Episode 1210 Scott Adams: All of the Loserthink About Election Fraud, Coronavirus, And More
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
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Content:
An "Interesting!" thought on preventing election fraud
Historic election indicators ALL failed in 2020?
Examples of bad thinking
Whiteboard: Georgia Counting Situation
Passing citizenship test made harder?
Mask effectiveness
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It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams, the best time of the day.
Once again, an unbroken string of success that's called Coffee with Scott Adams in the Simultaneous Sip.
And what do you need? Well, to make this special, how about a cup or mug or a glass, a tank or chalice or a canteen jug or a flask?
A vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. Do you see what just happened?
Oh my god.
This is a tragedy.
Look at this.
This is where there should be something called a coffee cup.
And right now I should be reaching behind me and sipping with that coffee cup.
But I don't have one.
Kind of an emergency situation, wouldn't you say?
Hold on. Hold on.
Don't go anywhere. Don't go anywhere.
While I'm gone, this will only be 10 seconds because my coffee cup's just on the other side of the room.
But I'd like the YouTube people and the Periscope people to have a conversation among yourself while I'm gone.
It'll only be 10 seconds.
So here it is. Periscope people, I'd like you to meet...
YouTube, be right back.
Da da da da da da.
Now this is what I call a poor production quality.
Does it matter? Doesn't seem to.
Doesn't seem to. You all just seem just as happy.
And now, let's take it from the top.
Because I know a lot of you are not going to be satisfied with any half-assed simultaneous sip.
Can we agree on that?
I think we can. So, what do you need?
Yep, copper, mug, glass, tanker, chalice, stein, canteen, jug, glass, vessel of any kind, fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. Join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
It's called the simultaneous sip, and sometimes it's better if you have an actual cup of coffee.
Go. I don't know.
That might be the best one ever.
So I hear the Wonder Woman movie is coming out, and here's the big news about that.
Apparently it doesn't suck.
So there's a movie, and I don't have a fact check on this, but according to the early reviews, the Wonder Woman movie is quite good.
I hope that's true.
I'll give it a look.
There's a poll by Gallup that finds that 17% of Americans are idiots.
Does that sound a little bit low to you?
Now, that's not how they worded the poll, but that's what they found.
The way they worded it, which I guess is just another way to put it, they found that 83% of Americans think the media is biased.
Now, according to my math, if 83% think the media is biased, that does leave 17% Of Americans who don't think the media is biased.
So 17% of Americans are idiots, according to a poll.
So yesterday, I'm trying to mind my own business, and I thought, you know what would be good?
To take a break from Twitter for just a few hours.
Because I'm on Twitter all day long, can't keep off, I'm addicted.
And I thought, just a few hours off of Twitter tomorrow, just clear my head, try to live like a life in the real world for just a little bit.
And I thought to myself, you know, a couple hours off of Twitter, what am I going to miss?
I mean, I'm not going to miss very much in a couple hours, right?
Well, in those couple of hours when I was off Twitter, President Trump retweeted me four times.
Now, I don't want to make too much of this, but today in the news we found that there was a fourth obelisk, or a monolith if you like, found in yet another remote location.
So, I'm just saying, Trump retweeted me four times yesterday, And the fourth monolith was found.
That could be a coincidence.
Could be. Don't make too much of it.
I'm just saying.
I don't know. I'm not saying they're necessarily connected.
But they're both four.
And that can't be a coincidence.
All right. So, the funniest thing about being retweeted by the president four times in one day...
It creates this weird reaction from my critics.
They all climb out of their holes and out from underneath the rocks or wherever my critics go when they're not bothering me.
You always wonder that, don't you?
When your critic is abusing you online and you say to yourself, well, I can imagine where they are right at this moment.
Probably using a phone or typing on a keyboard.
But where do my critics go When they're not actually actively abusing me.
I assume it's holes.
You might think homes or apartments, but I think holes.
I think they live in just holes, possibly under rocks.
But they come out and they say this sort of thing.
That I'm desperate to be relevant Which is weirdly true, so I don't know how that's exactly a criticism.
Is there anybody who doesn't really, really want to be relevant?
I mean, I guess it depends on your definition of relevant, but is there somebody who wants to go the other direction on that?
Is there anybody who wakes up every day and says, God, I hope I can remain irrelevant today?
I feel like, with a little work, I can go through the whole day without any relevance at all.
So, when you accuse me of desperately wanting to be relevant, I say, compared to what, exactly?
Because I feel like that would be the winning attitude, wouldn't it?
To try to be relevant?
It feels like that's something you should teach children in school.
Children. You're going to grow up, and wouldn't it be great if you tried to be relevant?
So first of all, my critics like to compliment me while imagining that it's an insult.
But the funny thing is they're accusing me of being a has-been while they themselves have never been.
At exactly the moment the president is tweeting me four times, Which makes me a has-being.
Like, at this very moment, I'm being relevant.
Not, you know, not in my own doing, right?
The president tweeted me.
I didn't know that was going to happen.
But at this very moment, I'm being relevant.
And my critics are saying, well, he's desperately trying to be relevant.
Anyway, it always makes me laugh.
CNN analyst Jessica Husman tweeted this when she saw the president retweeting me.
And she said, one of the more bewildering things about 2020 has been the creator of Dilbert becoming a relevant figure in national politics.
I tweeted back and said the competition wasn't very stiff.
Um, So here's one of the tweets, and I think it was the one that maybe got the most attention.
And this was, I was retweeting Mike Cordray's A suggestion that the president use an executive order to ban the Smartmatic machines and Dominion from future elections, but do it based on homeland security.
If you do it under a security umbrella, I think people will say, oh, we get that.
This is a Machines that send our votes overseas.
There's some foreign ownership.
Yeah, of course, that situation should be secured for national security.
And the president retweeted that with one word.
Interesting! With an exclamation.
Now, I do know from my own sources that although this might have been a new thought to the president specifically, that Maybe an executive order banning these counting machines.
Not the counting machines, the voting machines.
Might make some sense, at least to be considered, but apparently the administration or the people who need to be working on this stuff within the administration, it's not a new idea to them.
So do not be surprised if this turns into an actual executive order.
Not because I tweeted it, but because apparently it was a good idea.
Independent of, you know, anybody else thinking of it also.
It turns out that if you do this kind of work for the government, it occurs to you that you should maybe look into this.
And they were. So the good news is your government was very much on top of this.
It didn't need any tweets from me.
Apparently Trump is considering, this is reported, who knows how true it is, that he's going to do this made-for-TV big event when he leaves the White House, should that be the outcome, and Biden is being inaugurated.
So he wants to counter-program Biden's inauguration with a big showy, you know, leaving the White House in Air Force One, which would technically not be Air Force One.
But you know what I'm talking about.
And then doing a rally to counter-program him.
I can't tell you how much I love this idea.
I love this idea so much that I want to marry it.
Because on one hand, he's breaking norms, and I guess it's disrespectful to the incoming president, and blah, blah, blah.
But we like our entertainment.
And one of the things that Trump has done, completely accidentally, is he's made us all far more aware of politics.
There are things about the law and the Supreme Court and how Congress works under unusual situations.
I learned so much this year, just watching all the shenanigans.
But I would love to watch.
I would love to know that the public was so engaged in politics that you could have two major events, an inauguration and counter-programming, at the same time.
You know, I think that's why, not I think, but of course, We had greater engagement in the election this year than ever before.
There is a positive element to this if it makes us pay attention.
There's a story about Rudy Giuliani has been tested.
He has coronavirus.
Now, I don't want to brag, and indeed, I don't know if there's anything to brag about here, so that's my question.
When Rudy appeared on...
Remind me which...
Which hearing it was?
Was it Michigan?
Which was the hearing in which Rudy was all sweaty?
It was just like a week ago, right?
And when I turned on the TV and I saw Rudy at one of those hearings, I forget which state, and he was conspicuously sweaty, and of course I've seen him on TV a billion times, and I know that he's, you know, comfortable on camera, so it's not about the situation.
Somebody says Pennsylvania.
I think that's right. So I didn't think there was anything about the situation that would make a Rudy Giuliani somebody who's taken down the mafia.
He doesn't really get nervous.
You and I might get nervous, but Rudy Giuliani isn't going to get nervous because it's a big event.
He's been to the show.
But he was sweating profusely, and the moment I saw it, I tweeted that he should get tested.
Now, here's my question for those of you who have way too much time on your hands.
Can you find that tweet?
Can you find my tweet?
It must have been during the Pennsylvania hearing somebody saying, in which I said, he looks like he should get tested.
And it turns out he was sick.
He had exactly what it looked like.
Now, I feel like I called it just by looking at him.
Because as soon as I saw them, I thought to myself, I don't know what the other explanations would be, because the other people don't look sweaty, doesn't look like it's a hot room.
Why would it be a hot room in the winter?
Right? The one thing you could make sure you don't have is a room that's too hot in the winter.
So, do I get that win?
Because I don't know. I'm not going to claim it, because I'm I'm not sure if anybody else was saying the same thing at the same time.
So do me a favor if there's anybody who's really bored, and it's only just because I'm curious, if anybody diagnosed him before I did.
I might have been the first one in the world, literally, at least the one who did it publicly.
Maybe people at home said the same thing.
But I might be the first one in the world to diagnose him with COVID, just over TV. Which would only be fun, not important.
So Iran is an interesting place lately, and not in a good way.
And there's an interesting thing timing-wise, that apparently just about exactly the time that Joe Biden would take office if he goes all the way there and becomes sworn in, just about that time, Iran will probably crank up its...
It's enriching of uranium to levels above where we would be comfortable.
So what exactly is going to happen?
Wasn't there a story?
I didn't see much follow-up on it, so I don't know if it's even true.
Was there a story that the Supreme Leader had given some of his or all of his duties to his son?
Did you hear that? Is there some change of leadership going on in Iran?
I feel as though I saw a story on that, And then I didn't see much about it, so now I'm not sure if it was real.
Could have been fake news.
Give me a fact check on that.
So you've got Iran is crumbling, so much so that apparently somebody, we don't know who, I can only guess, assassinated their head of their nuclear program.
And I don't know if Iran will really be able to retaliate.
I just don't know if they will.
So, what will Biden do with Iran?
Because Biden would have to save Iran at this point.
You know, if things just go the way they're going, I think Iran just collapses, or it looks like it, because they're just going to get picked away at until there's nothing left.
So, I'm really curious how Biden will handle Iran.
And I feel as if there are going to be a whole bunch of situations where Joe Biden will just have to do Pretty much the same thing Trump did.
There are going to be more and more of these, right?
And it's going to be funny as they start rolling out.
It's like, well, okay, Biden's going to do very similar things to what Trump did, but we're going to talk about it differently so you think it's really a little bit different.
And after about the fifth one you see of those, where you say, wait a minute, that's exactly what...
Trump was doing. All you're doing is changing the words you're using to describe it, because you know that's coming.
That's totally coming.
On Mark Levin's show, let's talk about some of the best and worst arguments here about the election fraud.
So Mark Levin had Democracy Institute Patrick Basham on his program.
No relation to Christina Basham that I know of.
And one of the things he noted is that there are these indicators that are very reliable in saying that if this thing happens, the incumbent should win re-election.
Now, if one or two of these things that had always been predictive in the past doesn't work out in any given year, you'd say, well, it's just one or two things out of many things that So you wouldn't make too much of this.
But his claim is this.
In 2016, all of these indicators indicated that Trump would win, and he did.
So in 2016, all those indicators worked.
But in 2020, none of them worked.
What are the odds?
Oh, I've got an answer already.
Somebody says that I tweeted about Rudy Giuliani on November 19th.
But that would be...
It's almost too long, right?
Makes you wonder if he really had coronavirus then.
I don't know what else it could be, but maybe that's too long.
But anyway, so what do you think of the case?
So some of these things are such as, if I remember, one of them is if the incumbent president gets 20% more votes, or even just more votes.
If the incumbent gets more votes...
Then the first time he ran, his odds of winning are like way, way high.
And there are a bunch of things like that.
If you win this primary, if you have this enthusiasm, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Now, what are the odds that all of those indicators worked perfectly in 2016 just the way they should have, and yet, in 2020, all of those indicators stopped working?
What's that telling you?
Well, the implication is it's telling you there was fraud because the indicators say Trump definitely was going to win, but the result was that he lost.
So what's that tell you?
So I see that most of you in the comments are saying, well, that's pretty good evidence that there was some fraud, right?
Is that how you interpret it?
I hate to tell you this, but I don't feel like that's what's happening here.
Let me give you another way to interpret the same thing.
Here's another way to interpret why those indicators all worked in 2016, and they also all worked all the times before that, but they stopped working in 2020.
Let me give you an alternative reason that has nothing to do with fraud.
A lot of people voted.
That's it. That's it.
That's the whole story. So there are two explanations for why all of those indicators would be flawed this time.
One, massive fraud.
Two, it was a weird year.
A lot of people voted. I feel as if if things went so weirdly that one of those indicators got violated, there's a really good chance they would all be violated because the one variable wouldn't violate just one of the indicators.
That one variable of just way more people voting and way more people hating Trump than hated him in 2016 or hated him with greater passion or there was more get out the vote or something like that.
So here's my take.
If you see something like this where all of these indicators stopped working suddenly, it's definitely a red flag.
But it might be, well, maybe it's not definitely a red flag.
Maybe it's a yellow flag.
Maybe it's a flag that says you should really be looking a little deeper over here.
But let me tell you what it's not.
Strong evidence of fraud.
It's not. Because if you had one big variable that just blew the election predictions out of the water, it would take all of the variables out at the same time.
It would only have to be one thing that's different, and we know there was one thing that was different.
Gigantic turnout, massive caring.
You could get two possibilities.
Now, I've learned from prior experience that many of you are binaries.
There should be a name for this.
I'm going to call you binaries.
A binary is somebody who said, there definitely was fraud, or there definitely was no fraud.
Those are binaries.
You're picking one of two possibilities, and that's it.
It's just one of these.
It's definitely this, or it's definitely that.
And you've made up your mind.
I don't do that. So when you're telling me I'm wrong, you're not even in the right conversation.
Because I can't be wrong when I'm saying that you have to apply odds to things.
So if I say there's a 90% chance that something will happen and then it doesn't happen, was I wrong?
No. If I say there's a 90% chance of something happening and it doesn't happen, I'm not wrong, because I said there was a 90% chance.
10% is still pretty healthy, right?
So you have to understand that if I criticize the people who are criticizing the election, or if I criticize the other side, I'm doing the same thing.
I'm saying we have to understand this as a percentage thing, an odds thing, and just don't be a binary about it, okay?
So there is not, and I'll be very certain about this next statement, it is not true that because all those variables were violated only this one time, it is not true that therefore there is fraud.
It could be true that there's fraud, and it could be true that's exactly the reason that all those variables were changed.
But there is another explanation.
Something different was about this election in every way, which was Trump and blah, blah.
So that one's just keep an eye on it.
We'll see. Here's another one.
Dr. Craig Malkin tweets today that 48 cases about the election irregularities, 48 cases counting, might be 49 now, he says, where liberal and conservative judges have tossed out Trump's legal team For lack of evidence.
Primary documents prove they aren't arguing fraud in court.
So, do you think it's logical to say, now I'm going to go the other way, right?
So this will be an argument on the other side.
Do you think it's logical to say that because you've lost prior cases with different evidence and different claims that you will lose all future cases that are different evidence and different claims?
It's the dumbest thing I've ever heard in my life.
Now, the other thing that Dr.
Craig Malkin may not understand is that I don't believe the legal team was assuming that they would win These cases.
I don't think they thought they would win.
Why'd they do it? Well, I suppose you might win.
Yeah, there's always a possibility.
But it feels to me it's more like convincing the public that with all this smoke there must be fire.
So if you look at the court cases as court cases, that's a pretty bad record.
If you look at it as managing public opinion about the question of whether fraud happened, Home run.
Flat out home run.
And if you think that the president's attorneys are only looking at law, then you don't understand anything about the world.
They have to look at public opinion too, because even the courts are influenced by public opinion.
So of course the legal team is managing both what the public thinks about the situation, at the same time they're managing the legal technicalities.
If they lose on all of the legal technicalities 49 times in a row, but the next poll that comes out says that a gigantic amount of the public thinks the election was fraudulent, did they lose 49 cases?
Technically, yes, because they didn't succeed in court.
But I would argue that they won 49 cases in a row, because the net effect was people saying, well, with all these claims...
That's a lot of claims.
There's got to be something in this with all these claims.
Now, does it have to be true that with all this smoke there has to be fire?
No. No, that doesn't have to be true.
There could be tons of smoke and no fire whatsoever.
But in terms of persuasion, it makes you think there's probably a fire.
Let me tell you what, and somebody tweeted this today that I didn't write it down, I should have, and it goes like this.
Suppose you imagine that somehow you have omniscient powers, and you know that fraud did happen.
So let's take this just as a mental exercise.
You know it's a fact, there's no doubt about it, just for the mental exercise, that fraud happened.
How many examples of that real fraud would you expect to find relative to the number of confirmation biases and fake discoveries would you find?
What do you think would be that ratio?
If you assumed real fraud happened and there were just millions of people, lots of millions, involved in voting and counting and everything.
So tons of people are involved.
It's complicated.
It's messy. There will be real mistakes that are just innocent mistakes.
What would you guess would be the number of real things, even if there's a real thing there, to the number of fake things where people are pretty sure they're seeing this fraud, but maybe they're imagining it because they just see more than they see.
I'm guessing 10 to 1.
Ten to one would be my guess.
Yeah, I see somebody else saying that.
About ten to one. And that would be predictable based on the setup.
It wouldn't matter if it was an election or anything else.
A big, complicated thing, once you come to believe that there's some mischief in any big, complicated thing, you're going to see ten times as much what you think is evidence or even proof Then there is actual real proof.
That's completely normal.
So, if you lose, let's say, 90N of 100 court cases, would that be you doing a bad job?
Probably not.
Maybe that's about what you'd expect with these numbers, even if there's really something there to find.
All right. Here's the dumbest tweet I've seen in a long time, doesn't matter who said it, just a Twitter user, who said about the virus, virus is going to do virus things and spread like, wait for it, a virus.
And it was in the context of basically we shouldn't be treating the virus like it's a big problem.
And I'm thinking to myself, You know, that almost sort of made sense six months ago.
If you didn't know any better.
Oh, six months ago people were saying that.
Maybe it's just the flu.
But it's not six months ago now.
It's not six months ago now.
How can you still say...
That there's nothing you can do about this virus, because it seems like you could.
But we'll talk more about the virus in a minute.
Let me go over some more bad thinking.
So here's a tweet. I'm a firm believer in Occam's razor.
The simplest explanation is the correct one.
So now this is getting into the Michigan suitcase situation where People were apparently sent home and then some counters stayed behind for hours counting.
We'll talk about that more. But somebody saying that Occam's Razor, the simplest explanation is that while it's possible that everybody left on their own, the most likely explanation is that they were told to leave.
What do you think?
We've got a few different versions of the story.
About the Michigan ballot counters.
One version is that only the people opening the envelopes were asked to leave.
And the other people just saw them leave and they left with them.
So the witnesses and the news people saw people leaving and they just left with them.
So that's one version. The other version is that the people in the room were all told that the counting was done for the night.
So they could go home. But then the counting wasn't done for the night.
So who's telling the truth?
Who's telling the truth?
Well, there's an excellent article in The Federalist by Molly Hemingway who takes you through some of the claims and she looks at what is allegedly the debunk And she debunks the debunk, basically. Does a great job, as Molly Hemingway always does.
I would say, remember I told you I'm going to give compliments between now and the end of the year, just because it's the holiday season?
If you're not following Molly Hemingway on Twitter, you're really missing a lot, because she would be She's probably in the top three or top five political commentators in the country right now.
You could argue top one, I think.
So you should be following her.
But I'm not so sure I agree with it all.
It's a really good article, a really good take, but let me give you my take.
We're going to go to the whiteboard.
Let's go to the whiteboard.
Alright, see if I can line you up so you can see this well.
Here's what I call the Dilbert filter on that Michigan ballot counting situation.
Now the Dilbert filter goes like this.
That there are some things you can depend on in any organization that has somebody in charge and then a bunch of people trying to figure out what they're doing.
In other words, a business, an organization, any kind of group of humans trying to get something done.
There are some common things that you'll always find.
So let's look at...
The room situation, as I remember it from the videos, and if I get any of this wrong, feel free to tell me because I'm not, you know, I didn't do the deepest of dives, so maybe I got some stuff wrong here.
So if I remember the room, there were these counting stations on one end.
I think there were four of them, or were there five, but a limited number.
And then the claim is that there were these other tables where the ballots were being opened by people whose only job was to take them out of the envelopes.
I don't know if they were checking the signatures, but they were removing them from the envelopes, putting them in containers, and then in some cases they were stored under tables, which is actually exactly where you would store things, because putting them in the aisle would be dumb.
So the claim is that the woman with the blonde braids came into, and I think we saw in the video, that she was standing between the counting stations and the ballot opening larger body of work here, and that while facing the cutters, but not facing the counting stations, there are two versions of Of what this person said.
Have you heard both versions?
Probably not, right?
Somebody says, Jesus Christ, man, it was Georgia.
Correct that to Georgia.
This is exactly why comments are good.
Yeah, so forget everything I said about Michigan.
I'm confusing the states.
So Georgia. So we're back to Georgia.
So somebody who they thought maybe was a supervisor who had some authority, who had blonde locks, said one of two things, and both of those two things are being reported.
One of the things that's being reported is that this person said, The ballot counting is done.
Everybody can go home.
Now, if that version of the story is true, we've got a big problem.
Because if it's true, what she said is, the ballot counting is done, you can all go home.
But some of the ballot counters stayed behind, and then when the witnesses were gone, at least the Republican witnesses, They kept counting through the night.
That would be a pretty big problem, wouldn't you all agree?
If it's true that she said the ballot counting is done, go home, and then they counted ballots after the witnesses left, I think we'd all agree that if that happened, this is a big problem.
Same page? Everybody?
Everybody agrees that would be a big problem if that is the fact.
So, I went to look at the witness statement, because the witness statement presumably says that she said, the ballot counting is done, go home.
Isn't that what you've heard?
Isn't everybody reporting?
In fact, I think in Molly Hemingway's article, I believe that there was at least one place where she says the people said the ballot counting was done, Go home.
So then I went and looked at the actual witness statement, and did the witness who was there say that somebody told them the ballot counting was done, go home?
Nope. Nope.
If you read the witness statement in the witness's own words, what the witness says, or at least the one that I saw, was that this person said, the work is done.
Come back in the morning.
The work is done.
Now, remember where she's standing, and remember who she's talking to.
She's facing the envelope cutters, and she's saying, hey everybody, the work is done.
You can go home, come back in the morning.
You see where I'm going?
She's not even facing the people who are counters.
There are no ballot counters here.
And she didn't say the ballot counting was done.
She said to these people whose work was done, she said, hey everybody, the work is done.
Come back in the morning. Now there's a question I have, which is, was there reason to believe that there would be more for the cutters to do in the morning?
Which is, you know, a big gap in the story, right?
Did the cutters believe that there might be more ballots coming in after that night?
Because we've watched this happen, right?
Ballots are still trickling in even now, right?
There's still some counting going on.
So was she referring to the fact that there might be some more to open in the morning?
So I would need a fact check on that.
Was that even a thing? Could there be more that needed to be opened in the morning?
And could it be...
Let me give you the version that if I were these people, the ones who stayed, and I were going to offer a defense, it would look like this.
There were only this many counting machines, and the people who had planned to remain knew which was their machine, and they knew that just the four or five of them would be enough to do the work.
If the four or five of them Didn't feel like having all these people wandering around and slowing them down, and they were just thinking, innocently, there's no reason for everybody to be here.
We don't need any counters.
We're not talking to the observers and the reporters.
They're doing their own thing.
So we're not even going to talk to observers and reporters.
We'll just talk to the counters, the cutters, tell them to go home, because they're not needed.
We have exactly the right number of people for counting, so we'll just work extra hard, get this done.
You guys don't need to stay up.
You can all go home. Now, the official version from the state, somebody, an investigator for the Secretary of State, I think, said that the witnesses and the press simply interpreted...
Your work is done.
It's time to go home.
And when the cutters started to walk out, the observers and the press said, oh, I guess we're done here.
And so they left.
Is there anybody who says that anybody told the observers or the press the ballot counting is done?
Have you seen that reporting?
Because I haven't People are literally laughing in the comments because I'm saying, that's a stupid take.
So what about the pipe break report?
Completely different story, different night, the pipe breaking.
Somebody says the counting has stopped.
Right. Right?
So the claim here is that Scott, Scott, Scott.
Somebody said, the counting has stopped.
Why are you ignoring that?
To which I say, who said that?
Who said that, and who claims somebody said that?
Bet you can't find it.
We all believe, we're all under the impression, that somebody told the room, the counting has stopped.
But the one witness thing that I read under oath, he never said counting.
He said work. And she was talking to the people whose work was done.
All right? Now, here's the Dilbert filter on this in summary.
The Dilbert filter is this.
If you take any 10 people in a work environment...
And the supervisor tells those 10 people some instructions, even simple ones, such as, if you're done with this work, come in tomorrow.
Really simple instruction.
How many people, N of 10, correctly interpret a supervisor telling 10 people what to do?
Not 10. Definitely not 10.
Suppose you're one of the people in the room and you're the press.
And you're sort of semi-paying attention, and the supervisor says to the cutters, hey, everybody, your work is done for the night.
Go home. And then the supervisor, or maybe the press, looks at somebody else in the press or one of the witnesses and said, are we closing up?
Are we done? And then somebody else says, yeah, it sounds like the counting is done.
And then somebody asks that press person, you know, what's happening?
I see people leaving. And then that person says, yeah, the counting's done.
Where did the word counting come from first?
Because I'll bet the people who were working there used the word work.
The work is done, and I'll bet it was interpreted as the counting was done.
That is my theory. But is it sketchy looking?
Yes. It is totally sketchy looking.
Did people count a lot of ballots without witnesses?
Yes. So, I'm not telling you that nothing bad happened.
I don't know. I'm just telling you that the way it was reported leaves out the Dilbert filter, which is that people hear the same thing differently.
And maybe that's all that happened.
Don't know. I'm very, very suspicious, just like all of you are.
You can't out-suspicious me If you're trying to out-suspicious me, good luck, because I'm pretty suspicious.
I'm just telling you that what we have so far, or at least what I've seen, doesn't quite make the case.
Could be a case.
It hasn't been made. All right.
I was listening to Smirconish on Sirius yesterday, and This is one of my favorite stories.
So he was talking about how the citizenship test for naturalized citizens has been made more difficult.
So those of you who are good at math, you're going to get ahead of me.
If you're good at math, pretend you're not good at math just for a minute, and then I'll let you be good at math in a little bit.
So as Smyrkanish reported, it used to be that you only had to get 6 out of 10 questions about the government functions to become a naturalized citizen, in addition to what other things you had to do.
But you had to get 6 out of 10 ranked in a test.
Now the test is from a body of study.
They give you, I think there are 128 questions or something.
So you have a specific document to study.
And out of that, whatever, 100 and so questions, they're going to randomly give you 10 of them, and you only have to get 6 right in the old days.
But it's being revised, and as Smirkanish reports, it's becoming harder now, which doesn't seem fair, does it?
It seems kind of unfair and a little bit mean to immigrants to make this harder, because it went from you have to get 6 out of 10, and they stiffened it, so now you have to get 12 out of 20.
And so Smirkanish did a whole episode about, you know, what do you think about the fact that it went from an easy 6 out of 10 to this mean old Trump administration is, they're stiffening it.
Now it's going to be 12 out of 20.
Okay, okay, those of you who are good at math, you can be good at math again.
Yeah, so you're allowed to be good at math again.
So now tell me what's wrong with this.
Yeah, that's right.
The Trump administration tightened the requirement from you have to get 60% right all the way to you have to get 60% right.
Because 6 out of 10 is 60% and 12 out of 20 is 60%.
Now, let me ask you this.
If you knew that you were studying a body of 128 questions, and you had to pass a test with 60% right, what would you prefer?
Would you prefer that your test was 6 and a 10, or would you prefer, as the test taker, to have a 12 and a 20?
Well, I'm going to take 12 and a 20 every time.
Why? Because there might be out of those hundred and so potential questions that I'm studying, what if the ones I miss...
Happened to be, you know, I just happened to miss the wrong ones, and they happened to be the ones on the test.
My odds of doing a good job are way better if there are more questions.
Because remember, I studied all the questions.
I didn't study some of the questions.
I've studied all of them. So I'd rather have the 12 and a 20 option, right?
Is there anybody who disagrees with that?
Wouldn't you all rather have 12 out of 20?
So it was an entire story about how this change, there was another change that alleges that the questions got harder, which is separate.
I don't know that that's true.
I don't know. Seems to me like it's about the same.
All right. There was a claim that...
California and Texas had similar COVID trajectory, even though they did completely different stuff.
California is doing a tight shutdown, and Texas is a little looser.
And the claim was that they got about the same result.
Which took about two minutes for Andres Backhaus to explain why they were just analyzing it wrong, per usual.
Every one of these charts you see on Twitter, you should give them no credibility.
Let me tell you, there's probably nothing less believable than an official-looking chart on Twitter.
I don't think there's anything you should trust less than a graph Even with sources, and even if you can check the sources to be true, there's nothing less useful than any kind of official-looking graph on Twitter.
They're all as likely to be disinformation as to be information, and you can't tell the difference, really.
So Andres explains it this way.
He says, neglecting what seemingly small but prolonged differences add up to large cumulative differences over time, saying that's the problem with it.
And he points out that the cases per million are 36% higher, and the deaths are 46% higher in Texas.
So if you just look at the graph, it looks like they came out about the same, but if you dig a little deeper into the numbers, it turns out That California is doing tighter restrictions and having much better luck.
Does that mean the masks work and shutdowns work?
Probably. Probably does.
But there are a lot of differences, so you don't know for sure.
Rasmussen is going to be telling you this morning that 47% of the country thinks there's a good chance that fraud happened in the election.
47% still think that.
So let's see.
What else we got here?
Sometimes I worry that we don't have a pandemic problem so much as an inability to understand risk management.
It looks like we have a virus problem, and if that's your mindset, then that requires you to do a certain set of things.
But I feel as if we almost have a risk management problem.
You know, if every human being were good at risk management, I feel as though the pandemic would already be over.
Because people would simply do all the smart things, and then we'd be done.
So it feels like stupidity is killing us, not the pandemic.
Let me see if I can find a bad analogy, because all analogies are bad.
If we have lots of people drown every year, if lots of people drown every year in swimming pools and oceans, do we have a water problem?
Or do we have a problem that maybe people should learn to swim or not drink and dive off a diving board?
We might not have so much a water problem as we have a human being problem.
They should do different things and not drown.
It's starting to feel like the pandemic is really sort of a human problem.
We're just doing dumb things, and that's why we're getting a bad result.
Now, there's also the Wall Street Journal has now called bullshit on the Sweden experiment.
Let me ask you here, most of you watch the news, that's why you're here.
How many of you think it is still true that Sweden got a good result by doing different things?
How many of you think that's still true?
Because the update is that Sweden gave up on their own technique.
Sweden has now decided to conform to other countries' stricter shutdowns because Sweden itself says that their last strategy of being permissive didn't work.
So even Sweden says Sweden didn't work.
And therefore they changed it to be like everybody else.
So how many of you still think Sweden worked?
Now, it worked in the sense that they had more freedom for a while, but it definitely did not work in the sense that they're getting a better outcome compared to the alternate way to treat it.
Sweden's becoming like the rest of the world.
So, I feel like we owe a debt of gratitude to Sweden, because Sweden did the thing that should have happened intentionally, But you can't do this intentionally because it would be unethical.
Which is to handle at least one country completely differently.
Because don't you need to know?
Alright, one country did it completely differently.
Now we can track them and see how they did.
And that's what they did. Now, of course, we couldn't have done that intentionally because people would say, hey, people will die.
You can't have an experiment like that.
But it happened for good intentions, and now we know.
So, great debt of gratitude to the people of Sweden who sucked it up, and maybe we learned something.
How about this question?
As of today, how many of you think masks work?
In the comments, it'll take a while for them to catch up.
How many of you, as of today, You know, because we've had lots of time to see what works and what doesn't.
But as of today, how many of you believe masks work and that it has been demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt?
And I'm going to read the comments as they go by.
Nope, nope, nope.
Nope, nope, nope. So YouTube's a little faster than Periscope on the comments.
But I'm seeing...
I saw somewhat.
That's the closest to a yes.
But people watching this Periscope are almost...
I see one yes over there.
I'm seeing no, no, no.
Limited. I see a yes.
So overwhelmingly...
Oh, a little more people on Periscope saying yes.
Somebody says, define work.
Work means reducing the spread.
All right, 20% they work.
If the masks worked 20% of the time, then they work, because that would be enough to make it worthwhile.
All right, so isn't that weird to you?
No matter whether you think the masks work or don't work, and I'm on the side that says it's obvious they work, to me, it's a closed question.
But let me not be binary.
I suppose there's some chance that they don't work.
But let me ask you this.
Does it bother you that there are no doctors on the other side, as far as I know?
Are there any doctors saying that masks don't work?
And if you were to ask the majority of doctors, number one, do you think they have better information than you on this topic?
Most probably, yes.
Why do the doctors all wear masks?
Do you see any trained medical doctors or epidemiologists, let's say, do you see any of them not wearing masks or promoting lack of mask wearing?
Now, I'm not the guy who says the experts are always right.
But by this time, don't you think the experts know by now?
Because it doesn't seem like the hardest thing in the world to test.
Now, the thing that's misleading is there were all these wrong kinds of tests done where they see if a virus can get through the mask.
And the virus can get through the mask, but that's the wrong kind of test because you're not trying to stop all virus.
You're trying to slow it down.
That's the only point.
So... That's like saying air protects lives.
That's not a good analogy.
Somebody says 20% effectiveness is not going to affect the spread.
Yes, it would. 20% effectiveness of masks, hypothetically, would have a gigantic effect on the spread.
It wouldn't stop it, but it'd be pretty big.
Doctors that say they don't work are being censored by other doctors.
The only reason that doctors who are anti-mask are being censored is because other doctors are saying that.
It's not because you and I are saying that.
It's not because the media has an opinion per se.
It's because so many other doctors say, no.
Somebody says, yes, there was a huge case in Ontario about nurses not wearing masks, but I don't know which way that went.
Surgery isn't normal?
No. So I'm not making the case that because surgeons wear masks, that therefore masks are good.
They're different masks with a different situation.
They're not comparable in the least.
Yeah, okay.
Well, I just think it's mind-boggling that that's still a question.
Let me put it this way.
In terms of risk management, it's a no-brainer.
It really is. In terms of whether you can be absolutely positive they work in the way that you want, no.
You really can't be absolutely positive of anything these days.
But in terms of risk management, the fact that most experts say they work That's worth wearing a mask.
So there's no question what you should do, even if there's some small question about whether they work.
Somebody says masks do work by all accounts.
Not by all accounts, but certainly by the majority of experts.
The people who fooled you on masks are the ones who did the test about whether the masks are too porous.
And it just was the wrong question, because if you stop the airflow and you stop some of the water, or if you even redirect it so it's not going directly in somebody's face, you're going to get a different situation for sure.
Yeah, so we're not using surgeons wearing masks as any kind of a guide for whether you should wear a mask as an individual.
It's different. Read the box.
Why is it lying? The box for the mask?
I don't know how many different ways to explain this without people still understanding it.
Let's see if there's a way to do this.
You all understand, I think, that the amount of viral load makes a difference, right?
So if somebody were infected and they talked for an hour directly into your open mouth, You would be sicker, say the experts, and they seem to be pretty sure about this.
You would be sicker because you've got a ton of viral load.
It went directly from a sick person right into your mouth, and it lasted an hour, and man, you're going to get some bad COVID. But if you had more of a casual contact with that same infected person, And you got a little bit of COVID, you'd still get the virus.
You'd still be infected.
But because it started slowly and then built up in your system, your own defenses would have a little more time to kick in and you wouldn't have as bad a case.
So, once you understand that the amount of virus you get makes a big, big, big difference, now do you think masks don't work?
Because at the very least, it's going to cut the amount of direct air That's going directly into the face of the person you're talking to.
If the only thing it did was distribute it to the sides and, you know, around you, instead of cannon shooting it into the face of the other person you're talking to, I would think that would release the viral load, and I don't see any argument that that couldn't happen.
Now, if you both stayed in the same room, and you were both wearing masks, and you were in a tiny space, And you're also close, and you stayed in this tiny space with bad ventilation, and you stayed there for hours at a time, would the mask help?
Probably not, right?
Because if you stay there long enough, you're basically going to fill the whole room with COVID. If you stay there long enough.
So it wouldn't matter if the virus is coming out the sides, or it wouldn't even matter how fast it's coming out.
If you stay there long enough in the little room, you're going to get plenty of it.
It's just that the mask slows it down.
That's all. That's almost certain to work, I would say.
All right. Let's see...
Yeah, the other thing that's just blowing my mind is, you know Alex Berenson, who's been quite vocal about the efficacy of masks and lockdowns and stuff.
And he started out being, I would say, what would you call it?
I would say a patriotic skeptic.
I'm making up a term here.
So, you know, you want your Alex Berenson's, like you wouldn't want a world without that guy, because you need the guy who says, oh, wait a minute, you know, you say we should all do something, but I'm not seeing the science.
You want that guy, right?
You want lots of that guy.
You want lots of skeptics, because they're doing it for the right reasons, right?
Good intentions, every positive, you know, purpose.
But sometimes... You can be a skeptic, but eventually there's enough information to say, all right, I was skeptical, but now I accept that there's enough information now, and now we don't have to be skeptical.
I feel as though Alex Berenson is sort of at a turning point now, where he's going to have to re-examine his skepticism on at least masks, and maybe more.
So we'll see. We'll see if that happens.
And again...
If a skeptic is claiming there's no evidence and making a big deal about it, and then later is shown that maybe they're not right, that's not really wrong, right?
Because if somebody's complaining there's not evidence and there wasn't, at least good enough evidence, that's still true.
If later you find out it worked, that's just new information.
All right. Somebody says, studies are now showing there's little spread in closed work environments.
I don't trust any of those studies.
I suppose if you get enough.
If masks are effective, why are there spikes and infections everywhere?
Well, the people who are pro-mask will tell you that's just not true.
They will tell you that it is clear as day And there's current evidence to show that when there are masks, there is less infection than where there are no masks.
So I guess you can pick and choose your studies.
Okay, please stop sending me comments about how the good masks used for surgery are a different situation, because nobody's talking about that.
There's nobody involved in this conversation.
Who thinks that the surgical masks and that application should be useful in this conversation?
Somebody says handwashing is the key.
I don't think so. I think that we thought handwashing was the key before, but it turns out that you don't have to wash with soap your bags of delivered food or anything.
What about vitamin D and zinc?
I read a story today that said that if you don't have enough magnesium, I think Joshua Lisek was tweeting that, that if you don't have enough magnesium in your body, which is pretty common, a lot of people don't, that you don't take advantage of your vitamin D the way you could if you had magnesium.
So I'm going to look into supplementing with magnesium, if I can confirm that That it has a role in making your vitamin D more effective.
So I'm going to look into that.
If anybody has some ideas on that, let me know.
But let me know. Is magnesium something people should have just in general?
Just general health?
Are we low on it?
Is it a good idea to take it?
But then on top of that, does it help my vitamin D become more effective?
So I'll look into that. I'm seeing 40% say they will not take the vaccine.
I don't believe that number.
I believe 40% said it.
I believe that once people start getting the vaccine, the amount of peer pressure will be just enormous.
So I don't think it'll be 40%.
Watch out for the snake oil salesman.
Yeah, supplements are something that I'm really, really skeptical of, just in general.
Um... Alright, you need K. So you need K. Is it vitamin K? Alright, that's all I need for now.
And I will talk to you tomorrow.
Alright, Periscope's gone.
YouTube, you're still with me?
Somebody says, is masks and social distancing worth it if we lose our humanity?
Okay.
Well, we certainly have to balance economics with that.
You know, I'm generally not concerned about the long-term implications of short-term actions, if we know they're short-term.
All right, that was a bad joke I'm not going to repeat.
All right. Somebody says, epidemiologists say that cloth masks will slow the spread, but not stop the total number eventually affected.
False. False.
If epidemiologists say that, then you should stop listening to them.
Here's what they should say.
If cloth masks slow the spread, and you've got a vaccine coming, Wear a cloth mask.
Because slowing it makes sense in a world in which you've got a vaccine coming.
Slowing it is less useful in a world in which you're all going to get it eventually.
It's still useful to slow it, but it's not the same equation.
Why were the ballots under the table?
Where would you put them? If you've ever been a caterer, you know that's where you store things under the table.
And you saw that all the tables were cleaned on the top, and they stored things under the table, which is where I would put them.
I would put them under the table.
Dominion miscounted in Georgia...
I think, did they?
I think that was debunked, wasn't it?
Why does the huge spike for Biden in the end of the night correlate perfectly with the tape?
Because that's when they counted a lot of votes really efficiently.
That's why. Once everybody was left and everything was opened, the last four people said, we're going to crash through this as fast as possible and go home.
Everything's ready for us.
We'll just run them through. So there should have been a huge spike in votes, and if most of those votes were from a region that voted for Biden, then most of them would be for Biden, and there would be a big spike at the end of the night.
I'll tell you what would be more unusual.
Wouldn't it be more unusual if there were not a big spike at the end of the night?
Because wouldn't that suggest people were hurrying up to get home?
And there was a learning curve.
Wouldn't you expect that you would have the slowest ballot counting in the beginning of the night because everybody's new and you get all the bad ballots and they haven't been corrected?
By the end of the night, let me give you another scenario.
I'm not saying this happened because there's no evidence that it happened, but just somebody asked the question, how could there possibly be a big spike for Biden votes at the end of the night and it be normal?
I'll give you a scenario just to tell you that your imagination might be limiting you.
It doesn't mean this happened. Suppose the voting process was this, that the problem ballots that don't go through the counting machine, they're folded or bent or whatever, they all go to a room for correction.
In the correcting room, while witnesses are watching, so there's no funny business, a clean ballot is taken with no entries, and they look at the one that's damaged, And they simply write the same entries on the clean one, so that they'll have a clean one to go through the machine for counting.
Now, as long as it's witnessed by the right witnesses, there's nothing wrong with that.
It's the same ballot, they're just transferring it onto a clean one.
Now, you're the one who's doing the corrections in the correcting room, and there's a lot of correcting, because they're all folded ballots.
You know, it's a messy system.
So now you've got this big bunch of corrected ballots.
When do you give them to the counters?
Are you giving each corrected ballot as you correct it?
Alright, here's one. Take it to the other room.
Or do you process all of them in your own little room, and then when you're done, at the end of the night, because you wouldn't do it before that, if you're correcting ballots, you're going to wait until the end of the night to make sure you've got them all.
At the end of the night, you take your buckets full of your corrected ballots, you put it on top of the ones that were going to get counted anyway, And then people are faster at counting because they figured out how to do it better.
There's a learning curve. Nobody's asking them the questions.
The witnesses went away. There's nobody to slow them down.
And it's the best counters that stayed late because the bad counters who were not very efficient got sent home.
You could think of easy reasons why very naturally and for no funny business there was a big spike at the end of the day.
If it turned out that 98% of that spike was for Biden, well, that's close to impossible.
So that would be a problem.
But there shouldn't be a problem with the fact that there was a spike at the end of the night.
The problem should be the percentage within the spike, if there's a problem.
And what if you've got a big bunch of Marxists doing the correcting?
Same thing, I guess.
So all I'm trying to tell you is that I join you in your skepticism that this was a clean vote.
I join you in your skepticism that whatever was going on in that room needs some answers, and more answers than we've heard so far.
But the only thing I'm adding to it is there could be completely legitimate reasons for everything you saw.
There could be. And if you were to bet on it, I don't even know which way I'd bet on this one.
Because my bias says there's something mischievous there, but I didn't see it.
So it feels like it's confirmation bias.
Alright, that's all I got.
Somebody says Occam's Razor.
You might have missed the first part where I was mocking Occam's razor.
Occam's razor is generally confirmation bias in disguise.
So everybody thinks that their explanation of what happened is the simple one.
But that's why Occam's razor is a way to fool yourself into thinking you've got the right answer.