Episode 1485 Scott Adams - All the Fake News and Propaganda You're Watching Right Now

fun good morning and welcome to the best part of your entire day yeah and we're gonna do something here uh very special something that i totally haven't done yet today and it's called the simultaneous sip if you'd like to join me all you need is a copper mug or glass a tanker chalice or stein i can't eat jugger flask of vessel of any kind fill it with your favorite liquid and join me now for the unparalleled pleasure the dopamine head of the day you think it's called the simultaneous sip and it happens now go first one of the day as far as you know all right let's talk about something interesting for a change how would you like that it's a big change i know but apparently china i saw one report on this from the spectator index twitter account and it says that china will limit minors to playing online games just three hours a week with services limited to an hour each friday saturday and sunday so if you're a kid in china the total amount of video games you can play is one hour for each of the three weekend days now what does that suggest well it suggests it might be boring to live in china if you're a teenager but it makes me wonder about the whole chinese system versus the american system because you know i think president xi of china has made a point that their system should be superior in the future and they do have a few advantages let me list a few number one they can block their teenagers from playing video games all day is that good i don't know i really don't you know your your common sense tells you it's you know destroying brains but while kids are playing these video games is they're very stimulated and they're doing hand-eye coordination they've got to think and plan they're competing they have if they have their headphones on they're talking to other people they're being social they're coordinating they're planning i'm not entirely sure that video games are bad for kids especially the ones where they they've got the headphones on and they're talking to their friends online at the same time they're playing and stuff i feel i feel like they might be wrong about this yeah i get why they're doing it probably every parent has the same impulse right your your impulse and your common sense is you don't want kids staring at a screen and playing with their thumbs eight hours a day um but here's what else china can do that we can't do they can get much better control of their drug addiction not only can the chinese with their harsh system and their full surveillance people not only can they keep people from getting addicted but they can make us addicted so they can send us their fentanyl and get their competitor addicted and dying all like crazy while at the same time keeping their own public from having the same problem how big of a problem is addiction to modern society if you were to rate addiction on a scale of one to ten for how big a problem it is to society it's like a nine isn't it it's yeah it's it's i don't know 10 is probably nuclear war or something but it's like a nine and china will be in a much better shape for avoiding that nine sized problems here's another one uh i think in america we can't cheat as much against our rivals now this is sort of speculation so i'm assuming this is true yeah i would take a fact check on this for sure but it seems to me that an american company could just blatantly break the law and spy on a chinese company or steal their ip without fairly large risk but it looks like a chinese company can do anything they want to a foreign company in their country or anywhere else because their government would support it so long as it's you know good for the competition of china it's good for china so i feel as though our system doesn't allow us to cheat when we're competing as much you know i'm sure there's some cheating going on everywhere so we'll have we might have more video game addiction but i don't know if that's a plus or a minus less we would have more drug addiction we're more susceptible to cheating these are some big things these are some big deals if you're trying to figure out which country is going to dominate in the future um and then here's another one this is really big susceptibility to propaganda now let's assume that both the united states and a we'll take china as our totalitarian example both of them are hugely successful susceptible to propaganda and i would say completely right i don't think there's more propaganda in china than there is in the united states i probably wouldn't have said that always but at the moment i i could say this with confidence i don't think we have any less propaganda it's just just comes from different sources in our case it comes from the you know the different teams they just do the propaganda themselves whereas in china the government does it all so we both have terrible propaganda but there's a big difference in china the propaganda is controlled by the government which means that they can control it in a way that's good for the nation even if it's not good for the people whereas in the united states it's just a fight between two competing groups just destroying the country by tearing it apart so it seems to be that although both china and the united states would be fully propagandized china could do it in a more controlled engineered way to get a specific outcome in the united states it's a it's a free-for-all we don't know who's going to win the propaganda war we don't know who's going to be more persuasive on any given topic i think that's a disadvantage it would be an advantage if we had a good news industry in that case we would have accurate news the chinese citizens would have inaccurate news and maybe that would give us some advantage but since we're both getting inaccurate news and we can't tell the difference then i would say the one who can engineer that inaccurate news the best which would be china might have an advantage so what would be the advantage of our system only one that i know of only one advantage that i know of now i'm not talking about lifestyle because there might be a number of lifestyle advantages of freedom but in terms of the strength of the total country i think our biggest advantage is creativity and risk taking meaning that we allow it we allow people to do crazy things and just destroy themselves but every now and then somebody is the wright brothers and they created a create a lighter than air not lighter there but they create a flying machine so there's something about the permissiveness of our system that allows creativity to come out and so far that's been the difference the biggest difference is creativity now somebody says capitalism but i think i think they have a lot of that advantage in china as well at the moment um yeah so i think invention and risk taking were are our only enduring advantages and we'll see if that's enough um here's some prediction tracking now i've mentioned this before but i'd like to keep reminding you one of the ways that you can predict is by assuming that people act the same all the time okay you can't trust people to tell you the truth in fact i would say you shouldn't trust anybody or you shouldn't trust anything that anybody says just automatically here's what you can trust are you ready this is like a really really important reframing so every now and then i'll i'll make a little statement that could change you know change your life entirely this is one of them so just pay attention to this some of you this will be life-changing i it really will you can't trust what anybody says let's start with that now i know you're going to say to yourself well i can trust some people no wait for the reframe you can't trust anything that anybody says is true just start with that to protect yourself now you have to make decisions right you still have to live in the real world you still have to decide what to do and so part of that decision making is figuring out who's telling you the truth or not here's what i would say instead of trusting what people say which you should never trust trust that people will be the same as they always have trust that the person who's giving you the information is the same person they were yesterday that you can usually trust it's not a hundred percent nothing is right but trust that people will be the same as the last time that you dealt with them so it's sort of the maya angelou thing you know when somebody shows you who they are believe them the first time because it's coming back right you're going to see them asking the same way again so if you don't believe it the first time you're going to be surprised all right so here's here's how this works um if you if if you're gonna look at the arizona audit situation and you're trying to predict where it's gonna go can you can you say that anything that anything has anybody said about it so far you should trust no so if there are people who said the audit has found nothing should you trust them no how about the people who told you oh there's definitely something there oh wait wait do you see what we got should you trust them no no so the two things you shouldn't trust at all is people saying they definitely have some stuff and they'll show it to you later and people who say they definitely don't have any stuff because there's nothing there don't trust them now use the reframe and trust trust that people will act like people okay so that's your reframe people will act the way people have acted before if you have a big complicated audit and it's full of people and people are blabbers are people who have always been blabbers going to stop being blabbers suddenly no no you can trust the human beings we'll have an x number of blabbers people who will talk about things they're not supposed to talk about in any large group every time you don't have to wonder if this large group of auditors had any blabbers in it of course it did 100 chance there were blabbers where are the blabbers telling us that they've already found the stuff and my god you won't believe it and here's the you know here's the area in which this fraud has been found no blabbers no blabbers so my prediction is that because people are always the same if if the arizona had found stuff there would be plenty of people who knew about it and some of those people not all of them some of them would be blabbers you would know by now right so i'm gonna i'm gonna take this as a prediction technique doesn't mean it predicted right this time right because everything is about the odds but the odds are there's something with this many people involved people are the same everywhere all the time they're the same as they were they're not the same as each other they're the same as they used to be and they used to be blabbers nothing changed that if you haven't heard anything what are the odds that there's something there every day that goes by and you don't hear about it with some specifics the odds of anything being there go way way way down now it doesn't mean i'm right it is a prediction technique just track it and see if i'm right there's a new propaganda documentary whose name i may or may not have written down something like fox news and the big lie i think that's what it's called and the idea is it's a documentary showing that fox news according to the theme of the documentary was culpable in spreading what they call the big lie about the election now i haven't seen the documentary yet but it's getting a lot of attention on social media but there was one part uh that i thought was quite interesting um did you know this that you remember cindy powell was talking about smartmatic one of the one of the vendors that do voting machine technology i don't know if i can't remember if they're software or hardware smartmatic are they software or hardware doesn't matter to my point but um did you know that when you were listening to all those allegations that smartmatic had some issues according to this article on cnn it says that that in 2020 smartmatic only had a there was only one contract for doing anything in the united states so in the year 2020 there was only one county it was a big one it was la county but probably didn't matter to the overall outcome that only smartmatic was only operating in one county in the whole whole country and the allegation is that fox news left that out because your idea of how big the potential problem was is very different if the vendor is only operating in one county so but here's the thing when i read this the way it was written was as if they were trying to mislead me this was on cnn it was written so here's the actual sentence the company accused of orchestrating a nationwide election fraud had a single contract in the 2020 election to provide a new voting system in la county that's it that's an ambiguous sentence isn't it let me read it again see if you how you interpret this one sentence the company so this is talking about smartmatic the company the company accused of orchestrating a nationwide election fraud had a single contract in the 2020 election to provide a new voting system in la county so one way to read this is that smartmatic had a trivial amount of involvement in the election i feel like that's what they want me to get out of this sentence but if you break it apart it seems overly specific do you know how to identify a liar they have an overly specific denial did you kill bob on tuesday no i didn't kill bob on tuesday see what i mean if you're if your denial is too specific it's usually an indication of lying and the way this was written is that they had one contract in 2020 to provide a new voting system in la county what's left out of that sentence did they have any existing contracts they had they had only one new voting system contract the word new was there they had one new voting system contract in one county is this telling us that they had lots of other existing contracts they're just not new i don't know i can't tell but i don't know who's doing the propaganda here did fox news leave that out which would be a propaganda like mistake no matter what their intent was or is cnn shading the story in a way that's just completely misleading yeah now dominion is another story right now let me uh let me emphasize that to my knowledge there is no evidence of either smartmatic or dominion doing anything illegal or inappropriate i want to say that clearly so i don't get banned from social media to my knowledge there is no credible evidence that's been presented that i've ever seen that looks like either of them did anything bad now keep in mind my larger philosophy is that any kind of automated system can be corrupted and that given the number of intel agencies that would love to do it it will happen we just don't know if it's happened yet so corruption of automated systems for voting is largely guaranteed you just don't know when it's going to happen so that's the part i don't know well the afghanistan war is over or is it it feels creepy and disgusting to say that this war is over is everybody with me on this to say that the afghanistan war is over is creepy and disgusting because it's not over for some people who are trapped there it's not over for our allies that we stranded it's not over for the service dogs we left at the airport allegedly i don't know if that's true um so i wouldn't call it over but at least the last soldiers have left allegedly and who knows if that's even true um now lara logan is reporting that or tweeting that from senior u.s sources that the house to house executions have already started and now we don't know who they're executing but we presume it was people who supported the united states or the afghan government maybe other people maybe maybe gays maybe at least one folk singer was taken out and shot ned he sings let me say that again a folk singer was dragged out of his home and shot in the head not because he was singing anti-government or anti-taliban stuff but because he sings so they dragged him out and shot him in the head because music outside of a religious context is forbidden by the taliban although the taliban has been doing their their uh act i'll call it of acting more progressive and they said well we're not going to make a big deal about the music but it is anti-islamic they say so the thinking at least the reporting is that maybe kabul doesn't have so much executions but the places where there's less media and less fewer eyeballs that they might be executing people like crazy so there's that um here's uh here's your latest cnn propaganda by anecdote i told you that there will be exactly one anecdotal story basically about somebody who didn't get the vaccination uh and then died so it's going to be something about people who made the wrong choice according to cnn and they killed them so there'll be one per day and here's the one per day daniel wilkinson a u.s army veteran died from a treatable illness after being unable to find an icu bed in five different states his mother tells blah blah so here's somebody who didn't have kovid he's a us army veteran which of course means a little more to us today right if you were going to do a story about something bad that happened to a u.s army veteran today would be the day to do that story because we're all feeling unusually close to our military is that is that a fair statement wouldn't you say that as of today that you as a citizen of the united states let's say don't you feel close to your military do you feel that i feel close to them meaning you know connected like you know we're sort of all in this together that wasn't always the case you know it's it's a luxury in this country that you can let the military go off and fight their wars and you can think about other stuff i mean that's a gigantic luxury but at the moment we do feel close to them and so when cnn does a story about an army veteran who died because the evil people this would be their their take not mine because the evil people who didn't get vaccinations filled up all the icus and now an army veteran who we should be respecting and showing our best died from it died from it now this assuming the reporting is correct this would be a huge tragedy but it's worse than that right because of the army veteran part like here's an army veteran who like gives his you know risks his life and to the largest and gave his you know his living life to the country and what the country gave back to him was a big fu and no icu bet and i guess you're just gonna die so it's a horrible anecdotal persuasion story but it's pretty good persuasion wise so watch the technique one once you see it you can't unsee it and the technique is this one headline per day on this topic on cnn's site every day every day until until everybody's vaccinated or we all die from covet well apparently when biden was at the military ceremony for the returning um deceased veterans he did check his watch about five times now if you go to honor the dead especially military and their families are there please have your aides take your watch away because you do not want to be seen checking your watch in this situation but joe biden was five separate times why does the president need to check his watch can somebody tell me why he would need to check his watch what exactly somebody says meds i feel like that might be it i feel like it might be his meds it could also be a uh a nervous stick yes i was going to say that if i don't have anything to do i check the time a lot it doesn't really mean anything it just means i didn't have anything to do so i checked the time a lot um so i'm not sure that this was you know anything except an old man who wasn't thinking clearly because he's the president of the united states i suppose that's a pretty big deal um but oh my god could he embarrass us anymore now even cnn as you know has turned against him i don't i haven't watched enough msnbc to see if they've turned against biden yet but cnn has turned against him and i would say that as a compliment to cnn sorry sorry i know i know nobody here wants to hear me compliment cnn but i didn't know if they would be able to turn against him no matter what he did but boy did they and i'm going to make i'm going to speculate here you know a big network like cnn there will be lots of voices and people in charge and the on-air talent has a certain amount of credibility and weight etc but there is one there's one voice on cnn that i think is stronger than the others who would you say that is if i told you there's one voice on cnn that's probably stronger than the others i imagine all right so i'm just speculating here but i imagine that when we're not watching there's somebody there who's stronger than the other players yeah it's funny i'm watching over on locals everybody's guessing it's jake tapper that's who i think it is yeah i think jake tapper just guessing i think he has a larger let's say just a little bit more weight there partly because yeah his show is popular he does a good job and he knows what he's talking about but as you know i've worked with jake in the past we did some fundraising for veterans now if you've watched jake tapper you know that his his concern and interest for veterans has been consistent and 10 out of 10.

right say what you will about the reporting about cnn you can say what you want but jake tappers a consistent respect for veterans has been unquestionable would you give me that would you give me that that jake tapper's respect for veterans has been a 10 out of 10 consistent over the years yeah he's really good on that topic and i've worked with him on that um so i think maybe he's their biggest influence because i can't imagine that given you know jake tapper's affection for the military etc that he could be on cnn and give give biden a pass i don't think jake tapper could ever give biden a pass for what he did in afghanistan and i think that that basically forces cnn's hand because you couldn't have one of your main people saying biden is screwing everything up while the other opinion people were saying the opposite kind of you know they kind of need to get on the same page so i'm just speculating i think he's probably the strongest voice there behind the scenes just to guess based on you know what i know of him and his capabilities and i'll bet that once he flipped on biden that the rest of them kind of had to follow suit just to guess pure speculation all right um as you know the afghanistan withdrawal i've uh we've called that the big botch the big bunch and uh and even stefan collinson over at cnn is writing an opinion piece saying that uh biden completely screwed the pooch on that so once you've got the main anti-trumper writing anti-biden opinion pieces which he did today i think it's not the first one i think he's done a few that's pretty serious cnn is done with biden what does that mean i feel like that's a big deal because not only is cnn done with biden i think they're done with democrats because who else are they promoting not kamala harris right you don't see them uh praising nancy pelosi even though i think you know she's pretty credible person for her team um i don't know i feel like something's happening here i think biden just destroyed the narrative that the democrats had a better plan it just looks like it's been destroyed did you see the video of a helicopter looked like a blackhawk helicopter say people who know what helicopters look like and it was in kabul and it looks like the taliban somehow was flying a helicopter and hanging somebody from the bottom of the helicopter it looks like they used the helicopter to dangle somebody they hung from a rope and they were flying around did you see that i'm going to call that fake news all right i saw it on social media and it was reported it was reported that it was a hanging now there are two things i doubt number one number one uh i thought i saw his hands moving i wasn't sure but if his hands were moving obviously he wasn't being hung so that's my first question did i see his hands moving did anybody else see it looked like his hands were free number two we don't know who it was or why now the place your brain goes to is that it was probably some uh american ally or you know a folk singer or something so your hand your your mind immediately goes to it's whatever is the worst case scenario of a revenge killing and it might have been it might have been exactly that which would be horrible but it could have been just a criminal it could have been a member of the taliban who did something that the taliban didn't like remember they hang people for all kinds of reasons they kill people for all kinds of reasons one of the reasons that they might want to kill somebody publicly is to gain further control over a city that's maybe hard to control now i'm not saying they should but the more brutal you are probably the more control you get over the population so it's possible that it could have been just a criminal it could it could have been a you know a taliban who was a a traitor it could have been anything so here's the thing it looked like the worst thing i've ever seen and maybe it was it could have been exactly what you think it was a revenge killing that they did in public from one of our helicopters horrible but there's a real good chance it wasn't that at all i just don't know what it was so i'm gonna call fake news on that uh only because there's so much fog of war that we don't even know if a person got hung or or who it was or why you wanna hear some good news this is just about the best news i've ever heard but we don't know if it's gonna go to completion yet so representative maria elvira salazar and a dozen republican lawmakers they're launching this uh plan that would allow some kind of wireless communications for any a place that didn't have it let's say there was a natural disaster and they needed to put quick communications up so they would have some kind of either helium balloons or satellites or some kind of i think it's somewhat undefined so far but they would they would fund the development of some kind of an emergency internet that would be used not only where there's a natural disaster which could make a huge deal but also if there's a rogue regime that shuts down the internet access now you're way ahead of me do i not understand that elon musk is putting in place and has put in place a lot of satellites that would give everybody um everybody's cell phone and alternate network that's there all the time am i wrong that elon musk starlink could do this now i don't know if he'd want to and i don't know what the capacity is and all that and i also don't know if your phone would necessarily just automatically use this network but are we right at the verge where elon musk can do what the government can't do which is provide emergency internet to any place on earth by pushing a button is he building that and do you know how important that would be because like i said for china to have an advantage over the united states they need to control the propaganda and the information what happens if they can't do that anymore what happens if anybody can just uh flip a switch and the next thing you know they're on the starlink network i mean i don't know if that's possible but i don't know i i've got a feeling that just the fact that we're seriously thinking about how to give internet to people who have been cut off of internet seems like a civilization changing idea so let me give a shout out again to representative maria salazar um you are doing good work and that would put you in the one percent of congress because congress is largely completely worthless uh i'm not sure this is the details of the bill are exactly what it needs to be but you're doing the right stuff all right so congratulations elected representative salazar from florida it's always florida uh it's always florida or texas isn't it doing exactly the right stuff all right um i'm going to now mention some vaccination stuff without trying to make you feel like i'm talking you into it okay can we agree on that i don't know exactly how to talk about stuff without making you think that i'm persuading you but i don't want to do that i just want to mention some interesting new things number one a new study says the modernity vaccination has twice as many antibodies as pfizer so remember you know how you haven't heard about the moderna needing a booster you sort of assumed it was coming but it's conspicuously absence from the news right wouldn't you think that would be in the news every single day oh the pfizer requires a booster and the other one is the moderna and then what nothing the modernity doesn't need a booster nobody's saying it now i'm guessing that you still will need a booster or at least it will be recommended why am i saying that even though the moderna has twice as many antibodies as the pfizer shot why do i predict that the modernity will need a booster too is it because of my great scientific understanding that even the manure could wear off over time no follow the money right even when the money shouldn't be predictive why is it that it always is it shouldn't be you think that it would be science alone that would determine whether you need a booster for the moderna but as long as the economics say you do need one is there any chance it won't happen it feels like it's just guaranteed by the fact that they'd make more money and they're they control the data if you control the data and you would make billions of dollars if you show the data one way versus maybe another way what's going to happen i think the data is going to coincidentally look the way that makes you billions of dollars i know that's super cynical and the world doesn't always work that way and i'm not saying it does i'm saying that if you made predictions as if the world always worked that way you would be astonished how often you're right and you won't know why it'll fool you like you'll even be surprised like oh i'm surprised that worked joe rogan seems to be pretty angry that he he sold a bunch of tickets to madison square garden for his upcoming show in october but from the time that he announced the show new york city required vaccinations for anybody going to public events and so now joe rogan has sold a bunch of tickets and people already bought the ticket and after they bought the ticket they find out they can't go unless they get a vaccination so joe rogan to his credit is saying they can get their money back because he's not going to he doesn't want to be part of forcing people to get vaccinations so you can get your money back from a joe rogan show and damn it joe rogan that just makes me want to go to your show why do you do that it makes me want to fly across the country and just go to the show just because you said that you won't put up with this forced vaccination stuff so he continues to make a popular and smart decisions so um that's a little commercial for joe rogan who totally totally earned it um here's some more fake news and how to recognize it so cnn is reporting that although this ida didn't reach the worst case scenario it was pretty bad million people without power a lot of flooding to deaths so far so it's bad could have been a lot worse um but cnn is reporting that climate change is making storms more frequent hurricanes are more frequent because of climate change all right suppose that's all i told you cnn is reporting that climate change makes the storms more frequent how do you know it's fake news go tell me how you know that's fake news just from that one sentence cnn reports and they show studies and let's say they they refer to science they're not just making it up right they're referring to science they say that the storms are more frequent and the climate change is being um used as the explanation no sources no they do have sources they have sources so how do you know it's fake news i'm going to be real disappointed if you don't get this come on i'm looking at all your comments here here um and maybe i missed it somebody's gonna say it come on okay you're close complex systems single variable yeah you're close all right you're getting you're getting close it's the dog not barking it's what they didn't say all right so here's what they did say the storms are more frequent more frequent what's left out strength of the storm yes the strength of the storm is left out why do you assume that the strength of the storm is the same maybe not right there could be more of them but less how about uh what period of time are you measuring this storms being more frequent do you know that is it is it hundreds of years of storm reporting no because we've only been tracking hurricanes in a in a useful way since the 70s so when we say there are more storms we're really talking about this tiny tiny little sliver of history between the 70s and now you know in geological terms it's it's just a blink of an eye so could you say that climate change is the cause when you're looking at such a sliver of time feels like anything can happen in a sliver just by chance right so that's one thing and then here's the other thing that's being left out come on tell me another gigantic thing gigantic for understanding the topic that's left out of the statement that the storms are more frequent what is being left out besides the severity of the storm and the strength something else is being left out thank you death count exactly our ability to mitigate against danger is really really good now compared to what it used to be the number of people who are killed by hurricanes in the modern times it's still tragic but you're talking about a handful you talk about a handful of people dying from a hurricane in 20 in you know modern times whereas a hurricane could you know wipe down a city 100 years ago so if you're looking at what is the problem well the problem isn't exactly that there are more frequent storms um you know you have to you have to put in all the other variables or else it's obviously fake news so i'm going to call it fake news because they leave out the obvious things you put in it and then that same story that they linked to as their source for their claim they show an animation of what charleston the city of charleston would look like under a number of scenarios of rising sea level and the rising sea level that they estimate for charleston and these are these are not predictions these are just what if what ifs so they show you a graphic of what if the sea level around charleston went up one foot and then it shows that areas would be flooded and it says what if it goes up two feet two feet of uh sea level rise charleston's got much more problems but what if it's four feet four feet of uh rise in charleston's largely underwater now what's missing from that analysis what are the odds that the sea level is going to go up a foot is anybody predicting the sea level will go up a foot i thought that predictions were more like inches like two inches is going to be a problem and you know if it's four inches it's a big problem but who who's talking about four feet of serial level rise i mean that just seems like complete propaganda to me i don't even know if anybody's talking about that i hope not all right um is long covered real or not believe it or not that's a question now i think i think everybody agrees it's real we don't know if it's smallish or biggish that's the bigger problem so professor francois balu tweeted this that there's a preprint study do you know what to think about pre-print studies everybody if i say there's a pre-print study how much credibility do you give a pre-print study low right so the correct answer is low so this is a low credibility doesn't mean it's wrong low credibility just means you can't necessarily know if it's true and this says that uh when they measure they studied a bunch of people in the uk and found out that almost nobody like a tiny tiny percentage might have something that you could call long covet now remember the estimates have been as high as 25 percent now if long covet is affecting 25 percent that's a big part of your decision making process but if it's way less than one percent maybe not so much so it's a big deal whether long covet is a is 25 percent of the public or way less than one percent but there's also a sketchiness in the coding and the data collection so apparently everybody not everybody but doctors code different things differently so they don't necessarily code it as long covet because they might not know it's long covered they might just think it's a second problem a lot of people probably don't bother going to the doctor they just feel shitty for months they don't know why they just figure it's something else so we doubt that the data on long covet is even close to accurate but to be fair i've told you that the numbers show it could be as high as 25 percent and now i've told you that it could be as low as less than one percent so i'm just trying to give you the range of what it might be and if that changes your calculation about decision making maybe you should maybe you should i would say that it's starting to affect mine because the longer we go without really solid uh evidence of long cove being you know a big problem the longer we go without that the less i think it might be right it's sort of the same same strategy that on day one you say well maybe maybe not but the longer you wait without confirmation the less likely you'll get confirmation all right so i don't know about that um uh you know the united states is being coy about what we're going to do to rescue the rest of the americans and our allies that are trapped in afghanistan but do you fault them for not telling you what we're going to do about it or being vague about it or general do you fault the administration for not being specific about how we plan to get more americans out of there i don't because i think that would be the wrong thing to be specific because probably we're going to have to do some things that even the taliban has to be flexible about maybe we might have some secret threats with the taliban we might even have a secret deal it's possible we have a secret deal with the taliban where we'll release their funding if all the americans get down or something like that so i would support the administration's not being straight with us on this topic i do think that for national security sometimes your military leaders have to lie to the public would everybody agree that that's an acceptable lie if the military genuinely believes that they can protect the country better with a temporary lie do you favor it i do but i i could respect an argument that says you don't yeah i so tony blank blinken and biden i'm not going to get give them a hard time for acting as though we don't have a plan or speaking only generically about it like it's some kind of weak plan because i imagine a real plan would look like this tell the americans to get to this specific place where the taliban doesn't have any you know surveillance or air coverage and we'll drop some helicopters in there and we'll take you home so it seems to me like they would have to keep secret from the taliban and the rest of the world some of their plans because some of it is going to be stuff the taliban doesn't know we're doing right and other stuff might be stuff the taliban is working with us and we can't exactly say that right because we might be bribing them there might be blackmail it could be any damn thing so it's concerning that we do not have a stated plan for getting everybody out but i don't know that you'd want it the other way all right um and that is what i needed to say for today and i have to go it has been terrific to see you and

fun

good morning and welcome to

the best part of your entire day

yeah and we're gonna do something here

uh very special

something that i totally haven't done

yet today

and it's called the simultaneous sip if

you'd like to join me all you need is a

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the dopamine head of the day

you think

it's called the simultaneous sip and it

happens now go

first one of the day

as far as you know

all right let's talk about something

interesting for a change how would you

like that

it's a big change i know

but

apparently china i saw one report on

this from the spectator index

twitter account

and it says that china will limit minors

to playing online games

just three hours a week

with services limited to an hour each

friday saturday and sunday

so if you're a kid in china

the total amount of video games you can

play is

one hour for each of the three weekend

days

now

what does that suggest well it suggests

it might be boring to live in china if

you're a teenager

but

it makes me wonder about the whole

chinese

system versus the american system

because you know i think president xi

of china

has made a point that their system

should be superior in the future

and they do have a few advantages let me

list a few

number one

they can block their teenagers from

playing video games all day

is that good

i don't know

i really don't

you know your your common sense tells

you it's

you know destroying brains

but while kids are playing these video

games is they're very stimulated

and they're doing hand-eye coordination

they've got to think and plan

they're competing they have if they have

their headphones on they're talking to

other people they're being social

they're coordinating they're planning

i'm not entirely sure that video games

are bad for kids especially the ones

where they they've got the headphones on

and they're talking to their friends

online at the same time they're playing

and stuff

i feel

i feel like they might be wrong about

this

yeah i get why they're doing it probably

every parent has the same impulse right

your your impulse and your common sense

is you don't want kids staring at a

screen and playing with their thumbs

eight hours a day

um but here's what else china can do

that we can't do

they can get much better control of

their drug addiction

not only

can the chinese with their harsh system

and their full surveillance people not

only can they

keep people from getting addicted

but

they can make us addicted so they can

send us their fentanyl and get their

competitor addicted and dying all like

crazy

while at the same time keeping their own

public from having the same problem

how big of a problem is addiction to

modern society

if you were to rate addiction

on a scale of one to ten

for how big a problem it is to society

it's like a nine isn't it

it's yeah it's it's

i don't know 10 is probably nuclear war

or something but

it's like a nine

and

china will be in a much better shape for

avoiding that

nine sized problems

here's another one uh

i think in america

we can't cheat as much against our

rivals

now this is sort of speculation so i'm

assuming this is true yeah i would take

a fact check on this for sure but it

seems to me

that an american company could just

blatantly break the law and

spy on a chinese company or steal their

ip

without fairly large risk

but it looks like a chinese company can

do anything they want

to a foreign company in their country or

anywhere else because their government

would support it so long as it's you

know good for the competition of china

it's good for china

so i feel as though

our system doesn't allow us to cheat

when we're competing as much you know

i'm sure there's some cheating going on

everywhere

so

we'll have we might have more video game

addiction but i don't know if that's a

plus or a minus less we would have more

drug addiction

we're more susceptible to cheating

these are some big things

these are some big deals if you're

trying to figure out which country is

going to dominate in the future

um

and then here's another one this is

really big

susceptibility to propaganda

now let's assume that both the united

states and a we'll take china as our

totalitarian example both of them are

hugely successful

susceptible to propaganda

and i would say completely

right i don't think there's more

propaganda in china than there is in the

united states

i probably wouldn't have said that

always

but at the moment i i could say this

with confidence i don't think we have

any less propaganda

it's just just comes from different

sources

in our case it comes from the you know

the different teams they just do the

propaganda themselves whereas in china

the government does it all

so we both have terrible propaganda but

there's a big difference

in china the propaganda is controlled by

the government which means that they can

control it in a way that's good for the

nation even if it's not good for the

people

whereas in the united states it's just a

fight between two competing

groups just destroying the country by

tearing it apart

so it seems to be that although both

china and the united states would be

fully propagandized

china could do it in a more controlled

engineered way to get a specific outcome

in the united states it's a it's a

free-for-all we don't know who's going

to win the propaganda war

we don't know who's going to be more

persuasive on any given topic i think

that's a disadvantage

it would be an advantage

if we had a good news

industry

in that case we would have accurate news

the chinese citizens would have

inaccurate news and maybe that would

give us some advantage but since we're

both getting inaccurate news and we

can't tell the difference then i would

say the one who can engineer that

inaccurate news the best which would be

china

might have an advantage

so what would be the advantage of our

system

only one that i know of only one

advantage that i know of now i'm not

talking about lifestyle because there

might be a number of lifestyle

advantages of freedom

but in terms of the strength of the

total country

i think our biggest advantage is

creativity

and risk taking

meaning that we allow it we allow people

to do crazy things and just destroy

themselves

but every now and then somebody is the

wright brothers and they created a

create a lighter than air

not lighter there but they create a

flying machine

so

there's something about the

permissiveness of our system that allows

creativity to come out and so far

that's been the difference the biggest

difference is creativity now somebody

says capitalism but i think i think they

have a lot of that advantage in china as

well at the moment

um

yeah so i think invention and risk

taking were are our only enduring

advantages and we'll see if that's

enough

um

here's some prediction tracking now i've

mentioned this before but i'd like to

keep reminding you

one of the ways that you can predict is

by assuming that people act the same all

the time

okay

you can't trust people to tell you the

truth

in fact i would say you shouldn't trust

anybody

or you shouldn't trust anything that

anybody says just automatically

here's what you can trust are you ready

this is like a really

really important reframing

so every now and then i'll i'll make a

little statement that could change you

know

change your life entirely this is one of

them so just pay attention to this some

of you this will be life-changing i it

really will

you can't trust what anybody says

let's start with that now i know you're

going to say to yourself well i can

trust some people

no

wait for the reframe

you can't trust anything

that anybody

says is true

just start with that to protect yourself

now you have to make decisions right you

still have to live in the real world you

still have to

decide what to do and so part of that

decision making is figuring out who's

telling you the truth or not

here's what i would say instead of

trusting what people say which you

should never trust

trust that people will be the same as

they always have

trust that the person

who's giving you the information

is the same person they were yesterday

that

you can usually trust it's not a hundred

percent

nothing is right

but

trust that people will be the same as

the last time that you dealt with them

so it's sort of the maya angelou thing

you know when somebody shows you who

they are believe them the first time

because it's coming back right

you're going to see them asking the same

way again

so if you don't believe it the first

time you're going to be surprised all

right so here's

here's how this works

um if you if

if you're gonna look at the arizona

audit

situation and you're trying to predict

where it's gonna go can you can you say

that anything that anything has anybody

said about it so far

you should trust

no

so if there are people who said the

audit has found nothing

should you trust them

no

how about the people who told you oh

there's definitely something there oh

wait wait do you see what we got should

you trust them

no

no

so the two things you shouldn't trust at

all is people saying they definitely

have some stuff and they'll show it to

you later

and people who say they definitely don't

have any stuff because there's nothing

there don't trust them

now use the reframe and trust

trust that people will act like people

okay so that's your reframe

people will act the way people have

acted before

if you have a big complicated audit and

it's full of people

and people are blabbers

are people who have always been blabbers

going to stop being blabbers suddenly

no no you can trust

the human beings

we'll have an x number of blabbers

people who will talk about things

they're not supposed to talk about in

any large group

every time

you don't have to wonder

if this large group of auditors had any

blabbers in it of course it did

100 chance there were blabbers where are

the blabbers telling us that they've

already found the stuff and my god you

won't believe it and here's the you know

here's the area in which this fraud has

been found

no blabbers

no blabbers

so my prediction is

that because people are always the same

if if the

arizona had found stuff

there would be plenty of people who knew

about it

and some of those people not all of them

some of them would be blabbers

you would know by now

right so i'm gonna i'm gonna take this

as a prediction technique

doesn't mean it predicted right this

time right because everything is about

the odds but the odds are

there's something with this many people

involved

people are the same everywhere all the

time

they're the same as they were they're

not the same as each other they're the

same as they used to be and they used to

be blabbers nothing changed that if you

haven't heard anything what are the odds

that there's something there

every day that goes by and you don't

hear about it with some specifics

the odds of anything being there go way

way way down now it doesn't mean i'm

right

it is a prediction technique just track

it and see if i'm right

there's a new propaganda

documentary

whose name i may or may not have written

down something like fox news and the big

lie i think that's what it's called

and the idea is it's a documentary

showing that

fox news according to the theme of the

documentary was

culpable in spreading what they call the

big lie

about the election

now i haven't seen the documentary yet

but it's getting a lot of attention on

social media but there was one part

uh

that i thought was quite interesting

um did you know this

that you remember cindy powell was

talking about smartmatic one of the

one of the vendors that do voting

machine technology i don't know if i

can't remember if they're software or

hardware smartmatic are they software or

hardware doesn't matter to my point

but

um

did you know that when you were

listening to all those allegations that

smartmatic had some issues

according to this article on

cnn

it says that

that in 2020 smartmatic only had a there

was only one

contract for doing anything in the

united states so in the year 2020 there

was only one county it was a big one it

was la county but probably didn't matter

to the overall outcome

that only smartmatic was only operating

in one county

in the whole whole country

and the allegation is that fox news left

that out

because your idea of how big the

potential problem was

is very different if the vendor is only

operating in one county

so

but here's the thing when i read this

the way it was written was as if they

were trying to mislead me this was on

cnn it was written

so here's the actual sentence the

company accused of orchestrating a

nationwide election fraud

had a single contract

in the 2020 election

to provide a new voting system in la

county

that's it that's an ambiguous sentence

isn't it

let me read it again

see if you how you interpret this one

sentence the company so this is talking

about smartmatic the company

the company accused of orchestrating a

nationwide election fraud

had a single contract in the 2020

election to provide a new voting system

in la county

so one way to read this

is that smartmatic had a trivial amount

of

involvement in the election

i feel like that's what they want me to

get out of this sentence

but if you break it apart it seems

overly

specific do you know how to identify a

liar

they have an overly specific denial

did you

kill bob on tuesday

no i didn't kill bob on tuesday

see what i mean if you're if your denial

is too specific it's usually an

indication of lying

and the way this was written is that

they had one contract in 2020

to provide a new voting system in la

county

what's left out of that sentence

did they have any existing contracts

they had

they had only one

new voting system contract

the word new was there they had one

new

voting system contract in one county

is this telling us that they had lots of

other existing contracts they're just

not new

i don't know i can't tell

but i don't know who's doing the

propaganda here

did fox news

leave that out

which would be

a propaganda like mistake no matter what

their intent was or is cnn

shading the story in a way that's just

completely misleading

yeah now dominion is another story right

now let me uh

let me emphasize that to my knowledge

there is no evidence of either

smartmatic or dominion doing anything

illegal or inappropriate

i want to say that clearly so i don't

get banned from social media to my

knowledge

there is no credible evidence

that's been presented that i've ever

seen

that looks like either of them did

anything bad

now

keep in mind my larger

philosophy

is that any kind of automated system can

be

corrupted

and that given the number of intel

agencies that would love to do it

it will happen we just don't know if

it's happened yet

so corruption of automated systems for

voting

is largely guaranteed

you just don't know when it's going to

happen so that's the part i don't know

well the afghanistan war is over or is

it

it feels creepy and

disgusting

to say that this war is over

is everybody with me on this

to say that the afghanistan war is over

is creepy and disgusting

because it's not over for some people

who are trapped there it's not over for

our allies that we stranded it's not

over for the service dogs we left at the

airport allegedly i don't know if that's

true

um so

i wouldn't call it over but at least the

last soldiers have left allegedly and

who knows if that's even true um now

lara logan is reporting that or tweeting

that from senior u.s sources

that the house to house executions

have already started

and now we don't know who they're

executing but we presume it was people

who supported the united states or the

afghan government

maybe other people maybe maybe gays

maybe

at least one folk singer

was taken out and shot ned

he sings

let me say that again

a folk singer was dragged out of his

home and shot in the head

not because he was singing

anti-government or anti-taliban stuff

but because he sings

so they dragged him out and shot him in

the head

because music outside of a religious

context is forbidden

by the taliban although the taliban has

been doing their

their uh act i'll call it of acting more

progressive and they said well we're not

going to make a big deal about the music

but it is

anti-islamic they say

so

the thinking at least the reporting is

that maybe kabul doesn't have so much

executions but the places where there's

less media and less fewer eyeballs

that they might be executing people like

crazy

so there's that

um

here's uh

here's your latest cnn propaganda by

anecdote i told you that there will be

exactly one anecdotal

story basically about somebody who

didn't get the vaccination

uh

and then died so it's going to be

something about people who made the

wrong choice according to cnn and they

killed them

so there'll be one per day and here's

the one per day

daniel wilkinson a u.s army veteran died

from a treatable illness

after being unable to find an icu bed in

five different states

his mother tells blah blah

so here's somebody who didn't have kovid

he's a us army veteran which of course

means a little more to us today right

if you were going to do a story about

something bad that happened to a u.s

army veteran

today would be the day to do that story

because we're all feeling

unusually close to our military

is that is that a fair statement

wouldn't you say that as of today

that you as a citizen of the united

states let's say

don't you feel close

to your military

do you feel that i feel close to them

meaning you know connected

like you know we're sort of all in this

together that wasn't always the case you

know it's it's a luxury in this country

that you can let the military go off and

fight their wars and you can think about

other stuff i mean that's a gigantic

luxury but at the moment we do feel

close to them and so when cnn does a

story about an army veteran who died

because the evil people this would be

their their take not mine

because the evil people who didn't get

vaccinations filled up all the icus and

now an army veteran who we should be

respecting and

showing our best

died from it

died from it now

this

assuming the reporting is correct this

would be

a huge

tragedy but

it's worse than that right because of

the army veteran part

like here's an army veteran who like

gives his

you know risks his life and to the

largest and gave his you know his living

life

to the country

and what the country gave back to him

was a big fu and no icu bet and i guess

you're just gonna die

so it's a horrible anecdotal persuasion

story but it's pretty good

persuasion wise

so watch the technique one once you see

it you can't unsee it and the technique

is this

one headline per day

on this topic on cnn's site every day

every day until until everybody's

vaccinated or we all die from covet

well apparently when biden was at the

military ceremony for the returning um

deceased veterans

he did check his watch about five times

now if you go to honor the dead

especially military and their families

are there

please have your

aides take your watch away

because you do not want to be seen

checking your watch

in this situation but joe biden was five

separate times

why does the president need to check his

watch

can somebody tell me

why he would need to check his watch

what exactly

somebody says meds

i feel like that might be it

i feel like it might be his meds

it could also be a uh a nervous stick

yes i was going to say that if i don't

have anything to do

i check the time a lot

it doesn't really mean anything it just

means i didn't have anything to do so i

checked the time a lot

um

so i'm not sure that this was you know

anything except an old man who wasn't

thinking clearly

because he's the president of the united

states i suppose that's a pretty big

deal

um

but oh my god could he embarrass us

anymore

now even cnn as you know has turned

against him i don't i haven't watched

enough msnbc to see if they've turned

against biden yet but cnn has turned

against him

and i would say that

as a compliment to cnn

sorry

sorry i know i know nobody here wants to

hear me compliment cnn

but

i didn't know if they would be able to

turn against him no matter what he did

but boy did they

and i'm going to make i'm going to

speculate here

you know a big network like cnn there

will be lots of voices and people in

charge and the on-air talent has a

certain amount of

credibility and weight etc but there is

one

there's one voice on cnn

that i think is stronger than the others

who would you say that is

if i told you there's one voice on cnn

that's probably stronger than the others

i imagine all right so i'm just

speculating here but i imagine that when

we're not watching

there's somebody there who's stronger

than the other players

yeah

it's funny i'm watching over on locals

everybody's guessing it's jake tapper

that's who i think it is

yeah i think jake tapper just guessing i

think he has a larger

let's say just a little bit more weight

there

partly because yeah his show is popular

he does a good job and he knows what

he's talking about but as you know i've

worked with jake

in the past we did some fundraising for

veterans now if you've watched jake

tapper you know that his

his concern and interest for veterans

has been consistent

and 10 out of 10.

right

say what you will about the reporting

about cnn you can say what you want but

jake tappers a consistent respect for

veterans has been unquestionable

would you give me that

would you give me that

that jake tapper's respect

for veterans

has been a 10 out of 10

consistent over the years

yeah he's really good on that topic and

i've worked with him on that

um

so

i think maybe he's their biggest

influence

because i can't imagine

that given you know jake tapper's

affection for the military etc that he

could

be on cnn and give

give biden a pass

i don't think jake tapper

could ever give biden a pass

for what he did in afghanistan and i

think that that basically forces cnn's

hand because you couldn't have one of

your main

people saying biden is

screwing everything up

while the other opinion people were

saying the opposite kind of

you know they kind of need to get on the

same page so i'm just speculating i

think he's probably the strongest voice

there behind the scenes just to guess

based on you know what i know of him and

his capabilities

and i'll bet that once he flipped on

biden

that the rest of them

kind of had to follow suit just to guess

pure speculation

all right

um as you know

the afghanistan withdrawal i've uh

we've called that the big botch

the big bunch

and uh

and even stefan collinson over at cnn is

writing an opinion piece

saying that uh biden completely

screwed the pooch on that so once you've

got the main anti-trumper writing

anti-biden opinion pieces which he did

today i think it's not the first one i

think he's done a few

that's pretty serious

cnn is done with biden

what does that mean

i feel like that's a big deal

because not only is cnn done with biden

i think they're done with democrats

because who else are they promoting

not kamala harris right you don't see

them uh praising nancy pelosi

even though i think you know she's

pretty credible person for her team

um

i don't know i feel like something's

happening here i think biden

just destroyed

the narrative that the democrats had a

better plan it just looks like it's been

destroyed

did you see the video of a helicopter

looked like a blackhawk helicopter say

people who know what helicopters look

like

and

it was in kabul and it looks like the

taliban somehow was flying a helicopter

and hanging somebody from the bottom of

the helicopter

it looks like they used the helicopter

to dangle

somebody they hung

from a rope and they were flying around

did you see that

i'm going to call that fake news

all right i saw it on social media and

it was reported

it was reported that

it was a hanging now there are two

things i doubt number one

number one

uh i thought i saw his hands moving

i wasn't sure but if his hands were

moving obviously he wasn't being hung

so that's my first question did i see

his hands moving did anybody else see it

looked like his hands were free

number two we don't know who it was

or why

now

the place your brain goes to is that it

was probably some uh american ally

or you know a folk singer or something

so your hand your your mind immediately

goes to it's whatever is the worst case

scenario of a revenge killing and it

might have been it might have been

exactly that which would be horrible

but

it could have been just a criminal it

could have been a member of the taliban

who did something that the taliban

didn't like remember they hang people

for all kinds of reasons

they kill people for all kinds of

reasons

one of the reasons that they might want

to kill somebody publicly

is to gain further control over a city

that's maybe hard to control now i'm not

saying they should

but the more brutal you are probably the

more control you get over the population

so it's possible that it could have been

just a criminal

it could it could have been a you know a

taliban who was a a traitor it could

have been anything

so here's the thing

it looked like the worst thing i've ever

seen

and maybe it was it could have been

exactly what you think it was a revenge

killing that they did in public from one

of our helicopters

horrible

but

there's a real good chance it wasn't

that at all

i just don't know what it was so i'm

gonna call fake news on that

uh only because there's so much fog of

war that we don't even know if a person

got hung or

or who it was or why

you wanna hear some good news

this is just about the best news i've

ever heard but we don't know if it's

gonna go to completion yet so

representative maria elvira salazar

and a dozen republican lawmakers

they're launching this uh plan

that would allow some kind of wireless

communications for any a place that

didn't have it

let's say there was a natural disaster

and they needed to put quick

communications up so they would have

some kind of

either helium balloons or satellites or

some kind of

i think it's somewhat

undefined so far but they would they

would fund the development of some kind

of an emergency internet that would be

used not only where there's a natural

disaster which could make a huge deal

but also if there's a rogue regime

that shuts down the internet access

now

you're way ahead of me

do i not understand that elon musk

is putting in place and has put in place

a lot

of satellites that would give everybody

um

everybody's cell phone and alternate

network that's there all the time

am i wrong

that elon musk starlink

could do this

now i don't know if he'd want to and i

don't know what the capacity is and all

that and i also don't know if your phone

would necessarily just automatically use

this network

but

are we right at the verge where elon

musk can do what the government can't do

which is provide emergency internet

to any place on earth

by pushing a

button is he building that

and do you know how important that would

be

because like i said for china to have an

advantage over the united states they

need to control the propaganda and the

information

what happens if they can't do that

anymore

what happens if anybody can just uh flip

a switch

and the next thing you know they're on

the starlink network i mean i don't know

if that's possible but

i don't know i i've got a feeling that

just the fact that we're seriously

thinking about how to give internet to

people who have been cut off of internet

seems like a civilization changing idea

so let me give a shout out again to

representative maria salazar

um you are doing good work and that

would put you in the one percent of

congress

because congress is largely completely

worthless

uh i'm not sure this is

the details of the bill are exactly what

it needs to be but

you're doing the right stuff all right

so congratulations

elected representative salazar from

florida it's always florida

uh it's always florida or texas isn't it

doing exactly the right stuff

all right um

i'm going to now mention some

vaccination stuff without trying to make

you feel like i'm talking you into it

okay

can we agree on that

i don't know exactly how to talk about

stuff without making you think that i'm

persuading you but i don't want to do

that i just want to mention some

interesting new things

number one

a new study says the modernity

vaccination has twice as many antibodies

as pfizer

so remember you know how you haven't

heard about the moderna needing a

booster you sort of assumed it was

coming

but it's conspicuously absence from the

news right

wouldn't you think that would be in the

news every single day

oh the pfizer requires a booster

and the other one is the moderna

and then what nothing

the modernity doesn't need a booster

nobody's saying it

now i'm guessing that you still will

need a booster or at least it will be

recommended why am i saying that even

though the moderna

has twice as many antibodies as the

pfizer shot why do i predict

that the modernity will need a booster

too is it because of my great scientific

understanding that even the manure could

wear off over time

no

follow the money

right

even when the money shouldn't be

predictive

why is it that it always is

it shouldn't be

you think that it would be science alone

that would determine whether you need a

booster for the moderna

but as long as the economics say you do

need one

is there any chance it won't happen

it feels like it's just guaranteed

by the fact that

they'd make more money

and they're they control the data

if you control the data and you would

make

billions of dollars

if you show the data one way versus

maybe another way what's going to happen

i think the data is going to

coincidentally look the way that makes

you billions of dollars

i know that's super cynical and the

world doesn't always work that way and

i'm not saying it does

i'm saying that if you made predictions

as if the world always worked that way

you would be astonished how often you're

right and you won't know why

it'll fool you like you'll even be

surprised like oh i'm surprised that

worked

joe rogan

seems to be pretty angry that he he sold

a bunch of tickets to madison square

garden for his upcoming show

in october but from the time that he

announced the show

new york city

required vaccinations for anybody going

to public events and so now joe rogan

has sold a bunch of tickets and people

already bought the ticket

and after they bought the ticket

they find out they can't go unless they

get a vaccination

so

joe rogan to his credit is saying they

can get their money back because he's

not going to he doesn't want to be part

of forcing people to get vaccinations

so

you can get your money back from a joe

rogan show and damn it joe rogan that

just makes me want to go to your show

why do you do that it makes me want to

fly across the country and just go to

the show

just because you said

that you won't put up with this forced

vaccination stuff

so he continues to make

a popular and smart decisions

so um that's a little commercial for joe

rogan who totally totally earned it

um here's some more fake news and how to

recognize it

so cnn is reporting that although this

ida

didn't reach the worst case scenario it

was pretty bad million people without

power a lot of flooding to deaths so far

so it's bad

could have been a lot worse

um but cnn is reporting that climate

change is

making storms more frequent

hurricanes are more frequent

because of climate change

all right suppose that's all i told you

cnn is reporting that climate change

makes the storms more frequent

how do you know it's fake news go

tell me how you know that's fake news

just from that one sentence

cnn reports and they show studies and

let's say they they refer to science

they're not just making it up right

they're referring to science

they say that the storms are

more frequent and the climate change is

being

um

used as the explanation

no sources no they do have sources they

have sources

so how do you know it's fake news

i'm going to be real disappointed if you

don't get this

come on i'm looking at all your comments

here here

um and maybe i missed it

somebody's gonna say it

come on

okay you're close complex systems single

variable yeah you're close all right

you're getting you're getting close

it's the dog not barking

it's what they didn't say

all right so here's what they did say

the storms are more frequent

more frequent what's left out

strength of the storm

yes the strength of the storm

is left out

why

do you assume that the strength of the

storm is the same

maybe not right there could be more of

them but less

how about

uh what period of time

are you measuring this storms being more

frequent do you know that is it

is it hundreds of years of storm

reporting

no

because we've only been tracking

hurricanes in a in a useful way since

the 70s

so when we say there are more storms

we're really talking about this tiny

tiny little sliver of history

between the 70s and now

you know in geological terms it's it's

just a

blink of an eye

so could you say

that climate change is the cause

when you're looking at such a

sliver of time feels like anything can

happen in a sliver just by chance right

so that's one thing

and then here's the other thing that's

being left out

come on tell me another gigantic thing

gigantic for understanding the topic

that's left out of the statement that

the storms are more frequent

what is being left out besides the

severity of the storm and the strength

something else is being left out thank

you death count exactly

our ability to mitigate against danger

is really really good now compared to

what it used to be the number of people

who are killed by hurricanes

in the modern times

it's still tragic

but you're talking about a handful

you talk about a handful

of people dying from a hurricane in 20

in you know modern times whereas a

hurricane could you know wipe down a

city

100 years ago

so if you're looking at what is the

problem

well the problem isn't exactly that

there are more frequent storms um

you know you have to you have to put in

all the other variables or else it's

obviously fake news so i'm going to call

it fake news because they leave out the

obvious things you put in it and then

that same story that they linked to as

their source for their claim

they show an animation of what

charleston the city of charleston would

look like under a number of scenarios of

rising sea level

and the rising sea level that they

estimate for charleston

and these are these are not predictions

these are just what if what ifs

so they show you a graphic of what if

the sea level around charleston went up

one foot

and then it shows that areas would be

flooded and it says what if it goes up

two feet

two feet of uh sea level rise

charleston's got much more problems but

what if it's four feet

four feet of uh rise

in charleston's largely underwater

now what's missing from that analysis

what are the odds that the sea level is

going to go up a foot

is anybody predicting the sea level will

go up a foot

i thought that predictions were more

like inches

like two inches is going to be a problem

and you know if it's four inches it's a

big problem but who who's talking about

four feet of serial level rise

i mean that just seems like complete

propaganda to me

i don't even know if anybody's talking

about

that i hope not

all right um

is long covered real or not

believe it or not that's a question

now i think i think everybody agrees

it's real we don't know if it's smallish

or biggish that's the bigger problem

so professor francois balu

tweeted this that there's a preprint

study

do you know what to think about

pre-print studies everybody if i say

there's a pre-print study

how much credibility do you give a

pre-print study

low right so the correct answer is low

so

this is a low

credibility doesn't mean it's wrong

low credibility just means you can't

necessarily

know if it's true

and this says that uh when they measure

they studied a bunch of people in the uk

and found out that almost nobody like a

tiny tiny percentage

might have something that you could call

long covet

now remember the estimates have been as

high as 25 percent

now if long covet is affecting 25

percent that's a big part of your

decision making process

but if it's way less than one percent

maybe not so much so it's a big deal

whether long covet is a is

25 percent of the public or

way less than one percent

but

there's also a sketchiness in the coding

and the data collection so apparently

everybody not everybody but doctors code

different things differently so they

don't necessarily code it as long covet

because they might not know it's long

covered they might just think it's a

second problem

a lot of people probably don't bother

going to the doctor they just feel

shitty for months they don't know why

they just figure it's something else

so we doubt that the data on long covet

is even close to accurate

but to be fair i've told you that the

numbers show it could be as high as 25

percent and now i've told you that it

could be as low as

less than one percent

so i'm just trying to give you the range

of what it might be

and if that changes your

calculation about decision making

maybe you should

maybe you should i would say that it's

starting to affect mine

because the longer we go without really

solid

uh evidence

of long cove being you know a big

problem

the longer we go without that

the less i think it might be

right it's sort of the same same

strategy that on day one you say well

maybe maybe not but the longer you wait

without confirmation

the less likely you'll get confirmation

all right

so i don't know about that

um

uh

you know the united states is being coy

about what we're going to do to rescue

the rest of the americans and our allies

that are trapped in afghanistan

but

do you fault them

for not telling you what we're going to

do about it or being vague about it or

general do you fault the administration

for not being specific

about how we plan to get more americans

out of there i don't

because i think that would be the wrong

thing to be specific

because probably we're going to have to

do some things that even the taliban has

to be flexible about maybe

we might have some

secret threats with the taliban we might

even have a secret deal

it's possible we have a secret deal with

the taliban where

we'll release their funding if all the

americans get down or something like

that

so

i would support the administration's

not being straight with us

on this topic

i do think that for

national security

sometimes

your military leaders have to lie to the

public

would everybody agree that that's an

acceptable lie

if the military genuinely believes that

they can protect the country better

with a temporary lie

do you favor it

i do

but i i could respect an argument that

says you don't

yeah i so

tony blank blinken and biden i'm not

going to get give them a hard time for

acting as though we don't have a plan or

speaking only generically about it like

it's some kind of weak plan because i

imagine a real plan would look like this

tell the americans to get to this

specific place where the taliban doesn't

have any

you know surveillance or air coverage

and we'll drop some helicopters in there

and we'll take you home

so it seems to me like they would have

to keep secret from the taliban and the

rest of the world

some of their plans because some of it

is going to be stuff the taliban doesn't

know we're doing right and other stuff

might be stuff the taliban is working

with us

and we can't exactly say that

right because we might be bribing them

there might be blackmail it could be any

damn thing

so

it's concerning that we do not have a

stated plan for getting everybody out

but i don't know that you'd want it the

other way

all right

um and that

is what i needed to say for today and i

have to go

it has been terrific to see you and