wo trends and put them together, the number of people who have let's say concealed carry, isn't it just purely chance, purely chance that none of the smash and grabs have run into a concealed carry person who is in a bad mood that day? Because the concealed carry person if they see somebody actually get injured, let's say there's a smash and grab and they take out a security guard as part of it, I feel like somebody's going to start shooting at all the people in masks and is going to take out 10 of them. I feel like that's going to happen. No I'm not trying to influence the simulation. I think it's just predictable that if you just combine these two trends eventually they're going to bump. But we don't want anybody to get killed.

PolitiFact is fact-checking a rumor which is apparently untrue that Kamala Harris was on a phone call and once referred to unvaccinated Americans as quote dirty Trump people. Apparently that never happened according to the fact checkers. But I love the fact that PolitiFact has to tell you what the rumor is before they fact check it. Dirty Trump people. Why is that so funny to me? I think it's funny because if you had never heard about the deplorables story you wouldn't have believed it on its face. But we've reached a point where so many things have happened that you didn't think could happen that having a vice president call half, you know 40% of the country or whatever, dirty Trump people was well within the believable realm. I don't think it happened but it was well within the believable realm and that's new.

All right so reality denial is becoming a thing. Not only in the Jesse Smollett case where he just denies reality and said nope nope wasn't a hoax, did not happen, despite all of the evidence that it totally did. And that seems to be more of a thing now that people will deny reality no matter how much reality is sitting on their head. And here's some examples.

So AOC is denying the crime wave. How could you possibly be alive and deny the crime wave? But that's pretty bold. Now she hasn't walked it back and it was plainly ridiculous to deny it but denying things that are right in front of you is sort of a new thing isn't it?

All right here's another one. Climate change doesn't look to be as bad as we once thought. Do you see anybody saying oh thank goodness turns out that whole thing was not as bad as we thought? What I mean by that is apparently for the past 10 years we're not increasing the amount of carbon we put in the atmosphere. Still too much according to the experts. That would still raise the temperatures. It would still be lots of climate disruptions say the experts. But could be just as much good as bad. You know we could be growing more while losing a little beachfront. Could end up ahead.

So who's telling you the story that the most current knowledge about climate change is that it looks like we'll be okay? Right that seems to be the actual reality but I think that's being denied by basically everybody who's been climate change alarmists from the beginning. Yeah so you hear people like Michael Shellenberger telling you what's actually true but most of the world is just sort of acting like that's not true. We'll just pretend that's not the case.

By the way Elon Musk came out with a tweet unambiguously in favor of keeping and not closing nuclear power plants. That's Elon Musk, the number one competitor to nuclear power. The number one competitor to nuclear power just told you we have to keep those nuclear power plants. That seems like a big deal because he's pretty good at risk management, right? And if he looked at it and said yeah the risk is worth the reward, well maybe you should listen to that. Maybe you should listen to that.

The other reality denial is I keep hearing from people that say that vaccinations are not slowing the spread and are not keeping people out of hospitals. I'm not going to argue with you on that because anybody who believes that I'm not going to change their mind. But are you aware that zero experts agree? Is there anybody who holds that opinion? Is there anybody who holds the opinion that vaccinations are not slowing the spread and it's not even keeping people out of hospitals or keeping them alive? Does anybody believe that? Because you'd expect you'd have at least one rogue doctor, right? No rogue doctors on this one. I think there are zero rogue doctors saying that vaccinations don't work. They just might not like the side effects or something.

Speaking of rogue doctors, I was pointed to yet another rogue doctor who said that the COVID vaccinations would never have been approved under normal standards for vaccinations. Meaning that the signal or the number of people who had side effects was already well over the number that would stop a normal vaccination or I guess any med trial. And therefore you should not be taking these vaccinations because they have not been tested the same way all other vaccinations have been tested. What do you think of that? What do you think of that rogue, I'm not even going to give you his name, the rogue doctor's opinion that we should not trust the vaccinations because they were not actually, we already know for sure that more people died than we would ever allow a regular vaccination to go forward with. What do you think?

Here's my take. These rogue doctors I have decided have one characteristic that you need to understand. They seem to really really know their topic, number one. So if you think that I'm arguing that something they said is incorrect on some medical or scientific front I'm not doing that at all. I'm telling you that they're bad at reasoning. Real good at medicine but bad at reasoning. This is a perfect example.

Here's how you should reason during a pandemic. Compare the risk of the vaccinations as best you can to the risk of the virus itself and you're done. And you're done. That's it. This rogue doctor is telling us we're all idiots and then he compared what you do in the pandemic to what you do in normal times when you have all the time in the world and millions of people are not potentially dying and he didn't know the difference. He acted as though that was a perfectly reasonable thing to do. And I have to tell you that he was talking to Brett Weinstein and Brett did not call him on it. He didn't call him on that. I don't know why. I'd love to ask him that question like why you didn't call him on the wrong comparison because that's a really big problem. That's the biggest problem you could ever have. Comparing the wrong things is like the worst analytical problem you could have and he did that. He compared the wrong things.

So let me ask you this question. Suppose you knew, and we don't know this right, this is purely hypothetical. Suppose the vaccination people had told you, and since this didn't happen you don't have to treat this like it's real right. Suppose the vaccine people had said well bad news people we can tell already it's easy to tell that these vaccinations are going to kill tens of thousands of people. Normally we'd hope to keep that under a thousand. We would never approve anything we thought was going to kill more than a thousand people. I'm making up the numbers. These are just made up numbers to give you a sense of the argument. But because it's an emergency and because we think the downside risk is 100 million deaths, again whatever that number is, if they said to you we're going to give you a vaccination but I got to tell you tens of thousands of people are likely to die from this but there's a really high chance we're going to save 100 million. If you're one of the 10,000 it was the wrong decision for you no doubt about it and we won't sugarcoat it. If you're one of the unlucky ones you would have been better off with COVID probably it's just true. But these are not normal times. This is war. You know it's a pandemic. It's a crisis. And in this one situation we offer you this proposition. We can give you something that's way safer than getting the virus and it looks like you're all going to get it. You're all going to get that virus eventually. It'll be way safer than the virus itself but also way more dangerous than any vaccination we've ever given. How would you receive that?

In the comments would you say fair enough you have disclosed exactly all the information. I will now choose to get it or not get it but I'm good with you. That's my only choice. I'll make a choice. What do you think? Fair or no? Because I think that's what happened without the disclosure. I'll give you my current best thinking subject to modification right. So if you come back to me later and say Scott you were wrong about that I'll say yeah I thought it might have been. I thought I might have been.

Here's what I think. I think that these vaccinations we always knew were substantially more dangerous than normal approved medicines of any kind. How many of you would agree with the speculation there? It's just speculation because I don't have data to back that up but would you agree that the experts did know early on it was substantially, maybe even 10 times, you know whatever substantial means to you. I'd say maybe even 10 times more dangerous than an ordinary medicine. And that the proposition is it's still better, way better in terms of overall risk management. Not for an individual and this is important for the crowd right. So it still might be worth it for the crowd and for the nation but for an individual you're going to kill some in some cases yeah. And of course the trade-off is completely unknown because you don't know the long haul. You don't know the long haul of the vaccination. You don't know the long haul of the COVID itself. All of our data is sketchy. Who knows what the variants are going to do to you? Who knows what having these vaccines are going to do to you?

So in the context of all those unknowns if the only thing you were confident of is that the vaccines would kill tens of thousands but probably save a hundred million would you be okay with it? I don't think any of you would be okay with it being forced or mandated but I bet a lot of you would be okay with it as a voluntary thing.

Now I get mocked quite a bit by the anti-vaxxers for choosing to get vaccinated and sometimes I fight back more aggressively because my opinion it's you know my choice not yours everybody's different blah blah. But one of the larger reasons that I decided to get vaccinated was a public good that I could maybe, and again we're all guessing because we don't know for sure, but my best guess is that I could maybe on average would reduce the load on hospitals if I got vaccinated. Now I'm at a certain age where if I die tomorrow I'd be okay with that. I feel like I had a good run. You know I'm reaching the age where you say well you know if it happens now it happens. So very much a big part of my decision was not personal. I felt like it was a World War II join the army situation. Is joining the military good for you individually if you're a soldier? Probably not.

You got duped Cassandra you're an, I'm gonna block you because if you know I got duped Cassandra I'm gonna get rid of you. You put that user in timeout. Yeah you're just an. All right now you could suspect that I got duped and you could be right. I wouldn't even push back on that. But if you say you got duped well you're just an. That's just behavior. That's not an opinion. That's not new information. That's just being an. So go be an like Anomaly. You know you could join his live streams then all the could be in the same place.

All right Ukraine is looking dangerous. So we've got 200,000 Russian troops poised there looking like they're going to invade. I still say they're not going to because it would be suicide not only for the troops because what kind of weapons do you think Ukraine would instantly get if there were ground troops? What kind of air cover would they get? I don't know