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Feb. 17, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:21:21
Episode 419 Scott Adams: How to Spot a Hoax, Distinguish Good News From Bad and See the Future
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Time Text
Hey everybody, come on in here.
Annie, I see you.
Come on in here. Make sure you've got a beverage with you.
You early birds, you get extra attention.
Jimmy, Nancy, Ray, come on in here.
Oh, the news is sort of fun today, isn't it?
It's fun news. Yeah.
All right. I think it's time for your favorite part of the day.
I like to call it Coffee with Scott Adams, and specifically something called the Simultaneous Sip.
Oh, yeah. Grab your mug, grab your glass, your stein, your chalice, your thermos, if you will.
Fill it with your favorite liquid, I like coffee, and join me for the simultaneous sip.
Ah, delightful.
So, let's talk about the news.
Kelsey Grammer, It was quoted talking about Roseanne Barr, or just Roseanne I guess, saying if we don't accept apologies, how does anybody ever make amends?
I tweeted that around because I agree.
Do you want to live in a world where an apology doesn't mean anything?
Think about that. Every time you don't accept an apology, you create a world where apologies don't mean anything.
And that's going to come back to you.
So in my opinion, we should be a little more gracious about letting people improve, letting people clarify, let people apologize when they've offended.
There's some word-thinking news.
Mostly on the anti-Trump side.
And word thinking is my own phrase.
And it applies to where somebody's trying to turn a choice of words into a story.
When there's nothing really there except a choice of words.
So you see the news do this a lot.
The current choice of words they're turning into a story is the president talking about his emergency declaration for the border security.
And he said when he was talking about it, quote, I didn't need to do it.
So now the anti-Trumpers are saying, what?
Obviously he's lying about it being an emergency because now he's saying he didn't need to do it.
Well, in context, I think everybody understands what he meant.
Meaning that he had some other money funding options.
He could have fought it a different way.
You don't need to do anything.
So they've turned, didn't need to do it, into a criticism of the fact that it's declared an emergency, when in fact we've all been educated that this emergency thing doesn't really mean that it's the only thing happening and it's the biggest emergency in the world, and that the world must stop unless you do one thing about it.
That's not what an emergency is in this context.
It's just something very important.
And the president thought that taking care of it sooner was better than waiting.
He could have waited to deal with the emergency.
He had that option, but he didn't want to wait.
So there's literally nothing to the story, but they're trying to make a story out of a choice of words.
You see that a lot. Now, on that same point, should we be happy or unhappy to live in a world in which, in order to generate news, Because there wasn't enough bad news, apparently.
In order to generate news, they had to manufacture news out of a word choice.
That's a pretty good world, right?
Because if something had blown up that day, nobody would be talking about a choice of words.
It wouldn't mean anything.
Likewise, Larry Elder had a great observation about the Jussie Smollett incident.
And his observation was we should be reporting it as good news that the most notable example of racial discrimination, especially in the violent category, the most famous example of it at the moment apparently didn't even happen.
If you have to make up news about racial events, We're living in a much better world than maybe we're giving, you know, that we're understanding.
And I always go back to Mark Dwayne's famous quote that we humans can't tell the difference between good news and bad.
Now, I made the same observation when the president was being accused of insulting black women.
So you remember there was about a week where the news cycle said, hey, the president keeps criticizing black women.
Is it a coincidence?
Could it be a coincidence that he always seems to be going after black women in his criticisms?
Well, first of all, it's stupid because he goes after absolutely everybody.
It doesn't take you much work to Google anything about the president and see that he goes hard at literally everybody.
Here's the good news.
The good news is that there were so many highly successful black women in high-level jobs that they were part of the targets at now.
That's nothing but good news.
The reason he was criticizing black women is that those particular black women are killing it in their careers.
They're absolutely slaying it in terms of success.
They had reached a level where the President of the United States was personally talking about them.
Now, it was a criticism, but that's sort of what he does, right, if you're on the other team.
It was hard for me to see that as anything but the best news ever.
It's like, if black women are killing it in their careers, so much so that the president has to talk about them, it's hard for me to see that as everything going to hell.
That looks pretty good to me.
Alright, so congratulations to black women who are doing great at the highest levels.
So, don't confuse your good news for your bad news.
In the news, we're talking about the El Chapo law that Ted Cruz has suggested, where we take El Chapo's captured drug money and use it for the wall.
But apparently there is no such thing as captured El Chapo drug money.
It's not like he had a banking account at Chase and they just froze it.
So nobody has any of El Chapo's money.
That money exists somewhere.
But here's the fun part. Does the United States know...
Which Mexican government officials...
You're going to love this point.
Does the United States know which government officials in Mexico have accepted bribes from the cartels?
Oh, I'll bet we do.
Don't you think?
Because those bribes are probably going into something like bank accounts, right?
The mayor of some border town in Mexico...
That mayor probably doesn't have any complicated ways to launder his money.
Probably we could just look at their bank accounts and say, okay, he's the mayor, his salary is this much, he deposited this much.
Probably a cartel situation.
So, here's the question.
What would happen if we started seizing the bank accounts Of Mexican government officials that we know to be taking bribes.
That would sort of be Mexico paying for the wall, wouldn't it?
Now, so the question is, I'm not suggesting that's a good idea, because I'm sure there are complications there.
But I'm going to ask the question.
I'll put it in the form of a question.
Does the United States have a pretty good idea which government officials are on the take?
And if we do, well, maybe we ought to just float a trial balloon and see if we can freeze one of their bank accounts and see if we can get at it.
Maybe just see if we can get at it.
Because you probably don't need to do all of them.
You could just test it with one.
Just pick a mayor, pick a chief of police, and just say, all right, We're going to just test this out.
It's obvious you're taking bribes.
Now we're going to take your money.
Because I don't know how easy it is to launder money these days unless you're a major player.
If you're just a chief of police or a mayor, can you figure out how to launder money in a way that the government of the United States can't identify it?
I don't know. So, let's talk about...
Hoaxes and how to identify them.
We're going to go to the whiteboard in a moment.
But I know you want to talk about the Jussie Smollett incident, which is a rare double hoax.
It's a double hoax.
Most of you watching this periscope have been hoaxed by the Jussie Smollett situation.
And what you're thinking when I said that was, oh, no, you don't mean us.
You mean the people who believed in this story about the, you know, that the people who believed that there were Trump supporters wearing MAGA hats attacking him.
If you ever believe that story, you're the one who got hoaxed, right?
But did you know this Malay never made the claim that anybody attacking him was wearing a MAGA hat?
Did you know that?
Did you know that Jesse Smollet never made the claim that anybody yelled, this is MAGA country?
Did you know that?
I didn't know it until this morning.
I had been reading social media, and I believe the story was that Smollet had claimed that somebody wearing a MAGA hat yelled, this is MAGA country, and beat him up.
That never happened.
I was totally hoaxed.
Now, in my defense, I wasn't really following the story.
So I hadn't read, I don't know if I'd even read any of the full news reports.
I'd just been watching it on social media and what people said about it.
And I did believe that that was the story.
I thought that the news was reporting that That Smollet had said these people were wearing MAGA hats and yelling, this is MAGA country.
Never happened. Complete fake news.
So this is a double hoax.
The first hoax is on the Trump supporters because there was no story in which Smollet claimed Trump supporters attacked him.
It literally never happened.
There was A unnamed person, a source, CNN says he did.
No, they did not.
If you believe that CNN claimed, that Smollett had claimed, that they were wearing hats or that they yelled MAGA country, go look for it and see if you can find it.
I don't think you'll find it.
Because I looked for it and couldn't find it, and I thought, well, what's happening here?
My world is unraveling because I thought that was the story, and then I looked for it and couldn't find it.
Now, you may have seen a pundit say it.
You know, that's possible.
But in terms of news reporting, they would have reported that maybe a source said it, But I'll bet you they did not report.
And if they did, send it to me.
If there's anybody who's not a pundit, who is, let's say, more identified with actually the news on CNN, somebody says he did say it in his interview, I don't think you can find a link to that.
Somebody's wrong here. And now some of you are saying he said it on Good Morning America.
Send me a link to that.
I saw him say it later.
Well, isn't this interesting?
Interesting.
Isn't this interesting?
See how many of you are living in a different reality.
Now let me say...
That the news I'm reading this morning is clarifying that he never said it.
But is the news this morning correct?
Or was it the news before?
Now people are saying he said it in an ABC interview.
So let's test that.
Let's see. ABC. Actually, why didn't somebody tweet that at me right now?
And you can tweet me to the link, and then we can find out for sure.
So tweet that at me.
Oh, here it is. It's already here.
Let's play it. Let's see.
Let me see if I can play that for you.
Now, this would be kind of interesting, right?
So there are people saying that he said it 100%, and you could be right.
There are enough of you saying it that I'm starting to...
To assume that you must have heard it.
So let's play it.
This is even better if he didn't say it.
Maybe it's a triple hoax. So this is a site called Vulture.
Vulture. February 14th, they say Jussie Smollett details assaults as attackers yelled, this is MAGA country.
So Vulture is reporting it.
I'm looking at the quote.
I'm looking at the quote.
So he arrived home.
Just seeing if it says...
He said, I heard Empire, and I don't answer to Empire.
My name is an Empire. I kept walking, and then I heard faggot Empire N-word.
So I turned around, and then I said, fuck you, did you say that?
And then I said, see the attacker's mask?
And he said, this is MAGA country, N-word.
Interesting. Interesting.
So let me reverse what I just said.
Yeah. So I had just read an article that said the opposite before I got on here live.
So there might be a triple hoax going on here.
He didn't say it.
His manager did.
Somebody's saying it.
Well, I just read the quote from Vulture that says he said it.
Oh, reportedly his manager confirmed he heard it while he was on the phone during the attack.
Could it be that Smollet was...
It's possible that he was reacting to what the manager said.
All right. So the...
So this is fascinating because as soon as I heard the news that CNN was reporting that he had maybe not been attacked and that maybe it was being investigated as a hoax, I looked to CNN to see the reporting of the corrected news.
And as Don Jr.
had said on the internet, we're waiting for CNN to say that the news was wrong and it was never a MAGA thing, but they never even mentioned the original MAGA reference.
And I kept looking on CNN for that.
And so I thought, well, why is the most obvious part of the story not there?
Did anybody have that same experience?
You go to CNN, you go, oh, what are they going to say about the fact that That it had been claimed it was a MAGA event and now it looks like it probably wasn't.
How did they handle that?
And they simply didn't mention it.
And I thought to myself, Well, why would that not mention it?
So then I went over to TMZ, and on TMZ, which was maybe the first one to report it, or among the first, on TMZ, the way they reported it is that a source said that somebody yelled, this is MAGA country.
But they clarified there was nothing about a hat.
So would you agree...
How many of you thought the story was that the two assaulters, alleged assaulters, had a hat?
Would you all agree that there were no red hats and that that part was never true?
He never claimed they were wearing a hat.
The rope was a pentuple hoax.
Yes.
Alright, so I think as...
So here's what we think we know.
So what we think we know is that there was some fake news that said that he had reported they were wearing a MAGA hat.
That part was always fake news.
So there was never a MAGA hat.
He did not report that in the beginning, and he did not say it later.
There was also the report about whether or not he's the one who said, this is MAGA country, but now you've confirmed by showing me the interview, that in his interview with Good Morning America, he did say that.
So if he did say that, It is absolutely disgusting that CNN doesn't mention it.
Alright, is CNN gaslighting us?
No, nobody's gaslighting anybody ever.
That's not a real thing.
Let us talk about ways to identify A hoax.
Now, in my case, there was a piece of information I didn't have.
So the information is that he gave an interview in which he specifically said, he specifically made that claim that I hadn't heard yet, and it wasn't on CNN. Alright, so here are some tips for identifying a hoax.
First thing I'm going to say about that is that Somebody saying they did have red hats and they know where they bought them?
I don't know. You better check that fact.
So I'm not going to claim that there's science behind these tips.
I will claim that after a lifetime of watching hoaxes evolve, That these seem to be useful ways to, you know, identify them in advance.
So let's talk about them.
They're not 100%. It's not like every one of these works every time.
But these are the flags you should be looking at.
Number one, anonymous source.
If there's an anonymous source and it's about politics, Probably is wrong.
The Smollet original story about the attacker yelling, this is MAGA country, was originally an anonymous source.
So before you pointed me to the Good Morning America source, which is not anonymous because he said it himself, the anonymous source should not have been trusted.
So the first anonymous source should not have been trusted.
Second is, is the story by its nature one of those, my God, I can't believe it kinds of stories?
And whenever you see that, you should say to yourself, okay, on the surface, the fact that this story is a hard-to-believe story probably makes it 85% likely to be untrue.
Let me give you an example. Here's a story in the news that on its surface feels like it's unlikely to be true.
The President of the United States is a Russian puppet.
Now, without knowing any information, with no evidence whatsoever, if somebody just told you that, the President of the United States is working for Russia.
There's an 85% chance that's false before you've heard any information.
Because stories like that, and by like that I mean on the surface you say to yourself, I don't think that's true.
Before you've heard any evidence, it doesn't matter what the story is, if your first reaction is, I don't believe that, you're right 85% of the time, no matter what comes out later.
Now there's a reason for that.
There's actually a well-documented effect.
The reason that something becomes national news is that it captures our attention.
The things that capture our attention are the things that are most unusual and out of character.
The most weird, hard-to-believe stories, they're the ones that rise to the top because they're so interesting.
And those stories, if you were to track them over time, you would find that they're almost always wrong.
So the fact that it was unbelievable on its surface probably makes it wrong.
Here's another one. Hillary Clinton sold our valuable uranium to our biggest military foe, Russia.
Now, when you hear that story, your first impression should be, that doesn't sound right.
I don't think so.
And sure enough, there have been no charges ever filed about that.
So chances are there was never anything to it from the beginning.
Again, it's an 85% rule.
There's a good chance it's true.
15%. That's a solid chance that it's true.
But your first reaction should be, if it sounds ridiculous, probably not true.
All right. This one is my favorite one.
Other people can't see it.
It's invisible to other people.
Now, it kind of depends how many other people.
If a million people can see something and three people can't, well, I'd go with a million.
But if half of the people in the room can see something, clear is the nose on their face, and the other half are looking at exactly the same stuff and they're saying, I don't see it.
It's probably the people who didn't see it.
You should always bet on the people who don't see it.
Let's take chemtrails.
Chemtrails. Do we have any sources on the record to talk about chemtrails?
I don't think so, right? Is it hard to believe?
Is it hard to believe that the government is doing secret things with planes to gas the citizens for something?
Well, that would be really hard to believe, which means it's probably not true.
And others can't see it.
In other words, when I look at the chemtrails stories, I go, I don't see it.
It doesn't look real to me.
All right. Also, is there an ordinary explanation that fits the facts better?
Now, one ordinary explanation for things is that it didn't happen.
So if you look at the Jussie Smollett situation, it would be remarkable if he had really been attacked by two random people yelling, this is MAGA country.
Not impossible.
There's nothing about that that's impossible.
But when you first heard it, didn't you have the, I don't know about that, reaction?
Wasn't your first reaction about Jussie Smollett, I'm not so sure.
Probably was.
The ordinary explanation is people make stuff up.
The ordinary explanation is, well, that didn't happen.
That's always the most ordinary explanation is, oh, the news is wrong.
How often is the news wrong?
Somebody says, I keep mispronouncing his name.
I don't really care.
I'm not sure he's earned a correctly pronounced name.
Has he earned that?
I'm not so sure. All right.
And then there's the gal man...
The Gelman Amnesia Effect.
How many of you have heard of that?
It's one of the most important things to know.
And it works like this.
And I will read...
I don't have any more.
So, the Gelman Amnesia Effect has to do with a famous physicist named Gelman.
And he noticed that when he watched the news about physics, an area that he understood the best, the news was always wrong.
But as soon as he turned the page to something he wasn't an expert on, let's say the Palestinian situation or anything else, he couldn't tell if any other news was wrong.
But whenever he looked at news about physics, he could tell, and it was pretty much always wrong.
So he finally asked himself, why do I forget that lesson that the only thing I know about is coincidentally always wrong?
Why would I believe the rest of it?
What would make me think the rest of the news is any more accurate than that one little slice that I can determine with certainty is wrong?
This is very important, and I gave you an example yesterday.
So yesterday there was an article in a publication called The Verge.
V-E-R-G-E. There was an article that included something about me.
The article was about Carpe Donctum and his meme getting retweeted by the President.
And in the story, they refer to me as a far-right personality, which is completely wrong.
I'm left of Bernie, I say so often.
I have an audience that is mostly right of center, but that's different from what I am.
So the one piece of information in this article that I can validate beyond any doubt is their description of me, and it was wrong.
So whenever I see an article about me, I can tell how wrong it is, and it's wrong so often, it's just laughable.
But if you're not a subject of the news and you don't have an expertise that you can validate whether the news is correct or not, you don't have any way of understanding how inaccurate the news is.
So the first thing you have to know about the Gilman amnesia is that you should assume that the news is wildly inaccurate Often.
That's the lesson. It's wildly inaccurate often.
That should be your starting point.
So let's say you hear a piece of news and you say to yourself, well, let's go down some examples.
I'm going to take a little detour here.
Are there any potential stories that you would like to test against the filter?
Is there anything that you'd like me to run through the filter to determine whether it looks more like a hoax or more like a real story?
Let's take Pizzagate or Sandy Hook.
So Pizzagate, Sandy Hook, I think they pretty much all fail these What would be the most common explanation?
For the Pizzagate coincidences that seem to indicate there was some massive pedophile ring.
The most common explanation would be it's just a bunch of coincidences that people have picked out.
And if you'd seen the whole situation, you would see that it's just a situation with a lot of coincidences.
The moon landing.
All right, the moon landing.
There was no anonymous source.
Is it hard to believe that we landed on the moon?
Well, that doesn't seem hard to believe because we're sending stuff into space all the time.
We've got satellites. We watched it on video, even if you think the video is faked.
None of the astronauts have come out and broken ranks and said, ah, we faked it.
There were a lot of people who would have been involved And it would be weird if none of them said it.
The most ordinary explanation is that it was just what you saw.
That would be the ordinary one.
It would be extraordinary if we faked it and got away with it.
That would be extraordinary.
Somebody said 9-11 as an inside job.
Well, so we don't have any...
I don't think we have any anonymous sources involved in that.
If we do, don't believe them.
The hard-to-believe story...
Would it be hard to believe that the United States flew two jets into its own assets, meaning something in the United States, killed 3,000 people just to give us an excuse for war?
That would be extraordinary.
What would be a more reasonable explanation?
The most reasonable explanation is it's just what you saw.
The most reasonable explanation, somebody saying jet fuel melting steel beams.
So it's funny you would ask that because yesterday somebody was tweeting around a picture from the California forest fires.
And the California forest fires pictures in the aftermath showed a gigantic steel beam that had melted in just the ordinary fire.
And somebody said, jet fuel can't melt beams.
No jet fuel here.
It was just fire that melted this beam.
So the most ordinary explanation is that it's exactly what you thought and the plane said it.
It's also the other people can't see it part.
Now Building 7 stands on its own.
Building 7 does not have to be explained by whether there was a terror attack or not a terror attack.
Because the essence of that conspiracy theory is that Building 7 was brought down because there might have been something in there that somebody didn't want to see.
I don't know some anyway there's nothing about that story that sells me on it but I couldn't rule out anything either well here's the thing
If you have engineers who say everything made sense, and you have other engineers who say this could never have happened, I would believe the engineers who say it makes sense, that everything could have happened just the way it was reported.
The coup. Oh, the direct energy weapons.
Yeah, the directed energy weapon, you know, the acoustic weapon that was allegedly used at the embassies, that's a good example of something that it would be amazing if that were true, which makes it almost certainly not true.
But Building 7 lends credence to 1 and 2.
Not really. Not really.
I think Building 7 has to be its own question.
I need to watch more YouTube.
Well, I'm not saying that conspiracy theories are not persuasive.
The we are all in a simulation hoax.
Well, the we are all in a simulation argument is based on statistics and math.
Sorry, I've got terrible allergies today.
Did you see the story about the AI group?
I guess you'd call it a startup.
So Elon Musk and Sam Altman and somebody else, Peter Thiel maybe?
I can't remember, are backing an AI startup which produced such good artificial intelligence that it could write prose that you can't distinguish from a person.
And here's the fun part of the story.
It was so good That they decided not to release it because it was dangerous.
Meaning that they didn't know what was going to happen to humanity if they released an AI that was so powerful it looked just like people.
That is a scary, scary thing and fun at the same time, but it sort of tells you where things are going.
All right. We talked about...
Have you tried affirmations on your allergies?
My allergies will only last for a few hours in the morning, and then I'll take care of them.
I do have meds for it.
I just take them after I do this.
The meds...
Well, you don't need to know the details, but I don't have allergies in the afternoon, typically.
All right... That sounds a little fake.
Don't know which one you're talking about.
Oh, how about Danny Williams, Clinton's black son?
Does it pass the hoax test?
Well, first of all, would it be an amazing story if Bill Clinton had fathered somebody out of wedlock?
Not really, right?
That would be sort of normal.
So I would say that the Danny story is more credible than most, given especially that he looks exactly like Bill Clinton, which would be a weird coincidence.
Q, definitely a hoax.
Yeah, so I would say the 9-11, as a false flag attack...
I would call that a hoax.
But Building 7, that's its own story.
And I would say that's, well, maybe.
We may have had to destroy something for some reason that we don't understand, but I would say that's far from proven.
Oh, what about the theory that Justin...
What's his last name? Justin, the Prime Minister of Canada.
What about the theory that Castro is his father?
I would say the odds of that are very good.
If you've seen the pictures of a young Castro and a young Justin...
Why am I forgetting his last name?
They look like the same person.
Justin Trudeau, yeah. If you see Justin Trudeau as a teenager and then a picture of Fidel Castro as a teenager, they're kind of the same person.
The Obama birth certificate.
Obama is a citizen, but I do not rule out that there might be something unusual about his birth certificate.
But I do rule out any notion that he's not an American citizen.
Seth Rich. Well, let's look at the filter.
Do we have an anonymous source about Seth Rich?
We do not. Is it a hard to believe story?
It is. It's pretty hard to believe that Hillary Clinton ordered a hit on an American citizen, especially one of her own people.
That's hard to believe.
All right. Others can't see it.
Correct. There are tons of people who have looked at all the same information and said, no, that doesn't look convincing.
So if half of the country can't see it, that should tell you something.
Is there an ordinary explanation that fits the facts?
Yes. He got killed by somebody who had a reason, but the reason was not robbery.
Or he got killed because of an attempted robbery, but the killer didn't want to wait around after the shot and ran away.
So I would say the Seth Rich thing...
it definitely fits more likely a hoax than not so whenever you're saying to yourself so if that's not a real story then why did this happen If the answer to all of those questions is, I don't know, could be a reason.
Somebody says, Scott is just naive.
Um...
I'm going to start blocking people for calling me naive.
I could certainly be wrong, and I could certainly be under-informed.
But naive is really sort of personal.
So if you say there's something I don't know, and then you tell me what that is, I would say that's a fair comment.
But if you're saying, I'm naive, that's sort of a surrender.
So that's sort of a tell that you don't have an argument.
If you say, but Scott, look at this link, I'd say, well, maybe you have something.
I'll look at the link. If you say, Scott, your logic is wrong and here's why, I'd say, well, maybe you have something.
But when you just say, Scott, you're naive, it means you don't have anything, right?
So up your game.
Can we call you an apologist?
Apologists get blocked, people who call me that.
Explain birth certificate is maybe false, but he's a citizen born here or not.
I'm just saying that there may be some issue with the birth certificate, which doesn't necessarily mean it's fake.
But there may be an irregularity involved there.
That doesn't mean anything.
Probably there are a lot of public records that have irregularities.
Somebody says, young Fidel does not look like Justin.
What was that? Are the pictures of them side by side?
Hoax pictures? Because they might be.
Which would be funny.
If the pictures I've seen of a young Castro and a young Justin Trudeau are not real pictures, you know, if they're altered or they're somebody else, then I will change my opinion.
Do you think Julian Assange would have mentioned Seth Rich if there was nothing there?
That's a good question.
You can't rule out that Assange was trying to redirect our attention.
So is there a reason that Assange would suggest that Seth Rich was the source when Seth Rich was not the source?
Is there any explanation of why he would do that?
And the answer is, yeah, to protect his actual source.
There is a reason.
I'm not suggesting that he did that.
I'm just saying there's a reason.
And it would be sort of a normal reason, right?
It's pretty normal to say, hey, look over there.
That would be just a totally normal reason.
When does my book come out?
Probably October.
WMDs in Iraq.
So we had biased sources, people who had something to gain by telling us there were WMD in Iraq.
We had... It wasn't hard to believe, so it was a believable story.
Could others see it?
Well, others didn't have access to all the information, so that one doesn't count.
Is there an ordinary explanation that fits the facts?
Yes, there was. The ordinary explanation is that the government was lying to you.
What is more ordinary than the government is lying to you?
It's the most ordinary explanation.
And what about the Gelman amnesia, where you imagine that the news is accurate on the things you don't understand?
Well, that one's sort of applicable, because didn't you look at all the information about WMD in Iraq and say, well, I don't know, but they seem to know, and why would this be wrong?
And the answer is, the news is wrong about everything.
If you thought that the one thing the news was right about was WMD in Iraq, that would be the hardest thing to know.
So we should have had our antenna up because there was so much certainty about something you couldn't be certain about.
Somebody got temporarily blocked from commenting.
That was not anything I did.
Is Russiagate the biggest hoax in history?
Well, maybe.
Yeah, the Russia thing certainly fits the hoax scenario.
Is Michelle Obama really a man?
No. Somebody's talking about...
So Joe Rogan got a lot of heat recently for his interview with Jack Dorsey.
And that caused a lot of people to be mad at him in general.
The thing I love about Joe Rogan is that he's not afraid of anything.
You see it in his career.
You see it in his hobbies.
You see it...
In every part of his being, he's just less afraid of stuff than you are.
He's certainly less afraid of stuff than I am.
He does stuff that other people wouldn't do because he's just less afraid and it serves him well.
Now when you are less afraid to say things, less afraid to put yourself out there with an opinion, you're going to create a body of work that includes some stuff where you were wrong.
You noticed that in the beginning of this periscope, right?
So if you put yourself out there, as I do, it comes with the territory that you're going to be publicly and embarrassingly wrong on a fairly regular basis.
So if you say that he's crazy or wrong about some particular topic or not, you might be right, you might be wrong.
But it doesn't change what we love about Joe Rogan.
What we love about him is that when you see his opinion, it's going to be honest.
How many people do you watch in any public sense that when he or she expresses an opinion, you at least know it's honest?
It could be wrong.
It could be right.
But at least it's an actual opinion.
That's actually kind of rare.
And I would say that Rogan's popularity is completely earned.
He earned it by putting himself out there, taking the risk, being wrong when he's wrong, correcting when he needs to correct.
He apologizes when he needs to apologize.
But he sort of, he lives a less risk-averse life than most of us.
And you're just seeing the natural output from that.
Gulf of Tonkin, yeah, that's a good example of the government lying to its people.
Microdosing?
I don't know about that.
Microdosing?
I don't know about that.
JFK assassination conspiracy.
Well, The JFK thing is really sort of a special case because the event that we know happened is so unusual that it's already into hard-to-believe category, even though we know it happened. But there were enough people who wanted to kill Kennedy who had the means.
I mean, the thing that was different about Kennedy is so many people wanted to kill him.
LBJ, maybe CIA, maybe Hoover, maybe the Russians.
So I would say the probable explanation for the JFK murder is that it was Oswald working on his own.
That's the probable explanation.
But I would say in this one case, you couldn't completely rule out any other involvement.
You really couldn't. I see people asking me to focus my talents on debunking Charlottesville.
I am doing just that.
So do you remember yesterday I said I'm a sort of a public figure and I'm going to say an outrageous thing and watch it not be reported in the news.
And so I did this experiment right in front of you, and so far so good.
And what I said was that a major news story that has been reported as fact for three years, meaning that the idea that the president called white supremacists fine people, that that fake news I'm going to call out as a hoax in public, You know, on Periscope.
And that you could watch as that is not reported in any other anti-Trump.
You know, it might be reported in some conservative thing.
But watch how it's ignored by the anti-Trump media.
And ask yourself, is there any other situation in which a public figure, somebody who's at least as public as I am, could call a major news story that's considered a fact...
Could call that a hoax and give reasons, and it's not reported.
It's pretty unusual.
And so I told you I was going to do it right in front of you.
I'd say it again. The Charlottesville story is a hoax, the way it has been reported on CNN and MSNBC. Because the president was obviously, if you step back a little bit, it's obvious that when he said there were fine people on both sides, he meant both sides of the statue question.
And indeed, there are fine people on both sides of the statue question.
But there are no fine people who are marching with torches and saying anti-Semitic things.
So to imagine that the president was talking about that group Is false.
It's ridiculous.
It's defining our...
It defines the Trump derangement syndrome.
It's the primary element of Trump derangement syndrome.
So here's somebody saying, so there weren't Nazis in Charlottesville?
Do you have bad reading comprehension, Wayne?
Wayne comes in and he goes, so...
So are you saying there were no Nazis in Charlottesville?
No Wayne. I said the opposite of that.
Notice how you can't actually hear it.
So the people who are experiencing cognitive dissonance, when I tell them, you know it's sort of obvious that he was referring to both sides of the statue question, The first time you hear that, if you're like Wayne, and you're thinking, no, I've been hearing for three years that he was talking about the Nazis, that I can't be wrong about that.
If that happened to you, you saw Wayne just get triggered into cognitive dissonance.
Now, the tell for cognitive dissonance is that you construct a world that tries to make sense without you being wrong.
After you've been proven wrong.
So Wayne is so obviously and clearly wrong because once you hear the explanation it's obvious he didn't mean the Nazis.
I mean the president wasn't talking about the Nazis being good people.
As soon as you hear it You're triggered into cognitive dissonance if you've been listening mostly to that as reported as fact for three years.
So imagine you're waiting and you heard that it was a fact that the president called the Nazis fine people.
For three years you've been told that's a fact.
And then you hear me tell you in 30 seconds why it's a ridiculous non-fact.
And you know, as soon as you hear me say it, you know my explanation rings true.
You can feel it.
You're like, oh, shoot.
Yes, it is obvious he was talking about both sides of the statue question.
Why is it obvious?
Because he clarified it when asked about it.
And he was very clear. No, I disavow those guys completely.
I'm not talking about them being good people.
Now, has this president ever backed away from a controversial opinion before?
It's not something he does.
If he believed that there were fine people in that group of marching anti-Semites, he would have said so.
Because, remember, there's somebody else here who says you're grasping.
You're grasping.
So that's another person who's triggered into cognitive dissonance.
And you can watch it here in real time.
So Wayne, you have something to struggle with.
You have to struggle with why.
Let's look at the hoax identification here.
Let's take Charlottesville as an example.
So there weren't any anonymous sources involved because it was a public event.
Is it hard to believe that a sitting president decided to consciously praise Racists were marching against his own family.
They were chanting against Trump's own family.
And do you believe that he went on television for the people who hate his family and said, oh, there's some good people in the group who hate my family and hate all, you know, all people who are not white, I guess.
Is that likely? No, that would be the most hard-to-believe story of all time.
So that should have been your first tip, Wayne.
Wayne, when you saw that tip, as soon as you saw the story, you should have said to yourself, well, that doesn't sound right.
Then there's the others can't see it.
Most of the people on this periscope Can't see what you see, Wayne.
We're looking at exactly the same story and we don't see it.
If there's somebody who sees it and somebody who can't see it and you know you're looking at the same stuff, generally you want to believe the people who couldn't see it.
Is there an ordinary explanation that fits the facts?
Well, yes there is. The most ordinary explanation is that he was talking about both sides of the statute question.
What would be more ordinary than talking about the topic exactly the way he always talked about the topic?
That's the most ordinary explanation.
Yeah, I was talking about both sides of the statute question, and then when you asked me, I clarified it.
Totally ordinary, right?
And then there's the Gelman amnesia effect.
Wayne... If you were famous, as I am, or if you were an expert on a topic that the news covers, you would understand how often the news is wrong.
Wayne, you may be hypnotized by the news into thinking that they're usually right.
Oh yes, sometimes they're wrong, but they're usually right.
That's reverse, Wayne.
Turn that upside down. The news is usually wrong.
The news is usually wrong.
How do I know that? Just talk to anybody who is an expert on whatever the topic is that the news is talking about.
If you find somebody who is personally involved, somebody who is an expert on that, somebody who is actually the subject of the reporting, ask them how accurate the news is.
It's wrong about 85% of the time.
So, Wayne, you fell for a hoax, and you're experiencing some cognitive dissonance right now.
And so you're saying things like, are you saying there were no Nazis there?
That's your tell.
Because clearly nobody said that.
You're actually imagining something that didn't happen because that's what cognitive dissonance does.
It changes your argument until you can be right about something.
So you're trying to be right about the attendance of neo-Nazis.
Never was part of the question ever.
Everybody saw it on TV. We all agree that there were Nazis there.
Wayne. I want to tell you about an interesting experiment I did that maybe you can try at home.
And it goes like this. Have you gotten in a debate with somebody where it's sort of like whack-a-mole and they'll make a claim and then you'll debunk it?
And once you debunk their claim, and let's say there's a link and it's just clearly debunked.
What does the person you're arguing with do when you have thoroughly debunked their best point about a topic?
Do they change their mind?
No, never. What they do is they go to their second point.
If you can debunk that, they'll go to their third point, and if you can debunk that, their fourth, etc.
Eventually they'll run out of points.
Once you have debunked all of somebody's points, let's say there are five good points of whatever their opinion is, and you debunk all five, what do they do?
And I'm wondering if you've noticed.
Do they change their mind?
Because they had five points and you debunk them in order.
They do not. They start over on the top.
They start at the top of the list as if you hadn't ever talked about it.
And it was only like five minutes ago.
And they just go back to the top and you go, what's going on here?
I just debunked that.
So I did an experiment the other day and I'm not going to give you any details of it.
I'm just going to describe it in a general way.
I was in that situation where I was going through the five and then they were just repeating.
And I said, I'm going to try an experiment.
And the experiment goes like this.
I'm going to write down what I say about the first item on the list, and it's going to be on this piece of paper.
I'm going to show you what I wrote down.
I'm going to make you repeat it out loud so that you know what I wrote down.
And then I'm going to say, I'm going to make you forget what's on this piece of paper, just one sentence.
Just one sentence on the topic.
I'm going to make you forget this within two minutes.
And I fold it up and I put it down.
And then I go through the list.
I go, debunk this, debunk this, debunk this.
And then, of course, they looped around to the top of the list.
And I said, wait, why are you talking about this first point Because it's already been debunked.
And the person I'm talking to looked at me as though they didn't know what I was talking about.
And then I took the piece of paper and I said, remember two minutes ago, I said I was going to make you forget what's on this piece of paper.
And I held up the piece of paper and the person looked at it like they'd never seen it before.
And I said, watch this.
I'm going to do it again. Read this piece of paper and I'm going to make you forget it within two minutes.
Put it down, took them back through the five reasons, the same as last time.
All five reasons were debunked.
Person came back to the top one, reiterated the top reason, and I said, did you see what happened?
Do you remember that I just told you I was going to make you forget what's on this piece of paper?
And I could do it repeatedly.
I can do it as many times as we go through the cycle.
And I said, what's on the piece of paper?
And the person couldn't tell me.
And keep in mind that what was on the piece of paper was very simple.
It wasn't the type of thing you can't remember for two minutes.
And then I said, watch me do it a third time.
I went through it a third time and then I said, what's on the piece of paper?
And the person couldn't remember.
And then I did it a fourth time.
Four times. They couldn't remember when they got to the top of the list what was on the paper.
Now, I have imagined that I could reproduce this test before.
I've imagined it, but I never actually did it.
And you have to do it with an actual piece of paper because if you do it with words...
I've tried it with words and it doesn't work.
And the way you do it with words is you'll say, we just talked about this and I already debunked it.
And the person will say, no you didn't.
We didn't talk about this and you didn't debunk it.
So you say, okay, well let me do it now.
Now you remember it, right?
So you don't have to say this again because now we've agreed that that's debunked.
We can talk about your next point.
You can get people to say yes, but when they circle back to that first point, they will swear to you that you never had that conversation.
And it will be as if it's fresh, and they're beginning the conversation anew.
So if you don't write it down, and you don't show it to them, and you don't make them read it out loud, and you don't call it out and say, I'm going to make you forget this in two minutes.
Pull it up, put it aside.
And then take it out in two minutes and say, look, I made you forget that, just like I said.
Try it at home. It's amazing.
I think you'll know when you reach this situation.
Now, as a trained hypnotist, it's not surprising to me.
It played out exactly the way I imagined it would play out.
To you, it will be mind-boggling.
You won't believe what you're seeing right in front of you.
And, of course, it only works if you really can debunk somebody's points.
If you can't debunk them, then maybe the other person's just right.
Who trained you? Well, I'm a trained hypnotist.
I took a hypnosis class when I was in my 20s.
was a course on how to learn to be hypnotist.
You know what?
I'll bet I can do this live.
You know, I'll think about doing this.
I'm going to be taking more I'm gonna be taking more call-ins.
There's a feature that needs to be fixed on this guest feature within Periscope.
So if I invite guests in when I'm in that mode, and you have to put you in that mode before you start the Periscope.
So if you start the Periscope with guests being invited, you can't also tweet it to Twitter.
So people don't know that the Periscope's happening.
So that, you know, I only get half as much traffic when I invite guests.
So as soon as that's handled, then I'll invite more guests.
Yeah, I could definitely do this live.
So the way I'd do it live is I'd say, here's my debunking.
I'm going to write it right here.
And I'll keep it here right behind me.
And then I'll say, I'm going to make you forget this While people are watching, I'll write it on the board and I'll say, watch.
I'm going to make you forget this one sentence here ever happened.
And then I'll do it right in front of you.
It'll be amazing. You won't even believe it.
I swear to God, you will think that I'm working with somebody that I know or something.
You will completely not believe that I'm really doing it.
So we discussed Smollet already at the start.
Schedule it so we know the day or time.
I'm not that well organized.
Can you give a concrete example?
What topic? Yes.
Let's say Russia collusion.
So somebody says...
So somebody says, it's obvious that the president was colluding with Russia.
So you say, what would be your evidence?
And they'll say, well, Manafort did something, or, you know, one of these other players did something.
And you'll say, would you agree that they are not the president?
We'll say, well, yes.
Then you go to point number two.
But Russia, they're trolls.
We're interfering with the election.
Well, do you agree that there's no evidence tying that to the president?
Well, yes, I do. But there's more evidence.
So you can go right through the list, and when you're done, And you've debunked all of them as not relevant to the central point, the claim that the president himself was colluding.
When you get to the point, they will start back up with Manafort.
And you will once again say, but Manafort was doing his own thing, and this does not have any connection to the president that has been demonstrated.
So that would be one.
So you could write that on the board.
I could write, Paul Manafort did his own thing, not related to the president.
I just write it down, take them through the arguments, and at the end they'll come back to Manafort and you'll say, well, you forgot it.
You forgot that one.
Do you think people that do this are stupid?
No. That's the interesting part.
Your reflex When I talk about this is to assume that I'm talking about dumb people, right?
And that's the normal thing.
You think, wow, these people are so dumb.
They can't remember what you said a minute ago.
Unfortunately, intelligence is completely unrelated to what I'm talking about.
And in fact... You could argue that intelligent people are more likely to experience cognitive dissonance because they get a little more, let's say, a little more invested in their own opinion.
So it's harder for them to imagine that they could be wrong.
If you're dumb and somebody corrects you, you probably say to yourself, well, I'm dumb.
I probably got that wrong. I'll just change my mind.
I think dumb people are far more likely to just say, eh, I've been dumb ten times this morning already, so the odds of me being dumb on this are, oh, pretty good.
I'll just change my opinion. Smart people are more likely to argue from cognitive dissonance.
In my experience, I will not claim that as a scientific truth.
Could it be dumb to you?
Yes. So somebody said, could this same experiment be done to me?
And in theory, yes.
Because there's nothing that I'm aware of that would make me extra immune to it.
The only thing that I maybe have as an armor against that is that I assume I could be wrong all the time.
So I try to keep with me the assumption that I could be very wrong.
And by the way, those of you who missed the first part of this periscope got to see it in real time.
I made a clear statement of fact that was completely wrong.
And the commenters pointed it out.
And you saw my reaction in real time.
My reaction in real time is, oh, a bunch of people that disagree with something I'm positive is true.
I'm going to check. And it didn't take more than 30 seconds for someone to send me a link that proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that I was wrong one minute ago.
Completely wrong. About a key fact.
So, I think I can demonstrate that you've seen it live, that I respond to, you know, I respond to new information by changing my mind, and that I went into it, and you saw it in real time, right?
You watched me do it.
You watched me go from complete certainty to, whoa, new information?
Okay, I'm open to that, and then changed my mind right in front of me.
So, if you can't do that, You shouldn't trust your own...
If you haven't watched yourself change your opinion as markedly as I just watched it and you all watched it right in front of you, if you don't have that experience with yourself, I don't know if you can trust your own opinions.
Can people be trained to see being wrong as positive?
I think they can be trained...
To see being wrong as not a damage to who they are.
In other words, they can get their ego out of it, which is just as good.
Engineers do it, wrong is useful.
Yeah, I think it is useful to be wrong.
Because every time you're wrong and you learn it, you learn something about the limitations of your own perceptions.
And that's good. Yeah, I think cognitive dissonance happens when your ego...
Is conflated with who you are.
If you imagine that your sense of your ego is actually the person you are, and your ego and you are basically the same person, you're likely to have more cognitive dissonance, I think.
Because you would more likely want to redefine the world than to imagine that you were wrong about something.
I live a largely ego-free existence, despite all evidence to the contrary.
Because as many of you have pointed out, Scott, you act arrogant and, what's the other word, narcissistic.
And the answer is, of course I do.
Because when that's useful, I ramp up my ego.
And when my ego would be a problem, I intentionally ramp it down.
You saw, again, in the beginning of this periscope, the moment people said, no, you're wrong...
I took my ego offline.
You actually saw it in real time.
When I started the Periscope, was I not full of my usual arrogance and self-confidence, if you want to call it that?
You saw it in live, right?
You saw it in real time.
You saw me come in with my normal level of overconfidence.
That's intentional. If you're going to do this sort of thing, you need to ramp up your confidence a little higher than it is normally.
Because the audience doesn't want to see you lacking confidence.
It's not a fun show.
So, it's a tool.
I ramp up my confidence to do these periscopes.
The moment there was a factual question in play, as in, did I get a fact wrong?
You watched me in real time take my ego offline.
I just took it offline.
I said, maybe, let's look at it.
I allowed that I could be wrong.
And in less than a minute, determined that I was completely wrong.
Completely changed my opinion in real time, right in front of you.
Now the question is, do I feel embarrassed about being so wrong?
Nope. Because my ego is offline.
I took my ego out of that question.
I could be wrong.
You know, being wrong is not something that's going to make me go cry.
I mean, I've been wrong a lot.
Is it a humble brag though?
Yes. Yes it is.
But somewhat unintentional in this particular case.
How do you not feel embarrassment?
Practice. So some of it is practice.
I have embarrassed myself in public more than any of you ever will.
And the more you do it, the more you have this experience.
I embarrassed myself terribly yesterday.
Huh, and yet my coffee tastes exactly the same.
You know, you sort of realize that it's just all in your head and that a day later your body is the same, your life is the same.
Most embarrassments don't make any difference and you learn that over time.
It just takes a long time. The other part of that is putting yourself in embarrassing situations.
So you have to practice embarrassment and practice changing your ego by putting yourself in situations where you have to do that.
One of the things I do is I try to be involved in at least something that I'm unambiguously bad at.
At the moment I'm trying to learn to play the drums.
I am unambiguously bad at music.
So the entire experience of trying to learn the drums is one of ego management, where I have to learn that I'm genuinely bad at this, and then do it anyway, and then kind of live in a world in which everything I do in this realm is embarrassing, and it doesn't matter.
Now, the other good thing for managing your ego is mushrooms.
Now, I'm not recommending anybody take any hallucinogens.
I'm not a doctor, and you should not take recommendations from cartoonists on Periscope.
But, it is nonetheless true that having taken mushrooms only once in my life, but it changes your entire View of reality.
Because when you take mushrooms, you experience a reality in which all the physical stuff is the same.
I would still know what a coffee mug is.
I would still know why it exists.
I understand my environment.
But under mushrooms, you see it as a completely new thing.
And it helps you understand that your ego is a perception.
And that you can re-imagine your entire existence and everything still works.
So if you don't like the way you see your existence, you can actually just reprogram it until it looks different to you.
And you learn that if you've used a hallucinogen.
And you never unlearn that.
It's something you learn from the one experience and you never lose that knowledge.
The knowledge that everything you see is an impression.
It's an interpretation of your world.
And you can just reinterpret it.
Somebody says, I have fermented mushrooms in a jar.
I'm scared to try them.
I don't recommend anybody try mushrooms on their own from some unknown bag of mushrooms.
It's some dangerous stuff.
Did it scare you?
I was afraid of the mushrooms before taking them just because of the unknown but once taken it was nothing but literally the best day of my life and I say that often but it bears repeating the one time I took mushrooms it was the best day of my life but I don't recommend it Alright.
It gives you ego.
Well, that was not my experience.
My experience was that it diminished it.
How old was I? I was 21.
Scott, but what if you had a bad trip?
You know what's interesting?
I believe there is such a thing as bad trips.
I will tell you that anecdotally, I've never heard of anybody having one on mushrooms.
That doesn't mean that it's safe.
You should not take that as evidence that it is.
Likewise, I know quite a few people who have done or continue to do LSD. And I've never actually heard of somebody having a bad experience.
I'm sure it's true.
Clearly there must be people who have had bad experiences.
But it doesn't seem common.
That's all I know for sure.
I can say for sure it's not common.
I can't tell you what the actual risk is.
Why not do it again, if best?
That's a good question. Why would I not do it again?
And the answer is, there's always some risk.
And I believe that the benefits one can get from hallucinogens Come primarily the first time.
I think it's an 80-20 rule.
The first time you do a hallucinogen, you get 80% of the lifetime benefits because you've experienced life through a different filter, maybe for the first time.
And that changes everything about how you process your life from that point on.
And you realize that there's a different way to look at stuff that is also valid.
I wouldn't get that benefit if I did it again.
I would just have a good time, and there might be some extra risk involved, so I would maybe not want to have some extra risk just for a good time.
Your uncle climbed a statue on LSD and broke both legs.
That's why you don't want to do it alone.
Just one reason.
All right.
I saw a guy who was supposedly stuck for life after thinking he's an orange person.
Yeah, it does seem to me that there are real risks.
I just don't know what they are.
Do you think Zuckerberg micro doses?
Probably not.
Trump uses his ego as a tool.
That is correct. That is correct.
He dials his ego up and down as he needs it.
Now, the only losing agenda I've ever done is mushrooms one time when I was 21.
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