Episode 1988 Scott Adams: Everything The News Gets Wrong Because They Are Not Engineers
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
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Content:
Boston's MLK statue
Confusing Trump Org tax fraud fine
NOAA data, 2 opposite interpretations
Jonathan Turley dunking on Adam Schiff
COVID & vaxx deaths...a 3rd factor?
The power of social media algorithms
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Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the highlight of civilization.
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Okay, I think we got everybody on board there.
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We're like the Marines that way.
Well, President Biden was bragging that gas is down more than $1.70 from its peak.
That adds up to around $180 per month for a typical family.
That's money in your pocket, not spent at the pump, he says.
Money in your pocket.
Yeah.
Does this kind of analysis remind you of anything?
Is there any fictional character who might be well-known for saying this sort of thing.
And might that fictional character be a comic?
And might it involve a boss with pointy hair?
And might it involve a boss who says, hey, we could have wasted a million dollars this year, but we only wasted half a million, and that's money in your pocket.
That's money in your pocket.
I could have done worse.
So, you're welcome.
That literally is a Dilbert comic.
Not just one.
I'm pretty sure I've hit that theme a few times.
And you know what?
I'm gonna hit it again.
I'll probably hit that theme again.
Yes, bragging about how things could have been so much worse, and therefore, because they're not worse, money in your pocket.
That's money in your pocket, baby.
Did you see those new Martin Luther King statue?
Some people say that viewed from a certain angle, it looks a little different than maybe what the creator hoped.
I think they're suggesting it looks like a giant, oh I can't say that on live stream, a giant thing.
But that's only from one point of view.
Now, I think I saw a Mike Cernovich tweet asking what we do about this statue.
Because it turns out at the same time the statue's going up, I think it was Politico had an article about some researcher, biographer who's come up with a bunch of dirt on MLK.
Apparently MLK would not have survived the Me Too era if the allegations are correct.
And so now you have an interesting situation.
What happens if the most storied and famous leader of the black community Turns out to be a Me Too person and then maybe a criminal of the female part of the public and other people too as well.
That would be an interesting battle of power, wouldn't it?
Who do you think would win?
Who has more power in today's world?
Black America or female America?
I would think female, because there are more of them, right?
Numbers.
There's more than half of the world, I think.
Or more than half of the United States, anyway.
So we'll see.
But I think it's optimistic to assume that that statue will not be pulled down.
Now, one reason it might not be pulled down is if it's mostly women who are complaining.
They don't have the upper body strength, so statue safe?
No, I'm just joking.
Because everybody cares about me too, not just women, so I'm just being provocative.
I don't think that statue is going to come down, nor do I think it should.
But it does raise some interesting questions in our complicated times.
All right, I may have told you before, but there's a phrase on Twitter that will get you instantly blocked.
And I don't care if you say it to me or someone else.
If you use these words about anybody, doesn't matter if it's about me, if you use this to explain anybody or to talk to anybody, you are instantly blocked.
And here's the phrase.
You're better than this.
You're better than this.
Nope.
No.
I am exactly as good as whatever I'm doing.
If there's one thing I'm never going to back off from, you are what you do.
You are what you do.
If you do something and somebody doesn't like it, you're not better than that.
You're exactly that.
And you might be happy about it.
You might not be apologizing at all.
You are that.
Yes, I did that.
That is who I am.
And here's why I don't like the phrase, you're better than that.
Because it's emotionally manipulative, and it acts as though I should organize my life around a stranger's approval.
Why would I organize my life around the approval of a stranger?
And why does that person think they can impose that on me?
And why would they be dumb enough to say it in public?
That their opinion should change my behavior and make me a different person?
I don't think there's anything that bothers me more than that phrase, because it's just manipulative.
How many of you would agree?
It's just pure manipulation.
And here's the other thing.
Anybody who would use that phrase, especially in public, would you want to be friends with that person?
Because that tells you where their mentality is, right?
All right.
Okay.
Recommendation there.
You know, as much as I appreciate the super comments on YouTube, I think YouTube should get rid of them.
What do you think?
Because when you stop to read a super comment, often it's not on the topic you're talking about.
And I feel like, you know, the law of reciprocity, When somebody does anything for you, you just automatically feel like you owe them something.
We're all designed that way.
So the problem with this model is that, especially if it's people I like, like sometimes it'll come from people I know personally and I like them.
But if it's not on the same topic, it's not good for everybody else.
So it's like paying $20 to go to the top of the line.
Now, if you go to the top of the line on the topic we're talking about, I think that's cool.
You know, because if you make a good point, it doesn't matter if you paid or didn't pay.
But if it's a different topic, that's probably not the best way to use the Super Chat.
So just keep that in mind.
You know, the feature is there so you can use it like there's no crime.
But just as a preference, I would rather you not give me money.
Is that fair?
I would rather you not give me money in that particular way.
But thank you.
Let me show some gratitude.
Thank you.
Because I think the people who do it are usually have the right, you know, the right thought in mind.
And I appreciate that.
All right, the Trump Organization, I guess, is going to pay a 1.6 million dollar fine, criminal fine, the news likes to make sure you know it's a criminal fine, for what their CTO apparently did.
Now, I'm having a little trouble understanding this story.
And maybe somebody who's maybe more clued into either the specifics of this case or the legal structure of the world, maybe can sort this out for me.
So here's what I understand.
The, oh is it CFO?
I'm sorry, CFO, the financial guy, not the technical guy.
Yeah, so the CFO, of Trump Organization.
I accidentally said CTO.
But the CFO, the financial guy, apparently was in charge of, you know, the accounting and how things were recorded.
And he paid himself without going through payroll by having the Trump Organization pay some of his expenses directly.
Now, that's illegal, because it didn't get taxed in the way that the system requires it.
Now, here's the problem.
Because it happened, and because the CFO is an officer of the company, the company is also on the hook, because although it was one person who seems to be involved, as far as we know, just one person, and the one person was the person who does it for the company.
So, it's a weird situation where The Trump Organization was a victim of a crime, and they have to pay a penalty for being a victim of a crime.
Now, it's a little unclear if the Trump Organization made or lost any money because of the way this was handled.
They should have come out about the same.
Certainly, it would not have been a big enough crime that the Trump Organization would have had any intention to do it.
Here's how you know there's no intention.
Because it wouldn't be worth it.
The Trump Organization would save maybe nothing, or maybe a little bit on some kind of payroll-related tax, if it's just a straight expense.
In both cases, it was written off as an expense.
So if the company pays it in payroll, that's a write-off.
But if they pay it directly, that's another.
But there's a little extra that you pay, a little extra taxes to pay to support an employee that you don't pay for a regular expense.
So there might have been, like, a little benefit to the Trump organization.
But given the size of the organization and the tiny amount of benefit, really just the employee-related taxes for one person, There's no way that anybody besides the benefactor would have okayed that.
In other words, had Trump or Don Jr.
or anybody who was in charge, if any of them had been presented with this option, hey, how about you pay my expenses instead of paying me?
I'll save a lot on taxes.
You'll save a little bit.
But if you get caught It's like really bad.
Nobody would approve that.
Because the cost-benefit doesn't make any sense.
You would never put yourself in that position.
So, am I interpreting this incorrectly?
That the Trump Organization is a victim of a crime?
that one individual in the company committed, there were two victims.
One is the taxpayers, us, and the other victim is the Trump Organization.
Because there's no way in the world they would have greenlit those activities.
The risk-reward wouldn't make no sense.
No sense at all.
Right?
So, the fact that this is being reported like it's some kind of a Trump-related crime, when they're literally the victim of the crime.
Literally the victim of the crime, I think.
There's no upside for them.
Alright, so that's your first Backwards News of the Day.
So I tweeted yesterday a strange little thought and I said that I think it would be a good standard for social behavior to ignore anything a person said before the age of 25.
Because young people are works in progress and we usually improve.
Now this is based on a specific story in the news that I'm not going to repeat.
To be consistent.
I'm not going to repeat the story because I don't think we should be talking about what somebody said when they were a young person.
Right?
So I don't even want to give you enough detail so you could Google it.
That's how much I don't want to talk about it.
But the concept I think is important.
So I looked at the tweet today and it's like 1.9 million views.
Now, a normal tweet of mine might get, like, 10,000 or 50,000 views.
This guy got 1.9 million views.
So I was like, what's going on here?
And then I realized, oh, Elon Musk commented.
So Elon Musk commented, if not, perhaps, age 30.
Which makes me wonder if there was something specific he said or did between his ages of 25 and 30.
So I thought, wow!
You know, one Musk comment.
He didn't even retweet it, he just commented.
And I got 1.9 million views.
Okay.
So, topic number two.
I think I mentioned this yesterday.
Steve Malloy.
His Twitter name is at Junk Science.
And he tweeted some statistics from the NOAA, the National Organization of Alcoholics Anonymous?
Now what is the NOAA?
The National Organization... National Oceanic... A is Atmospheric Association.
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Exactly.
That's exactly what I said.
Right.
Or something like that.
Anyway, so that organization put out their Their data, and it was interpreted two different ways.
Steve Malloy says, according to the official government numbers, in the last eight years, the trend has been a decrease in temperature.
Which, by the way, I don't see anybody questioning the data.
In other words, when Steve Malloy looks at it and says, you just told us that the temperature went down for the last eight years.
And then he shows the graph.
I don't believe anybody was questioning whether he interpreted it correctly.
I think it actually went down.
But, does that mean anything?
Does that tell you that climate change is over?
No.
No, because if you look at the longer term graph, there are lots of multi-year periods where it does go down, followed by going to a new high, followed off and by down a few years, followed by a new high.
Now, I'm not saying that those numbers are necessarily correct, because I don't believe anything anymore, but those are two completely different stories with the same data.
If you pick the most recent eight, Do you have an argument that the most recent eight are more important than the last ones?
A little bit.
Don't we all just assume that whatever's happening recently is going to be more important than what happened in the past?
Like, yeah, your brain just automatically says, well, yeah, it should be more important than it went down the last eight years while CO2 was going up.
That should mean something.
And then you look at the way that people who don't like that story or that narrative, how they twist and turn.
People actually said, this proves that our climate strategies are working.
What?
There are actually people who are following climate change and commenting in public, and they believe that we would see the change, you know, because we've done enough that's already lowering.
Okay, maybe.
I guess anything's possible.
But I don't think so.
I mean, it seems pretty unlikely to me.
But anyway, Elon Musk responded to that one as well.
And he said, so he was responding to my comments about it, that two different things were being presented.
We also have the eight years were the warmest on record, but also trending down.
So which one do you care about?
That it's the warmest on record, or that it's trending down?
You tell me.
Which one should I care about?
Which one matters?
It's the warmest in record, or it's trending down?
I see a lot of neithers.
Or neithers.
Trend, both.
Alright, here's the correct answer.
There is one correct answer.
And I won't take any debate on this.
Alright?
If you don't present both of them, you're not a credible person.
That's the answer.
If you don't present both at the same time, don't listen to anything else I say.
Now I think I'm going to give Steve Malloy a pass, because he's talking about it in the context of the other data, right?
So that's fair, because the other data has already been presented, so he presented the part they left out.
So that's good, because that incorporates the whole.
But if anybody tells you one of those numbers, and they leave out the other one, Don't listen to anything they ever say again.
That's somebody who doesn't know how to do anything.
And by the way, I don't know if Steve Loy is credible or not credible.
I have no opinion.
I just know that he had an interesting point about this particular data.
And I looked at my numbers and I had millions, millions of views on my tweet.
And I thought, what the hell is going on here?
Oh, Elon Musk responded to that one too, last night.
And he said, it's easier to argue that global warming is a risk rather than a certainty, but it is foolish to roll those dice, given that we will eventually run out of fossil fuels and have to generate energy sustainable anyway.
How many of you would say that's the best view?
Would you concur?
That we don't know what the future looks like, But we do know we can't use fossil fuels forever.
Is that a reasonable view?
Is there anything left out?
Anything left out?
Yes.
Because what he's saying, I believe, would be 100% compatible with everybody's view, wouldn't it?
Is there anybody who doesn't think, let me say it without the negatives, Do you all understand that there's no doubt about it, humanity will use different sources of energy in the future?
Does anybody doubt that?
We're all 100% certain that at some point in the future, we'll probably have other sources.
Might be fusion.
Might be more standard nuclear stuff.
Might be something else.
Might be electric.
Might be more wind.
Who knows?
But we're all sure of that, right?
So I would say that what Elon Musk said is something we would all agree with, right?
Is there anybody who would disagree with the proposition that we're going to run out of the stuff we use, so it doesn't matter if there's climate change or not, we have to get ready to develop new sources?
Everybody?
I'm seeing some dissenters.
I'll get to you in a moment.
All right.
The dissenters, you already know it's a trick, right?
You know I'm tricking you.
You know it.
Yeah.
Here's what's left out.
Here's the dog not barking.
It's not about where things are going.
We all agree that there's not infinite oil.
There's nobody arguing that there is.
The only thing we disagree on is the rate of change.
And he didn't mention that.
The rate of change is the only topic we disagree on.
How aggressively, how much of our taxes do you put into it because you're trying to make it happen fast versus letting the free market do whatever it wants, right?
So the question was never about whether we need new sustainable energy.
Everybody knew that.
Everybody knew we needed new ones eventually, whether it's 100 years from now or 200 years from now.
You still have to do it.
But if you have to do it in 20 years, that is an entirely different proposition than you have to do it in 300 years.
You can't compare those two.
And to imagine that you can leave that out looks a little bit more A little bit more, let's say, persuasion-related than data-related.
Because Elon Musk has a business that is very much in the business of alternative energy.
So of course he would like to do that maybe faster than the rest of us, maybe.
Or faster than some of us, and slower than some people would like it as well.
But he does have an enormous financial interest in being a little bit quick about it.
Because that's where his money is, is being quick about it.
Buy a Tesla now, save the world.
Well, he's not wrong.
He's not wrong.
You just have to consider that the rate is a real question.
Do you upend everything quickly or let it play out?
That's really the decision.
Well, this was going to happen.
You know how the Republicans or just people who lean right like to say that the Democrats are all groomers?
I'm sure you have not missed that story.
I tried not to talk about it because it's just icky.
It's not really a topic.
I don't know, it's just not worthy of talking about most of the time.
But the Democrats put together a compilation video of GOP groomers.
And it's a pretty long compilation video.
Now, of course, they include historical examples so they can go back a little bit.
But if you go back a little bit, you find a whole bunch of people who are Republicans who absolutely You know, we're in that groomer category, if you will.
So, do you know offhand who does more of it?
Now, most of the GOP examples were individuals who did things and got caught.
And they seemed like individual acts.
Whereas the so-called grooming that is, you know, the alleged grooming, I'll call it, on the left is industrial level.
Right?
It's not that people on the right are saying, hey, there's that one groomer over there.
Like sometimes they talk about Epstein or something.
But mostly it's about if you've got a teacher or somebody who has power.
Yeah, it's like systemic grooming.
That's the complaint.
So they're not really comparable.
But if you imagine that all the groomers are on one political side, well, maybe it will change your mind on that.
I don't think anybody thought that, but it's a pretty good play.
So just in terms of persuasion, I thought the Dems did a good job.
It's completely, let's say, manipulative and propaganda and it's not based on proper context and all that, so it's not good, but it is a well-executed persuasion.
It's a pretty good Me Too play.
Not Me Too.
What do you call it?
U2?
More of a U2 than a Me Too.
Alright.
One of my guilty pleasures lately is watching Jonathan Turley dunking on Adam Schiff.
If you haven't caught any of Jonathan Turley's articles or tweet threads about Adam Schiff, the most storied liar of our day, it's really good stuff.
Like, just to watch how capably He lays out the case.
Turley's great.
I can't get enough of anything he writes.
I see a tweet from his, and I'm definitely going to read that.
He does good stuff.
So he points out that the Schiff was publicly... His office was demanding all kinds of censorship at the same time he was lying about stuff in public.
So he was lying in public, While trying really hard to get the, at least Twitter, to suppress his critics.
While he was lying in public, he was moving really hard.
Not just like one phone call or something, but a whole program of trying to suppress the people who were calling him out for lying in public.
Jenny.
Stop it, Jenny.
It's amazing.
It's just amazing.
Yeah.
Like, to watch Schiff operate.
I think Schiff is, he is turned into a national asset accidentally.
Like, I think he was just the worst person.
Like, character-wise, I've never seen anybody lower character than Adam Schiff.
But, because he's now so well-known as the signal of lying, That whenever he gets pushed forward to lie for the Democrats, you can say to yourself, oh, they sent the liar.
And whenever there's a scandal that's not really anything, who did they send?
Bernstein, to say it's worse than Watergate.
So if you see Bernstein, or you see Adam Schiff, or you see Eric Swalwell, The one thing you can know is that honest Democrats aren't willing to say those things.
Or Brennan, right?
Brennan and Clapper too.
Right.
And I mean that literally.
Because there are a lot of honest Democrats.
Lots of them.
The honest ones won't go anywhere near a camera.
when their team is presenting a lie.
So they send Schiff and, you know, they're designated liars.
So it's actually useful now to know when they're lying because they just tell you.
Oh, by the way, this is just lying.
Now, I'm going to disagree with you on Ted Lieu.
I'm more of a Ted Lieu fan than you're going to suspect, right?
So he and I have had some exchanges on Twitter as well.
But he's just a partisan.
He's just a partisan.
He's not, like, he's just pushing his side and, you know, he's doing it in public.
Is he right?
No.
But is the other team right all the time?
No.
I just don't see him anywhere near the Schiff and Swalwell level.
He just seems like a partisan.
Gates was on Timcast last night.
Somebody says that was fire.
Yeah, I like Ted Lieu.
I don't know.
I feel like I could hang with him.
He just seems like he'd be a fun guy.
I tend to like anybody who's got a sense of humor.
Just sort of, you know, a general statement.
All right, Kerry Lake.
Still, I guess she had some court success in pressing her case, so basically she just gets the chance to press her case.
And two of the things that she's claiming about the Arizona election that she thinks were illegitimate are that 300,000 or more ballots did not have a proper chain of custody.
And number two, over 100,000 ballots with faulty signature verification Got through so the Arizona law says that they must be verified But her claim is that 100 over 100,000 were not now.
Here's my problem Here's my problem How would a court ever act on that?
I don't even see how a court would do anything.
Because isn't the court going to say, yeah, yep, good points.
Arizona didn't do a good job of following their own procedures.
Thanks for telling me.
I think the Constitution just says it's up to the states.
I don't believe the Constitution says the states must operate perfectly, according to you, or it doesn't count.
Now, it would be different if there were direct evidence of a crime.
But if the only problem is that there was the potential for rigging, not direct evidence, but just potential for rigging, what does the court do about that?
Doesn't the court just say, well, you know, get a better state.
It's up to the state.
If the state did not give you the transparency you wanted, maybe you should talk to the state.
Orders of full audit?
I don't know.
I can't see them decertifying a governor race at this point.
See, here's the thing.
If you're making a strict technical argument, then maybe you can make a case that the court could do something on a strictly technical argument.
But I don't think the courts act that way when it comes to elections.
I think the courts will always favor stability of the system.
And so the court, knowing that if they act, let's say overthrowing election, it would create instability in the system, I don't think they'll act.
I think the court is going to say, yeah, that looks pretty sketchy.
But you work it out.
It's better if you work it out than we work it out.
I think that's where it's going.
Now, that doesn't mean she shouldn't press the case.
Because I love the fact that she's highlighting two vulnerabilities in her system that probably are common to other states.
And maybe everybody should be looking into it.
So it's a good, solid, You know, patriotic thing.
And I think we should all be, even if you disagree with her case, you should all be happy she's fighting it.
This is exactly the kind of fight that you want to maybe get some more transparency in your system, make people a little bit more alert where the problems are.
It's all good.
No matter how this ends, Carrie Lake is fighting a good fight.
So I think we're going to come out ahead one way or another.
I don't think she's going to win, but I think we'll come out ahead.
Did you see the new Is it the CDC who's saying that the new variant of the virus is more likely to hit the vaccinated and already infected?
Do you believe that?
It's the and already infected.
Do you believe that there's a variant that is more likely to infect you if you'd already been infected with a variant of that variant?
Is that passing your sniff test?
Now, the problem is that I don't see a mechanism, right?
There's no proposed mechanism for why that could be the case.
But with the vaccinations, there are smart people who propose a potential mechanism by which they could cause harm to some people.
That's a well-described mechanism.
But having a prior infection, Everything we know about that says that should make you stronger against anything related to it.
Or at least the same.
Under no case have we ever seen, correct me if I'm wrong, but does it make sense you'd ever be weaker?
Weaker in that specific way?
I don't know.
Well, let me ask you this.
I sometimes go entire days without human contact.
Like actually none.
Yeah, like one day this week I talked to no people in person.
Except I guess I ordered something at Starbucks.
That was as close as I got to human contact.
Now, would a person like me, who can... I can socially isolate better than almost anybody.
Would a person like me be inclined to get like booster after booster?
Less likely.
Now, there are other reasons, right?
That's not the only reason.
But much less likely.
Now, suppose I had a job where I was going to be around people, like, hordes of people all the time.
Would I be more likely to have been boosted?
Now again, at my age, right?
We're not talking about younger people, that's a whole different calculation.
But at my age, would I be more likely to be boosted if I knew I was just going to be surrounded by possibly infected people all the time?
I think so.
I think so.
I think that I would be more likely to boost because I would talk myself into that being a danger.
So, how do we know That the people who have the most obvious chance of getting infected aren't the ones who quite reasonably are more likely to be vaccinated and boosted.
Wouldn't you expect that the more boosted you are, the more likely you would get infected?
That's what I'd expect.
But I'm not sure that that works for natural immunity.
Does it feel to you like they might have thrown in the natural immunity part so you wouldn't suspect it's the vaccinations?
Doesn't it feel like that's what they did?
It's like, really?
Because one of them has a described mechanism and the other one's never happened.
It feels like a little sketchy that they put them in the same sentence.
You know, if you got vaccinated or natural immunity, I'm not buying any of that.
Now, to his credit, do you know what Fauci said about it?
Fauci said the data might be bullshit.
Okay, I'm gonna give him that.
I'm going to give him that.
He actually said the data might be wrong.
Because apparently it's something that our data is showing but other countries are not buying into this analysis.
So there's something sketchy about the whole thing.
Either the data is wrong, or if the data is right, they're lying to us, maybe by throwing in the natural immunity people.
I mean, to me, this screams bad data or bad analysis.
I don't know.
I mean, we could be wrong.
I'll put everything in a statistical frame, not a yes or no.
But certainly sketchy looking.
All right, here's where I want to get the clopberts all clicking away.
Click, click, click.
Clopberts.
I'm going to say something that will make you mistakenly believe that I have a different opinion than I do.
Now, the rest of you will completely be on board, and it'll be easy to understand.
But the clopberts are just binaries.
Like, loves this, hates this.
Wait, wait, wait.
You said something about this.
You must hate it.
All right.
So the rest of you will be fine.
It goes like this.
I'm going to give you a little wind-up here.
There's one thing that artists add to the system that sometimes scientists and engineers and lawyers will miss.
What is it?
What is it that artists will sometimes see that engineers and scientists and other people don't see?
Now, not feelings.
Maybe that's true, but that's not where I'm going.
I'm not going for the feelings part.
Not nuance.
No, there's something really big that artists see that other people don't even look for.
In other words, we're actually actively looking for something that nobody else looks for.
A little connection problem there.
Alright, here's the answer.
Empty space.
Empty space.
If I'm going to design, let's say, a graphic art, If I'm going to design something, I will look for where I put stuff in the picture, but I'll make sure that there's a big empty space, a negative space, because that's what makes the composition work.
It's not just where you put stuff, it's where you decide to not put stuff.
So I actively look for the missing parts.
I often talk about the dog not barking.
I believe I've just trained my brain to look for the part that's missing.
Because humor does that too.
If I'm looking at a situation and I want to find the joke, I don't say what's there, I say what's missing, as well as what's there.
So I'm always actively looking for what's missing.
Now, we have this big conversation about excess mortality.
Some say it might be COVID.
Some say it might be the vaccination.
What does the artist say?
What if there's a third mass killer and it's invisible to us because we're focused on the other two things, the COVID and the Vax?
Now, of course, we think there's some disruption from the shutdowns themselves.
You know, there's some delayed medical things and everything.
Do all of those explanations feel like they're capturing the amount of death that we might be experiencing?
Does it feel like there might be something else?
And if there were, if it were fentanyl, we'd probably have noticed it by now.
So that is something else.
But I'm going to give you a hypothesis that I don't present as, you know, like a conclusion.
So I'm not going to say this is for sure.
I'm going to give you a hypothesis That there's something really big and really obvious that's killing people, maybe not instead of vaccinations or COVID, but on top of.
On top of.
So here's where the cloppers will get confused.
It's a fact that vaccinations kill some people.
We just don't know what the percentage is.
Like, even the people who are the most pro-vaccination understand That we're all built differently and some people are going to die.
It's like true of a lot of medications.
So there's not a question about whether the vaccinations are adding to excess mortality or, you know, that as well as the COVID itself.
But what if, what if there were a third mass killer?
Would you know it?
Let me ask you the first question.
If there were something else going on, would you buy the first assertion that we wouldn't notice?
We wouldn't notice, right?
Now here's my question.
What else changed at about the same time as the vaccinations were rolled out?
If it's the only thing that really changed, Then I think it probably makes perfect sense to focus on it, if it's the only thing that changed.
But is it?
Is it the only thing that changed?
I don't know.
Did you know that stress can cause cardiac arrest?
Did you all know that an increase in stress kills you?
I mean, not every person, but statistically.
Let me take you back to 1970.
You're going to love where this is going.
1970.
I was alive then.
A young person.
Let's say I had a stressful day.
A bunch of stress.
And then I wanted to recover from the stress.
What did I do to recover from the stress?
Well, I'd usually just sit around bored.
Or I'd pick the bark off a stick.
Or I'd sit on a wall and wait for a car to go by.
Or as a healthful person said, I'd beat off.
I would go for a walk.
I'd play some sports.
Right?
And if I did any of those things, my cortisol levels and my adrenaline would go down.
I'd get back into a healthy mode for a while, but then later, you know, some stressful thing would happen.
And then, you know, so I'd be, I'd be peaking and valleying all day long, right?
Peaking and valleying.
Now one assumes, one assumes that the, the, the low points are where you regain your health.
Imagine if you never got to relax.
What if you had high stress, followed by more stress, followed by more stress, and it never stopped?
Alright, what do you do in 2023 after a stressful situation?
So you feel stressed.
What do you do?
I'll tell you what I do.
Check my phone.
Check my phone.
So I'll be up in like high stress area and I'll check my phone.
And then my stress goes up a little bit.
And then I gotta go do something else.
I can't play on my phone all day.
So I go off to a stressful situation and I stay there.
But now I've got a break.
I've got a break.
So I pick out my phone and I look at Twitter and I'm like, ah!
And my stress stays the same.
If I simply describe that situation to you, and then I add on top of it something we know for sure, one thing we know for sure is that all change causes stress.
If you get married, it's stressful.
If you get divorced, if you change jobs.
If you get a promotion, it's stressful.
If you get fired, it's stressful.
If the weather changes, it's stressful.
If your finances change, it's stressful.
If your relationships, you know, everything.
Every change.
What is a bigger change than the pandemic in your life?
For me, nothing.
That was it.
The pandemic was the biggest stressor of my life.
How many of you would agree?
The biggest stressor that's not part of your actual personal experience, but the external stressor.
Now, if you went to war, that'd be worse.
But in my lifetime, I haven't gone to war.
So I asked on Twitter, I did a little non-scientific poll, and I said, rank your stress before the pandemic compared to during and after.
And 31% said it's about the same.
Stress level's about the same.
28% say it's a bit higher now than before the pandemic.
And 24% say it's much higher.
Much higher.
And 17% say it's actually less stress.
Now, the way I asked the question, Was a problem, and it's a non-scientific poll, so don't put too much credibility into it.
But the way I asked the question, and I could tell from the comments, people thought that when I said stress, that what I really meant was, do you trust the so-called vaccination or not?
And that wasn't the question.
So we're so primed to see it as anti-vax or pro-vax that I asked about people's stress in general, and they answered it like I was asking about vaccinations, which was a small part of the whole.
So people can't even answer a simple poll in 2023 without thinking it's about vaccinations.
Like we're just so primed for war, yes or no, conflict.
So, now imagine that we were in a period in America where we had the lowest level of trust in our leaders.
And that at the same time, we had the biggest challenge they've ever had.
You know, maybe World War II was bigger.
But in, you know, in my lifetime, the pandemic was the biggest leadership challenge.
So imagine not trusting your own leaders before the pandemic even started.
And then you've got a pandemic, and then all the leaders and experts start looking like maybe they're not on your side so much.
It looks like a money grab.
And the data and the fog of war, you don't trust your data.
How stressful would it be to have one of the biggest challenges at the same time that you think the people in charge of it are lying to you, and incompetent, and maybe corrupt?
I can't even imagine anything more stressful than that, short of war.
Let me be clear.
The Ukrainians have it a lot worse.
All right?
Just put that out there.
We're not comparing it to war.
But in terms of just ordinary life stress, I don't think it's ever been higher.
If I had told you I'm going to take 25% of your public and I'm going to make them more stressed than they've ever been in their life, do you get more heart attacks?
Yes or no?
Do you get more heart attacks if I take 25% of the public and stress them beyond what they've ever been stressed?
I think so.
Now, I'm not sure if that would necessarily have athletes falling over.
Do you?
I don't know that that would make athletes start falling over in bigger numbers.
Like, I kind of expect that would affect people my age, you know, not elite athletes.
But let me give you another hypothesis.
Do you think there's anything that elite athletes imbibe that's different from what you imbibe?
Probably.
Probably.
Because they would supplement, maybe some would cheat, maybe some performance enhancing things, right?
What if There was one popular form of, let's say, athletic performance enhancing thing that a lot of people were using, and there was a bad batch.
Would you ever stop to think that there was any problem but the vaccinations killing people?
You would not.
You would assume it was the vaccinations.
And it might be.
So here's the part I have to say for the Klopperts.
Klopperts I'm not saying that the vaccinations are safe.
I'm saying I don't know how dangerous they are.
But I'm also saying that if you assume it's the only thing that would be killing people, at the same time a lot of things are changing, there are a lot of other things that are changing.
And I worry that it's like a magician's trick.
We're watching the magician's two hands.
You're like, oh, watch his left hand.
That's the vaccination one.
Watch his right hand.
That's the anti-vaccination one.
But this guy's only got two hands.
So if we watch those two hands, we'll see the trick.
And while you're watching the magician's two hands, the magician's assistant is doing the trick.
Because you're looking in the wrong place.
So here's the only thing I'm going to add with certainty.
Everything else is just speculative.
But with certainty, we are blind to any third killer.
I don't know that there is one.
Jenny says, Scott, apologize for begging the government for mass testing for two years.
No, we needed mass rapid testing.
That would have helped a lot.
Anybody who thinks that wouldn't have helped?
Because the mass rapid testing would help you make your own individual decisions.
Are you opposed to people making their individual health decisions with data?
That's just a silly thing to be against.
And by the way, the only reason we didn't have them had to be corruption.
All right.
So, have I made my point, have I made my point that if there's a third killer, there totally could be, and we would be blind to it.
We would be blind to it.
Okay, that's all.
Yeah, I'm not going to state that those are killing people, just that we would be blind to it.
But I will state that the extra stress is guaranteed to cause more heart attacks.
How about that?
We don't know if that's what we're seeing, but would you say with a large population, if you substantially increase their stress, more heart attacks?
The part that, and again I'll say it again, but not necessarily the athletes.
The athlete's dying looks like it could be.
There could be a fourth killer, right?
We could have four things killing people and only be seeing two, because we're just tuned to those two.
All right, here's the question I asked.
If an evil hypnotist took control of TikTok's algorithm, could they use it to murder people in a demographic?
Now, not murder a specific person.
Although it could probably do that.
But I'll say, could it murder lots of people, you don't know which ones, just... Yes.
Absolutely.
If you gave me control of TikTok's algorithm and said, here's who we want you to target.
We want you to increase the death rate in this group of people.
You don't think I could do that?
If I had control of the algorithm?
And I could say, these people are going to see this content?
Oh, I could do that.
Yeah, I could do mass murder, and it wouldn't even be hard.
Like, you know, I'm not like the super hypnotist or anything.
It would just be basic, pretty basic, for somebody who had just ordinary persuasion skills, if they were evil, and if they had full control of the algorithm.
Now, how lucky are we That China hasn't figured that out, huh?
How lucky are we that, you know, a podcaster here in the United States can easily see it.
Easily see it.
Very obvious.
And all of you, as soon as I said it, said, well, you know, it is obvious.
You can definitely kill people if you control the algorithm.
But aren't we lucky that China, our adversary, Who is sending in fentanyl to kill us by the tens of thousands every year.
Isn't it lucky that they haven't, like, keyed in on this?
Yeah.
By the way, do you know that they don't allow TikTok to be used in China?
Yeah, the Chinese owned TikTok.
It's not allowed in China.
They have a different version that doesn't have any of the problems.
Yeah, so how lucky.
Lucky, lucky, lucky, lucky that the Chinese government hasn't figured out what every one of you know and is obvious, that they could use that algorithm to kill Americans.
Now, do you have any doubt that our Congress is corrupt?
None.
None.
Now, there may be members of Congress who are not corrupt, Like, I have a good feeling about Thomas Massey and Paul Rand and a number of others, but clearly, the reason that TikTok is still legal in the United States, clearly, is corruption.
There's nothing else it could be.
Nobody's even offered another hypothesis.
Right?
Had there been another hypothesis where somebody says, you know, Scott, you're forgetting all these good reasons why it might not be so easy.
There is no other argument.
Do we have any other national topic where everybody's on the same side?
I've never seen one.
Everybody.
100% of the Congress is on the same side.
And yet TikTok's not banned.
Not banned.
Not even close.
There's not a vote.
I don't believe there's any legislation.
There's no conversation.
Right?
That has to be massive corruption.
Give me any other hypothesis.
Any other hypothesis.
There is none.
It's obvious.
It's like the rapid testing scandal.
That the news treated us like it wasn't a scandal.
The biggest corruption we've ever seen, unless we find out something about the vaccinations, was as sketchy as it looks.
It wasn't even covered in the news.
Does the news cover the fact that there's no debate on TikTok, and yet no action?
No.
No, it's not covered on the left, and it's not covered on the right.
Now, in both cases, they complain about fentanyl.
And they complain about fentanyl deaths.
But they don't complain about TikTok killing people and then tell us that nobody's doing anything about it when that's obviously the case.
What else could it be?
I mean, really?
Now, here's a perfect situation where if I were talking about an individual human citizen, I would not say that they're guilty without proof.
I'd say, no, no, a citizen is innocent.
You better bring some serious proof if you're going to accuse a citizen of a crime.
But the government?
The government is presumed guilty unless they can show you some transparency to show you that they're treating you seriously.
And they have no transparency, no argument.
They are guilty by definition.
In the same way a citizen is innocent by definition, you know, our system just defines it that way, until guilty, the government by definition is guilty.
By definition.
If they won't tell you or even engage in the conversation, that's just guilty.
And anything that you assume otherwise doesn't make sense.
Yeah.
Yeah, the TikTok is an educational product in China.
Alright.
And that, ladies and gentlemen... Let me give you another insight into this.
I'm not going to tell you what the topic was, but several weeks ago, Social media was messing with my head, because I made the mistake of looking at some specific content, nothing disgusting, don't be weird.
I looked at some content, you know, legal, ordinary content, and then the algorithm started serving me more of it.
And it really messed with my life.
Because I couldn't break the habit of looking at It was Instagram.
I couldn't break the habit, but it was feeding me things that made it impossible to sleep.
I couldn't sleep, like, for weeks.
And it was only because there was a recurring thought that the algorithm kept putting in my head.
And every time it would, like, wear off, every time I looked at it, it would go back in my head.
Now, it doesn't matter what the content is.
It only matters that I couldn't turn it off, and I couldn't stop looking at it.
So that actually caused me major health problems.
Like actual health problems.
From Instagram algorithm.
Not a joke.
Very clearly a health problem.
Because I couldn't sleep more than a few hours a night for night after night.
That's a health problem.
That's a pretty major health problem, right?
And that came just from the algorithm.
And it wasn't because I looked for something.
It was because something was served to me.
It wasn't about my personal life.
Then, here's another one.
I found some humor and interest in some anti-relationship content.
Meaning it was people saying that men and women basically are never going to get along.
Because there's something about modern life which has made men and women toxic to each other.
Like we just don't have a way to be partners anymore.
And it was basically very strongly would encourage you never to get married or be in a serious relationship.
And once I looked at some of them, the algorithm started giving me, just, just burying me with, uh, don't be in a relationship.
Now, would that be a benefit to China?
To have an algorithm convince people not to get married and have children?
Yeah.
Yup.
If I, if I were in charge of the algorithm, I would be promoting Don't have children, don't get married, don't do any kind of classical relationship.
It's all broken.
You have to go do something totally different and it'll just feed you over and over again.
And I started getting inundated.
And at first, I thought, whoa, I love the fact that these are outside the mainstream.
I love the way it's expressed.
The people who are on these videos were really good.
They were just charismatic.
They had good communication skills.
And as content, it was good stuff.
Just as content.
Entertaining.
But what did it do to my life?
If I had been a younger person, and I was questioning whether I'd get married and have kids, it would absolutely have reprogrammed me.
It was strong enough that it would have changed my procreation preferences.
It would have changed my reproductive preferences.
And I could feel it in real time.
Like I could feel it changing my brain.
Right?
And you saw me mention it a number of times because you could see it was taking up a little real estate.
And now just imagine somebody doing that intentionally.
Maybe it is intentional.
No way to know.
But imagine if I had control of the algorithm.
There's two examples where I know I could make you less healthy.
I could make you less healthy because I experienced it.
I'd give you just disturbing images and you wouldn't sleep well.
And then your health would be bad.
Or I could tell you that the things which we know are good for you are really bad for you.
For example, if you were China, would you let the algorithm present lots of being overweight is good for you content?
Would you?
Do you think that the United States, which has always had a history of telling people to exercise, right, through the 60s and 70s and Arnold Schwarzenegger, the government has always said, oh, exercise, exercise is good for you.
But what would China want the United States to do?
China would want us to value our fatness and say, don't change me.
This is just me.
Body positivity.
And by the way, the women can all weigh 400 pounds, and you men, you still want to mate with them because, you know, you don't want to be a jerk.
Yeah.
China could absolutely end us.
Just with TikTok.
And our Congress is completely blind to it.
That's the best case scenario.
But I think they're bought off.
I think they're bought off.
So at this point, China has the fentanyl in our veins, and they got the finger on the plunger.
And the best we can hope for is they don't push their finger on the plunger.
But the needle's in our arm, right?
The TikTok's here.
It's already in our kids' hands.
The needle's in.
All they have to do is push the plunger, and they can take out our whole society.
If they haven't already.
Because what would it look like if they did?
Body positivity.
Maybe you should try being gay.
Maybe you shouldn't get married.
Maybe you should complain more about wokeness, because that's what's important.
Almost everything that's on social media is destructive.
Now, here's what I don't know.
Is there also a thriving TikTok pro-health exercise part of it that I never see?
Maybe.
But, you know, that would still get lost in the noise.
All right.
Yeah, there's one.
If China wanted to destroy the United States, would they promote Andrew Tate's videos?
Think about it.
If China wanted to destroy the United States, would they promote Andrew Tate's videos?
Who was the most viral content recently?
Andrew Tate.
The most viral.
And TikTok was the leading cause of that, right?
It was mostly a TikTok thing.
So China may have decided, unless the algorithm did it itself.
Because Tate did a lot of things to make things viral.
So, I mean, he was pushing himself.
So we don't know if that, maybe that was enough.
It looks like they're trying to encourage obesity.
Yeah.
So I would just put that out there, that the needle's in the arm, and we're trusting our adversary not to push the plunger.
So great job, Congress.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is the best livestream you've ever seen.
I hope it challenged your current thinking.
I don't know if anything I'm saying is true.
But I know we're not thinking broadly enough about what the possibilities are.
That being my theme of the day.
And YouTube, I'm going to say goodbye to you now.
I'm going to talk to the locals platform privately.
