Episode 1602 Scott Adams: Are You Smart or Just Afraid? You Can't Tell the Difference

Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the highlight of your entire life. It's called Coffee with Scott Adams. And this is the special Christmas Eve edition. Yeah. In case you didn't think it could get any better, it could be special. And let me remind you that tomorrow, a lot of the people that you would see on a regular basis, and by regular, I mean, say, five days a week. You know, nobody does seven days a week like I do. But tomorrow, a lot of them will be gone. But not me. Not me. I'll be here. And not only will I be here, but I'll be here with a simultaneous sip. A special Christmas edition. And all I'll need then. And all you need now is a cup of mug or a glass of tanker chalicerstein, A canteen sugar flask, a vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better, including the holidays. It's called the simultaneous sip. And it happens. Now. Go. Yeah, that was it. Yeah, that was the stuff. Well, there's a report that a team of astronomers have discovered 70 rogue planets in the Milky Way. Now, they're rogue because they're not surrounding a star, so they're not orbiting a star. They're rogue planets, and they just discovered them. I guess we'd never seen 70 rogue planets in the Milky Way before. But I'm no fool. I'm no fool. 70 rogue planets suddenly appear. I think it's pretty clear that these are death stars and they're heading our way. So if you're worried about the coronavirus or climate change, doesn't look like that's going to be your biggest problem. 70 death stars heading our way. Allegedly. I'd like to point out again that every day this is weird. It's just weird. A coincidence, really. But we've learned in the last several years, and correct me if I'm wrong, that our intelligence agencies can't be trusted. The news can't be trusted. Our politicians can't be trusted. In fact, every institution in American life has shown us that it can't be trusted. Except our election system. Now, I guess we're all pretty lucky because 100% of our other systems are known to be fraudulent in substantial ways. But our election system. Can I have a standing ovation for the only thing in the whole country that is not corrupt? Oh, it's impossible to audit it by design. So it would be fair to say that you wouldn't know if it was corrupt, but it's not, is not standing ovation. Let's give it up for the election system. The only thing in America that is not corrupt, even though it easily could be. And there's no way to check. Sarcasm. Yes, sometimes you can mock things into happening when you can't reason them into happening. And I'm going to fucking mock into existence the belief that our election system is the only one without a problem. I'm going to try to sell that. Only one. How about the international financial world? That's okay, right? Oh, there are plenty of fraud. There's lots of fraud in the financial world. Huh? Well, at least our banking system never made what our banking system has paid gigantic fines for fraudulent activities. Well, okay, I guess you can't change. Can't trust the banking system. But thank goodness our elections are first rate, airtight and working. Firing on all cylinders. I was reminded yesterday that it is unfair to go after somebody's appearance, don't you think? You know, saying nasty things about some public figure's appearance, totally inappropriate. This came to me after I mentioned that the 1619 projects. Nicole Hannah Jones dresses like a clown. She actually has like bright red clown hair with the two puffs and wears clothing that sort of is evocative of the clown vibe, if you know what I mean. And I do think that there could be special cases, right? Here's a special case. Suppose, and this did not happen, but suppose the Surgeon General of the United States weighed 600 pounds. Would it be appropriate to mention his or her appearance? I think so, because it would be the Surgeon general, somebody who's promoting health if they weighed 600 pounds, I feel like that would be something you could criticize based on appearance. Am I right? Likewise, if somebody is selling the most clownish idea that the world has ever seen and they dress exactly like a clown, that has to be noticed. You can't have a clown like idea and dress like a clown and then ask me not to notice that. I mean, I am willing to go with the idea that we shouldn't make fun of people's appearance in general. In general, but not in these cases. These are very special cases. You give me clown material and dress like a clown. I'm not going to ignore that. Okay. Speaking of the golden age, I think it's the golden age for pranks because somebody did this prank. It was a fake headline. Somebody faked a New York Times headline that made it look as if teachers were going to permit bullying against unvaccinated children. So somebody faked A headline for the New York Times. Calling out teachers to permit bullying against unvaccinated children. And all the fact checkers had to fact check it as false because we live in such absurd times that it was believable. So this is the golden age of pranks, where you can say anything and just put it in the headline and somebody's going to say, yeah, that probably happened. That looks well within the realm of something that could have happened. Golden age for pranks. If you don't think I'll be taking advantage of that, you don't know me. How many of you saw clips or the whole interview of Trump talking with Candace Owens? Did many of you see that? It's getting a lot of news today. Now, it's interesting how it's being framed, of course, because Trump's involved. So it's highly polarizing. But some people are framing it as though Trump schooled Candace Owens on the value of vaccines. But I'm not quite sure I saw that. I mean, I watched it, but what I saw was he made a claim. Trump did that the people who are vaccinated are having far better outcomes. But I didn't see her push back on that. Did you? So it wasn't really a disagreement, was it? He made a claim and it just. It was true. I mean, it's compatible with science, whether it's true or not. And she. And then she brought up a related question about mandates, and then they agreed again, Trump doesn't like mandates. Candace doesn't like mandates. So they agreed on that. But then she. She sort of started focusing. I don't want to say she moved the goalposts, because I'm not sure that that happened. But. But she started focusing on the question of should somebody young and fit, such as herself, get vaccinated? And I don't know that Trump had an opinion on that. So it was a weird kind of situation in which some people imagined they were having some kind of a disagreement. But I didn't see any. Did you. Did you see any disagreement? I didn't say any, but I did notice that there is a. I'll talk about what we do and do not know about vaccines, but I think this is. It sort of showed you why you need the point counterpoint kind of discussion. And you don't want a person interviewing one person. That that model just gives you confusion. And we saw it again here. People couldn't even tell what they saw. Did they see two people agreeing or disagreeing? I saw two people agreeing. What did you see? Did you see Two people disagreeing or did you see two people agreeing on everything? What did you see if you saw it? I mean, that's pretty basic. Were they agreeing or disagreeing? We can't even agree on that. Yeah. Okay. And a lot of conservatives. Have you seen conservatives say that vaccinations, quote, quote, quote don't work? Have you seen that? How many would you. How many of you would say that's true? How many of you would agree with the statement? And we'll talk about what that really means. But how many of you would agree with the statement, vaccinations, quote, don't work? Agree or disagree? Mostly disagree. Okay. I see a yes on YouTube. Okay, interesting. Because I'm still seeing people. I've seen more yeses on YouTube for some reason, I think. I think the locals people have. I hate to tell you, but they're better informed in general. They tend to be better informed, at least on the topics I talk about, because we talk about the same stuff. So here's what I saw on FOX News. And I'm not going to name names because there's got to be more than one person doing this, but I did see a prominent conservative last night on FOX News say vaccines don't. Did anybody see that? I'm not going to name names, but did you see a prominent conservative tell you that vaccines don't work on TV last night? And it wasn't questioned. I don't think there was any pushback on it. Why would he say that? He would say that because you can still get, you can still transmit and catch the virus if you're vaccinated. But it seems that some people maybe to, I don't know, manage their audience or something, are saying that it doesn't work when we know, as Trump pointed out, that it lowers hospitalizations and deaths radically, or at least all information is. Now, how many of you would disagree with this statement that when the president said that vaccinated people have better outcomes, that 100% of the data agrees with them? Would anybody disagree with that statement, that all of the data agrees, there's no data that says anything else? Would anybody push back that? That 100% of the data, all of it, every data anybody's ever looked at says the vaccinations drastically lower your risk of death. Does anybody see anything different? I haven't. Okay. If you've seen something different, send it to me. But I think the president was on pretty solid ground, at least in terms of agreeing with science. You know, science could be wrong. No absolutes. I'M telling you that what I've seen was 100% of the data on one side, but I'm asking you for an exception. So I'll take your. I take your guidance that I should avoid absolutes. Nothing's 100%. That's correct. It's easy to talk in absolutes. And it's, it's. I like it when you catch me. That's one of the corrections. I always appreciate if I accidentally speak in an absolute, because that's never true. You know, the absolute. Well, I just use an absolute to talk about absolutes. So let me, let me just escape that conversation. Christopher Hill on Twitter said this. Until someone answers the question, at what age BMI is it no longer statistically beneficial to be vaccinated against COVID 19. All of this is a joke. Well, not all of it, but isn't that a pretty big. Pretty big thing that we don't know? And isn't that a fair question? Shouldn't we see a chart that's got. I'm designing on the fly here, but I think if you had age on one side and BMI on the other, on the other axis, that you could find the place, you know, the zone where you're both old enough and heavy enough that you've got to get. You've got to worry. Wouldn't that visualize. We could produce that. Right? We have enough data at this point, and if we haven't given that to the public, you have to assume that we're not working with science. Is that fair to say that given that this could be produced, the crossover of age BMI to know when it doesn't make sense to get vaccinated, instead we're just vaccinating everybody. But that tells you that we departed science, right? Or does it? I'm gonna, I'm gonna take the opposite argument a little bit later. I'm just priming you. Okay, so it is very annoying that we don't know that I made the statement that I had fun with this one. And I have to admit this was a little bit trollish because I really wanted to get comments and then read you the comments. So it was a little more trollish than I have been doing lately. I don't know if you've noticed, but I've been trying to reduce the trolling where you're just trying to get a big response and try to make things value added. Although sometimes things are just entertaining, so I can't resist. But here's what I said, and I'll tell you Some weird reactions to it. I said, our collective awareness is now almost high enough, and the almost is a key here is almost high enough to realize that no one used reason to make their vaccination decision. Fear made all of our decisions and we rationalized it after the fact. To imagine otherwise is a denial of what science knows about decision making. So here's the thing. It is irrational to say that you followed the science and made a decision about your vaccination. Do you know why that's irrational? It's irrational to say it doesn't matter who you are or even what your argument is. It's always irrational to say, I followed the science and then I reached my rational conclusion. Do you know why that's irrational? Because science knows we don't do that. If you follow science, you know that you didn't do that. You can't have it both ways. You can't say you followed science and reached reasonable decision. If you believe in science, if you believe in science, you know you don't have that ability. You don't have the ability to reach rational decisions. Not in situations like this where there's lots of complexity and lots of unknowns. It just can't be done. We all got there by fear. Now you're going to say to yourself, scott, I didn't. Yeah, maybe other people did and maybe only the people who got vaccinated. But I'm pretty sure I didn't. So here's my statement again. Our collective awareness is now almost high enough to realize. So a lot of people who don't yet have not reached that level of awareness are fighting hard to represent their point of view. Let me tell you what it looks like when people who are in thoroughly irrational territory try to rationalize their irrationality. You ready for this? Here are just some comments I picked out for this, and I won't even tell you who made the comment because I don't think that's fair. Because it's sort of. Everybody's in the same group here. So one user said to me, I didn't use fear at all, just common sense. What's the first problem? There's no such thing as common sense. Common sense is what you say you had when you have an irrational decision and then you rationalize it after the fact. We know common sense doesn't exist because you and I would have the same opinion on everything. You and I would just use our common sense. Oh, we all agreed on everything. Common sense absolutely does not exist. So here's the first. The first pushback that against Us. He uses common sense and he says my ability to see blatant lies for what they are. And use an example that Ivermectin is dangerous. This user says is a blatant lie. Told me everything I needed to know about my decision. Did it? Did that one lie? Allegedly. This one person believes he can identify lies, has common sense, and, and didn't use fear at all. What level of awareness is that about his own place in the universe? It's pretty low. It's pretty low because we don't have common sense. You did use your fear and you certainly don't know if Ivermectin was a lie. You might have a strong opinion, but you certainly don't know at this point. All right, let me give you another one. Someone had said, I disagree. Vaccines typically have more time to observe long term effects. In other words, we usually have more data for vaccines. These were administered in record time with full understanding that long term risks were a question mark. I think one can reasonably refuse a vaccine where the long term risks are unknown. What about that? Is this a rational take? That you can refuse a vaccine where the long term risks are unknown? Is that, is that a good take since you don't know if the vaccination is good or bad in the long term because we don't have data that therefore not taking it isn't reasonable, is it? No, it's fear. You'd have to know the risk of the virus, which we don't, in the long term and you'd have to know the risk of the vaccination in the long term. We don't know either one. So here's someone who doesn't know either the cost or the benefit of the decision and is comfortable with the reasonableness of his decision without knowing the costs and without knowing the benefits of any of the variables that mattered. So this is what it looks like when you have a fear based decision that you rationalize after the fact that give you, give you some more, by the way. Once you learn to recognize this, you just see it everywhere. You'll see that people are just rationalizing their fears. And pretty much that's all we do. Almost all of what we think is our common sense and our thinking is just rationalizing fears. Here's another one. All right. We know healthy children that are at very low risk. A child is 10 times more likely to die of cancer. I would say that is reasonably sufficient information when you're trying to make a decision against a vaccine whose long term risks are unknown. It's a no brainer for me. Is it a no brainer? So how many of you would agree with the statement that because children that are super low risk that therefore vaccinating them isn't good for them? How many of you would agree with the statement we should not vaccinate young children? Go. How many of you agree with that? I'm expecting almost all of you to agree with this, right? Agree, agree, agree. Don't know agree. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Now when you say you agree, I assume that your argument is. I assume your argument is that it is not good for children to take on the vaccine risk when the risk that you're trying to mitigate is so close to zero. Would that capture your argument? Anybody? Does that capture your argument pretty well? Okay, I get, I'm getting yeses on that. All right, here's the counter argument. Do you think there is one? Do you think there's a counter argument? There is, and it's the argument coming from the government and it's a pretty good one. But they don't say it out loud because they can't. So here's my take. I think the government has an actual pretty good argument which is different from saying I agree. So I'm not going to agree with the government argument. I'm going to simply explain it as best I can and then I want you to reassess your opinion based on new information. Okay. Would you say it's true or false that a child would be damaged by the death of, let's say, one parent? True or false that a child's well being would be damaged by the death of a parent? True. Right? True. Is the point of vaccinating children to only protect the children? Was that ever the point of it? Did the government ever say we're going to vaccinate the children strictly for the protection of the children? Never said that. Right. I believe it was always part of the overall strategy of getting enough people to some kind of herd immunity, wasn't it? So I believe the government's argument goes something like this. Again, this is not me agreeing with the argument, I'm just representing it. Because you should see here both arguments. If we let the pandemic spread through the normal adult public, a lot of children would lose a parent. Now you could argue what is a lot, right? But maybe let's say if we didn't do any mitigation at all, and let's say, well, let's be more specific, let's say we vaccinated adults mostly, but no children, and then the Virus sweeps through the children and it becomes, you know, they spread it to the adults and even some of them vaccinated might die. Not many. But the argument is, Scott, do you really think we affected the spread at all? Almost certainly, but not maybe in the long run. You know, Omicron's gonna get us all. But I do think we probably pushed off some of the delta that we could have had. There's no way to know. Right. But I would say that if you do all the things that logically should have made a difference, it's hard to imagine that none of them did. And you know, if you're looking at small percentages as being something useful, you know, it's always hard to tell. Anyway, I would argue that the. Let me ask you this. If the economy goes down, let's say the GDP and unemployment goes up, is that good or bad for children? If the economy does less good than it could be good or bad for children, I'd say it's bad. Right? And children get it the worst because poverty really hits a kid. All. So the argument for vaccinating kids is that we are intentionally putting the young at a little extra risk to benefit the older population because, and here's the part the government doesn't say directly because that's how you protect the children. Protecting the adults is how you protect the children. It's just indirect. Now it does absolutely put children at the extra risk from the vaccination itself. We all agree on that, right? But the presumed trade off is not the kids health. The real argument is the health of society because society's health will have a big impact on the kids. Now having said that, do you say to yourself, yes, Scott, but, but, but society does not, does not disadvantage the young to benefit the old. Right? We don't kill kids to save old people. Am I right? No, of course we do. We do it all the time. We massively do that. We've always killed kids to benefit the old. This isn't new. This is the most basic thing society does. Have you heard of the national debt? Anybody who's going to pay the national debt? It's not my old ass. I'm driving up the debt so I can live a good life and leave children in poverty. We're doing that intentionally and massively. We could not be damaging children more than we are. Those who believe that climate change is catastrophic, does that mean that we raped the earth and left destruction for the children? Well, there's a big part of the public who thinks we did exactly that. And is okay with it. How about the military? Now? We have a volunteer military right now, but if the shit came down, it wouldn't be voluntary for long. I mean, if we got into a real war, like a big one, it's not going to be voluntary for a minute. You're going to be drafted right away. So every military is about young people sacrificing for the older generation. Every bit of debt is the same thing. Every time we increase the Social Security payments, which increases the debt, sometimes it's the same thing. What about abortion? Is abortion good for the children or is this something that older people do that's bad for the fetus? You were waiting for that, weren't you? Took me long enough to get there, didn't it? I know that was the argument you were waiting for. So let me back up and be really clear. I'm uncomfortable vaccinating children. I'm not going to be the one to tell you that was the right decision. But I think the government has a better argument than you give it credit for. A much better argument than you give it credit for. If the government is trying to protect the whole as the way to protect children, too, they do have an argument. It's not one I'm quite on board with because. And why am I not on board with it, by the way? What makes me not on board with that argument? Fear. Fear. That's why. Because I would be afraid of directly hurting the child. Even if you gave me the argument that. Oh, but yeah, yeah, yeah, I get it, Scott. You would be directly hurting some children because there's always somebody who's going to get hurt by a vaccination. But you have to look at the big picture, Scott. In the big picture, people are better off. Nope, I can't get there. My brain can't get past. But you're hurting a child. Right? So the fact that my brain can't get past. But you're directly hurting a child, no way. I can't be okay with that. I can't think of this rationally. And I can tell you directly why I can't. Because there's no way I'm going to rationally weigh the life of a child. I can't. I don't have that capability. If you think you do, you're just kidding yourself. You can't. All right, how about here's somebody else who said he did not use fear for his decision. He said in order to travel internationally for my business, which I must do, I needed to get the vaccine in order to avoid Mandatory quarantine rules. So he says, tell me, Scott, where is the fear in my decision? Mine was pure reason. Do you agree with that? Here's somebody who used pure reason, simply needed the vaccine for business travel and wanted to avoid inconvenience of quarantines. No fear at all. Wasn't afraid of the virus, wasn't afraid of the shot. No fear at all. No, he was afraid of losing his job. This tweet is how to say you're afraid without saying you're afraid. Of course he was afraid of something, but he never felt fear because he had a way out. Right. So I would agree in maybe some technical way that he avoided any actual feeling of fear. So when he says, where was my fear? I agree there wasn't any, because he had a path that, in his opinion, avoided the thing he feared, which is losing his job. Viva Fry said, oh, I did another tweet in which I was talking about the. What we do and we don't know about the virus. And Vivi. Fry was questioning whether there's any evidence to suggest that vaccinations reduce the time one is infectious. What do you think? Is there evidence that a vaccinated person would spread it less than an unvaccinated person? You're all wrong. All right, so there was a piece of fake data that convinced everybody that vaccinated people spread it the same as unvaccinated. The fake data, which was based on true facts, but the way it was presented is misleading. The fake data is that vaccinated people tested had the same viral load as unvaccinated people. And then that was generalized to, oh, I guess you can spread it the same. Except that we also know that people who are vaccinated clear the virus faster. So if both the vaccinated and the unvaccinated peak at the same amount of viral load, which is what you've all heard, and I think it's true, but one of them declines fast and the other one doesn't. Which one would spread it more? I'm saying not true. But can you. What about the immunes? Vaccinated and unvaccinated are treated the same in terms of isolation. Yeah, probably shouldn't, but they are. Okay, well, that's the argument, and I believe that 100% of science agrees with what I just said. I'm making a big claim, and I gave that as an absolute to see if you can refute it. So I'm being provocative by saying this is an absolute in my understanding, and I want you to prove me wrong. Because if you could prove me wrong, I would find that exciting. I mean, it would be fun to be proved wrong on this question. Prove me wrong, I say. 100% of all the data that we have suggests that vaccinated people clear the virus faster. Check just that they clear it faster. That's just the only thing you're checking. I agree with the fact that the viral load can be similar at the peak. I'm only arguing that one side clears faster, that's all. So all I did was Google that question and it popped right up. So I don't know why that's a question. Actually, there's a story that the Biden administration got this very credible suggestion from a bunch of people in the know that they should. In October, they were supposed to rapid, rapidly fire up the rapid tests, but the administration decided to focus on vaccines and not go nuts with rapid testing. And now Biden belatedly said, oh, I wish I'd started earlier. And this is in Vanity Fair. Now, Vanity Fair, as you know, or you should know, is a very pro Democrat publication. It's an anti Trump publication. And Vanity Fair is basically saying that the Biden administration failed totally and was told, clearly was told how to do, was all scoped out. Here's what you need to do so that we have lots of tests for Christmas and he didn't do it. And do you think that incompetence can explain that? Do you think that incompetence can explain why it didn't happen in October? Here's the tricky thing I've told you about radical compliance or extreme compliance as a way to stop something you don't like. I feel like somebody in the decision making process is following the rules during the pandemic because following the rules is making something happen. In other words, keeping these tests out of the market is good for somebody. Find out who, because that's why we don't have them. The reason we don't have the tests is because it's good for somebody that we don't have them. And that means money. Follow the money and what you find is you'll find a bunch of bureaucrats who followed all the rules and broke no law. Do you see what's going on here? In order for a bureaucrat, let's say hypothetically, let's say there was hypothetically some member of the FDA or somebody in the decision making chain who wanted to stop tests from being available. Maybe they took a bribe from the vaccination companies. Maybe they took a bribe for one of the Approved early, approved test companies. I'm not saying any of that happened. I'm just saying work through it in your mind. What would it look like when you look to find the corruption? What would it look like? It would look like following the rules, because all you'd have to do is just use the regular FDA process and you could guarantee that nothing got approved on time. Right. The reason we have vaccinations quickly is that Trump just kicked asses until they changed their process. But nobody kicked their ass to change their process when it came to making testing available. So all they did was follow the process. And then they said, you know, we should have been better funded. I sure wish this wasn't so slow, but I guess we'll have to follow the process and keep you all protected. The fact that they did not break their process during a pandemic is the best proof of corruption you'll ever see. 100% of the people involved knew that this was a pandemic, and this was the time to reassess which of these procedures make sense in an emergency. They did not do any of that. Right. There's no reporting at all that the government even once considered bending a rule and putting tests up to the top of the list. Not even once. Why corruption now? I think that the government probably couldn't see it. If you were the boss and you were in charge and you said, okay, why is this taking so long? You would say, all right, everybody, let's have a meeting. Can you explain to me why this is taking so long? And everybody in the meeting would give you a reason. That actually sounds really good. There's a good reason it's taking so long. We're making sure it's done right. But all of those reasons applied to vaccinations, and we did it anyway. I don't think there was even a conversation about bending the rules for tests. There is corruption here. It's obvious, it's glaring, it's glowing. But it's also possible nobody broke the law. Weirdly, all you'd have to do is follow the existing procedures and you could stop anything from happening. I've done it myself. I can stop something just by following the rules. Have done it in my corporate days quite a bit, actually. CNN is actually saying that Biden is confused. He talked about ordering the 500 million test kits, but he confused it with a separate conversation about therapeutic pills, which were similar numbers, I guess. And at some point, he realized he had confused them and corrected it. But even CNN is calling him out now for being Confused. And it didn't look like he even understood the topic that well. I have to admit, Biden's doing better than I thought he would do. When he explains things in public, even when he gets confused like this, these are easy things to confuse. I feel like he's better than I thought. I had pretty low expectations, but I don't think he's up to it, Just better than I thought. So here's the summary of the pandemic, that we'll always look back at the pandemic and I think we'll be proud that we saved the lives of so many obese Americans at the cost of our children and our freedom. Now, why is it that we can't say that we save the fat to save at the cost of the young and the healthy? Why can't we say that out loud? Because we're too woke, right? The trouble is, wokeness just ruins everything. The fact, as many people on social media have said, the fact that Biden is not telling us to exercise and lose weight, especially because he's actually a good role model for exactly that. Biden's been a healthy, fit weight all the way to like nearly 80. I mean, that's a really good role model. He should take advantage of that. I mean, we should be hearing about that all the time anyway. How in the world is China going to host the Olympics without crashing their economy? Do you think that? Now, I did see from my nemesis Chen, who is on Twitter, we interact a lot and Twitter actually labels him as China state affiliated media. Now, Chen has informed me that he is not a Chinese operative because he watched my live stream. He is not a Chinese operative. He is just a journalist and has been a journalist for a long time. I probably would have preferred a Chinese operative over a journalist, but that's just me. That's just me. But Chen, who is part of a China state affiliated media, his opinions are totally his own, totally his own. He is not influenced one bit by the mother country, not one bit. And he would like you to know that. And he even says that the Olympics won't be a problem because China is so efficient and they've got things worked out in terms of spectators and movement, so they will limit the transmission. To which I say, my nose is itching by the way. Sorry about that. To which I say, how is that possible? Are you telling me that you're not going to get one person with at least Omicron into that country even though they're tested? You assume they're tested and quarantined and everything. But even with that, you don't think a little omicron is going to get in there. And once it gets in there, won't the Olympics just crash the whole thing? And how many countries want to send their athletes into that toxic stew and then have them come home and infect the home country? I feel like. I feel like the Olympics might destroy China, but they can't cancel the Olympics, can they? Because they would lose face if China canceled the Olympics. It would make it seem as if they can't handle Covid and the Olympics, but they'd like you to believe they can do both. I feel like China is hoping, or maybe half hoping that other countries will cancel the Olympics. So here's what to look for. Dr. Dixon Gayford. You don't look like a real person. I'm gonna block you. You look like a troll. So here's what to look for. Look for the Chinese government to act as though they kind of hope other countries pull out of the Olympics so they can cancel it. I think they want to cancel it, but they don't want to be the ones that cancel it. I think they want other countries to say, oh, it looks too dangerous. Can we postpone this? And then they'll say, ah, well, if nobody's going to come, you know, if we're not going to have a full house, I guess we'll have to cancel it or postpone it. So I've got a feeling that China's got a really big problem and I don't know which way this is going to go, but apparently Japan just said they're not going to send government people to the Olympics. It's not quite a boycott. They're just not going to send government people to it. Which China noticed, by the way. Jenny says, no, they don't want to cancel. Well, I'm not saying they want to cancel, like, with all of. All of their heart and soul, I'm saying that they might be a little bit on the fence about it. Meaning that there are probably some people there who don't care about the Olympics, but they do care about not crashing China's economy. So they might be saying to themselves, you know, don't want to cancel them. But if they got canceled, I wouldn't complain too hard. Didn't they cancel the Olympics in 80? I don't know. Do we want a functioning global economy and no war? Yeah. It is the best live stream every day. You are right, Jonathan. I'm glad you noticed. All right, the US pulled out in 80. Where was it when we pulled out. What country? Oh, Russia. Okay. If they run out of food, they'll be coming for hours. Well, there's that problem. All right, let us end here. I didn't mean to talk about nothing but coronavirus, but I feel like when you hit these slow news periods, it's going to be whatever's already out there. It's not going to be new news. It's going to be more of whatever's out there. Well, Boo is doing great. Thanks for asking. 2021 recap. Yeah, I still have a few more days to do the recap, but I'll probably be calling out some people who were especially productive and useful on Twitter because I don't know if you know it or probably you do know it, but there's sort of a self organized army of people who send me things every day on Twitter, which is amazing because I get to see sort of the filtered good stuff. So most of the people who are sending me things are really good at filtering, and that allows me to give you better stuff here and maybe change the world a little bit. All right, there's a recent Shellenberger tweet string with good news. Okay, I'll go check that out. All right, that's all for today and I will talk to you tomorrow.