Episode 1147 Scott Adams: I Tell You How Fear Persuasion and Fake News Will Determine the Election
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
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Content:
Fear persuasion
Joe Biden's Gettysburg "unity" speech
The 2016 COUP...may succeed in 2020
Pelosi designed the new stimulus bill to fail
Facebook banned Qanon...for being dangerous?
VP debate tonight
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Fill it with your favorite liquid.
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The thing that makes everything better.
Everything. It's called the simultaneous sip and it happens now.
Go! I feel all my vital signs improving.
White blood count up.
Vitamin D levels improving.
Yep, it's all coming together now.
So, what's happening in the news?
Apparently, FBI Chief Christopher Wray has something to tell us this morning.
If you find out what it is while I'm yammering away here, tell me in the comments what the news is.
Some big news. I saw somebody saying they thought he was going to resign, but I don't think that's anything like confirmed.
So we'll see.
Could be a whole new news cycle.
Could be interesting.
All right. Here's a question I wonder about.
Whenever we talk about death rates for coronavirus, we're always talking about averages.
And the averages are useful.
But they could be misleading as well.
And here's what I'm wondering.
How many people in Trump's position, meaning they were diagnosed early, so there was sufficient testing to catch it before the symptoms were bad, And they got the full suite of, let's call it the Trump protocol, every drug that Trump got the same way that he got it.
And let's say they were in their 70s and let's say they had one comorbidity, they had some extra pounds.
How many people in that situation who were lucky enough to get treated as well as the president, which would be rare, but we could get there, how many of those people would die?
Because I'm starting to think that the number is so close to zero that we should just forget about it.
I mean, if we can get to the point where we can catch people early and give them exactly what Trump got and whatever else comes along, I feel as if vaccines are not going to be the answer.
One of my predictions I made months ago Which I haven't re-upped, but I think I'll do it now.
I'm not sure we'll ever see vaccinations.
I'm just not sure vaccines are going to be the answer.
As other people have noted, we've never successfully made a coronavirus vaccine.
So, are you wondering Why is it we've never been able to make one in the past, but now six or ten different companies suddenly can all make one, and they can make it all with different techniques?
So suddenly, the thing that was impossible every year until now is now so possible that you can do it ten different ways.
There's something wrong, right?
There's something terribly wrong with what we're being told.
Now, maybe it was always possible and there was some financial or other reason it wasn't being done.
Maybe it was a timing thing.
Maybe those coronaviruses weren't so bad so we didn't have to try so hard.
But we're definitely not getting good information about what's going on in the world.
Have you seen the latest polls?
It looks like the polls are starting to show Biden with a commanding lead.
What do you think? Do you buy it?
Apparently, this is the same week in 2016, relative to Election Day, the same week that Hillary was at her maximum poll numbers.
Now, does that mean that this will go the way I went last time?
Well, I certainly suspect That people are lying to pollsters, first of all.
We'll see how much.
But it's also true that this might be one of the president's worst weeks, wouldn't you say?
And we also see that these numbers can swing wildly in one week.
So what it is today is really not terribly predictive of what the election is going to be, as we know from 2016.
So I wouldn't worry yet.
But if things don't change, it's not looking good.
That's for sure. All right, let's talk about persuasion and the strongest elements of persuasion to see if we can get a little visibility on what's going on here.
As I've told you before, the strongest persuasion, especially for the presidency, is fear.
You could pretty much predict that whoever does the best job of scaring voters in the way that they want to scare them That's probably who's going to win the election.
Fear is the big persuader.
It's the one thing that'll get people off the fence.
It's the one thing that'll make you show up to vote.
And it'll certainly get you to switch parties if you're afraid.
You might not do it for other reasons, but if you're afraid, you might switch parties.
So let's look at the fear filter.
So number one fear is COVID, right?
So the Democrats, quite wisely, decided to focus on coronavirus as the primary push against President Trump.
It works for two really good reasons.
Number one, there's a general impression that he has not performed as well as he could.
So they've got something to say about his performance.
Now I, of course, have said that those opinions are probably ridiculous.
It won't matter because we make decisions based on ridiculous thinking.
But my point is this. What do we know about how well, let's say, a different leader would have been in the United States.
Let's say if we picked the leader of Germany, the leader of New Zealand.
Pick anybody who you think did a good job on the coronavirus and tell me that you know for sure If that other leader had just been born American and had been the president instead of Trump, that we would have gotten a better result.
Because you can't say that.
It's unknowable, and if you use your common sense to just think it through, whoever that other president would be, hypothetically, would probably get the same result.
Because they would have the same limitations.
They would come into an administration that had faulty tests from the CDC. It wasn't the president's fault, but they were faulty.
You would have the states jockeying for power.
We have a system where the states have a lot of control.
They would be making a variety of different decisions just the way the system is supposed to work.
It's exactly what it's supposed to do.
I don't know that some other leader would have gotten a better result, but the country is not good at analyzing, so they won't make that comparison.
They won't know enough to say, wait, wait, the only thing that matters is what another leader would have done in the same situation as President of the United States.
It doesn't tell you anything to know how somebody did in another country, because there are just too many different variables.
So, point is, Fear is always the big motivator, persuasion-wise.
Coronavirus has been our biggest fear, and the president is vulnerable to criticism because people aren't good at analyzing.
So they quite rightly went after this.
But the president, and I don't think this is getting enough attention, The president's instincts to downplay the fear of the coronavirus is politically probably right on point.
Because you might say to yourself, Scott, I think the country would do better, you know, if people were more afraid.
Maybe they would take more precautions or something.
Maybe. That's entirely possible.
But from a political perspective, if the president can take the fear off it He can take the criticism and it won't hurt as much politically.
So, if you are on a scale of 1 to 10, if your fear of coronavirus was, let's say, a 9 or a 10, and he can bump that down to a 7, he probably wins.
Now, what do you feel about the risk of the coronavirus when you see a 73-year-old, 73 or 4-year-old man who's got some comorbidities, got a little extra weight on him?
What does it make you feel when you see him going to the hospital and shake it off in a few days?
Less afraid, right?
Now, you might say to yourself, well, I'm not going to get the same health care as the president.
But even so, When you watch him go through it, you sort of relate to it more because it's somebody you sort of know, and you feel, okay, I just watched the cycle from beginning to end, and there was nothing that happened there that looked extra dangerous.
It could have been if he had not gotten the right treatment, etc., but your impression of it Right or wrong, just your impression of it is less scary.
So I think that the president is knocking that down from a 9 or a 10 to about a 7, and you don't really see...
and it's sort of an invisible play, because what people are concentrating on is what that will do to, let's say, the actions of the citizens.
Will the citizens then expose themselves to greater risks than they should because they're less afraid?
They might. That's entirely possible.
They might. But that will count much less.
Let's say that the death rate is 235,000, but it could have been 232,000, just to pick the numbers.
Would you notice? Would the public say, ah, that was an extra 2,000 people if the president had just said different things about his own infection, 2,000 people would be alive?
Well, we'll never be able to demonstrate that anybody died because of what the president said.
It just won't be studyable.
We won't know, and certainly won't know by Election Day.
That's my dog making all kinds of noise if you hear that.
So, here's the thing.
The president is doing a good job on the fear reduction.
Now, in order to win, they've got to amp up the fear in the other direction.
So right now, we don't have enough fear about what would happen if Joe Biden got elected.
What would be the thing you would fear the most?
Well, you can think of all kinds of stuff.
You say, well, maybe he's a little, you know, too friendly with China.
But you don't feel that it's going to kill you tomorrow.
It feels like some kind of long-term, you know, suboptimal situation.
And then you say, okay, well, he might do something with your health care.
But it might not affect you personally.
It might take a while.
Maybe it would be okay.
It doesn't scare you.
You just have a preference.
So the president needs to apply some fear to his persuasion or it probably won't get done, meaning he won't win.
What would be the scariest thing That they could persuade on.
Well, street violence and crime, revolution, socialists taking over and destroying the planet.
So I would be expecting that Mike Pence in his debate tonight, I think he's going to be pushing hard on the risk of socialism.
That would be my guess.
I think he's going to push hard on how that will destroy the country and we're all in trouble.
The Democrats are also doing a better job lying, as it turns out.
They're telling people that they're going to lose their health care if Trump gets re-elected, that you'll lose pre-existing conditions.
There's no evidence that any of this is true, and there's evidence that it's false.
But because the country is in such information poverty, You can make any claim on the left and it will never be fact-checked because they don't fact-check themselves and the people watching the news from the left just will never see the other argument.
So the Democrats can literally just say anything, just anything.
So they can push the find people hoax, as you know.
They can tell you that Trump's taking your health care, that he's going to cut Social Security.
None of this is true. None of this is based on anything.
But they can just say it.
Just put it out there. Now, I'm not saying that the president isn't also making wild claims, but I think his wild claims get fact-checked, but they don't get fact-checked on the left.
I would go for starvation as the fear that the Republicans could push.
So Joe Biden gave this speech at Gettysburg, the scene of the Gettysburg.
I'm going to talk about Sweden in a little bit.
I see your comment there.
And I would say that I listened to a little bit of Biden's speech and I'd have to say High marks.
I give it high marks.
I would say that Biden, in terms of going to Gettysburg, because it's, you know, a place of, you know, famous for civil war, national unrest.
So image-wise, pretty good.
Speech-wise, pretty good.
If I'm being objective, he did a solid job there.
I would say just a really good job.
And I thought the content of his speech was strong as well.
But as Joel Pollack pointed out in his article in Breitbart, That he was doing a unity speech in which he led off with the most divisive lie in American history, the fine people hoax.
So he goes to give a speech on national reconciliation And he leads off, with his own bad behavior, the worst thing that's happening in the country.
And I don't think that's an exaggeration.
His lie about the fine people hoax is the alpha problem in the country.
Even more than coronavirus, in my opinion.
Because to the extent that people believe the fine people hoax, and apparently people on the left do, That makes everything that they do okay.
It's the approval to be dangerous.
It's the approval to be extreme, because they think they're fighting something extreme, which, as it turns out, just didn't happen, doesn't exist.
But he can get away with that, because, again, there will be no fact-checking of his false claims.
Let's see. There's a big story, of course, which will only be shown in the right-leaning media.
So maybe what would be normally the biggest story in the country will be non-existent on CNN and MSNBC. It just won't exist.
Now, I've told you in the past that that's usually an indication of fake news.
Fake news is usually when either only the left or only the right report it as even happening, and the other one just doesn't act like it didn't happen.
That usually means it didn't happen.
If both of them report it happened, it probably did.
They might have a different spin on what it means, but if they both at least report it happened, it probably happened.
So right now we've got this story that only exists on the right and may only exist there.
It may never be covered by the left.
The president has now ordered declassification of all of the Russia collusion stuff.
Now, I don't know what that means, but does it really mean it's all declassified?
Really? All of it?
Because most of the stuff we've seen had redactions like crazy.
Is he really getting rid of all the redactions?
So first of all, I don't believe it.
You know, it seems like too much of a claim.
I feel like there have to be redactions somewhere.
But that's not the big story.
The big story is that what's already released Shows that John Brennan was aware and must have briefed, I think he briefed Obama, he must have been aware That Hillary Clinton had a scheme to detract from her own email problem by creating a fake scandal about Trump and Russia,
which she did, and with the help of her helpers in the Department of Justice and the FBI or whatever, CIA, and with her helpers, almost succeeded in overthrowing the country.
Almost succeeded.
And you know what?
She's almost there again.
We're at the brink of Hillary Clinton succeeding in the coup that she attempted in 2016.
Now, when I say she's on the brink of succeeding, if you look at the polls, it would suggest that the collective lies coming out of the left have done their job and that those lies collectively might, you know, Get Biden elected, which puts the Hillary-Obama crowd back in charge.
We don't know exactly who.
But it's starting to look like Hillary's coup attempt, which is now clearly documented in 2016, is actually going to work.
Like right now.
Because this election will be completely fraudulent because none of the information the voters have to vote on Is real.
All of our information is just made up.
Just fake. Now, of course, the Russia collusion thing was fake news that was an attempt to overthrow the country.
This is just more of that.
It's just more fake news.
The fine people hoax being the prime example.
It's just a whole bunch of fake news that collectively the left gets together and promotes that is so strong when you put it all together It might actually cost Trump the election.
I'm still predicting he'll win, but at the moment that's what it looks like.
So that should be the biggest story in the world, right?
Not just the biggest story in the country, it should be the biggest story in the world.
Won't even be covered on CNN. Won't even be covered.
Now there's a race to the finish line that's really interesting because Brennan and maybe some others in the government might be in a whole lot of legal trouble.
But only if Trump gets re-elected, because otherwise they can stall until Biden gets in office and then everybody's home free.
So it looks like we have documented evidence of an actual coup in 2016.
We have an actual coup that's in progress right now, a fake news coup.
The fake news creates the coup, basically.
And the people that we know are involved Are on a path, if things go the way the polls are indicating, they're on a path to completely get away with it.
Not only get away with it, but might be your next head of the CIA. Brennan could be that next head of the CIA. That's completely possible at this point.
I can't think of a worse outcome, but we're certainly on the precipice of that being possible.
Let's see what else we got going on here.
The stimulus is off.
And this is another example of how the fake news can overthrow a government.
The accurate news would be like this.
Nancy Pelosi put a bunch of things in the stimulus bill that anybody would have known would make it impossible for Republicans to pass it.
Anybody would know that.
So it's quite obvious that Nancy Pelosi knew that that bill was impossible to pass the way it was designed.
And she wasn't going to negotiate it, which further tells you it was never intended to be passed.
It was intended to fail so they could blame it on the president.
That's right. Nancy Pelosi is actually starving Americans Starving.
Starving Americans for political gain.
But, because they control the media, so much of it anyway, that story will turn into the opposite of that.
They can just say it's the opposite.
It's the opposite. It was a perfectly good bill, and this President Trump He decided not to negotiate and walked away, so it's all on him, right?
Of course, the president has said that he would be perfectly happy to sign a clean bill that just had stimulus checks and I think one other thing.
But they won't send that to him because they can starve the public and blame it on Trump because they control the news.
Amazingly. And also, since the media doesn't understand how negotiating works, when they see Trump walk away from the negotiating table, they say, hey, Trump stopped negotiating, which is exactly the opposite of what happened.
They can report exactly the opposite of reality and get away with it completely.
When he walks away from the table, that's negotiating.
That's what it is. And he's told us specifically.
He wrote a book about it.
Walk away from the table.
Otherwise, you can't get what you want.
So he's negotiating, but the news will treat it as he stopped negotiating, because they can.
They just have the power to report things as the opposite of what is obviously true.
And they can get away with it.
It's amazing. And, of course, the ignorance of the public really helps in there.
I'm seeing more reports about that drug that Trump is apparently on, this dexamethasone.
And some doctors are saying it has the side effects including aggression, agitation, and confusion.
Now, most people won't have those side effects.
But I don't like those side effects.
And I gotta say, as much as I love my President Trump, any president who is taking a drug that might have those side effects, I think you have to take the nuclear codes away from them.
I really do. And it's so close to an election that I can't imagine that would happen.
But under normal conditions, yeah.
No matter how much you love your president, that's a pretty big risk.
Right? You would find no value in my commentary if I just agreed with the president on everything.
That would be no use to you at all.
So that's my opinion on that.
Here is the strangest simulation thing.
As you know, Kellyanne Conway has been tested positive, as well as her daughter.
So both Kellyanne and her daughter have the coronavirus.
I was Googling this morning to try to determine if George Conway has tested positive for coronavirus.
You would think that if two family members have tested positive, his odds are pretty high.
Now, this opens up the following completely possible scenario.
You've seen George Conway, right?
He doesn't look...
I don't like to fat shame, but it's important in the story.
So I'm not going to fat shame him.
I'm just going to say he's got an obvious comorbidity.
Would you agree? And far more, I think, if I can remember what he looked like, far more than Trump.
And there is a non-zero chance that Trump, through the coronavirus, will take out his biggest critic.
And that would be, first of all, tragic.
I'm not hoping that that happens.
I'm not a George Conway fan, but we don't hope illness on anybody.
We don't wish for any violence or any kind of bad outcomes for anybody.
I hope you don't either.
But in terms of the simulation, this is really possible now.
It's entirely possible that Trump's number one critic could be susceptible to this.
And if it turned out that Well, if it turned out that that happened, I don't know what I would think about reality after that.
It would just be so mind-bogglingly looking like a movie script, I just wouldn't know what to think of it.
Here's another one like that.
I saw a chart of various countries' opinions of China.
And if you look at the various countries and what they thought of China over the years, it's up and down.
But about 2018, the dislike of China just went through the roof.
So every country in the world just had a big change around 2018.
Boom. Now, here's the simulation part of that.
And I know from experience that at least a third of you are going to misinterpret what I say next.
So I'll just let that happen because I can't help it.
I can only say this as clearly as I can, knowing that a third of you will permanently misinterpret it.
It goes like this.
In 2018, my stepson died of a fentanyl overdose.
Fentanyl, of course, comes from China and they do it intentionally to hurt the United States.
At that time, I declared that China was my mortal enemy and I was going to take them down or certainly try as hard as I could.
So exactly the time that I publicly announced I was going to take down China and destroy their reputation first, their reputation just fell off a cliff.
And all over the world, people were hating China.
Now, I'm not going to say, and here's the part you'll misinterpret, I'm not claiming I did that.
A third of the people listening will go away and say, he just claimed he did that.
I'm telling you, I'm not claiming that.
I'm claiming it as a coincidence.
But it's a big one. And by itself, it wouldn't mean anything, right?
Because a lot of people probably turned negative on China around the same time.
So if you just looked at it in isolation, it wouldn't mean much.
But I've got to tell you, the number of times in my life that I've picked a desirable global thing to happen and then watched it happen just when I decided it should happen is really freaking me out a little bit.
Just a little bit. So the point of the story is not that I'm changing world events.
It's that I don't understand why they change when I want them to.
Am I just good at guessing what will happen?
I'm genuinely confused by it because it happens so regularly.
You know, someday I'll give you the list of things that happened just about the time I started persuading in that direction.
I feel like Somebody says breaking news.
Is something breaking right now?
Tell me in the comments if you see something.
Somebody says, you caused it, I know you did.
Well, I don't make that claim, but I will tell you that I was trying to make exactly this happen.
And at the time, you would have said it would be unlikely, wouldn't you?
If in 2018, when I said publicly, as I did a number of times, that I determined that China was my enemy and I was going to try to take them down, you probably didn't think much would change, did you?
You probably thought 2020 would look a lot like 2018 in terms of China.
You probably wouldn't think much would be different, except we're decoupling and there's a lot different But I don't take credit for that.
All right. Facebook has decided to ban QAnon across all of its platforms.
What do you think of that?
Do you think it's reasonable for Facebook to ban QAnon based on the fact that they spread, I guess this would be their argument, that they spread untruths that presumably are potentially dangerous untruths.
Do you think that's reasonable?
Here's what I think.
It might be reasonable.
I could totally see how it would be reasonable to remove conspiracy theory BS from your platform.
But don't you have to be a little consistent?
That's my only issue.
Why can they allow Joe Biden to base his campaign on an obvious falsehood, the fine people hoax, when you just have to look at the transcript to know that it's not true?
Just look at the transcript.
It's that easy. Now, why is it that the most divisive and dangerous hoax in the history of America, that's my claim for the fine people hoax, the most dangerous hoax in all of American history, why is that okay?
Now, you could say, well, you know, it's a political claim and there's lots of political claims and we can't really fact check all that and people will just put it in context.
It's just a political claim.
Is it? I would say no.
Here's a here's a political claim.
President Trump will cut your Social Security.
It's not true.
It's the opposite of what he says he'll do, and he's been pretty good about doing what he says he'll do, and not doing what he says he won't do.
He's been pretty good at that. So it's not true.
Is that okay? Is it okay to have something that's clearly not true, this political claim?
I would say probably that's okay.
Because as soon as you get into the business of determining what's true and not, It's just a forever rabbit hole.
You can't get out of that hole, right?
Because, you know, there are lots of things that are gray area.
Some people could say it's true.
Some people would say it's not true.
You could never really use that standard of that it's true or not true.
You'd have to use the standard that is not true.
And on top of that, it's dangerous.
I think that's what put QAnon over the top.
Not that it's untrue.
But that it's untrue and has a fairly obvious potential for danger.
That's what the fine people hoax is.
The fine people hoax isn't just something that's untrue.
It's not like saying I'll raise your taxes.
It's not like saying I'll cut your social security.
It's not like saying you can keep your doctor.
It's not like any of those things.
Those are just untrue.
They're not dangerous.
The fine people hoax could get me killed.
Me, personally.
I could get killed.
Because of that hoax and all that it supports.
Because it supports a whole structure of beliefs that, you know, I think that's the strongest pillar and it's not real.
So that's the world you live in.
All right, so I think Facebook just needs to be consistent.
I wouldn't mind them banning QAnon if they also banned the fine people hoax.
I would say those are equivalents.
Interestingly, a fellow named Glenn Lowry, who's a scholar, he's got together with a bunch of other scholars and they're calling for the Pulitzer Board to revoke the Pulitzer Prize awarded earlier this year to Nicole Hannah-Jones for her 1619 project.
And they're asking for the Pulitzer Prize to be revoked because the scholarship in that piece of work Is lacking.
Meaning that there's a claim in there that's ridiculously untrue.
Specifically the claim that the American Revolution was fought in large part to preserve slavery.
Apparently there's no historical evidence that that was the case.
But that's part of the learning and somebody got a Pulitzer Prize for that completely false claim.
Of course, you're all going to watch the VP debates tonight.
I think the VP debate is going to be more interesting than you think.
Might be more interesting than you think.
Of course, the big drama is that Kamala Harris is going to ask for plexiglass walls and Pence wants to have no wall.
Now, if it turns out that Kamala is in a plexiglass box and Pence is not, who wins?
Who wins? Does Kamala Harris win because she's the one playing it safe and she's got her little plexiglass cubicle?
Or does Pence win because he's clearly far enough away from people to not infect anybody, but he's also not being a little bitch in a plastic box?
Who wins? Well, it might depend, you know, people will pick sides with their political favorite, but I think Pence wins that.
In terms of the optics, you don't want to be the bubble girl.
If Pence is a free-range chicken on that stage and Kamala Harris is a bubble girl, bubble girl does not beat free-range chicken in optics.
It's not even close. So I don't know if it'll turn out that way.
One's in a bubble and one isn't.
But bubble girl doesn't have an advantage.
Now, here's the other stuff.
The first thing you need to know about vice president debates is that that's a good place to test out messages.
So what you might see is you might see Pence framing one of the issues or more in a way that you haven't seen before.
Which would be really interesting because if you see that, it means he's testing it because that would be a normal procedure.
You let the vice president test it.
If it doesn't work, you just don't do it yourself.
If it becomes a big controversy and it's a problem, Then the president could say, well, that was the vice president.
You know, just listen to me and sort of make it go away because that's typical too.
Vice presidents do sometimes say something that the top of the ticket has to modify.
Fairly ordinary. I think it's happened in a lot of different races.
So it's a low-risk thing for Pence to try on a new argument.
So see if he does that. And here's what's interesting.
And I've said this a number of times and I'm just going to keep saying it.
I think Pence is the most underrated public servant in America.
The most underrated.
In terms of how good he is.
Because the job of the vice president is primarily not to cause trouble, right?
You don't want to become a problem.
You just want to be a steady spare tire.
And I think he does that better than just about anybody's ever done it.
I think that he stays out of trouble like nobody's business.
He also can win debates.
I believe he was considered the winner of his Tim Kaine debate in 2016.
He's good at it.
He's excellent in public.
You know he's not going to have a weird gaffe.
You know he's going to be prepared.
You know he's going to present well.
You know he's not going to have an emotional flip-out moment.
You know he's strong enough to handle whatever's coming.
He is really solid.
Now, do you know that about Kamala Harris?
Would you say to yourself, yeah, I know Kamala Harris is just as strong as all those things I said about Pence?
Nope. She could have some moments.
So she is capable of moments, you know, to capture the news cycle and that could be dangerous.
But she's not in his class.
He is just a better debater.
And if I were her, I'd be a little bit worried because people are going to look at the vice presidential debate a little bit harder than they would normally.
Because people are looking at Kamala as maybe the top of the ticket.
Think about this. Pence could, I'm not predicting this because this would be an unlikely outcome, but he could.
He could end the election tonight.
That's possible.
Here's how he'd have to do it.
He would just have to expose Kamala and just destroy her and eviscerate her in the debate.
If he does that, suddenly Joe Biden doesn't look like such a good package because you've always thought, all right, really it's about the number two, right?
If he destroys number two, he destroys number one.
That wouldn't be true the reverse.
If Pence were to lose the debate, What's anybody going to say, really?
Are you going to say, therefore I change my vote?
Nope. You're not going to change your vote.
So first of all, it's very unlikely he's going to lose.
It'll be a tie or he'll win.
I would say that's a fair estimate.
But he might win, and this is the thing I don't think people are counting on.
He has the skill, he does have the skill, compared to Kamala Harris, To eviscerate her.
Now, probably not.
I think she'll rise to the challenge and usually these things look closely even, even if you think somebody won.
But he does have the talent.
He has the talent to completely take her out.
And I don't think the risk works in the other direction in this case.
So if he exposes her as unusually weak, could change the race.
We'll see. Have you noticed, let me just do a little recap here on...
Oh, I want to talk about Sweden before we do that.
So, I was looking at a tweet by, I don't know how to pronounce his name, Jainan Weiss, I think?
Jainan or Jainan?
And he showed some graphs showing Sweden compared to some other countries, UK, France and Spain.
And the point he was making is that Sweden is doing great in terms of death rate and infections, so very low and I think trending down.
Whereas there are at least three countries he mentioned, and the US I think he threw in there too.
So UK, France and Spain, where they're having more infections.
Now his point was that Sweden has essentially stopped the lockdown.
They've gone back to something closer to normal.
And he's saying that Sweden is doing great, doing none of the things that the countries that are doing poorly feel they need to do, like the lockdowns and the masks and stuff.
Now, first of all, I don't think the Sweden story is that clean.
I think that the Swedes are wearing masks, and I think that they are voluntarily socially distancing, so it's not really a clean comparison.
But he tries to make this case, And I am not convinced.
And here's why. Number one, every time you see somebody say, I'm going to compare one country, no matter what country, to these three or four or five countries, you can just forget what they're saying.
Because nothing they say is useful.
Out of all the countries in the world, I don't know, 180, whatever there are, if you're going to take six of them and say, I can tell something from these six, that's probably not true.
It's probably cherry-picking.
If you had picked other countries, you might get a different result.
So first of all, anytime you see a coronavirus graph with three or five countries, don't believe anything you see on that graph.
That is cherry-picked data.
It might be true, but you shouldn't assume it's true because it's non-credible by design.
Just a few countries. But here was, in part of his Twitter thread, He had this little throwaway line.
He said, and yes, other Nordic countries did better than the Swedes.
What? Wait a minute.
His point was that Sweden is doing a great job without the lockdowns and the masks.
But he compared it to UK, France and Sweden.
But then in the tweet, he throws in this line.
Yes, other Nordic countries did better than the Swedes.
But that is not proof lockdowns work, because the other Nordic countries did the lockdowns.
It may just be proof that the Swedes should have protected their nursing homes better.
Maybe. Here's my take.
In other words, the Nordic countries The ones that supplement with vitamin D all year round because they don't get enough vitamin D. So apparently in Sweden it's typical to take fish oil on a daily basis to get your vitamin D. Is that true in the UK? Do people in the UK supplement with vitamin D? Don't think so.
France? Nope.
Spain? Don't think so.
So here's what I see.
I see that when Jainan Weiss was trying to make the case that the masks and lockdowns don't help that much because Sweden is doing well, that's not the story I saw.
I looked at his own tweet thread and said, um, there's more evidence in your own tweet thread That the vitamin D levels are the main thing.
Because if it's true that it doesn't matter if you have a mask or a lockdown or not, you get wildly different results, but that the people who do well all seem to be the vitamin D supplement people?
Is that a coincidence? Is that a coincidence?
It could be. So the first thing you should say to yourself is, yes, Scott, that could be a coincidence.
It totally could be a coincidence.
But what I'm saying is that all of the other correlations or causations that you imagine you see, don't believe them.
They're just not credible.
Is the vitamin D correlation credible?
No. No, not based on the little bit of data that I just mentioned.
It's not credible at all.
But it's not less credible than the idea that masks and lockdowns don't work and that Sweden is telling you that.
All right. How many of our stories today, stories in the news, are based on just lies?
All right, let's go through them.
So we've got the coronavirus situation, which, yeah, that's been filled with lies.
We've got the Russia collusion thing and who's behind it.
That's filled with lies.
It's all about lies. We've got the stimulus deal being off, but the stimulus deal was never really being negotiated.
It was a lie that it was ever being negotiated because it wasn't.
So that's just a lie. Let's see, what else?
Facebook is banning QAnon because those are lies.
The Pulitzer Prize might get revoked, or at least some scholars are asking for it, because the document that got the Pulitzer Prize had a big lie in it.
Do you see a pattern yet?
The pattern is pretty clear.
All of our biggest problems are based on the fact that we don't have a credible news media anymore.
As soon as your news source becomes completely non-credible, then all of your news becomes bullshit.
It's just all bullshit.
Every one of our problems is bullshit.
But the problem is real.
But what people are saying about it is just not true.
Right?
Somebody says that I'm conflicted about Kamala because she's my creation.
Right?
See, you get blocked for saying stuff like that because that's a mind-reading thing.
So, hold on a second.
I have to move something in order to block you.
Nah, it's not worth it.
I'll block you next time.
I'll catch you next time. So if that confuses you, the blocking is when you ascribe opinions to me that are inaccurate.
You can ask me my opinion and you can certainly criticize my actual opinion.
But when you assign an opinion to me that I do not hold and then criticize it, you get blocked.
Pence is somebody saying Pence is more disciplined than Trump.
I think that's true.
He's more disciplined, less interesting.
All right. That is all I have for now.
And I will talk to you Periscopers tomorrow.
And you YouTubers still with you.
We can look at your comments here as we close up.
Is anybody enjoying the YouTube experience better?
So you might have noticed I took out my AirPods that I was using for a microphone.
And I'm not seeing anybody...
Oh, somebody's saying the sound is echoing.
Okay, that's what I was going to ask.
So you should hear a little echo.
Let me give you a little update on the sound because so many of you have asked for it.
Now, people have said to me, Scott, you should upgrade your sound system.
Yes. Yes, I should.
I've got every kind of sound device you could possibly think of.
I've got a whole rack of high-end sound equipment.
I've got this.
I've got this.
And here's what I've learned, because I've experimented with all of this stuff.
If you do this super high-end stuff, like the Shure microphone and the sound boards, etc., you can make that work, but only if you have a soundproof room, because this kind of microphone will pick up too much room noise and you get way too much.
The preferred method, which I just bought, I bought another lavalier to use that.
The lavalier, when it clips on, doesn't give you the full richness of the high-end sound system with a soundproof room, but you can use this in a non-soundproof room without the echo.
So on Periscope, the sound is pretty good.
It's not as good as the best it could be, but it's fine.
I had to order a second one of these so that I could use it with YouTube.
So here's the bottom line. The sound will be different in a few days on YouTube without the echo and I think that will be the best it could be.
I have tried for four years every possible sound and video combination and this is what I've learned.
You can't beat the video from an iPhone or an iPad.
So this is just my iPhone that you're watching right now.
It's the best video.
If you get any kind of high-end camera, you can get a better video, but the complexity of a high-end camera, because you have to run it through other equipment and other software, it basically makes it completely unusable.
Because you can get it to work, but the very second time you want it to work, some software will need updating, something went off, something timed out.
It just never works twice.
So the iPhone or the iPad is the number one way to get a clean video that works every time.
But to get the sound, like I said, I've purchased expensive sound boards such as this one.
Such as this thing.
And, you know, I've learned to use it.
I've hooked it all up. I've soundproofed a room, you know, a different room in the house.
I've tried every combination of microphones and the best kind.
I'm buying some pretty high-end stuff.
And nothing works as well as a $20 plug-in lavalier microphone on an iPad.
Nothing comes close. Now, I could come close if I had a full-time engineer and a room that was designed for sound and then this high-end equipment and then the engineer troubleshooting it every day because you have to troubleshoot it every time you use it.