Episode 1177 Scott Adams: Want Some Election Optimism? I Have it. Come Get it.
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
Twitter censorship of President Trump
Voter election fraud
Electoral College vote options
Arizona GOP blocked early vote count?
Wisconsin 89% voter turnout, normal is 70%?
President Trump's potential path to victory
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If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topics to build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure.
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Alright, all you YouTubers, I'm coming to you early before I fire up Periscope.
I want to see if any of you have any questions before I get going on my normal program.
I see there are 68, 78 of you now.
Hey, who won?
Well, we'll talk about that.
You're here for the simultaneous SIP? Well, that'll happen in three seconds.
So I fired up YouTube early because I've been having some technical problems with it.
In about 15 seconds or 20, I'm going to fire up Periscope and then we'll get going.
Okay? And I finally figured out my monitor setup so I could easily see all of the comments.
It was a little hard before.
Is Sam Harris saying things again?
Are you ready?
Here we go. Hey everybody!
Come on in. It's time.
It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams special optimism episode.
Yeah, have I been a little bit not as optimistic as you expected and wanted me to be?
Perhaps. Perhaps I have.
It's been a tough week, hasn't it?
But we're recovering now.
Baseline happiness. It's all coming back.
You ready? We're a little bit exhausted after the election, but we're not done.
No, we're not done.
There's a lot more to go.
And it's going to be good.
I'm going to tell you about all the good news.
But first, the simultaneous sip.
And all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or a chalice or a stein, a canteen, a jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of that dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
Except for mail-in voting.
It's called the simultaneous sip, and it happens now.
Go. Oh, yeah.
Yep. I don't think there's a dangling chad anywhere in the country after that sip.
It's all good now.
Well, let's talk about all the things.
Have you seen your stocks?
Now, I know you don't all own stocks, but you should be interested.
The stocks are, oh my god, doing really well.
Now, are you confused as to why stocks are going up, since we don't even know who the president will be?
Why does that happen?
Can you think of it?
Oh yeah, somebody's reminding me to talk about the death predictions.
Make a note of that.
I do want to talk about that.
So stocks are up.
Here's your economics lesson of the day.
Stocks like a divided government.
So the fact that the Republicans looks like they're going to retain a slight majority in the Senate, and of course the courts are leaning conservative for a while, So it kind of doesn't matter if Joe Biden gets elected or not.
We will have this divided government and, you know, sometimes our markets like that.
Now the other possibility is that the markets think Joe Biden will be elected and they like it.
Do you think markets like higher taxes?
I don't.
I've got a feeling that if we knew Biden would get elected...
Stocks would be maybe not so happy.
But getting Biden elected and having a Senate which is likely to thwart his chances of a tax increase, well, maybe that gives you cause for hope.
But I think there's something much bigger, way bigger, than even taxes, as big as taxes are, right?
Interest rates and taxes...
And earnings, those are all the big things driving stock markets.
But sometimes there's this animal spirit thing.
There's just the thing you feel that you don't even know if you can put words on it.
It's just the general zeitgeist, if you want to use the big word.
It's just how people feel.
Why do people feel optimistic right now?
What would cause that as we're fighting this out?
I have a contrarian theory, and it goes like this.
Didn't you expect the worst?
Some people did.
I didn't. But a lot of people expected that we would have this election, and then 10 minutes after the votes are counted, we would be tearing each other's flesh off.
We would be devolved into the Civil War.
Now, I've been telling you it's not going to happen.
It's not even close to happening.
It's nowhere near the universe of something that's going to happen.
We're not going to have a civil war.
Oh yeah, we'll have some street protesting, we'll have some looting, something will get caught on fire.
But we're not going to have a civil war, and here's why.
We don't want one.
That's it. I used to have a hypnosis instructor who taught me everything I need to know about weight loss.
And it goes like this.
He was overweight himself, my instructor was.
He said, you know why I overeat?
And we sat there and waited for the answer, and he said, because I like to eat.
That's it. That's the whole story.
I like to eat.
Everything else that you learn about weight loss won't be as important as that.
He just likes to eat.
I've often said that my ability to keep my weight under control isn't really willpower.
It's just that I don't like eating as much as other people like eating.
But if I liked eating as much as he did, I'd probably weigh what he weighs.
Likewise, this country has a tiny, tiny little sliver of people who would want something like a Civil War.
Everybody else don't want it.
Don't want it even a little bit.
Don't want it slightly.
Don't want it in my private thoughts.
Don't want it subconsciously.
Don't want it consciously, subconsciously.
Don't want it. Doesn't matter if I'm left or right.
Don't want it. And so, it wasn't until you have the election and you actually watch and observe how other people act, because your belief about a civil war, correct me if I'm wrong, Was your prediction about what other people would do?
It was never about yourself, was it?
Was there any point where you said, I think I might grab my weapon and start some trouble?
You probably never thought that about yourself.
You were just thinking, well, I'm watching the news, I'm on social media, it feels like other people are kind of fired up.
But it was never true.
Whatever it is that makes America America?
Nothing changed on that.
The strongest forces in the world are the voluntary ones, meaning that people are trying to get into America because they like America the way it is.
You know, it could be better, of course.
But people are not trying to come here illegally because they don't like it the way it is.
Of course, everything could be better.
So I think that whatever it is that's the central psychological force that keeps this country together is as strong as ever and never really was even challenged by any of this.
If you have an historical view of the world and the country...
Anybody who has the longest historical understanding, say your Newt Gingriches, even your Jake Tappers, somebody who's a student of history, as both of them are, We're good to go.
Our current times are really not a challenge for us.
We can handle this, and we are.
LeBron James is asking for help because apparently one of his best childhood friends had a sister who was murdered.
So he's trying to find out who the murderer is of some really good friend's sister.
And he's looking for help from the public.
And I can give him a little bit of help.
I don't know who the killer is, but I can narrow it down.
So, LeBron, if you're looking for at least some initial help in telling you who the killer is, I can narrow it down.
It wasn't a Trump supporter.
That's all I know. I don't know who it was, But I can tell you there are about 90 million people that you can rule out.
Probably not a Trump supporter.
I feel confident about that.
On Twitter, somebody was giving me a hard time because I was out of my lane.
I'm a mere cartoonist who has written some books, and I do not have legitimacy in talking about politics and things which I know nothing about.
Now, I certainly would not be the one to tell you I'm some expert on politics or history or any of it, because I'm not even close.
But I would like to point out, as I often do, the loser philosophy that says you can't change fields.
The Wright brothers had very little experience building airplanes until they did.
Steve Jobs was a college dropout who built Apple Computer.
And, of course, Leonardo da Vinci had a few skills.
I'm not comparing myself to any of those people.
I'm simply pointing out that those people who say, you can't be good in this area because you have only experience in this other domain, that is the most loserish philosophy or filter on life of any filter on life.
It's up there with be yourself.
The worst advice ever.
Don't be yourself.
Be better than that.
You know, if we all acted like, you know, how we just felt like acting, just, oh, be yourself.
You would be a monster.
Don't be yourself.
Try to look at other people and maybe see if you can get a model of how to be better than whatever you are.
See, look around. Maybe you can improve on that a little bit, huh?
I don't think you reached the pinnacle of human behavior.
Maybe you can... Maybe you can take it up a notch.
All right. So don't tell people to stay in their lanes.
It's the worst advice after be yourself.
Let us check our predictions, if we will.
Every now and then I tell you that since you can't determine what is true and what is not in our fake news world, that at least you can do this.
It's the closest you can get to understanding what is real and what isn't.
It's prediction. If your worldview or your filter on life allows you to predict accurately, you probably are going to do pretty well on the next question, too, if your history is good using the filter you're using.
So every now and then I say, all right, stop.
What did you predict would be happening today, and how right are you?
So now we have this election stuff, and we can look at our predictions.
If Biden wins, my prediction of a Trump victory would be wrong.
We can all agree on that.
And the way we score these, it's sort of binary.
Did you pick the winner or did you not pick the winner?
So if it turns out to be Biden, and I don't think that that's certain at all, then I would be wrong.
But we don't know that yet.
There's still a clear path for Trump, which I'll talk about in a minute.
But suppose it's a razor-thin margin, and it goes to Biden, and it goes that way because of the oddities of how state populations are.
So in other words, let's say the vote is so close that it's really not even about choice or democracy or even the vote.
All it's about is the coincidence of where people decided to live.
You get that, right? Because of the Electoral College, when the vote is that close, and not even as close as it is now, but if you're that close in the vote, it's not really a vote of preference anymore.
All you're doing is you're doing a census of where people live, in effect.
Because where people decided to live And the coincidence of this demographic group ended up more in this state than another state.
That's what picked your president.
You know, should we ever get a real result?
It wasn't people's choice at all.
So all of the close ones are really just a coin flip.
That has to do with, oh, a lot of people moved out of California and moved to Arizona, so it changed the electoral balance, and therefore you get different people.
But here's my point.
The basis of my prediction for a Trump win was all predicated on this following prediction.
In other words, the Trump win was a sub- Prediction of the larger prediction, which was that the polls were fake.
Now, not all of them.
I believe that the Rasmussen poll was probably in the neighborhood, and it was.
Trafalgar, I think, was in the neighborhood.
Even if they get it wrong about Trump winning, they were pretty close to what the vote would look like, right?
But all of those ones with double-digit leads of Biden, they were all fake polls.
So now here's where you get to check yourself.
If you believed those polls were accurate because, hey, they corrected from the last time, you know, 2016, they had these known problems, so they had all this time, they knew what the problems were, so they fixed them, right?
Did you predict that?
If you predicted that the polls would be accurate this time, give yourself an X on that one.
You got that wrong.
Even if you got the right president.
So even if you said Biden will get elected, if you thought it was because the polls said so so clearly, you were more wrong than right.
So let me state this, and I know this sounds like a weasel answer, but I'm going to do it anyway.
My wrongness, if it turned out that Trump lost, but by the narrowest margin and the electoral college reasons, my prediction would still be closer than most of the country.
Because most of the country said, I think those polls are about right.
And they weren't even close.
So I was right about that, which was a bigger prediction.
Who gets to be president, really, like I say, has to do with the oddities of where people live.
I'm no expert on that.
But I am an expert on bullshit.
So I will make one claim of special talent.
And it's based on my stack of experiences.
I believe I can spot bullshit better than most people.
What I can't do is count populations and estimate that this county will go red or blue.
I can't do any of that stuff.
But I can spot bullshit, and the polls were such obvious bullshit, and I think many of you were on the same page with that, that that means something.
So if I say to myself, what is my ability to pick an electoral college winner?
I'd say, probably not any better than anybody else.
But ability to spot bullshit?
I'm going to give myself an A for that.
Does anybody argue with that?
Would anybody argue that I should get an A for predicting that the polls were bullshit?
And I think the reason will be, they may call it shy Trump supporters, but I'm going to stick with my original characterization of it as the world's greatest dad joke, meaning that somebody says they can't believe I'm digging this deep.
What do you think I'm digging deep on?
I don't even know what that comment means.
So, yeah, so I'd give myself an A for knowing the polls are wrong.
If I get the actual prediction wrong of Trump, the way we score things, that would be failure, just because that's the way we score it.
But my worldview is certainly very, very close to reality, as we're going to be able to measure it.
Might have missed it by, you know, 1% or something.
How about your prediction of whether there would be a revolution?
Well, there's still time, I suppose.
We could still have a civil war.
But I predicted, no way.
So far? So far, we don't really have a civil war.
Right? Here's what else we predicted.
How about... How about predicting deaths from coronavirus?
This was what somebody prompted me in the comments.
So back in the spring, before we knew much about the coronavirus, I had predicted that the shutdowns would save so many lives because we wouldn't have car accidents and a lot of extreme sports and stuff like that, that we might save enough lives from normal accidents That it would be a very low net death rate, even with the coronavirus deaths thrown in.
Now that prediction was when we didn't know a whole lot about the coronavirus itself.
So, that was a case where science didn't know enough to tell us enough so we could make good predictions on that.
So I would say that prediction seems completely wrong.
Later, when we knew more about it, I predicted that the death rate would be over 200,000.
And I did that because I had asked other people, what is your opinion of what would be not a problem in the end?
In other words, if we got to the end of the coronavirus and got past it, and how many people died, would you consider that the effort we put fighting it was worth it?
In other words, what would tell you that it really was not a regular influenza?
That it wasn't just an extra strong influenza, that it really was a gigantic problem compared to other problems?
And most people came in around 200,000 deaths.
They said, 200,000 deaths?
That would convince me that I was wrong all the time about it just being the flu.
And so, sure enough.
Yes, so I'm looking in the comments.
You're saying that my initial prediction was that we would net 5,000 deaths.
In other words, we'd save enough people with this shutdown if it was short, no car accidents, etc., that the net would be very small, 5,000.
That was about the wrongest...
Prediction anybody ever made.
Now, you should go to the next level, which is why was it wrong?
If you were wrong about a prediction because the bulk of science has not given you good information, I think you could be okay with that, right?
A bad scientific opinion based on bad scientific data is not really a flaw.
But I believe that my ability to detect bullshit is my special talent.
I thought it was bullshit when people were comparing coronavirus to regular influenza.
So that was my bullshit call.
That part I was right about.
So on the bullshit...
Identification. I nailed that.
This is a big problem.
It's not the regular flu.
And, all right, so that's my record of predictions.
You should do your own.
So McEnany is saying that Trump's path to victory requires him to win Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Georgia, which are all razor-thin.
Is that the most perfect 2020 thing to happen?
That it would come down to just the smallest margins, where actually a recount could actually make a difference?
I don't think it would make a difference, but you could imagine that the margin would get so small that a recount actually could change it.
I don't think we're there yet, but maybe.
Twitter is blocking some of Trump's tweets.
Because they suggest he may have won or that the vote is fixed or something.
And this is really...
I've got to say, at the moment, it's not hurting him because the Streisand effect makes you wonder what he was saying and then you go look, so he probably has.
Who is saying, OMG, stop?
Stop what? Stop what?
I don't even know what you're talking about.
So, what do you think?
Do you think Trump should be able to have free speech and say whatever he wants about winning?
Or, in his special case, because he's the president, he could cause something bad to happen by his choice of freedom of speech?
Well, let me say this.
Oh, I want to swear again.
Does anybody mind if I use the F word?
Does anybody have a problem with that?
Because, like I say often, there are just some sentences that just require it.
It's like you can't get past it.
It just requires it. So send the kids out of the room.
Let me say it again.
When you restrict President Trump from speaking the way he would like to speak on social media by putting warnings on it and, you know, And blocking it, etc.
On one hand, we can certainly all understand the point of it.
The point of it is they don't want bad information that would damage the country to get out through the platform.
That's not a bad instinct, is it?
To want to not have bad information get out from the president?
But here's the counter-argument to that.
And let me say it as clearly as I can.
He's the fucking president of the United States.
The fucking President of the United States.
When he talks, don't fucking tell me I can't hear it.
He's the fucking President of the United States.
If you want to block Joe Lunchpail, who's got a dumb opinion and he's promoting some conspiracy, I don't care.
I didn't want to hear him anyway.
But when you meter or filter or block the President of the United States because you think he's saying something that shouldn't be said, you are becoming the President of the United States, Twitter.
I didn't elect you.
I don't remember voting for Twitter for President of the United States.
And do you know what I want to hear about the Twitter, let's say, quality control people's opinions?
Not a fucking thing.
I don't need to hear the opinions of Twitter's, whatever, quality control or censorship group.
Because in effect, that's what we're getting.
When they put any kind of a warning on the President's speech, you're seeing Twitter's free speech.
And Twitter has decided that you can see their free speech, but not the...
May I say it again?
But not the president of the fucking United States?
Yeah, he may say some things that are dangerous.
I think that's just a fact.
And maybe you don't want that to hurt anything.
I get that.
You know, the base instinct there isn't wrong.
But in terms of a system that...
Supports the citizens of the United States.
This one's kind of black and white.
Not kinda. Let me remove kinda.
This one's black and white.
If Twitter decided to put a warning on something I say, you know, I'm a fairly prominent political pundit at this point, but I don't know that I would think the same thing about that.
Because I'm not the, may I say it again, President of the fucking United States.
You don't really have any kind of, you know, need or right to hear what I say on every single topic.
So if I cross the line and accidentally violate some Twitter rule, and Twitter puts a little warning on me or bans a tweet, I'd say, okay, It's negotiable.
That's a little negotiable.
Maybe I'll appeal it.
Maybe it's reversed.
Maybe it doesn't. But the total importance of that is nothing.
If I do something over the line and I get slapped back by Twitter, maybe I learn something.
Maybe it gets negotiated away.
But it's not a big deal. It's not a big deal, as long as it doesn't go too far.
But when you decide to limit the speech of the President of the United States, Twitter, we elected that guy.
I know you don't like it, maybe, but we elected that fucking guy.
I want to hear everything he says, when he says it, in the most efficient way you can get it to my brain.
I'll decide if I don't like it.
And other free speech will tell, hopefully, will inform people whether it was the right thing for him to say.
But man, I didn't elect Twitter.
So don't be blocking my fucking president.
And I don't care if it's, you know, some other president.
It's not about Trump.
Twitter shouldn't be blocking fucking presidents.
That's just...
I'm sorry, there's no argument there.
If you tell me that you're going to argue that point, I'm sure most of you wouldn't, but if there's anybody who's going to argue that point that I can't hear what my fucking president is saying because you think it's harmful, no.
No. You could do that shit with other citizens and I'll look at that as the normal interplay of what works and what's good for the country, but don't block my fucking president.
Um... What else we got going on?
Let's talk about these...
I know the only thing anybody cares about is how the state vote counts go and blah, blah, blah.
So let's talk about that. So what are the odds that as we look into the vote that you would see things that you are clearly, absolutely convinced are voter fraud?
What are the odds That if you look into it, you'll find that.
The voter fraud, that's pretty important in this election.
Odds are 100%.
Right? 100%.
But here's the important part.
There's a 100% chance you would see voter fraud even if it's not there.
That's the point.
If there's one thing you can learn from this Periscope, this live stream today, it's that You would see a 100% chance, there's no wiggle room here, you will see fraud even if it doesn't exist.
You have to understand that.
You're going to see it even if it's not there.
That's how confirmation bias works.
And you will be convinced that's real fraud that you just saw, even if it isn't.
It will feel exactly the same.
So, I don't know whether there's massive fraud or whether there isn't.
I can tell you I agree with you.
Sure looks like it.
Sure looks like it.
But wouldn't it look exactly like this if there were not massive fraud?
Sure, sure, you're going to find individual small things, but maybe that's just always the case.
Maybe not enough to change anything.
But that said, we do have a pretty sketchy result here.
And would you say that it would be true That no matter what the final outcome is, let's say we do get to a point where there's one president, do you think that the other side will accept the result?
Not really. There's pretty much no chance of that.
So whoever is the president will be considered a fraud, or illegally or illegitimately elected, by the other side.
I think that's now baked in.
There's no way to get past that at this point.
So you have to take that as a given and say, all right, what do you do?
What do you do? Well, there is one very disturbing possibility that this opens up.
And you may have seen some hint of this on social media.
And it goes like this.
Because we have this thing called the Electoral College, and the way it works is the state legislators...
Select the electors.
So those are the people who cast the vote that matters in the Electoral College.
Now they are not legally bound to go by the vote.
So your elector could, it would be kind of rare, but they could vote opposite of what the actual vote in the state was.
They could. Nothing would stop them.
It's completely legal.
And the reason that they can is this.
That's why they can do it.
The reason the legislators can ignore the will of the people is if they think it wasn't a legitimate vote.
That would be one reason, maybe the only reason, but it's the one I know about.
So if the GOP legislators in a couple of tight states, and let's say it comes down to, and this is entirely possible, Maybe at least a 50% chance of this.
This could happen.
Suppose it comes down to Arizona.
That could happen, right?
It just comes down to Arizona.
And suppose, because Arizona has a GOP state legislature, I don't know how many people are in the legislature, but suppose a handful of influential ones Decide that the vote was rigged.
They might be wrong, but they could decide that, and they could even believe it.
And then they decide to cast their votes based on what they think is right, in their opinion, versus how the vote count went that they don't trust.
You could end up with a President Trump who did not win even the electoral vote In terms of the popular vote that informs the electoral vote, but could win in the actual electoral vote.
Would there be a little bit of rioting if that happens?
Yeah, there would be.
There would be some serious rioting if that happens.
But if you think the odds of that are zero, they're not.
Now, I don't know what the odds are, but it's definitely not zero.
Because serious people are already talking about it.
There's no legal or constitutional barrier to it happening.
And because the setup, thanks to the weird way that this year went, the setup is that we feel like there are extremes of different outcomes.
In other words, a President Biden you think is the slippery slope to the end of the republic.
Many people do.
Other people would think another four years of Trump would end the Republic.
So, if it's that important, it's not like Bush versus Gore, where the big thing that all the smart pundits were saying is, well, it doesn't matter which one.
They're all basically the same.
These two are not the same.
A Biden presidency and a Trump presidency, at least in your mind, you're thinking AOC when you think Biden.
A lot of you are. So, the stakes are through the roof, meaning that the GOP legislators could legitimately think they were saving the union.
Actually think that.
Now, of course, the way it would be seen is they're just being illegitimate, and they're just voting for their team, and that's all it is.
So that's the way it would be seen.
But it is entirely possible that those legislators would say, I'm not going to let the country be destroyed by socialism, and it looks like that's exactly what would happen, so I'm going to just vote for Trump.
Could happen. Don't rule that down if you see it.
And of course, because it's 2020, even the Senate race is locked at 47 apiece with how long it's going to take to figure out who actually owns the Senate.
But I think these smart people are saying that's leaning slightly GOP. And that would be why the stock market's up if we have a government that can't function.
The stock market likes that.
Here's a question I asked that I've not gotten a good answer to.
When Arizona's, whoever it is in charge of the elections, went to the state legislature and said, can we start counting the mail-in votes before Election Day, as other states do, the GOP-led legislature in Arizona said no.
And so Arizona has to take several more days Because they couldn't start early, even though other states are doing exactly that, and that's why you have, for example, Florida, you get a result on election day because they counted the mail-in votes ahead of time, the ones that were ahead of time.
Now, why do you think a Republican-led legislature would say no to something that other Republican states are doing, so it's not a Republican-Democrat thing, It makes perfect sense.
Can you think of any reason that Republicans would say no to counting early when you have the ballots and you have the mechanisms to count?
Can you think of any reason for that?
The reason that I was offered, which I'm not buying, is that it was always a setup to overthrow the election result.
In other words, that the The accusation is that the Republican state legislature in Arizona intentionally did the wrong thing of not allowing the votes to be counted early to have an unclear outcome,
because that would give you more, let's say, more flexibility to, let's say, have the electors be selected by the GOP, to have some kind of a sketchy outcome.
Do you believe that? Do you believe that the Republican legislature in Arizona, as accused, were so clever that they decided to do what makes no sense, which is not count the votes early, just so they'd have a bad outcome that wasn't trusted, because then they could do some mischief and play games and get Trump elected?
Do you believe that? Because that's what's offered as a reason, and it feels a little too clever to me.
And it feels as if that had ever been a plan, that all of the Republican states that could be close, which would include Florida, at least we thought it could be close, they would have all done it.
If there was some obvious Republican advantage, wouldn't they all do it?
Why just some Republicans did it?
I don't know. But that could be, I don't know, I don't know what the composition of Florida's state legislature is.
That could be a factor. All right.
You're watching Sharpiegate, the idea that Republicans were given Sharpies to fill out ballots, and the rumor is that the Sharpies will be declined by the computer or something.
But apparently Sharpies are recommended and they don't.
So I think the Sharpie gay thing is just confirmation bias and BS. Does everybody agree with that yet?
The Sharpie gay thing doesn't look real to me.
I would toss that one out as being important.
It could be. You never know.
You never know.
Alright, some questions being asked about the Wisconsin count.
Now, this is a perfect example of something that later we could find out there was a good reason for it.
Now, one of the most important things you'll ever learn in your life about how to understand your reality goes like this.
If you look at a situation and you say to yourself, there's only one explanation for this set of facts, you're not smart.
Okay? Let me say it again.
It doesn't matter what the situation is.
If you look at a situation and you say to yourself, there is exactly one thing that could explain this set of facts.
Only one explanation.
You're not smart. Because one of the most common situations in our experience is that you think there's only one way to explain something, and then the moment somebody tells you the other explanation, you go, okay, that makes sense too.
We're not really good at knowing if we've thought of all the possibilities.
So that's how confirmation happens, confirmation bias.
So I'm going to give you an example in which I can't think of any way that this could be legitimate.
But does that mean it's illegitimate?
Nope. It just means that there may be some argument we haven't heard.
But again, I can't think of any explanation for what I'm going to tell you that isn't mischief.
So Harlan Hill mentioned this first in a tweet.
That's where I saw it. Wisconsin, if you look at the number of registered voters, and then you look at the number of votes, it would suggest that they had an 89% turnout.
Now, do you believe there's any chance that Wisconsin had an 89% voter turnout?
Because that's never happened anywhere.
And is there something special happening in Wisconsin that would make people's brains on fire and they would vote?
Nearly 90% of them would vote.
I can't think of a reason other than the vote is fake.
Now, harken back to my last conversation.
The fact that you and I can't think of any explanation for how Wisconsin could have an 89% turnout, because you know that can't happen, right?
I mean, that's so far out of the ordinary that you just, your brain can't process that as actually having happened.
So if the only explanation is fraud, Is it fraud?
Because it's the only explanation, right?
Let me give you another explanation.
The numbers are wrong.
Somebody did the math wrong, or the numbers that are reported as voting, they just reported it wrong, or the number of people who have signed up to vote, who are registered to vote.
Maybe just one of those numbers is wrong.
I'm not saying that's what's going on.
I just want you to have less confidence in your certainty that there's only one explanation for anything.
It could be this.
It could be an entirely different situation.
There's almost always more than one explanation for things.
Just keep that little loop playing in your head.
I can't think of any other explanation, but quite often there is.
This is one where even I am stumped.
Usually I can come up with at least some kind of a reasonable guess of how something could be different than the way it looks.
But I don't even have a good guess on this because people are tweeting this publicly and somebody would have called them out for having the wrong numbers.
So there's something to look into there.
Remember when I predicted that both Biden and Trump would be declared president at one point?
I think we're heading for that.
Because what if we get to the point—and this is just one way it could happen.
It could happen some other way, too.
Suppose we get to the point where Biden has won the Electoral College vote according to the votes— But there's a faithless, as they call them, faithless elector who decides to vote for Trump anyway because they don't trust the vote count or whatever.
You could have a situation where CNN would declare Biden the president because he won the electoral college vote and Fox News would declare Trump the president because the actual electors selected Trump.
Now, Do you think that that could get worked out?
Maybe the Supreme Court makes a decision and works it out.
Maybe. But we're at a point, and you've seen it clearly, where the mainstream media can simply convince half of the country that Biden became president.
They can do that.
And I predict that it will happen.
That there will be a point where CNN is telling the country, That they have a different legitimate president than you're hearing on, let's say, a right-leaning network.
So the Trump sporting crowds have descended on Philadelphia to try to keep them honest in their vote counting.
Representative Gosar is there.
Mike Cernovich is there.
So they're bringing the heat.
People are voting with their feet and their signs and their protests.
So we'll keep an eye on that.
It's probably super important that Trump supporters are on the streets if you want to get the result you want.
Let me give you a full report on all the rioting because of the Trump supporting people.
So here's a full list of all the looting and fires that were set by Trump supporters in Philadelphia.
Okay, still zero.
Still zero. All right.
Now that the odds of the country trusting the vote result is zero, would you accept that assumption?
Would you accept the assumption that half of the country will not trust the vote outcome no matter what it is?
Doesn't matter if it's Biden or Trump.
Half the country isn't going to think it was valid.
So that turns it into sort of a persuasion election, doesn't it?
Suddenly, the president is going to be kind of based on who the media on the left or the right does the best job of persuading.
So it's a persuasion election now.
Either Trump or Biden could become president based on the same set of facts that we have now.
Either of them could become, and it could be persuasion that makes the difference.
Persuasion in the sense of You should ignore this vote count or persuasion in the sense of believing that some state was illegitimate in their vote count, etc.
That kind of persuasion. One good thing that might come out of this bad 2020 situation is a whole new voting system.
And here's what I think it would look like.
If I were going to design a new voting system, it would go like this.
Number one...
It would cause you to do it on a device.
So if grandma is voting, she might need a little help, or maybe grandma could still do a paper ballot.
But for most of us, if you can use a smartphone, you should have an app, and the app should verify your identity with facial recognition.
Now, is facial recognition 100%?
No, but it's pretty close.
It's getting close. So on top of the facial recognition, You should be forced to record, let's say, three seconds of video of you just saying your name.
So I turn on my app and I say, I'm Scott Adams and I'm voting.
And the app registers that I said that You know, within a few minutes of actually pushing the buttons to vote and submit it.
So now I have the facial recognition, but if I ever need to go back and check, I also have the video taken, just a three-second video, of right before I voted, and you can check those timers.
And then the information gets pushed onto the blockchain, because the blockchain becomes a permanent public record.
And then you have a separate app, or maybe it's the same app, With a different function.
Where you can track your vote.
You can see how you voted.
You can see it being put onto the blockchain.
And you can go check it.
Maybe other people can't check it.
But you can check your own vote, for example.
Or maybe the government can check it.
You can check it, but nobody else can.
Let's say. For example.
I don't know if that's a thing. So some technical people can fill me in to see if that's a possible situation.
So you've got your blockchain.
You got your facial recognition, you got three seconds of video in case it ever needs to be checked, and you have a way to track your own vote all the way and get a confirmation.
Is that not better?
Somebody says that is voter suppression.
It's not voter suppression if you can still vote the other way.
So if grandma can still just fill out a form, that's good enough.
Somebody says blockchain can be hacked.
If blockchain were hacked, then when I go to check my vote, I would see that it had been hacked.
So I think anything could be hacked, but I think blockchain, you could always see the hack.
And that's where I'll need a technical expert to tell me if I'm off on that.
So let's just put that out there.
Now, what do you think about the fact that Trump gained in every category, every demographic except white men?
I didn't.
Well, I did predict that he would do better with black voters, and I guess he did.
But I didn't see Hispanic voters pulling for Trump as hard, and I should have.
I feel like after the fact...
It's sort of obvious after the fact, don't you think?
Because the one thing that Black Lives Matter did is it marginalized Latino, Hispanic, whatever is the better word to use, voters.
If you were...
Put yourself in their position, right?
If you're not in that community, put yourself in there.
And imagine that you just watched a year of Black Lives Matter arguing for their...
Whatever. Relief, special consideration, more justice, whatever words you want to put on it.
And you see the Hispanic, Latino, Latinx community, whatever they want to call themselves today, and you see them just being ignored, basically.
Just being completely ignored.
They're not even in the conversation.
How would that make you feel?
And if you like law and order, and who doesn't, except criminals, why wouldn't you favor Trump if he's the law and order guy?
So we should not have been surprised, and that's on us.
If you were surprised by that, that's on you just the way it's on me, because I didn't see it coming, and we really should have.
But here's my hypothesis for why white men, the group you would most imagine would have increased or stayed the same for Trump, why that was the one conspicuous category, why there were fewer supporters.
And it goes like this.
Beta males.
Now, I know that when you use a term like beta male, You automatically put your brain in a place where you say, oh, he's going to say something funny, or it's going to be an insult, or he's really, he's zinging that group, zing, he got him. I'm not doing that, right?
So take all the humor and sarcasm out of this conversation, none of it.
It is just true that there's this tremendous range of of difference even within demographic groups.
As in, one black person is not like the next black person.
One woman is not like the next woman.
Indeed, I've said that if you were to take the Venn diagram of men and women, there's this gigantic overlap in which there are women who are more like men than some men are like men.
Does that make sense? And vice versa?
Meaning that I see this continuum of gender, and one of the reasons that I'm pro-LGBTQ and every kind of variation, is that I see it as this infinite difference that is way bigger than your demographics.
The difference between just two white males can be pretty extreme.
Pretty extreme.
So to say that your 300-pound alpha-testosterone-filled male is sort of in the same demographic with your 120-pound Antifa male who doesn't have any testosterone in his body, to say they're in the same demographic group is just sort of bad thinking.
They're very different.
And I would argue that that hypothetical male who has low testosterone probably is closer to female, not biologically, but in the ways that matter to life, right?
And I also wonder if there's not a gullibility factor.
And it goes like this.
Somebody did a...
Somebody did a little survey where they asked, I forget who it was, I'd give credit if I could remember, in which they asked minority members if they recognized the racist dog whistles as racist dog whistles.
So they would say something that Trump had said, and they'd say, what do you think?
Does it sound like a racist dog whistle?
If you ask white men, they will often, if they're Democrats, they'll say, oh yeah!
I can hear that.
Anybody can hear that.
That statement, that's a racist dog whistle, and I can hear it clearly.
And then you ask a black voter, do you hear it?
And the black voter will say, what racist dog whistle?
I just heard somebody say they like law and order.
I like law and order.
Why would you think I wouldn't?
So it turns out that this racist dog whistle thing That the Democrats have been trying to sell.
It sells much more easily to white men.
Or maybe white people in general.
But the white men were the ones who, I think, were sold on this idea.
And I think that minorities, and this is just a hypothesis, that if you live and breathe racism, it's the fabric of your reality.
Let's say you're just average black American.
You walk out the door.
You don't even have to walk out the door.
You're just surrounded.
This is your impression of the world.
You're surrounded by, you know, subtle racism, systemic racism, direct racism.
Don't you think that a black person is good at spotting racism?
Right? In the same way that I think most of you would accept this generality.
That gay people are better at spotting other gay people?
Would you all accept that that's true?
Now, of course, it's a gross generality, so I hope it's true, but I think it's true.
Anything that you focus on and is important to you, your filters will be set that you can spot it.
Because you care about it, you think about it, it's your world.
You can spot your world easier than you can spot something you're unfamiliar with.
So in the same way that gay people probably, I think it's true, I'll bet you could actually prove this if you did a test, gay people probably can spot other gay people better than, you know, people who are not gay.
Don't you think it's also true that your average black American can spot real racism faster than somebody else?
They're just better tuned to it.
And they can't hear this dog whistle because it was bullshit all along.
But the white people, who don't have any special tuning, we're mostly oblivious to a lot of racism.
We can pick up the obvious stuff, but if anybody's been paying attention, it's quite clear that white people have to be trained To spot racism.
Am I right? We can see the obvious stuff, but all the subtle stuff, we have to be trained.
That's what every black, brown person is telling us.
You know, you don't see it.
You've got to be trained.
But white people were trained to see this dog whistle thing that wasn't there.
And black people, being immune to the training, Because they have real-life experience.
They don't need CNN to tell them what's racist, do they?
Do you think a black person needs CNN to tell them what is racist?
I don't think so. I think they got that worked out.
So, I think white people are just more gullible on this story.
I'm not saying in general, right?
It's not a general gullibility problem.
But on this topic, I think white people don't have their own anchor, right?
So they can't disprove it with their own experience.
They can't say, no, that's not a racist dog whistle.
They take other people's word for it.
And so, therefore, more gullible.
All right. And I've said this before, but I'll say it again.
I believe that Democrats, because they're so concerned with demographic groups as opposed to the Republicans who are more concerned with the Constitution.
Now, everybody sees race.
Everybody sees gender. There's nobody so woke that they don't see that all the time.
But there is a difference.
And the Republicans do try pretty hard, the conservatives, try really hard To ignore the racial gender stuff and focus on, you know, constitutional rights as just being more practical.
But the Democrats, I would say they have developed a hierarchy of value.
And it goes like this.
If you're a Democrat, at the top of your value would be black women.
You see that in the street protests.
You see that black women seem to have just sort of automatic authority in Black Lives Matter and Antifa and all the protesters on the left.
Directly below them would be black men, for similar reasons.
And then next, in terms of how the Democrats rank people, would be white women.
Then below that would be white men.
And then they just sort of ignore Hispanic, Latinx, Latino, Asian communities like they don't need any help or something.
And do you feel that?
Is that just my filter on things?
Or do you feel that the Democrats fairly explicitly, I'm talking about younger ones mostly, mostly young Democrats, or at least young Antifa and Black Lives Matter, they do seem to have a hierarchy of demographic value that doesn't seem to be present on the Republican side.
So even a Republican who is literally a racist, they don't rank people like this.
They still look at the Constitution and still say, well, you know, legally we're all the same.
All right, I'm looking at all your comments here because I've come to the end of what I wanted to say.
So, let me give you some odds on Trump winning the election.
He has a really good shot.
That's a really good shot.
I'm seeing it in the comments.
Do not use Latinx.
Now, is that because I used it incorrectly?
Or because you...
Oh, somebody says that Latinos don't prefer that term at all.
I would guess that it would...
I would guess that there would be some difference there.
Probably some like it, some don't.
Um... I'm hearing that Latinx is hated by Hispanics everywhere.
Well, I doubt that's true.
I doubt it's true universally.
But, you know, I have more empathy than most of you do, because I know you're Trump supporters and I know a little bit about you.
I have more empathy for the idea of using the words to describe people than are the words they would want you to use.
Now, you can't really...
Achieve that standard completely, because you don't know what people want you to use, and people have different opinions, and you can't read their minds.
But I do think there is value in attempting it.
So if you put in a legitimate attempt to use the words that people would like to hear you use about them, I think that's a better world.
I don't think it should be the law.
I don't think you should lose your job if you use the wrong term.
I don't think that. But I think as a general social standard, I would like people to use the words about me that are the words that are friendly to me.
I would like that. So I don't have a problem with that.
Somebody says, where is Bill Barr?
Good question. Yeah.
What would happen hypothetically If Trump did not win the election, but he still has a few more months of presidency, would they push up the Bill Barr business and go after the...
I'm seeing Sparky as saying that Latinx is condescending social justice warrior Karen talk.
Shall we just not use that anymore?
The only problem I have is, unless I say Hispanic, maybe I'll just use that.
But if I say Latino, then I've got to add Latina, right?
So it's just too many words.
People like being called people, as somebody says.
