Episode 1485 Scott Adams: Let Me Tell You About All the Fake News and Propaganda You're Watching Right Now
Episode Stats
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Summary
In this episode of the podcast, we talk about China's new ban on minors playing video games, and why it might be better than the U.S. for our own drug addiction problem. Plus, we take a deep dive into China's propaganda machine.
Transcript
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Good morning and welcome to the best part of your entire day.
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Yeah, and we're going to do something here very special.
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Something that I totally haven't done yet today.
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If you'd like to join me, all you need is a cup or mug or glass,
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a tank or chalice or a stein, a canteen jug or a flask or a vessel of any kind.
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Fill it with your favorite liquid and join me now for the unparalleled pleasure.
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It's called the simultaneous sip and it happens now.
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All right, let's talk about something interesting for a change.
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But apparently China, I saw one report on this from the Spectator Index Twitter account.
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And it says that China will limit minors to playing online games just three hours a week
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with services limited to an hour each Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
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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.
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Well, it suggests it might be boring to live in China if you're a teenager.
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But it makes me wonder about the whole Chinese system versus the American system.
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Because, you know, I think President Xi of China has made a point that their system should be superior in the future.
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Number one, they can block their teenagers from playing video games all day.
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You know, your common sense tells you it's, you know, destroying brains.
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But while kids are playing these video games, they're very stimulated.
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If they have their headphones on, they're talking to other people.
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I'm not entirely sure that video games are bad for kids,
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especially the ones where they've got the headphones on
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and they're talking to their friends online at the same time they're playing and stuff.
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Probably every parent has the same impulse, right?
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Your impulse and your common sense is you don't want kids staring at a screen
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and playing with their thumbs eight hours a day.
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But here's what else China can do that we can't do.
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They can get much better control of their drug addiction.
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Not only can the Chinese, with their harsh system and their full surveillance people,
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not only can they keep people from getting addicted,
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So they can send us their fentanyl and get their competitor addicted and dying like crazy,
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while at the same time keeping their own public from having the same problem.
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How big of a problem is addiction to modern society?
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If you were to rate addiction on a scale of 1 to 10 for how big a problem it is to society,
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Yeah, I don't know, 10 is probably nuclear war or something, but it's like a 9.
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And China will be in a much better shape for avoiding that 9-sized problem.
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I think in America we can't cheat as much against our rivals.
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Now, this is sort of speculation, so I'm assuming this is true.
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But it seems to me that an American company could just blatantly break the law
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and spy on a Chinese company or steal their IP without fairly large risk.
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But it looks like a Chinese company can do anything they want to a foreign company in their country
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or anywhere else as their government would support it,
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so long as it's good for the competition of China.
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So I feel as though our system doesn't allow us to cheat when we're competing as much.
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I'm sure there's some cheating going on everywhere.
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So we might have more video game addiction, but I don't know if that's a plus or a minus.
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These are some big deals if you're trying to figure out which country is going to dominate in the future.
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Now, let's assume that both the United States and a...
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Both of them are hugely susceptible to propaganda.
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I don't think there's more propaganda in China than there is in the United States.
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But at the moment, I can say this with confidence.
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In our case, it comes from the different teams.
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So we both have terrible propaganda, but there's a big difference.
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In China, the propaganda is controlled by the government,
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which means that they can control it in a way that's good for the nation.
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Whereas in the United States, it's just a fight between two competing groups,
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just destroying the country by tearing it apart.
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So it seems to me that although both China and the United States
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China could do it in a more controlled, engineered way
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We don't know who's going to win the propaganda war.
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We don't know who's going to be more persuasive on any given topic.
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It would be an advantage if we had a good news industry.
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then I would say the one who can engineer that inaccurate news the best,
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because there might be a number of lifestyle advantages of freedom.
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But in terms of the strength of the total country,
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I think our biggest advantage is creativity and risk-taking,
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We allow people to do crazy things and just destroy themselves.
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But every now and then, somebody is the Wright brothers,
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Not lighter-than-air, but they create a flying machine.
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So there's something about the permissiveness of our system
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but I think they have a lot of that advantage in China as well at the moment.
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Yeah, so I think invention and risk-taking are our only enduring advantages.
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Now, I've mentioned this before, but I'd like to keep reminding you.
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is by assuming that people act the same all the time.
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In fact, I would say you shouldn't trust anybody.
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Or you shouldn't trust anything that anybody says, just automatically.
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This is like a really, really important reframing.
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So every now and then, I'll make a little statement
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that could change, you know, change your life entirely.
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You can't trust anything that anybody says is true.
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And so part of that decision-making is figuring out who's telling you the truth and not.
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Instead of trusting what people say, which you should never trust,
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trust that people will be the same as they always have.
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Trust that the person who's giving you the information is the same person they were yesterday.
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But trust that people will be the same as the last time that you dealt with them.
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You know, when somebody shows you who they are, believe them the first time.
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You're going to see them act in the same way again.
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So if you don't believe it the first time, you're going to be surprised.
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If you're going to look at the Arizona audit situation,
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and you're trying to predict where it's going to go,
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can you say that anything that anybody's said about it so far, you should trust?
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So if there are people who said the audit has found nothing, should you trust them?
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How about the people who told you, oh, there's definitely something there.
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is people saying they definitely have some stuff,
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and people who say they definitely don't have any stuff,
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People will act the way people have acted before.
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You can trust that human beings will have an X number of blabbers,
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people who will talk about things they're not supposed to talk about,
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You don't have to wonder if this large group of auditors
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Where are the blabbers telling us that they've already found the stuff,
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and here's the area in which this fraud has been found.
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So my prediction is that because people are always the same,
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there would be plenty of people who knew about it,
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So I'm going to take this as a prediction technique.
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It doesn't mean it predicted right this time, right?
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But the odds are that something with this many people involved,
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what are the odds that there's something there?
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Every day that goes by and you don't hear about it with some specifics,
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the odds of anything being there go way, way, way down.
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And the idea is it's a documentary showing that Fox News,
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was culpable in spreading what they call the big lie about the election.
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but it's getting a lot of attention on social media.
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But there was one part that I thought was quite interesting.
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That you remember as Sidney Powell was talking about Smartmatic,
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one of the vendors that do voting machine technology.
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I can't remember if they're software or hardware.
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But did you know that when you were listening to all those allegations
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It was only one contract for doing anything in the United States.
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but it probably didn't matter to the overall outcome.
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Smartmatic was only operating in one county in the whole country.
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And the allegation is that Fox News left that out.
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Because your idea of how big the potential problem was
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is very different if the vendor is only operating in one county.
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the way it was written was as if they were trying to mislead me.
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The company accused of orchestrating a nationwide election fraud
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So this is talking about Smartmatic, the company.
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The company accused of orchestrating a nationwide election fraud
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is that Smartmatic had a trivial amount of involvement in the election.
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I feel like that's what they want me to get out of this sentence.
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But if you break it apart, it seems overly specific.
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They had one new voting system contract in one county.
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Is this telling us that they had lots of other existing contracts?
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But I don't know who's doing the propaganda here.
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there is no evidence of either Smartmatic or Dominion
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that looks like either of them did anything bad.
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because it's not over for some people who are trapped there.
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but at least the last soldiers have left, allegedly.
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that they might be executing people like crazy.