Episode 1527 Scott Adams: Today I Will Test My Fake News Filter on the Lying Megaturds in the Media
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
Kamala's child actor NASA kids
Netflix Trans employee suspension
Laundering fake news through science
Virus risk target to end mandates, restrictions?
The right to say anything you want PRIVATELY
Fake News Filter: https://tinyurl.com/2esjzm23
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Hello, everybody, and welcome to the best thing ever, the best thing in your entire lives.
It's called Coffee with Scott Adams, and that's why you're here.
Because today we're going to be taking on the lying megaterds in the media with, that's right, the fake news filter.
We're going to test it out.
But before we do that...
Let's go, Brandon. And let's have the simultaneous sip.
And all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass of tank or gel.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure.
The dopamine of the day.
The thing that makes everything better.
You know it. It makes everything better.
It's called the simultaneous sip.
and it happens right now.
Go.
I feel connected.
The meaning of life has been restored.
For a moment there, I was just sort of floating.
Did you feel it?
You felt a little disconnected?
Didn't feel like the meaning of life was having any impact on you?
But now, now you feel good, don't you?
The meaning of life has been restored, and let's talk about all the news.
How many of you saw my dead-on impersonation of Kamala Harris talking to the NASA space program kids?
I hope you saw it.
I don't like to say instant classic about everything.
Instant classic.
And it was even cringier than I had imagined.
You've probably heard by now that the child...
The kids in the video were child actors.
They were not, in fact, any members of this NASA space board.
That's right. What you saw was Kamala Harris being really excited, really excited for these kids who were actors, that someday they're going to answer all these questions about space, and they're going to see with their own eyes.
Things on the moon, a crater.
You're going to see a crater. Except, no you won't, because you're child actors.
It was the cringiest, fakest, most ridiculous thing you've ever seen.
But did you notice the composition of the kids?
Did you notice?
Anything interesting about the composition of the kids?
Somebody said multiracial.
That's almost what I'm looking for.
I don't believe there was a white boy in the group.
Am I wrong? I didn't see one in the pictures.
Did they really assemble a multiracial STEM group, basically people interested in science, and they didn't include a white male kid?
They did have enough kids to spread around the ethnicities.
Really? No white male kid could even be part of that?
You just shake your head.
Like, what the hell is going on?
And how the hell could the Democrats ever win another election?
I mean, the Republicans have to go pretty deep into awfulness to lose against that.
Seriously, I could throw a dart into my audience and hit somebody who could do a better job than the Democrats are doing right now.
It doesn't look like it's hard.
Well, speaking of disasters, how many of you follow the gossip news and especially the celebrity stuff with Megan Fox and her new boyfriend, Machine Gun Kelly?
Is anybody as hooked on that as I am?
It's one of my guilty pleasures.
By no means is this important, and by no means should you bother paying attention to it.
But. But.
Let me say this.
They are one of the best examples you'll ever see of the basket case theory.
The basket case theory says that other people seem pretty put together and lucky and things are going pretty well for them until you get to know them.
And then you find out that they're just basket cases.
Well, we got a little glimpse of that as if you couldn't tell already that Megan Fox has body dysmorphia issues.
Fairly serious mental disorder.
If you've got that, you're not happy at all.
And her boyfriend says he's got PTSD from past drug use and other experiences.
So these two people who look like the most lucky people in the world, they're rich, they're famous, they're beautiful, they found each other.
All good stuff, right?
And you go down this deep, you know, you just scratch a little bit of the surface off, and immediately, massive mental problems.
Yeah, somebody's saying Tommy Lee, Pam Anderson, 2004.
Yeah, now, this is nothing against those two people.
They are... Two people doing the best, you know, presumably doing the best they can, trying to make this world work.
But I like to point that out for those of you who feel less lucky.
I don't know if you would trade places with them.
I mean, I say that about myself.
If you look at my life, how many people would think, oh, I wouldn't mind having his life.
It looks like things worked out pretty well for him.
How many of you would trade for my life?
Well, you don't know my life, do you?
If you had to take the whole thing, you don't get to pick and choose, right?
You don't get to pick the good parts.
You don't get just the money and the fame.
You've got to take it all. Would you trade with me?
If you're dumb, you would.
I've got some issues, too.
More of my issues are in my past than my present.
But if you had to take my whole life, no, you wouldn't take it.
Trust me. But at the moment, it's pretty good, relatively speaking.
I'm not sure what pretty good even looks like, because you can't...
Do any of us have a problem-free life?
I don't think any of us don't have any major problems that we're dealing with, right?
Pretty much all of us have some major problems.
And if you don't have major problems, your minor problems feel like major problems.
So we're largely in similar situations, even if it doesn't look like it.
It's always good to remember that.
Business Insider has a story about teachers reporting just massive mental health problems with kids.
Now, this is the least surprising story of 2021, that the children...
Apparently have been quite damaged psychologically by the pandemic.
And here's the question that I ask you.
We have gym class.
Did you ever think gym class doesn't really fit exactly with school?
I mean, I get it.
You want to teach them to be physically fit, you need to get them standing up and away from their desks, and they can socialize a little bit better in gym than they can in the rest of the classes.
There are tons of reasons that gym class is good, so I'm in favor of it.
But don't we need a mental health class?
Don't we need the equivalent of gin class for your brain?
It's not good enough just the reading and writing and arithmetic.
That stuff's good.
But we have health class, which is good.
I think the content in health class is probably very beneficial.
But how many of the kids are being taught the techniques of good mental health?
Because there is technique.
And I always get in trouble for this, so I'll be as clear as I can, because people are going to conflate my opinion with some opinion that's not mine, and suddenly I'm in trouble.
It goes like this.
I want to be very clear that if somebody has an organic, serious mental disorder, that they're not going to fix that by getting more sleep and Improving their nutrition.
Probably. As far as I know, that doesn't work.
So we're not talking people who've got the real serious, you better see a medical professional right away kind of problem.
I'm talking about the people who maybe think they ought to need to see a professional, but they're not quite there.
And maybe it's not an organic problem.
Maybe it's situational.
That's a lot of people.
That's a lot of people. So I'm not talking about the deep depression stuff where you really need some help.
I'm talking about the people who just couldn't get through the pandemic without some mental damage and can't get through modern life and managing their smartphones and their social lives and everything without actual mental damage.
Why can't we teach kids the basics of good mental health?
Let me ask you this. Just in the comments, let me know.
How many of you have kids, let's say, between 10 and 17?
How many of you in the comments?
Because I don't know if this crowd has a lot of kids.
Oh, they do. I'm seeing lots of yeses in the answers, especially on locals.
So a lot of you have kids in that 10 to 17 range, so you know exactly what I'm talking about here.
How many of those kids between 10 and 17 have wildly different sleep schedules on the weekend than they do during the school week?
In the comments, how many of your kids have wildly different sleep patterns on the weekend than the weekdays?
I'm actually seeing more no's than I thought.
Interesting. I think that suggests maybe a more conservative audience here.
But, yeah, it looks like most of you are saying yes to that.
Now, are the children being taught in school that having those wildly different sleep patterns guarantee that they'll be depressed?
Guarantee it. It's not even statistically, oh, you've increased the chance that you're going to be depressed and sleepy and unhappy and have mental problems.
I'm not talking about increasing the odds.
I'm talking about you got it.
You messed up your sleeping pattern, and now you have some mental problems.
One-to-one correlation.
Now, ideally, they're temporary, right?
They're more the kind that you could fix with lifestyle and some work.
What about nutrition?
Do you think that kids are completely unaffected mentally...
By a bad diet?
Of course they are.
Of course they are.
And again, I'm not even sure that you'd say that's a statistical thing as much as a one-to-one thing.
It's not statistically true that if you overeat, you get fat.
It's true for every person who does it.
Every individual. If they eat twice as much as the caloric recommended intake, they'll get fat.
So why are we not teaching kids if you do the things on this checklist, you're going to feel exactly the way you're feeling right now?
Do the things on the checklist.
You know, have sleep that's wildly different on the weekends, eat junk food, and I could fill out the rest of the list.
But here's the checklist.
It's just a checklist.
It is that simple.
Did you do these things?
No. No, you didn't do the things on this list that everybody has to do to feel good.
You didn't do them. Nobody can feel good unless they do what's on the list.
And all of it, really. All of it.
You can't eat wrong and then try to get the other stuff right and it works.
Probably won't work. You can't get no exercise and think, well, I did everything else right.
Nope. Nope. That's not going to work.
You have to do all of those things.
Because we're not so naturally happy that you've got any, like, slop in the system.
You kind of have to get everything right.
At least in 2021.
I don't know if it's always been the same.
But we should have a class where we teach them, if you do these things, you're going to feel this way.
If you do this set of things, you'll feel a different way.
At least know that you're choosing it.
Because my observation is the kids don't have any connection in their minds.
They don't connect the things they do with their bodies and their minds with how they feel.
Not really. I mean, they know that they feel better when they hang out with their friends, and they know that if they're hungry, it's better to eat.
But that's about it.
They're not connecting their mood, their entire mental framework to the things they do.
It just feels like they're disconnected things.
So we should teach them to connect those things.
Well, there's a publication, and I use that term loosely, called The Verge.
Here's a headline from The Verge.
A headline on Twitter, anyway.
It says, Netflix suspends trans employee who tweeted about Dave Chappelle's special.
So Netflix suspended a trans employee...
Who, I guess, complained and tweeted about the Dave Chappelle special, which was on Netflix.
That sounds terrible, doesn't it?
It sounds as if Netflix suspended somebody for having an opinion.
Well, I mean, that's not unusual for a company to fire a disgruntled employee who's complaining in public.
But given the issue...
It's an issue of general societal interest.
Seems inappropriate, doesn't it?
Except it didn't happen.
Here's what did happen.
It is true that Netflix suspended that employee.
It is true that that employee also tweeted about Dave Chappelle's special.
Those are two true things.
Except one didn't cause the other, according to Netflix.
What did cause it, I think, was the way she did it.
Maybe she, I don't know, she did something, like attended a meeting she wasn't supposed to be at or something.
So it wasn't her opinion.
It was the way she managed her, you know, interactions.
Right? So when The Verge reports this, they make it seem as though these two things are connected, when in fact they're just two facts.
They're not connected. They're indirectly connected, because I'm sure whatever her behavior was that got her fired probably sprung from that.
But it wasn't because of the opinion.
And I actually think that Netflix does genuinely...
Who knows?
I can't read their minds.
But I think Netflix probably genuinely appreciates hearing from their employees on the stuff like this that matters.
Why wouldn't they? Why wouldn't they?
I mean, if you're a big company, you do want to feel out what the employees are thinking, especially the stuff that they're really hot about.
Of course you want to know that.
So of course Netflix wanted to know what its employees were thinking about it.
Of course. And do they mind that the employees are making a statement against discrimination against the trans community?
Probably not.
I don't think Netflix cares.
Let me say it more positively.
I'm sure Netflix management would support...
People speaking out in favor of treating everybody well.
Now, it's a difference of opinion about whether Chappelle was treating people well or not.
But nobody's disagreeing with the concept, at least at Netflix, I don't imagine.
Nobody's disagreeing that, you know, you shouldn't be unkind to people for no reason.
So, for The Verge, I'd like to offer a headline of my own.
It goes like this.
Two things that are true.
All of the staff of The Verge, and I'm pretty sure this is true, maybe not 100%, but close to 100%, 100% of the staff of The Verge masturbated after the Holocaust.
That's true. That is completely true.
Now, not 100%.
But almost every member of The Verge masturbated after the Holocaust.
I don't think we can feel good about that.
Can we? Now, I'm not saying because of.
Not because of.
It was just after.
There are just two facts that happened.
I'm just reporting two facts.
You do what you want with the facts.
If you're connecting them in your mind, well, that's on you.
I'm just telling you that the entire staff of The Verge masturbated after the Holocaust.
I don't know how you can feel good about that.
David Leonhardt, which is a cool name because I assume that's based on Lionheart at some point in history.
But David Leonhardt, who's a senior writer at the New York Times, and therefore we should all listen to him, He did a tweet thread in which he's showing...
He's making the point that science doesn't know why the COVID cases suddenly dropped.
They also don't know why they spiked.
And they won't know why they dropped next time.
And they won't know why they spiked next time.
Now, of course, the Delta variant is part of the story.
But even if you factor in all the things we do know...
According to a senior writer at the New York Times, who I agree with, and therefore he must be right.
Using my confirmation bias, I agree with him, so therefore this must be true news.
So basically he's making the case that we don't know why it plunges up and we don't know why it plunges down.
Do you believe that? How many of you accept the beginning premise of How many of you accept the premise that the experts don't really know why things are going up and down the way they're going up and down?
Everybody on board with that?
Yeah. So anybody who says it's because of masks, it's because of mandates, it's because of vaccinations, those are all variables.
We don't know what weight to put in all the variables exactly, but we don't know why anything's going up and down.
Now, if you agree with that, here's the next part you should agree with, logically, that the two people who got the Nobel Prize for Economics didn't deserve it, and I do.
And I'm not kidding.
Who was the person who told you often and publicly, and I think the only one, And fact-check me on both of these claims.
Number one claim, I'm the only one to say this, and I said it early and publicly, that we'd never know how much impact leadership had on different countries' outcomes because it would be too complicated.
Who else said that?
Name one other person who told you at the beginning of the pandemic that at the end we wouldn't know who did a good job.
Nobody else. I'm the only one who told you that.
Pretty sure. And it's completely opposite of what the guys who just won the Nobel Prize in economics would have told you.
They would have told you, because this is what they won their prize for, that you just take two areas that are largely the same, You say, oh, this one had this policy, this one had this one.
And then because the areas are largely the same, you could observe the differences, and then you'd know something.
And I told you exactly the opposite.
I told you that in complex systems, there's no way you can compare them because you're just guessing that the other stuff doesn't matter.
And guessing is the opposite of science.
It's the opposite. It's literally, you could not be more opposite of science of just sitting there and guessing.
Well, I'm looking at Norway and I'm Sweden, and I'm going to guess that there are no variables except the ones that I've decided are important.
I'm just going to guess.
Because, you know, I don't know of any.
I just guess there aren't any.
That's not a real control group.
That is somebody guessing and then laundering their guess with science.
That's right. The guys who won the Nobel Prize in Economics are teaching you how to launder fake news through science.
And they got a Nobel Prize for it.
That prize should be mine, damn it.
Now, I don't really mean that.
Except it's true. I don't mean it, but it also has the benefit of being 100% true.
As far as I know. Alright.
I tweeted and got just a huge reaction to this tweet.
I said, Dear government, what level of virus risk do we need to reach before ending all mandates and restrictions?
If you don't have a target, don't expect compliance.
Don't expect compliance if you don't have a target.
What do you think? A lot of people retweeted this, so it looked popular.
But I would say this is basic leadership.
It's the most basic leadership.
I'm going to ask you to do this really hard thing, and the reason we're going to ask you to do it is to achieve this goal.
Win a war, for example.
Stop climate change from getting above a certain level, for example.
Pretty specific. If somebody asks you for a sacrifice, and they say, I need you to do the sacrifice because we're trying to achieve this specific thing, you can say to yourself, yes or no, I would like to help you achieve that specific thing.
But if your so-called leaders say, I would like you to make this big sacrifice, and you say, great, until when?
And what target are we going for?
And they say, we'll let you know.
We'll get back to you on that.
We'll see how it works out.
It's flexible. It's fluid.
The situation is fluid.
We don't know. Will there be another variant?
Don't want to make any promises because there might be another variant.
Don't know. Right?
So we don't want to make any promises because we don't know what the future looks like.
But we'd like you to make this big sacrifice to get to this future that we can't see.
Nope. Not acceptable.
Not even a little bit acceptable.
You need to tell us what you're shooting for.
Now, will I forgive you if you have to change later and modify it and say, oh, damn, we thought we could get to this, but now we're a little smarter, we learned something, we have to modify the goal.
Okay. Okay.
That would be just normal.
How many projects in your big corporation end up exactly the way you planned them?
None? None.
But every corporation tells you, you better have an end point.
I'm not going to give you a bunch of money unless you show me a business plan with a specific target of how much money or ROI you're going to shoot for.
There's no leadership in any company that lacks an end point that's described pretty specifically.
But also, everybody knows you're not going to hit it.
You need it even if you know you're not going to hit it because it gives you a direction.
Now, the government would like you to be happy with, well, we're going to save as many lives as we can.
No. No.
Try that in your corporation.
We don't need a business plan.
We're just going to make as much money as we can.
We want to be flexible. We don't want to lock ourselves into a specific thing.
We just want to make as much money as we can.
That's our plan. That's not really a plan.
So don't expect massive compliance with no target.
Now, if we made a target, what are the likelihood that we'd have to revise it later?
I think it's 100%, but it has nothing to do with whether or not you should have one.
Because you always miss your target if you're a corporation or anything else.
You just need them. So John Gruden, coach of the Raiders, resigned.
Some emails from his past were made public, and they had things which people are calling misogynistic and anti-gay and a little bit racist, they thought.
Now... Here's my take on that.
I do not defend or condone anything that John Gruden said privately.
Likewise, I do not defend or condone anything that any of you have ever said privately.
I don't condone it, but I also don't condemn it.
Anything you say privately with the expectation that it would remain private is okay with me.
It's okay with me.
What if it's really, really offensive?
Okay with me.
What if it's really, really insulting to me?
Like, just really racist and sexist and totally insulting about me, specifically.
In your private communications, okay with me?
100%. I want you to be able to say anything you want privately.
If you say it in public, then we have something to talk about.
Well, privately? No, you can say anything you want about me.
It could be the darkest, most insulting, deeply offensive thing that anybody's ever said about anybody.
I'm cool with that.
Just don't tell me about it.
And, you know, ideally, don't tell other people that might tell me about it.
Now, I get that sometimes things get out that you thought would be private, but I'm not going to blame you for that if you had an expectation of privacy.
You know who I'm going to blame?
I'm going to blame the mofo who told me.
That's the author of the message.
The author of the message is not the person who said it first, privately, because the expectation of privacy was there, but the mofo, the a-hole, The megaterd who told me about it.
That's who created the damage.
The person who creates the damage is the megaterd who tells you about it.
Period. That's got to be the standard.
We can't let ourselves have a standard where people's private communications affect their job or their standing in society.
No. That's a hard no.
So I see why the Raiders had to do what they do, because they have to respond to the fact that their customers will...
The customers are going to have some reaction, and they don't want to lose their customers, etc., So I think big companies sometimes just have to do things that aren't fair to employees because it's good to an individual employee because the stockholders or the bigger picture requires it, I guess. So I don't love what the Raiders did, but I understand it.
I'm not sure I would have gone the same way if I had been in charge of the Raiders.
Maybe I would have tried to take a stand, but I don't blame them.
Companies have got to take care of themselves.
They're designed to take care of themselves, and you wouldn't want to change that.
So here's the standard.
I say, number one, private communications should stay private, or if your private communications are not going to stay private, the asshole who leaks them is the author.
The asshole who leaks them has to take responsibility for all of the racism, misogyny, everything else.
Now, if you look at the actual content of the messages, did they look racist to me?
Nope. Nope.
They did look exactly like the things you should never say in public.
Nope. Let me give you one of them.
One of them was that, I guess, John Gruden in an email said something about a black player's the size of his lips.
And that was considered racist.
Do you know when that would be racist for sure?
It's if he said it in public.
I would call that racist.
Because you'd be saying something that you know would be offensive to an entire ethnicity, plus anybody who has any sense of decency.
But not privately.
Not privately.
When you change the context to privately, it's just an observation.
There's nothing in this story that suggests he has a bad feeling about black people because one of them has a feature which is notable.
I just don't see it. Now, do you see the point?
That that exact thing he said privately doesn't have a trace of racism in it.
But if he had ever said that in any mixed crowd or in public, yeah, very racist.
Very bad move.
Let me give you another one.
He used the word queer when referring to a gay person who was going to be drafted, I guess.
Does the word queer suggest that he doesn't like or doesn't respect gay people?
Maybe. I don't know.
I mean, you could certainly interpret it that way.
If he had used that word in public, what would I say about him?
I'd say he's very, apparently, very anti-LGBTQ, or at least anti-gay, and he needs to...
He needs to, you know, have some consequences.
I mean, that would seem pretty racist to me.
I'm sorry. It would seem pretty anti-gay to me.
Now, I know what you're thinking.
You're saying that the gay community uses that word themselves.
Exactly. That's why, when he used it privately, it didn't look the same to me.
Privately, people use words that are offensive just because they're more interesting.
Right? Have you ever used an offensive word with somebody who's a friend?
It's just a more interesting word.
That's it. No real intent behind it.
It's just a more interesting word.
It's just more fun.
It's more provocative.
So, again, I don't condone anything that John Gruden said, because I don't want to be tarred with any of that.
But I'll say that as a consumer...
Of this information, I looked at the things that were noted, and I did not see the things he was accused of.
But had he said any of that in public, of course, it would look awful.
All right. I saw an article in the New York Times, I guess it was written a while ago, about micro steps and micro goals.
And they mentioned they were influenced by the book Atomic Habits by James Clear.
And the idea is that if you want to get something done, getting started is the important part.
And that if you can get any kind of momentum toward your goal...
That it's self-reinforcing.
You get a little dopamine hit for making any progress.
So the Atomic Habits, a big part of it was just do something.
A small little thing.
Get a phone number. Make yourself a note.
Just whatever is the smallest thing you can do toward your goal, and eventually it'll get a little momentum going, and it'll be self-fulfilling after a point.
Very good advice.
Now, that was in Atomic Habits in 2018.
Now, James Clear has always, from the beginning, credited the microsteps idea as part of the systems versus goal idea from my book, How to Failed Almost Everything and Still Went Big.
It came out five years earlier.
Now, I think it was very smart of James Clear to pick that part of...
Part of what was in my book, and amplify it.
Because, you know, I just sort of mentioned it and described it a little bit, but it did deserve its own book.
And I think that...
Let me say as clearly as possible, there aren't that many new ideas.
Almost any time somebody has an idea that's like this...
This game-changing idea, and they make a book, and it's popular.
You can almost always find out who influenced that person.
There's always something before it.
Same with music. It seems like all musicians were influenced by somebody else.
But, as I often say, an idea is worthless.
The value of an idea is zero, right?
Ideas don't have any value.
So if you say, hey, this was your idea, and then James Clear took that idea and made a great book out of it.
Well, maybe in some sense he was influenced by it, but the value in the book is how he expressed it.
The value is the packaging, the design, the communication.
So, I mean, that's where the value comes from.
So likewise, even when I have something that looks like a new idea, probably isn't.
But the value is I communicated it to you.
That's where the value is.
But I'm starting to think that this one thing might be one of the most important things that I've ever done.
Because to the extent that it's influenced other people, who then influence other people, this is a really good technique.
You know, the micro-step idea.
Especially in a world where everything's It's complicated and we're busy.
It's that complication and busyness that stuns us into inaction because there are too many things you could do and there are too many things you could do instead.
So finding some way to beat the complexity of modern life and finding a way to take that first step, maybe it wasn't always important, but right now it's critical.
So it could turn out to be one of the most important things I've ever done Or the most important thing.
And, you know, it was one chapter of one book.
Let's do the fake news test on an Axios story.
Well, it's a national story, but I'm going to use Axios as my example.
Now, if you don't know, I created a first draft, and this is just a prototype, so we'll be testing the filter as well as the story.
If the filter says the story's fake...
It could be the filter is the problem, not the story.
So keep in mind that this is all experimental at this point, but we'll see what happens.
So I did a Google Sheets, which I tweeted the link to, so you can all go look at it, in which I've just got a column of sort of a checklist...
Of what to look for to decide if something is fake news.
And let me first run through it because I've added to it since the last time I told you about it.
Okay? So these are...
It's a growing list of the checklist of things to ask.
I'll just do them quickly because they're self-explanatory.
So if you see a new story, ask yourself these questions.
Is the source anonymous?
Is it a disgruntled employee or ex-employee?
Is it only being reported on CNN but not Fox or vice versa?
Is it too on the nose?
It's like too exactly the narrative.
You know what I mean? Is it confusing correlation with causation?
Is it still the fog of war phase of the story where we don't know all the facts?
Is it too man bites dog, meaning it's just too unbelievable to really, really be true?
Is it only covered by the lesser known news sites?
Does the journalist have a grudge against the subject?
Are you still waiting to hear the other side of the story?
In other words, is there somebody who's accused of something and they haven't told you what their side is yet?
Does the story give you a percentage without the raw number?
That's another one I added.
Does it report a percentage, but it doesn't tell you any raw numbers?
That's a flag. And vice versa.
Does it give you raw numbers without putting them in context of what percentage of something that is?
Let's see. Does the story have sources that have ties to some industry?
Is a story from a serial debunker who's selling a book?
Here's a new one I added.
Is the source of the claim a serial debunker?
Somebody who keeps debunking things and writing books about it?
I don't trust serial debunkers.
Because once they become the debunking person, they have to keep debunking.
Because that's who they are.
They become the debunking person.
That's how they make the money. So be careful of the serial debunkers.
Not so much somebody who only once is debunking something.
Is the story source politically active?
You can't trust them. And is the primary evidence of video?
So here's one I added that's just mind-blowing.
One of the checklists to see if it's fake news is if there's a video so you can see it with your own eyes.
In 2021, if there's a video and you can see it with your own eyes, it's probably fake news.
You would have thought the opposite.
But in 2021, if you just look at all the examples...
You can see time after time it's just a video edit.
They leave out a qualifier or they leave out some context.
So if the primary evidence is a video, there's a good chance it's not true, which is weird, right?
All right, so that's the filter.
Let's run this story through it, and here's the claim.
The claim is that Southwest Airline pilots are intentionally...
Intentionally, basically calling in personal days or sick days.
I don't know which one. Definitely some personal days, but I don't know if they're sick days, too.
Or they're not accepting flights, etc.
So they're basically responding to the vaccine mandate.
So it's basically a work slowdown, if you will, because so many of them don't want to get the forced vaccination to continue working.
Now, here's what Southwest says.
There's no pilot action happening.
No. It's just weather.
It's weather. Duh.
We just got a weather problem.
It'll take care of itself. We'll be fine next week.
One of those things isn't true.
One of those isn't true.
But let's take the claim that the pilots are doing this intentionally.
Okay? And we'll run it through the fake news filter.
Okay? All right, so here's the claim.
Is the source anonymous?
Kind of yes, but kind of no.
Who exactly is your source who told you that the pilots are organizing this?
Well, I've seen reports about individual pilots saying, yeah, this is happening, but they seem to be speculating that They didn't seem to say...
The ones I saw, maybe you saw something different, I didn't see anywhere the pilots said, yes, I'm calling around, I'm organizing people, we're definitely doing this.
Have you seen that? I haven't seen it.
I've seen unknown sources and something close to anonymous.
So I'm asking you, so somebody says they saw that last night on Tucker.
One on Tucker didn't seem to be guessing.
So I'm going to take that as a fact, that there's somebody who is not an anonymous source.
Same page so far?
It's not an anonymous source.
Is the source a disgruntled current or ex-employee?
Disgruntled employee.
Disgruntled employee is a big flag.
So there's one. I'd watch out for that one.
Disgruntled employee. Is it only being reported as a fact on one of the networks or neither?
Is CNN and Fox News, are they both reporting that the pilots are doing an action, that the pilots are intentionally doing that?
Anybody? Does anybody know that?
Is CNN saying that the pilots are doing this intentionally and also Fox News?
CNN is reporting the weather angle.
Can I get a confirmation on that?
Because I'm only hearing it in a comment.
Can I get anybody else who watches enough CNN? It looks like CNN's not reporting it as a pilot thing.
All right. You need a time filter.
Maybe. Maybe. All right.
Interesting. So we don't know.
Axios is reporting it.
All right. So I'm going to put a question on that one, but we'll circle back to that one.
Is it too on the nose?
Is it too, like, right on?
Yeah, it kind of is, isn't it?
Isn't the story kind of perfect?
The airline pilots are often military people.
And they're ex-military people, and they're fighting another freedom thing for the United States.
It's not complicated, though.
It's sort of straightforward.
A, we don't like this, so we're protesting.
So I'm not going to say it's too on the nose, because it's too ordinary.
Like, it would be easy to be on the nose in such a simple situation.
Is the correlation being treated as causation?
Hmm. I don't think so.
Does it look like there's a correlation versus causation problem?
I don't see that. Are we still in the fog of war phase?
Are we in the fog of war where you're not quite sure what's going on?
Yes, we are. Yes.
We are still in the I'm not so sure what's going on here phase, which is a big flag for fake news.
All right. Is it two man bites dog?
No. Is it only covered by lesser-known news sites?
No. Does a journalist have a grudge?
No. Are you still waiting to hear the other side of the story?
No. Does the story give percentages without raw numbers?
Does it? What percentage of the pilots are protesting?
Do you know? That would be the biggest part of the story, right?
What percentage of the pilots...
We have percentages of flights, somebody said.
6,000 out of 140,000.
Does it look as though the percentage is being left out of the story or underreported?
Yeah.
So...
So I do think there might be a little bit of playing with the raw numbers versus percentages.
The stories I saw didn't seem to do a good job of sorting them out.
Is the story source a serial debunker?
No. Is the politically active people?
No. Is the primary evidence of any of them?
No. So, we do have several flags.
There are some flags that would suggest this is fake news.
Doesn't mean it is. Because remember, this is just giving you an indication.
You can't prove anything with this.
But how could it be that Southwest, which does not have a reputation as a big lying company, right?
Correct me if I'm wrong.
Southwest actually has a pretty good reputation.
One of the best, right?
Isn't it often one of the best places to work?
Voted near the top all the time?
I think it's fair to distrust corporations.
But wouldn't you say Southwest is a little bit more on the reliable, non-lying side of the equation?
Wouldn't you say? I feel yes.
Which doesn't mean they're not lying in this case.
But I think reputationally, they're a pretty solid company.
So how could it be true...
Simultaneously, that Southwest is telling the truth, that it's not a pilot action, while the pilots are saying, oh, it's a pilot action.
Trust me, I'm a pilot, and this is a pilot action.
How could both be true?
Well, let me tell you.
What if nobody has said to Southwest management, we're doing this thing?
What would Southwest say if If every time they talk to a pilot, hey, are you doing this because of the vaccine mandate?
And the pilot looked at them and said, vaccine mandate?
No, I'm just taking my personal days that you've allocated.
And then the Southwest says, oh, well, we heard people are doing this because of the mandate.
And the pilot looks at them and says, yeah, I've heard that too.
I think I'll take my personal days.
See where I'm going?
I think they're both true.
I think that from Southwest's point of view, they have not been informed there's an employee action.
So from their point of view, there isn't.
Now, furthermore, they said it's weather.
Could it be true that the problem is weather, but also true that the problem is the pilot's?
Yes, it can be both.
Here's how. Suppose there are enough pilots doing the personal days that it puts a strain on the system, but not a strain that they couldn't normally handle, except the weather was bad, too. It could be that they had two problems.
Either one of them they could handle because they've got enough flexibility.
So let's say you've got some bad weather in one place, but you need to move some pilots around to adjust for the bad weather.
You could do it. But now they didn't have the flexibility because so many people took personal days.
Do you think that when each pilot went to their supervisor and said, I'd like to take a personal day...
Did all the supervisors immediately coordinate with all the other supervisors to find out if too many people were asking for personal days at the same time?
Probably not, right?
So don't you think that if management asked the supervisors what's going on, they'd say, not much.
A few people asked for personal days, but that's not that unusual.
You know, wanted to get it in before Christmas.
I feel as though Southwest is maybe giving us a little bit of a weasel answer, that they would certainly be aware that the pilots may be acting in a way that is reducing the number that are available, but not so overtly that they're saying, we're doing this. And on top of that, the bad weather may have taken that little extra cushion they had and removed it.
So could you say the weather is the problem, Because if the weather had not happened, they would still have enough cushion to get things done.
Yeah, see? It's like, it's not so clear, is it?
So I'm not so sure that the filter works in this case because it's just a murky situation.
But I would say there's at least a possibility that both stories are completely true.
There is a pilot action, and from Southwest's point of view, the weather was a problem because they could have handled the pilot action okay without the weather problem.
See what I mean? It's sort of like saying COVID killed you.
The COVID killed you because you'd done everything wrong in your life up to that point.
You overate, you didn't exercise, right?
So you've done everything wrong and then the last thing that happens is the COVID. Well, likewise, it's entirely possible that the last thing that happened was the bad weather.
But they would have been able to handle it if all the other bad things like the pilot actions hadn't happened.
Anyway, that's just speculation.
Biden is failing on getting us rapid tests.
I don't know if Trump would have done better, but this is a clear case of Biden failing.
I mean, I think even his friends would say he's not getting it done on the testing.
So that's a gigantic failure for the Biden administration.
Gigantic. Now, would Trump have done better?
I don't know. I don't know.
But we'll never know.
Ben and Jerry's was defending why it's boycotting someplace.
Was it Israel? Someplace.
And was asked, why don't you stop selling your ice cream in Texas?
Because they've got that abortion law and you don't like that.
And I don't know if it was Ben or Jerry.
Got really, shall we say, befuddled.
Because they couldn't answer how they can continue to stay in business selling any ice cream at all when everywhere you sell the ice cream...
Everywhere you sell the ice cream, there's somebody doing something you don't like.
And I saw somebody make a comment on Twitter that it looked like an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm.
And boy, did it. Once you hear that comment, it did look like an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm.
The AP is fact-checking this claim.
See if you heard this fake news.
There's an anti-vaccine website...
It's distorting a study in Vietnam, and it says that vaccinated people carry more virus than unvaccinated.
Have you ever heard that? Have you ever heard that unvaccinated people carry more...
I'm sorry. Have you ever heard that vaccinated people, if they do get infected, would carry more of the virus than an unvaccinated person?
Has anybody heard that? Because it's not true.
Somebody says, obviously.
Yeah. So that's fake news.
And here's what the study actually said.
that compared to the original virus, the ones that people are getting these days is the Delta variant, and that's far more infection, especially in your mouth and nose, I think.
How satisfied is Scott Adams with where we are at now?
Of course not. I ask because I have considered us to have mostly returned enormously.
Well, I can't travel.
I mean, right?
I can't travel. That's not too normal.
It looks like our supply chain is pretty effed up.
I don't know how quickly we'll fix that.
And I still wear a mask at the grocery store where I live.
Anyway, so the point is that while it is technically true that people who are getting the virus lately...
Even if they're vaccinated, the vaccinated people have tons of virus compared to the last variant.
But the comparison is the old version to the variant.
That's the only thing being compared.
The Delta variant gives you more virus.
It wouldn't matter if you were vaccinated or unvaccinated.
The Delta variant gives you more virus.
So it seems as though...
People are vaccinated, and they get the breakthrough case.
It seems like they have more virus than the old days, but that's because of the Delta variant.
It's not because of anything about the vaccination.
So it's fake news. And speaking of fake news, I'm going to have to go.
That is all for today.
I am late, and I think today was a tremendous live stream.
