Episode 2005 Scott Adams: Pretending To Care About Kids, Bill Maher & CNN, China Can't Make Chips
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Content:
Bill Maher to slightly join CNN
Kids getting dumber because of smartphones?
Dan Crenshaw's strong anti-fentanyl stance
China's state managed manufacturing system
Excess COVID deaths or psychogenic death?
MSNBC Yasmin Vossoughian's Myocarditis
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Congratulations, you made it on time.
I see some people just got here at the nick of time.
And your day will be perfect today.
Man, what a day you're going to have.
In fact, I'm going to give you a little technique to try today.
So I've tried this, and it works every time I do it.
And it's kind of freaky, because it's not obvious why it would work.
It goes like this.
Today's the day.
Something good is going to happen.
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Just say, I think, I feel like some good luck's coming.
Today's the day.
It's gonna be a good day.
Wow, today's gonna be a good day.
Some good stuff coming.
Now, it might be that you talk yourself into seeing the good stuff as more important than the bad stuff that day.
So it might be just a psychological phenomenon.
Or, or we live in a simulation and that's how you steer it.
By your intentions.
Because all evidence does suggest that's the case.
One day, that's all I'm asking, just one day, every now and then, remind yourself, something good is going to happen today.
I can feel it.
It's coming.
See what happens.
You'll be amazed.
Well, at the same time that the price of eggs is going through the roof, Because of avian flu, there was some big egg production facility that burned down.
Does that sound like a coincidence?
At the same time, the eggs are in great demand and high price, that a major egg facility would burn down.
Now, I believe this is a case of, well, it's obvious who did it.
Do I have to say it?
It's obvious.
No, it was the egg white supremacists.
The egg white supremacists.
That's the way I think they did it.
Yes, it did kick off many bad puns.
I won't repeat them all.
Just that one.
Go work among yourselves and do the rest of the puns.
Well, the big news, entertainment-wise, is that Bill Maher is going to slightly be on CNN.
Oh, he's not moving his show to CNN.
He's just sort of slightly, tangentially, a little bit sometimes kind of flirting with the idea of a little bit of content on CNN.
So on Friday nights, the extra part of his show that's on HBO real time, the extra part after the end of the show where they sit around and keep talking, the extra part will be on CNN late at night on Fridays because his show only goes on, it's only once a week.
Now, is this a reaction to Got Felt?
Are they testing the waters?
Will CNN test Bill Maher for a little bit at that time and then say to themselves, we should be running this kind of content at this time all the time?
Because people want to see funny news, not like hard news before they go to bed.
So I think that's one of Garfield's magic, is that he can make you feel good before you go to bed.
Anyway, keep an eye on that.
I do have a feeling about it, which is just one of those feels-alike.
You know how people always think in analogies?
So if something reminds you of something else, you irrationally think that the thing it reminded you of is telling you something about the thing.
It probably isn't.
It's just two things that remind you of each other.
But here's what it reminds me of.
When I used to own restaurants locally, When I saw a restaurant start to serve brunch, when normally they were just a lunch and dinner place, as soon as they would offer brunch, you knew they were going out of business.
Do you know how?
It's because brunch is a terrible business.
It's like a last ditch thing to do.
Like if you've given up on making money the normal way, you try to do brunch.
It never works.
It's like the ultimate thing that never works.
Nobody ever goes to the lunch and dinner place for brunch.
Do you know why?
Because they're used to it as the lunch and dinner place.
It doesn't really ever become a breakfast place.
The only places that do are breakfast places.
If a place is a breakfast place, people go to breakfast there.
Otherwise their minds just can't wrap around it.
So when I see CNN trying to scoop up the leftovers from Bill Maher's show on HBO, that looks to me a lot like brunch, if you know what I mean.
Sort of a Hail Mary, desperation, try anything kind of thing.
But if I want to look at it as a more aggressive approach, I would say they're testing out their audience To see if they can maybe compete for his full show.
What do you think?
I don't know if he'd want to do it every night, though.
I don't think he wants to do a nightly show.
But maybe he would.
Maybe he would.
You never know.
My music teacher... Well, I won't say.
I'll just say a music teacher.
I shouldn't have said that.
And now I can't do the story.
Because I didn't want to identify it.
Skipping that story, going right to the next one.
So does it seem to you that kids are getting dumber because of smartphones?
How many would say that the children, the youth, are getting dumber because of smartphones?
A lot of people say yes, somewhat reflexively.
Now what do you think you would find Don't do this yet, but what do you think you would find if you were to go to Google and Google are smartphones making children dumber?
What do you think you'd find as the top result from Google, who I believe would like everybody to use a smartphone?
Do you think that Google would say, oh, here's the research showing these smartphones, which we're a big part of, are bad for you?
What do you think?
Well, the top result, or one of the top results, or actually the top curated results.
So if you go to Google and you look for something that other people have looked for a lot, Google will help you by curating a quick hit that's like all you need to know.
You can look deeper, but it's basically the answer to the question.
But it's curated.
Meaning it's not just a natural way that you search and the good stuff comes up first.
Somebody at Google decided that the first thing you should see when you click on it is this.
The arguments that are making us, that smartphones are making us dumber don't hold up.
Explained some PhD, cognitive scientist, blah blah blah.
And that it's the opposite.
Smartphones are making us smarter.
What do you think about that?
Do you think smartphones make you dumber or making you smarter?
Well, maybe there's a trick to it.
Maybe there's a trick.
Here's the trick.
If I say to you, are smartphones making you smarter, who is you?
It seems obvious, right?
You is you, and then your phone is separate.
Your phone is there, and this is you.
But this answer that smartphones are making you smarter treats you like a cyborg.
You're part phone and part person.
And if you look at the person as part phone, connected to the internet, and part person, we're way smarter.
What do you think of that?
So it might be true that the organic part of our cyborg being is getting some less abilities.
It might be decreasing its memorization ability.
But at the same time, we're no longer just an organic entity.
We're a cyborg.
We're part machine, part human.
And the machine part is awesome.
It more than makes up for what we're losing in cognitive abilities.
So do you buy that?
And do you buy that it's a total coincidence that Google, a company that would really like you to look at a screen a lot, that a big company like that wants you to know that you're just getting better and stronger and smarter because you're part computer and part person.
And how could that be bad?
Now, there are lots of studies that would suggest the opposite.
So, other studies that don't look at you as a cyborg and see you just as your organic part, there's lots of indications that we're getting more distracted, shorter attention spans, that kind of stuff.
Can we treat... Let me tie a few things together here.
So, I did an unscientific Twitter poll And I asked people, what will destroy the lives of more children?
And the choices were pandemic policies, so that would include everything from vaccinations, to masks, to shutdowns, to Zoom class, all that.
So the pandemic policies, or smartphones and social media being called out, that's a big part of that.
Or COVID-19 itself, the actual virus So the number of people who thought that the most people of these choices that COVID-19 would destroy the lives of more children was 2%.
2% thought COVID was the thing that would destroy the most children.
Coming in second was all of the pandemic policies put together.
25%. 25%. 25%. 25%. 25%. 25%. 25%. 25%.
25.
25.
That's about a quarter.
That's about a quarter of the people.
Interesting.
The other people said, 73% said it was the smartphones and social media.
I don't want to make too much of the 25%.
And what do you think? - Okay.
73% think the smartphone was worse than everything in the pandemic.
73% think it was worse than the COVID itself and worse than the response to the COVID from vaccinations to masks to Zoom school.
So that's how many people think smartphones are like a serious danger to children.
Do you see a big movement to ban smartphones for children?
I don't.
There's none, is there?
I tweeted it the other day and I got a lot of support, but there's nothing in the government that's going to ban smartphones now, because the big tech companies have too much control.
That's never going to happen.
Can we stop pretending we care about children?
Can we just stop lying about it?
Because I feel like It's bad enough that we're putting children in these situations.
That's bad enough.
But we're also lying about it while we're doing it.
Obviously we don't care about children.
And in fact, I'll go further.
I believe wars, general wars, the kind where you're shooting and killing, wars are about sacrificing young people to protect old people.
Aren't they?
You put the young people in the front line, cannon fodder, to protect the old people in their retirements.
We've never cared about young people.
It's just never been... And in fact, if you go back for most of civilization, children were just an asset that could maybe make you some money or protect you from your enemies.
But basically, it wasn't all about the kids.
The kids were just like the animals.
They were just part of the system.
So, I find it distasteful that we even pretend that we care about children when it's so obviously we don't.
So obvious.
Do you know why parents give up on phones when they should be tough?
Why do parents give up and say, all right, you can have your phone, but not after 9 p.m.
Okay, you can have your phone after 9 p.m.
Why do most parents do that?
Because it's too hard to take it away.
It's just too hard.
And the kid is less trouble when they're on their phone.
They're not making trouble in the backseat of the car.
It's sort of like television.
People use television as a babysitter.
Because it works.
It works really well.
And the phones are just that.
So I think we're destroying our children.
73% of you know it completely, and at least the pandemic policies are, you know, mopping up whatever you haven't destroyed with smartphones.
But do you see any indication?
So look at the state of our public schools.
Look at our public schools.
Just all of it.
Just all of it.
Look at smartphones, and then look at how we treated kids during the pandemic.
And you tell me that we care about children.
Seriously.
Tell me we care about children.
Now I do think that every parent does.
I believe that.
I believe every parent cares about their children.
And a lot, right?
No difference than it ever has been.
But as an entity, a group, as a country, you can't tell us we care about children.
Come on.
Yeah, the fentanyl.
Fentanyl is just an obvious one.
Stop saying we care about the young.
We don't.
If we wouldn't do any, you know, homeschooling is growing.
But homeschooling is a growth from individual parents.
Am I right?
I mean, there's some politicians on board.
But it's mostly that grew up from the bottom up.
That wasn't the top-down thing.
All of the top-down stuff is anti-children.
I don't know, is that a coincidence?
That it's all anti-children?
All of it?
Because it is.
It's all anti-children.
I don't know how that ever evolved to be like complete anti-children.
But maybe we've always been this way.
Maybe it's just a little more obvious because of the pandemic.
But maybe we've always just not cared about children.
We just pretend that we feel otherwise because we do care about our own.
So I think we're conflating how much we care about our own kids with how much we care about your kids.
You know what I mean?
Because that feels like your problem?
All right.
A few other things.
If you keep looking at the Google searches, you'll see all kinds of signs on both sides.
Some saying it's hurting our attention spans and some saying it isn't.
But let me tell you my favorite pushback from this.
So I'm an old man shouting at the sky, right?
So I'm clearly a boomer.
I'm clearly in that demographic who says, you know, get a haircut, you kids.
Stop listening to that Elvis Presley and that rock and roll.
It's going to hurt your minds.
So after I make this whole tweet thing about the safety of children, a Twitter user named Steve Stevens I won't say anything about the creativity of his parents who named him Steve Stevens, but I will just say that his comment was hilarious.
So after talking about his smartphones hurting the children, he tweets, You left out pinball and pool halls.
Okay, you win.
You win.
Can we just let Steve Stevens have the win?
Stevens for the win.
Total win.
Yes, Steve Stevens, who has been around long enough to know that there's never been a time when we didn't say the children are dumb this time.
And we've been wrong every time.
We always say the children are dumb.
Always.
Since I was a kid, all that rock and roll was going to destroy our minds.
Nothing like that ever happened, right?
So this was just such a good comment.
You left out pinball and pool halls because they're gonna rot those children's minds.
Here's what I think is true.
The truth is that the only smart people who matter are the top 1%.
And they're probably no different than they ever were.
In fact, there might be more of them.
Did you invent any microchips today?
I didn't.
I didn't.
Did you make any breakthroughs in artificial intelligence today?
I didn't.
I really didn't.
I didn't do anything.
So it almost doesn't matter how smart I am.
I just have to be able to take care of myself and that's it.
The 1% smart people who have always been with us are still doing what they always do.
They invent the future and then we live in it.
So it doesn't matter if the average person can memorize a poem.
Somebody else said, the other thing that kids can't do today, ever since the invention of writing, they haven't been able to memorize 10,000 word poems.
I thought to myself, that is so perfect.
Because you know when the invention of writing came along, Somebody probably said, all right, look, with all of this writing, kids are no longer going to be able to memorize 10,000-word poems like they can easily.
So let's get rid of the writing, Gramps.
Yeah, Rush Limbaugh said 10% would carry the rest.
It's way less than 10% if you're talking about the people who have invented the future.
Elon Musk isn't in the 10%.
He's in the 1%.
So, my argument will be this.
I believe that smartphones have made us different.
And that it made some people smarter, in some ways.
But it also probably changed their attention span.
Did that hurt us?
It depends.
It might hurt some people in some weird ways.
What I imagine is that the average person can scroll through a screen way faster than the ancients could have.
I feel like they optimized for insane amounts of information.
So what is a kid optimized for in the boring past?
In the boring past, we were optimized to survive boredom.
That's all I remember of my youth.
Pain and boredom.
That's it.
Pain and boredom.
That was my entire youth.
I was either in pain or I was bored.
I only had two reactions.
So it was horrible.
Now kids are full of, you know, so much stimulation.
Do you think that a kid today is more or less able to handle complexity?
I don't know.
I mean, I'm just throwing out some suggestions.
They might be more.
It's possible less.
It's possible less.
But I think more.
I think more because they handle complexity every day with their interfaces and social everything.
But they may be giving up some interpersonal skills.
They might be giving up some concentration.
But do they need it?
What would be more important?
Let me ask you this, which skill would be more important in 2023?
An ability to really focus deeply on a single subject for a long time?
Or the ability to quickly skim all kinds of useful information quickly using your smartphone?
I know, I see people learning like crazy because they have phones.
Don't you know somebody who Googles everything?
You're in a conversation, and like one minute into it, they're googling to fact check you, or to add a thing, or to find out anything.
You know, that didn't exist before.
There's no way smartphones aren't making us a lot smarter in some ways, while at the same time taking something away.
So I think we could confirm that we're changing.
I don't know if it's bad yet.
Might be a mix.
But I think it's all bad for kids.
Are you aware that Representative Dan Crenshaw and also Michael Waltz, both Republicans, issued a joint resolution authorizing Biden to use military force to combat the cartels pumping fentanyl and other stuff into the country.
So that's all good.
Now remember my current political stand.
is that I'm going to back for a president, whoever has the best fentanyl policy.
So far, that's Trump, because Trump also says use the military against the cartels.
Crenshaw is saying something similar, but as far as we know, he's not running for president.
How did I get this far with my microphone not on?
Is that better? - Yeah.
Sorry.
All right.
So if Crenshaw runs for president, then I will have a dilemma.
Because then I would have to choose between Trump and Crenshaw.
Now, I know what you're going to say.
Some of you are going to say, no, not Crenshaw.
I dislike him for my five reasons.
Don't care.
Do not care.
Don't even tell me what you don't like about him.
Warmonger?
Sure, whatever.
Don't care.
If he would have the best policy on fentanyl, and so far it would just be a tie.
You know, so far Trump still has the advantage.
But hypothetically, and I'm doing this just to warn you, right?
Because I don't want you to have any shock.
I will abandon Trump in a hot flash.
I will abandon him so fast if somebody has a better idea on fentanyl.
Only fentanyl.
One issue.
That's all I care about.
Everything else, you know, Deep State's going to do what Deep State does.
But congratulations to Crenshaw for having his priorities straight.
He said one thing that was, or I don't know if he said this, but the news reported that Crenshaw said this.
Now this can't possibly be true.
I want you to maybe help me here.
Did the news just report it wrong?
Or did he misstate this?
Or is this actually true?
I'll just read what the news said.
Crenshaw, the architect of the bill, last Congress, told Fox News Digital that the cartels, quote, "are responsible for about 360,000 homicides this year in Mexico." That couldn't possibly be true.
Is it?
360,000 murders.
Murders.
One year in Mexico.
No, that's not plausible.
That is not plausible.
I'm sorry.
36,000 might be.
Would you accept 36,000?
might be, would you accept 36,000?
36,000 is a lot.
That would be a lot of murder.
But 360,000?
360,000?
No.
So can we do a fact check on that?
Because my belief is that... Oh, 370 per day?
What's wrong with a little hyperbole?
Well, that's a lot of hyperbole.
Yeah, that's a lot of hyperbole.
Because if it were really 360,000 murders in a year, the Mexican government would be begging us to send in the military, wouldn't they?
Am I wrong about that?
If it were really 360,000 a year, just in Mexico in one year, they would be begging us for the military.
That can't possibly be true.
Would you believe 25,000?
I would, yeah.
I would believe 36,000.
I mean, I wouldn't know it's true, but it's within the credible range.
So, that's weird.
Now let's talk about China.
Wall Street Journal has an opinion piece.
I'm trying to decide if it's racist.
Every time I hear that China can't develop technology, You know, because they have something about their system.
They can't develop technology.
Didn't we say this about Japan when I was young?
Didn't we say, oh, the Japanese, there's something about their culture.
They'll never want to take a chance.
So therefore, they'll never build any technology because they don't want to.
There's something about their culture.
Well, Japan is doing OK.
Seems like they fixed that.
Now we're doing the same thing about China.
That there's something about the system or something about, I don't know, the culture that makes them not be able to make microchips.
On the surface, doesn't that just sound like a racist sort of thing that we're looking for support for?
Like we're looking for confirmation bias.
But it feels like it starts with racism, doesn't it?
Am I wrong about that?
Am I too woke?
Is that too woke?
Because that might be.
Maybe I'm just so primed for it.
But I'll give you the argument.
So I'm going to give you the argument.
I suspect, I just feel like it may have started in the wrong place and then they worked backwards to the argument.
But we'll give them the benefit of the doubt.
And here's the argument.
Now this first part is a pretty good argument.
In the US system, funding for big companies Usually starts with small companies and it's private.
Venture capitalists and angels and stuff.
And so there are tons of people in the market and they're watching their money pretty closely.
If a venture capitalist gives you a million dollars, they're going to attend your meetings.
They're going to make sure you spent their million dollars right.
So we have a system in which the funding for tech is monitored and managed by the people who gave them the funding.
So the funders are very close to the process, literally in the room, same room.
In China, it's a state-managed process.
So the state decides which industries they're going to be promoting.
They decided they would do chips.
It's a good idea.
So then, at the top of the government, they release a gazillion dollars.
I think it was going to be like a trillion dollars or something eventually.
Just huge amounts of money.
And then, who does it go to?
Who does it go to?
Well, it doesn't go to anybody who's not part of the Communist Party.
Did you know that?
If you're not in the Communist Party, you don't get any of the money.
So right there, They've basically taken out part of what works in the United States.
Because in the United States, you just have to be good at what you're doing.
Over there, you have to also be in the Communist Party.
So that's one inefficiency, right?
They're missing anybody who's not.
But I don't know what percentage are not, frankly, so maybe it's not as big a deal as I think.
Secondly, The higher your rank as a technology person, the higher your rank in the Communist Party, the more funding you're going to get.
So that it's based not on the quality of the project, but on the status of the person who asks for the money.
Again, there's no way in the world that doesn't hurt their system.
Now, but you could argue it's the same here.
It just looks different, right?
You could argue that if Elon Musk starts another company, and if he were to ask for investments, which he typically doesn't, people would say, oh, OK, we'll definitely give you money.
So it could be that the important people always get the most money anyway, however you slice it.
But I think our system works better there.
But here's the big part.
So if the Chinese government at the top releases a billion dollars for something, it first goes to the biggest communist who wants the money.
And then after that, it just goes into some corruption black box.
So the opportunity for corruption among the Chinese system is that a lot of the money is going to get siphoned off for projects that were not good ideas, but somebody had the clout to get it funded from the government.
So China's system is based on who you are, how much corruption you're involved in, and looking good.
to the Communist Party.
Our system is almost entirely, brutally based on performance.
And I have to admit, if their system did not adjust to this problem, I don't see how they could build anything.
And I think there was another reason given, which was It's mostly corruption.
Here's the part that really raised my red flag.
So this is an opinion piece.
I won't even tell you who the opinion is from, but it's in the Wall Street Journal.
Let's see.
Dreams and passions are impractical and expensive and even silly.
So he's talking about the typical Chinese culture.
That dreams and passions are impractical and expensive and even silly, and they must be discarded.
And he says, if China can't cultivate free thinkers, it's always going to be a follower.
Do you think China can't cultivate free thinkers?
Or does that just sound super racist to you?
Because it sounds super racist to me.
Because you know who else can't cultivate free thinkers and make a difference?
United States.
Because 98% of us are not contributing anything that our free thought made a difference to.
I didn't invent any chips.
Did you?
I don't know.
I feel like the top 1% of Chinese effective scientists and technical people, probably just like everybody else.
So I don't know, I'm not buying this whole cultural thing.
There's definitely something going on that they're not keeping up, but I think it has more to do with the funding.
Probably the funding more than anything.
Alright, Rachel Maddow, who I watched just for humour purposes, watching her face contort When she's trying to sell you some anti-Trump stuff.
Now, first of all, watching Rachel Maddow do anti-Trump content feels like seven years ago.
It doesn't feel current anymore, does it?
This feels really kind of old, kind of stale.
But she's really making a big deal about the fact that Trump is now going to be prosecuted for Giving money to Stormy Daniels to not talk, but it was campaign financing money.
Now, of all the things that Trump is accused of doing, is this the one that people care the least about?
Have you ever met even one person who said, oh, I thought he'd be a good president, but once I found he used campaign money for campaign purposes, To make the Stormy Daniels thing go away?
I don't know if I could support somebody who used campaign funds to benefit his campaign.
I can't support that.
Is there even one person who cares about that story?
Seriously.
Now I get that your Rob Reiners are hoping that this is what takes Trump out.
But do you think Rob Reiner cares about the story?
Does he care that Stormy Daniels got some money that came from donations that actually did, if it worked, it would have helped Trump get elected?
I've never seen a story with less meat on it than this.
Now I'm not saying he won't be prosecuted, but is it going to keep him from being president?
Wouldn't it just be a fine?
Correct me if I'm wrong, the worst he's talking about is paying a fine?
Which is somewhat typical.
Obama's paid one, I think.
Has not Obama paid a fine for the same thing?
Campaign, you know, lapses?
It's just the most... If I could tell you one fact that would convince you Trump is going to be your next president, here would be that one fact.
You didn't know anything else.
It's the only thing you know.
It's 2023.
And MSNBC is running Rachel Maddow, a major segment, talking about the problems with Trump and that payment to Stormy Daniels seven years ago.
That's what they have.
That is the best they have right now.
What would stop him from being president?
See, I think you have to now talk in terms of what could possibly stop him.
Because I think we're asking the wrong question.
Who's going to run?
What could possibly stop him at this point?
I don't see anything.
I mean, he's been proven basically right on everything important.
And all they have left are things that nobody cared about in the first place.
That's what it looks like to me.
And I don't think DeSantis will run, but I could be wrong.
We'll see.
So Biden is going to cancel the COVID emergency Emergency, whatever, laws.
So that would mean that nobody would be required by the federal government to mask or get vaccinated.
How about that?
Do you know why Biden says he's going to cancel it on May 11th?
Because Republicans introduced legislation to cancel it sooner.
And as Thomas Massey points out, Republicans are already getting results.
Because the news is quite clear that Biden would not have announced this except that he had to counter the Republicans wanting to get rid of the restrictions.
And the public very much wants the restrictions to go away.
So it was something that was free money for Republicans.
So, remember, I always look for, as a sign of competence, can you at least pick up the free money?
It's just right there on the table.
Why are your hands not going toward it?
Why are you walking away from the free money?
Well, there is Trump again.
Trump picked up the free money.
It's such a reliable indicator.
If he can't do the easy stuff, We're not going to trust you to do the hard stuff.
But if the money's just laying there on the table, just pick it up.
Thomas Massey saw money lying on the table.
It's obvious that the public wants the restrictions lifted.
It's obvious that scientifically, health-wise, it's the right time to do it.
So they say, Republicans do, the smart ones, there's this money on the table, why don't we just pick it up?
And so they picked it up.
And it made Biden scramble to keep up with him.
Now that's what I want to see.
I want to see Republicans see free money on the table and then walk over and pick it up.
And just keep doing that.
You don't even have to do anything magical or special.
You don't need any character.
You don't need any charisma.
Just pick up the free money.
That's all.
We're not asking that much.
Just the free stuff.
I love the fact that we think we live in some kind of objective reality where we figured out what's true and what's not.
And then I mentioned how Sweden did during the COVID epidemic.
And I triggered yesterday, I triggered a Twitter graph war where everybody was putting up their graph to show that Sweden was either doing poorly Or doing great.
And do you know how I can tell which Twitter graphs are the credible ones?
And which ones are garbage?
Do you know there's a way to know, right?
If it's on Twitter, it's garbage.
Also, if it's not on Twitter, it's garbage.
If it's based on data, it's garbage.
If it comes from somebody you don't know, it's garbage.
If the source of it is not shown in the graph, and quite often that's the case on Twitter, that's garbage.
So basically we got to this point and we can't even tell if Sweden did a good job or a bad job.
Now I know you think you all know, but when you see the level of fighting on Twitter, the people disagreeing whether it was a good job or a bad job, we don't know.
We really don't.
It's actually kind of confusing.
So the fact that they're younger and thinner and they supplement with vitamin D, I think, is most of the story.
But I will go back to my best, probably the best prediction I've ever made.
At the beginning of the pandemic, at the end of the pandemic, we wouldn't know who managed it well.
And everybody who heard that disagreed.
Oh, we're going to tell.
Some people are doing it right, some people not.
Nope, can't tell.
The narrow place where you can tell is whether people protected the nursing homes.
So in the case of DeSantis, yes, that was good work.
That's one item that you can identify and say, OK, compared to New York, yeah, the leadership made a difference.
Like, there's no doubt about that one.
But on the country level, on the country level, hard to say.
Still don't know.
I know some of you think you might know.
Have you ever heard of, oh, then also the excess deaths are still a mystery.
Now some of you think all the excess deaths or most of them are vaccine injury related.
But the excess deaths seem to be in every demographic and they also seem to be across countries.
So the excess deaths are not an American thing.
It's everywhere.
And I think that they're doing different kinds of vaccines and all kinds of different policies, but still the excess deaths are high.
Wherever we can count them well in the Western countries anyway.
So I will put out one possibility.
Psychogenic death.
How many of you ever heard that term?
Psychogenic death.
It means basically you lose the will to live and you just die.
And I have a hypothesis.
That when I grew up, no matter how bad things were at the moment, I had in my mind a path to happiness.
And that path was, you get a good job, you get married, you have a family, American Dream.
The American Dream was very clearly, it was just, you could feel it.
Like everybody was moving toward it, it seemed like.
And no matter how bad things were, you had a future.
You had a hope.
Now compare that to our LGBTQ trans culture.
And by the way, I'm a big supporter of the LGBTQ trans community.
But we can talk about them honestly, right?
And I would say that the American dream Had to disappear to make room for this other kind of wokeness.
And again, I'm not criticizing it, I'm just describing it.
That if you say, well, you know this, you gotta get married and you gotta have a family and go to church on Sunday thing, that doesn't work for everybody.
So now it's a free-for-all.
And people are saying that they're more single people than ever, more people alone, people using their phones.
Tinder made it impossible to date unless you're a nine or above, right?
So basically, if you were a kid, and I've heard actually young people say this, there's no future.
Now of course there is.
There is a future.
But it's not cleanly packaged and supplied to children as their hope.
Oh yeah, you're having a bad day today.
I get it.
But look at this American dream.
You just get on this American dream path.
Everything you're doing today, studying hard, staying in a jail, you're on the right path, kid.
You're doing it right.
And here's your happiness in the future.
Here's your meaning.
And now if you're a kid, you don't see any of that.
Do you?
Who's selling the American dream?
Conservatives.
Homeschoolers.
Homeschoolers.
So my theory is, if you tested the psychological well-being of homeschoolers, you would find they have something like hope for the future.
Because the homeschooling community is likely to be more likely to say, follow this path and you'll have a good life.
I think public school says, you're all being discriminated against, systemic discrimination is going to hold you back forever, it looks like the police are trying to kill you because you're brown, and you better get on the streets and complain, because complaining is the thing to do.
Complaining will make things better.
And it does.
Sometimes it does.
But that message would leave me feeling hopeless if I were a child.
I would just think, well, if I don't get married, Why am I doing anything?
The marriage is more about having children, in this case.
But what's my future?
Let's say I'm 12-year-old Scott today.
I make money.
For what?
For what?
For my entertainment?
Even at 12, I knew I would get bored entertaining myself all day.
Oh, I'm going to make money so I can party on the weekends.
And that's it.
I can have short encounters with women, and that will be a lot of fun.
But that's it.
That's what I have to look forward to, is brief encounters with women who are having brief encounters with lots of other people.
And that's what I'm going to live for.
I'm surprised there isn't higher excess deaths.
Because there's a whole bunch of people who just figured out there's no reason to live.
That's what we taught the kids.
We taught the kids there's no reason to live.
I think we did.
So, I don't know if that's any of it, but I'd throw that in the mix.
It's probably some small part of it.
Here's the most useful thing to know if you're a consumer of news.
Which news outlets are controlled by the CIA?
If you don't know that, You really can't watch the news.
You're going to be all confused.
Let me give you an example.
MSNBC, who people who are smarter than me say is clearly, and has always been, as is NBC, captured entities by our intelligence agencies.
Right?
Now, you might doubt that.
You might say, Scott, Scott, that's a little bit of hyperbole.
Yeah, they may have leaned on the networks in some ways, on some issues, but in general, you know, they're independent.
And then there's this story.
I'm going to tell you this story, and then you tell me if this is independent news.
This is pointed out on Twitter by Unhoodwinked.
A good follow for you.
You should follow Unhoodwinked.
There was a nine-minute segment.
That's a lot of time on television.
Nine minutes on a TV news show is forever.
That's a lot of time.
He refers to it as CIA run MSNBC.
All right, that's his characterization.
And she's talking about her COVID and how she was diagnosed with periocarditis and myocarditis.
So for nine minutes, she talked about how COVID had probably given her periocarditis and myocarditis.
For nine minutes, and never mentioned her vaccination status.
Let me just say that again.
An MSNBC host talked for nine minutes about her own quite scary myocarditis, and she was a young woman, too young to be having heart problems, for nine minutes.
Never once mentioned her vaccination status.
Is there anything else you need to know about this story?
Do you wonder If this is independent reporting.
Do you think she may have mentioned, well I don't, you know, do you think in her first draft, I assume somebody sees her first draft, don't you think her first draft was, well I don't know what the cause is, you know, I did get vaccinated?
But I also had COVID, and now I have myocarditis.
It's hard to know if it's the vaccination or the COVID, but I'm just letting you know my experience so that you can recognize it too.
Don't you think the first draft might have said something like that?
Now, you could not be more obvious, and you're trying to hide the story.
But suppose you didn't know that MSNBC and NBC are, you know, Strongly suggested to be Democrat slash CIA run.
If you didn't know that, you'd think that was the story.
You'd think that was something like an objective representation of something that's happening, and it wasn't.
Not even close to objective.
Now, I'm not saying the vaccination caused her problem.
I'm not saying that at all.
I'm saying if you don't mention it as a possibility, It's just amazing that anybody can watch that network with that kind of situation.
All right.
The host was Yasmin Vazugian.
All right.
I think that's all I had to say.
And that, ladies and gentlemen.
I feel like there was one other thing I was going to say.
Is there a topic I missed?
You can blanket blame COVID?
Well, indirectly, sure.
I'll tell you about that later.
All right.
Somebody says, Scott is looking for a way out from Trump.
It's so transparent.
Correct.
It's transparent because it's true and it's obvious and I'm telling you right up front.
I don't want a president who's over a certain age.
Trump, in my personal view, is age down at the job.
So somebody's showing their great insight here and says, I think Scott secretly is looking for a way to not support Trump.
No, it's not a secret.
I'm doing that right in front of you.
If anybody comes up with a better fentanyl plan, and they can walk and talk and they're not 100 years old, I'm going to look at that pretty seriously.
I'm going to look at that really seriously.
So don't be surprised.
I'm saying it as directly as I can.
Fentanyl policy is all I care about.
I will drop a trumpet like a hot rock the minute a legitimate candidate has a better take.
And it doesn't even have to be military.
I mean I could imagine somebody coming up with a better take that wasn't attacking Mexico.
I just haven't heard it.
Those who bailed out Sam Bankman, their names can be released.
That's interesting.
I don't think that'll tell us much.
Any place to pre-order?
I'm not sure when you can pre-order my book.
It'll be called Reframe Your Brain.
I think Amazon has a holding place for it, but I don't know if you can order it yet.
Do they have pre-orders already?
They probably don't put it there unless there's a pre-order option.
Oh, you ordered too?
Oh, okay.
I guess I'm selling a book I haven't made yet.
So that's pretty good.
I mean, I've finished writing it.
Cope, a Claude Adams story.
It's a good movie.
Why would you pre-order?
To make sure you don't run out?
This is a book that's likely to run out.
Now, I don't think my publisher knows that yet, but I'm almost positive this will be the biggest book I've ever written, and I think the biggest book in the world.
Not counting religious books.
That's what I think.
That's based on just looking at it myself.
And I look at it and I think, I think everybody's going to buy this.
Because one of the things I've done is I've dealt with the attention span problem.
By reducing everything to one sentence, you could kind of skim the argument and see the one sentence and you'd know if the reframe was going to work for you or not.
So I think it's got everything.
It's got stuff that would change everybody's life.
A lot.
Dean is asking if I'm being humble.
I know how to judge my own work.
Meaning that I've produced things that I knew wouldn't be good and wouldn't sell, and I knew it immediately.
But my biggest book, which was the Dilbert Principle, so that's the one that sold the most.
I also told my publisher, when my publisher said it might go gold, which is selling 100,000 copies, which is great.
If you sell 100,000 copies of a book, You're definitely going to get another book deal.
I mean, the publisher loves that.
That's solidly successful.
And when my publisher told me that, I said, gold, huh?
100,000?
I said, I think this is going to sell a million.
Very few books sell a million.
Very few.
I mean, well under 1% of new books sell over a million.
And I remember the look on his face.
It was like, well, You know, it's very unusual, he explained to me, that anything sells a million.
And 100,000 is really, really strong.
So if you could sell that, which hasn't happened, but if you did, that would be really strong.
And I said to him, I think it's going to be a million.
Last I checked, it was 1.5.
1.5 million.
So this is the only time I've had that same feeling.
But this feeling's stronger.
A lot stronger.
Like a lot.
Now, this'll be a good test of my intuition.
Because I actually think it'll be the best-selling book, at least in the country, not in the world, but in the United States.
I think it'll be the best-selling book of all time.
Now, you haven't seen it, so there's no way you can judge that claim, but You wouldn't believe the feedback I'm getting just from some of the reframes.
The number of people who have changed their life with one reframe already, without even the book existing yet, is a lot.
It's a lot.
And it's going to surprise you.
Lance says it sounds boring.
Sounds boring.
Well, maybe it's not for you, Lance.
Have I seen Dowd's book?
No.
So this is a funny thing that happened to me yesterday.
Maybe I'll save this one for Locals.
All right, I'm going to save this story for Locals.
This is not for you.
Sorry, YouTube.
I'm going to go talk to Locals privately, and thanks for joining.
I think this was the best livestream you've ever seen in your whole life.
