A pig that can paint and sells for $20,000 a painting. And a woman who thinks she knows what's wrong with Kamala Harris. Plus, a story about a guy who thinks he's wrong about something, and then he eats his words.
00:12:07.180This was either a really good persuasion play or it was a really risky one that paid off.
00:12:16.500I don't know if Ted Cruz knew in advance he was going to get this deal done, but he did.
00:12:22.660So the punchline is that soon after this exchange, Schumer and Cruz reached a deal, just like two adults negotiating for something, right?
00:12:33.540So, and it was actually a reasonable deal where both people could get something that I think the public would look at and say, yeah, that looks pretty reasonable.
00:12:41.260From the perspective of the public, yeah, let's get some ambassadors and let's also have a vote on something that's up for a vote.
00:12:50.680You know, what's to disagree about that?
00:12:54.060So the public is served and sure enough, Ted Cruz's framing of Swalwell as a child interfering with the work of adults, he pretty much delivered that, didn't he?
00:13:07.140He delivered the work of adults within 24 hours of telling Swalwell to stay at the children's table.
00:13:56.340Anyway, my only lesson on here is that if you make that kind of a reframe, reframing somebody as a child, you have to deliver, and you better do it pretty quickly.
00:14:40.040So if one of them tweets at you, it's actually labeled a state-sponsored entity or something like that, Chinese.
00:14:47.900So you know you're talking to somebody who has a government-approved role to mess with us on Twitter.
00:14:54.960And if you're one of the bigger accounts, you know, you haven't got a lot of followers, you're pretty much going to run into one of these Chinese operatives.
00:15:03.520So the one that, I don't know if he's assigned to me or just volunteered or whatever, I've talked about him before, Chen.
00:16:28.960And here's how Chen replied by Twitter in his China-state-affiliated media.
00:16:36.440He said, the question that U.S. leaders should ask is why other nations, including China, don't have such a serious problem like in the U.S.
00:16:45.620So, something must be seriously wrong with the U.S. itself.
00:16:49.980Blaming others won't help solve your problems.
00:18:55.300I'm literally sitting here in my pajamas.
00:19:00.100Like, actually, right now I'm wearing pajama bottoms, as I always do when I'm doing these.
00:19:05.900And I'm tweeting with a representative of the Chinese government.
00:19:10.780And I'm pretty sure they pay attention to opinions of the United States, especially if they're, you know, existential questions of survival.
00:19:20.460And I'm pretty sure that they pay attention to, you know, anybody that they think needs their own private troll.
00:19:27.580If I've qualified for a troll, you know, somebody's watching.
00:19:33.400You know, that doesn't mean President Xi is, but somebody's watching.
00:19:36.860So I get to sit here in my pajamas and reframe China's dictatorship and do it in public so everybody gets to watch.
00:20:02.000Here's what Chen doesn't realize about the United States.
00:20:07.600He imagines that we don't criticize our own government or that we don't criticize our own people.
00:20:14.500Chen, I literally was tweeting just before this exchange a bunch of Michael Schellenberger, you know, stuff about exactly how to fix everything we messed up with, you know, these very problems that Chen is mentioning.
00:23:50.140We learned that listening to a highly credentialed expert talking with an independent podcaster seems like a great way to learn what is true about the world, but in fact, it is often the opposite.
00:24:08.640Okay, that's the one I was slipping in there.
00:24:10.320Because there's still some holdouts here who believe that if they hear one expert talking to one independent podcaster, that they're more informed.
00:24:35.960It could be exactly the opposite of that.
00:24:37.760And we've seen lots of examples of that.
00:24:39.180I don't have to give you examples of where something was wrong that appeared on a podcast and an expert said it.
00:24:47.840So just I would caution you to have some humility about how much you can discern by listening to one expert, even a really good expert, and one independent podcaster, even a really good one.
00:25:02.000And by the way, I think any independent podcaster would tell you the same thing.
00:25:07.220Do you think that Tim Poole or Joe Rogan would disagree with what I just said?
00:25:22.720I imagine that they would say, you know, see it in context with everything else.
00:25:27.660But, you know, the model's good for getting one side of the equation out there.
00:25:32.200But if you don't see it all together and somebody there to ask questions at the same time and fact check it in real time, it's probably going to be more misleading than not, depending on the topic.
00:25:44.980Scott, if you can't trust data, experts, or studies, how do we measure anything?
00:25:54.820Well, you have to keep measuring, because if you're not measuring, you're not managing.
00:26:00.860If you're not managing, we're just flailing around.
00:26:03.800So you have to measure, but you have to learn how to assess the quality of your measuring.
00:26:11.200And here's the first thing I'll tell you.
00:26:14.360Don't ask an expert who's not an expert on data analysis if the data analysis tells you something.
00:26:20.820Ask somebody who's an expert on data analysis.
00:26:23.980So if an expert on data analysis says, I don't see any problems with this, doesn't mean it's true.
00:26:31.300But if you get enough of those, your certainty should start to harden.
00:26:35.380But if you have a doctor who says, I trust this data, and it's only a doctor who says it's good data, who might not be an expert on data analysis, then I would say that's just sort of an open question.
00:26:51.360You better look for some more confirmation.
00:26:53.700So you want to look for things that predict.
00:26:57.020Things that predict are more likely to be closer to the truth.
00:27:00.280Look for making sure that you've heard both sides of everything.
00:27:05.640If you see one expert on a podcast, do this.
00:28:07.340And he responded to my thread by saying, we learned that some people can be duped into taking experimental vaccines and wear diapers on their face if you scare them with a bad cold.
00:28:27.020Just listen to it to see if it's persuasive.
00:28:30.020We learned that some people can be duped into taking experimental vaccines and wear diapers on their face if you scare them with a bad cold.
00:28:52.300As the creator of the Dilbert comic strip.
00:28:56.420Well, actually, you just saw a story about that recently.
00:28:59.280You saw that Elon Musk says that he uses the Dilbert rule, if I can call it that, to decide what makes sense and what doesn't within his companies.
00:29:11.880So he says if you're doing something that looks like it could appear in the Dilbert comic, maybe rethink that.
00:29:18.820So, yes, mocking is so powerful that it could become the operating system for one of the biggest companies in the world.
00:29:43.940Mocking is good in any context to scare people away from an opinion.
00:29:48.640But it's better if you have a little bit to back it up.
00:29:52.720So if he had, let's say, had made the same tweet and then followed it with some links to some, you know, studies or some articles that backed it up, that'd be pretty good.
00:30:04.660But as it is, it looks like a tell for cognitive dissonance.
00:30:43.720I said, if you think one side of the vax-no-vax debate is operating in a fear, and it's only one side that's got all the fear, they're afraid of that coronavirus, you don't really understand humans.
00:32:26.100But that's the part you have to understand, that the person who was making that argument wouldn't know that the real reason was a fear, a fear of a needle.
00:32:35.320Now, I'm not saying that applies to any specific person or, you know, how many people that would apply to.
00:32:41.580I'm just saying that's a normal way a brain works.
00:32:43.920If you think that's the exception and that that's like a special case, then the whole, all of life will be confusing to you.
00:33:21.180And then you rationalize it after the fact.
00:33:24.040So imagining that there is one rational side of this debate and one irrational side is a tip-off that you're operating at a low level of awareness.
00:33:38.900But if you're starting with the point of view that you're right and the other side, or that you're rational and the other side is irrational, you just got lucky.
00:33:49.000You could be right, but it would be because somebody was going to be right.
00:33:55.360There was two irrational sides and somebody was going to be right.
00:33:59.480So in the end, whoever it is, by Locke, mostly, is going to say, well, you idiots.
00:34:15.880That's what the people who are right by accident will say after this.
00:34:19.360Now, if there had been good data that we all were looking at or could have looked at and we didn't see it, like it was right there in front of us and we just couldn't see all that good data,
00:34:30.700well, then maybe it would be a case of people being stupid.
00:34:53.940How many months ago would we have said, yeah, these vaccinations are really going to clamp down on this pandemic, and then the Omicron comes along.
00:39:48.440That possibility is forming with such likelihood that it's like one of the possibilities of the cat and the Schrodinger's cat mental experiment.
00:39:59.720But the other one is exactly the opposite.
00:40:58.700But Omicron is going to change how we think about it, I think.
00:41:02.480I think it's going to change how we think about it, meaning that we're just going to be done.
00:41:09.800And even if it does pack the hospitals, I think the public's going to say, that's the trade-off to get back to life.
00:41:20.120Now, all of this depends on how much we learn in the next few weeks about whether we can keep the death count low at the same time the virus is raging through.
00:41:30.640Now, let me tell you my anecdotal experience.
00:41:36.340You know a guy who went to a wedding recently.
00:41:55.880Of the people I know, about the same number of vaccinated and unvaccinated, and then we're seeing some reports that I don't think are verified yet, that the vaccination has a modest effect at most on Omicron.
00:42:12.220This could be the best possible situation, or the worst.
00:42:24.000Because if it turned out that Omicron was mild for everybody, except the sickest person in the world, if it's mild for everybody, what would be the perfect situation?
00:42:36.140Would the perfect situation be that the existing vaccines stop it?
00:42:43.320Or would the perfect situation be that the unvaccinated would use the vaccinated as their vaccination?
00:42:52.340In other words, the way you would get the Omicron in the first place is from a vaccinated person.
00:43:06.140Now, I don't know what the odds of that are.
00:43:09.360Is there anybody smart enough to say Omicron's going to wipe out our health care versus anybody smart enough to say, oh, the perfect situation just arose and we're just blind to it?
00:43:21.020We want Omicron to rip through the vaccinated population as fast as possible.
00:43:27.380Under that, I'm not saying that that's what I want, because we don't have enough information to say that.
00:43:31.920But I'm saying that one of the futures that is not ruled out by anything I've seen, maybe you have, it's a future that's not ruled out and well within contention for a possible future.
00:43:44.020Let me tell you how I understand the world.
00:43:46.820You ready for the weirdest thing you've heard in a while?
00:43:51.560My experience is that if I get an envelope, I was going to use a visual aid, but it's too far away.
00:44:03.000If I get an envelope in the mail and I know that the contents of that envelope are going to be either good news or bad, because it's that kind of a letter, you know it's either going to be the yes or the no that you were waiting for.
00:44:17.020Either you got accepted or you didn't get accepted or you won money or you didn't win money, something like that.
00:44:22.240My worldview is, and I'm not kidding, this is legitimate, that the contents of the envelope are variable until I see it, just like Schrodinger's cat.
00:54:38.800So in other words, he's generally reacting to someone's point, generally criticizing the analysis.
00:54:47.780So, but, to your point, even better than hearing the point and the counterpoint would be hearing the point, the counterpoint, and then the response to the counterpoint, right?
00:54:58.760The closer you could get it to an actual, you know, jury trial model would be good if you could make it entertaining.
00:55:47.120Yeah, there's, did you see that some company made a chip you can embed in your arm so they can, somebody can put their phone up and see if you're vaccinated?
00:56:33.820And the other kind is when you have a list that's a bunch of stuff the other side is going to agree with, and you slip in one that maybe they wouldn't after they've said yes, yes, yes, yes.