orities in Iran are saying, correct me if I'm wrong, but they're saying, whoa, whoa, it's not as bad as you think. Only 18% of the people who got it died in a few weeks. What? 18% of them died?

Now if either one of these two reports, which disagree with each other, is true, this is a way bigger problem than I was imagining. And I was imagining it was pretty big. So can we believe maybe there are those things, that 18% of the people in Iran died from it? I mean, if that's true, never leave the house again. But I don't know if it's true. I doubt it.

Recently, thanks to Chuck Schumer, and I will give him credit for this, yeah, the Transportation Security Administration, the TSA, stopped allowing employees to use the app TikTok. Now if you don't have kids in your life you might not know how big a deal the TikTok app is, but if you have kids you probably know it's just gigantic. And the kids are just glued to it. It's bigger than Snapchat. I mean it's a really big deal. But you might not know about it if you don't have kids in your life of a certain age. But a lot of adults are using it too.

And here's the problem. It's a Chinese company. And here's the second problem. They — ready for this? So not only can China, the government presumably, get all of your personal information because it's a Chinese company and you assume that the Chinese government can get whatever it wants from any Chinese company. So this TikTok app has got a real problem. But here's the other issue. When you sign up for a lot of apps they will ask you for permission to control your social media accounts.

Now the reason that you think that is so you can more easily post your social media TikToks. In other words, you can make a TikTok and then easily post it to Twitter with a few commands because you've set it up to take care of that for you. But let me combine two stories here and see what you think.

As you know, I had reported, and lots of other people reported, that on Twitter people can follow you and then for reasons that are still a mystery you can get unfollowed. So the person who thinks they followed you and succeeded, they can tell because time goes by and they see your tweets and they know they're following you and then suddenly they're just not. They just stopped.

Now I personally asked Jack Dorsey if there is an official explanation, and it's been a few weeks. I haven't heard back. Here's my current hypothesis, and this ties into the TikTok thing because I've communicated with Jack enough on this very topic. Unless I'm the worst judge of character in the world, I don't think he has any idea what's happening. And I'm really confident in that opinion.

Now I know, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, well anybody can lie and certainly there would be an incentive if you know if there were something there, if somebody wanted to cover up. But I'm a pretty good judge of people. I'm not perfect. Clearly I've made mistakes. But if I'm wrong about this I mean I would just be amazed.

So here's what I know to be true. I know that it's happening. Lots of people reporting it's happening to them. I can check it in real time. I've seen myself be unfollowed. You know it's just clearly it's widespread. It's clear, it's obvious. There's no question, no question that it's happening.

Now what are the possibilities behind it? Well one is that it's some kind of management of Twitter behind it. I don't think so, honestly. They're not acting as if that's the case. It just doesn't seem like that's — I mean I suppose it falls into the category of you know anything's possible, but I'm gonna rule it out. I don't think so.

I've seen the comments. Somebody said, Scott, you sold out. Now from your perspective that's actually a pretty good hypothesis. You know the only source you have to know whether I'd been co-opted or bought by powerful forces is what I tell you. I can't tell you that they don't have enough money to do that. Yeah, I'm sure that the social media companies have a lot of money, but they don't have enough money to buy me off like this. You know there's nothing they could offer me directly, indirectly, you know in any form that would make me go in public and say what I'm saying. No, there's no amount of money that could make that happen because I am already rich, right? So I just wouldn't do it. It's way beyond my line.

So I think you should find yourself some comfort in knowing I'm not lying to you about this topic. Yeah, I hope you can believe that. In my opinion Twitter is not lying to me about it, meaning that I think they actually don't know what's going on. And it's been a few weeks, and if they knew they probably would have gotten back to me.

So here's my hypothesis. It's a third-party actor. And it could be — I'll just throw this out there — more than one third party. It could be that anybody who has control of an app that asks people to give them permission, they might be taking advantage of that and making a few changes in your social media accounts that you're not aware of. Could be politically motivated. Maybe. Why wouldn't they do that?

Let me ask you this. If you were the nation of China and you knew that you could change the social media quite a bit by manipulating through TikTok the accounts of people who don't really know necessarily that they gave you that permission, and you could just sort of drop a follow here and drop a retweet there, that sort of thing, what would people think? Wel