Episode 1222 Scott Adams: Toobin Holds His Post, Putin's Excellent Schemes, Vaccination Cognitive Dissonance
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
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Content:
Aesthetics of pronouns says Elon Musk
Give Jeffrey Toobin a break
Uptick in artists insult-trolling me
Election influence by China, Iran, Russia?
Pete Buttigieg for Secretary of Transportation
Andreas Backhaus debunking talent
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The thing that makes everything better.
Accept the lockdown. It's called the simultaneous zip and it happens now.
Go. Well, those of you worried about the coming demise of Periscope, worry not.
You have options. It looks like Twitter is going to just incorporate Periscope into Twitter.
So it's starting to look like Twitter isn't going away so much as the name is changing and the way you get into it is different.
So we'll wait on that.
But in the meantime... Especially since I don't trust YouTube to not demonetize me or not kick me off.
I've opened up a Rumble account in addition to YouTube.
Now Rumble is almost ready to have live streaming.
So until Rumble has live streaming I'll just continue to do the two live streams and then as soon as these are done they'll get posted to Rumble.
Also to the locals platform if you want to see it there.
All right, let's talk about all the stuff.
Chris Christie just recorded a commercial public service announcement telling people to wear masks because he got the COVID himself and he was in the ICU for days and now he says, quote, this message isn't for everyone, Christie said in the video.
It's for all those people who refuse to wear a mask.
You know, lying in isolation in ICU for seven days, I thought about how wrong I was to remove my mask at the White House.
Well, I suppose it depends what he means by that.
If he means he thinks he got the virus because he removed his mask, I'm not sure that's what the masks are for.
Has that changed? Because I thought we were told very clearly and often that wearing a mask is for the benefit of the other person.
It's not so much that you're going to prevent things coming into you, but you might prevent giving off some virus to somebody else.
Has that changed? I saw a comment that says the CDC changed that, but I didn't see that in the news, so I don't know.
But if it did change or it didn't, there's so many things that are just sketchier.
But it would be weird if Christie went from whatever he believed about masks to his current belief about masks and still didn't know it's about the other person.
Somebody says it can help, but I would have to think it would help in both directions, maybe more so in one direction.
Well, today is the anniversary of Back in 1903, the Wright brothers flew their first airplane.
And whenever I see a story about the Wright brothers, I think back to all of my critics who say, Scott, Scott, Scott, stay in your lane.
Don't try to go into some other field.
That's not going to work.
You're a cartoonist.
Cartoonist. Draw cartoons, cartoon boy.
Don't you get out of that lane.
But of course I call that the most loserish advice of all advice in the history of time.
Stay in your lane would have not given you the airplane.
Stay in your lane would not give you the automobile.
Stay in your lane would not get you Apple computer.
What did Steve Jobs know about computers before he got into that?
And, of course, I would not be doing this livestream, and I wouldn't be a cartoonist, because I was not in the cartooning lane before I was, and I wasn't in this lane until I was.
So stay in your lane.
Worst advice of all time.
Here's a question for you just to make you feel uncomfortable.
How many of your decisions that you've made during the pandemic, and of course we're all making lots of decisions every day about when to put on your mask, do you wash your mask, how much social distancing, how close to get... So you're making hundreds of decisions a day about coronavirus, even if you're not thinking about it consciously.
And here's what I'm wondering.
There are a lot of things that we do where we say, you know, I'm just going to take a little extra chance here.
I'm going to cut a corner.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the only reason that we think we're being ethical when we cut a corner is because we don't know who would die, right?
If we knew... Uh-oh.
If I don't put my mask on to talk to my next-door neighbor, if you knew that would kill a guy named Bob, you wouldn't do it.
If you knew. But because you don't exactly know if talking to your neighbor is going to spread it one way or the other, which will get to somebody's grandparents, which will kill Bob, you just have no way to know the chain of cause and effect.
But that doesn't make you less responsible, does it?
It just makes it harder to know who did what that caused what.
And so I had this experience the other day, without getting into the details.
I had the experience that you have every day, which is there was a thing I could have played safe, but it was a little inconvenient.
I didn't, maybe didn't want to.
It's not that I didn't know That there was a proper way to go about this thing.
It doesn't matter what it is. I knew what the proper thing was.
I just cut a corner.
I made a decision that in this one case, I'll just cut a corner.
The only reason I can do that is cognitive dissonance.
That my brain turns off and I no longer think in some kind of a social way that what I'm doing is part of saving lives.
Just because I can't trace my specific action to a specific death, I tell myself, well, I'm not being unethical.
I'm just cutting a little corner here.
Nobody's even going to know the difference.
So when I noticed...
And by the way, this rarely happens.
The whole point of cognitive dissonance is that you don't know you're in it.
It wouldn't be cognitive dissonance if you understood yourself to be in it.
You would just think your way out of it if you could do that.
But with this coronavirus, I've actually caught myself...
Using cognitive dissonance to try to rationalize my own laziness.
Because usually it's just convenience or laziness where you say, well, I cut a little corner.
Now some of you have decided that masks don't work and that the virus isn't real.
I believe that for some of that population, the ones who think the virus is not really real or the ones who think social distancing and masks don't work, I feel as if there was a time when that conversation made sense, but now it's just cognitive dissonance.
Just cognitive dissonance.
And when you see people argue it, it looks like nonsense now.
There was a time when it was perfectly sensible to question every part of the scientific recommendations for coronavirus, because they got a lot wrong.
It's not like the experts were right on top of it in every way.
But it looks to me, it looks to me like there's a sizable number of people who believe they're involved in some kind of a logical argument, but it is really obvious to an observer, and not just me, but to any observer who's not in cognitive dissonance, it's really obvious. So let me give you one example I just saw on social media.
There was a user on social media who said, argumentatively, that his child, he estimates, has a one in 250,000 risk of dying from COVID. One in a quarter million.
So that's the risk of the COVID. And he points out quite reasonably, but what's the risk of the vaccine?
We don't really even know what the risk of the vaccine is.
Nothing is risk-free, right?
Even if the vaccine passed every standard and even if it's the safest medicine we've ever made, even the safest medicine you've ever made is going to kill somebody.
There's always somebody who's got just the right situation where an aspirin takes them out.
So... Anyway, it just seems to me that our decisions are cognitive dissonance much more than they are accumulated learning.
And we feel like we want to do things that are lazy and good for us and selfish, and so we put a veneer, this little thin veneer of cognitive dissonance on it, and we act like it doesn't matter.
Act like it doesn't matter.
The only thing we know for sure is that we can't tell if it matters, which is really different.
All right. Elon Musk got in some trouble for complaining about the, well, he used this word, the aesthetics of pronouns.
So you've seen the people with their Twitter profiles, and they'll do the he, him, and etc.
And Musk complained about the aesthetics of the pronouns.
In other words, it just takes something that wasn't a problem before, and it makes it Harder to navigate.
Right? Now, his critic said, Elon Musk, you're being an anti-LGBTQ, but really?
What the hell does that have to do with being pro or anti-LGBTQ? It has nothing to do with that.
You know, Musk is an engineer.
He's simply taking one part of the problem, which is that the pronouns are awkward, And he's isolating that problem, and he's saying, okay, we've got a problem with just these words around pronouns.
It's just a very engineering thing to say.
Is it true?
100%. It adds a little bit of friction or complication.
It creates a situation where you can be wrong, where before it was hard to be wrong.
So that has nothing to do with whether you love or appreciate LGBTQ people.
It's a completely independent, isolated little engineering thought that could not be more harmless.
Indeed, if you are LGBTQ, don't you want simplicity in your life as well?
Who wants to be more complicated than something needs to be?
Now, I'm very much on the side of using language that people are comfortable with for their own descriptions of who they are.
And I try pretty hard to do that.
But it's still just a fact.
It adds a little friction.
I don't think that's improper in any way.
So it's a weird world that even a basic engineering thought, which would be, I would say, 100% agreeable, Which is the weird part.
I'll bet there isn't a person on the planet.
Not one. I'll bet you couldn't find one person who disagrees with Elon Musk's point that the pronoun thing just added some friction to something that didn't have friction before.
That's all. That's it.
Nobody disagrees with that.
CNN News reporting, and I love this choice of words.
I quote from CNN itself.
Tubin is holding on to his post.
I'm just going to let that sit there for a minute.
CNN literally wrote this.
Tubin is holding on to his post.
Now, as you know, I am a vocal supporter of Jeffrey Toobin keeping his job or jobs despite the fact he made a humorous mistake on Zoom by pleasuring himself not knowing that his camera was still on.
Now, you don't have to make any excuse for or, you know, you don't have to apologize on his behalf for anything he did.
A mistake is a mistake.
But it was a mistake with no victim, and it was also a completely understandable mistake.
I mean, literally this morning, this is not a joke, literally minutes ago, I accidentally hit the live button on YouTube.
You know, 15 minutes before I wanted to go live, I just hit the wrong button.
So I was literally live on camera to the entire planet.
I mean, at least they had access to it if they wanted.
I was live on video to the entire planet for about five seconds before I realized what I'd done.
I mean, how easy is it to make that mistake?
Now, as it turns out, I was not holding on to my post, if we may say it that way.
So I got off easy, so to speak.
But I don't want people losing their job over a little silly, dumb mistake over the course of a successful career like that.
It's just wrong. So as much as I dislike just about everything Jeffrey Toobin's ever said on CNN about Trump...
I fully support him keeping his job.
And anybody who has a similar situation has nothing to do with politics.
It's just being human.
I mean, let's give each other a frickin' break.
You know, let's give Elon Musk a frickin' break for a reasonable opinion.
There was no mistake there at all.
And let's give Jeffrey Toobin a frickin' break.
Give him a break. It was a mistake.
It's not like he even argued the point.
He never argued the point.
Accepted it like a man.
Took his lumps.
Took his embarrassment. He just sucked it up and just...
That's all I'd ask from anybody.
Alright, enough of that. I'm finding that there are more artists coming out to troll me than usual.
It's sort of a running joke that when an artist comes at me on Twitter, it's usually the dumbest take.
Almost always. It's the dumbest take.
And usually they just come with insults and no reasons or points or anything.
And so I just do hashtag artist, and that's my only reply.
Because later you'll be able to search for hashtag artist, and you'll see all the dumbest comments from all the artists.
But as I was doing that today, I thought to myself, you know what I'd really like as a filter on Twitter?
I would love a filter by TalentStack.
Just as an option. You know, Jack Dorsey was talking about one of the things Twitter is looking at seriously.
I don't know, you know, where that's at status-wise.
But they were looking seriously at letting users have control over the algorithm.
So you would be able to have one kind of algorithm.
Maybe I could just turn it off.
Maybe there's a modified one for somebody else.
And I like that idea and concept.
But here's a filter I would love to see.
I would love when people are onboarded onto Twitter that, and this is not practical, so this just is conceptual, I would love if people who signed onto Twitter would self-identify what skills they have.
So I might say, you know, I've got a degree in economics and blah, blah, blah.
And Then, that would give me the ability to filter out all artists.
Because I would do that.
If I had an option to never hear again from anybody whose primary job is artist, unless they also had, let's say, a second degree or second talent, which would be picked up when you signed up, I'd like to be able to just turn off all the comments from people who are artists.
Because they don't add...
Anything. Anything.
There's no value at all from the artist, because they don't understand the topics.
They're adding noise and unpleasantness without anything valuable.
Now if you say to yourself, but Scott, Twitter is mostly about things that are like that.
To which I say, not exactly.
Because there's lots of ugly disagreement on Twitter, but that's also part of the fun.
And in that ugly disagreement, often you can get your mind changed.
You can learn something.
Somebody will point to a useful link.
Somebody will frame things in a way you hadn't thought of it before.
Generally speaking, Twitter does have the ability to change opinions.
I would say my opinion on lots of stuff has changed just because somebody smart came in and said, oh, you forgot about this.
And then I'll say, oh, yeah, okay, changed my mind.
But I'll tell you what never happens, not even once.
An artist changed my mind.
I don't think it's happened.
And I mean that seriously.
I don't think it's happened even once.
So I'd like the option of just turning off all the artists so I can't see them, unless they have additional skills.
All right. So I told you I've moved my videos to Rumble.
I forget if I told you that Rumble will have live streaming.
It just doesn't have it yet.
So just look for that later.
Oh, I think I was...
Yeah, never mind.
So it looks like our intelligence people are telling us now that Russia not only hacked a number of critical U.S. systems, but they might be so deeply into a lot of our important systems that you can't get them out, which is the thing.
Because first you get in there with your malicious software, but once you're in...
You can move things around and make changes so that you can be there forever without being identified.
So it's possible we might have to throw away all the software of all the major systems because they're all really tainted.
Now here's the question.
With this massive alleged Russian access to our systems, what have they done?
That we could identify as damage.
Well, they've apparently interfered with the election, but we don't even know how much.
You know, in 2016 they also interfered with our election, but the interference, if you added it all up, it wouldn't have changed, I don't know, one vote, I don't think.
So it was fairly trivial.
And so I ask you this.
They have all this access, But they don't seem to be using it, at least directly, in terms of attacking the country and taking it down.
Maybe they're stealing secrets or whatever.
But here's my take on this.
I heard some people online who don't know how the world works saying that the Trump administration must have done a bad job in cybersecurity because Russia got into everything.
I don't feel like that's a thing.
I don't feel like it was a possibility that the US government could have protected all of our technology systems.
Is that a thing? I don't think that's a thing.
I think if it's technology, it's hackable.
And if it's a state hacker, if it's not just somebody in their basement, but it's an entire nation with lots of patients, they'll wait 10 years to get into a supply chain situation.
There's nothing you can do to stop that.
It's not stoppable.
So what do you do if you can't keep them out of your systems?
Well, I'll make an assumption that I feel is fair.
My fair assumption is this.
We are so far up, or at least our cyber warfare people, are so far up Putin's ass that they can see his tongue.
Meaning that there's mutually assured destruction at work, I think.
It looks like Russia could take down the United States in 10 minutes.
Doesn't it? If anything we saw in the news today is true, Russia could destroy the United States in 10 minutes.
Just activate some software, wipe a bunch of servers, goodbye banking system, goodbye commerce, goodbye internet.
We would basically be reduced to our technological needs In ten minutes.
And it looks like they have the ability to do that.
Why don't they? Why don't they do that?
Well, the reason is we would wipe them off the map.
We would destroy everything that's Russian, wherever it lived, anywhere in the world.
Well, maybe we wouldn't do that.
But Russia as a country would cease to exist.
So ten minutes after they brought down the United States, we'd probably know where it came from, and we'd just take out Russia.
Now, we might have to do it with nuclear weapons or something, but we wouldn't sit there and take it.
We wouldn't take it and just say, oh, I wish that hadn't happened.
No. It would be maximum And indeed, I would like to see our nuclear deterrent extended.
I think our nuclear deterrent should be extended to cyber warfare.
And we should say, if you nuke us, we will respond with nukes.
And if you take down our technology with your hacks, we will respond with nukes.
Because we can't respond with technology, necessarily, if you take on our technology.
But we'll respond with nukes.
Now, you can always change your mind.
If you're in that situation, you can always say, well, maybe we won't launch our nukes.
We'll try to deal with it.
But I'd like them to think we would.
I'd like to put that on the table.
Because we keep pretending that regular war is the bad kind, and cyber war is sort of clean, and if it doesn't touch you physically, you're fine.
But that's only because they haven't weaponized it.
The moment Russia wanted to weaponize it, as opposed to just being annoying or interfering with elections and stuff, the moment they wanted to weaponize it, it would be plenty deadly.
It probably could kill millions, probably as deadly as a nuclear war, ultimately.
So we should just tell Russia, look, here's the deal.
We know we can't stop you from diddling with our systems, but you can't stop us either.
We're all up in your systems.
So if you try to take us down with cyber, we will take your whole country down with cyber.
And if for some reason we can't do that, we'll nuke you.
Because I'll tell you what we're not going to do.
Let you take down the country with cyber warfare and do nothing.
That's not going to happen.
We would nuke them.
We should. That would be my choice.
All right. Here's a question for you.
We hear a lot of news about Russia.
So there was the news about the dissident who was poisoned, allegedly, by Putin.
And Putin says that's fake news.
Putin says if we tried to kill him, he'd be dead.
And Putin says, if I were trying to kill him, why did I immediately allow him to be taken from, I guess he was in, where was he, in Siberia or something?
But Putin gave him permission, the wife, I guess, to take him to Berlin for treatment immediately.
Would Putin let the guy he poisoned out of the country to be cured if it were his choice?
And it was his choice. It took Putin to say, yeah, you can take him to a hospital in Berlin.
Why would he do that?
Now it could be, let me give you a reason, it could be that the The threat of poisoning is all he needs, right?
He doesn't really need the guy to die.
He probably just needs the guy to know that next time he's not going to be so lucky.
And he probably needs other potential dissidents to know, well, he didn't die, but he got really close.
So Putin is probably just as well off whether he succeeded or he got really close to succeeding.
It looks about the same as a warning.
But I ask you this question.
Given that we know that all the news about the United States, the political news, is fake news.
I'm exaggerating a little bit.
But if you look at the amount of news in the United States that is just unambiguously fake news, why would you think any news about Russia is true?
Where does that come from?
Who exactly gives you the news about Russia?
Well, you know, the media.
But How much of it is true?
What if Putin did not poison that guy?
It's possible, right?
We all take it as a certainty that because our news has uniformly reported that Putin is almost certainly behind this poisoning and other ones like it, we accept that that's probably true.
But wouldn't it be weird if the only news that's true is about Russia?
You see where I'm going with this, right?
This is like the Gelman effect, where if you're looking at your expertise, as reported in the news, you know that the news is fake, because you're an expert on that subject.
But then you don't know that about any other topics, so you think, well, maybe those other topics are better.
We're doing the same thing with Russia.
We're looking at our own news, any news about US politics, and we know it's all fake.
But the moment it's about Russia, oh yeah, that's pretty reliable.
Yeah. Putin's a poisoner.
Now, I believe he did it too.
But do I believe it because it's smart?
Do I believe it because of the evidence I've looked at?
Or do I believe it just because I was told to believe it?
Think about it.
The reason you believe that Putin poisoned anybody is that you were told to think that.
It has nothing to do with your own senses of, you know, your own sources, your own wisdom.
Anything. You were simply told he did it.
And again, I believe he did it.
But my belief is so disconnected from reason that I'm aware of it.
That's pretty bad. Usually we're doing irrational things, but we think at least we're being rational.
Here I'm doing a 100% irrational thing right in front of you.
I'm doing it with no shame.
It is my opinion that Putin was behind those poisonings.
Here's my good rational argument for it.
Nothing. Nothing.
I've only been told that by a media that I know not to be reliable.
That's it. That's all I know.
Why do I believe it?
And yet I do.
That's scary, right?
I do believe it, but I shouldn't.
And I can feel that...
I can feel that duality in me because they can't both be smart.
All right. So there's that.
So apparently we've got lots of evidence that China was trying to influence our elections.
So we've got Russia was trying to influence our elections in addition to getting into our other critical systems all over the country.
We see that, at least reportedly, China and Iran were both into our elections trying to influence them.
Now here's the interesting question.
Let's say it's true that Russia, Iran, and China all were trying to influence our election.
What direction were they trying to influence it?
Are they all on the same side?
I'm a little bit confused about this.
Because I would think that China would like Biden, right?
Fair assumption. I would think that Russia maybe prefers Trump.
I don't know, but maybe.
Or maybe they don't think there's much difference.
I don't know. Iran probably prefers Biden, you would think.
But what do we know about Putin?
So did Putin, Iran, and China all decide they're on the same team when it comes to influencing our elections?
Or is it possible that the outside influencers cancelled each other out?
I mean, roughly speaking.
It wouldn't be exact. I don't know.
But we have this weird situation where this thing that was designed to be a democratic process within the context of a republic...
It turns out that your vote is the least important variable in the entire election, and all of our votes.
The things that matter, and Joel Pollack talks about a lot of this in his new book, whose title I always have trouble with, Neither Fair Nor Free, I think it is.
And it talks about, if you look at the media propaganda, you look at the rules, changes, and the shenanigans with the rules, you look at...
Gerrymandering. You look at the rules changes about how the votes were counted, you look at the non-transparency of the vote itself, and you just go down the line.
And the variable that's the smallest, and then throw in the foreign interference, etc.
And the smallest variable is the vote.
Because all of those other things are bigger than whatever the difference would be if you could actually have a fair and free election without these influences.
So, you know, the media can move it more than that difference.
Foreign interference, I don't think they've done it yet, but I think they could.
You know, if there's fraud, it could easily be big enough.
Don't have proof that that happened.
But we have this weird situation where the Republic and our democratic process is pure placebo.
But is that bad?
So, when I tell you that our democracy is a placebo, it's completely artificial.
There's nothing even close To something like the will of the people being expressed in our votes and all that.
On paper it looks like that.
But there's nothing even remotely like that happening.
It's just all these different forces of mischief and how they end up balancing out.
That's it. It's the forces of mischief.
And who's got more mischief on their team in any given year?
Who does better at mischief?
That's it. That's pretty much the whole game.
So democracy is good and well dead.
But here's the interesting thing.
Has it ever been different?
Certainly, you know, there used to be no social media platforms, etc.
So it's different in that way.
But do you think the elections have ever been fair in this country?
I really think maybe not.
Maybe there were some worse than others, and certainly if you had a candidate who gets 70% of the vote, probably that's the will of the people.
But for anything close, I think it's just a pretend democracy, republic situation.
We're literally pretending.
That the vote matters.
Now, there's nothing wrong with that.
Sounds bad, right?
We're just pretending. But probably this is the most important part of the process.
Because the point is to convince the public that whatever happened was legitimate.
And that's almost as important as deciding, you know, who's going to be running the government.
You want the public to say, whoever it is, they're legitimate.
So the whole voting thing is nothing but a psychological experiment or a psychological process just to make you feel like you were part of the process, just to make you feel like you had buy-in, just to make you feel like something fair happened.
But nothing like that's happening.
It's pure theater on top of mischief, basically.
All right, I'm going to defend Pete Buttigieg for a moment, who has been chosen, I guess, for the...
Secretary of Transportation.
Now, when Buttigieg was picked to be Secretary of Transportation, a lot of people said to themselves, what exactly is his experience in transportation?
And if you said to yourself, wouldn't we be better with, let's say, an expert in transportation?
To which I say, Probably not.
Let me tell you what I know about consultants.
And Pete Buttigieg, before he was mayor, before he ran for president, he was a consultant for McKinsey.
Now McKinsey consultants do not hire dumb people.
They hire the smartest people they can get.
They like to hire from Harvard, where Pete Buttigieg came from, and also Oxford.
So he's got Harvard and Oxford degrees.
And he was a McKinsey consultant.
Let me explain what a McKinsey consultant does.
They are people who are not experts at the industry for which they consult.
Now you say to yourself, uh, isn't that a problem?
How do you consult for an industry when the industry knows way more about their industry than you do?
How does that work?
And the answer is, it works like this.
Consulting is largely...
A fake industry.
Everybody who works for a big company and has been in this situation will agree with me.
Anybody who hasn't been through this experience will be thinking, I don't know if that's true.
That doesn't sound quite true.
Look at the other comments, and when I tell you how the world really works, look at the other comments and you'll see the agreement from the people who have this experience.
The point of hiring expensive consultants for your business is so that the smart employees at your company can finally get their way.
That's what consultants do for you.
Because in every group you've got your smart ones and your dumb ones, and there are many situations where the smart ones can't convince the dumb ones to see their point of view.
Because that's part of being dumb, right?
You can't see a smart opinion.
It's invisible. And sometimes that's your boss, or at least the boss looks at the staff and says, I'm getting different opinions here.
And the boss doesn't want to just pick one, because then it's the boss's responsibility if something goes wrong.
So what does the boss do to solve this problem where the boss doesn't know what to do and doesn't want to make the bad opinion?
They hire an expensive consultant.
What happens if the boss takes the advice of the expensive consultants and it doesn't work out?
Well, the boss has a pretty good excuse then, doesn't he?
He's like, look, I hired the world-class consultants.
I took their advice.
It didn't work out.
I'm still a great manager because I did everything you're supposed to do.
We just didn't get lucky this time.
It's a pretty good argument.
I did everything you should do.
Not everything works every time.
So the first thing that a consultant does is it makes the boss more secure and also gives them an argument that they can take that are their boss.
Hey, these consultants say this is a good idea.
I can sell this to my boss now.
If just my employees say it, it's not as strong.
So the The McKinsey people go into a business, and they sit with all the experts in the industry, some of the dumb ones and some of the smart ones, but they all work for the same company.
And they say, all right, we've got a bunch of questions, because they have sort of a framework or a process, that they apply to every situation.
There's sort of a standard way to start digging in and analyzing things.
So the McKinsey people start asking lots of questions and interviewing your staff.
And they very quickly learn who the idiots are and who the smart ones are.
And they start winnowing out the idiots.
They start listening to the smart ones.
And they take what the smart ones say and they put it into graphs and charts and spreadsheets and make it look like a real proper package.
And then they take that to the boss of the smart people and they say, this is what we, McKinsey, say you should do.
What they don't say is, you know, all we did is package up what your smart people said.
But that's all they do.
They might act like they're adding something, but maybe not so much, right?
So my point is that Pete Buttigieg, having gone through this process of being a McKinsey person whose specific training is to go into a new situation which they are not experts in, Quickly become experts because they're so damn smart.
I mean, a big part of their success is they're crazy smart.
The McKinsey people, they're not normal smart.
They're crazy smart.
And they just package up your smart people's ideas and sell it back to you and take their money.
Suddenly, it becomes credible looking within the company, etc.
So what Pete Buttigieg brings to the Department of Transportation is Is exactly, exactly what you want.
Because I've got to think that the transportation department is really complicated and probably has a bunch of inefficiencies that a McKinsey consultant or somebody trained to be one is going to be able to find.
And if the only process that P. Buttigieg does is the McKinsey process, Where he figures out fairly quickly who the smart people are, and then he does what the smart people want.
He just packages it up.
So I'm going to say, and maybe you don't want to hear this, but I think this Biden pick for a cabinet position, one of the best I've ever seen.
This isn't just a sort of a political pick.
I think people thought that.
This is one of the most perfectly on-the-nose...
appointments I've ever seen.
This is really strong.
And if Biden could do more like this, I'm not going to have a big problem with him.
Right? If he can reproduce this, we don't know that he can.
But this is just inspired.
This is exactly the right person and the right job, in my opinion.
Twitter user, human being, that's just the Twitter name, tweets this at me.
Scott, I'm heartbroken tonight.
My beautiful five-year-old Deese and her two sisters' mother is in the hospital dying of fentanyl use.
Please send an extra loud and angry fuck you to China for me tomorrow.
Happy to do it.
Happy to do it.
China? Fuck you.
And... China, you are my enemy.
You're not my nemesis.
You're not my adversary.
You're not my competition.
You're my fucking enemy.
And we should treat it like that.
So fuck you, China, for killing my stepson, and fuck you for what you've done to human beings' family.
You fucking fuckers.
Alright. One of my big pleasures on Twitter is watching Andres Beckhouse destroy people's data collection.
Related claims.
It's really entertaining.
So somebody will tweet, look at my graph.
It proves something about Sweden or masks or something about coronavirus.
And it takes approximately 10 minutes for Andreas to come in and say, and the reason you got this wrong is...
And what's funny about it is he uses only public sources.
So Andreas is debunking one thing after another using nothing but stuff you can Google.
It takes him 10 minutes, and he's debunking like 95% of everything you see posted on Twitter.
And when you read the claim and then you read the debunk, The debunk always looks stronger.
I don't know if that's just because debunks always look stronger.
But watching him demolish these claims on Twitter is just really fun.
You should follow him. Andres Backhaus.
B-A-C-K-H-A-U-S. I've seen people speaking of claims.
Oh, one of the claims he was debunking is that the Sweden total death, not just the pandemic deaths, But the total deaths in Sweden are actually not so bad.
And he debunked that in two minutes.
Here's another thing I would like to debunk.
So I've seen a number of tweets and analyses, and I believe there was an expert who testified to this, that if you looked at all the anomalies in the presidential election, That the odds of all those anomalies happening, and Biden still being the president, would be one in a quadrillion or whatever it is.
And I don't think you can calculate those odds.
Here's why. You can calculate the odds of things that are very similar.
Of course, it's just the odds.
You can't know what's going to happen.
But I think if, let's say, if the last election were two normal-ish candidates in a normal year, You could pretty much say that maybe things about that would be similar the next year.
But if you have a situation that's completely unique, I don't think you can calculate the odds, can you?
And the completely unique part is Trump.
You throw Trump into the election cycle and suddenly none of the rules and none of the history and everything you thought before, none of it holds.
Now, if you have something that just changes the nature of the situation so much, how do you calculate the odds of something that's never happened, happening?
And I feel like it's just magical thinking that we could know the odds that Biden would win in the context of, say, bellwether states that didn't go the way you would expect them to, and counties that reliably go one way usually but didn't this time.
I just feel like it's not calculable.
And I guess, Andres, if you're watching this, I'd like your opinion on this.
I feel like it's nonsense.
I feel as if this was just a one-off situation.
There was nothing like Biden running against Trump.
Just never been in this situation.
So everything you can say about what that would have looked like before, even with similar voting patterns of Democrats and Republicans in certain areas, even with all that, I feel like it's just too different.
So I discount all that.
There was also a story that China owned...
Some part of a company that owned part of Dominion.
Do you remember that story?
Did you all see that? I think I saw that that's debunked as well.
And that the nature of the ownership of those companies was just misinterpreted.
So I feel as though China has some interest or ownership in the Dominion voting system.
I think that's fake news. Now, let's do a little recap.
How many claims have you seen about coronavirus, for example, that turned out to be true or fake?
And this is one of those times where it's good to look back and see how many times you were right.
How many times did you say, ah, I hear that's in the news, but I think that's fake.
And how many times were you right?
Or vice versa. Maybe you thought masks don't work, but then you're convinced that they do, so you change your mind.
How many times have you changed your mind during the coronavirus?
Because I would say I have.
I'm pretty sure I've changed my mind on a number of things.
Somebody says, I'm seeing in the comments, that China owns 75% of something in an investor form.
So the debunk to that Yeah, I'm reading in the comments now.
UBS 75%, China's 400 million, 2 million.
Yeah, I think that that's simply a misread of the bank's role.
I think the bank just did a transaction.
I think that's the whole story.
So I believe the real financial people looking at that story have debunked it.
But that's just what I think.
All right. Here's the prediction that I made in the beginning.
I told you that 95% of the specific claims you hear about the coronavirus would later prove to be false.
Also, 95% of the election fraud claims would prove to be false.
But let's just talk about the election.
Wouldn't you say, don't you think it's fair to say that 95% of the election fraud claims, specific claims, wouldn't you say 95% of them have been debunked?
Pretty much exactly like I told you was going to happen.
Now, the other 5%, I wouldn't say they're necessarily confirmed.
They might just be, you know, not yet debunked.
But it is completely compatible...
I've seen the people say no.
All the people who say no are wrong.
If you were to just make a list, just a list of all the claims, and then you check the list for a debunk, you would find that 95% of them have a debunk that's stronger than the claim.
Now, hold on, I know I'm getting you too angry here.
It can be true that 95% of the specific claims of election fraud are untrue.
At the same time, it can be 100% true that the election was stolen.
Do you understand there's no conflict there?
You could have 100% chance that the election really was stolen, while no conflict with the fact that 95% of the evidence is not real.
Right? There's no conflict.
In fact, that's exactly what you would predict.
You would predict exactly this situation, and I did.
I predicted in public Exactly this situation, which is that most of the claims would be debunked.
And that's because of confirmation bias.
So once you get it in your head that there's something here, you see it everywhere.
So confirmation bias is very predictable.
It was obvious that there would be more false claims than real ones, even if real ones exist.
It's also obvious that if you have a system that can be gamed with fraud...
And the payoff is very high if you were to get away with it.
Of course it happened.
There isn't any doubt that it happened.
It's just that it's hard to prove.
So, you know, the election isn't going to be changed.
But somebody said you predict both sides of everything.
Are you fucking stupid?
You predict both sides of everything.
Are you intentionally trying to be the dumbest comment on here?
Because I just told you that those two things are not in conflict.
That's really the whole point.
So your comment that I predict both sides of something is really fucking stupid.
If you were listening.
Alright. Did I seem a little triggered?
Have you noticed that in the holiday season people get a little tense?
You can get wound up pretty quickly.
Like Spygate.
Which one was Spygate?
I don't even remember what Spygate was.
Somebody says 95% of claims could not be proved.
Not that they're true.
No, I'll say that 95% have been debunked.
So I hear what you're saying, but I disagree with it.
All right. You are very wrong, say people, in the comments.
Totally wrong. So there's a separate issue, as I'm being prompted in the comments.
It is true that the courts have not ruled on a lot of the specifics.
That's not quite what I'm talking about.
I'm talking about if you go to Twitter and you see any claim, whether it got into a court case or not, you will see a debunk 95% of the time.
It's pretty good. Alright.
So, Bitcoin's still going up?
Somebody said. Let's see what our Bitcoin situation is here.
Oh my god.
Bitcoin is really going up.
Okay. Cool.
I was going to do a special class on investing.
Some investing stuff, but I haven't decided whether to do that yet.
Alright, that's enough for now. I will talk to you later.
And YouTube people, you've got a few more minutes with me.
What's Trump's next move?
My guess is he's looking at all of his options for the next four years and probably hasn't decided yet.
