Episode 1243 Scott Adams: Georgia Election Credibility and Where Do We Go From Here?
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Content:
Your age and believing election fraud
Stacey Abrams won Georgia
ALL the exact same questionable behavior?
Ranking the credibility of various fraud claims
What will VP Pence do?
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It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams, the best part of the day, and you're going to need it today.
You know, sometimes you come and you watch this live stream and you say to yourself, well, I enjoyed it, but did I need it?
Today you need it.
You really do. And if you'd like to make it special, and I'm pretty sure you do, All you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or a chalice or a stein, a canteen jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind, and fill it with your favorite liquid.
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It's called the Simultaneous Sip, and it happens now.
Go! I feel democracy returning.
Slowly. You'll get there.
All right, let's talk about all the things.
Some of you know, if you watched my live stream yesterday, Christine and I tried to take a vacation in beautiful Park City, Utah.
Because things were more open there and there were still flights.
So we thought, well, if it's legal and it's open and they're open for business, Should go there.
But let me give you one travel tip.
I gave some more details yesterday, but here's your travel tip.
If you pick a city destination, say Park City, Utah, and you end up 19 miles away from your destination in a hotel that says on their website they're in Park City, but when you get there, you're 19 miles away from Park City in a whole different city.
Which is not at all what you planned.
In those conditions, you just say thank you very much and you fly home.
Because you can't fail harder than being a luxury resort.
There's a high-end resort where you show up and the people who show up go, uh, maybe not.
How about you just book us a car back to the airport?
So that was our, that was my vacation for the year.
Was flying with a mask on a plane to a location that was the wrong location, putting my mask back on and flying home.
How was your vacation?
It was so bad it was laughable.
All right, so there's some news about a nationwide bicycle trail that is being built.
Now, some people said Hey, Scott, you brought up that idea early in the pandemic.
Why don't we have a connected bunch of national bicycle trails and we could use e-bikes and regular bikes and make it a tourist destination and people from Europe and everywhere would come and they would ride bicycles and have great vacations because the travel part would be easy.
Just get on your bike and you go hundreds of miles.
If it's an e-bike, it's pretty easy.
Now, while I did I did suggest this idea probably last spring or something.
I did not suggest it before this effort had started.
So I was actually just saying it was a good idea, but there were people already working on it.
And it's called the Rails to Trails Conservancy.
And I think the rails part is that they're converting old Railroad tracks into bike paths, and they got a bunch of funding.
So what's different and new is that because bikes became such a big thing during the coronavirus that they got more funding.
So it was always an idea before I came up with it, but now the coronavirus made it more of a thing, and I could not be happier.
Interestingly though, there was a criticism, which is that we turned into A lawless criminal place where all the bikers would get mugged by homeless people.
And I thought, my first reaction was, well, that's not going to happen.
Why would homeless people just start deciding that they're going to be robbing people on bicycle paths?
And then I thought about it a little more, and I thought, oh, actually, that's what's happening right now.
There are lots of bicycle paths that do have homeless people on them, and it's getting a little dangerous.
I was starting to wonder if we should just turn all of our cities into bicycle paths, because they don't seem to have a reason to exist.
And traffic's no good.
So just ban all the traffic, except maybe delivery trucks or something, and just make it all bicycle paths.
So if you can get your bike to Detroit, you can bike all the way through it.
No traffic. All right, let's talk about some other stuff.
Kim Jong-un is alive.
We'll get to the election thing.
I'm just letting more people get on.
Before we talk about the lead story, Kim Jong-un, he is alive, so that's good for him, I guess, because he did a speech at the opening of some big economic thing in his country, and he admitted that they had failed in all of their economic goals.
Basically, he said, we failed at everything, economically.
Now, of course, the coronavirus is a big part of that, and the Sanctions from the United States are maybe a bigger part of it.
But here's what I found interesting.
Since when does a dictator say we made a mistake?
On everything.
It was weirdly honest.
Yep, everything we planned didn't work economically.
It feels as if he's softening up the public for something.
It feels as if He's a guy on the verge of making a deal with the rest of the world.
Maybe something about the nukes.
Because he tried it his way, which is try to keep the nukes, we keep our sanctions on, and then just see what happens.
See if he can break the sanctions enough.
But he's admitting in the most transparent way that it didn't work.
So what do you do after you've said it didn't work?
Do you keep doing it? Because the thing you would not expect to happen is that he would tell everybody this didn't work, let's do more of it.
Feels like he's getting ready for some kind of a change.
Now, it's too bad that Trump won't be in office, it looks like, anyway.
That's the way it's going. So could he make a deal with Biden?
Would he? I don't know.
This could get really interesting.
There are a bunch of air traffic controllers who heard a threatening message saying that the Iranians might try to retaliate for Soleimani's assassination, and they might do it by flying planes into the capital on Wednesday, which would be today. Raoul Davis on Twitter told me, he goes, it's a solid way to stop a protest from happening.
Now, suppose you were heading to Washington, D.C. to protest, let's say you're Republican, and you're going to protest the results.
And then you heard that maybe it will be under attack.
Would you be less likely to go to protest if you thought the whole state was going to be, not state, but the city was going to be under attack?
I would say the likelihood of this being real is pretty close to zero.
Nothing's impossible, but I don't think they're going to fly airplanes into the capital unless Iran wants to not exist by next week.
Tell me any scenario in which something like this actually happens, Iran attacking the capital of the United States?
Right after an election?
And then Iran still exists a week later?
That's not a thing.
What kind of plan would that be?
So I would say the odds of Iran wanting to kill itself this week are low.
Let's get into the election stuff now, okay?
That's why you're here.
The Rasmussen poll has an outcome that you haven't seen yet, but I've got a sneak peek.
And It's exactly what you'd expect.
Maybe not you.
It's exactly what I'd expect.
And it goes like this.
Apparently the older you are, because they broke it down by age group responding, the older you are, and therefore the more experienced, wouldn't you say that that's almost exactly the same thing?
The older you are, the more experienced, the less likely you believe that the election was fair.
Coincidence? Now, so here are the numbers.
If you're over 65, according to the Rasmussen poll, 49% of you think Biden did not win fairly.
Basically, half the country...
I'm sorry.
49% think that Biden did win fairly, which means that more people think that it was an unfair election if they're over 65.
If you're between 40 and 64...
That goes up to 51% think it was a fair election.
So once you get to over 40, people are really, really skeptical that this was real.
But what about under 40?
Under 40, 65% of them think it was a fair election.
Gigantic difference.
Now, is it because senior citizens fall for conspiracy theories?
Well, if there were a big difference between the over 40s and the over 65s, I'd say, yeah, that might be something to look at.
But the over 40s and the over 65s are almost statistically exactly the same.
That half of them-ish, only half of them think it was a fair election.
But under 40 years old, 65%, two-thirds of them, I think it was a fair election.
Now, what have I told you about our young citizens?
They're the stupidest citizens.
Now, am I insulting young people when I say that they are our stupidest citizens?
No. I was young, and I was far stupider than I am now.
Now, some of that is that your brain gets developed over the years.
Until you're 25, your brain isn't quite done cooking.
And some of it is just experience.
If you've seen enough things, things change.
So can it be a coincidence that the people with the least experience, the ones under 40, are the ones most likely to think no cheating happened?
Maybe. Maybe it has to do with Democrats being younger.
Maybe it has to do with senior citizens falling for conspiracy theories.
Maybe. But I would think the more obvious, straightforward interpretation is that the younger you are, the less you've seen stuff like this.
At my age, I've seen things like this, meaning things that look true but weren't, Way more times than you have if you're 25.
It's not even close. By the time you get to my age, you've seen a lot of BS, and so you can spot it a little bit easier.
All right, here's my take on Georgia.
So my guess is that it will be two victories for Democrats.
One appears certain, the other is close, but I think it'll go the Democrat way.
And the Democrats seem to think that as well.
But here's the thing.
Turnout will probably be the big story, right?
It already is emerging as the big story is turnout.
And the story will be that Stacey Abrams got more turnout than, say, President Trump did because he said the wrong things and she did the right things with registering voters and stuff.
But here's my problem.
If we all accept That the rate of turnout for each of the parties is the deciding factor.
And we know that turnout is driven by things such as the way the news is covered, the amount of attention that a party puts on signing people up, the techniques they use, the legal processes, the tricks, even the gerrymandering, because it's both parties, right?
Once it comes down to how well you game the system, There's nothing like a democratic republic.
It's not even close.
If it all comes down to gaming the system, that has nothing to do with democracy.
It has everything to do with whose small team of operators can make the right decisions.
So I believe in the concept of one person, one vote, but in Georgia that one person and one vote was Stacey Abrams.
Because if it's true, That her efforts could be identified as the key thing that made the election go the way you wouldn't expect, in other words, go to the Democrats.
If she really made that much difference, then it wasn't a real election, was it?
Not an election the way it was conceived by the founders, where your vote actually matters.
The only vote that mattered was Stacey Abrams.
If it's true... That why she did made a difference.
Now here, by example, or, you know, to fill out this point, in 2016 I didn't vote.
In fact, I haven't voted in years.
I didn't vote this last election either.
I just decided it was not worth my time.
But I asked on social media, on Twitter, How many people had their votes changed by me?
In other words, listened to me or watched my Twitter feed and decided in 2016 to vote for Trump when maybe they wouldn't have.
And I think, if I recall, 1,500 people immediately said, yes, you specifically, Scott, are the reason that I voted for Trump.
Now, that's just the people who answered a Twitter poll.
You could probably multiply that by 10 to get the actual number of people whose votes I changed.
So 15,000.
So one vote, one person, I voted 15,000 times.
I don't know how many times I voted in 2020.
But people like me are not voting once.
People like Stacey Abrams, she's not voting once.
She may have voted tens of thousands of times based on her efforts to get more people to show up on her team.
So that's what's happening, and we should acknowledge it for what it is, more like a game show in which it's more like The Apprentice.
You know, in The Apprentice, you've got two teams, and they go out, and they've got a task, and whoever executes the task becomes the winner.
And that's what our elections turned into.
Two teams, the Democrat operators, the Republican operators, and they go out and they try to game the system the best they can, and whoever games it best is the winner.
It's just like The Apprentice. Definitely not like a democracy or a republic.
Geraldo was saying by tweet that some reports indicate the Republicans in North Georgia stayed home and did not vote because they had been told time and again that Now, I would agree with the if-true part.
But let's talk about it.
Is it true? Do you buy into the hypothesis that the way Trump talked about the elections and his allegations of fraud It caused voters for him or voters for Republicans to stay home.
Do you believe that?
Because I don't understand the connecting tissue.
You know, there are lots of things which I claim to be obviously true.
You know, you don't need data or a poll to determine that some things are obviously true.
For example, if you change the incentives about something, you don't have to wonder if it works, because incentives always work, you know, if they're big enough.
So if they're too small, that's different.
But here's my question.
I'm really skeptical that the way the president talked about it made a difference.
Now, the way the news talked about the way he talked about it I can imagine that would make a difference.
Because the way he talked about it was there was a lot of fraud, but you better get out and vote to overcome the fraud.
That makes me feel like I'm more likely to vote.
Because you know the fraud is going to have to be limited, or else it'll be too detectable.
So the fraud's got to be in that 5% or less range, or else it's just too obvious.
So who was it who said to themselves, huh, If the other team's going to cheat up to 5%, my best strategy is to stay home.
Because it's not as if the election was going to be 90-10 in one direction and they were going to switch it to 10-90.
Nobody thought that. It's got to be a small fraud, but big enough.
So of course you should try to surprise with outcome and win.
So why would somebody pick the obviously wrong strategy?
Because that's what Geraldo's hypothesis says, that people would pick the opposite strategy of the one that's obvious.
And the obvious one is to vote so much that even if there's fraud, you've still overcome that hurdle.
But did people do the opposite?
Now, the way the news reports it, which is not what Trump says, the news reports it and social media reports it and pundits report it as Trump is saying essentially...
There's no point in voting because it's rigged.
Trump never said that.
Can you find me a quote where Trump ever said anything like, Republicans maybe shouldn't vote because it's rigged?
Nothing like that came out of his mouth, and I base that on no research at all.
Do I need to research to know that he never said anything like that?
I don't think I do. It's so obvious he never said anything like that.
I don't feel like I have to Google it.
Right? Do you feel like you need to Google that?
Of course he didn't say that.
His entire efforts, his actions were all about getting more people to vote.
Of course he didn't tell them not to vote.
How crazy is that? But that's what was reported.
It's all over social media, etc.
So, I would question that.
Now, having questioned it, I would also easily be convinced that it was true if there were some data to suggest it as opposed to anecdotes.
Anecdotes are not going to convince me that this is true.
I just don't see the connecting tissue.
But I can be convinced with data.
A user on Twitter named Kai, K-I-E, who says that seeing their state officials refuse to investigate or audit claims of illegality has had more of an effect than the claims of rule breaches themselves.
So what about that point?
Is it Trump talking about that he thinks there was fraud that kept people home, allegedly?
Or is it the fact that the Republicans could watch how the elected officials...
Treated their concerns and treated them as if they weren't concerns, that they weren't real.
Now, I think, as I've said, most, it could be all of them, but at least 95% of the claims are bogus.
But if the claims are not treated as serious, what does that do to the voter?
Okay, I voted, and my elected officials won't even do an audit to make sure I really voted.
Because there is a big question about whether I voted.
And I'm just asking my elected officials, can you confirm that I really voted?
Is that unfair?
Is that a wrong thing to ask?
And if they refuse to do that, to either assure you that things were fair or to prove that it wasn't, they just don't even want to deal with it at the level that you think they should.
There have been recounts, but people always want more.
So which made a bigger difference?
Trump or the fact that the elected officials wouldn't look into it?
Good question. Jack Posobiec was tweeting this morning, and I would agree with him because I said the same thing earlier.
Jack said he's struggling to think of a bigger political miscalculation than blocking stimulus checks during a pandemic one week before a special election.
I believe I said that too.
Now, we don't know how much that changed the outcome, but I'd have to think it changed a little bit, and these are really close elections.
So it's still mind-boggling to me that it wasn't perfectly obvious to every Republican that under these very specific conditions, we're in a pandemic, We seem to be able to print money for other things, so it's not like there's a budget problem, per se.
And we've got a special election coming, as Jack said.
This was really obvious.
There are very few times when you can really say for certain what the right policy is.
This was easy.
You pick the big number.
If you don't pick the big number, the other team says, we would have, and you're done.
Because do you know what citizens like more than they like a little bit of money?
Just take a guess.
Something that citizens like more than they like getting a little bit of money.
That's right. They like getting more money.
Now, if you're surprised at that, I don't have any science to back it, really, but I feel confident that given the choice of less money or more money, citizens would make the right choice.
But did Mitch McConnell and lots of the Republicans, did they make the right choice that was obvious to owe every single person who was not them?
Apparently not.
They found a way to snatch a stinging loss from what should have been an obviously easy decision.
So congratulations on that, guys.
Nate Silver...
You know him, of course.
Statistically brilliant, famous guy.
And he says this. He says basically the polls were quite good in the Trump era when Trump was in the election.
I'm sorry, when he was not in the election.
So when there was no Trump in the election, the pollsters were pretty close.
In the 2018 midterms, Georgia 2021, Alabama 2017, he gives other examples.
But they were quite poor, the pollsters were, in any election in which Trump was in it.
So how do you interpret that?
That when there's no Trump, polls are pretty accurate.
When there is Trump, polls are inaccurate.
And inaccurate in the same way, probably, of underestimating Trump.
So Ney Silver speculates.
He says maybe that was a quirk.
So it could be just a statistical oddity.
But it increases the likelihood of certain theories of polling error relative to others.
And he mentions, especially those centered around Trump, turning out low propensity voters that are hard to capture in polls.
So Nate is suggesting that maybe the reason is that Trump gets people to vote that you wouldn't even know to poll them because they've not voted before.
So you just wouldn't bother asking them who they're going to vote for if they have a 30-year record of not voting at all.
No point in polling them.
And so maybe that's part of the question.
But what happened to the most obvious hypothesis?
The one that has just zillions of at least anecdotal evidence, which is that Trump supporters didn't want to tell the truth to pollsters.
Isn't that the more obvious hypothesis, at least?
I don't know how you would exactly figure out which one had a bigger impact, but I would go with that one first.
But without data, we don't know, but that'd be on the top of my list, given how many people have told me personally that they lied to pollsters about that.
All right. What were the odds that the Georgia special election Coming so soon after the presidential election would have all of the same tells for looking like a stolen election.
Now, what did I tell you before the Georgia election?
I told you that if it's true that the national election was stolen, there isn't anything in the world that I could see, no friction, no obstacle, that would keep them from doing it in Georgia.
I mean, why wouldn't they? Can you think of any reason they wouldn't?
Now, this is a big if, right?
If, with a big if, it was done nationally, and done including done in Georgia for the presidential election, and nobody went to jail, and nobody's arrested, and we don't have a smoking gun that at least the mainstream news reports as a real election problem, Why wouldn't they do it again?
So I was expecting, since I also believe that the national election almost 100% had fraud in it, based on just the setup, not based on any specific claims.
So if you're new to me, I base that on the fact that any large system that you could cheat at, and that's certainly true of elections, you could.
You could. There are a whole bunch of ways you could do it.
And there's a big upside potential, and there are lots of people involved, so you can always find somebody who's willing to do anything.
Under those conditions, there has to be massive fraud.
You couldn't build a system that has those qualities.
You can do it. There's a big advantage if you do it.
There are plenty of people willing to do it.
You always get fraud.
So, of course it was.
But we don't know that they'll ever be proven in any way that could reverse anything.
Who knows? So, Here's my bigger question, and Joel Pollack spoke to this.
So one of the things that happened was that apparently in at least one polling place, they stopped counting the votes and went home for the night to continue counting them in the morning.
Now, if you were not in a coma for the last few months, wouldn't every one of you know that if there was one...
Wouldn't you know that if there was one thing that you have to get right in the Georgia election, what would it be?
One thing you had to do right process-wise in terms of the people running the election process.
I would say that one thing you just had to get right is not to stop counting votes in the middle of the night when the Democrat challenger starts to catch up To a significant, or at least, you know, substantial lead of the Republican.
Right? That's the only thing you shouldn't have done.
And they did it. They did it.
Now, I don't know how many precincts there was.
Was it just one? But even the fact that there was one...
If there was one thing you shouldn't do to convince the public that this is a fair election, don't do that.
Now, what would be the second thing that you definitely don't want to do if you're trying to run a good election and you just saw what happened in the presidential election?
Well... One thing you don't want to do is to make it hard for the observers to get close to the action.
Because that was one of the biggest issues, right?
If you don't let the observers observe, you must be hiding something, people said in the presidential election.
So again, if there was one thing you had to get right, it's don't stop counting the votes just as the Democrat starts to get close.
If there are two things...
What really you don't want to do is ban the observers from getting close enough to watch.
Now, if you did those two things, which they did, are you even trying to look like an honest election?
Because this doesn't even look like trying.
Now, those two things apparently are based on decisions.
There might be some factors in here.
We'll find out more about this.
We're still in the fog of war about this election.
So we could find out that the one that stopped counting had some physical or health or safety reason and there was nothing they could do about it.
We could find out that. That would change my opinion.
And we could find out that the reason some observers were blocked was actually this time there might have been a good reason, whereas last time there wasn't.
So wait for more information.
But at this point, if you wanted to make it look stolen, you would do those two things.
Block observers and stop the counting.
Now, I turned on CNN's coverage when...
The two GOP senatorial candidates were solidly ahead.
And I turned it on, and I see the two GOP guys are solidly ahead, but not so much that it couldn't be overcome.
And I said to myself, is there any possibility that this is going to go exactly the way I would expect it to go if it were a fraudulent election?
Which is that the Republicans get this early lead and then it just sort of disappears right at the last minute.
Last minute it disappears.
And then I watched it happen right in front of me.
I'm watching it and I go, you know what would be funny?
Funny in a simulated world kind of way.
As if it looks exactly like the presidential election.
Just like the same pattern.
That would be funny.
And then it happened. And then it happened.
Right in front of me.
Now, did you have the same experience where you were watching and you said, I feel as if these Republican leads are about to disappear in the next hour.
Why do I feel that?
And then you watched it.
Okay, given those three data points...
That, you know, voting was stopped in at least one place.
You know, some observers had some friction in at least one place.
We'd like to know more. And you know that that pattern, which was alleged, and it can't be true that that pattern happens everywhere in every state in every election in the United States.
What were the odds it happened twice in a row?
I mean, it could happen, right?
It could happen twice in a row.
There's nothing that would stop it from happening twice in a row.
But it feels like exactly...
Alright, let me address this troll before I block you.
So I'll address you before I block you.
And the troll is saying, you lost, bro.
Let me clarify.
I congratulated Biden at the same time.
That the mainstream press said that he was the president-elect.
Same time. So I don't need you to remind me who's going to be president because I understand how it works.
But do you understand that my point is not about who's going to be the president?
Do you understand that I'm talking about the credibility of the system And how this election mimicked everything that looked wrong with the first election, and it was so easy for that not to happen.
Why do you explain that?
It was so easy for it not to happen, and yet it did.
So, I'll get rid of you.
You'll go into the blocked bin.
Johnson, totally real name.
So, that's where we are today.
We'll see how the final vote comes out, and I guess the Democrats are all ready to go nuts on this.
Now, we also had this situation where there was the vote count decrements, meaning that you could look at the vote coverage on CNN, and you could look at the vote totals as they came in, and you can see that, at least in one case, it decreased by 30,000-some votes.
But, here's the thing.
You say to yourself, is there any situation in which vote totals would ever go down when you're counting votes?
And the answer is yes.
There is a reason that a vote total would go down in the middle of the count.
And the reason would be human error.
And there was exactly that report.
That there was a transcription error.
Somebody put 7-1 instead of 1-7.
And so there was a difference that had to be reversed.
Now how often does that happen?
How often does a number get reported, and then when they check them, uh-oh, misreported, you transcribed a number?
I don't know. Maybe a few times.
You get a lot of different counties, a lot of people reporting.
I can see it happening a few times.
Would it happen only to one party, though?
Would all of the mistakes, if there are multiple, I saw one, but if there were more than one, would they all go in one direction?
Well, that's a big part of the claim.
The claim is that, hey, Yeah, I could believe you if you said there's some human error that gets corrected.
That would make sense. Because it's not a surprise that there's human error.
But why would there always be one side?
That part wouldn't make sense if it's human error.
But the claim is that it doesn't happen to just one side.
So the claim is that people are seeing it on one side or they're ignoring it when it happens to somebody else, but that it actually is just a normal part of the process.
Things go up and down because of human error and correction.
Which is more likely.
If you didn't know anything else and you just heard this explanation, say, oh yeah, Completely routine and it does happen to both parties.
Versus the claim that it's not routine and it only happens to one party.
If you didn't know anything else, which of those two sounds more credible?
The answer is the one who says it happens to both and it's routine.
That doesn't mean it's true.
But if that's all you knew and you heard those two explanations, the one that says it's normal and routine is always going to be the The one you bet on.
The one that says something very surprising and shocking in a crime that you could see on television as it happened.
That's kind of a big claim, right?
It's a big claim to say that an election was stolen in such an obvious way that you could watch the number change in real time on television.
Maybe. We've been through the kind of year, 2020, Where it looked like anything could happen.
So do unlikely things happen?
Yeah, they do. Unlikely things happen.
But if I had to choose between those two explanations, I would like to see two people who know what they're talking about and have access to the data answer this one question.
Can you show me a happening to the Democrat?
That's it. Can you show me those examples where it happened to Democrats?
If you can, And it sounds like a pretty reasonable claim.
If you can, that's the end of it, right?
Would you agree? If they can show, okay, you just watched the wrong clip.
Watch this clip. This is also CNN. Same night.
Okay, here's a case where the Democrat went down.
It was just a correction. How hard would it do just to show the counterclaim?
But I haven't seen it.
Have you? And is it because the news is just no longer even trying to do news and they're not really investigating anymore?
Because you can't rule that out.
One reason that maybe you don't know that is that we don't have a functioning news industry anymore.
We really don't.
They do dig into some things, but it's what they want to dig into.
The news doesn't cover things because you want them to cover it.
They cover things because they estimate how many clicks they'll get.
That's it. It has nothing to do with what you want to see.
What I would like to see on the news tonight is basically one story.
This. I'd like the news to say, look, they got that claim out there that they decrement, they decreased the number of votes, it only happens to one side, and that claim is causing something like half of the country to think the election was fraudulent.
Now, there are other claims, but that one sort of is sticking in people's minds because it's a visual.
You know, there's the video, and you can watch the video, and it happened.
I watched it with my own eyes.
So it's the stickiest claim.
Of course the Democrats should want to dispel it.
But I haven't seen it. Have you?
Now, is this because I just watched the wrong networks?
Have any of you seen it?
Have you seen anybody showing you as visually as you see the Republican vote go down?
I think it was Purdue.
You saw 30,000 votes just disappear in real time.
Have any of you seen it?
Because I've heard it claimed, but you should be able to see it.
Because it's visual.
So where is it? Now, does it bother you that that's maybe the most important question in the country, which would make it by extension, because we're the United States, one of the most important questions in the world, and it would be as easy to answer as looking at the tape from the coverage and just see if the Democrat ever goes down.
That's it. And also see if the Republican It goes down in more than one case, because if it's just one, it could be that human mistake that was reversed.
It's the easiest thing in the world to check.
It's right there on video.
You just play it back and just look.
So we don't have the debunk, but we don't have the opposite of the debunk where it's confirmed.
Do we even have news in this country?
Right? Because I know there are a whole bunch of news organizations.
I think most of the major news organizations have at least somebody watching this livestream almost every time.
What do you think? There are a lot of producers watching this right now.
I know because I get a lot of messages from them.
You're news producers, so I'm talking to you, news producers.
Why isn't that your top story?
How hard would it be for that to be the top story?
You could take the steam right in of the fraud allegations, which would be good.
If they're not true, I don't want to believe something that's not true.
Just let us know.
All right. Here's something else.
So people have been sending me a couple of videos, and they have to do with these very big conspiracy theories about election data was forwarded from Frankfurt, Germany to Rome, and there's an Italian connection, and the CIA was in on it, and MI6, and the Italian and there's an Italian connection, and the CIA was in on it, and MI6, and the Italian defense contractor, Leonardo, and then I guess
And then there's a video of some blonde woman who has a very long story of these spooky characters and intelligence agencies in Rome, and I don't know what her story is.
But anyway, so I've been asked to evaluate these claims.
Now, let me start by saying that 2020 was so weird that it starts to make it look...
I said blonde.
Did she have, like, white hair?
She was older. I'm not sure.
So here's the question.
I lost my train of thought there.
But my point is that I don't think any of these are credible, even slightly.
So if I had to put a ranking on the credibility of it, let me do that.
Let me rank the credibility of various claims.
The claim that someone somewhere probably hacked into our voting system, I'd say that has a credibility of 10 out of 10.
Because you know people are trying.
You know it's possible. 10 out of 10.
We don't know how much.
Maybe we'll never find it.
But it's a credible report, or a credible allegation.
What are the allegations, what credibility would I put on the votes decrementing?
Meaning that votes were just taken away from Trump or the Republican.
I'll put the credibility of that at 2 out of 10, maybe 2.
My guess is that when looked at, it'll be easily debunked.
And it's only based on pattern recognition.
Things like that tend to get debunked.
What would be an example of a thing like that?
Russia collusion hoax.
That was a thing like that.
When you first heard it, you thought to yourself, I don't know.
That feels exactly like a thing that isn't true.
Right? There are just some claims that you just see and you go, ah.
So I listened to the woman who had the story with the details, and here's my takeaway.
I believe all of the claims are based on a person you don't know saying things.
Am I right? That 100% of these stories about data going through Rome and Italy and the CIA and all that, that all of this...
It's based on just somebody you don't know saying things that come out of their mouth.
That's it. No documents, no video to back it up, no statistical data that shows their version of events, nothing.
So what credibility should you put on wild story from a stranger with no evidence?
Zero. It should be exactly zero.
If you give that a one, you've got some explaining to do.
How would you get a one out of that?
It's zero. Wild story from a person you don't know with no other physical evidence.
Credibility is always zero.
Now, remember, again, if you're new to my live streams, credibility does not mean it didn't happen.
There are things that don't sound credible, and then you find out, oh, shoot, that actually happened.
That didn't sound credible to me at all.
It did happen. So when I talk about credibility, it's statistical.
Not a guarantee.
So, researchers are looking into the benefits of vitamin D for coronavirus.
Boston researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital are going to do some kind of a trial to see if vitamin D can lessen the severity of COVID symptoms, and they're going to see if it actually can help you from getting it in the first place.
It can actually protect you prophylactically.
Now, here's the question I have about this.
What? Why are they just beginning to test this?
You know, what are we, 10 and a half, what, 10 months since the pandemic started?
No, 12 months since the pandemic started, and we're just trying to figure out if vitamin D works?
Now, I know that there have been other, there's lots of scientific indication that it could work or should work, Because it has that kind of antiviral protective kind of benefit in general.
But it took us this long to even begin the test?
Really? Because it was sort of the most obvious thing to test from day one.
Because there's a correlation between having low vitamin D and bad outcomes.
But it doesn't mean that's causation.
It could be just a correlation and that's what they'll test.
At the same time, over in the UK, the National Health Service is now offering free vitamin D for anybody who they define as high risk.
So if you're, say, a senior citizen, you have some comorbidities, the government will give you vitamin D to supplement you.
So they must think it works, or at least the risk management of it working is good because the risk is low.
But if it works, that'd be great.
So a number of people have been giving me credit for suggesting that vitamin D would make a difference last February, but I'm not like the person who invented that idea.
So I'd love to take credit, but there are lots of people who knew that vitamin D would be important for your general health, so why wouldn't it be important for this?
I want to say something that I've said a few other times, but I like to put it in better wording sometimes because it helps the message.
I think you should trust science whenever science is doing something that you don't know anything about and you don't have any insight that would tell you to trust them or not.
When I say trust science, I mean trust that the process It can move you from being wrong to being half right to being right if you do everything right and you wait long enough.
The problem is you never know where you are in that journey.
Are you at the beginning of the journey where you're wrong about everything in science, or you're at the end where you finally figured it out?
Or are you in the middle where you're not right yet either?
So when I disagree with science, The reason that I do it is that there's something about it where my special skill of identifying BS applies.
So, for example, in climate change, when scientists say, hey, CO2 added to the atmosphere will cause this warming effect, you've never seen me criticize that.
Why would I? What do I know about chemistry?
Zero. What do I know about physics?
Nothing. So I don't criticize things that I don't know anything about.
Now, I don't know if science is quite right or if there'll be more right later, but there's plenty of science that says CO2 should warm the atmosphere, all other things being equal.
But you do see me question the 80-year economic projection.
That's because I can recognize obvious BS And that's obvious BS, but I can't really judge science.
So when I'm disagreeing, or it looks like I'm disagreeing with science or scientists, I'm not really.
I'm just picking this low-hanging fruit that just happens to be the exact thing that I know how to do it.
Find out when somebody's full of crap.
You just watched this live stream, I just did it on a whole bunch of questions.
So that's my skill.
Can I not doubt a scientist?
If the scientist happens to blunder into my special skill, meaning that they said something that I can just look at, and with no experience in science whatsoever, I can just look at it and say, I don't have to be a scientist for that one.
Right? Like an 80-year economic projection.
You don't have to be a scientist to know that's bullshit.
That's just obvious.
Alright, it's obvious if you have a certain amount of experience.
If you're under 40, well, maybe a little less obvious.
If scientists disagree, it's appropriate to doubt.
Yes, of course. And that will be part of the scientific process.
Somebody says, you have no scientific training.
Okay, I'm going to stop you there.
What did you think that comment was addressing?
When you say, Scott, you have no scientific training, are you disagreeing with me when I said, I have no scientific training?
I don't even know why some people make comments.
You're not surrounding yourself in glory.
Do we care where the science is from?
We should. Should.
You know about how many nerves the human body has?
Do I? I don't even understand that.
No scientific training equals appeal to authority fallacy.
Well, yeah, if you don't have your own skill, you kind of don't have a choice.
you kind of have to believe the experts or else just guess.
Vitamin D is sunshine.
Yes, we all know where vitamin D comes from, I think.
I hope. If you're watching this live stream and you don't know that vitamin D comes from sunlight the best, you need to catch up.
I'm not really following the Assange story because I feel as though the part that's important in that story is the part we don't know.
Somebody's saying that I should Google the swine flu being a fake and that it never really existed anymore.
It was bad testing. Now there's an example of something I can call BS on.
So somebody just made a claim that there are some scientists who say swine flu wasn't real and that it's just the test gave you false results.
Here's a perfect example in real time.
I don't have to be a trained scientist to know that It was a real swine flu.
Again, you just have to live in the world long enough.
I don't even feel I have to explain why that's obviously wrong.
If that's not really, really obvious to you that that's not true, maybe you're young, or maybe you don't have much experience dealing with BS as I do.
But that was obvious. I don't need to Google that.
It's obviously not true.
Can restaurants open if they add vitamin D to their food? - No, there's an interesting question.
Suppose restaurants decided to give you free vitamin D supplements for eating at the restaurant.
Could you make the argument that that alone would make eating at a restaurant safer than staying home?
Right? Because we don't know.
There's optimism that vitamin D does make a difference.
It protects you. But suppose the restaurant just said, we'll give you 6,000 units of vitamin D if you haven't already supplemented.
It's just free. It'll just sit there and you just have it when you get your bread.
If vitamin D works, it's safer to eat in the restaurant than to stay home if you haven't been supplementing.
All right.
Let's talk about where things are going, because it looks like now the Democrats are going to have a lock on power.
Don't know for sure, for sure.
Don't know 100% for sure, but it's looking like that way.
So, are we going to see Washington, D.C. become a state, and maybe Puerto Rico?
That one's a little harder.
Are we going to see, therefore, the Democrats will have control of the Senate forever, and they'll be making all the decisions?
There's something you're missing.
Democrats can be stupid when they don't have power.
Right? Watch this.
I'm not the President of the United States, so I have no power.
Watch what I can say.
Global warming is caused by UFOs.
What happened? I didn't get fired.
Because it turns out I'm not a politician.
If you're not a politician, say anything you want, right?
And if you don't have power.
So Democrats have had the benefit, at least in terms of criticizing Trump and everything he does, they've had the great advantage of having no power.
At least not the power that could override a lot of things he wanted to do.
And so they could say any crazy thing in the world and they would never get called out because their crazy thing would never be implemented.
They could never be held accountable.
So there's no limit on the crazy stuff you can say you want to do.
But what happens if you're the dog and you chase a car and you catch it?
Now what do you do?
So the Democrats just became, I think, again, not guaranteed, still could be some surprises, but it looks like the Democrats were the dog that caught the car.
Now what? If your prediction is that they will use their power to implement the ridiculous things that they've been saying, And I'm not saying that making D.C. a state is ridiculous.
That's just strategy. But in terms of policy and the Green New Deal and some things they say about that stuff, let me take a concrete example.
Democrats who were, let's say, anti-nuclear, the ones who were more...
Green New Deal and didn't like nuclear so much.
I think even the AOC is open to nuclear.
But let's say they got power and decided to get rid of nuclear.
Could they do it? I don't know, because if you actually got down to it, it would be so dumb that they probably couldn't do it.
How about the border? This is a better example, because actually Biden is pro-nuclear, so that was a bad example.
But here's one where Biden and Trump are on opposite sides, which is border control.
What the hell is Biden going to do?
Because if Biden does the things they said, which were absurd, hey, let's just let everybody in.
That's the sort of crazy stuff you can say when it's not your job.
But as soon as it becomes your job to decide who comes in, do you make the same decision as when it wasn't your job?
Well, if you're stupid, you do.
But if you're smart, you know that the things you were saying when you were not in power weren't that real.
There were things you say when you're not in power.
They're not things that you do if you think you're going to be held accountable for them.
There's a difference. You can say any crazy thing if you're not in power.
So, Here's my optimism for those of you who think the Republic was lost and we're all doomed.
Number one, our elections almost certainly have been fraudulent for your entire life.
Did you notice?
I didn't.
Guaranteed, your elections have been fraudulent all of your life.
And probably longer.
And you didn't even notice.
Guaranteed, Because of the setup, not because of the specific allegations, which I think are either all bullshit or 95%, but just the setup, that there can be cheating, there's a high upside, there's lots of people who would be willing to do it.
Guaranteed. Guaranteed it's happening.
Does it matter? I don't know if you're even going to notice.
If, let's say, California decided to raise its taxes as much as Gavin Newsom says he wants to, could he do it?
I doubt it.
I doubt it. I don't think he could get away with it.
Could the progressives, who want a whole bunch of stuff, Can they get away with it?
Well, there's some stuff they probably can, such as getting rid of school choice.
I'll bet they could get away with that because the public is uneducated.
They don't realize because there's no school choice.
They're uneducated. And I guess they'll stay that way.
So there's certainly some things they can change.
How about if the Republicans got so much power, I guess they wouldn't be able to do much with the Supreme Court for a while.
It's too packed. Oh, let's say they pack it.
Let's say the Let's say the Democrats pack the court and then they have full control of everything.
Could they change abortion rules?
I mean, it's already legal-ish in most places.
So if you actually come down to what will they do differently, can Joe Biden, under our current scenario, be nice to China The way we used to be nice to China versus being tough with them.
I don't know that he can be anything but tough.
Because no matter what you said before about Trump doing things wrong and starting trade wars, blah, blah, blah, once you're in the job, I feel as if you're going to have to at least pretend you're doing the job.
Now, he doesn't have to worry about getting re-elected, but he at least worries about Kamala Harris's future, I would assume.
Somebody says they'll ban guns.
Isn't that a state decision?
And what happens if you try to ban guns beyond the point where the non-city dwellers can't take it?
Well, there's a limit to how much you're going to ban guns because there are so many guns.
Anyway, so here's my overall thought.
The overall thought is that Things won't be nearly as bad as you think, even if the Democrats have full control, because using that power the way they've been talking about it would be so obviously suicidal that they kind of have to get serious now.
I watched this phenomenon when I was working at Pacific Bell, the local phone company years ago, and I remember that there was an opening for a director job, which was a pretty high-paying job, to be a boss above a number of people.
And the person who was selected was just somebody I worked with who was very smart, but he had no management leadership skill that I could detect whatsoever.
But he was smart and they figured he could figure it out.
The weird thing is that he acquired those qualities of being a manager slash leader almost instantly.
So because he had to, okay, this is your job now, now you're a leader and you're a manager, so he just became that person.
And I think the people who become president or get power have to become the person with power.
And the person who didn't have power is just a different person.
So you have to become a different person.
So that's your protection.
Your protection is that the system's probably always been rigged, and probably it is again, and the Democrats, if they get the power, They have to act differently than when they talked before the power.
They have to. There are too many forces against them.
Somebody says, disagree, Obamacare cost us affordable health care.
You don't know that. How would you know that?
That's a problem of not knowing how to compare things.
The comparison of, we got Obamacare, and this is the result, Compared to your imagination of what would have happened if something else happened that didn't happen, that's not an analysis.
All you know is that one thing happened.
You don't have any information whatsoever of what could have happened.
Now, the exception would be, I suppose, if it's a situation that you've had lots of times before, and you know that whenever you make this decision in this situation, you get a good outcome.
I mean, in those situations, you can know.
But if it's a one-off situation, all you know is that something happened.
You don't know what the alternative could have been under different scenarios.
Yeah, you can know that your price went up, but you can't know if it would have been worse.
That's unknowable. So yeah, Trump is making the claim that Pence can decline to certify the state's electoral votes or something along those lines.
Pence, of course, because he's smart, and I say this a lot lately, Pence is smart, so he's not going to do something that, I hope, even if it maybe looks like it's technically, constitutionally, he could make an argument to do it, it's not the right play.
There are probably lots of ways you could imagine that if the election turned out to be fraudulent, In a way that could be detected, that you could reverse it.
But I don't think having the vice president do it's a good play for the cohesion of the country.
That feels like a mistake.
But we'll see. You know, how many people have said that, hey, Trump, this thing you're doing is a mistake.
It's too risky.
How often has that happened?
Well, just about every decision he makes.
Ordinary people say, oh, that's a little too risky.
You're asking for trouble.
Don't move that embassy to Jerusalem because of all the...
Okay, that worked out.
I thought that was going to be a lot of trouble.
Don't get so tough with North Korea because he...
Okay, that worked out.
Don't... Do not get tough with China on those trade talks because they're...
Okay, that sort of went a good way in the end.
So everything Trump does seems to be something that you and I would say, oh, that's a little scary.
And then he does it, and you realize, oh, okay, that just worked.
There were no outcomes at all.
So, I'm saying the same thing again, but at least I have a little bit of awareness that I could be wrong about this.
Let's just game this out.
Let's say that Trump, since I think Pence will not waver on this, I don't think we have to worry about the what if.
But, Let's say it anyway.
Let's say, what if Pence decided to go along with this?
Would it destroy the Republic, as the worry warts worry, or would it simply bring us to a good place, where Pence says, nope, you know, I'm going to draw the line, I can't certify this, and I don't know if he can even get away with that constitutionally, but let's say he could, for the sake of talk.
And let's say that caused a recount And either the recount or the audit showed that things were fine.
Would we be worse off?
No. We wouldn't be worse off.
Might delay things a little bit.
But the worst case scenario is that we find more certainty or more confidence in the outcome of the election.
Now the other way it could go is that we find that it was fraudulent.
The audit picks up some big problems in 10 days.
I think Ted Cruz is just asking for 10 days for an audit.
Wouldn't change the schedule of anything.
You'll just have more information in 10 days.
That's all he's suggesting. So, while I do believe that the president is better than I am at judging how much risk a thing has, because I would say that if I look at my track record versus the things he said he was going to do, and that I predicted how bad that would be, I think in most cases I was on his side.
Certainly with North Korea, definitely with China trade.
So I guess most times I was on his side that it wasn't that risky.
But the move of the Jerusalem embassy, which I agreed with, I did think was going to cause more trouble.
So I guess he was right and I was wrong on that.
And you have to take that humility with you.
By the way, that's what I recommend in my book, Loser Think.
To protect yourself from bias, which you can't do entirely because you're human, but you can do what you can do, is to keep track of your own predictions well enough that you can do what I just did, which is I can recognize a pattern in which Trump does riskier things than I think I might do, and then it turns out he's right.
Once you see the pattern, you need a little bit of humility about your next opinion, right?
Or you should. So if Trump, in fact, does not...
Oh, somebody says look for a ban on fracking.
Well, certainly on maybe federal land, but I don't know if even the Democrats could ban fracking at this point.
I feel as if that's the problem with having power versus wanting power.
Yeah, I guess Biden is hiring some of the Russian hoax pushers.
So Biden has that same problem that Trump did, but a different version.
Trump had a problem that he had been so villainized that the number of people willing to work for him at all, reputationally, was small.
So Trump had to pick from a pool of people who were willing to work for him.
Which is a really small pool after the fake news has turned him into Hitler.
But Biden has his own special form of the problem that almost every Republican was pushing the Russia collusion hoax.
So how could Biden staff his government without staffing it with people who believed in the biggest hoax of all time?
I don't know if it's the biggest, but it's one of the best.
Well, I don't need to finish that.
All right. What's happened with Swalwell and Hunter?
I guess those stories got less interesting lately.
Oh, somebody says they won't ban fracking, they'll just add red tape until it won't be economical.
Well, that could happen.
That could happen. But it's going to be harder for Biden to add back red tape if the removal of it didn't cause a problem.
And I feel as though the stuff that Trump cut, all those regulations, if it caused problems, wouldn't we be hearing about it?
I feel as if we would.
So I don't know why Biden would fix something or why we'd try to fix something that wasn't broken.
So if a regulation went away and nobody's the worst for it, I don't know.
Does he put his political capital into that?
Oh yeah, and if he bans fracking, he's going to have to go even harder at nuclear.
Obama didn't ban fracking.
Biden won't either, Sparky says.
Yeah, Biden says he's not going to ban it, except maybe on federal land.
And I don't know why he'd even do that.
Alright, that's all I've got for now.
I will talk to you tomorrow.
Alright, Periscope is gone.
You YouTubers are here for another minute or so.
Where can I find hypnosis classes?
The most frequently asked question about hypnosis.
The answer is, I don't know.
I mean, I went to a hypnosis school that doesn't exist anymore a million years ago.
But if I haven't gone to a hypnosis school, I wouldn't know if I could recommend it.
I'd go to Yelp. Find out what's local.
Go to Yelp. But hypnotists are pretty good at getting people to recommend them.
Yeah, Park City was a...
Well, actually, I can't say that Park City sucked because I never got to Park City.
I only got to a place 19 miles away that was baited and switched as Park City.
Why did I not go to the D.C. protest?
Have you met me?
Do you think I would go to a street protest?
That's the last thing I would do.
I wouldn't go to a street protest for anything.
And I don't know why anybody else is going either.
What good do you think that's going to do?
Why would I go to a protest that wouldn't change anything?
What happens when Republicans learn that rules don't matter?
I don't know if that's exactly what's happening.
I think they might be learning to cheat better or to get out the vote better or something.
Did you give the hotel a bad review?
Well, not yet.
I should have guests more often because you enjoyed when I talked to Joel Pollack.
Well, thank you. You know, the trouble with having authors as guests If you don't read the book, you're not really a good host for having an author on.
And I don't read a lot of books, to tell you the truth.
And the reason is that usually you can get the essence of a book in different ways.
So a book is something I would do for entertainment, and only when the plane is taking off.
Or if I don't have Wi-Fi on the plane, I guess.
When do Conservatives start getting silenced like Conservatives in the UK? Well, we'll see.
So I don't know the answer to that question.
It looks like a creeping problem.
Dilbert's life matters, so thank you. - Mm-hmm.
Trump's next gig.
Well, I think Trump will enjoy just being in the public eye.
I would imagine he has a whole bunch of offers.
I think he has an offer to do The Apprentice again, but that feels like going backwards.
I think he's likely to become part of or found some kind of a platform, which would be a good outcome.
Kat, you're from Jewett, New York?
Wow, that's walking distance from where I grew up.
Not quite, but it's bicycle distance.
Your husband has a jewelry store in Park City?
Well, I was 19 miles away from it.
Dogbert was your hero? Thanks.
Will Trump go as a third party?
No, I don't think he will. But that's the other thing that could happen to the Democrats.
The Democrats might end up splitting into a progressive party, and that would be the end of them.
One thing that would end the Democrat Party's power forever is if the progressives decided to start a third party.
Antifa is still rioting up in Portland, but nobody cares about Portland.
