Episode 1200 Scott Adams: Don't Miss My Impression of Reporters Looking at the #Kraken Claims, Section 230
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
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Content:
Facebook's "Break the Glass" plan
Section 230 and social media
Obama's white victims
President Trump and Rudy...are experts
Is a secure voting app possible?
Sidney Powell's Kraken accusations
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Today, it's a big shopping day, but more importantly, it's a big day on Coffee with Scott Adams and aren't you glad you made it?
Oh yeah, you're happy you made it.
It's gonna be rockin'.
Ugh, what a word, rockin'.
Don't let me ever say that again.
Okay? And to enjoy this day to its maximum, all we need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or a chalice or a stein, a canteen jug or a flask or a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
Do you know what I like?
I think you do. It's coffee.
Join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
Even the kraken.
It's called the simultaneous sip.
Go! I would like to begin my program with an impression.
Now, I'm not like an expert on impressions, so bear with me as I build my talent stack in doing impressions.
This first impression I call a mainstream reporter reviewing Sidney Powell's allegations, which she's recently filed, called the Kraken.
Let us refer to them as the Kraken.
And here is a mainstream reporter looking at her evidence for the first time.
Let's see what kind of baseless claims we got here.
Oh, typo.
Typo. Another typo.
What in the world?
That's just page one.
First page. Two typos.
Can't take you seriously.
How many pages is this thing?
Seems to be...
Almost...
You could almost say...
The allegations are widespread.
But I don't think I can say that, so instead, I better look at the data.
Got a lot of legal terms in here I don't really understand because I went to journalism school.
Alright, so I don't understand the legal parts.
I'll skip those.
But, well, there's graphs.
There's graphs and exhibits and math.
But I don't know anything about math.
So I can't tell if these are true or valid or not, and I can't read the law exactly.
So how am I going to summarize hundreds of complaints from different people, eyewitness reports, data?
I got it.
It's all baseless.
You know why? I don't understand it.
I don't really have time to get into it.
So I think it's all just baseless.
It's baseless. And that is why I don't do impressions.
Now you know. But let's talk about all the baselessness and stuff.
I'm gonna jump around a little bit.
Let me ask you this question.
Has the news of the coronavirus vaccination made you feel like you want to take more risks because you feel like help is on the way, or do you feel like taking even less risk because you'd feel so stupid if you got the coronavirus and had some lasting problem or you died, when you only had to wait a few months?
Which way does it go for you?
Because I found myself feeling the following, and I'll give you an analogy.
I always thought that if I were to die doing something stupid, I would hope that the death would be instant, because I have this weird fear of knowing that I just did something that's going to kill me, but I didn't die right away.
So I have to not only know I'm dying, But know that I was so stupid, I shouldn't have done whatever it was that was going to kill me.
And for some reason, that plays a big psychological role in my life, completely irrational.
I'm not claiming it has any rational basis.
But my experience so far is that my willingness to accept Social distancing and masks and lockdowns and a disruption in my life is much higher than it was.
I think many of you are going the opposite direction, saying, ah, help is on the way, we can loosen up a little bit, you know, because we'll still get the vaccine, so we'll be okay in the long run.
And I'm thinking the opposite.
I'm feeling as though, because I'm sort of in the bottom half of the class of people who have to worry about the coronavirus, because I've got a comorbidity, I've got asthma, and I'm over a certain age, so I'm starting to get close to that range where it's dangerous.
And here's what I felt.
So this is just my internal feeling.
I don't recommend it for you.
I'm not trying to influence you to think the way I'm thinking.
I just think it's useful to know how people are processing this situation.
And the way I'm processing it is I've never felt as much personal responsibility as I feel right now.
And what I mean by that is, before I was willing to say, well, you know, it's my life, I'll take a risk if I want to.
But of course that's short-sighted because it's not just your risk.
You're filling up an ICU, you're causing problems for people who love you, you're using up resources, etc.
And so I've decided that the most, let's say, defensible, morally defensible thing that I can do is to suck it up.
Because what you don't need is for me to be sick.
Right? Don't you want that ICU bed to be available?
Don't you want to not lose coffee with Scott Adams?
Don't you want to, you know, make sure the resources don't get sucked up?
Don't you want to make sure I don't infect a frontline healthcare worker?
You want that, right?
My personal responsibility as a person who's in that vulnerable class, albeit at the low end, I'm not highly vulnerable, I'm sure I'd be fine as well, But I'm in the vulnerable class.
So here's my commitment to you.
I'm going to be extra cautious.
And the only reason I'm going to be extra cautious is really for your benefit.
Because I'm in the dangerous class.
Now, at the same time, I don't care if you're not.
Now, can that be consistent?
Is it consistent for me to say I'm personally...
I'm going to take more precaution because I don't want you to have to deal with me being sick.
But at the same time, I think I can be consistent by saying if you're, just pick a number, if you're 25, I don't care what you do.
I just don't care.
You could take some extra risks if you want to because I'm going to be taking some extra precautions.
So I'm hoping my extra precautions will compensate for your Maybe a little extra risky behavior.
It's going to happen anyway. It's not like it's up to me.
It's just going to happen anyway.
So I'm just interested how you process this.
I would like to see extra, maybe a little extra caution on the vulnerable and maybe a little looser on everybody else so that we can have a real life.
One of the things that we consistently do wrong As a civilization is that we tend to bucketize our topics because it's hard to talk about things until you can put them in categories.
But this ends up fooling us because we imagine that the category that we put something into just to make it easy to talk about it, we think it's meaningful.
But usually it's just a way to talk about it.
Now let me give you an example.
If I said to you, There's a decision about COVID health, but then the other variable is the economy and how the economy also translates through to health.
You need a good economy to have good health.
So we started out with people saying, hey, you're focusing too much on just the direct observable health care problem, and you're not focusing enough on this other variable, which is the economy, which also affects Your healthcare.
Now I feel as if collectively the minds of the world have indeed shifted so that now most of us, I think, are now capable of saying, oh yeah, I get it.
You can die in two different ways.
The economy could be bad or the virus gets you.
So you have to have a smart balance of those things to get the right result.
What's being left out?
So now you've done a good job.
You said, oh wait, my buckets, my healthcare bucket, is not really separate from my economy bucket.
It's just that we put them in buckets because then you've got an economist who looks at the economy, you've got doctors looking at the healthcare.
It makes things easier, but it could mislead you because these are not separate buckets.
It's closer to being one bucket, but it's just easier to talk about it as two Because of the way we separate our experts, right?
But what's missing?
That's two big variables, economy and healthcare.
What one's missing?
And this will be your test for a blind spot.
In the comments, tell me what topic which is as big as those.
It's as big as a pandemic.
It's bigger, actually.
It's bigger than a pandemic.
And it's at least as big as the economy.
And importance. Somebody says freedom.
That is a correct answer, but not the one I'm looking for.
Alright? The freedom question is a little trickier, so that's not what I'm going for.
But you're correct, right?
So I'll give you full credit for the answer, but it's not where I'm trying to take you.
There we go. Boom!
Somebody got the right answer.
Look at all the people who answered, and only one person got the right answer.
Military safety.
Homeland security.
Why? Because you can't have a military without a strong economy.
And even if you imagined that your economy still existed, but it took a hit, let's say your economy goes down 20%, will your military be as ready?
Not a chance. Not a chance.
Because most of your money has to go toward keeping people alive in the short run.
Your military is a little bit of a luxury.
And that's where your last dollar goes to that.
It's like, well, I've got to do this too.
You would imagine it could be your top priority, but living today is going to be your top priority.
So here's the thing.
If you imagine that the military questions are this separate bucket...
Then you can ignore it, right?
Just ignore it. That's another bucket.
We're not even talking about that.
I'm talking about coronavirus.
That's the bucket I'm talking about.
But if you don't look at this problem as a healthcare plus economy plus homeland defense, military essentially, you've missed one-third of the decision.
You know, I'm speaking very rough terms, they're not really one-third, but a gigantic part of this decision is what are you doing to your homeland defense, right?
What does China, does China get, let's say, like a big gain and it catches up to us economically?
What would that do to your military preparedness if China pulls to parity with economy?
You're in trouble, right?
The military is almost perfectly correlated with the strength of your economy.
You want to go a little bit further?
Let me go a little bit further.
We're looking at the climate.
When you look at the climate, Of course, we made the mistake of saying, hey, this climate could be dangerous and kill people, etc.
But at least we were smart enough to say, oh, but there's also this economic part.
It's not just about that you would be dangerously at risk health-wise if global warming is what the scientists are telling you.
What's missing? What's missing, once again, is your military.
Can you have a strong homeland security and a strong military in this day and age if you don't have energy independence and, if it isn't, carbon-based?
Now, nuclear-based is in there, too.
You've got to have that.
Could you have an entirely green economy?
Let's say it was possible.
Let's say the numbers work, there's some breakthroughs in solar power.
So you got a really good green economy, you get rid of your oil, you get rid of your coal.
What happens to you?
Well, you become conquered by China, guaranteed.
Because if you're powering your tanks with electricity and solar panels, I mean, I'm using a ridiculous example, you don't really have a military.
So when people are talking about the Green New Deal, sometimes they'll allow that there's an economic element to that.
They'll say it's positive, not negative.
I would say that if you don't have an oil-based or a carbon-based energy system with independence, you don't have a military.
You do not have a military if you have the Green New Deal.
What if you get rid of your nuclear?
If you get rid of your nuclear capabilities as Let's say a domestic power source.
You also get rid of your nuclear experts.
And suddenly you can't do nuclear for military either.
And you kind of need it for military.
Because you're not going to power your submarines, etc.
Now what about space?
Is it possible to be safe if your nemesis controls space and you don't?
It is not possible.
It is not even slightly possible that you could be militarily safe if your enemy controls space above you.
It's just not even slightly possible that you could be safe from that.
You might have mutually assured destruction, but you'd be in a big problem.
Now, what are you going to need to have a robust space force?
Nuclear power.
There probably isn't any alternative to that, right?
Eventually, Space Force will be nuclear-powered, unless somebody invents, you know, warp drive or something.
I don't see that coming.
So anytime that people have these conversations where they've simplified it to health versus economics, here's the recording that should play in your mind.
You left out the military, because it's all connected.
And the military is not trivial.
It's necessary, right?
It's just not optional.
Now we've lived, most of us have been born into a world where the United States was so dominant militarily that you have the luxury of not thinking about it as much.
It's like, well, we're militarily dominant.
Nobody's going to attack our homeland, you know, at least not a military force, just terrorists.
And I got a feeling that if you start messing with the The energy production, you might clean up the sky a little bit, but you're going to do it at the risk of your military.
So if you haven't included that, you're not really doing a proper analysis.
Let's talk about Facebook. We're learning that Facebook had some kind of what they call a break-the-glass plan, where if things were bad after the election, in other words, if society was starting to break down because of the election results, They were going to kick into play a change in the algorithm that would spike in visibility the mainstream publishers such as,
and I'm not making this up, this is the actual list, such as CNN, NPR, and the New York Times.
And it would de-emphasize Breitbart and some other site that I don't remember.
So, what would be the justification for boosting CNN, NPR, and New York Times but de-emphasizing Breitbart?
Well, the word that they've injected into this is hyper-partisan.
So, they've decided to label Breitbart hyper-partisan while saying that CNN, NPR, and New York Times are not.
Now, Is it just me?
Or is that hilarious?
Let me just walk you through some examples.
Was it Breitbart that told you the fine people hoax?
Nope. Breitbart told you that it was a hoax, showed you the transcript, did it quite a few times, actually.
Joel Pollack did that a number of times.
So CNN, NPR, and New York Times reported the fine people hoax as true.
Which ripped the country apart and probably changed the election result.
Breitbart reported it accurately, but they're being called hyper-partisan.
How about the hoax that the president suggested or noodled on the idea of drinking bleach?
Which of course never happened.
Not even close.
Did Breitbart report that the president thought about drinking bleach?
No. They reported it as a hoax, which it was.
What did CNN, NPR, and New York Times report?
They reported the hoax as true, right?
Now, I don't think they all used the word bleach, CNN did.
They may have said injecting disinfectants, which is the same story, they just don't use the word bleach.
All right, how about, do I really need to go down the list?
I don't need to go down the list anymore, right?
What was the last fake story you read in Breitbart?
I mean, I usually consume the news based on links that people send me, so I don't read every word of any of these publications.
I read the things that people say, hey, you should look at this.
But I don't think that this characterization of hyper-partisanship could hold up to even the smallest bit of scrutiny.
It's not even close.
To be an accurate framing of reality, and it's pretty easy to prove.
All you have to do is look at the hoax reporting.
Who reported the most hoaxes?
I don't think it's going to be close.
I haven't looked into it, but I don't think it's close.
So if Facebook can decide that one site that reports the truth in terms of those hoaxes, that's the part I know about, And they can boost the ones that reported the lies, and still are.
How do you say that Facebook is not a publisher?
Because this is the very definition of a publishing decision.
They've made a judgment call, a wrong one, a very wrong one, but that's how judgment works.
You don't get them all right. It's a judgment call on what content you should see.
That is Section 230.
That is a publisher.
It's not even close to being a communication platform.
We're not even in the same galaxy as being like the phone company.
What was the last time the phone company told you you couldn't make a phone call because the person you're calling was hyper-partisan?
It's like, I'm sorry, we cannot connect this number.
You are dialing your friend who is hyper-partisan.
Let us refer you to some Democrats who are more, more, less hyper-partisan.
Does the phone ever do that?
I mean, I don't make many phone calls anymore because phone calls are for losers, but I feel as if that feature is not in my phone.
Am I wrong about that?
And isn't the whole thing about whether they're editing content?
That's the whole question, right?
Why are we even fucking talking about this?
Why is this even a fucking question?
We're way beyond the fact where you can even wonder, huh, I wonder if they're making editorial decisions.
Who is wondering that?
Who is so fucking stupid that they don't see that this is 100% publishing?
It's not even slightly not publishing.
I have to admit, this is...
Is this the first time I've talked about this topic?
Maybe the first time in any detail.
And the reason is, I've sort of monitored this Section 230 thing, and I thought to myself, well, this is more of a lawyer question, because as soon as you get into these grey areas, If you're not a lawyer, the grey is just grey.
And even if you are a lawyer, it's probably still grey.
And I thought, ah, this isn't really the topic I can add anything to.
Because, you know, maybe it's hard to tell where do you draw that line between editorial decisions and being a good citizen, which is getting rid of stuff that could be damaging.
Right? I thought, ah, it's a little unclear.
It's not fucking unclear now.
Did you see what they did?
They just...
Twitter just suspended the website for the plot against the president.
A documentary which is probably the most successful documentary of all of 2020.
And I think they may have forwarded some of Sidney Powell's claims or something.
And they got suspended.
What the fuck is that?
That's not protecting us.
That's editorial. That's an editorial call, purely.
It's not even close to not being an editorial call.
So let us leave behind any notion that there's some ambiguity in this decision.
That ambiguity is gone.
Let's talk about this racist called Obama.
So he is in the news saying that one of the explanations he believes for Why Trump got as many votes as he did is that he believes that somebody told white men that they're victims.
That's right. President Obama thinks that white men have been brainwashed by someone into thinking that they're victims in this world.
Well, Obama, that makes you a fucking racist.
There's no other way around this.
Because he just said, and I don't think this is, I don't, I'm going to put an interpretation on him, and I'm going to summarize his thought.
I don't think that I'm using hyperbole.
All right, so I'm going to attempt to not make this super partisan slash You know, exaggerated, just because I can, right?
I'm going to try to play it right down the middle, and you tell me if this is not a fair statement.
When Obama says that somebody convinced white men that they're victims, here's what I hear.
White men lives don't matter.
White male lives don't matter.
That's what you're fucking saying, right?
Because let me explain this to you.
Could it be true that there's a difference in the average of the outcomes of white people and black people?
Of course. We all see that.
Nobody's questioning there's a difference in an outcome.
Could it be that the legacy of slavery is rippling into the current?
I say yes.
I say that's obviously true.
But having said that, we're talking about the average.
Do you think that the Person who lost their job because the factory moved to China?
Do you think that person is unworthy of empathy?
Is that person not a victim?
Now, they're not a victim alone, because there would be people in every group that would lose their jobs the same way, but are they not victims if they lost their jobs for other people's decisions?
Are there not white men We're born as children into bad situations for which the baby is not responsible.
How is that different than a black child born in the United States, through no fault of their own, they're born into a world that has a legacy of slavery which will affect them their whole life?
What about a white male who is born into this world and doesn't have, let's say, a high IQ? Are you going to do great if you don't have a high IQ in 2020?
Probably not. Do you deserve some sympathy or empathy for being sort of in a tough situation?
I think so.
If you're born into a poor family, but you're white, is that not worthy of empathy?
I have empathy for that.
How could you not have empathy For a white person born into a bad situation.
Is it just because they're white?
Because I think that's what Obama's saying.
He's saying you could have all kinds of problems, but if you're a white man, it doesn't matter.
Because there's something about the average that's different.
And the average is different, right?
Nobody's arguing that. But it doesn't matter to the individual.
Do you know that when we vote, Mr.
Racist Obama piece of shit, do you know that when people vote, they don't vote as a group?
I don't know if you knew that.
It's an individual thing.
An individual white male will vote or not vote.
They don't vote as a group.
When people vote, they don't say, well, what's my group doing?
Nope. They might vote similarly, but they're voting for themselves and their own situation And they absolutely deserve empathy if they were born into a bad situation.
How many white people are just killing it?
You know, just killing it in life?
Well, I don't know what the percentage is, but it's not most.
It's not most.
You know, I don't know what the number is, but even if half of white men are killing it in life, I doubt that's the number.
But that leaves a lot of people who were just born into a bad situation or, you know, got there however they did.
But Obama says white men's lives don't matter, in effect.
That's probably the most racist thing I've seen a public official say.
Would you agree? Have you ever heard any public official say anything that was even close, even in the range of being as racist as what Obama said?
And was reported by the mainstream media as just a comment.
That's it. Just a comment.
Amazing. So, Seth MacFarlane.
You know him.
A brilliant entertainer and creator.
He has created, among other things, the family guy.
And a very successful guy.
But when he talks about politics...
He is sometimes, let's say, his skill stack might be a few pancakes short.
And I only mock him because his TV show Family Guy has mocked me personally, meaning they've mocked Dilber as a product, so that's mocking me.
Had he never mocked me in public...
Meaning his property, not him personally, necessarily.
I would not bother with him.
He would just be another person with an opinion.
And, you know, sometimes I agree, sometimes I don't.
But he has very strong opinions on politics, and he is unique in that he's a perfect example of what I write about in my book, Loser Think, Loser Think, which is you can be really smart, and he is really smart, But you could have blind spots if your talent stack does not have, let's say, economics, engineering.
There are lots of things which you could have blind spots in.
And he's like the best example you'll ever see.
So he's talking about the Supreme Court decision that allowed the churches to operate during the pandemic.
And so Seth tweets this about Gorsuch.
He says, Gorsuch, If you can't make the distinction between the risk level of a small business, like a liquor store, and massive indoor gatherings, like a church, with regard to raging pandemic, you are more scientifically illiterate than the man who appointed you.
Now, do you think that Gorsuch was making a scientific legal decision?
What the hell is wrong with Seth MacFarland?
The law and the Supreme Court is making a legal decision.
That's it. It's a legal decision.
He's not making a scientific decision.
He's not ruling whether masks work.
He's not ruling whether social distancing works.
So I tweeted back at him, was it a one-variable problem?
Because I'm pretty sure there's another variable, which is freedom...
Freedom of religion, you know, there are a few other variables in there, Seth, and the court doesn't rule on all of those variables, just the one.
Here's a question I ask just to be provocative, just for fun.
So, critics have been calling Trump a con man since the beginning, since he was running for office.
This is the most common insult you hear, not counting Orange Hiller, I guess.
So, con man, con man, con man.
But they also observe that he apparently used those con man skills to become president of the United States.
So, do you think that the people who think he's a con man and used those skills and no other skills to get the most prized, highest office in the entire United States, well, that would be successful, right?
So, if you think it's con man skills...
And that's what he used.
And that it worked to get the highest land in the job, running against the most qualified candidate, they said, in years.
Wouldn't you say that he's really good at being a con man if that was your frame?
It's not my frame.
But my critics' frame say he's a con man.
Wouldn't they also have to conclude that That if they hate everything about why he's doing it, his intentions, even if all of that's true, it's not.
But suppose all of that was true.
Wouldn't they still agree that he's good at it?
I think so, right?
Now, if somebody is that good that they become president, would you call them an expert?
Do you think that if it comes to conning people, Would you call President Trump if you're one of his critics?
Wouldn't you say he's an expert at that?
I mean, he did become president.
There are people who are writing books about his technique, including me.
It's, you know, talking about it all the time.
I'd say he's an expert at identifying bullshit.
For example, did he not correctly identify that the Paris Climate Accord, although well-intentioned, was ultimately a bunch of bullshit?
He did, right? Now maybe those con man skills, according to his critics, came in handy there.
Because he spotted a con that other people even still think is real.
How about comments on other things that look like bullshit?
How about when Kerry and all the experts said, hey, you can never create peace in the Middle East unless you get Iran on board and Palestinians first.
And then apparently he's doing it.
So he's doing something that was impossible.
He seems to be getting it done.
I don't know how you could conclude, given all of the examples, that he's not an expert at being a con or recognizing a con, if you're his critic.
So here's the question.
If he's an expert, and he's looking at the election, and he says, in my expert opinion, effectively, this is obviously a con...
Why would you not listen to the expert?
President Trump's critics are obsessed with the question of listen to the expert.
I would say that they have deemed Trump an expert in cons.
He just called out the biggest con you've ever seen, which is the election.
Why wouldn't you believe him?
He is an expert at this.
Do you think that Rudy Giuliani...
Is not an expert at identifying organized crime?
He is. He is an expert at recognizing organized crime.
In fact, I don't know who would be better at it.
If you were going to pick one person in the whole United States that you had to trust to identify organized crime based on preliminary indications, you know, before it goes through court, Who would you pick ahead of Trump and Rudy Giuliani?
I don't think there's anybody I would pick ahead of those two.
They're pretty much experts at this.
Anyway. Now, somebody weighed in and said that the reason you wouldn't trust Trump on this is because this, too, is another con.
Which was a pretty clever answer.
Remember, I'm doing this just for fun.
I'm not trying to be too logical here.
But what I pointed out in return is that that's no different than your other experts.
Because if you can't trust Trump to be an expert on cons, because he might be conning you about the con, how is that different from your financial advisor?
It's not. You just think it is.
Your financial advisor wants you to buy Financial products that the financial advisor gets a cut of.
Your financial advisor isn't trying to make you rich.
Your financial advisor is making him rich or her rich, right?
Financial advice is a con.
How about scientific advice?
Well, we're pretty aware that our scientists are either being paid by oil companies or they're They're wedded to the green deal and they'll benefit if the green thing happens bigger.
It's all cons.
We don't have objective experts.
That's not a thing.
All the experts have something in it for themselves.
So if Trump is an expert on cons, but the problem is he also might be doing a con.
That's exactly the same.
As every one of the experts that Biden tells you to believe.
Every one. They all have an incentive for the con.
Which doesn't mean they're all conning, but they've all got an incentive.
So I wouldn't be so sure that your experts are any better than Trump on any question.
Trump tweeted that Section 230 must be immediately terminated.
Let me give you some more examples of why that's true.
Senator Mastriano, who organized that Gettysburg hearing on the election, alleged fraud.
His accounts got suspended by Twitter.
A senator suspended by Twitter.
And I'm pretty sure, I don't know the details, but I'm pretty sure...
That whatever got him suspended was an opinion.
If he got suspended for an opinion, now, it might have been wrong.
It might have been right.
But that's not the criteria, is it?
It looks like Twitter has decided that they will just judge what's true and what's not.
They will overrule a senator.
And they will decide that you, as somebody who voted for that senator, can't fucking hear what he has to say.
Twitter decided that.
Twitter decided to disenfranchise you from your elected official and make sure that the most common way you could find out what he was thinking is removed from your toolbox.
Temporarily in this case, but they can do it as many times as they need to.
Alright, how about, so now you've seen the plot against the president removed, you've seen Senator Mastriano being suspended, and you've seen Facebook's deal with promoting the so-called less hyper-partisan stuff, which is bullshit. If ever there was a time to do this Section 230 thing, now it's a slam dunk.
There really is no argument anymore.
It's gone. And believe me, I would say I was completely unconvinced one week ago.
I mean, I didn't have a decision either way.
I was just sort of monitoring it, trying to figure out if I could form a decision.
But now I'd say, this is clear as it could possibly.
Oh, also the links to Sidney Powell's documents, I think those were removed too.
All right. I ask this question, is it technically possible to make a secure voting app?
I ask this because I think there's going to be a big difference in the opinions of people who know how to do stuff versus the people who don't know how to do stuff.
And I feel, and this is more of a gut feeling based on experience, that it's doable.
I think maybe it wasn't doable before blockchain.
I think maybe it wasn't doable before facial recognition, before you could take a fingerprint, before you could do lots of other stuff.
But I think at the moment, we finally have all the pieces that we could build an app that would be at least way more secure than what we have.
Nothing's 100%, I guess.
And I have seen people say, oh, you think blockchain's the answer, but somebody thinks maybe not.
So I don't know that it's a settled question.
But like I said, somebody should build the app and then just run it in parallel for the next election.
And don't count the app, just run it in parallel and see what you get, see if you learn anything.
But we should definitely be running one in parallel by 2022.
It doesn't take that long to build an app.
Let's see some prototypes.
We should have a dozen different prototypes, different startups or whatever, and we should be able to run them all.
I would say the main thing that you need to get a fair election is that you can identify the voter, which the app can do better than a human can do, and that the voter can audit their own vote all the way to the endpoint.
And they can make sure that their vote got recorded the way they wanted it to.
Could the app be built to do that?
I say yes. There's lots of ways to do it wrong, but I think you could do it.
CBS News is reporting, and reporting is a stretch, that Trump supporters are reportedly calling for a boycott on voting in the Senate election.
Now, do you believe that story?
Now, do you think that CBS News is really reporting this as news, because it's real, that Trump supporters might want to not vote in the Senate election?
Oh my god.
This could not be more obvious propaganda.
They're trying to create this idea that Trump supporters would not vote on a principle.
There are no Trump supporters Recommending a boycott.
This is disinformation.
Now, I'm not saying there isn't some one idiot somewhere who would say anything.
But no, it's not true that Trump supporters are considering not voting in the most important election in their lives.
No, that is not.
Somebody says Ali was trying to push it.
No, he wasn't. All right.
If you're telling me that Ali Alexander was convincing Trump Republicans do not vote in the Senate race?
Don't even try to tell me that.
Don't try to tell me that.
It can't be true.
Now, I know you're going to send me a tweet, and you're going to think that it says that.
I'll bet it doesn't.
I'll make you a bet.
So all of you have seen the facts, right?
So those who are saying that it's real, and that Ali Alexander is pushing it, I haven't seen it, so even with no facts and no information, I will say with confidence it's not true.
I'll bet if you read it, and if you ask him, you'll find out that you're misinterpreting something.
All right? Somebody on Periscope, somebody's saying he retracted it.
Are you happy? I guarantee Alexander.
And here's why I guarantee it.
He's not an idiot.
You would have to be the biggest idiot in the world to be pushing that.
Now, if he played with it and retracted it, he may have some scheme going there in terms of communication style.
But there's no way he thinks that's a good idea.
All right. Trump said that he would leave office if he loses the Electoral College.
Of course, that's a big if, I suppose.
But I think at this point, we should review our predictions.
If you predicted that Trump would lose in the Electoral College and remain in office, or even try to remain in office, you need to check your ability to predict.
I would say anybody who made this prediction...
That Trump would fight to remain in office, even at the risk of violence, if the Electoral College said he lost.
You really have to check your ability to predict.
Because you're terrible at predicting.
If you had not predicted that Trump would get elected in 2016, I would say that was pretty reasonable.
Like, you're not a bad predictor if he got that one wrong.
I think you're probably a good predictor if he got it right.
But there wouldn't be anything dumb or stupid about getting that wrong, right?
Likewise, in this last election, no matter who you predicted was going to win, if you got it right or you got it wrong, it's not saying too much about your predictive ability, because the odds are it was going to be close.
But if you predicted that the president would use violence to try to stay in office, You really have to ask yourself if you're good at predicting.
Because you might be really, really bad at predicting.
I don't think there was anything more predictable than the fact that he wouldn't do that.
It's not even close to something that seems, you know, in the neighborhood if possible.
All right. I still could be wrong, right?
There's always a non-zero chance anything could happen.
But I think you really have to check yourself if you predict that.
All right. USA Today says this.
Nonpartisan investigations of previous elections have found that voter fraud is exceedingly rare.
State officials from both parties, as well as international observers, have also stated that the 2020 election went well.
That is pure propaganda.
Let me break it apart.
They say nonpartisan investigators looked into the election.
Who is a nonpartisan investigator?
In 2020, the USA Today is trying to tell you, a thinking human being who lives in the world, that there exists such a thing as a nonpartisan investigator into our elections.
Okay, USA Today, We're not fucking idiots.
There's no such thing as a nonpartisan investigator.
There might be somebody who lied to you and you're dumb enough to believe it.
There are no nonpartisan investigators.
None. None.
They don't exist. And then they say, previous elections have found that voter fraud is exceedingly rare.
Did they? Or did they simply find that they didn't find it?
All they know is that they didn't find it.
There are lots of things which exist which I can't find.
Does gold exist?
I think gold exists.
I looked in my backyard and I didn't find any.
So does gold not exist?
Because I looked in my whole backyard and I don't think there was any gold back there.
So every part of this Statement just reeks of not even trying to be something like news.
Not even trying. I think we need a high school class in spotting propaganda.
And I tweeted that, and a few people said they actually have taken that course.
So apparently, in at least one private school that I heard of, they do actually have a class, or at least a section of a class, where they're asked to read headlines in the news about And pick out the propaganda from the news.
Wouldn't that be a great class?
Wouldn't you want your own kid to have a class that taught them to look at headlines and then do a report on how it was really propaganda?
That's a good class.
Let's have some more of those.
There's some fake news on net deaths, which will fool many of you, probably has.
Allegedly, there was some John Hopkins study showing that the rate of deaths is similar to previous years, which is what you want to believe, right?
If you want to be a coronavirus denier or whatever, don't you kind of want to believe that it's all just a hoax?
Don't you want to believe that It's not really that bad and maybe it's just over if we just realize it's not that bad.
Well, it took about two seconds for people to call bullshit on that.
I called bullshit on it without research.
And I did it on this basis.
If this were true, That John Hopkins had done a study and shown that there were no excess deaths, it would be the biggest headline in the country.
And even if the mainstream media ignored it, it would at least be on the places that sometimes will give you real news.
It wouldn't be invisible, and it wouldn't be only in this tweet.
So one of the things I would teach my high school class on spotting propaganda, if it existed, Was that news that comes from one source and doesn't seem to spread to the other sources, at the same time it would be the biggest story in the whole country, that is a really good indicator.
So sure enough, the page that had that claim was deleted within hours.
It was deleted as being BS and denied.
So there is no such thing as some evidence that the coronavirus is not killing people at a higher level than if we had a regular economy.
Here is another dog that isn't barking.
So now for, it's been over a day, right, that the Sidney Powell accusations have been out.
The Kraken, if you will.
Lots and lots of claims in the, I guess, two different lawsuits and plenty of claims.
Now, I've seen lots of stories about the typos.
I've seen lots of stories talking about the people.
You know, Sidney Powell, this or that.
Have you seen any mainstream media entity go through the accusations and attempt to debunk them or attempt to confirm them?
Shouldn't that be a really big story?
Isn't that kind of important to know?
Are those real?
Now, when I was doing my humorous impression of the reporters looking at that Kraken document with all those claims, they're journalists.
What are they going to do?
They can't judge any of those claims.
They don't have the skills. And suppose they went and found an expert to help them, To, you know, give some quotes and judge the claims in the lawsuit.
How do you find that expert?
Who is it who has looked at those very claims?
I don't know. Could you even find one?
So you have this gigantic story that by its nature...
The mainstream media just has to look at it and go, uh, I don't know what to do with this.
I can't talk about it, because I don't really understand all these claims, and I can't really find anybody that I would trust to give me an opinion, because there are no such things as nonpartisan analysts.
It doesn't exist. There are no nonpartisans in this country.
What's the journalist to do?
I think they just say, hey, it's not widespread, it's not baseless, let's go to lunch, right?
So the fact that you're not seeing anybody go down the list and try to debunk it or not debunk it, that should tell you a little bit.
I had to look up the word baseless because it keeps being used.
Merriam-Webster says that baseless is defined as, quote, Having no basis in reason or fact.
Do Sidney Powell's allegations in the lawsuit, do they have no basis in reason or fact?
Well, they're claims, and I would say that those claims, you could make a strong argument that they don't become fact in a way that matters until they go through the court and the court says they're facts.
So could you say that the facts have not been established?
I think that's fair.
I think it's fair to say that the facts are alleged, but they're not established by, you know, a credible entity such as a court.
But that's the fact part.
Here's the definition again.
Having no basis in reason or fact.
Does it have to be fact-based?
To have a base. In other words, could something have a good reason, but you don't have facts?
Let me give you an example.
Can you prove that there is no air in France today, right now?
That there's no air? Air doesn't exist in France.
Nope. You can't prove that because you don't have any facts.
I mean, you could probably get them.
But would you do that?
Would you go to France with a little bottle and try to capture some air and prove to me that air does exist in France?
Would you do that? Or would you just say, I'm going to use my reason.
France is not contained in a sealed bubble.
And air has this tendency to move wherever there's not enough air to fill a vacuum.
So my sense of reason tells me I don't really need to look at the facts.
My sense of reason tells me, yeah, there's air in France.
Okay? Don't need to check.
Because the reason is so clear.
Let's take the election.
Does my analogy hold?
Well, I would say this, that 100% of the time, You have a gigantic incentive to do a thing.
Let's say cheat on an election.
So you have a gigantic incentive.
The motivation is off the chart.
You've got lots of people involved.
And so long as you can control who witnesses what, you're not really going to get caught.
So how often do you get crime in a situation where the motivation to do the crime is off the chart?
The opportunity...
Is observably easy.
Because I think we could all agree that no matter what else is true, it is true that the witnesses didn't witness very much.
Even the people who say the election was fair, I think they would agree with that statement.
For example, has anybody witnessed the software working?
Has anybody audited the lines of code?
Is there anybody who has a chain of custody all the way from the vote to the vote counting and beyond?
No. No, we don't have that.
So if you were to look at what could be witnessed, a little bit was, would you say 10%?
I feel as though, based on the reporting, it would be fair to say that maybe 10% of the election process was witnessed.
Now, the intention, of course, is to witness 100% of it.
But we saw that the witnesses were bullied and had to stand too far back and all that.
So no, maybe 10% was witnessed.
So if you've got 90% opportunity, just for conceptual purposes, I'm not measuring it, but 90% opportunity, motivation through the roof, because you want to stop orange Hitler at all costs, right?
How often will there be massive cheating?
Not a little bit, but massive cheating.
Under those conditions.
100% of the time.
You will never not have massive cheating when these conditions exist, and these are the conditions we all observe exist.
There's nobody who would say, well, there aren't many people involved.
There's nobody who would say, well, they don't have the motivation.
Nobody would say that.
Nobody would say they don't have the opportunity as of this week.
Last week, I was hearing, there was no opportunity.
You couldn't do it and get away with it.
Well, we've got hundreds of witnesses that says they did it and they didn't get away with it, at least in terms of being observed.
Or claims that they couldn't observe, which I think should be treated the same.
So I think any decent respect to what reason is would say that the claims of the election being fraudulent have a base.
That base, I agree, It's not yet based on court-certified, if you will, validated or verified facts.
But that's not the only definition of the word baseless.
If you have reasons, such as reasoning that air exists in France, you don't need the facts, because the reason is all you need.
And this is one of those cases.
So when they say baseless, that is propaganda.
If they had said...
There are allegations that have not been proven in court.
What would you say to that?
Would you say that that was propaganda?
Nope. You'd say, oh, that's an accurate statement.
There are allegations which have not been proven in court to the extent that it would overturn the election, at the same time that you would also have to say there are hundreds of witnesses that, if you look at their claims, they are big enough to overturn the election, if true.
They can all be true.
And so that is what I got for you today.
Somebody says, the natural man, Scott, does not receive the things of the spirit, which is very limiting.
I am a spirit-free individual, says the commenter.
Okay. But Scott, was Rudy's fake hearing propaganda?
Yeah, yeah. So one of the things that my bad critics often say is, oh, I got you, Scott.
If you think that's true, what about this?
Can you be consistent?
Yeah, I can.
The fact that you would even think that I wouldn't be consistent on that, yes, Rudy was Specifically and intentionally using persuasion that you could, of course, call propaganda.
Of course. And it was clear, obvious he wasn't hiding it.
And do you know what Rudy is?
He's something called an advocate.
Do you know what the job of an advocate is?
Advocating. It's advocating, yeah.
His job is to persuade you If you want to call that propaganda, I'm okay with that.
So I accept that word, fine.
That's his job. Now he also, on top of that, he's managing public opinion.
He's managing the opinions of maybe future judges and juries.
This is his job.
So when somebody whose job it is to do propaganda does propaganda, isn't hiding it even a little bit.
It's right out there.
I'm an advocate.
I have a client.
Client's paying me.
That's pretty transparent.
So I don't mind propaganda that's packaged as propaganda, and that's what that was.
But if you're the news, and you're selling me propaganda packaged as news, I've got a labeling problem there.
You tried to convince the world that that was good propaganda.
That's right. There is good propaganda and bad propaganda.
Again, somebody's trying to catch me in some kind of inconsistency.
There's good propaganda.
Trump does it all the time.
When Trump says the economy is great, it's getting better, that's good propaganda.
Because when he says that stuff, it causes people to invest and feel confident and then the economy is good.
When Trump says our military is like way, way better than it was before he took office, is it Is that necessarily true?
I don't know. You don't know.
None of us know what's happening in the military, because they keep that secret, right?
But is it good propaganda to tell the world even more than he's telling the country?
He's telling the world, we've got the best military you've ever seen, and it was pretty good before, but now it's even way better.
Is that good propaganda or bad propaganda?
Because it keeps you safe.
Right? That's good propaganda.
So, just know that when an advocate, a politician, is saying something, that's always propaganda, but it could be the good kind.
If your news is giving you propaganda instead of news, and they're selling it as news, that's fraud.
It's different.
All right. A poor economy would increase the number of military volunteers.
That's true, but I don't think that matters in our technical wars.
I just don't see us having a war in which standing armies of China or Russia or the United States go at it with a tank war.
We're not going to have a tank war with China or a tank war with Russia.
That's not going to happen. I mean, the reason it's not going to happen is that Whoever moved a force of tanks against a superpower would lose all of their tanks in 60 minutes.
I'm not wrong about that, right?
Somebody says, go talk to Ali and apologize.
I'm not going to apologize for calling him smart, because that's what I call them.
So I don't know what you're talking about.
When people call me smart, I usually say, thank you.
I do not require an apology.
All right. Check Trump's most recent tweet.
Is it that good? All right.
I usually don't like to do that because it slows down the pace here.
But let me do that anyway.
Trump. Trump, Trump.
Have you noticed that Trump doesn't come up first in your fill-in?
Sometimes he does.
So Donald J. Trump, the real Donald Trump thing, it comes up fourth when I search in Twitter for Trump.
Donald Trump has 80-whatever-million followers, and he comes up fourth when you start typing in Trump.
Ahead of him is the POTUS account, perfectly fair.
Then there's Trump Googling.
It's not even a blue check.
And then there is a blue check, but it's Tiffany Trump.
That's right. Tiffany Trump comes up in the search before Donald Trump.
And you're wondering if Section 230 should be important?
Yeah. All right.
So now that I'm done ranting on that, Oh, okay, it's getting good now.
So Trump just tweeted 11 minutes ago, Biden can only enter the White House as president if he can prove that his ridiculous 80 million votes were not fraudulently or illegally obtained.
When you see what happened in Detroit, Atlanta, and Philadelphia and Milwaukee, massive voter fraud, he's got a big unsolvable problem...
Oh, I tell you, Trump doesn't know how to not be provocative.
I don't think he...
He doesn't know how to be boring.
He just can't be boring.
He just doesn't know how.
So he's now...
Now, obviously, you can't prove a negative.
So basically what he said is he's not leaving the White House, which was how it will be interpreted, because you can't really prove a negative.
So he's created a situation where the news will have to talk about his allegation that there's all this fraud, and they hate talking about that.
They hate talking about it.
Because if you just talk about the election fraud enough, it becomes true.
I don't know if he's thinking of it this way, so I won't.
I won't assume there's intention in this, but this is the way it's going to work out.
If you simply make the mainstream media talk about election fraud, even if they're denying it, it didn't happen, it didn't happen, election fraud, didn't happen, didn't happen, election fraud, what happens to your brain?
Your brain says, I heard a lot about election fraud.
And even if Every single thing you heard was also debunked.
That's not how your brain is going to process it.
If Trump can simply make the news, do the thing they don't want to do, which is talk about the election fraud allegations, even if they debunk them, he wins.
And this is so provocative, they have to talk about it.
Because they're going to have to talk about it in the context of, I think he just said he's not going to leave.
But that's, you know, he's a little more clever than that.
He's forcing them to be anchored to that tweet so they will sell his message simply by repeating election fraud, election fraud more times than they wanted to.
So, I don't know, that may be one of his finest tweets in terms of strategy.
All right, that's all for now.
I'll talk to you tomorrow.
Alright, Periscope is off.
Anything you YouTubers want to ask me while you've got another minute here?
I see there, somebody says that there's a new study showing that hydroxychloroquine with zinc and azithromycin works really, really well in reducing hospital visits.
Do you know what's missing in that story?
What is missing in that story about the study that says hydroxychloroquine works really well?
Well, here's what's missing.
One of the authors is Zelenko, the original hydroxychloroquine doctor.
And the study itself is a retrospective.
Now, can you trust a retrospective study?
No. You can't.
So it's a retrospective study.
Basically, they're saying, all right, we're not going to study it.
We're going to look at what happened in the past.
And see if we can figure out just by looking at some data from history whether we can judge that it works or not.
That is not the same level of credibility as a randomized controlled study.
So if you've got a randomized controlled study that would have to use those same chemicals and have to administer them in a similar way, not waiting until too late.
If you had that and it said it worked, I'd take that pretty seriously.
If you have yet another retrospective study, it just gets thrown on the pile with the other retrospective studies that seem to disagree with the randomized controlled studies.
So if you don't see a randomized controlled study on hydroxychloroquine, I would ignore it.
Same with vitamin D. Vitamin D, I think there's a strong argument that boosting your vitamin D could protect you.
Just because it protects you from things in general.
But if you see a retrospective study that says people with vitamin D did much better, you must be careful.
Because those people might have been unhealthy in general, and a low vitamin D level is a marker for low health in general.
So it could be that the vitamin D is telling you nothing but, these are generally unhealthy people.
And if you were to boost their vitamin D, There would still be just generally unhealthy people with vitamin D. It might not make that much difference at all.
So be careful of correlation versus causation.
Is the slaughter meter still relevant?
Not really, because the situation became this weird two worlds where Trump could actually win and not be president.
So, you know, prior to the actual election day, I modified my prediction to the coin flip would come up edge, meaning that you'd have two winners, and it would just stay that way.
And I think that's the situation.
I think Trump will make his case, at least to the public.
And so the public will say, yes, it is true that he won the election.
It's also true that Biden took the job.
So... I don't know what the slaughter meter means in that context, but I still think that there's a 98% chance that he really won based on the electoral college votes if they had been counted accurately.
That's what I think. All right, that's it for now.