Episode 1485 Scott Adams: Let Me Tell You About All the Fake News and Propaganda You're Watching Right Now
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
China's harsh-system advantages
CNN Documentary: Fox and the Big Lie
Biden checks watch five times?
Is CNN done with President Biden?
Moderna doesn't need booster like Pfizer?
CNN omits key info on "more frequent storms"
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Good morning and welcome to the best part of your entire day.
Yeah, and we're going to do something here very special.
Something that I totally haven't done yet today.
And it's called the Simultaneous Sip.
If you'd like to join me, all you need is a cup or mug or glass, a tank or chalice or stein, a canteen jug or flask or vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid and...
Join me now for the unparalleled pleasure.
The dopamine hit of the day, you think.
It's called the simultaneous sip, and it happens now.
Go! Ah!
First one of the day, as far as you know.
All right, let's talk about something interesting for a change.
How would you like that?
It's a big change, I know.
But apparently China, I saw one report on this from the Spectator Index Twitter account.
And it says that China will limit minors to playing online games just three hours a week, with services limited to an hour each Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.
So if you're a kid in China, the total amount of video games you can play is one hour for each of the three weekend days.
Now, what does that suggest?
Well, it suggests it might be boring to live in China if you're a teenager, but it makes me wonder about the whole Chinese system versus the American system.
Because, you know, I think President Xi of China has made a point that their system should be superior in the future.
And they do have a few advantages.
Let me list a few.
Number one...
They can block their teenagers from playing video games all day.
Is that good?
I don't know.
I really don't.
Your common sense tells you it's destroying brains.
But while kids are playing these video games, they're very stimulated.
And they're doing hand-eye coordination.
They've got to think and plan.
They're competing. If they have their headphones on, they're talking to other people.
They're being social.
They're coordinating. They're planning.
I'm not entirely sure that video games are bad for kids, especially the ones where they've got the headphones on and they're talking to their friends online at the same time they're playing and stuff.
I feel like they might be wrong about this.
Yeah, I get why they're doing it.
Probably every parent has the same impulse, right?
Your impulse and your common sense is you don't want kids staring at a screen and playing with their thumbs eight hours a day.
But here's what else China can do that we can't do.
They can get much better control of their drug addiction.
Not only can the Chinese, with their harsh system and their full surveillance people, not only can they keep people from getting addicted, We're good to go.
On a scale of 1 to 10, for how big a problem it is to society, it's like a 9, isn't it?
Yeah, I don't know.
10 is probably nuclear war or something, but it's like a 9.
And China will be in a much better shape for avoiding that 9-sized problem.
Here's another one. I think in America, we can't cheat as much against our rivals.
Now, this is sort of speculation, so I'm assuming this is true.
I would take a fact check on this for sure.
But it seems to me...
That an American company could just blatantly break the law and spy on a Chinese company or steal their IP without fairly large risk.
But it looks like a Chinese company can do anything they want to a foreign company in their country or anywhere else because their government would support it, so long as it's good for the competition of China.
It's good for China. So I feel as though our system doesn't allow us to cheat, When we're competing, as much.
I'm sure there's some cheating going on everywhere.
So we might have more video game addiction, but I don't know if that's a plus or a minus.
We would have more drug addiction.
We're more susceptible to cheating.
These are some big things.
These are some big deals if you're trying to figure out which country is going to dominate in the future.
And then here's another one.
This is really big. Susceptibility to propaganda.
Now, let's assume that both the United States and a...
We'll take China as our totalitarian example.
Both of them are hugely susceptible to propaganda.
And I would say completely, right?
I don't think there's more propaganda in China than there is in the United States.
I probably wouldn't have said that always, but at the moment I can say this with confidence.
I don't think we have any less propaganda.
It just comes from different sources.
In our case, it comes from the different teams.
They just do the propaganda themselves, whereas in China the government does it all.
So we both have terrible propaganda, but there's a big difference.
In China, the propaganda is controlled by the government, which means that they can control it in a way that's good for the nation, even if it's not good for the people.
Whereas in the United States, it's just a fight between two competing groups just destroying the country by tearing it apart.
So it seems to me that although both China and the United States would be fully propagandized, China could do it in a more controlled, engineered way to get a specific outcome.
In the United States, it's a free-for-all.
We don't know who's going to win the propaganda war.
We don't know who's going to be more persuasive on any given topic.
I think that's a disadvantage.
It would be an advantage if we had a good news industry.
In that case, we would have accurate news, the Chinese citizens would have inaccurate news, and maybe that would give us some advantage.
But since we're both getting inaccurate news, and we can't tell the difference, then I would say the one who can engineer that inaccurate news the best, which would be China, might have an advantage.
So what would be the advantage of our system?
Only one that I know of...
Only one advantage that I know of.
Now, I'm not talking about lifestyle, because there might be a number of lifestyle advantages of freedom.
But in terms of the strength of the total country, I think our biggest advantage is creativity and risk-taking, meaning that we allow it.
We allow people to do crazy things and just destroy themselves.
But every now and then, somebody is the Wright Brothers and they create a lighter than air.
Not lighter than air, but they create a flying machine.
So there's something about the permissiveness of our system that allows creativity to come out.
And so far, that's been the difference.
The biggest difference is creativity.
Now, somebody says capitalism, but I think they have a lot of that advantage in China as well at the moment.
Um... Yeah, so I think invention and risk-taking are our only enduring advantages.
We'll see if that's enough.
Here's some prediction tracking.
Now, I've mentioned this before, but I'd like to keep reminding you.
One of the ways that you can predict is by assuming that people act the same all the time.
Okay? You can't trust people to tell you the truth.
In fact, I would say you shouldn't trust anybody.
Or you shouldn't trust anything that anybody says, just automatically.
Here's what you can trust.
Are you ready? This is like a really, really important reframing.
So every now and then I'll make a little statement that could change your life entirely.
This is one of them. So just pay attention to this.
Some of you, this will be life-changing.
It really will. You can't trust what anybody says.
Let's start with that. Now, I know you're going to say to yourself, well, I can trust some people.
No. Wait for the reframe.
You can't trust anything that anybody says is true.
Just start with that to protect yourself.
Now, you have to make decisions, right?
You still have to live in the real world.
You still have to decide what to do.
And so part of that decision-making is figuring out who's telling you the truth and not.
Here's what I would say.
Instead of trusting what people say, which you should never trust, trust that people will be the same as they always have.
Trust that the person who's giving you the information is the same person they were yesterday.
That you can usually trust.
It's not 100%.
Nothing is, right?
But trust that people will be the same as the last time you dealt with them.
It's sort of the Maya Angelou thing.
When somebody shows you who they are, believe them the first time.
Because it's coming back, right?
You're going to see them act in the same way again.
So if you don't believe it the first time, you're going to be surprised.
Alright, so here's how this works.
If you're going to look at the Arizona audit situation, and you're trying to predict where it's going to go, can you say that anything that anybody's said about it so far, you should trust?
No. So if there are people who said the audit has found nothing, should you trust them?
No. How about the people who told you, oh, there's definitely something there.
Oh, wait. Wait till you see what we got.
Should you trust them? No.
No. So the two things you shouldn't trust at all...
It's people saying they definitely have some stuff, and they'll show it to you later, and people who say they definitely don't have any stuff because there's nothing there.
Don't trust them. Now, use the reframe and trust that people will act like people.
Okay? So that's your reframe.
People will act the way people have acted before.
If you have a big, complicated audit and it's full of people...
And people are blabbers.
Are people who have always been blabbers going to stop being blabbers suddenly?
No. No, you can trust that human beings will have an X number of blabbers, people who will talk about things they're not supposed to talk about, in any large group.
Every time. You don't have to wonder if this large group of auditors had any blabbers in it.
Of course it did.
100% chance there were blabbers.
Where are the blabbers telling us that they've already found the stuff and, my God, you won't believe it, and here's the area in which this fraud has been found?
No blabbers.
No blabbers. So my prediction is that because people are always the same...
If the Arizona had found stuff, there would be plenty of people who knew about it, and some of those people, not all of them, some of them would be blabbers.
You would know by now.
So I'm going to take this as a prediction technique.
It doesn't mean it predicted right this time, right?
Because everything is about the odds.
But the odds are...
That something with this many people involved, people are the same everywhere all the time.
They're the same as they were.
They're not the same as each other.
They're the same as they used to be.
And they used to be blabbers.
Nothing changed that. If you haven't heard anything, what are the odds that there's something there?
Every day that goes by and you don't hear about it with some specifics, the odds of anything being there go way, way, way down.
Now, it doesn't mean I'm right.
It is a prediction technique.
Just track it and see if I'm right.
There's a new propaganda documentary whose name I may or may not have written down.
Something like Fox News and the Big Lie.
I think that's what it's called. And the idea is it's a documentary showing that Fox News, according to the theme of the documentary, was culpable in spreading what they call the Big Lie.
About the election. Now, I haven't seen the documentary yet, but it's getting a lot of attention on social media.
But there was one part that I thought was quite interesting.
Did you know this?
Do you remember as Sidney Powell was talking about Smartmatic, one of the vendors that do voting machine technology?
I can't remember if they're software or hardware.
Smartmatic? Are they software or hardware?
Doesn't matter to my point.
But did you know that when you were listening to all those allegations that Smartmatic had some issues...
According to this article on CNN, it says that in 2020, Smartmatic only had a...
For doing anything in the United States.
So in the year 2020, there was only one county.
It was a big one. It was LA County, but probably didn't matter to the overall outcome.
Smartmatic was only operating in one county in the whole country.
And the allegation is that Fox News left that out.
Because your idea of how big the potential problem was is very different if the vendor is only operating in one county.
But here's the thing.
When I read this, the way it was written was as if they were trying to mislead me.
This was on CNN. It was written...
So here's the actual sentence.
The company accused of orchestrating a nationwide election fraud had a single contract in the 2020 election to provide a new voting system in L.A. County.
That's an ambiguous sentence, isn't it?
Let me read it again.
See how you interpret this one sentence.
The company... So this is talking about Smartmatic, the company.
The company accused of orchestrating a nationwide election fraud had a single contract in the 2020 election to provide a new voting system in L.A. County.
So one way to read this...
is that Smartmatic had a trivial amount of involvement in the election.
I feel like that's what they want me to get out of this sentence.
But if you break it apart, it seems overly specific.
Do you know how to identify a liar?
They have an overly specific denial.
Did you kill Bob on Tuesday?
No, I didn't kill Bob on Tuesday!
See what I mean? If your denial is too specific, it's usually an indication of lying.
And the way this was written is that they had one contract in 2020 to provide a new voting system in L.A. County.
What's left out of that sentence?
Did they have any existing contracts?
They had only one new voting system contract.
The word new is there.
They had one new voting system contract in one county.
Is this telling us that they had lots of other existing contracts, they're just not new?
I don't know. I can't tell.
But I don't know who's doing the propaganda here.
Did Fox News leave that out, which would be a propaganda-like mistake, no matter what their intent was, or is CNN... Shading the story in a way that's just completely misleading.
Now, Dominion is another story.
Now, let me emphasize that, to my knowledge, there is no evidence of either Smartmatic or Dominion doing anything illegal or inappropriate.
I want to say that clearly so I don't get banned from social media.
To my knowledge, there is no credible evidence that's been presented that I've ever seen That looks like either of them did anything bad.
Now, keep in mind my larger philosophy is that any kind of automated system can be corrupted and that given the number of intel agencies that would love to do it, it will happen.
We just don't know if it's happened yet.
So corruption of automated systems for voting is largely guaranteed.
You just don't know when it's going to happen.
So that's the part I don't know.
While the Afghanistan war is over, or is it, it feels creepy and disgusting to say that this war is over.
Is everybody with me on this?
To say that the Afghanistan war is over is creepy and disgusting.
Because it's not over for some people who are trapped there.
It's not over for our allies that we stranded.
It's not over for the service dogs we left at the airport, allegedly.
I don't know if that's true. So, I wouldn't call it over, but at least the last soldiers have left, allegedly, and who knows if that's even true.
Now, Laura Logan is reporting that, or tweeting, that from senior U.S. sources, that the house-to-house executions have already started.
And now we don't know who they're executing, but we presume it was people who supported the United States or the Afghan government.
Maybe other people, maybe gays, maybe at least one folk singer was taken out and shot in the head because he sings.
Let me say that again.
A folk singer was dragged out of his home and shot in the head not because he was singing anti-government or anti-Taliban stuff, But because he sings.
So they dragged him out and shot him in the head.
Because music, outside of a religious context, is forbidden by the Taliban.
Although the Taliban has been doing their act, I'll call it, of acting more progressive.
And they said, well, we're not going to make a big deal about the music, but it is anti-Islamic, they say.
So the thinking, at least the reporting, is that maybe Kabul doesn't have so much executions, but the places where there's less media and fewer eyeballs, that they might be executing people like crazy.
So there's that.
Here's your latest CNN propaganda by anecdote.
I told you that there will be exactly one anecdotal statement A story, basically, about somebody who didn't get the vaccination and then died.
So it's going to be something about people who made the wrong choice, according to CNN, and it killed them.
So there'll be one per day, and here's the one per day.
Daniel Wilkinson, a U.S. Army veteran, died from a treatable illness after being unable to find an ICU bed in five different states.
His mother tells blah, blah.
So here's somebody who didn't have COVID. He's a U.S. Army veteran, which of course means a little more to us today, right?
If you were going to do a story about something bad that happened to a U.S. Army veteran, today would be the day to do that story.
Because we're all feeling unusually close to our military.
Is that a fair statement?
Wouldn't you say that as of today...
That you, as a citizen of the United States, let's say, don't you feel close to your military?
Do you feel that? I feel close to them.
Meaning, you know, connected.
Like, you know, we're sort of all in this together.
That wasn't always the case.
You know, it's a luxury in this country that you can let the military go off and fight their wars, and you can think about other stuff.
I mean, that's a gigantic luxury.
But at the moment, we do feel close to them.
And so when CNN does a story about an army veteran who died...
Because the evil people...
This would be their take, not mine.
Because the evil people who didn't get vaccinations filled up all the ICUs and now an Army veteran who we should be respecting and showing our best died from it.
Died from it. Now, assuming the reporting is correct, this would be a huge tragedy, but...
It's worse than that, right?
Because of the army veteran part.
Here's an army veteran who risks his life and to a large extent gave his living life to the country and what the country gave back to him was a big FU and no ICU bed and I guess you're just going to die.
So it's a horrible anecdotal persuasion story but it's pretty good persuasion-wise.
So watch the technique.
Once you see it, you can't unsee it.
And the technique is this.
One headline per day on this topic on CNN's site every day.
Every day until everybody's vaccinated or we all die from COVID. Well, apparently when Biden was at the military ceremony for the returning deceased veterans, he did check his watch about five times.
Now, if you go to honor the dead, especially military, and their families are there, please have your aides take your watch away.
Because you do not want to be seen checking your watch in this situation.
But Joe Biden was five separate times.
Why does the president need to check his watch?
Can somebody tell me why he would need to check his watch?
What exactly? Somebody says meds.
I feel like that might be it.
I feel like it might be his meds.
It could also be a nervous tick, yes.
I was going to say that if I don't have anything to do, I check the time a lot.
It doesn't really mean anything.
It just means that I didn't have anything to do.
So I check the time a lot.
So I'm not sure that this was, you know...
Anything except an old man who wasn't thinking clearly because he's the President of the United States.
I suppose that's a pretty big deal.
But, oh my God, could he embarrass us anymore?
Now, even CNN, as you know, has turned against him.
I haven't watched enough MSNBC to see if they've turned against Biden yet.
But CNN has turned against him.
And I would say that as a compliment to CNN. Sorry.
Sorry. I know nobody here wants to hear me compliment CNN, but I didn't know if they would be able to turn against him, no matter what he did.
But boy, did they. And I'm going to speculate here.
You know, a big network like CNN, there will be lots of voices and people in charge and the on-air talent has a certain amount of credibility and weight, etc.
But there is one voice on CNN that I think is stronger than the others.
Who would you say that is?
If I told you there's one voice on CNN that's probably stronger than the others, I imagine...
All right, so I'm just speculating here.
But I imagine that when we're not watching...
There's somebody there who's stronger than the other players.
Yeah, it's funny.
I'm watching over on Locals.
Everybody's guessing it's Jake Tapper.
That's who I think it is.
Yeah, I think Jake Tapper...
Just guessing. I think he has a larger, let's say, just a little bit more weight there.
Partly because, you know, his show is popular and he does a good job and he knows what he's talking about.
But, as you know, I've worked with Jake in the past.
We did some fundraising for veterans.
Now, if you've watched Jake Tapper, you know that his concern and interest for veterans has been consistent and 10 out of 10.
Right? Say what you will about the reporting and about CNN. You can say what you want.
But Jake Tapper's consistent respect for veterans has been unquestionable.
Would you give me that?
Would you give me that? That Jake Tapper's respect for veterans has been a 10 out of 10 consistent over the years.
Yeah, he's really good on that topic.
And I've worked with him on that.
So, I think maybe he's their biggest influence.
Because I can't imagine that given Jake Tapper's affection for the military, etc., that he could be on CNN and give Biden a pass.
I don't think Jake Tapper could ever give Biden a pass for what he did in Afghanistan.
And I think that that basically forces CNN's hand.
Because you couldn't have one of your main people saying Biden is screwing everything up while the other opinion people were saying the opposite.
Kind of, you know, they kind of need to get on the same page.
So I'm just speculating.
I think he's probably the strongest voice there behind the scenes, just a guess.
based on what I know of him and his capabilities.
And I'll bet that once he flipped on Biden, that the rest of them kind of had to follow suit.
Just a guess. Pure speculation.
All right. As you know, the Afghanistan withdrawal, we've called that the big botch.
The big botch.
And even Stephen Collinson over at CNN is writing an opinion piece saying that Biden completely screwed the pooch on that.
So once you've got the main anti-Trumper writing anti-Biden opinion pieces, which he did today, I think it's not the first one.
I think he's done a few. That's pretty serious.
CNN is done with Biden.
What does that mean?
I feel like that's a big deal.
Because not only is CNN done with Biden, I think they're done with Democrats.
Because who else are they promoting?
Not Kamala Harris, right?
You don't see them praising Nancy Pelosi, even though I think she's a pretty credible person for her team.
I don't know. I feel like something's happening here.
I think Biden just destroyed The narrative that the Democrats had a better plan.
It just looks like it's been destroyed.
Did you see the video of a helicopter?
It looked like a Black Hawk helicopter, say people who know what helicopters look like.
And it was in Kabul, and it looks like the Taliban somehow was flying a helicopter and hanging somebody from the bottom of the helicopter.
It looks like they used a helicopter to dangle somebody they hung from a rope, and they're flying it around.
Did you see that? I'm going to call that fake news.
I saw it on social media, and it was reported that it was a hanging.
Now, there are two things I doubt.
Number one, number one, I thought I saw his hands moving.
I wasn't sure. But if his hands were moving, obviously he wasn't being hung.
So that's my first question.
Did I see his hands moving?
Did anybody else see? It looked like his hands were free.
Number two, we don't know who it was or why.
Now, the place your brain goes to is that it was probably some American ally or Or, you know, a folk singer or something.
So your mind immediately goes to whatever is the worst-case scenario of a revenge killing, and it might have been.
It might have been exactly that, which would be horrible.
But it could have been just a criminal.
It could have been a member of the Taliban who did something that the Taliban didn't like.
Remember, they hang people for all kinds of reasons.
They kill people for all kinds of reasons.
One of the reasons that they might want to kill somebody publicly is to gain further control over a city that's maybe hard to control.
Now, I'm not saying they should, but the more brutal you are, probably the more control you get over the population.
So it's possible that it could have been just a criminal.
It could have been a Taliban who was a traitor.
It could have been anything. So here's the thing.
It looked like the worst thing I've ever seen.
And maybe it was. It could have been exactly what you think it was.
A revenge killing that they did in public from one of our helicopters.
Horrible. But...
There's a real good chance it wasn't that at all.
I just don't know what it was.
So I'm going to call fake news on that only because there's so much fog or war that we don't even know if a person got hung or who it was or why.
You want to hear some good news?
This is just about the best news I've ever heard, but we don't know if it's going to go to completion yet.
So Representative Maria Elvira Salazar and a dozen Republican lawmakers, they're launching this plan that would allow some kind of wireless communications for any place that didn't have it.
Let's say there was a natural disaster, and And they needed to put quick communications up.
So they would have some kind of either helium balloons or satellites or some kind of...
I think it's somewhat undefined so far.
But they would fund the development of some kind of an emergency internet that would be used not only where there's a natural disaster, which could make a huge deal, but also if there's a rogue regime that shuts down the internet access.
Now... You're way ahead of me.
Do I not understand that Elon Musk is putting in place, and has put in place a lot, of satellites that would give everybody's cell phone an alternate network that's there all the time?
Am I wrong that Elon Musk's Starlink could do this?
Now, I don't know if he'd want to, and I don't know what the capacity is and all that, and I also don't know if your phone would necessarily just automatically use this network, but are we right at the verge where Elon Musk can do what the government can't do, which is provide emergency internet to any place on Earth by pushing a button?
Is he building that?
And do you know how important that would be?
Because, like I said, for China to have an advantage over the United States, they need to control the propaganda and the information.
What happens if they can't do that anymore?
What happens if anybody can just flip a switch and the next thing you know they're on the Starlink network?
I mean, I don't know if that's possible, but...
I don't know.
I've got a feeling that...
Just the fact that we're seriously thinking about how to give Internet to people who have been cut off of Internet seems like a civilization-changing idea.
So let me give a shout-out again to Representative Maria Salazar.
You are doing good work.
And that would put you in the 1% of Congress, because Congress is largely completely worthless.
I'm not sure the details of the bill are exactly what it needs to be, but you're doing the right stuff.
So congratulations, elected Representative Salazar from Florida.
It's always Florida. It's always Florida or Texas, isn't it?
Doing exactly the right stuff.
All right. I'm going to now mention some vaccination stuff without trying to make you feel like I'm talking you into it, okay?
Can we agree on that?
I don't know exactly how to talk about stuff without making you think that I'm persuading you, but I don't want to do that.
I just want to mention some interesting new things.
Number one, a new study says the Moderna vaccination has twice as many antibodies as Pfizer.
So remember, you know how you haven't heard about the Moderna needing a booster?
You sort of assumed it was coming, but it's conspicuously absent from the news, right?
Wouldn't you think that would be in the news every single day?
The Pfizer requires a booster, and the other one is the Moderna.
And then what, nothing?
The Moderna doesn't need a booster?
Nobody's saying it.
Now, I'm guessing that you still will need a booster, or at least it will be recommended.
Why am I saying that even though the Moderna has twice as many antibodies as the Pfizer shot, why do I predict that the Moderna will need a booster too?
Is it because of my great scientific understanding that even the Moderna could wear off over time?
No. Follow the money.
Even when the money shouldn't be predictive, why is it that it always is?
It shouldn't be.
You'd think that it would be science alone that would determine whether you need a booster for the Moderna.
But as long as the economics say you do need one, is there any chance it won't happen?
It feels like it's just guaranteed by the fact that they'd make more money and they control the data.
If you control the data...
And you would make billions of dollars if you show the data one way versus maybe another way.
What's going to happen? I think the data is going to coincidentally look the way that makes you billions of dollars.
I know that's super cynical and the world doesn't always work that way, and I'm not saying it does.
I'm saying that if you made predictions as if the world always worked that way, you would be astonished how often you're right, and you won't know why.
It'll fool you.
Like, you'll even be surprised.
Like, huh, I'm surprised that worked.
Joe Rogan.
Seems to be pretty angry that he sold a bunch of tickets to Madison Square Garden for his upcoming show in October, but from the time that he announced the show, New York City required vaccinations for anybody going to public events, and so now Joe Rogan has sold a bunch of tickets, and people already bought the ticket, and after they bought the ticket, they find out they can't go unless they get a vaccination.
So Joe Rogan, to his credit, is saying they can get their money back because he doesn't want to be part of forcing people to get vaccinations.
So you can get your money back from a Joe Rogan show, and damn it, Joe Rogan, that just makes me want to go to your show.
Why do you do that? It makes me want to fly across the country and just go to the show just because you said that you won't put up with this forced vaccination stuff.
So he continues to make...
Popular and smart decisions.
So that's a little commercial for Joe Rogan who totally earned it.
Here's some more fake news and how to recognize it.
So CNN is reporting that although this Ida didn't reach the worst case scenario, it was pretty bad.
A million people without power, a lot of flooding, two deaths so far.
So it's bad. Could have been a lot worse.
But CNN is reporting that climate change is making storms more frequent.
Hurricanes are more frequent.
Because of climate change.
Suppose that's all I told you.
CNN is reporting that climate change makes the storms more frequent.
How do you know it's fake news?
Go. Tell me how you know that's fake news just from that one sentence.
CNN reports, and they show studies.
And let's say they refer to science.
They're not just making it up.
They're referring to science.
They say that the storms are...
More frequent.
And the climate change is being used as the explanation.
No sources? No, they do have sources.
They have sources. So how do you know it's fake news?
I'm going to be real disappointed if you don't get this.
Come on. I'm looking at all your comments in here.
And maybe I missed it.
Somebody's going to say it.
Come on. Okay, you're close.
Complex systems, single variable.
Yeah, you're close. All right, you're getting close.
It's the dog not barking.
It's what they didn't say.
All right? So here's what they did say.
The storms are more frequent.
More frequent.
What's left out? Strength of the storm.
Yes. The strength of the storm is left out.
Why? Do you assume that the strength of the storm is the same?
Maybe not, right?
There could be more of them, but less.
How about what period of time are you measuring these storms being more frequent?
Do you know that? Is it hundreds of years of storm reporting?
No. No.
Because we've only been tracking hurricanes in a useful way since the 70s.
So when we say there are more storms, we're really talking about this tiny, tiny little sliver of history between the 70s and now.
In geological terms, it's just a blink of an eye.
So could you say that climate change is the cause when you're looking at such a sliver of time?
It feels like anything could happen in a sliver just by chance, right?
So that's one thing.
And then here's the other thing that's being left out.
Come on, tell me another gigantic thing, gigantic, for understanding the topic, that's left out of the statement that the storms are more frequent, right?
What is being left out besides the severity of the storm and the strength?
Something else is being left out.
Thank you. Death count.
Exactly. Our ability to mitigate against danger is really, really good now compared to what it used to be.
The number of people who are killed by hurricanes in the modern times, it's still tragic, but you're talking about a handful.
You're talking about a handful of Of people dying from a hurricane in modern times.
Whereas a hurricane could have wiped down a city 100 years ago.
So if you're looking at what is the problem, well, the problem isn't exactly that there are more frequent storms.
You know, you have to put in all the other variables, or else it's obviously fake news.
So I'm going to call it fake news because they leave out the obvious things you put in it.
And then in that same story that they link to as their source for their claim, they show an animation of what Charleston, the city of Charleston, would look like under a number of scenarios of rising sea level.
And the rising sea level that they estimate for Charleston, and these are not predictions, these are just what-if, what-ifs.
So they show you a graphic of what if the sea level around Charleston went up one foot.
And then it shows that areas would be flooded.
And it says, what if it goes up two feet?
Two feet of sea level rise.
Charleston's got much more problems.
But what if it's four feet?
Four feet of rise, Charleston's largely underwater.
Now, what's missing from that analysis?
What are the odds that the sea level is going to go up a foot?
Is anybody predicting the sea level will go up a foot?
I thought the predictions were more like inches.
Like, two inches is going to be a problem, and if it's four inches, it's a big problem.
But who's talking about four feet of sea level rise?
I mean, that just seems like complete propaganda bullshit to me.
I don't even know if anybody's talking about that.
I hope not. All right.
Is long COVID real or not?
Believe it or not, that's a question.
Now, I think everybody agrees it's real.
We don't know if it's smallish or biggish.
That's the bigger problem. So Professor Francois Ballou tweeted this, that there's a preprint study.
Do you know what to think about preprint studies, everybody?
If I say there's a preprint study, how much credibility do you give a preprint study?
Low, right?
So the correct answer is low.
So this is a low credibility.
It doesn't mean it's wrong. Low credibility just means you can't necessarily know if it's true.
And it says that when they measured, they studied a bunch of people in the UK and found out that almost nobody, like a tiny, tiny percentage, might have something that you could call long COVID. Now, remember, the estimates have been as high as 25%.
Now, if long COVID is affecting 25%, that's a big part of your decision-making process.
But if it's way less than 1%, maybe not so much.
So it's a big deal whether long COVID is 25% of the public or way less than 1%.
But...
There's also sketchiness in the coding and the data collection.
So apparently everybody, not everybody, but doctors code different things differently so they don't necessarily code it as long COVID because they might not know it's long COVID. They might just think it's a second problem.
A lot of people probably don't bother going to the doctor.
They just feel shitty for months.
They don't know why. They just figure it's something else.
So we doubt that the data on long COVID is even close to accurate, but...
To be fair, I've told you that the numbers show it could be as high as 25%, and now I've told you that it could be as low as less than 1%.
So I'm just trying to give you the range of what it might be.
And if that changes your calculation about decision-making, maybe it should.
Maybe it should. I would say that it's starting to affect mine.
Because the longer we go without really solid evidence of long COVID being a big problem, the longer we go without that, the less I think it might be.
Right? It's sort of the same strategy.
On day one, you say, well, maybe, maybe not.
But the longer you wait without confirmation, the less likely you'll get confirmation.
All right.
So I don't know about that.
You know, the United States is being coy about what we're going to do to rescue the rest of the Americans and our allies that are trapped in Afghanistan.
But do you fault them for not telling you what we're going to do about it or being vague about it or general?
Do you fault the administration for not being specific about how we plan to get more Americans out of there?
I don't. Because I think that would be the wrong thing, to be specific.
Because probably we're going to have to do some things that even the Taliban has to be flexible about, maybe.
We might have some secret threats with the Taliban.
We might even have a secret deal.
It's possible we have a secret deal with the Taliban where we'll release their funding if all the Americans get out or something like that.
So I would support the administration's not being straight with us on this topic.
I do think that for national security, sometimes your military leaders have to lie to the public.
Would everybody agree that that's an acceptable lie?
If the military genuinely believes that they can protect the country better with a temporary lie, do you favor it?
I do. But I could respect an argument that says you don't.
Yeah. So, Tony Blinken and Biden, I'm not going to give them a hard time for acting as though we don't have a plan or speaking only generically about it like it's some kind of weak plan.
Because I imagine a real plan would look like this.
Tell the Americans to get to this specific place where the Taliban doesn't have any surveillance or air coverage, and we'll drop some helicopters in there and we'll take you home.
So it seems to me like they would have to keep secret from the Taliban and the rest of the world some of their plans, because some of it is going to be stuff the Taliban doesn't know we're doing, right?
And other stuff might be stuff the Taliban is working with us.
And we can't exactly say that, right?
Because we might be bribing them.
There might be blackmail.
It could be any damn thing.
So it's concerning that we do not have a stated plan for getting everybody out.
But I don't know that you'd want it the other way.
All right. And that is what I needed to say for today.
