 Good morning, John. A couple of months ago, I embarked on a project. I decided to start keeping track of every time that I believed something outright and then later discovered that the thing that I believed was either not quite right or, like, really totally wrong. And today, because it's not embarrassing, but because I feel like it's useful, I'm going to go through four of those things. Let's start with the one that I believed that was most incorrect. It's this graph showing the cost of rent and household income. I saw it on TikTok in an animation with, like, a fun song showing how rent and income had dramatically diverged since the 1990s. This aligns with my understanding of how things have gone, and though I was shocked to see how much they had diverged, I did not question it. Turns out, however, that this sentence at the bottom here is incorrect. In this graph, income was adjusted for inflation, but rent was not. And that is, like, the majority of the reason that they diverged. Now, I can really only speculate on how this graph got created. My guess is that it was a mistake, like, they made the graph. It was a mistake, and it went super viral because it showed a really dramatic thing. The more outrageous thing is going to go more viral if there was a similar graph, which would show a divergence, but not one as dramatic. It would not go as viral or viral at all. So my guess is that this was just a mistake that went viral once, and then it went viral over and over and over again because people saw that if they post this graph, it would go viral. Another useful thing to look at is just rent as a percentage of income, which, since the year 2000 anyway, has increased quite a lot, and then it skyrocketed in 2022 and 2023. So it's not like there's nothing here. And this also, of course, varies a lot depending on what part of the country you're in. And it is useful to note that the places where it has gone up the most are the places with the largest homeless population. We hear a lot about how homelessness is a problem of this or that or this or that. It is a problem of a lack of homes. When there are more people than there are homes, the cost of housing goes up a lot and the people who have the least end up without a home. Homelessness is a problem of a lack of homes. Please advocate for the construction of new homes in your community. Thing number two. There was a fairly large Twitter storm one day because Jane Goodall advocated for reducing the global population to 500 million people. I accept this because I know a lot of old school environmentalist types who advocate loudly for population reduction. And I did not like it. And I agree that the earth cannot handle an infinite number of humans. But we see that population growth goes down when people are in more equitable societies that have more resources for them. So we should focus on that. Whereas the active tense of reducing populations is for me a red flag. People should be granted their own destinies, not paternalistically controlled by well meaning outsiders. I actually looked up the tweet that I saw and it said that she said, We can solve all of the world's problems if we reduce the world population to where it was 500 years ago. Thing is, she never said this. I actually ended up googling this a couple of months afterward because someone said something nice about Jane Goodall and I was like, yeah, except for that thing that she said. But it turns out I was fine with having the information put in my head. But when I put it in someone else's head, I felt a little weird about it. So I went to check just in case. And here is a clip of what she actually said. We cannot hide away from human population growth because, you know, it underlies so many of the other problems. All these things we talk about wouldn't be a problem if there was a size of population that there was 500 years ago. And here's a clip of what she had just said before that. If we can't do something to improve the lives of these people, we have no hope of even trying to save the chimpanzees. It just wouldn't work. And so it was in 1994 that the Jane Goodall Institute began its program, Take Care or Takari, as it's known, in the 12 villages around the small Gombe National Park. Not a bunch of arrogant white people going into a poor African village and telling them what we were going to do, but a very small hand-picked group of eight local Tanzanians going into the villages and asking them what they thought we could do to help them. And like, these are just true things that a person heard and took an implication from and then attributed the implication to Jane Goodall when she did not say it. Whether she meant to imply it is entirely subjective. From my read, she did not. Number three, John Stuart is a guy who I trust a lot. And here is a clip of John Stuart talking about taxes in America. We gotta be the most taxed people in the world. What do we got there? Really? 8% is the average tax burden? And I watched this and I was like, wow, that is much lower than I thought it would be. But I'm watching the thing that aligns with my perspectives from my guy who I trust and I just moved on. And then I came across a TikTok from a guy who was like, this is not right. And I watched it and indeed it is not. And I should have known this because like I know that the average tax burden in the U.S. is 25%. I've read that a bunch of times. But it turns out there's some fine print on this. This is the average tax burden for a one earner married couple with two children. And if that sounds really specific to you, that's because that's really specific. He also would just talk about sales taxes and property taxes and gas taxes, but those numbers are not included in this 8%. This is just the federal income tax for the average married couple with one earner and two children, which is not most families in America. But also specifically, this was that household during the pandemic when the government was giving many families money. And that counted as their tax money coming back to them so their effective rate was lower. Which is a little weird because like an 8% tax rate is so low that anyone above the U.S. poverty line knows that they pay way more than 8% in taxes. They see it come out of their paychecks every month. So it seems weird to try to get that status look out of the radar. Especially because as a percentage of DDP, our tax burden globally is low. Now you don't have to make anything up about it. All right, last one. And it's a doozy. I'd only include it to show how messy it could be. I am a huge fan of the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration. It's a great use of my tax dollars and they provide data on the number of natural disasters that do more than a billion dollars in damage per year. This is a graph created by the good people at Scientific American of those data. And when I looked at this, my brain said, look at all the damage that climate change is doing. Now, this is not what Noah said. And it's not what the article said. It's what my brain said. And it's also what people on Twitter were saying. And I had no reason to question that interpretation or even notice that the article was not about how climate change was causing more billion-dollar disasters. It was about how we need to be more prepared for handling natural disasters. But the conversation on Twitter was about how climate change was increasing the number of billion-dollar disasters. And then other people on Twitter started saying, no, Noah and Scientific American are lying to you. And when I read their arguments, I was like, oh my gosh, they're right. Since 1980, the number of people living in America has increased from 230 million to 340 million. And those people work, and they shop, and they go to school, and they live in houses, and they buy things on Amazon.com. And all of that requires buildings. Noah's numbers adjust for inflation, but they do not adjust for the fact that more than half of the buildings in the US were built after 1980. This graph is a better reflection of the total value of buildings in America than it is of climate disasters. And it's so bad and annoying that Noah and Scientific American, two extremely reputable institutions, would misrepresent these data. But they didn't do that. People on Twitter misrepresented the data as showing something it didn't say. And then people attributed that misrepresentation to Noah and Scientific American. And John, I'm going to be honest with you, I didn't realize that until I was making this video. I had to come back and reshoot this part, and I had gotten a haircut in the meantime. So first, I believed a lie that my brain told me by looking at a graph that didn't say what I thought it said. That the sole reason the graph was increasing was climate change. That's part of the reason why it's not all of the reason why. And then I believed a lie that Twitter users told me, that it was not told to me by my own brain or by other people on Twitter. The lie was told to me no by that government and by Scientific American. And then I was like, maybe disasters aren't even increasing, but they are, especially heavy rainfall events and heat waves. John, I don't love this! Quick note, all four of these things are examples of misinformation from the more progressive side. This is a sampling bias because this video is about wrong things that I believed, and I'm going to be less skeptical of stuff that aligns with my worldview. I'm a little bit uncomfortable doing this because I think people could misconstrue it, but I'm dealing with that because I think that very few people watching this video think that misinformation is a bigger problem on the left than on the right. Not least because data clearly show it is a bigger problem on the right. Quick final note, I'm really kind of happy with how this came together because these are examples of varying fakeness of varying kinds. There's a wrong graph, there's cherry-picked data, there's a misattributed quote, and a fact that doesn't say exactly what it sounds like it said. I've heard the internet refer to as a challenging information landscape. And like, yeah, yeah, I mean, I feel like I'm pretty good at this and I fail at it all the time. I will run to go fact-check something that I disagree with and I will not do that with stuff that aligns with my previous conception of the world. That's just going to be a bias that we all have to deal with and live within work through. And yeah, sometimes I feel like, what does it matter if, like, somebody's saying a graph is saying something that it isn't actually saying? Or that this graph is making people sort of active and excited and enthusiastic about making the kinds of change I want to see in my country. Even if it's not right, what does it matter? And I think a lot of people think that way. And I think a lot of people who disagree with me on a lot of topics definitely think that way. But for who I am and where I sit and what I do, I have to attempt to have a very strong alliance to the truth. And the incentives of, like, the social internet's content recommendation systems make that hard for all of us. And I don't know what to do about that, except to try very hard to have an alliance to the truth. And also to, in a year, that is going to be bad to touch as much grass as I possibly can. John, I'll see you on Tuesday.