Episode 1916 Scott Adams： Seasonal Flu Deaths Confirmed Fake, Dems Think Narrative Is The Problem
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 24 minutes
Words per Minute
142.79144
Summary
Scott Adams has solved one of the greatest mysteries in human history: how to stop people from not breathing when they're looking at a screen. And he explains how to fix it in the most simple and effective way you can think of.
Transcript
00:00:01.000
Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the Highlight of Civilization.
00:00:05.960
Coffee with Scott Adams, and I promise you, this will be the most awesome livestream you've ever seen.
00:00:12.980
Today I have something, well, you've heard of it.
00:00:16.180
It's called Content, the Good Kind, because the news has served up a bounty that we must thank the creator of the universe for.
00:00:33.680
But before we get to that, would you like to take it up to another dimension, a dimension that you didn't even know existed?
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And all you need for that is a cup or mug or a glass, a tanker, a chalice, a stein, a canteen, a jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind.
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And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
00:01:14.080
If you're alone, give it a good slurp and don't apologize.
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If you're with people, well, think of your larger relationships.
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I've solved one of the greatest mysteries in human civilization.
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Have you noticed that everybody is anxious and has anxiety?
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When I was a kid, I don't think anybody had that.
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I mean, I never, literally never even heard of it.
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Is it something about being attached to your phones exactly?
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Well, today I'm going to tell you the answer and then tell you how to fix it.
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I'm going to fix the biggest problem in civilization, which is everybody feels bad.
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But mostly you're getting anxious about everything.
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Did you know there's a thing called screen apnea?
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Tell me in the comments, have you ever heard of that?
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Now that means that when you look at a screen, doesn't matter what kind, could be your phone,
00:03:14.880
I noticed that when I look at screens, I don't breathe.
00:03:18.600
Now, I thought it was more about concentrating.
00:03:21.300
I thought that if I were concentrating on something, I didn't breathe.
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But I didn't realize it was every time I looked at a screen.
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And so yesterday I said to myself, could this be a thing?
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And I'm going to tie it together with something else in a minute.
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I said to myself, is this, I wonder if I Googled this.
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If I Googled, do you breathe the same when you watch a screen?
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And so I Googled some kind of phrase like, do you breathe differently when looking at a screen?
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Well, it turns out that there's a thing called screen apnea.
00:04:03.840
And you don't breathe right when you look at your screens.
00:04:08.600
Now, let's tie this to my ongoing saga of my blood pressure meds,
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which I suspect may be another one of these, you know, COVID vaccination situations
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where perhaps the benefits of blood pressure meds have been oversold.
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I know that the one of several types I took was bad for me because it had terrible side effects.
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So I only know from personal experience, you know, one drug, one drug and one experience.
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So I can't say for sure that nobody should take blood pressure meds.
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I imagine there are cases where it will save your life.
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But I do wonder if maybe it's oversubscribed or prescribed.
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So here are the things that are good for lowering your blood pressure.
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Exercise, moderate exercise, especially going for a walk.
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So that definitely lowers your blood pressure temporarily.
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And also in the long run if you do it regularly.
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Breathing exercises like the Huberman Method or the Wim Hof.
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And it turns out that walking is one of the most highly correlated things with longevity.
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People who can walk every day tend to live a long time.
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100% of the things that fix your breathing fix your blood pressure.
00:06:19.980
Now, you've heard something about the blue light that comes from the devices.
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But, apparently, the devices make you breathe wrong.
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I don't know that one for sure, but I'm guessing.
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Can somebody give me a fact check as I describe this?
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I need a real-time fact check because I'm doing this from memory.
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I think the Huberman method, which apparently he was part of studying the benefits of breathing differently, I guess, for some Stanford study.
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And I think he described it as two inhales through the nose followed by one exhale to get rid of all your air.
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Two inhales through the nose and one exhale through the mouth.
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Now, of course, the first time I heard it, I tried it.
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I mean, as soon as the second exhale is done, your body feels better.
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Now, if it were the kind of thing where, you know, if you did it every day for 10 minutes, your blood pressure might go down a point or something like that, I wouldn't recommend it, you know, necessarily.
00:08:11.440
I think that devices have affected our breathing, and your breathing is the reason you have all the other problems.
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Have I solved the biggest problem in civilization, that we're all anxious and we need meds?
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Today is going to be a tour de force of solving all your problems.
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But before I do, before you turn me off, I'm going to hypnotize you that whenever you pick up your phone, no matter what you're doing with it, this is your trigger now.
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I'm going to key your phone to breathing exercises.
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Every time you use your phone, no matter what it is, two inhales, one exhale, and then use your phone.
00:09:32.600
Now, if you get it right with your phone, I'm confident that that's going to be a big part of your problem.
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But maybe you can extend that to your other devices.
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Because when you sit down with your other devices, you might be there for an hour.
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So, over the course of the hour, you're going to forget to breathe right.
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But during that hour, are you going to check your phone?
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I told you what I was going to do, and then I did it.
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All I did was pair two thoughts, and now they're paired.
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The first time you think of it on your own, you're locked in.
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If you never think of it again, you won't lock in, of course, obviously.
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If you think of it once, you're probably going to lock in.
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Now, do any of you have any depression problems, or people in your life who have depression problems?
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Who, if they were better, especially you, your life would be better too?
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Well, turns out that there's a new study, a pretty big study, so more dependable than most, you know, a very serious study,
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that they synthesized magic mushrooms, took some of the good stuff out, put it in a shot,
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and gave it to people who were severely depressed, and what happened?
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Quote, an immediate, fast, rapid-acted, sustained.
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They say it starts to wear off after three months.
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Now, do you see the trick that's happening here?
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For how long have you known that if you take the actual mushroom itself,
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people have been telling you forever it'll take care of a lot of your mental problems, like depression?
00:12:00.220
You've been hearing that for a long time, haven't you, right?
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Now, somebody found out a way to synthesize it.
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You know, you would synthesize it if you're trying to take something that is practically free and grows out of the ground,
00:12:18.440
and you try to turn it into a multi-billion dollar pharma industry.
00:12:29.020
So I could put it in a pill or a vaccination that you can't give yourself so easily.
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So you're seeing a natural thing being morphed into a big pharma product, clearly.
00:12:44.220
So that they can tell you that if you eat those damn mushrooms you picked out of the ground, you're going to die.
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But they've got the quality control, and they've got the extra ingredients, the X factor,
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the things that you can never, never do on your own.
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And you'd better pay hundreds of dollars per year.
00:13:00.380
Every three months, you need a shot, and then you'll be all good.
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Until big pharma could make money on it, you are not going to see a study that's a high-quality study.
00:13:23.000
Well, so that's the good news and the bad news.
00:13:24.820
The bad news is that big pharma will try to control it.
00:13:29.560
So whether you get your own mushrooms or you use theirs, I think we've got a cure for anxiety, a cure for depression.
00:13:38.800
And I think they're both highly likely to work for most people.
00:13:55.540
Now, I don't know if this is the golden age, but if I were entering the golden age, the things I would look for are
00:14:02.440
everybody agrees that nuclear energy is good, finally.
00:14:10.660
Everybody agrees that we can, you know, if we breathe better and work on our health and use magic mushrooms if you need them,
00:14:17.960
that you can take care of a lot of your problems.
00:14:26.300
There's still the issue of who's getting vaccinated.
00:14:35.740
Would it surprise you to know that the New York Post is reporting there was a study about who faces more scrutiny in the mainstream media, Republicans or Democrats?
00:14:46.580
Who do you think gets the most negative press, Republicans or Democrats?
00:15:25.940
Something like GOP got 87% of the time negative coverage compared to 67% of the time for GOP.
00:15:36.160
Now, some would argue that Fox News has a bigger audience than all of those, so probably this study is complete garbage.
00:15:45.640
Actually, if I'd read it more clearly before I came live, I would have said, oh, they're looking at ABC, CBS, and NBC.
00:15:54.820
I think if you throw Fox News in there and then you weight it by the size of Fox News, which is bigger than all three of them put together, I think you get a different result.
00:16:06.160
Jake Tapper looks like after the midterms he'll be moved back from his evening program to his afternoon program where he had originally been.
00:16:18.160
Now, the reporting is that the new head of CNN, who wants CNN to be more of a mainstream news and not a wildly leftist news,
00:16:28.020
he wanted Jake Tapper to be the face of CNN, so he put him in the prime time slot that Chris Cuomo had left.
00:16:41.740
He got shellacked by the other networks, and they're going to move him back.
00:16:48.400
Now, here's what is interesting about this story.
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Was that the right choice to put Jake Tapper as the face of CNN if you wanted to present yourself as more mainstream?
00:17:19.460
You know that Tapper is the only person on CNN that I know of, that I know of,
00:17:25.800
who ever added any nuance to the Charlottesville story.
00:17:30.260
He's the only one who said, and the president clarified that he wasn't talking about the people marching.
00:17:43.780
Now I'm going to tell you some stuff from behind the screen.
00:17:51.240
I feel like this is fair, even though it's based on a private conversation.
00:18:01.580
I had him do some guest cartoons for Dilbert a couple of different years for charity.
00:18:09.440
And I've talked to him about, I've talked to him directly about the fine people hoax.
00:18:14.420
Now I talked to him before that one time he added some nuance.
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Ye, that if Ye has had a life experience where the people who keep thwarting him are coincidentally Jewish, and it just keeps happening over and over again, if he says something racist, I'm going to say, okay, I don't like that.
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You know, I disavow it, but I understand it, right?
00:19:05.200
If some Elbonian punched you in the face every time you went outdoors, and then you said, I hate Elbonians.
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I would say, I think I'd feel exactly the same way if I got punched by an Elbonian every time I walked out the door.
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And I told you this story about somebody I went to college with, who had a long history of being beaten up and bullied and robbed almost every day by black kids roughly his age.
00:19:37.460
Because he was in a neighborhood where that was a routine.
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So he was a racist I could easily hang around with and be friends with.
00:20:02.020
He was abused by one group of people every fucking day.
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If that happens to me, I'm going to be, I'll be as racist as I need to be.
00:20:10.180
I mean, I'm going to do whatever feels right for me, and I don't care about that other group if they beat me up every day.
00:20:16.340
And I'm not going to be all nuanced about it, right?
00:20:24.480
Like, I might intellectually realize that this was a special case and cannot be generalized to the rest of the group, but fuck that.
00:20:33.240
If anybody in that group beat me up every day for a year, fuck that.
00:20:53.300
All right, so here's what I say about Jake Tapper or anybody who identifies as Jewish and looked at the Charlottesville event.
00:21:03.740
If you identify as Jewish and you say to yourself, I don't care if the president explained away his comments.
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I just don't care because the whole thing is just so bad that I don't want to hear my president softening anything about anybody who attended.
00:21:27.320
So, in my mind, you know, somebody like Jake Tapper, he's got a right to have a, let's say, an interpretation of Charlottesville that differs from mine, and I think I'm okay with that.
00:21:45.180
Now, it's different if he reports it based on his bias, but I don't think I've seen that.
00:21:50.920
I saw the one guy, well, not one guy, I saw one guy who is Jewish on CNN, was the only one who ever offered any nuance to that story, and noted that the president had a clarification that he gave right away.
00:22:12.860
Like, from the perspective of management of CNN, I think he actually was a good choice.
00:22:16.740
I would say he was closer to being the middle than the other characters who had big names there.
00:22:28.920
That everybody at CNN is a version of Jake Tapper?
00:22:37.000
Fox News, in my opinion, the management and the producers, from the executives to the producers, a whole other level of talent, in my opinion.
00:22:51.640
I just think the Fox News executive people are just more talented.
00:22:56.260
And what they do is they pick on-air talent that have personalities.
00:23:13.480
You know, Don Lemon was sort of a gay, black Jake Tapper.
00:23:21.740
Everybody was just sort of a version of Jake Tapper.
00:23:27.200
Everybody is not too far from the same personality.
00:23:48.880
Who's the, you know, you could go down the line.
00:23:55.400
So the Fox News has personalities who also give you the news.
00:24:01.840
I mean, the examples are, I could just keep going.
00:24:10.720
And I think that that's what Fox News does brilliantly.
00:24:14.560
The other thing that Fox News does brilliantly is who they combine at the same time.
00:24:31.560
And especially when he's on The Five, he does something I've never seen anybody do.
00:24:37.180
And I didn't even know you could pull it off, which is he plays almost a caricature of himself.
00:24:45.480
In other words, he plays a caricature of somebody who doesn't care about nuance or the other side.
00:24:51.200
He's just going to sort of take a political view.
00:24:53.520
And the fact that he calls himself out as he's doing it is so wildly entertaining that it's just, it's insanely good TV.
00:25:03.520
I mean, it's really, it's one of my favorite things on television, is watching Jesse just being honest about the role he's playing at that moment.
00:25:12.320
Then other times, you know, he plays other roles on different shows and stuff.
00:25:15.620
But, oh my God, that is such a perfect combination of comedy with actual news.
00:25:24.900
Because the news, he says, tends to be real news.
00:25:39.920
I don't know if Jesse Watters would want to hear that or not.
00:25:43.880
But if you notice the Gutfeld effect when he's on The Five, how he changes the interaction of the group.
00:25:51.100
In other words, he brings greater danger to the group and also greater danger because he'll say more, you know, provocative, funny things.
00:26:01.640
And it allows them all to be, to have a larger playing field.
00:26:05.480
Because as long as he's the craziest one there, everybody else can loosen up.
00:26:10.720
Because they're not going to get in trouble as long as he's there.
00:26:13.200
Like, Gutfeld protects all the rest of them by taking the larger chance.
00:26:17.440
And, you know, making sure that everybody's having a laugh.
00:26:25.360
Is that they know that those personalities work that way.
00:26:42.360
It sounds like the fact that they're going to move him back to the afternoon means that it didn't work out, just ratings-wise.
00:26:48.920
But I do think this is another sign that CNN's serious about finding the middle.
00:26:53.840
But let's talk about two fake newses on CNN today.
00:27:02.600
I guess I didn't go too far complimenting them.
00:27:11.840
It talks about a study showing that drinking caffeinated coffee, if you're a mother, could make your children shorter.
00:27:31.840
But they're reporting there's a study correlating caffeine drinking while you're pregnant with having shorter kids.
00:27:44.800
And you think to yourself, my God, this is terrible.
00:27:51.360
And then you get to sort of the last part of the story.
00:27:54.720
And at the last part of the story, an expert says, I'm paraphrasing,
00:28:00.860
yeah, but the correlation is probably with poverty.
00:28:10.100
It turns out it's rich people who go to Starbucks more than the poor.
00:28:15.580
Did you know that rich people drink more coffee than poor people?
00:28:19.820
And did you know there's a distinct height difference between rich people and poor people?
00:28:29.400
And the story itself says it's fake, but you have to read through the fake part to get to the part where it says,
00:28:39.920
So I don't know, maybe it's an improvement that they report the news and then they call it out as fake themselves.
00:28:47.640
How many of you remember me toward the beginning of the pandemic saying something very provocative,
00:28:55.840
which was that the seasonal flu numbers that we have every year are complete bullshit.
00:29:03.280
And that we don't have 30,000 to 50,000 people dying of the flu because there's no way I wouldn't know that.
00:29:09.680
There's no way I could live in this world and not be aware of that.
00:29:16.920
How many people thought I was right when I said that?
00:29:30.540
So guess how many people have died of seasonal flu so far this year?
00:29:38.920
Next, the estimates had always been that the number of people dying from the regular seasonal flu was 30,000 to 50,000 a year, right?
00:29:49.220
30,000 to 50,000 a year were dying of the regular flu.
00:29:57.920
But there is, reportedly, more flu than ever before for the obvious reasons, right?
00:30:04.280
People stayed away from the regular flu so long.
00:30:09.000
So the total number of people who have died so far of the regular flu is 360.
00:30:22.840
Do you think that by the end of the year, we'll get up to 50,000?
00:30:27.120
Do you think it's going to be like a really bad November and December?
00:30:33.940
It turns out, if you follow my thread, and I tweeted a thread from an account called Unhoodwinked, which I recommend.
00:30:46.460
So look at his thread that I tweeted showing how the regular flu is counted.
00:30:52.840
And it turns out that it's counted in two different ways.
00:30:55.700
One of the ways is, I think the CDC does it, with an excess, it's an excess death estimate.
00:31:04.700
They just look at how many people die normally, and then they look at the winter, and they say,
00:31:15.460
And then there's another way where, apparently, you come closer to counting them.
00:31:19.720
And if you count them, you get 1,500 a year, on average.
00:31:25.700
If you do the estimate way, now, I think both of these are official ways.
00:31:31.260
I believe they exist simultaneously as both official ways to count.
00:31:46.100
Everything you knew about the seasonal flu was big form of bullshit.
00:31:52.080
With their vaccinations, they had no benefit whatsoever.
00:31:59.240
Obviously, if you're one of the 1,500 people that dies, that's a problem.
00:32:02.480
Now, obviously, this is going to be skewing toward older people, or the one at risk from the flu,
00:32:09.520
or people with various medical problems that would have comorbidities, I guess.
00:32:21.080
That the seasonal flu shot is probably a bad idea.
00:32:27.740
Now, I'm not a doctor, so I won't say that with certainty.
00:32:31.300
I'll just say that if you look at the full context of the last few years, no reasonable person could think it's a good idea.
00:32:40.800
Now, I want to give you one possible reason everything I just said is wrong.
00:32:51.840
Because the number of people who are dying seems to be from pneumonia.
00:32:59.000
It looks like maybe the flu and pneumonia numbers get combined.
00:33:03.520
And the question I don't know the answer to is, does the flu turn into pneumonia?
00:33:12.880
It gets coded pneumonia, but really, it was the flu that killed them.
00:33:22.840
So it could be that it is the flu, but it's the flu triggering pneumonia, and then the pneumonia kills you, and then it gets coded into pneumonia.
00:33:33.520
But what I don't have is the number of how often the flu isn't the one cause of pneumonia, is it?
00:33:48.700
Don't you get pneumonia from a variety of things?
00:33:55.780
So it could be, it could be, that the flu numbers are complete bullshit, and you don't need the shot.
00:34:07.140
That would actually fit the evidence that we can confirm.
00:34:12.920
But also, but also, here's where I keep myself out of trouble.
00:34:16.540
Well, it's entirely possible that we're just confusing pneumonia and flu numbers, and that if you want to not die of pneumonia, maybe a flu shot helps, if you're a certain age.
00:34:30.080
But I know that what I can determine so far tells me I would not get the flu shot at my current age and current health.
00:34:49.040
Here's the funniest story, I think, in the news.
00:34:53.820
Gavin Newsom believes that the problem, in terms of the polling, that Republicans look like they're ready to win the midterms.
00:35:03.920
Gavin Newsom says the problem is that the Republicans are, quote, winning the messaging war.
00:35:15.900
It's the way the Republicans talk about the message.
00:35:36.400
If somebody said that to you in person, you wouldn't laugh.
00:35:40.000
If Gavin Newsom stood in front of you and said, you know, the polling is all going against us, I think it's because the GOP is better at messaging.
00:35:54.660
Not because I was being an asshole, but because I would think it was funny.
00:36:22.680
Physically, it looks like you'll have a full recovery.
00:36:24.680
But the doctors say that they can't save the narrative.
00:36:38.180
You know, this is one of those situations I wish the live audience could clap out loud.
00:36:48.800
So, even Newsom says that it goes to my fundamental grievance with my damn party.
00:36:57.420
He's even calling his own party the damn party.
00:37:02.660
Am I wrong that if you're a political party, and then you create a bunch of policies that
00:37:17.880
people don't like and obviously don't work, and then you also have trouble describing why
00:37:24.760
the policies that clearly don't work are really awesome, are you not two levels away from reality?
00:37:38.120
The policy is out of whack with reality because it doesn't understand reality.
00:37:44.120
And then beyond that, the way you talk about the policy that doesn't understand reality also
00:37:55.680
So, you literally have two degrees of reality separation between the average candidate and
00:38:09.420
Now, why do the Republicans have such a good messaging discipline?
00:38:18.920
Why do Republicans have good messaging discipline?
00:38:26.120
They're saying parents, they're saying education, they're saying crime, they're saying border, right?
00:38:34.200
Well, on one hand, it's easy if those are the things you are already saying, right?
00:38:40.900
So, the Republicans are just saying the same things they always say.
00:38:44.280
They've just got a little extra ammo because the Democrats are, you know, creating mischief
00:38:54.920
All right, here's another thing which I don't know if you've realized.
00:38:57.360
Have you noticed that Fox News has been running non-stop anecdotal stories of physical criminal
00:39:08.560
It's almost all black people attacking non-black people.
00:39:17.320
It bothers me not because it's not a snapshot of reality, because unfortunately it is.
00:39:22.360
It bothers me because what people see is what they believe, and if you feed them a diet
00:39:28.280
of one thing, that's pretty manipulative, right?
00:39:33.100
Now, in my opinion, Fox News is a big part of why the Republican messaging is disciplined.
00:39:40.600
Because as long as Fox News is just hitting crime, crime, crime, crime, people coming across
00:39:46.640
the border, here's another picture, here's another assault, here's another picture of border
00:39:50.580
people, here's another assault, it's easy to be on message if the media that's sort of
00:40:03.080
Now, I suppose you could argue that the Democrats could have taken the same cue from the Democrat
00:40:23.100
The right can look at Fox News, and they can say, well, they're running crime stories every
00:40:28.080
single night, so if I talk about crime, I'm going to be backed by the news.
00:40:37.340
But I don't know, I feel like the Democrats just complain about Republicans.
00:40:48.540
Or worse, the message that the Democrats decided on was a conceptual one.
00:41:11.560
I'm going to take your phone away from you, your physical phone.
00:41:18.180
Or you might lose the, you might get a slightly elevated risk of damage to the democracy and
00:41:36.420
I'm either going to take your phone away, or a second choice is a slightly elevated risk
00:41:43.220
of the republic being distorted in a way you don't like sometime in the future.
00:41:47.980
We're not sure which topics exactly, but it seems bad.
00:42:02.540
So the Democrats are taking your money, but in return they're promising to protect you
00:42:08.460
from a vague, some kind of attack on democracy, because a guy with a bison hat once was in
00:42:17.700
the, two years ago, I don't understand how any of this makes sense to me.
00:42:31.300
You can't, you can't be, I'm taking your money, like out of your pocket with inflation.
00:42:37.640
You can't be, I'm taking your money with a fucking concept about something that's, you
00:42:43.160
know, three abstractions away from meaning anything.
00:42:48.700
I feel as if the entire Democratic Party has no leadership whatsoever.
00:42:58.180
And Trump, of course, is playing it brilliantly, I think.
00:43:02.200
You know, I worry that Trump has a health problem, because he's too quiet lately.
00:43:07.640
I just worry about, maybe something's going on there.
00:43:11.940
But the smartest thing you can do is just stay quiet for a while.
00:43:15.140
Because the Democrats are just shooting themselves.
00:43:18.720
When your enemy is making mistakes, you know, don't stop them.
00:43:26.080
Just say, well, if you'd like me back, I'm here.
00:43:36.000
Apparently, suburban women have switched fairly quickly and radically toward the GOP.
00:43:43.020
Just an enormous switch from being Democrat voters to GOP likely voters.
00:44:15.500
Number one, inflation, the education problem, and the crime problem have been the same all year.
00:44:24.620
The things that you said are the reasons that they suddenly switched.
00:44:31.000
You're saying they suddenly switched because of things that have been true for a whole year.
00:44:50.460
And this will be one that you haven't heard before.
00:44:54.500
Number one, if you're a mother, when do you start paying attention to politics?
00:45:08.460
So the obvious answer is they weren't paying attention to politics until now.
00:45:16.980
The group that would least pay attention to politics until it mattered.
00:45:24.560
Like a good functioning mother who's like really killing it in the mother department.
00:45:30.000
What is the one thing you could say about that mother?
00:45:44.400
They get those priorities right just about every time.
00:45:48.080
And where was their priority to follow politics?
00:45:53.080
But when it comes to, when it's election day, then how important is it to the mom?
00:46:01.720
The elections are not important to parents until election day.
00:46:07.080
You know, you and I, maybe we're not, you know, parenting every day.
00:46:10.980
So we just, we got time to talk about this stuff.
00:46:23.620
And it starts with a story told in, I think I heard this in business school.
00:46:37.100
So they would give you some noodles and some spices.
00:46:39.980
And then you'd have to bring your own hamburger and, like, you know, sauté that up.
00:46:46.860
And then you'd combine it with their thing and then you'd create a meal.
00:46:50.180
Here's the story that you don't know about Hamburger Helper.
00:47:11.880
They couldn't sell the Hamburger Helper when it was a better product, a more convenient product.
00:47:28.460
It was about mom did not feel like she was doing her job unless it was a little harder.
00:47:39.280
The mother who took, let's say, identity from being the housekeeper or provider.
00:47:59.880
But in those days, you had more traditional, you know, mom making dinner.
00:48:04.320
And mom didn't want to make dinner and make it look like she didn't do any work.
00:48:11.160
So she looked like, you know, her brand had been diminished.
00:48:14.580
So as soon as they made it harder to do Hamburger Helper, it became a gigantic hit.
00:48:24.920
But if you're combining things with other things, you're cooking.
00:48:43.480
And then she realizes she's standing in the store.
00:48:46.840
And she realizes that budget is not what it used to be because of inflation.
00:48:51.180
And now mom needs to make some choices about food.
00:49:08.520
How does mom feel when she knows that she's going to bring home worse food
00:49:29.060
But mom is going to take the hit at the dinner table.
00:49:39.840
Why do we have, what do you call it, flat steak instead of good steak?
00:49:46.680
The mother's reputation cannot handle the effects of inflation.
00:49:54.440
It's about making mom look like an asshole to the rest of the family.
00:50:00.600
Inflation looks, makes mom look like an asshole to the rest of the family.
00:50:08.300
They're just mad that she didn't buy what she used to buy, and it's not her fault.
00:50:13.080
Now, you tell me your government's going to make you look like an asshole, and it's not your fault.
00:50:20.580
I'm not going to vote for the one that makes me look like an asshole in front of my own family, even if it's not my fault, and it isn't.
00:50:38.220
Now, it's not one thing, and it's not two things.
00:50:40.700
It's probably five different major things that cause the shift, but I think this is part of it.
00:50:47.560
And I think the Hamburger Helper story really gives you some insight on how that could possibly be true.
00:50:54.520
Did I tell you this would be the best live stream you've ever seen?
00:51:05.340
Not only are you healthier than you've ever been before because of this breathing thing, smarter too.
00:51:12.240
In fact, when you're talking to people, you're going to bring up this Hamburger Helper thing, and people are going to be like, wow, you're pretty smart.
00:51:31.080
If you want to bring this up in conversation, you can even tweet it.
00:51:34.900
I'm giving you full intellectual property release.
00:51:38.540
If anybody says, hey, somebody stole your idea, I'll say, oh, I don't think so.
00:51:50.840
I think the smart people all got there the same way.
00:51:59.380
You'll be the smartest ones at your holiday parties.
00:52:02.080
Today we hear that ESG fund flows are way down from 2021, meaning fewer people are investing in ESG-rated companies.
00:52:23.900
Now, ESG is environment, social, good, and governance.
00:52:29.900
So ESG is trying to measure whether companies are good for the environment, they have good diversity, and they're basically a social good.
00:52:41.360
And critics such as myself say that's a terrible idea because you don't want to insert some entity between a company and their customers and their investors.
00:52:56.920
And so the fund, I just eyeballed it, but it looked like the investments are down 80% or so from 2021.
00:53:08.780
Now, a big part of that is that just people are putting less money into the market because the market is down.
00:53:23.440
Specifically, we know that when people get a choice to invest in ESG companies in their own 401k, what do they say?
00:53:32.180
Fewer than 10% of investors who are making their own decisions chose to allocate money to ESG funds when it was offered in their 401k.
00:53:57.260
Because I always joke that 25% of people get every question wrong.
00:54:05.720
If you could get all the way down to 10% got it wrong, that is not normal.
00:54:12.880
That means that the thing is so bad that the 25% rule doesn't even apply.
00:54:18.520
And you've got to really push to get past 25%, right?
00:54:22.000
But apparently the average investor just says, fuck that.
00:54:25.380
I'm not going to put my money in this bad idea.
00:54:30.120
All right, here are things that, in my opinion, died from scrutiny this year.
00:54:35.320
And this is an extension of my basket case theory that I applied to people.
00:54:40.720
That everybody looks like they're in better shape than you are until you get to know them.
00:54:46.080
And then once you know all their problems, you're like, well, that's a basket case.
00:54:52.540
You just don't know them well enough if you think they're not a basket case.
00:54:55.900
But it turns out that applies to most large organizations as well, right?
00:55:02.340
Does Apple look like a pretty solid organization?
00:55:07.640
If you were looking from the outside at Apple, wow, that looks like a company that's got their shit together.
00:55:13.140
What do you think it would look like if you worked there?
00:55:16.540
No, it would look like a shit show if you were on the inside.
00:55:20.920
If you're on the inside, you'd be saying, is it my imagination or have we not invented one awesome thing since Steve Jobs died?
00:55:29.220
On the inside, it's just going to look like luck and impetus.
00:55:32.800
And it's a good thing that nobody's wised up to the fact that they haven't made anything new lately.
00:55:43.220
So anyway, I take this concept that the more you know about something, the worse it looks.
00:55:51.560
The more you know about something, the worse it looks.
00:55:56.560
So here are some things that died from scrutiny.
00:55:59.060
Things you thought might have been good, or at least you were open to it, but now that you actually got to see the inner workings, you're like, blah.
00:56:18.060
Do you remember when people said, yeah, he talks funny, and maybe it's just because he had a speech problem, but he's basically all there.
00:56:34.100
So the scrutiny was we got to actually see him as president, and then we found out, oh, yeah, he's way worse than it looked on the surface.
00:56:47.540
When progressive Democrat policies are originally floated, people can say, well, I like it, and people can say, I don't like it, and they can have their reasons, but you don't really know.
00:57:00.140
The way you know for sure is to implement the policies, which unfortunately happened, such as defund the police.
00:57:07.220
And now you can actually see the inner workings of progressive Democrat policies, and how do they look?
00:57:26.300
Did Black Lives Matter survive greater scrutiny?
00:57:31.740
Greater scrutiny turned out to show that the organizers were scammers.
00:57:39.880
Did ESG start out with something like an awesome idea, but the more you looked at it, blah, yes.
00:57:55.620
As soon as you looked into nuclear enough, you found out that the anti-nuclear stuff was just all bullshit.
00:58:08.620
The more you looked into it, did it look better or worse?
00:58:17.540
Medical experts mostly, but experts in general.
00:58:20.780
Did we not learn a lot more about experts in general in the last two years?
00:58:26.120
And the more we learned about the experts, did they look better or did they look worse?
00:58:39.480
Basically, everything we see, DC, everything we looked into in any kind of detail looked worse.
00:58:49.440
So anyway, that's the basket case theory applied to basically everything.
00:58:54.080
Everything looks worse when you're on the inside.
00:59:06.800
I saw a story that the area where, I guess the area where Apple makes most of its iPhones in China is now under lockdown.
00:59:18.580
Because that would be, like, a really big problem.
00:59:21.220
I remember Apple seemed like the one company that maybe, because they had so much clout,
00:59:27.620
Apple seemed like the one company that could do business in China and maybe make it work.
00:59:35.820
And now it turns out that even Apple's going to have some trouble because just being in China is a problem because they're going to close it down.
00:59:45.280
So China is unsafe for business, even if you're Apple.
00:59:49.980
However, I would like to give you this counterpoint from Naomi Wu on Twitter, who's also a great follow.
00:59:56.920
Now, Naomi is Chinese and can give you, like, a different perspective on how people, you know, look and feel there.
01:00:06.080
And one of the things she points out is that the China's zero COVID policy worked.
01:00:16.520
And by that, she says that they got past the bad variant of COVID.
01:00:24.240
And now, even if it flares up, they're still on zero COVID.
01:00:27.660
But even if it flares up, it's going to flare up in the less dangerous way.
01:00:33.460
And I thought to myself, that's not a bad opinion.
01:00:43.140
Because if China knew that the variant would flame out, and most experts predicted that, right?
01:00:51.080
Did not the experts say that the virus would flame out to lesser variants?
01:00:58.560
So if China played the game to see if they could wait long enough to get past the first variant, they won.
01:01:07.360
Because they stayed in business, for the most part, except for the closed-down parts.
01:01:13.200
Now, was it a gigantic burden on the people who got closed down?
01:01:22.620
Leadership is screwing some people for the greater good.
01:01:33.280
I don't think the shutdown destroyed their economy.
01:01:41.040
I think you could make an argument that China played it right for China.
01:01:45.800
It's not something that would have worked in the United States.
01:01:48.880
But do you buy that at least the argument has some meat on it?
01:01:55.460
You wouldn't dismiss the argument on a head, would you?
01:01:59.820
It's interesting, because nobody's more critical of China than I am, but they might have played it right.
01:02:11.040
Mike Cernovich is surfacing a story that I tried to understand as best I could.
01:02:18.440
He's got some long threads on it, but apparently something like this has happened.
01:02:23.960
Back in 2017, when Roy Moore was running for office, for Senate, I guess,
01:02:30.700
a whole bunch of Russian bots started following him, and then that became a story.
01:02:39.600
Well, it turns out that Democrats are the ones who created all the bots, made them look like Russian bots,
01:02:47.580
and then planted the news story that Russian bots love this Republican, and got caught.
01:02:55.180
So, you know, that's all water under the bridge now, right?
01:03:00.820
Can't go back in time, but at least we caught them, so we know how bad they were.
01:03:09.940
As Mike Cernovich points out, someone who worked for a group that was organizing this fake Russian bot thing
01:03:44.120
I didn't connect the story quite right before I got on here.
01:03:48.980
But anyway, this is the sort of fox-in-the-hen-house problem that we need to be vigilant of.
01:03:56.320
And this is, again, why, you know, Mike Cernovich is like a national treasurer, basically.
01:04:02.040
Because, you know, he can do some things that other people just don't do,
01:04:05.680
or don't notice, or don't talk about, or something.
01:04:09.000
But it all seems like important stuff when he's involved.
01:04:19.420
So here's another example where transparency works.
01:04:24.020
Somebody tried to do something, a little bit of transparency probably will modify it,
01:04:29.400
I would think, because it'd be kind of embarrassing to just go on like nobody noticed.
01:04:47.700
So Elon Musk said, they're going to put together a content moderation council.
01:04:53.060
It will include representatives, and here's the key phrase,
01:04:59.220
which will certainly include the civil rights community
01:05:06.560
Twitter will have a content moderation policy with wildly divergent views.
01:05:20.720
Now, he didn't say that they'll be racially balanced.
01:05:44.040
And so I tweeted back to the, it was Elon Musk's tweet.
01:05:50.140
And I had one problem with the idea of a wildly divergent group of people.
01:05:56.720
And the problem is that when you put together a committee
01:06:12.360
So I tweeted back, I tweeted back to the beginning of the comic
01:06:18.120
Because I can't think of anything that would be a better Dilbert comic
01:06:40.200
Now, you tell me, can I make a joke out of that?
01:07:14.240
a large group of people with wildly divergent views
01:07:27.920
The United States is a country of wildly divergent views.
01:07:55.080
because it's the leader who just gets their way
01:08:24.920
Scott, he didn't say he would take their opinions.
01:09:15.280
I don't even know if you could define it better.
01:09:28.820
or at least one of them says it should be allowed.
01:10:06.320
I'm not going to fill in the name of the group.
01:10:19.120
Well, that would be against the terms of service.
01:10:25.400
So they wouldn't even have to make a decision on that one
01:10:27.700
because the terms of service would take care of it.
01:10:32.220
I don't think people argue about that level of hate speech
01:10:38.500
That seems like a reasonable business standard.
01:11:09.240
Would you be okay as long as Musk makes the decision
01:11:15.800
about what's going to influence him from this group?
01:11:20.340
Because the problem is you can't get a perfect system.
01:11:29.420
What happens when somebody replaces Elon Musk in that job?
01:11:39.160
Well, then you're down to trusting that one person again.
01:11:49.280
where the best idea has to win, not a perfect idea,
01:11:54.740
But that doesn't make it not material for a Dilbert comic.
01:12:27.640
And that's why when Musk says the standard for Tesla
01:12:45.400
If you tell me you're not going to listen to them
01:12:55.440
Because that just sounds like a pretty good system to me.
01:13:13.740
What happens when Musk combines Neuralink and Twitter?
01:13:24.160
you know, someday I might have this Neuralink thing
01:13:39.180
You know, I'd just be like thinking and insulting.
01:13:52.960
But when you own Neuralink and you own Twitter,
01:13:57.220
I feel like they might be able to work together.
01:14:03.820
Do you think the boring company that bores tunnels,
01:14:07.800
do you think that has anything to do with Mars?
01:14:21.280
so you know if there was previous civilizations and stuff.
01:14:24.820
Now, it would be pretty tough to get a boring machine to Mars.
01:14:32.680
So how would the boring machine work if it's on Mars?
01:14:45.300
Probably need to do a lot of underground stuff on Mars
01:15:15.040
who are in the same party, interestingly enough.
01:15:17.520
But Cheney's becoming more of an anti-Republican.
01:15:23.500
because apparently she used it for her own fundraising.
01:15:27.820
thank you for your generous and kind contribution to my campaign,
01:15:32.020
And she went on saying that basically it all worked in her favor.
01:15:38.060
But she thinks it'll add another 10 points to their lead.
01:15:55.280
thank you again for the huge boost to our campaign.
01:16:06.400
knowing that one more warmonger is out of office.