinfected, right? There's nobody who has any doubts that you still get infected if you have the shots. The vaxxed are the super spreaders. The evidence suggests not. Do you ever gamble in typical casino style games? Well, technically, yes. Technically, I do gamble at a casino if I'm in town and I've got some time. But I don't see it as gambling. I see it as throwing my money away because I don't expect to win. It's just, you know, so I don't gamble much. Right. Relative to my income level, I. You know, I don't gamble much. It's a skill, John. Learning to read and talk at the same time. It's actually something you develop over time. You know, it's interesting. I. Most of you know, I'm trying to learn playing drums and watching the brain separate itself into four or five sub brains, which you have to do. To play the drums. Because all your limbs are operating independently and you can actually audit each parts of your brain as you're going. You can change your consciousness to your left hand. Oh, my left hand is doing this. Oh, let's think about my right hand. Oh, my left hand's still doing that thing. Oh, let's think about my foot. Why do you trust your sources of information? Scott, you fucking idiot. How could you watch me for 10 minutes and think I trust any source of information? Seriously, Come on. Did you just turn this on? How in the fucking world could you look at me and say, scott, why do you trust your fucking information? Nobody distrusts information more than I do. Seriously. Seriously. Name one fucking person on the planet who has less respect for information than I do. If I tell you that information agrees with my opinion, you should be playing a recording in your head the whole time that says, but probably it's not reliable information. Just do that for me, okay? Just play that recording in your head every time you listen to me. So you saw a study that shows you can get Covid twice or more? Yeah, that's. That's a known thing. I didn't see a study. I've seen anecdotes. So there are. There are known cases of people getting Covid more than once. That is true, but it's not common. Don't feed the trolls. The trolls are feeding me. I'm not feeding the trolls. They give me energy. So here's what happened recently. I told you that the professional trolls have started bombarding my stream or my Twitter. And then there was a big purge. So my user count, like, zoomed up, but it seemed like it was all trolls. And then suddenly, like, a thousand people get whacked off. That's not a Jeffrey Toobin joke. Let's say they are whacked from the service, not whacked off. And it looks like there's a battle going on between Twitter and the trolls. And it looks like Twitter's got a pretty good handle on it because the trolls would come up, but also my user count would go up. And then as soon as the user count, like, drops, which looks like a. It looks like some kind of a Twitter action. The troll action just drops at the same time. So I think that the Democrats, or maybe foreign countries, I don't know, and Twitter are in this pitched battle right now, and Twitter's winning, interestingly. So congratulations to Jack, because that was one of the big things Twitter was trying to do is knock down the trolls. And I feel like they've figured out some good tools for doing that. It does look like they're staying ahead of it. Scott, you ask about and criticize our personal vaccine decisions on the basis of risk management. No, I don't. No, I don't. That's never happened. You are fucking hallucinating. I've never challenged any of you personally. I've talked about the logic of getting vaccinated or not. But I say as clearly as possible, every situation is different. Nobody has. My exact situation. Oh, let me thank Erica. Erica, I know you're watching. So I kept wishing I had enough time to put together the whole. The whole drinking bleach hoax timeline and, you know, the whole transcript and everything. And Erica did that to put together the transcript, so I had that, and then I could put it together in a thread, etc. So thank you, Erica. On locals and. And on Twitter. So good job on that. I think that made a big difference. So now there's a thread that does a good job of showing you your various sources for debunking that hoax. If you need it, just grab that. You can see it in my Twitter feed and you can grab it. I think it was from yesterday. All right, that's all I got for now. Is that on locals, too? No, it's on Twitter only right now. Scott doesn't understand that Erica made a useful resource for. I assume you're joking. I hope that's a joke. How to debunk Trump? Depends what you need. RFK junior's notebook. I don't trust RFK junior Even the left debunks him. So do you really think Trump will win again? 50% chance. 50% chance. But that's the highest chance of anybody. Okay. How do you find proper balance of doubting yourself? Of doubting yourself while talking to a spouse? Well, I'll tell you what I do is I soften every statement because I have a big problem of talking in absolutes, which I imagine people understand are not real absolutes, because it's just faster to talk that way within all the hedging. But I've learned to hedge everything. Well, I think this is true, but I could be wrong. So I just say I could be wrong about everything I assert, because as soon as you say you're sure, that's when the fight starts. But as long as you say, well, I'm not sure, but looks this way to me, you know, is there any way to find out? So that's my best advice, but it's not good advice. All right? And that is all for today. Goodbye, YouTube. Until tomorrow.