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Nov. 22, 2020 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:02:33
Episode 1195 Scott Adams: I Tell You Who is Being Most Gullible, Show You Some Nuclear Persuasion, and Predict

My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com Content: You don't need proof of the obvious Vote count versus enthusiasm for Biden Early lawsuits to keep the message alive Nuclear waste persuasion technique COVID19 in China, current status? DNA susceptibility to COVID19 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 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. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scott-adams00/support

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Oh, hey, I didn't see you there.
You snuck in here without me even noticing.
Good morning. Good morning.
It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams.
The best time of the day.
Every single time.
And all you need is a cup or mug or a glass, a tank or a gel, a cyan, a canteen, a jug or a flask, a vessel.
Of any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid I like, coffee.
Join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
You know it does. It's called the Simultaneous Sip, and it happens now.
Go! I feel as if even remdesivir works now.
It's because of the coffee. If you add coffee to any therapeutic or vaccine, it's more effective.
A lot of people don't know that, but that's why I'm here, to educate you.
Speaking of educating you, I'm experimenting with a new form of education.
Have you ever noticed that if you take a class in anything, it's really boring?
Have you noticed that?
Have you noticed that education, just in general, boring as hell?
Does it need to be?
Probably not.
Probably not.
Sometimes it's just because we say that a class has to be 45 minutes.
And then you just make it 45 minutes.
Why does every class have to be 45 minutes?
Or an hour or whatever?
Don't you think that there are some types of content that you should hit in 10 minutes and then let it rest for a day?
We have this structure set up that's completely wrong for learning.
So, I'm doing a little experiment over on the Locals platform where I have content for subscribers only.
And what I'm doing is I'm putting what I call micro-lessons there.
And a micro-lesson would be maybe a two to three minute lesson on some really focused and immediately useful life skill.
And the idea here is if you've watched other YouTube videos on any topic, let me give you my impression of looking up a YouTube Video that will explain how to do something that I want to do.
And let's say the thing is, I want to learn how to, let's say, repaint my house.
And I'll go to the video on how to paint your house.
And I'll click it and I'll say, great, this is exactly what I need.
I want to paint my house.
I don't know how. This video is going to tell me.
And then the guy will come in and he'll say, so I've been doing videos for six months and some people said some things I should change.
And I'll be like, how about painting the house?
Can we get to the part where you tell me how to paint the freaking house?
And it'll be five, ten minutes later before he starts talking.
And then he talks way too slowly.
Like I'm doing right now.
Because your patience and your attention span has been shrinking every year, especially lately.
Because your smartphones and social media are just shrinking your attention span like crazy.
So if you can't get education down to tiny little nuggets...
It's probably more than you want to handle, because your life's pretty complicated and fast-moving.
So if I can't put it into a little nugget for you, it's probably not going to work.
So here's some of the classes, micro-classes.
So these are like two, three-minute classes on locals.
So you've got locals.com if you wanted to be there.
I taught how to talk like a hypnotist.
Success strategies.
I went through some basic life success strategies.
Using imagination to fuel your success.
Programming yourself for bad habits.
For good habits, not bad habits.
How to ask for what you want.
These are basic life skills.
Do you know how many people don't know how to simply ask for what they want?
Just really basic life skills.
Knowing when to trust experts and when not to.
Pretty useful. And I'm working on one I haven't done yet, and I had to know you have a good product or service.
So anyway, that's there.
The Rasmussen report says that 61% of people, actually likely voters, 61% of likely voters think Trump should concede.
61%. At the same time, 47%, nearly half, say it's likely that Democrats stole the votes or destroyed pro-Trump ballots in several states to ensure his victory.
So think about the enormity of these two numbers.
61% of voters, likely voters, think Trump should concede, but half of voters think the election was stolen.
That means that there's a whole bunch of people in this country who have the following thoughts.
The election was stolen.
Let's just go with it.
Let's just go with it.
And now, if you said to yourself, would this work if the situation had been reversed?
Would you find that the Democrats, if they believed, let's say 50% of the country believed that Trump had won, but it was a rigged election, do you think the Democrats would say, ah, darn it, darn it, I sure wish we hadn't had a rigged election, but all right, we'll just figure it out on the next election.
Do you think they would have just said that?
Because the Republicans...
Kind of are. That's kind of what they're saying.
They're kind of saying, uh, we think it was stolen.
We're going to live with it anyway.
What would be behind that?
I have an opinion.
I would say it's a preliminary opinion.
I'll just put it out there and you can decide if you like it.
I think conservatives slash Republicans are Have this general philosophical sense that if there was something that went wrong that they could have fixed, it's a little bit on them.
A little bit of, let's say, a bias for accepting responsibility, even if it wasn't your job, if you could have done something about it.
Do you think there's something that you personally could have done more or better, collectively let's say, you know, you personally but also collectively, to have gotten to a better place in this election where it was either more certain or your candidate won?
And probably there are a lot of Republicans and conservatives who are saying some version of this.
You know, maybe if I'd made more noise about having a fair election, or I'd fought harder to get rid of mail-in votes, or I'd complained differently, or I'd volunteered to be a watcher, maybe there's something I could have done so we wouldn't be in this situation.
I see one person agreeing with me.
I don't know if I'll get more.
But I do believe that Republicans...
Are biased, and again, anything I say about Republicans or Democrats never means every one of them, right?
So you're all smart enough to know when I make generalities, it doesn't mean every person.
It just means there's a tendency or, you know, a bias.
I think Republicans say, well, we had our shot.
It's our own damn fault.
We'll try to figure it out next time.
I don't know if that's widespread, but I feel that at least some people feel that way.
Because I feel that way a little bit myself.
I feel that if I let the process run, meaning that the legal process does what the legal process does, and then we get to the end of it and the challenges are somewhat extinguished, even if...
I'm certain that the election was stolen, I'm actually going to be completely okay with it.
Completely okay.
Like, 100% okay.
That doesn't mean I don't still think maybe the election was stolen.
But if the process goes forward, and the consensus of the country is it's just time to move on, You know?
You can't fix the past.
You can't fix history.
You can't have everything the way you want it.
But you can maybe improve.
You can maybe fix it for the next time, if you still have that option.
I hope we do.
So I've got a feeling that there's a lot of, what's the word, capitulation?
As they say in the financial markets, there's a lot of capitulation going.
People who believe that the election was rigged and are still, still willing to say, well, all right, we'll get them next time.
That's what it feels like.
That's the way it feels like it's shaping up.
Interestingly, when I look at the CNN homepage, I see no stories about alleged election fraud.
Except stories saying it didn't happen and Trump is crazy and any of his followers who think any of that stuff happened, they're crazy too.
And I thought to myself, can you think of other situations where the accusation itself wasn't enough to make news?
And I'm curious if you can think of any other example of that.
Because it seems to me that the accusation is pretty much 80% of the news, isn't it?
Isn't 80% of all news somebody is accusing somebody of something that typically ends up not being true?
More often than not, it's not true.
So why is this the one time that an accusation is not news?
Well, the answer is this.
That news is also persuasion.
And the left does not want you to think that the irregularities, alleged and real, made a difference.
And if they even reported the allegations, there would be so many of them.
I guess there are 220 sworn affidavits or something like that.
Even if you'd say half of them are complete BS. If they just talked about all the allegations, You would come away thinking that the election was rigged.
So your brain, not you personally, but brains in general, they work on how often you see something, whether your attention is brought to it, far more than your logic and your reason.
Those things are largely illusions anyway.
You don't have a lot of logic and reason, but you think you do.
What you really have is things you spend time thinking about.
And if CNN made you think about allegations of fraud, even if their reporting said none of these are true, your brain would still record, sure was a lot of fraud.
So they have this weird situation where even if they reported all the allegations and said every one of them is false, you'd still come away thinking there was a lot of fraud.
So they can't even cover the story without influencing you to think there was the opposite of how they covered the story.
So it's kind of a tough spot they're in.
Have you noticed that the social media platforms have gotten a total pass on election interference?
Before the election, we were talking about them a lot.
What we were talking less about was outright fraud.
But once the election happens, and you've got something real to talk about, not hypothetical, and there are lots of reports of fraud, we'll find out how many of them are real, But it seems that fraud is the shiny object.
And that if you were to, perhaps if you were to somehow, and I imagine it's impossible to do this, but if you could measure how many votes were determined by fraud, and let's say you think that there were a bunch, and might even be millions.
Let's say, worst case scenario, I'll just pick a number, Worst case scenario, you're very skeptical of the election, and you think, God, I think that election may have moved fraudulently, I don't know, five, six million votes, something like that.
That'd be a lot.
That'd be a lot of fraud.
How many votes do you think social media moved?
If you were to imagine...
I'll even up that a little bit.
I'll take it to 10 million.
Let's take it to 10 million...
The worst case scenario of the worst accusation of how many fraudulent votes there were.
I doubt there were 10 million, but let's just use this as our thought experiment here.
How many votes do you think social media moved by being biased toward a side?
Well, I would think a lot more than 10 million.
I don't know how you would measure such a thing.
It's largely impossible to measure because there's so many variables.
I don't think you could tease out how much was the social media impact.
Maybe you could. I can't imagine it's doable.
But I feel as if social media is hiding behind the alleged direct fraud accusations because they're just more interesting at the moment.
And social media is like, don't look over here.
Nothing happened here.
No direct evidence, right?
So, I think that was an interesting outcome.
I've noticed that as more and more, let's say, Trump supporters start to move toward conceding or suggesting that the president should concede, that the number of his remaining supporters shrinks.
And then instead of being lots of targets, there are fewer and fewer targets.
Now, my message is not like I believe.
Can you fact check me on this?
I believe that the things I'm saying about the allegations of fraud are different than what other people are saying.
Would you say that's true?
Would you say that my take on the fraud allegations is different than most Trump supporters?
For example, I don't think that the Venezuelan whistleblower is real.
But probably I would bet the majority of Trump supporters are willing to buy into that story.
So I don't think that my version or my opinion really maps too much to anybody else's at the moment.
But one of the ways I'm noticing my critics are going after me is by lumping me with other people who have different arguments.
Because it's hard to go after my arguments because they're so darn reasonable.
It would be one thing to say, Adams believes everything that is being alleged.
Now, if I had believed everything that was being alleged, I would be a laughable figure, and you could lump in with anybody else, and that would be fair.
But you can't really do that.
I have a fairly nuanced opinion that doesn't attract anybody else's, and it's a little bit harder to assail, in part because I don't pick absolutes which are impossible to support.
So I think that the only way that you can go after me It's to say that I'm really just Rudy Giuliani or I'm really just some other troll on the internet and that I'm just like them.
I saw this approach this morning where somebody pointed to some article that had nothing to do with me.
A complete stranger wrote an article with an opinion and then somebody tweets that this guy is just like me.
And then I look at it, it's like, well, just like me except We don't share any opinions.
And I get thrown in with a stranger because they can't attack me directly, which is a good place to be, I guess.
I asked this question on Twitter, and I think it's a sort of question that people will interpret differently, so I don't know if you can make anything from the answers.
But I did a little unscientific Twitter poll, and I asked this question.
If you personally, and personally is important to this, if you personally have no proof of any election fraud, and wouldn't you say that would apply to most of us, right?
There are allegations, and there's evidence, but meaning there's people making allegations, that's the evidence, but that's not proof.
That's well short of proof.
So here's the question.
If you personally have no proof of election fraud, Which opinion would be the most reasonable one to hold in 2020?
So you have no proof of fraud.
Would you believe, with no proof, zero proof, do you believe that the election was probably fair or probably rigged with no proof?
What do you think the responses were?
Well, last I checked, 88% said it was probably rigged.
And say that even if there was no proof.
Is it reasonable to have a belief that something was rigged with no proof?
Now, if there was a little bit of proof, I think we'd all agree it's reasonable to have an opinion.
You got a little bit of proof. Might not hold up, but you got a little bit of it.
But hypothetically, if you had none, Would you still believe it was rigged?
With no proof?
I would. And I would argue that it was completely reasonable.
Why? Because you don't need proof of the obvious.
Let me give you some more questions and see if you can answer the following questions with no proof.
Is there oxygen in China?
Can you prove it? Show me a study.
Show me a study that says that there's oxygen in China today.
Oh yeah, you have studies that there used to be oxygen in China.
Y'all agree with you on that.
But show me your study that says there's oxygen in China today.
You don't have any.
So you're going to claim there's oxygen in China with no proof.
Zero proof.
And yet... And yet you're willing to go out there and say, I think there's oxygen in China with no proof.
No proof. There are some things which by their nature do not require proof.
It's just obvious.
And when you have a big complicated system that has software all over it, And you have the greatest incentive in the world for intelligence agencies as well as partisans on both sides, at least the evil elements of them, to attempt mischief.
You are going to get it every time.
It's like oxygen in China.
There's no scenario in which it can't happen.
It's impossible for it not to be true based on everything else you know about the world and physics and the fact that air doesn't stay in one place.
It has to be true.
So if you ask me, is there massive fraud in American elections, I would say, how could there not be?
I mean, really, how could there not be?
But if you're not going to be stupid, You have to take it to the next level, which is probably both sides.
Probably both sides.
If you're not willing to say probably both sides, and, you know, in varying degrees, it doesn't mean both sides do the same amount the same way every election or anything like that.
But if you can't admit that there are probably cheaters on both sides, you're not really a legitimate, you know, Person in this conversation, you're really not legitimate.
Of course it would be both sides.
Might be different amounts, but it would certainly be both sides.
Now, what we don't know is if the cheating would be sufficient to change a result.
I would say that nobody knows that.
But you can't say that the election was not at least attempted to be rigged.
So the legal challenges are falling like flies.
But let me make an observation about the legal challenges which have been thrown in a court for being apparently laughably weak in some cases.
Would you say that in, let's say, the financial market, would you say in the financial market that past performance can predict future performance?
Well, if you believe that, you're going to be poor because it doesn't work.
Everybody who has ever tried to invest in the stock market and said, well, I'll just look at what happened in the past and assume that keeps happening with an individual stock.
The one assumption you can make is that the general market will go up over time.
But for an individual stock, its history doesn't tell you anything.
It really doesn't. And as soon as you think that the history of that one stock tells you something, you're on your way to losing all your money.
Because it just doesn't predict.
And likewise, no matter how many lawsuits get thrown out for being laughably weak, it does not predict how strong the next one is.
You get that, right? I'd like to think that everybody watching this Periscope understands that the last lawsuit does not predict what the next one looks like.
It doesn't work that way.
So all the people saying there will be no good lawsuit coming because other ones have been rejected, there's no logical thread to that.
Now, of course, you could say it's the same people involved, but even that's not true.
Because the lawsuits are coming from individuals, are coming from different, probably different members of the legal team, etc.
And I also think that the early lawsuits were about keeping the argument alive.
I think the early lawsuits were just to make sure that the public knew there were big questions.
Let the public know that the questions were not just one thing but might involve a variety of things and that lots of people are involved questioning it.
So if the only thing the legal team did was send the public the message, hey, there's not only questions here, but there are so many questions that you could have lots of different lawsuits because there are so many questions.
Even if they lose them all, was a good strategy to flood the zone with weak lawsuits?
Well, I'm no legal expert, but it might be.
Because remember, you're fighting on two fronts.
Trump is fighting on the public opinion front, which could affect, let's say, the legislatures and whether there's a credibility for the outcome in general.
And then there's the legal cases.
So I would say that Trump was winning the public opinion contest by flooding the zone with weak, weak lawsuits.
Because remember I talked about CNN not even talking about the fraud accusations?
Because even if you just talk about them, people will think they're real.
Even if the thing you're talking about is that they're not real.
Likewise, Trump using the same strategy, the same concept, by flooding the zone with lots of lawsuits, if 100% of them get thrown out eventually, but while you're thinking about it, there's more in the pipeline, as long as there's more in the pipeline, you're going to say to yourself, well, there must be something to it, because there are so many lawsuits.
How could there be so many lawsuits if there's nothing to it?
So the legal team is 100% winning the public opinion battle with weak lawsuits because it just makes you think something's happening.
So everybody who says your lawsuit record on the initial ones is terrible is correct, but that wasn't really the play, was it?
I think the play was more about the public opinion and...
They're winning. Because as you saw, half of the country thinks the election was thrown.
That's winning, you know, in terms of public opinion.
I've got a prediction about the Venezuelan whistleblower.
Are you ready for this?
I think you're going to laugh at this, because this will be one of those cases that I teach that there are six dimensions of humor.
And if you get at least two of them into your joke, it's funny.
One of the dimensions is recognition, meaning you recognize it in your own life.
So I'm going for that element of humor and then some cleverness, and it goes like this.
If this Venezuelan whistleblower is real, what would be the things you would already be seeing?
Would you be seeing a photograph of the whistleblower?
Because I think the whole point of it is he's willing to be public, right?
I haven't seen a picture of him, and I'm wondering why not.
What about, would you see him appearing on Hannity?
Would you see the whistleblower appearing on Tucker Carlson's show?
If he were real.
Yeah. Yeah.
By now? Now, maybe you wouldn't have appeared by now, but you would at least be hearing Hannity or Tucker or somebody saying, we've booked him, he's going to be on next week.
Have you heard that yet?
Nope. Haven't heard that.
Here's what I believe is happening.
As I've said before, if you're an attorney working for a client, you have a responsibility to the client to make the best case, even if in your own mind you're thinking some of it may not hold up, you still have a responsibility to your client.
So as long as this whistleblower is making the claim, I think Sidney Powell is within her ethical and And she might also think that the software has some issues.
Which are not necessarily being whistleblown by this whistleblower.
But maybe it gets you closer to some kind of a deeper audit into the code.
Maybe it just moves you forward, even if this isn't exactly accurate.
So here's what I think is happening.
Here's what I think is the funny part.
I'll bet he's not returning calls.
I'm just going to guess.
But I'll bet at this point, Sidney Powell and her team are putting in phone calls to the whistleblower and saying, hey, maybe could we talk to you again?
We've got some follow-up questions.
We've got some interview requests.
We'd like to see if you'd do them.
And they put in the message, I'll bet he's not calling back.
Or they email them and say, hey, would you do this?
And you get sort of a non-committal answer back, or I've got to go get some work done, I'm going to do some traveling.
Maybe when I'm done traveling, we could talk about these interviews.
I'll bet you, I'll bet a large amount of money on this, that Sidney Powell is getting the stall and the runaround.
If that's true, then obviously he's not a real whistleblower.
Now, of course, the whistleblower could.
You know, you can't rule this out.
Maybe afraid for his safety or something like that.
But I doubt he would have come forward in the first place if he were not willing to eventually be public.
Why would you do that?
I mean, you wouldn't come forward if you weren't willing to be public because they're going to find you, right?
So... I'm looking at angry, all caps, yelling guy on the comments.
Yeah, and maybe it panics the conspirators, somebody says.
So that's my guess, is that the Venezuelan whistleblower is going to be, quote, hard to get a hold of.
I think he's going to be a little hard to get a hold of.
Just saying. And by the way, if you turn on TV, let's say tomorrow night, and that whistleblower is a guest on Hannity, everything I think is wrong about the whistleblower.
I don't think you're going to see the whistleblower on TV. What do you think?
Do you think you'll ever see him?
Because I think he's a disinformation play.
All right. Here are some things that we've learned recently about the coronavirus that we didn't know before.
There's a thought now that asymptomatic carriers are not carriers.
If you're asymptomatic, you're probably not spreading the disease.
And if you are, it's so rare that you could almost forget about it.
So we don't worry too much about asymptomatic.
We know that outdoors is safer than indoors.
We know from studies that opening schools doesn't seem to spread it, even though some places are closing schools anyway.
We know that wearing gloves didn't seem to make a difference.
For example, when I get gas, the first month of the pandemic, when I would go to get gas, I would wear gloves.
But now I don't. And I don't see anybody wearing gloves.
So I don't think anybody's worried about surfaces, especially if they're outdoors.
So we're not too worried about surfaces.
But here's the question.
What's the data on restaurant-related virus transmission?
So we're putting basically every restaurant and a business in the United States.
And I don't think we have data to back that up, do we?
Because all the other things that we thought were kind of obvious to do, turned out that the obvious thing didn't really act the way you thought it would.
Because wouldn't you think it was sort of obvious that an asymptomatic carrier could maybe spread it?
Because you could have it and the symptoms could be low, but if you're coughing, you're coughing, I suppose.
No, I guess that would be a symptom.
So I've got a feeling that restaurant-related transmission, you know, so long as they're spreading the tables out and doing their basic stuff, I'll bet there's not much transmission from that.
We're going to put the whole business, the whole industry out of business.
I think that's...
There's probably some lawsuits that have to be filed over that.
I don't know. I don't know if you can sue the government for anything, but...
I don't feel the government is doing right by the restaurant business.
Do you feel the same?
Yeah, it feels like the restaurant should get a break.
I wanted to share with you one of the best persuasive tweets I've seen in a long time from Mike Schellenberger, and the topic is nuclear waste.
And I'm going to show you the technique in this tweet.
Now, once you notice that the technique is very good, I will tell you that Mike Schellenberger does continue to build his talent stack, as it were.
So it includes environmental stuff and nuclear energy, and I know that he has intentionally learned persuasion.
I'm pretty sure he's read one or more of my books.
So let's see how well he has incorporated persuasion into this tweet.
I'll read you the full tweet, and I'll go back and tell you the persuasion parts.
So here's the tweet.
Nuclear waste is the best kind of waste.
All of it ever produced can fit on a single football field.
It never hurts anyone and never will.
It will be recycled in future reactors.
And then he says, nice to see stridently anti-nuclear...
Senator Reid acknowledged that it is safe where it is.
And then he includes, he pastes a quote from Senator Reid, and a question was asked of Senator Reid, based on your experience of, is it Yucca or Yucca Mountain in Nevada, what do you see as the future of nuclear waste disposal in this country?
And Senator Reid said, I think that what we've learned over the years is that the best thing to do with nuclear waste is to place it where it is.
Don't transport it.
Put it in dry cask storage containers.
You can bury it in the ground or leave it above the ground because the dry cask storage containers that we've developed are extremely safe.
So there's a senator acknowledging, he's a Democrat, right?
Democrat senator acknowledging that nuclear waste basically isn't a problem because it used to be But now we've learned, just as we've learned with the coronavirus by experience, we've learned that transporting it kind of doesn't make sense.
Because if the nuclear facility itself already has, you know, a stay away written all over it, right?
Because you would stay away from, you're not going to build a house, or you don't want to build a house right next to a nuclear reactor, so just keep the waste there.
It's the same problem.
You don't want to be near it, so just put it in all the places that you didn't want to be near anyway.
And on top of that, they've developed these dry storage techniques, which are seen to be quite safe.
But let me tell you what is good about this tweet.
Number one, tweets that have an attachment or a photo get much more engagement.
So this is trick number one.
An attachment or a photo gets more engagement.
So what he did here was he attached the text from Senator Reid as a photo, basically an attachment.
Now, because the attachment looks different from the regular text, even though it's all text, it breaks it up, and I think that counts toward the same kind of attention-getting as a photograph would, because it's broken up, it's not just straight text.
So that's the first thing.
Second thing is that the topic is sort of a hot current one.
We're talking about the Green New Deal because Biden's the president.
Nuclear waste is always hot.
So he's got the right topic that's naturally viral.
You know, anything about this topic is going to get people's attention.
He's got the right, you know, visual look because it's not just text.
And then the size of the tweet hits the sweet spot as well.
A brilliant tweet that's only one sentence still won't be that viral.
Because people will look at it and say, well, it's brilliant.
That's just one sentence.
So people are less likely to retweet one good sentence.
But they will retweet a good argument, especially if it's got like a picture or something with it.
So he's got all of that working for him before he's even started his tweet.
The first sentence...
He says, nuclear waste is the best kind of waste.
Now, I've taught you that the first sentence is the important one because it's the one that makes you curious or not.
Does this make you curious to read the rest of the tweet?
Nuclear waste is the best kind of waste?
Yeah! Yeah, you have to read the next sentence because who is telling you that nuclear waste is the best kind of waste?
It's like opposite of what you thought.
Can he make that case?
Do you think anybody can make a case that nuclear waste is the best kind of waste?
And then he does.
Then he makes the case.
So it's surprising, provocative, shocking.
He invokes curiosity in the first sentence.
In the first sentence, he got all that in there.
And then he goes, all of it ever produced can fit in a single football field.
What have I told you about visual persuasion?
It would be one thing to say, all of that waste is safely stored.
Just a concept.
But if I say to you, all of the waste ever produced could be put on a football field, now you've imagined the entire size of the planet Earth, and then you've imagined what one football field would look like on the entire planet Earth, And now it doesn't seem so scary, does it?
So it's visual in the second sentence, which is A-plus persuasion.
Keep it visual. Then he says, it never hurts anyone and never will.
Now that's a provocative claim.
How do you know it never will?
Well, he can't know that, of course.
But by making it so extreme, you can't look away.
And that's good persuasion.
He went a little too far by making it an absolute.
In this context, the absolute works because it's wrong.
And a little bit of wrongness will tie you to a point in a way that being all right won't.
Here's what it should have said if you wanted to be accurate as opposed to persuasive.
Accurate, instead of saying, it never hurts anyone and never will, a more accurate statement that I think you would find more fair would be, it has never hurt anyone, and it is extraordinarily unlikely that it ever will.
Now that would be fair to say.
You could disagree or agree, but it sounds like a fair statement.
But to say, never will?
Well, you can't really say something never will, right?
Somebody could fall out of a helicopter and land on a...
I don't know. But there must be some way to hurt at least one person in the future of the entire civilization.
But turning it into an absolute, which your brain recognizes as wrong, still binds you to it.
And you say to yourself, but how wrong is it?
Now you've got to deal with it, right?
It's wrong. I'm sure it's wrong.
That you could say with certainty, nobody could ever get hurt.
But how wrong is it?
Is it 100% wrong?
Is it completely wrong?
Is it left field?
Is it in the wrong zip code?
No, it's not.
It's pretty close to reality.
And that's the point.
If he can make you argue that you can't know that it could never hurt anybody, he's probably already getting you to the point where you're willing to accept it's very low risk.
It's very clever persuasion.
And then he says it will be recycled in future reactors.
And that is sort of like the drop the mic moment of this tweet.
Because you and I probably knew that nuclear waste can be used in the newer types of reactors for their fuel.
That's a newer emerging industry, but it seems quite obvious that that will be the future.
For people who didn't know that, That's like a big, big piece of information that they just learned.
Imagine if you didn't know that.
It's the first time you've read this sentence.
It will be recycled in future reactors.
What? If you didn't know that was a thing, that would be pretty impactful, I think.
And you might even have to research it to find out if that's real.
And it is. It is real.
Um... So anyway, that is a whole lot of things to get right.
And then he shows the Senator Reid thing so that you can feel that people on both sides of politics agree with him.
It's a social proof.
So, I mean, look at all the things.
He's got curiosity. He's got a little bit intentionally wrong.
He's got visual persuasion.
It's the right size.
It's provocative.
Social proof.
He got all of that into a tweet.
When I saw this thing, my jaw just dropped.
I was like, God, this is some good work here.
All right. I wonder if the pandemic ruining all of our leisure activities...
It's going to give us some insight about how valuable those things were in the first place.
For example, prior to the pandemic, one of my favorite things in the entire world was going to a restaurant and having somebody bring me food and, you know, have a good time.
But now after six months of really not enjoying that, I have gone to restaurants, but, you know, it's a masky situation.
It's a different situation.
I asked myself, if I never could go to a restaurant again, and let's say restaurants just stopped existing, would I be less happy?
I don't know. I don't know if I would.
So there are a lot of assumptions you made about your life that the pandemic destroyed, where you have to go back and reassess your own assumptions.
Like, do I really need this to be happy?
Let me tell you another assumption.
I've never had less human contact at any time in my life.
I'm at my maximum smallest amount of human contact.
And it's fine. It's not that bad.
So there are a whole bunch of things that I wouldn't have imagined could be true that I'm learning.
All right. One of the benefits of the pandemic is that movies will stream sooner.
So you don't have to wait for them to get out of the theater and get to your TV. And I guess there's some deals now about movie streaming where it'll only be three weeks of exclusivity in the theater.
So the movies are only going to be in the theater for three weeks before you get them on streaming.
Here's a...
Somebody challenged one of my assertions.
And the challenge is good enough that I would like to bring it to you to see what you say.
I've said that the election is obviously illegitimate because I couldn't believe that Biden would get so many more votes than Obama got in 2008.
But the counter to that argument is there are 25 million extra voters since then.
If there are 25 million extra voters...
Would you now accept that Biden got as many votes as he did?
25 million.
Well, let's say young people probably skew Democrat.
So let's say another 25 million, maybe 15 million would be at least leading Democrat.
How many of young people vote?
They're potential voters, but are they voters?
I don't know. I'm a little unclear if those are people who did vote, or if they're just potential voters, of which only half of them would kind of vote.
But here's the problem.
Are there enough people in the country who are voters to give Joe Biden that number of votes?
And the answer is yes. There are enough people.
There are definitely enough people.
And there are enough of those people who could potentially vote Democrat to give him the number that is reported right now.
Here's the part that doesn't square.
I cannot square the complete lack of enthusiasm with the vote count.
If you can get that much of a vote count just by hating Trump, maybe...
I'm not going to say that's impossible, but it doesn't pass my sniff test.
So I'm going to stick with, is it mathematically possible that a great candidate could get as many votes as Joe Biden?
No. I mean, yes, it's possible.
It's completely possible that a great candidate could get as many votes as Joe Biden does.
But is it possible that he did?
Like a terrible candidate with no enthusiasm that is observable whatsoever for the entire campaign.
No enthusiasm.
And yet it showed up on election day?
It is possible.
It's just when you say, is there anything that would suggest there's fraud?
Well, that's at least where I'd be sniffing.
But again, it's not proof.
All right. So it looks like Regeneron works and is getting approved for emergency use, whereas remdesivir doesn't work.
So that's our current information.
Remdesivir doesn't work.
And what about hydroxychloroquine?
It's like masks.
You know, every week is a new study that says hydroxychloroquine doesn't work, followed by one that says it totally works, then it doesn't work, it totally works, just like masks.
Believe the experts who are telling you conflicting things.
And I'll say this again, I don't remember if I said this yesterday, but is China still reporting that the coronavirus is basically solved in China?
That's true, right?
Give me a fact check on that.
China still says they've eradicated it for all practical purposes, right?
Is that possible?
I mean, really? Really?
Is that possible?
Now, there are two possibilities that I can see.
Number one, maybe three possibilities.
Number one, China is just lying, and they haven't controlled it at all.
Now, if that were the case, wouldn't we know that by now?
If, you know, millions of people were dying in China and And there was a wild, rampant virus there.
We would know that, right?
Even if they claimed it wasn't happening.
We have enough observable people around.
We would know that.
So I think the thing we can rule out is that they have a massive pandemic over there that they're hiding.
I don't think they're hiding it.
Now the other possibility is that they found some way to treat it.
That they're not sharing with us, or they have shared and we're not doing it right.
Do you believe that their better adherence to masks is the difference?
No. Nobody believes that.
Even people who are pro-mask don't believe that the difference between China and the United States is masks.
Nor does anybody believe that it's social distancing.
I believe. Because while those things, a lot of experts say, work and are important, and obviously social distancing has to work, I don't think that's enough, because you can see in our own experience that even when we do it well, it doesn't really stop the pandemic.
So, how about medicines?
Don't you think by now that there's enough sharing of information that if the people in China were getting some kind of secret medicine, Wouldn't we know about that?
You know, hypothetically, if they were all getting hydroxychloroquine, and it turns out that it really did work, and that's the big difference.
I'm not actually high.
There's always somebody who asks me if I'm high at 8 in the morning.
Not so much. No.
This is actually my actual personality.
Shocking, I know. So the other possibility is that they have some medicine or therapeutic or cure that we don't have.
But how would we not know that by now?
Because it would have to be somewhat massively produced and massively distributed.
We'd know that, right?
I mean, there's some things we can't know about China, but you'd know if there was a massive pandemic, and you would know if they were using some massive kind of different vaccine or therapeutics.
So can we eliminate those things as possibilities?
Probably. There is another possibility, which is the worst case scenario, which is that they always knew there was a genetic, let's say, advantage.
That maybe they just don't get it as badly, or maybe the 5% who were susceptible already got it.
Could there be that much of a genetic difference?
And could that be part of the reason?
Now that, of course, would suggest that maybe it was a weaponized virus, which is a separate question.
But we have a mystery here.
The only thing I want you to agree on is, would you agree that we don't know why they're having a good result?
Can you fact check me on this?
Is there anybody here Is there anybody here who believes that we understand in the United States why China's experience is what it is?
Is there anybody who thinks we understand it?
Because if we don't understand it, we should break relations with China.
Just send every one of their fucking diplomats home and say, look, we will continue having relationships with you, meaning diplomatic relations, after you tell us what you did.
Because whatever you're doing seems to be working, and you're not telling us what it is.
And given that the virus came from you, and you seem to have gotten over it and we haven't, and you're not telling us how, I feel like we're at war.
And at the very least, we're going to send your fucking diplomats home until you tell us something that sounds even a little bit like it could be true.
Just a little bit like it could be true.
Send the fucking diplomats home.
China has some explaining.
Now, could it be that they have a perfectly good explanation, and once we heard it, we would say, oh, okay, I guess you're doing a good job over there.
We should be more like that.
Yeah, could be.
You can't rule out the possibility that it's just something we don't know, and once you've found out, you'd be satisfied.
So, I think we need to get a little tougher on China about that.
Now, in a related story, there's a startup, which I'll talk about later, but I'm not ready to do it yet.
There's a startup that will test your DNA to see if you have a high propensity to have a bad experience with COVID. I actually tested my DNA, which I can download from 23andMe, because I'd used 23andMe once, And once you've used it, you can download your DNA because it's your DNA, so you can own it.
And then I send it off to the start-up.
And I'll tell you about the startup in a separate periscope.
And they tested it, and they said that I'm somewhere in the average range.
So in other words, I'm not in the population which, by my DNA, I would have an unusually bad situation.
But neither am I in some category where I'm unusually exempt from it.
So I'm sort of in the average range there, I think.
So, if it's true that this startup can tell by your DNA, if you are likely to have a bad experience with it, is it possible that China made a virus that they were not expecting to release, perhaps, to see if they could make a virus that would affect non-Chinese people?
You know, I'd love to think that that's not a thing, and no country would ever work on something like that.
But in terms of military stuff, I've got a feeling that the military works on all kinds of stuff, both ours and other countries, that if you heard about it, you would be horrified.
But maybe it's just because they need to know how this stuff works in case the enemy uses it.
All right, so that's all I got for now.
I'm not accusing China of anything except not being forthcoming.
And that's enough to send their diplomats home, in my opinion.
That's all for now. And I'll talk to you later.
All right, you YouTubers, Periscope is offline.
People are still blaming Fauci for sending the virus to Wuhan.
I don't buy any of the Fauci is in on it stories.
The longer it goes on, the longer you believe China had something to do with it, somebody says.
China needs to pay.
What about the Canadian researcher getting arrested?
I don't know about that. Should the vaccine be compulsory?
No. No, it should not be compulsory.
I don't think it'll need to be.
Can we make merchandise for you?
I'd rather you did not, but thank you.
Reparations? Oh, reparations for the virus?
Yeah, I don't see China paying us any reparations.
That doesn't seem like that is ever going to happen.
Aren't you using analogies to describe the chances of fraud?
Yes, and that is the correct way to use an analogy.
I will explain this for the billionth time.
Analogies are not persuasive as arguments.
They are very useful for describing a concept for the first time.
But it is not true that if something reminds you of something else, that the something else is going to act the same in the future, That's the thing that reminded you of it.
So it's not a persuasion.
It's just describing something for the first time.
It's useful for that. All right.
You redefined the slaughter meter.
Yes. So I know there's going to be an entire cottage industry of people who want to tell me, Scott, you're wrong, and you can't admit it, and you move the goalposts, but...
Here's the situation.
I've already congratulated Biden for winning.
I'm done. If Biden is put in office, I'm the guy who congratulated him the day the networks called it for him.
That's it. But it is also true that Trump has these legal challenges, and he's allowed to do them, and we can talk about them.
But I can still congratulate him for winning in a surface way.
And I would expect the same would be true if it'd gone the other way.
And because I've already accepted that Biden is likely to take the office, then I've also modified what it means to talk about the slaughter meter.
But I'm doing it in front of you.
I'm not trying to be tricky.
I already said I predicted Trump would win on votes.
Didn't happen. There may be an explanation.
We may never know. But, you know, it is what it is.
Alright. Alright, so here somebody says backpedal time.
Alright, so I'm going to block you, Sammy.
Because the whole point is that I've said what I'm doing, and when I adjust my prediction, I acknowledge that I'm adjusting it because it doesn't work anymore.
So I'm accepting...
That it didn't happen, right?
So I am allowed to re-predict.
Repredicting and saying that your old prediction didn't work is not moving the goal line because you're doing it explicitly, right?
You can change your prediction.
So I'm going to delete you.
Hide user on this channel.
Okay, you're hidden. No, you can't, Scott.
Alright, that's all for now, and I will talk to you.
Silence leads to violence, Dave says, and thank you.
I appreciate that.
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