1030 – Always be skeptical: Tom talks Stinky Statistics

SUMMARY BY CHATGPT

Main Theme
Tom Antion explains why most statistics and polls are misleading or untrustworthy, and how businesses, governments, and marketers manipulate numbers to push agendas.
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Key Points
1. Polling Bias
o Surveys often use leading questions (e.g., “How great was our service?”) or loaded questions (e.g., “How often do you beat your wife?”) that force skewed answers.
o Media and political polls frequently design questions to influence results.
2. Lying by Omission
o Marketers highlight revenue without mentioning expenses.
o Example: A product “made $200,000 in two weeks,” but after affiliate commissions and advertising, the business may have actually lost money.
3. Straight-up Lying
o Example from Washington, DC: crime stats were falsified by downgrading serious offenses (like stabbings or armed robberies) to less serious categories (hospital transport, theft) to make violent crime appear lower.
4. Why This Matters
o Numbers are often manipulated to protect reputations, sell products, or push political agendas.
o Pharmaceutical companies are cited as another source of questionable statistics, since their incentive is long-term customers, not health.
5. What to Do About It
o Don’t trust statistics at face value—verify them independently.
o Ignore obviously biased sources.
o Adopt a healthy skepticism and do your own research.
o If you create your own polls, design questions fairly and use results ethically.
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Closing
Tom encourages listeners to stay skeptical, avoid being manipulated, and check out his mentor program and school for internet marketing.

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Episode 1030 – Stinky Statistics
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody, it's Tom here with episode 1030 of Screw the Commute podcast. Today we're going to talk about stinky statistics and why you can barely believe any of the numbers you see around. I hope you didn't miss episode 1029. That was mental toughness and ways to improve it if you don't have it. It really helps you in your business and your life. Pick up a copy of our automation e-book at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. Make sure you get version 3.0, which is now out. And check out my mentor program at GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com and my school at IMTCVA.org is certified to operate by the State Council on Higher Education in Virginia. But you don't have to be in Virginia because it's quality distance learning. Check it out and save yourself a couple hundred grand by blowing money with these major institutions that just teach the kids how to protest.

[00:01:24] All right. So here's the thing. You can't believe most statistics and polls. All right. I'm going to give you three different methods that they skew the numbers on you so that to convince you to do stuff maybe you wouldn't do if you had real numbers. And the first one is called polling bias. And there's like 7 or 8 ways that you can skew a poll to say anything you really want, basically. And I'm going to give you a couple of them here.

[00:01:59] And the bias is where they. They make the questions and design the questions to push the person that's getting the question towards a particular answer. So here's two of the ways that they do that. One is called a leading question. And so let's say I'm talking about customer service. You're doing a survey and you say how great was our customer service. Okay. So you're leading them and implying that the service was great. Just how great was it. That's a leading question and a polling bias. So that so that that company can get loads of people saying their customer service was great, when it might really suck. A reasonable question would be, what was your experience with our company and our service? You know, so leading questions. That's one way for polling bias loaded questions is another way. The famous one is how often do you beat your wife, right? That's the one that's been around forever, which assumes the person beats their wife and puts them in, you know, a crazy position. I mean, there's loads of other ones more subtle than that, but those are two ways that poles can push people towards certain answers. And there's like I said, there's 7 or 8 different ways if you just research polling bias. So anytime you see a poll, you really have to think, okay, who's behind the poll and what are they trying to accomplish with the poll? You see it on the mainstream media all the time in politics, and they try to push certain agendas on people so their polls are biased.

[00:03:46] Usually if you ever got one of these calls from one of the pollsters, you would see that, oh, I see what they're trying to do. Savvy people would. But the average person that just gets a polling call doesn't think in those terms. But you have to be a savvy marketer. That's what I'm trying to help you to be. Okay. So the first thing is polling bias. The next way you got stinky statistics you can't believe is what's called lying by omission. Lying by omission. And I see this all the time in my internet world. So here's an example. Let's say some big promotion comes out and they say, hey, we made $200,000 in the first two weeks with this great new product. All right. Okay. So that part might be true. All right. But remember that the topic here is lying by omission. So they may have actually taken in $200,000 on this product. No question about it. That's so fine that it could be a lie. But let's say give it. Given that that is true. They took in. They grossed $200,000. Well, 100 to 150,000 of that would have gone to affiliates. So they really didn't make $200,000. They grossed $200,000. But they didn't tell you that 100 to 150,000 went to affiliates.

[00:05:14] All right, then they didn't tell you that like 75,000 went towards advertising. And so they actually I don't know what those numbers are, but let's say they actually lost $50,000 on the promotion and they didn't tell you all that. And they're trying to make it up by suckering you into buying this supposedly great product that sold $200,000 in two weeks. And it's so great when they lost their shirt. And the only way to get the money back is to hoodwink you by lying by omission. All right. They didn't tell you all those expenses against it and how they actually lost money on the project. All right. So that's lying by omission. And then you have this just came out in the news just lying. And this happened in the the DC area crime statistics. One guy got put on leave for falsifying the crime statistics to make the city look better. And the other thing is, I was listening to the radio and the the head of the police association for that area told exactly how they skew the numbers. Listen, this is terribly and this is this one is really dangerous. So the the police guy said, well, here's what happens. Let's say somebody gets stabbed and they're not dead and they're stabbed. And so the police show up and then they get, uh, they check out what happened. And I think most of you would say that getting stabbed is a violent crime.

[00:06:58] Okay, unless it was self-defense. But getting stabbed is a violent crime. Well, what the police guy said, he says, well, a big shot shows up on the scene like a lieutenant or captain or somebody big shot and says. And of course, they took the bleeding person to the hospital. Right. So the the police guy tells the the people that were on the scene, write this up as just a transport, hospital transport instead of a violent stabbing. All right. Guess what? That's just lying about what happened to make the city look better, to make the mayor look better and all that. You know that stuff. And that's, like, over and over again. So if it was a robbery and, like an armed robbery, the big shot would show up and just say it was a theft, because a theft is not considered a violent crime, but a robbery or a burglary at gunpoint or whatever it is, say so. When DC said violent crime was down 26% from last year, people were afraid to walk down the street. And so this big hoopla about the National Guard and all this, I'm not getting political here, but I'm just saying this is an example of bias and why you can't trust statistics. You have to trust your lying eyes or you're not lying eyes. So what do you do about this? Well, first of all, you should ignore numbers coming out from obviously biased sources.

[00:08:41] I mean, especially in politics, we know certain publications lean all the way, one way or the other. Say so you got to ignore the numbers coming out of there. And you also like pharmaceutical companies. I don't believe that they have shown any interest at all in making sure you're healthy. It appears that they want to make sure you are continually sick so they can keep selling you stuff. It's like lifetime value of a customer. They don't want you to die. They want you to hang in there sick the whole time. See, that's my not so humble opinion. So any kind of statistics coming from those people, how could you believe it? Say, especially at the end of every commercial, they had this 30s of, you know, you're going to start bleeding from your eyeballs and, you know, all these side effects that that come from one good thing and then 900 bad things, if you get this particular drug thing and then do your own research, say, We don't want you to just believe everybody else. Now, the old saying was trust but verify. I'm saying don't trust and verify, but verify. And, um, here's my my final thing on this is adopt a healthy attitude of skepticism. You know, I got this because I had this practical joke company, and luckily we were only doing good, fun, nice things as practical jokes.

[00:10:19] But I just saw I mean, we did 4000 of them up and around Washington, DC in the six years that I had that company, and it was just so easy to hoodwink people. I mean, it was unbelievable to me how easy it was to trick people. See? And luckily, I was doing it for good. That's kind of how I got into the anti scam business, because I, I see how vulnerable people are because they trust too much? Say so. Adopting a healthy attitude of skepticism. When you see numbers or create your own numbers, like I said, do your own research and do your own polls and and look up how to create the questions so that they're fair and get some fair answers that can help your company try. I'm begging you not to use this for bad, like a lot of companies do, to pretend that your service is great when it isn't. Stuff like that. All right, that's my story. I'm sticking to it. Check out my mentor program. Greatinternetmarketingtraining.com and my school IMTCVA.org and that mentor program is the most unique, most successful ever in the field of internet and digital marketing. All the things you get from it. So check it out. Greatinternetmarketingtraining.com and I will catch you on the next episode. See you later.