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Back to episode — Episode 2574 CWSA 08/22/24

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p, and it happens now. Oh, oh, oh. That's good stuff. Well, let's talk about some fun science updates and then politics. Politics we'll get to it. So there's some research published in Science Advances saying that the simpler your headline, the more clicks you get. That's right. If people reading the news see your headline and they understand what all the words mean, they're more likely to click…

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time you heard the media criticize Trump for his simplistic communication style? Bet you didn't realize it completely disappeared, didn't it? What? Honestly, it's been years. I think it's been years since they brought that up. "Oh, he uses simple vocabulary." Do you know why? Because at this point everybody figured out that was the better way to communicate because the world is not as smart as writers and people who make headlines. The people who make headlines went to college and the college told them to use big words and so they do to impress their editors and their friends. And then the people who read it, who necessarily maybe didn't go to such a good college, they look at it and say, "I don't even know what those words mean. I think I'll click on something else."

So I really could have helped you there. But once you understand that Trump is arguably the best public communicator of all time, you know, even with his flaws, nobody's ever been more persuasive or more clear about what they want than he has. So shorter is better.

There's a medical study saying that it's published in JAMA Psychiatry. Publication anyway shows that kids who had persistent inflammation as kids, body inflammation, were far more likely to develop serious mental health disorders including psychosis and depression. Now to their credit, the article about it says very clearly that they have not established that the inflammation causes the other problems. It could be either related or associated. So the first thing I'll say is congratulations for clearly writing about science in a way that makes sense. But at what point in the article did they tell you that it wasn't necessarily causation? Was it up at the top? Was the first sentence "We don't know if this is causation but there's a great correlation between"? Do you think it did that? No, it did not. No, you had to read a long time before they confessed, "Yeah, we don't know if the inflammation causes the problems. Could be just correlation."

So I'm only going to give them partial credit because the reason that you would click it and read it is that you thought that they had established some causation. And if you knew that they did not establish any causation because they don't have the data to do that yet, maybe you would have read it differently or not read it. But here's my hypothesis that I've been

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working on for a long time. The other day I had a very bad mental attitude. I woke up just feeling a sense of dread and doom that wasn't really connected to anything happening in the world that was different than the day before when I felt fine. You know, surely there are problems in the world but why did I feel fine yesterday and then I wake up one day and then I feel like dread and doom? Do you…

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