Episode 2231 Scott Adams: I Explain Why Learning Magic Tricks Helps You Understand Today's News
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Content:
Politics, Dove Soap Influencer, Biden Impeachment Evidence, CNN Stephen Collinson, CNN John Avlon, Bill Maher, Paul Krugman, Vivek Ramaswamy, TikTok Ban, Alex Berenson, COVID Vax Study, Claim Analysis, Diversion Magic, Anthony Oliver, Scott Adams
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Very good.
Very good.
Well, we've got news.
Would you like hypocrisy news first?
Or lying weasel news?
Let's see, let's start with hypocrisy news.
Corey DeAngelis is having a good week.
You might know him as a school choice evangelist.
He's often in the news.
And he tweets that the CNN host, I think it was Abby Phillips, called out the Chicago teachers union boss for sending her own son to a private school.
So, one of the big advocates for public schools is sending one of her three kids to a private school.
Do you know why?
Reasons.
Yeah.
No, it's okay because she has reasons.
If you have reasons... Yeah, I don't see a problem here.
She's a big advocate for not sending people to... She's an advocate against school choice.
But she took advantage of it because of reasons.
She had reasons.
Do you know what the reasons were?
Public school wasn't good enough.
So that's exactly why, that's why she says you should fund the public schools better.
Because people like her, they're going to have no choice but to send their kids to private schools.
And how wrong is that?
Yes, there are no honest people when it comes to public school.
Here's a little more hypocrisy.
Steve Guest tweeted this out.
He said, or posted it.
I like to call it posting.
One year ago today, Joe Biden called the Inflation Reduction Act, quote, the single most important legislation passed in the Congress to combat inflation.
Wow, that's quite an endorsement of his own act.
The single most important legislation passed in Congress to combat inflation.
So that's what he said a year ago.
What's he say today?
A month ago?
He said, quote, I wish I hadn't called it that.
It has less to do with reducing inflation.
So he just waits a year, and he says, ah, that wasn't really an inflation reduction sort of a thing.
Did you ever think it was?
I don't even know why you thought that.
Was it because I insisted so hard that it was the most important inflation reduction thing of all time?
No, it wasn't really about that.
The good news is 100% of the public that was not on the left understood it was bullshit from the start.
All right, here's my favorite story that I can't believe this is true.
But apparently the Dove Soap Company, they have sort of an influencer situation, sort of like Bud Light.
And one of the influencers they're bringing into their stable of influencers is a 22-year-old woman who is famous for having once falsely accused somebody of racism, which basically ruined that person's life.
So she's known, she's first famous as being a famous influencer for ruining somebody's life over a false accusation.
Then she says she may have heard wrong.
She may have heard it wrong.
Yep.
Ruined somebody's life and thought it was pretty funny when the life was getting ruined.
But yeah, maybe heard it wrong.
But now, you should know that she looks to weigh maybe 400 pounds or so.
And she was a black activist for, I guess, Black Lives Matter.
But now she's one of their soap influencers.
So she'll be selling you some soap.
And it's part of a larger Dove campaign called Fat Liberation, a campaign to end the stigma of being overweight.
Well, I don't use that word fat, because I don't like to do fat shaming.
Or at least I'm trying not to use it.
It's almost impossible to never use that word.
But yeah, I kind of try not to use it, because it's not my first choice.
Because I don't believe in free will, so I don't believe that people's weight is essentially a choice.
I think some people just like food more than other people.
And that's the whole story.
So if I like food as much as she does, I would weigh as much as she does.
But luckily I don't.
So I just don't have that issue.
However, some people are saying, is this going to be one of those Bud Light moments where somebody picked exactly the wrong person to promote their brand?
Or will it be a brilliant move?
A brilliant move.
Well, I think it might be brilliant, actually.
Because who uses more soap than overweight people?
Am I right?
You know, it seems like a simple math problem.
You're using X amount of soap to cover X amount of body skin.
I mean, the amount of soap that it takes me to wash up in the morning.
And by the way, I use Dove soap.
So it's actually true.
I use a body soap that's Dove.
And the total amount that I could use, I could get by with one squirt.
Like I can do my whole body with one.
I don't have that much real estate.
I can get it all.
Maybe two squirts.
But I would imagine that this influencer, I don't want to be cruel.
I'm just doing the math.
It looks like it's probably a six-squirt situation.
Six-squirt situation.
So if Dove can sell three to six times more soap by bringing in the people with more area to cover, it could be a brilliant move.
Possibly brilliant.
All right.
Our next category will be people who don't know how magic tricks are done.
I'll explain that in a minute.
But before I do that, allow me to read a tweet from Ben Shapiro.
He's talking about how the left says there's no evidence that Joe is involved or benefited from Hunter's corrupt business arrangement.
No, there's no evidence.
No evidence.
Ben Shapiro agrees.
There's no evidence for that.
Well, unless, as he points out, you count the witness testimony from Devin Archer.
But otherwise, no evidence.
No evidence except that Devon Archer thing.
Well, unless you count the testimony from Tony Bobulinski.
But besides Bobulinski and Devon Archer...
Two people with direct knowledge who agree with each other.
Aside from that, there's no actual evidence that Joe Biden was involved in any way.
Well, unless you look at the WhatsApp messages from Hunter Biden's computer.
But besides the WhatsApp and Tony Bobulinski and Devin Archer, there's nothing.
There's basically just nothing.
Unless you count Joe Biden's statement about leveraging the ouster of Viktor Shokin into Ukraine, or the unexplained income to Joe Biden, or a lifetime of corruption benefiting his family from Joe Biden.
But, basically nothing, is what I'm saying.
So, what do you do if you're CNN, and you're trying to protect the narrative, and it's really super, super obvious that evidence exists, But you need to make it sound like it isn't.
It doesn't exist.
Who do you call?
Well, I would call John Avalon and Stephan Collinson.
I would call my superstars of opinion.
And if you want to know how to understand the news, there's some names you should become familiar with.
Because they're like this glaring signal of something.
If you need to call Stephan Collison and John Avalon on the same day, it's a critical situation.
So they're the ones who make the news disappear.
The news people are the ones that present it to you, and then the opinion people are the ones that take it away from you.
So they're the, let's make this news disappear a little bit.
Kind of an inconvenient news.
Maybe if the news disappeared, things would be a little bit better.
How about make it disappear?
So here are some things that John Avalon says.
He says, let's be clear.
Let me ask you, have you noticed that when people say, let's be clear, everything that follows is the most ridiculous bullshit you've ever heard in your life?
Do you know who always says that?
The spokesperson?
Corinne Jean-Pierre?
We've been very clear.
We've been very clear on this.
But what did you say exactly?
We've been very clear.
Been very clear.
We've been over it.
We've been over it and it's very clear.
Right, but I didn't actually hear you say anything.
It's very clear.
We've been over it.
We've been over it and it's clear.
How much more could I say than we've been over it and it's clear?
Did I mention, in addition to it's clear, that we've already been over this?
Are you getting it now, that it's clear and we've been over it?
So, John Avalon says, let's be clear, this baseless impeachment inquiry, huh, baseless, baseless.
But it's baseless.
Baseless inquiry.
It's part of an elaborate revenge fantasy.
from Hunter Biden's computer, WhatsApp from Hunter Biden's computer, Joe Biden's statement is not leveraging the ouster of Victor's joke and unexplained income to Joe Biden and a lifetime of corruption benefiting his family from Joe Biden.
But it's baseless, baseless inquiry.
It's part of an elaborate revenge fantasy.
Wow, wow.
John Avalon can actually read the minds of the people involved.
And he doesn't like what he's seeing in there.
Let me tell you, there's a revenge fantasy floating around in those skulls.
Revenge.
Well, that's no good.
We can't have that.
No, no revenge fantasies.
So I'm totally on board, John Avalon.
Let's have no revenge fantasies.
Wait.
I'm looking in the minds of the same people with those revenge fantasies.
Oh, there's more in there.
Oh, God.
Oh, God.
They hate dogs.
Oh, my God.
They're monsters.
What else?
What else?
Oh, my God.
They... Oh, no.
Oh, no.
They're gonna buy more dove soap.
Oh, God.
God.
God.
Yeah, there's lots of bad stuff in there.
So John Avalon, I think he's on to something.
If you just use your powers of mind reading the way he has, you can see some bad, bad stuff in those heads.
All right, he says, it's designed to blur the difference between Trump, who has been indicted four times, Indicted four times, there's evidence of the wrongdoing.
Am I right?
How could you possibly be indicted four times?
By Democrats.
By Democrats.
How could that possibly happen?
Unless you're really guilty of horrible, horrible... Four times!
Have I mentioned how many indictments there are?
You have two indictments, you could say.
Well, it's just because Democrats are making up indictments.
But if you have four indictments, suddenly your hypothesis that Democrats are making up bullshit to keep him out of office, it all falls apart.
Because there's four of them now.
Well, how could you explain it?
Well, John Avalon goes on.
So Trump has been indicted four times and Biden ahead of the 2024.
Yeah, you would not want to compare four politically driven indictments.
You cannot compare that to a lifetime of criminal activity that seems quite clear.
Don't compare them.
And John goes on, he says, rather than helping Republicans politically, oh, oh, so now he's going to inform us how Republicans will respond to this.
Because if you want to know how a Republican's going to act and think, You need to talk to the guy who can look directly in their heads and see all the evil in there.
And John Avalon can do that.
Because, as I said, he's reading minds.
He sees this revenge plot in these minds.
And now he's going to read their mind a little further and tell you how they're going to act.
So he says, rather than helping Republicans politically, it will provide just the latest example of overreach leading to back... Wait, which is the overreach?
You mentioned Trump's four indictments, but that's not the overreach.
No, the overreach is that somebody would look into an obvious criminal enterprise.
But the four indictments?
Just right.
No overreach, just the amount of reach.
Now, if this feels like a reach-around, Well, you're not alone.
I feel like I'm getting a handjob from John Avalon the further I read.
I believe I can reach completion if I finish this paragraph.
You won't want to see this.
So he says, it will provide the latest example of overreach leading to backlash.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
You know, when I talk to Republicans, you know what they always say to me?
I'm worried about the overreach of the Of the impeachment inquiry.
That happens to you, too.
Are you sick of it?
Every time I go somewhere, some Republican's like, I am so sick of this overreach trying to get Biden.
Like, I'm just going to vote for a Democrat because I hate all the overreach.
And then, John, it says, a tit-for-tat impeachment vote is not going to appeal to swing voters in swing districts.
It will look like hyper-partisan pantomime that it is, an exercise in putting party over country.
Oh.
Oh.
So the four indictments were not that.
They were just justice.
That's just justice.
But this impeachment stuff, very unlike the impeachments against Trump, which were completely legitimate, as they tell you, these are some kind of weird hyper-partisan pantomime.
It's a hyper-partisan pantomime, which I love to say.
Hyper-partisan pantomime.
You can say it at home.
Say it with me.
Hyper-partisan pantomime.
It's a good sentence.
It's an exercise in putting party over country.
Well, now that's something you don't expect from Congress, do you?
That somebody would do something like purely political.
God, no.
Stephen Cullinson, also running for CNN.
He says, the key question leading into the third impeachment effort in three and a half years should be whether this attempt to effectively reverse a Democratic election by asking Biden is justified.
Oh, you know, I had not thought of it this way, that this is just another attempt by the Republicans to overthrow the legitimate government.
First, it was January 6th.
And now, and now this.
My God, it's like one thing after another trying to overthrow these totally legitimately elected people.
And Stefan says, the GOP failure so far to provide much more than innuendo, that Biden corruptly uses power of a vice president to profit from his son's business ventures, suggests it is not.
Suggested as not.
Yeah, because really all the GOP has is innuendo.
That's all they got?
Just a bunch of innuendo?
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry, Ben Shapiro, if you think any of this is real.
So get away from us with your innuendo, such as the witness testimony of Ivan Darcher, the statements from Tony Pobolinsky, the text from Hunter Biden's computer, the WhatsApp from Hunter Biden's computer, Joe Biden's statements on leveraging the Auschwitz victor truck in a lifetime of corruption, benefiting his family from Joe Biden.
I call that innuendo.
In one end and out the other.
So once you understand who John Avalon is and who Stephen Collinson is, you understand that the news disappears.
They take the news and they make it disappear.
So here they're disappearing any evidence that the Bidens were up to anything suspicious.
Just making it disappear.
Well, we'll just talk until you don't notice.
I saw Bill Maher appeared on Ari Melber's show on MSNBC.
And even Bill Maher is willing to say that the Biden stuff, I think he said, stinks to high heaven.
That it looks like obvious corruption.
Before you say to me, wow, he's turning into a Republican, not so fast.
Because Bill Maher points out that although the Biden family seems to be quite obviously a corrupt enterprise, and has been for a long time, that that pales in comparison, pales in comparison to the things that Trump's done.
I mean, let's list some of the things Trump did.
For example, there's the imaginary calling people fine people, calling the racist fine people.
Imaginary, but he did the imaginary thing.
He imaginarily recommended drinking bleach, and he imaginarily tried to overthrow the country on January 6th.
So if you compare the things that you purely imagine Trump did, way, way worse than the things you can obviously see with your own eyes that Biden did.
So you gotta weigh those things and it's kind of a tie.
So if you weigh your imagination of things with the things that are obvious and everybody can see with their own eyes, they're about a tie.
So you don't want to jump too quickly and say that you like Trump when there's so many imaginary things that he's done.
I mean, Trump has done more imaginary things that you don't like than anybody I've ever witnessed.
I mean, he's like the worst when it comes to things that didn't happen.
He can do more bad things that didn't actually happen in reality than anybody I know.
I mean, he's just one bad thing that you imagine after another.
And that's got to be factored in.
Well, Paul Krugman was talking to Christiane Amanpour.
And he reminds us that we are, for some reason, and it's mysterious.
He's a little confused.
He doesn't know why, he admits.
He doesn't know why this is the case, but he says, quote, the economic data have been surreally good.
Even optimists are just stunned.
So why do polls show that most Americans don't think the economy is doing well?
He says, quote, there's a really profound and peculiar disconnect going on.
So he went on to mention all the things that are doing well, better than people expected.
So the employment rate, not so bad.
Inflation seems to be drifting down.
Depends what data you look at, but some of it appears to be down.
It's not heading up too fast.
Generally speaking, if you talk to people, he said, they'll say it must be bad for other people.
But according to Paul Krugman, people kind of say that their situation is not so bad.
They just think, a lot of them do, that maybe other people are struggling.
That sound right to you?
Do you know what's missing in this conversation?
Here's what's missing.
I completely agree with him.
As long as you ignore the impact of debt.
You didn't mention debt.
If you could borrow infinitely to paper over all of your problems, yeah, it would look pretty good.
Just like it looks now.
If you told me, Scott, the national debt, we've solved it, it's not even a problem.
Do you know what I would say about the current economy?
Pretty good.
Pretty good.
If you just take, if you take the biggest problem and ignore it, it's pretty good.
I mean, the fact that we can't pay our bills and there's, there's no, nobody can even do the math to figure out we possibly could anytime in the future.
And that's not even mentioned as part of the economy.
Do you think that Paul Krugman is trying to explain to you so you understand the economy?
Or does it seem more like he's working with Christiane Amanpour to conceal from you what's happening with the economy?
Because if you're not talking about the debt in 2023, are you even talking about the economy?
Or are you ignoring the economy when you're talking about the economy?
It's mind-blowing.
Imagine if you were a casual viewer of news, and you just read the CNN page today.
You would believe that there's no evidence that Biden did anything wrong, and that the economy is doing great.
Like, that's actually what you would have learned on CNN today.
It's so mind-boggling, I don't even know how to, like, I don't even have a comment about it.
You know, the fact itself is the comment.
All right.
What other bad behavior here?
So now we know, or we think we know, from a senior CIA whistleblower who alleges that the CIA paid six of their own officers a significant amount of money to change their assessment on COVID origins, to change it from the lab leak to, you know, natural, some kind of nature thing.
Do you believe that?
So there's one senior CIA whistleblower.
So just one.
Where do you put the credibility of one whistleblower who I believe was under oath?
So you got under oath.
Is the whistleblower named?
Do we have a name of the whistleblower?
Some say yes, some say no.
I thought the whistleblower is named.
No?
Don't get too excited about it because it's one person.
I would say the odds of one person being accurate, even being a whistleblower, that's the same as the UFO story.
Why do you think there are UFOs?
If you do, it's because of the whistleblower.
You think that UFO whistleblowers tell you the truth?
I don't know.
It doesn't look like it to me.
But why would you believe the CIA whistleblower?
You know, the CIA is an organization of people who are trained to lie, right?
That's like their job, is lying to people, including domestically.
It's literally their job.
Now, here's my problem with this story.
It's too on the nose.
It's too much something I want to believe, because it's like right in the lane of your worst suspicions.
Oh my God!
Not only did they lie, but they took money to lie.
Six of them.
Do you think you could get six people to lie about something like that for money?
I mean, there must have been something beyond the money.
Maybe some implied threats or something.
Maybe some career stuff.
But I don't know.
I'm going to give this one a maybe.
I'm going to rank this one a maybe.
I cannot take it all the way to probably.
And I'm definitely not discounting it.
Well, I am discounting it.
I'm not saying it's not true.
I'm just saying that I need a little more.
I would need at least one confirming fact, like a document, or one of these six people.
If one of these six people said, yeah, that's true, well then I'm sold.
But if you don't have any of the six people, and you don't have a document, maybe there is a document that I don't know about.
Is there a document I don't know about?
But I haven't heard of a document.
But without a document, one whistleblower from an organization who are trained to lie to you is not convincing.
So I'm gonna give it a coin flip.
I'm gonna say maybe, maybe.
Nothing rules it out, but it's definitely not convincing to me.
But it could turn out later, I'm convinced.
So, there's that.
Here's a little tip in telling who is lying and who is not.
Now, this might not be 100% true, but it's one of those indications, sort of a signal.
If someone says, there's no evidence of a crime, there's no evidence I did anything wrong.
They're almost always guilty, because innocent people don't talk that way.
Innocent people say, what the fuck are you talking about?
I didn't do that.
Are you hallucinating?
Did somebody pay you to say that?
What's going on here?
Like, that's what an honest person would say when you accuse them of something ridiculous that they didn't do.
A guilty person says, well, there's no direct evidence of that.
So what are the Democrats saying when they defend Biden?
Are they saying, none of this happened?
Nothing, nothing happened.
No.
They're saying that your evidence is not sufficient.
You don't have evidence.
I'll tell you, that just screams guilty.
When the people protecting you have to use the liar's defense.
They can't even use a straightforward, it didn't happen.
None of that happened.
That's what honest people say.
All right, as many of you have prompted me to talk about, so Vivek Ramaswamy has changed his opinion on TikTok.
I think it's a change, but I don't want to say it's a change because I only know for sure that he wanted to ban TikTok for people under 16.
Now, he's not under 16, and he talked to Jake Paul, and Jake Paul, he says, convinced him That using TikTok made sense if he wants to win an election, because it's just how you reach people.
So I guess he made a video on TikTok and said he's still opposed to under 16 using it, but he's not as concerned about the data.
He understands there's a problem with data collection, but he thinks that it's more important to win so you can make changes.
Now, what do I tell you when people talk about TikTok, politicians?
When politicians talk about TikTok and they focus on the data privacy and they don't mention the brainwashing effect that TikTok can have on the public, what do I always say?
And I've been saying it for a long time.
There's something wrong.
There's something obviously wrong.
Because Vivek is not the kind of person who ignores the other argument.
He doesn't ignore arguments.
He's the guy who has a better argument.
So why is he sort of not mentioning the brainwashing risk of TikTok?
Why is he focusing, like the people I don't trust, why is he focusing on the data?
Well, here's my tweet to maybe explain it.
So keep in mind that Jake Paul talked Vivek into it.
At least that's the way Vivek is explaining it.
I wouldn't say it's necessarily true that, you know, Jake Paul alone, you know, caused him to change his mind.
I'm sure it was a probably a accumulation of thinking, not just one thing, probably.
Anyway, this is what I tweeted to clarify.
I said the TikTok risk is not data collection.
The TikTok risk is that it gives China a user interface to control American brains.
They can control public opinion and distract us at will.
And then I said, do you know why so many of our leaders think the TikTok problem is data collection and not brainwashing?
It's because TikTok is the user interface to American brains.
And they trained our brains to see data collection as the problem.
This happened right in front of you.
TikTok brainwashed our politicians into thinking that data privacy was the problem.
Do you know why?
Because data privacy is the problem they can solve.
TikTok can put the data in an American-managed company and say, look, you Americans have it, and you're never going to give it to us, unless you want to.
I mean, why would you?
So we can solve that problem by having Oracle or somebody hold our data.
How in the world does a candidate for president not mention the brainwashing risk, but does mention the data privacy risk?
The only explanation I can think of is that TikTok has actually brainwashed all of our leaders.
Do you think you'll ever see on Fox News again now that they're accepting TikTok advertising apparently?
Do you think you'll ever see them talk about the brainwashing risk?
Or will they only from now on talk about the data privacy risk?
Well, if it's on the five, they can say anything, because they're a little more adventurous opinion-wise.
But I'll bet you almost all the rest of Fox News just stops talking about the brainwashing risk.
And they talk about data privacy, and they talk that, you know, that's solvable.
That's solvable.
Just watch.
You can watch it play out yourself right in front of you.
This is one that you get to a front row seat.
You can see it develop as it's developing.
You can actually watch China brainwash our leaders right in front of you.
And then also the public.
Let's talk about something else.
Alex Berenson tweeted this.
He said, well, this is landing hard.
He said, probably because it's so stunning.
Yes, mRNA COVID vaccination.
Now, this is his interpretation of a new study or new data that's coming out from somebody.
He said that the mRNA COVID vaccination raises a healthy adult's risk of being hospitalized for an Omicron infection.
He says, don't take it from me, this is a CDC government slide.
Do you think there's a CDC government slide whose data tells you that the vaccination makes you less healthy?
Do you think that's real?
Do you think if you looked at this, you'd say, well, there it is.
The CDC is saying that getting the vaccination makes you less healthy.
It's tweeted, and there's a link to it so you can see it for yourself.
Do you think it's real?
Well, here are the questions that I ask.
The first question I ask is, what kind of people get hospitalized from Omicron?
Is it all the healthy people?
Or a lot of 25-year-olds getting a vaccination and then getting hospitalized for Omicron anyway?
Even after the vaccination?
Because the vaccination allegedly is worse than the Omicron?
Well, here's what I think.
I went to Google and I wanted to see if overweight people are more likely to be vaccinated.
Isn't that a good question?
Don't you think that overweight people would see a bigger risk, because everybody says it's a bigger risk, and they would be more likely to do what they think they need to do to have less risk?
If you were 25 and skinny, and perfectly healthy, would you be inclined to get vaccinated?
I would think less inclined.
So let's go to Google and we'll check to see this important piece of data.
And I think you would agree this is an important piece of data.
What percentage of overweight people get vaccinated compared to non-overweight people?
Wouldn't you want to know that?
Seems like the most important question.
Because if it turns out that overweight people are overwhelmingly more likely to be vaccinated, well then it makes perfect sense that they would have also the worst outcomes.
Even if the vaccination helped them, hypothetically, they would still have enough things going on that perhaps they might end up in the hospital more often than somebody who didn't do anything, but they're 25 and healthy.
So I went to Google and I said, all right, what is the ratio of overweight people to non-overweight people?
Do you think I could find that?
If any of you can find that, could you send it to me or tweet it at me?
Because I don't think we track it, for whatever reason.
And am I wrong that it's the only number that would explain what's happening here?
Because wouldn't you like to know if the vaccination makes you more likely to die?
It's kind of a basic thing to know.
I can't tell, based on this data and based on Alex Berenson's take on it, which might be right, by the way.
Let me allow that his take might be exactly the right one.
But how would I know unless I saw it broken down by weight or obesity?
How would you know?
Because if there are too many obese people in the ones that got sick, is it the vaccination or is it just that you had a lot of obese people in one group?
Does anybody know?
I'm asking the most basic question.
I don't think any of you know the answer, right?
I don't know.
I have no idea.
But if Alex Berenson is right, That let's say, best case scenario, that all of the other variables were controlled for in a reasonable way.
Well, this would be the biggest news in the world.
And if he's wrong, I'd like to know why.
Why?
Why is he wrong?
And the only thing I can think of is that they haven't broken it down by weight, so the data doesn't tell you what you think it tells you.
So anyway, don't trust anything you see about pandemic data.
Probably the best thing I said about the pandemic is that a hundred percent of the information is unreliable.
A hundred percent.
The moment you trick yourself into thinking you know what the good stuff is, you're lost.
You're gone.
You don't know what the good stuff is.
A hundred percent of it is unreliable.
Doesn't mean it's all wrong.
It means you can't rely on it.
That's completely different.
It's not about the accuracy.
It's about you can't trust it.
You just can't trust any of it.
All right.
So I don't trust anybody who says the vaccinations worked.
And I don't trust anybody who says they don't.
If they're looking at data.
Because data is useless.
Let me tell you one of the most valuable things I learned as a kid, and I want to see if anybody agrees with this, because I'll bet there's some of you who had the same experience.
I was a nerdy kid.
I know, big surprise, right?
Stop it, stop it.
No, I really was.
I know, I know, stop it.
I was actually nerdy as a child.
Hard to believe that I grew up into this, you know, Adonis kind of athletic vibe, but no, it's true.
I was a little nerdy as a kid.
And one of my nerdy obsessions was magic tricks.
So I would try to learn all the magic tricks I could.
I'd buy little magic trick kits where I'd get them for Christmas and stuff.
So I was really into magic tricks.
Now, do you know what I learned?
I learned a little bit how to do magic tricks.
But the most important thing I learned is that you can fool anybody with a bad imagination.
Especially if they've never had experience doing magic tricks.
But if there's somebody who doesn't have much of an imagination, you say, well, there's one explanation for why this thing happened.
The person with no imagination will think, well, I can't think of any other way it could happen.
I can't think of any other way.
I can't think of any way I could be tricked.
Now, see, if I can't be tricked, there's no way I was tricked.
And I can't think of any other explanation.
Well, I guess it's just what you told me.
But, if you studied magic, and you have a good imagination, as I like to think I do, because it's literally my job to imagine things and write them down and make jokes about them.
When I see a claim, The first thing I think of is the 10 ways it could be faked.
I could come up with all kinds of ways it could be faked.
When people say they're sure that the election in 2020 was clean and it wasn't rigged, they're basically saying, look, How could it possibly be rigged?
You would have all these witnesses.
You'd probably have a whistleblower.
Certainly all the audits.
Audits would have picked it up.
We would have seen in the numbers that something was out of whack and it would be obvious.
We had witnesses.
There were witnesses watching every part of it.
But more to the point, every single claim has either been rejected by a court Or found not to be valid.
So therefore, how in the world could there have been any rigging?
I mean, how in the world?
Right?
So, but what do you say if you have an experience doing magic tricks and you also have a good imagination?
Do you know what I say?
Do you know how many ways I could come up with to cheat in an election and not get caught?
It's a pretty long list.
You can't do that?
Really?
Really, you couldn't come up with any way that somebody could cheat and get away with it?
None.
Not one way you can think of.
I think I'm up to like 25 ways in my mind.
So, when you're talking to somebody who says, you know, there's no way this was rigged, it's been checked so many ways, you know, somebody would have been a whistleblower, there were audits, there were court, you know, the court looked into everything.
These are really clueless people.
I'm not even sure that's a political difference.
To me, that's somebody who has either a poor imagination or they have a politically motivated opinion that's just completely different.
Or they have had no experience with magic tricks.
If you've done enough magic tricks, you know how they're done.
And so you can see them.
What are Stephen Collinson and John Avalon doing with their opinions?
Those are diversions.
If they can make you think of this, you're thinking less of this other thing.
That's a magic trick.
The magic trick is, look what I'm doing with this hand.
Well, don't look what I'm doing with this other hand.
Distraction.
Diversion.
That's not the only thing that magic is, but you spot it as soon as you see it.
So as soon as you see somebody whose opinion pieces are aggressively moving you off a point of fact, That's not an accident.
That's the magic trick.
And they're doing it right in front of you.
And if you've done a lot of magic tricks where you have personally taken people's attention away from the magic trick, you spot it immediately.
Like, oh, that's that magic trick where they're making me think of this other thing, so I'll forget the thing that's important.
Yeah.
So when you run into somebody who is positive that the election was not rigged, you should feel some sympathy.
I don't know how you could argue with it.
How do you argue that there might be something you don't know about?
But they do!
They actually argue that the lack of knowledge is proof of something.
I have lack of knowledge.
I guess that's proof.
Well, how do you know that the pyramids were really built by the Egyptians?
Well, I have a complete lack of knowledge about it, so I'm putting that forth as my argument.
What?
Yeah, I have no knowledge about it whatsoever, so therefore it was built by Egyptians.
That's actually what people are saying about the election.
I have no way to know, therefore it was perfectly fair.
What?
What?
And I'll say again, as I always do, I'm not aware of any credible problems with the election.
I'm not aware of any.
But I can think of a few ways it could happen.
Lots of ways.
Well, Anthony Oliver is getting some pushback.
Apparently, he was signed up to play for an hour or so for $120,000, which is pretty good payday.
But the organizers were going to charge so much for the tickets that he thought it was ripping off the audience, and he didn't want to be part of that, so he canceled.
So after they'd done the marketing and the advertisement and sold all the tickets, He did a video saying he wasn't going to show up because they were charging too much for the tickets.
Do you know what he got wrong?
It was a break-even event.
There was no profit intended.
The tickets were priced to optimistically cover their expenses and that's it.
That's just what it cost.
Turns out everything costs a lot of money.
So to put on a concert that doesn't have a million people there, it's a smaller event, it's real expensive to do all the organizing for the event.
And that's just what it costs.
Some people who are good with money weighed in.
So Bruce Fenton had this tweet that I thought really captured it well.
He said, if you want to be wealthy, avoid a negative mindset like Anthony Oliver.
Unfortunately, this kind of economic self-sabotage is common.
That's exactly what it was.
That was self-sabotage.
That didn't need to happen.
All he had to do was ask a few questions, and it probably would have been fine.
So he says, you know, this is what he sees.
Somebody complains about poverty, but they don't understand money.
He demands $120,000 for a 30-minute performance, and then he cancels the performance he agreed to do because he thinks ticket prices are too high, even though it's basically breakeven.
So here's what somebody who's good with money would have done.
The show.
The show.
Somebody who understood how money works would have done the show.
Now maybe they would, you know, maybe correct it at the next show.
So for example, if he's invited somewhere else, maybe that's the first question he asks.
You know, what's the ticket price?
And if he's not happy with that, he doesn't have to say yes.
But can you imagine anybody agreeing to a job and then not showing up?
For this reason.
I mean, he had a reason.
But for this reason?
To me, this is just not modeling good economic behavior.
If somebody's got a big pile of money and all you have to do is show up and do the thing that you do every day, which is play your guitar and sing, which he probably likes doing, if somebody's giving you $120,000 and you want to make the world a better place, you could give your $120,000 back to the audience.
You could play for free.
Or you could take your $120,000 and donate it to a charity.
Give it to a poor person.
There are a lot of things you could do with that money.
But the most important thing is, a deal's a deal.
If he did not ask the question about, and showed no original concern about the ticket price, too fucking late.
Too fucking late.
You made a deal, do the deal.
You want a job in the future?
Perform the job you got hired for and you agreed to do.
If I could teach you one fucking thing to make your life successful, do what you say you're gonna fucking do.
You cannot get a better piece of advice for the rest of your career.
Do you know how rare it is to hire somebody and they show up?
Just show up.
I hired you for this job.
Well, I'm sick today on a Monday or a Friday.
It's really, really hard to get anybody just to fucking show up.
So if you can't do the first fucking thing to make money, you don't deserve any money.
That's first.
Do what you say you're fucking gonna do.
Every other piece of advice is useless if you can't do the first one.
Useless.
You don't deserve any help.
If that's your mindset, you're going to be poor forever.
Just get used to it.
All right.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is my angry diatribe for today.
I think I'm going to make a little video on the difference between a reframe and regular advice.
Because a lot of people have said, oh, you've got a bunch of advice in there.
Not exactly.
Although some of it is advice-y.
My book is called Reframe Your Brain.
I call them reframes, but they do in fact overlap with advice.
I'll give you the quick version here, but I'll probably make a video about it just for promotional purposes.
The quick version is this.
Advice is telling you what to do.
You should do this.
That's advice.
Do this, don't do that.
Do this, don't do that.
A reframe is like just adding some code to your brain.
It's like computer code.
You just put in some words that are in a certain order, and if they're well picked, you've got the right words in the right order.
Simply putting it in your head is done.
That's it.
That's not advice.
That's making sure you have your tools working.
Now you could make a case, well that's sort of advice too, but that's not the way we think of advice.
I'm talking about something that just makes you more efficient for everything you do.
That's what a reframe will give you.
There's reframes for different areas.
So once you learn that critical difference, that a reframe doesn't have to be logical, it doesn't have to be advice, it doesn't have to be a plan, it doesn't have to be factual, and it doesn't even need to make sense.
And it can still do everything it needs to do, because that's how AI works.
AI doesn't do thinking the way it's currently built.
It's just word combinations.
The combination of words themselves creates intelligence with AI.
That's, you know...
That with some clever programming and transforms gives you something that we recognize as intelligence.
But people are not that different than AI.
We have this pseudo-intelligence that is just the way our words are combined in our head.
For example...
If you see a tennis player who yells at themselves when they miss a shot, stupid!
Scott, you're so stupid!
Have you ever seen that?
So those are words that somebody's putting in their head in a certain order, and that's a bad set of words.
So instead, you put better words in there to replace them.
You just say, next shot's gonna be great.
Or I'm totally going to win this no matter what.
So when I would miss a shot in tennis, I would try to forget the shot I missed as soon as possible.
And the way I would do it was I would imagine myself winning in the end.
Because that's visual.
So I take myself to that visual ending where my opponent is surprised that I came from behind.
I just visualize that.
Because that's more powerful than that one shot you just missed.
So as soon as I missed a shot, I go boom!
Right to the future.
I win in the end.
Missed a shot?
I don't even remember.
Did I miss a shot?
I can't even remember.
I'm winning in the end.
So that's how just putting different words in your head changes everything.
Just words.
It's just a combination of words you put in your head.
So that's not advice.
There is some advice that's sort of weaved into the reframes, but that's not the powerful part.
The powerful part is that you can just reprogram your brain directly.
And that takes a little explaining, so I'll probably do a little video on it.
Thanks for listening, everybody.
Did I miss any stories that you wish I had talked about?
I'm just looking to see if I missed anything.
Oh, and also, I'm hearing good things about the Trigonometry podcast that's available now that features me.
So look for the Trigonometry podcast.
I'm hearing good things.
I haven't re-watched it, but I remember it went well, so I think you'll enjoy it.
I also talked to James Altusher yesterday, and I think that's going to be I think that might be one of the best interviews I've ever given.
So wait for that one.
We don't have a release on that one, but you'll see that.
So I'm probably going to keep doing podcasts.
I took a few years off from appearing on podcasts, but I think now that the book is written and I have something specific to talk about, I'll probably go on a lot of podcasts remotely.
You handled yourself very well.
I always laugh at the compliments that don't sound like compliments.
It was yesterday, what was the one?
Somebody said about my interview on trigonometry that the hosts are very smart, but they thought I quote, held my own.
And I thought, I don't think that's quite the compliment that you imagined it was.
He held my own?
What, do you think I was like on the border of, you know, breaking down?
Did it look like I was on the edge?
Was I almost going to implode?
I thought it was just a conversation.
I didn't know I was holding my own.
Anyway, but I appreciate the semi-compliment, I guess.
And how can you tell I was holding my own?
That's sort of a Jeffrey Toobin joke.
Yeah, we talked about cough suppressants.
Not cough suppressants, decongestants.
For all these years, the decongestants that say decongestant, they were never real.
They were all placebos.
And then we just found out when the FDA banned them all.
Banned all the ones with a certain popular ingredient.
You look great for a change.
Yeah.
All right.
Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes the best live stream you've seen all day.
And I'll be back tomorrow.
I might be in my man cave streaming.
Those of you who are not on the Locals platform, scottadams.locals.com, you're missing so much.
So much.
Bye for now.
Ah.
I hate signing off because I just look uncoordinated.
