Episode 2225 Scott Adams: Headlines, Bulging Veins And My Guide To Understanding News
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
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Content:
Politics, California Psychedelics Legalization, Tucker Carlson, President Biden, Trump's Black Support, Peter Navarro, DNC Primary Rules, RFK Jr., 14th Amendment, Starlink Russian Fleet, Elon Musk, Drone Warfare, Democrat Designated Liars List, Identifying Fake News, Wrap-Up Smear, Scott Adams
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Good morning everybody and welcome to the highlight of human civilization.
It's Cold Coffee with Scott Adams and I can't even imagine more fun than that, really.
It's impossible.
So if you'd like to... Why does this cord only want to be in one fucking place?
Alright, I've moved you now three times.
All right.
I swear to God, I'm going to get you out of the way.
So it's the last thing I do.
There we go.
If you'd like to take this up to a level that you can't even believe, all you've got to do is grab yourself a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or a chalice of stein, a canteen jug or flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure The dopamine hit of the day.
The thing that makes everything better, it's called the simultaneous sip.
And it happens now.
Go.
Ah.
So good.
Well, people always ask me, Scott, why do you stay in California when you know it's turning into a fecal hellhole?
Yeah, I just made that up.
A fecal hellhole.
It's a It's like a hellhole with a little extra.
A little extra fecal.
But one of the reasons is, California looks like they're on the verge of approving a bill decriminalizing the possession and personal use of a variety of psychedelics, including magic mushrooms.
I think it excludes peyote, but it includes DMT.
DMT is on the legal use list.
Interesting.
And here's the thing.
I think you would agree with this statement.
No matter how much things are going wrong, there is a theoretical amount of hallucinogens that will make you not care.
Now, I shouldn't tell you my retirement plan, but it looks like I'll be retiring to California, if you know what I mean.
A lot of people keep saying, Scott, why do you want to take care of your body and be healthy?
All it's going to do is make you live like into your 80s, and nobody wants to be in their 80s and still alive.
I mean, that's no good.
To which I say, apparently you've never done psychedelics.
Apparently you never have.
Now, I would only recommend them in a legal, healthy environment.
Don't do anything illegal.
But when I'm 80, And these psychedelics are legal in California, which looks like that will be the case.
I'm never going to have a bad day.
So that's my plan.
The rest of you, you might choose differently and sit around in pain and misery and loneliness until you die.
Now that's another plan and that's the way most people do it.
But not me.
I'm going to be visiting other dimensions and you'll barely know I'm there.
That's my plan for aging.
Well, here's an update on my amazing book, Reframe Your Brain, which I just noticed has a solid five star reviews now.
For a while, there was like, it was 4.5, but now it's all the way up to solid five.
Five.
The trouble is, of course, that the Amazon is still showing a fake book listing.
So if you look for the hardcover, Even though for a while it was fixed, it immediately went unfixed again.
And the reason is that Amazon says they cannot remove a link.
There's not even a real link.
You can't buy a book from it.
And it's obviously a fake that confuses people about the real link.
And even under those conditions, they can't suppress the link.
That's what they say.
Now, do you think that's true?
Well, it might be true they have some policy, but obviously they can do it.
So once again, we're in this weird phase of history where you can't tell if this is just part of the national incompetence problem.
But Amazon is unique in that they're weirdly very good at most things.
It's the best software I've ever seen.
And so I asked myself, What do I assume about the reason?
Because it's been a long time now, and it seems to be unfixable.
They say I should go to my prior publisher, the one that cancelled me, because they put the listing there, and therefore they're the only ones who can edit it.
Does that sound even slightly true?
That the only people who can edit an existing listing are the ones who put it there?
So are you telling me that if it were racist, Amazon couldn't remove it.
Is that what they're saying?
If it were literally like a call to violence, it's not.
But if it were, they couldn't remove that, right?
If Obama published another book and somebody front-ran him and put like a fake version up there, and it was confusing the real Obama book, Do you think Amazon would say, oh, the publisher doesn't want to change it, so it has to stay there?
No, of course not.
Not even the slightest chance.
No.
So what do you assume when there's a system that seems to be giving you a problem, and you're a person who's in the political realm, as I am, and the system is opaque?
I mean, I can't quite see what's going on behind the curtain.
Your operating assumption is that it has to be exactly what you think it is.
It might not be.
You know, maybe a 50-50 chance or something like that.
But you have to assume that it's bad intentions and that you're being targeted.
Doesn't mean it's true.
Remember, we live in, as you said, a zero-trust environment.
I'm not the one who chose to be in a zero-trust environment.
It just sort of happened.
So if you want to buy the book, you're going to have to look pretty hard for it.
And it's almost impossible for me to imagine that this is accidental.
Realistically, it's probably a coin toss, 50-50.
But my brain can't really accept the other 50% because it's been too long.
It's too obvious that it can't be true.
Right?
Would you agree?
It's really obvious that it can't be true what they've told me.
But it could be incompetence.
Can't rule it out.
All right.
I was just re-watching this clip from Tucker Carlson, he was giving a podcast interview somewhere, and he says directly that he has personal knowledge of people on CNN, he used that as an example, and that the national security reporters, he didn't name names, are literally just mouthpieces for the Pentagon, and they're not even slightly real journalists, and that it's known, and there's no doubt about it.
Now, how many people who watch CNN would be aware of that?
That somebody who worked there can tell you for sure that the news isn't real.
And they don't even try to make it real on the national security stuff.
They literally just say what the Pentagon wants them to say.
Really, but how many people know that?
So I'm working on a news guide, a guide to understand the news.
I'll talk about that in a minute.
It's getting bigger.
All right, China is giving Apple some trouble.
I sold my Apple stock a month ago or so, because I thought Apple was going to hit some tough times.
And China was one of the things I was concerned about.
And apparently China is starting to push on Apple, and they've banned iPhones for government employees.
But in China, that's a lot of people.
A lot of people.
So what does that sound like?
Doesn't that sound like revenge for TikTok being banned in American government places?
Partly that, but also Huawei introduced a 5G phone.
That's a bit of a mystery because we didn't think they had the chips to do it.
And it looks like they're just pushing Huawei because it's the Chinese phone.
But yeah, Apple might have some Some difficulties there if they start to lose the Chinese market.
All right, so once again, I'm shocked that the media is not covering this story, that President Joe Biden called the Nazis that are marching in Florida, again, they're back, he called them very fine people, and it's just hard to understand.
Why would he say that?
Why would he call Nazis very fine people in public?
In public, he said that.
By the way, if somebody tells you he didn't say that, you should send them the transcript.
Now you might need to tweak the transcript, but you could find it, look for the transcript of Trump and Charlottesville, and just change the names from Charlottesville to whatever town these Nazis are in, and change Trump to Biden, and provide that transcript, and then ask people if they see Biden calling them fine people or not.
And they're going to look at that transcript and they're going to say, um, obviously he very specifically condemned them.
And you'll say, what?
What are you talking about?
Well, look at the part you're not telling me.
See this part you're not mentioning?
He says directly, I condemn them completely.
And I'll say, that must be some other reference to something else.
I mean, it's like, that was almost a full minute later.
I don't even understand what you're saying.
You obvious racist.
So that's how I play it.
Trump is apparently claiming that his black support after his mugshot went up by quadruple or quintupled.
He said his black support has quadrupled or quintupled since his mugshot.
How many of you think that that estimate is somewhere in the ballpark?
Does that sound pretty close to what the actual numbers are?
Four times?
He actually tricked CNN into fact-checking him.
It doesn't matter how many times he does it, they fall for it every time.
So they fact-checked him and said, no, no way.
No way he's up four or five times.
We checked the polls and he's only up like two, three percent in all the polls, I think, except one.
And that might be within the margin of error.
Yeah.
So no way he's up four or five times like that liar.
He's only up in every poll.
Enough to win, convincingly, if they're true.
But they might be within the margin of error.
So we're not going to look at the actual polls.
No.
You know, when they compare what they call Trump's lies to Biden's lies, there's such a difference.
This is obviously hyperbole, and it's obviously to make them go check, and then report that his black support is up.
Do you know what is the best thing that would help Trump's support among black voters?
Name the one best thing that could happen.
A lot of conversation about his increase in black support.
Even before it's there.
But you want a lot of people talking about it.
It's like, I don't know.
Is that increase in black support as much as we think?
And why?
Like, what would be the cause of it?
And maybe we should dig down a little bit and find out what's happening with all this more support from the black community.
It's classic Trump.
It's stuff only he can do.
So anyway, I love just watching classic Trump and then classic CNN falling for it.
This is very much the don't think of an elephant trick.
All right, I'd like you to not think of an elephant.
Don't.
Don't think of the elephant.
And then they're all talking about the elephant.
All right, here's a... I've been talking about trying to deprogram a Democrat.
From all the fake news and, you know, make them more like reasonable actual citizens and stuff.
And I'm not sure how easy it would be.
Seems like it'd be pretty hard.
But I found one technique that works right away.
And this was tried once in Minneapolis.
It involves four armed carjackers who first beat you up and threaten you, break your leg, bloody you in front of your children, and you barely get out alive.
Now under those conditions, which did happen to a Democratic Party chairwoman just recently, she is much less inclined to support defunding the police now.
I don't know.
Does that surprise you?
That being violently attacked in front of her own house.
In front of her own house.
That's a key here.
And was hurt pretty bad.
And that's not funny.
But it does tell you what would it take to change a Democrat into a Republican.
And it turns out the answer is armed robbery.
With a danger of killing your children.
Putting your children in mortal danger appears to be enough to make somebody say, huh, I wonder if everything I've ever said about the police is still tracking just right.
So if you want to deprogram anybody, armed robbery, carjacking, we'll get it done.
Speaking of injustice, Peter Navarro, economic advisor to Trump, Is found guilty, and he's going to go to jail, unless his appeals work, for not complying with a subpoena from the House Select Committee on the January 6th stuff.
So he didn't comply with a subpoena for an illegitimate political process.
So he's going to jail.
Nobody believes that that was a legitimate process.
Well, I mean, unless you're a Democrat, I suppose.
Because they don't watch real news.
But can you think of anything less fair than going to jail because you didn't comply with an obviously corrupt process?
So I don't know how far he can take it, but he only has to drag it out until a Republican gets elected.
Presumably he would be instantly pardoned.
Does that track?
Do you think if he just drags out and we get a Republican, it wouldn't matter which Republican, wouldn't he be pardoned immediately?
I think he would, so that's his best strategy.
Now speaking of strategy, apparently the Trump lawyers have the following strategy, that because the legal attacks on Trump are a little bit weird and unique, That they will have infinite technical objections that have to be ruled on.
And they basically said it directly.
We're basically just going to bury you in technical objections.
Each one has to be put through the process.
And we're going to make this last until he's president, so he can pardon himself.
And that that's the actual process.
That's the actual process.
They're really just playing it for a stall.
In both cases, why are they needing to stall?
It's a direct admission that the current process is not judicial and fair.
That you'd have to get past it to get anything that looks like justice.
That the justice system is just biased and broken.
So, that's shocking.
Anyway, RFK Jr.
was, I don't want to say complaining, I'll say describing, that the DNC is changing their rules about the primary to make it basically impossible for any challenger to challenge Biden in the primary.
So they're tweaking the rules about the Iowa and New Hampshire primary, which one imagines that RFK Jr.
could do well.
As long as, you know, there was no fiddling with the rules.
So they're going to fiddle with the rules.
And they'll make it basically impossible for an outsider to win.
Now, what did they just do to RFK Jr.?
Now that he knows for sure that his own team is going to prevent him from winning.
For sure.
There's no doubt about it.
What do you do if you're him?
He basically says he owes his supporters a path.
In other words, he can't take their money and run for president if he can't describe a way to get there, and the current system doesn't give him a way.
He's not saying third party yet, is he?
He's not saying the words.
But can't you imagine it?
Now I saw Paul Begala with his gigantic bug eyes.
You know the bug eyes when somebody's lying?
Paul Begala eyes?
Adam Schiff eyes?
Yeah.
But sometimes Paul Begala says something that is wise and true, and I'll tell you what he said, and it's not a bad take.
He says that Trump's base is the most solid base anybody's ever seen.
That the indictments didn't hurt him, you know, that January 6th didn't hurt him.
Nothing hurts him.
So he's got 45% guaranteed.
FK Jr. too.
Right?
Normally that would matter.
Does it matter with Trump supporters?
I don't know.
I don't know.
So, I feel like, so Begala says that it doesn't matter who it is, any third party candidate will make Trump the next president.
And the idea is that nobody from his base is going to defect, but somebody from the other base will.
It's a lot easier to imagine a Biden person saying, you know what?
I just can't vote for Biden.
I'd rather lose.
But I got to vote for a Democrat.
You know, or somebody who's like one.
So no, I'm not going to run.
If I ran, I'd get assassinated in 10 minutes.
All right.
So it's weird to be a Democrat.
Imagine being a Democrat and knowing that you're not going to be given a choice.
Think about it.
Michael Schellenberger said this about their attempt to use the 14th Amendment to remove Trump from the ballot.
So as Michael Schellenberger accurately pointed out, no, as Joel Pollack pointed out, it's the same system as Iran.
If you get to vote, but you only get to vote for who they tell you you can vote for, that's a ram.
That's their exact system.
And now they're doing it not only maybe in the general election, or by keeping Trump off the election, but they will also do it by keeping RFK Jr.
effectively out of the election by rule changes.
Do you think the Democrats are aware that That they're keeping their own candidate, you know, somebody in their own party, off the ticket so that it's not an option for them.
Are they aware of that?
Yeah.
Yeah, the Democrats are basically in an Iranian system.
And if you throw in the superdelegates, that's even more Iranian, isn't it?
Because the superdelegates kind of guarantee that Doesn't really matter what the voters wanted.
The super delegates have extra votes and they're appointed by the party.
That's my understanding.
And so they're the ones who always are the dominant voice of who becomes the nominee.
So it's not really even the voters getting involved.
You know I think that would be a good attack.
Is just to point out in the cleanest possible way to Democrats especially during.
Imagine saying this during a debate.
You know, Republicans, you might not like our policies, but I'll tell you one thing we're dedicated to that Democrats are not, which is giving the voters a choice.
You know, you could actually vote for any one of our primary candidates.
There are a lot of them.
They all have a full shot.
But on your side, you're trying to restrict not only who's on the election, who can run, in the case of Trump, but you're even restricting who can run on your own team.
When your main guy is so old that not a single person is missing the fact that he's not quite all there, right?
So I would think that you could make Democrats really mad at Democrats by telling them that their freedom is being taken away by Democrats.
And that what they get for that is that there are a number, as Newt Gingrich points out, there are a number of things which the citizenry is about 70 to 80 percent aligned on, and it's not happening.
Imagine that.
We live in this, you know, republic that's with a democratic element to it, and the public can want something by 70 to 80 percent, you know, majority, and our Congress won't give it to us.
What does that mean?
Well, it means that there's no interest in the people's will being the dominant thing.
Now, I'm totally in favor of the public not getting their way in the fog of war.
That's actually the exact time you don't want the public getting involved.
Let's say the country is attacked.
I don't want any voting.
No voting.
The president just has to take over, set the military on its way, do its thing.
But if it's something we all understand, such as, can schools talk to your kids about Things you, as a parent, don't want them to talk to your kids about without your permission and understanding.
Now that's something that parents largely are all on the same page, right?
They don't want somebody raising their kid in a way that's opposite to the way they would have raised them.
But we don't even get that.
The most basic thing.
And we understand that completely.
That's not like the fog of war.
That's a topic we all understand.
And yet you can't get that.
So whatever's happening is certainly not, you know, because Democrats want it.
It's just something that's happening to them.
So Vivek did a big Big post on X about the 14th Amendment.
And one of the things that he claims, which I also saw in the Wall Street Journal, so he's not the only one saying it, is that the 14th Amendment, which essentially says that you can't be elected I don't think it's just for president.
I think you can't run for office if you're, you know, a designated insurrectionist or something.
Now apparently this came from the Civil War and had to do with, you know, the people who had literally been part of the Civil War.
So if you're putting the country together, maybe they said to themselves, we don't want these troublemakers.
And so they had this rule to keep people out who had literally been part of an armed You know, civil war.
So that's what they were thinking of with the rule.
An armed civil war.
And they're trying to use this for the protest on January 6th to keep Trump out of office.
Oh, he's an insurrectionist just like the Civil War.
All right.
But apparently, the way the rule was written, it did not include an elected president.
So it seems pretty clear that it was written for people that he might appoint, but not for himself.
So there isn't the slightest chance that this is, well, who knows?
I'm not a lawyer.
But it doesn't look like this is even a good try.
It's the sort of thing you could only even attempt if you owned the media and you owned the courts.
Because if you didn't think you owned the media and the courts, you wouldn't even try it.
It's too stupid.
You couldn't possibly succeed on this path.
But they're trying it.
So they must think they do own the courts.
Or at least the lower courts.
And they must think that they do own the media.
At least for the people they're talking to.
And I think they're right.
Well, speaking of the media and their fake news, have I ever mentioned that the first story out of a war zone is always fake?
And have I ever mentioned that all news about public figures is fake?
All of it.
Now it might be based on some true facts, but the context is always fake.
So if you had something about a war that also was something about a public figure, what are the odds that the first report is true?
Zero!
Zero!
Because the fog of war is almost always untrue.
You know, anything that's like a new report out of a war zone.
And anything about a public figure?
Is almost certainly not true in its completeness, right?
In context.
If you put them together, as in the story about Elon Musk allegedly turning off Starlink in a zone that the Ukrainians wanted to use to send drone submarines to attack a Russian fleet.
I think the fleet was all in the same place or something, or a lot of them.
The original story from CNN, I think, was that Elon turned off the coverage in the area they needed for the attack, because he could control where Starlink is effective, and then they had to cancel their attack.
Do you think that was true?
No.
No, it wasn't true.
The area that they needed covered with Starlink has never been covered.
So they asked them to turn it on to support a major escalation of the war.
Such an escalation that it could have taken out the Russian fleet.
It basically could have been Russia's Pearl Harbor.
How does a country respond when you take out their naval fleet?
Well, how did we respond?
We actually nuked Japan.
Twice.
Twice.
And did we nuke them only because that was the way to end the war?
Well, some people say that.
Because we would have won anyway.
It just would have been bloodier and taken longer.
Bloodier on our side.
And so some people said, no, no, we just didn't care how many died.
We just didn't want to lose any more Americans.
Maybe.
Here's my take on it.
We nuked Japan because they attacked Pearl Harbor.
Everything that happened in between was irrelevant to that.
They attacked our homeland, sank our fleet, you're going to get nuked.
Sorry.
Everything in between didn't matter.
You're going to get nuked.
Especially in those days.
If this version of the story is true, that Elon didn't turn them off, he simply did not agree to turn them on to support the biggest escalation of the war we would have seen, probably.
Now even the question of what those drones were going to do is still fog of war, so maybe it wasn't a big attack?
But they're saying it was?
I don't know.
It's hard to know.
But if that's the information that Musk was working on, that they were going to take out much of the Russian fleet as a preparation to taking Crimea, and Musk just said, I'm out.
You can do your war without me if you're going to do that.
Now, did he just stop a nuclear war?
Isn't it weird?
That someday when the story of Elon Musk is written, it probably won't include he stopped a nuclear war.
Because you can't be sure.
Because you don't know what would have happened if he'd done something else.
But he may have just stopped a nuclear war.
One person.
We have some really brave people in the public sphere at the moment.
Like, seriously brave people.
RFK Jr., obviously.
Trump, obviously.
Elon Musk, obviously.
And any of us who are getting cancelled are willing to take an arrow in the back for something we think is worth doing.
I don't know.
To me, this was kind of awesome.
And I don't even have an opinion about whether it was militarily good or bad, or geopolitically good or bad.
I just like the fact that when he was asked, as a private citizen, he told the military of NATO, basically, and Ukraine, to go pound sand, and they had to.
I kind of like it.
It's pretty baller.
But we'll probably find out more about that and who knows, maybe even the decision might reverse, we don't know.
But I do think that Elon's instinct that since nothing much is going to change, no matter what happens, that we should be talking instead of escalating.
That makes perfect sense.
Now remember I told you, you remember my Was it a prediction?
I don't know if it was a prediction.
But I said that the big variable of what's going to happen in the Ukraine situation is probably the number of Ukrainian soldiers that they can put in the field.
And that that number might, you know, just from the deaths and injuries, might dip below a sustainable level and that could be the big turning point in the war.
But I said there would be an adjustment if they were running out of humans.
They would adjust it to be more technological.
And right after I said that, it turns out that there was going to be a fleet, reportedly, don't know if it's true, but reportedly a fleet of drones, of submarine drones, that was going to attack the fleet.
Now, presumably, there were going to be a lot of them, more than one, so that there would be enough that some got through, I guess, you know, kind of like a wave of technology sending at them.
Why we haven't seen that in the air yet might be because they can jam them easier or something.
Now here's the other thing I found out about Starlink, Wall Street Journal I think, that Starlink apparently can keep ahead of the jamming.
And the other means of communication over there, the Russians are jamming successfully.
But somehow the Starlink engineers can keep out of the jamming.
I don't know how they're doing it.
So it really wouldn't even be useful in the war zone if they could jam it.
But that's pretty impressive.
So I think you're going to see Just as you saw a larger threat than we've seen, that would be the largest underwater drone threat we've ever seen, if it was going to be a multi-ship attack, and it sounds like it was.
But how long before we see the sky just blackened with drones?
Because you know we've got, we must have thousands.
Don't you think we have like 20,000 drones just sitting in a warehouse, you know, waiting to be operationalized?
I think so, by now.
So I think when the big push comes, if there is going to be one, that you're going to see drones like you've never seen drones.
That's what I think.
All right.
I started to develop what I call a Guide to Understanding the News.
That's my working title.
But I'll tell you the categories.
So suppose somebody just didn't understand how to evaluate what they see in the news, to know what's true and what isn't.
Some of this you've heard before, but I'm going to write it up eventually and put it in one place.
So the first thing you need to know if you're new at this is the designated liars.
The people who they put in front of the camera, when the normal people just can't lie that much, like all politicians can exaggerate and hyperbole and that, but when you just have to tell a complete lie, a thing you know did not happen, and look in the camera and act like it did, oh yeah, that totally happened.
I went into the skiff and I saw it myself.
When you need that kind of person, there are only certain personalities who are willing to do that.
So if you knew who they were, the moment you saw them on TV, you'd say to yourself, oh, that's a signal.
That's a signal that these are not serious people.
So here's a starting list.
Adam Schiff, Eric Swalwell, John Brennan, James Clapper, Lawrence Tribe, I'm adding him, Phil Bump, Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL.
And I'm going to add Abby Phillips of CNN.
She's a promoter of the Fine People Oaks.
So that's the starting point.
Now, you're probably going to say to me, but Scott.
Oh, Goldman.
Yeah, Goldman.
Go ahead, Goldman.
Who I'm not going to add is leadership.
So I'm not going to add Pelosi or Schumer.
Because they're involved in all questions.
So they're not a good signal.
They might also be liars, but they don't signal anything because they're involved in everything.
But I'll need some... No, it's harder than you think.
And the news people, you never know what they actually believe is true.
Oh yeah.
Well, I don't want to just say it's all the hosts of MSNBC and all the hosts of CNN, because one of my other categories here is which entities are true.
So the fake news on the left, the ones you have to worry about, would be the New York Times, the Washington Post, MSNBC, CNN, and the Associated Press.
I would say that none of them are even slightly credible on political news.
Would you agree?
None of them are at all.
And I would say on the right you'd be looking at Fox News and Gateway Pundit as your fake news places.
Would you agree with that?
Now the trouble with Gateway Pundit is I think they sometimes have scoops.
But more often, it's stuff that doesn't check out.
Well, I don't know if it's more often.
It's just, you know, they're lower credibility entities.
Yeah, maybe NPR.
I don't want to just, I didn't want to just list every left-leaning entity.
Right?
That, because you could go deeper.
Basically, every entity has a bias.
So I don't want to just say, here's all the biases.
I want the ones that are really signals.
The ones you have to worry about.
Because if it's not in the New York Times and the Washington Post, it probably won't be anywhere else.
But if it's in one of these entities, it's probably going to be everywhere.
And then, of course, the most important part was I'll teach people how to know how credible any story is based on its elements.
For example, these are things that are probably true.
Not necessarily, but just a hint that it's probably true.
If one side, either the left or the right, hides the story, So it's different if one side says it's true and the other side says it's not.
But if one just won't mention it, it's probably true.
Probably true.
If both sides reported the same, if the left and the right entities reported the same, probably true.
How about if all studies for years and years are pointing in the same direction?
Like every time you do a study, no matter how you slice it, no matter what you study, same direction.
For example, cigarettes causing lung cancer.
I'm pretty sure that every way you study that, you get the same answer.
That means it's probably true, but not necessarily.
Because we've seen, for example, alcohol is good for you in small quantities.
Those studies went forever, but of course were not true.
About if one narrative predicts better than the other, that's more likely true.
Or you could treat it as true.
So there are some frames that just don't, or narratives, that just never predict anything.
And some that predict everything.
So if you hear one that predicts everything, it's one of those types.
Such as, follow the money.
Right?
Follow the money is a pretty good thing for predicting.
So it also is a good thing for truth.
Suppose you have a witness who has direct knowledge of a situation and is under oath.
And they're public.
You know who they are, they're under oath, and they have direct knowledge.
They didn't hear it from somebody, they saw it themselves.
Pretty good.
Pretty good.
Not guaranteed.
If you have two of them, and they're not friends or something, and they've seen it from different angles, say the same thing, that's much more likely to be true.
All right, and if you have witnesses plus documents, then you're in real good shape.
So if you've got somebody who is there, they're public, they saw it directly, but also there's an email or something that supports them, you're in pretty good shape in that case.
But that's rare.
The Hunter laptop and that stuff, that does fall into that category of direct witnesses and lots of documents.
That's about as true as anything can get.
Here's some things that are more like a coin flip.
You know, could be true, maybe not.
One scientific paper that has not yet been peer-reviewed.
You don't really know anything about it.
How about one scientific paper that has been peer-reviewed?
Exactly the same.
The peer review does not give you any benefit in terms of credibility.
We used to think it did.
And they could find, like, really big mistakes.
But if somebody publishes a scientific paper without a peer review, that sort of is a peer review.
Because everybody's going to look at it, and you would pretty soon see if there are strong objections.
So it's sort of a bad peer review, but it's kind of one.
How about if something's a meta-analysis?
If they say, well, the individual studies weren't that strong, but when we summed them together and did our magic called a meta-analysis, the results are very clear once you do the meta-analysis.
Definitely one direction.
That is no more than a coin flip.
Meta-analysis is somebody deciding what's in the study and what isn't.
So it's not science.
It's somebody deciding what's in and what isn't.
50% chance that they got it right.
How about if there is a video or audio of an event that people question really happened?
Video and or audio of the event.
No more than a 50% chance.
Because for everything that's a real video of a real event just the way it happened, there's at least one that is misleading.
At least one.
Maybe more.
Because video is the most misleading thing in the world.
Remember when we used to think a photograph doesn't lie?
I'm old enough to think that was real.
Oh, a photograph doesn't lie.
Of course a photograph lies.
A video lies even better.
And audio lies best of all.
They're all liars.
Yeah, so 50-50, even if there's a video or an audio.
All right, and here are the ones where you could pretty much make a lot of money if you could bet on these being fake.
So these are the things that probably are fake.
Anything where lots of money is involved.
The news is never real when lots of money is involved, whether it's a war or a pandemic.
As soon as there's lots of money involved, you just don't believe anything.
Let's see, how about if both CNN and Fox News say something didn't happen, then it probably didn't.
If you've got one anonymous source, probably fake.
One anonymous source is almost, it's like the classic fake news.
One anonymous source.
And usually you'll see that in a book.
Well, there's a book about what happened behind the curtains.
I've got this one anonymous source.
They're never real.
How about two anonymous sources?
Hmm.
We don't know who either are, but there are two of them.
And they say the same thing.
Nope.
Probably not true.
They're just adding the second fake one so it sounds more true.
Now there's no credibility to two anonymous people.
No credibility.
How about the only photos you can get are fuzzy?
You just can't get a clean photograph.
Bigfoot, UFOs.
Probably not true.
Probably not true.
All those photographs.
Can't get a good one.
They're always a little bit fuzzy.
How about a randomized controlled trial funded by somebody who has an interest in the outcome?
It's randomized and controlled.
That's the gold standard.
You can't complain if it's randomized and controlled and it's a big study.
Yes, you can.
If it's funded by somebody who has an interest in the outcome, it has no evidentiary value.
None.
You just imagine that you can't get that many scientists to be weasels, but we know we can.
You can get the entire world of scientists to be as weasel as you want.
You just threaten their money.
Well, you'll never get a job again unless you agree with the mainstream.
Okay, I agree.
It's easy.
How about the best argument is that the experts are on the same side.
That's our best argument.
I'll grant you that the data we're using, people question it.
Some people say it's good, some people say it's bad.
But the thing you should listen to is that the experts have a good sense of which ones are good and what's bad.
You as a layperson can't really tell.
But the experts, they know which studies to believe.
And which studies not to believe.
So under those conditions, if somebody says 90%, I'll just pick a number.
Let's say somebody says 97% of experts are on the same side.
But the data is in question by other people.
Yeah, that means that they have a monetary interest in it.
And therefore their opinions are worthless.
97% of experts agree in the context, in the context where the data itself that they're looking at, you're not quite confident is real.
In that condition, 97% of scientists agree.
Just means they're being paid to agree.
Indirectly, meaning they'd never get a job if they disagreed.
That's all it means.
So you should reverse your instinct when you see 97% of experts agree that should tell you that it's a fake.
It shouldn't tell you it's true.
If one scientist gives you a great argument, that would be a little bit more persuasive.
One person with a great argument that you could check.
It's like, oh, let me check that.
Well, he's right about that.
But 97%, that's just a huge raging signal of fakery.
Here's some other tricks.
So here are the ones that I call pure propaganda.
If your news mentions that there are a lot of heat deaths because of climate change, but they never mention how many cold deaths there are, so that you know both the costs and the benefits, If they always leave out one of those sides, they always leave out the costs, like always?
Or they always leave out the benefits?
Always?
When it would be easy to mention that they both exist?
That's propaganda.
So if somebody tells you we're in trouble because some places are getting hotter, without mentioning that That would be better for some places.
That's not any kind of news.
That's just propaganda.
So look for the dog not barking, the part they leave out.
If they're arguing by analogies instead of data, that's a sign for no real argument.
People don't use analogies when they have real arguments.
You can use analogy just to paint a general picture so somebody knows what you're talking about, but that's not the argument.
An analogy can get you in the general zip code of what you're both talking about, but it can't win a debate because the analogy is literally a different thing.
You can't learn about this thing by looking at a different thing.
So, if you see people leaning on analogies, such as, this is just like Hitler, it's probably not real.
If you see too much whataboutism, that's a sign of a weak argument.
If the response to criticism is whataboutism, that's the first response.
Now, whataboutism is perfectly legitimate, if it's not your only point.
If it's your go-to, then you don't have an argument.
There's no argument.
If you have to rely on whataboutism, you don't have anything.
All right, how about... And here's some tricks that the general public doesn't know about.
You know about all these.
When the headline doesn't match the story, because you know people don't read the story, they just look at the headline.
That trick is just so classic.
And if you are worried about the headline not matching the story, where do you look in the body of the story to find the part where they kind of admit the headline doesn't match the story?
It's at the end.
So the way to read the news is you read the headline and then ignore it, because headlines don't match stories.
You read the first paragraph.
Because all good writers, it's pretty much everybody in the news business, will tell you the basic thing in the first paragraph, which might be the misleading thing.
Might be misleading, but it'll give you the thing.
Everything that's in the middle, you can ignore.
And then you go to the last paragraph, where they'll tell you that everything that you read was bullshit.
Very common.
It'd be like, we found out that climate change is going to make the butterflies turn vicious.
The butterflies, the scientists say, will be attacking people and tearing their lungs out.
So we're all going to die from the butterfly attacks.
And then you get to the last paragraph and it'll be, but it should be noted that butterflies do not have the mass or strength to hurt anybody whatsoever.
And we would just use insecticides and make them go away.
And the whole story was nothing.
They'll debunk their own story in the last paragraph.
You have to read the last paragraph of anything in the news.
Written.
All right.
Then you know what the old correction method?
Say something you know isn't true.
It becomes the big story for days and days and weeks.
And then you issue a correction because you knew it wasn't true.
You're like, well, correction.
Didn't mean it.
And nobody sees the correction.
So the fake news just lives forever.
Corrections don't matter.
So you see that trick.
Then there's the wrap-up smear Nancy Pelosi talks about.
See if I have this right, because I may be conflating the wrap-up smear with a different thing.
But I think they're the same.
Where somebody will leak to a journalist something that's not true, the journalist will write it as if it is true, And then the politician who leaked it says, well, don't look at me.
It's in the news.
I mean, the New York Times just wrote about it.
So how about you leave me alone and go talk to the New York Times?
Why did they say it's true?
I mean, I said it's true first, but now they're agreeing with me.
Obviously, the news agrees with me.
I'm right.
You're wrong.
That's what the wrap-up smear is, right?
Where you launder your fake opinions through the fake news so that you can say, oh, not me.
Oh, then there's also the 24-hour rule.
Yeah.
Fog of War, 24-hour rule.
Would this be a good book?
It shouldn't be a book.
It should be more like a pamphlet.
But this would be useful to train people how to read the news, right?
I think it would be.
All right, here's another one.
That you need to know what is science and what is not science.
Because a lot of our news and a lot of the politics is based on what we think is science.
So you take climate change.
Climate change, the science, is that CO2 is a greenhouse gas.
You could test it lots of different ways and pretty much Whenever you test it, you say, yeah, it's a greenhouse gas.
Meaning that if it's in the atmosphere, it's one of several things that would keep the heat from escaping the Earth.
So it traps it in.
But it's not the only thing.
Clouds, blah, blah, blah, right?
So if somebody says that the basic science is that CO2 is a greenhouse thing, so it should cause some warming, that would be science.
But if they make a model to project where it will be in 50 years, that is not science.
That is marketing.
Sometimes propaganda.
The best it can do, if it were legitimate, which it isn't in this case, is tell you the cone of possibilities.
But nobody can predict anything in five years.
Much less 50.
I mean, you can't really predict anything in one year, most of the time.
So if you imagine that the projection models are actually science, you would be completely misled about what's going on.
They're the marketing arm so the people who do science can get more money and scare you.
Sorry, Don.
It's probably hurting your head.
we'll just get rid of you.
Don, I need to make Don go away.
Bye Don.
Alright.
So, here's the question.
I know that this is a repeat for most of you.
It's slow news day, so I'm trying to make something useful out of this.
But do you think you could reprogram anybody so that their politics was different simply because they learned how to interpret the news?
Do you think that's a thing?
Or do you think nobody would ever change their mind because they would just look at it and say, oh, this is in trouble.
Well, what I'd like is, here's the ultimate expression, that you could grade any story by these characteristics.
So you could say, for example, let's say somebody posts a story that's in some publication.
You could leave a comment That just picks out the reasons that make it low confidence.
Like, well, it's an anonymous source, blah, blah, blah.
And some kind of thing you could just paste in every time somebody does that.
Like a community notes.
So one of the things that community notes doesn't do is they don't tell you how to look for problems.
They'll just tell you if a fact is wrong, which is useful.
But it doesn't tell you stuff like, well, an anonymous source should not be believed.
They might just tell you there is or is not an anonymous source.
or that it was or was reported that there was one.
How do we get afraid of greenhouses?
People who think I have a thin skin.
That's the NPC take.
If anybody doesn't like anything, they're blamed of having a thin skin.
That's the NPC attack.
The NPCs say you're a flip-flopper, you're a fence-sitter, and you have thin skin.
Those are all the lowest level of analytical ability.
Yeah.
Wrinkly skin, maybe.
Foreskin?
Well, that's another story.
So here's what we might need to do.
If we end up putting on a mask rebellion, which I think is likely, we're going to have to find groups of people who want to go in two places at the same time.
So in other words, if you could find a way to agree with your anti-mask neighbors that you're all going to go grocery shopping between 7 and 8 p.m.
and then you just show up in masks without masks, nobody's going to bother you if there are enough of you.
So you have to go in numbers.
The problem is if you go as a onesie, they'll kick you out.
Yeah.
Yeah, basically a flash mob.
So you want to just break everybody you can break right away.
But the cleverness of how it's being rolled out is pretty good because they're making sure it's the people you don't want to boycott.
So first it'll be like medical professionals.
And you know, you saw me, I'm like, I'm not going to attack medical professionals.
I'm just not going to do it.
So, you know, if You might not like to hear this, but if my health care provider wants me to wear a mask inside a health care facility, I'm not going to second-guess them.
I don't think it's necessary, especially if I don't have symptoms, because the whole point is you're supposed to wear the mask if you're the one who has the symptoms, but now the latest information is that asymptomatic spreading was basically zero.
Right.
It was people with symptoms.
So, my common sense tells me I wouldn't need a mask in a medical facility, but that's not where I'd pick a fight.
I don't think the nurses and doctors need that kind of bullshit in their lives.
Like, let them do what they can.
So I'll put up with that annoyance.
And I think the government knows that.
They know that if your doctor requires it, you're going to fold.
Because that's not the fight you want to have.
Then they're going to go for the airlines.
And the airlines will say, hey, it wasn't our decision.
The government just made us do it.
What choice do we have?
You'd be like, oh, airlines.
Oh, I guess it's not really your fault.
So, and then I'll probably be in the military, right?
And I'll be like, oh, I can't really boycott the military.
So they're going to sneak it in all the places that you can't boycott.
And then they're going to start threatening the big companies, you know, with all kinds of things.
But at some point, you're going to have to destroy a big entity or more.
So you're going to have to take out a whole Fortune 500 company.
You're just going to bring some company to its knees, totally.
But it won't be until it's some capitalistic free market company that gets involved.
But it has to be brutal.
We have to actually destroy a corporation that doesn't deserve it.
Right?
So when we do it, and we probably will take down a big company, it has to be a company that it doesn't matter if they deserve it.
And it doesn't matter how much you like them.
And it doesn't matter how much you like their products.
It doesn't matter if your brother works for the company.
You just got to take them out of business.
Because that's war.
War has casualties.
And this would definitely be a war, in my opinion.
And I also think that's the point where I would lose all allegiance to America, basically.
I mean, I wouldn't be a traitor, but it would be hard to love my country if they make me put a mask on again, or try.
That would be a hard stretch for me.
All right, that's all I got for you today, YouTube.
