Episode 1147 Scott Adams - I Tell You How Fear Persuasion and Fake News Will Determine the Election

hey everybody come on in come on in it's just in time no you're not late you're right in time it's the perfect time for the simultaneous sip coffee with scott adams is about to start but not until we do the most important part of the day it's the thing that makes everything better it's a simultaneous sip and all you need is a copper mug or a glass of tanker chelsea stein a canteen joker plastic vessel of any kind fill it with your favorite liquid i like coffee and join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine of the day the thing that makes everything better everything it's called the simultaneous hip and happiness now go i feel all my vital signs improving white blood count up vitamin d levels improving yep it's all coming together now so what's happening in the news apparently fbi chief christopher wray has something to tell us this morning if you find out what it is while i'm yammering away here tell me in the comments what the news is some big news i saw somebody saying they thought he was gonna resign but i don't think that's anything like confirmed so we'll see could could be a whole new news cycle could be interesting all right here's a question uh i wonder about whenever we talk about death rates for coronavirus we're always talking about averages and the averages are useful but they could be misleading as well and here's what i'm wondering how many people in trump's position meaning they they were diagnosed early so there was sufficient testing to to to catch it before the symptoms were bad and they got the full suite of let's call it the trump protocol every drug that trump got the same way that he got it and let's say they were in their 70s and let's say they had one comorbidity they had some extra pounds how many people in that situation who were lucky enough to get treated as well as the president which would be rare but we could get there how many of those people would die because i'm starting to think that the number is so close to zero that we should just forget about it i mean if we can get to the point where we can catch people early and give them exactly what trump got and whatever else comes along i feel as if vaccines are not going to be the answer you know one of my predictions i made months ago which i haven't i haven't re-upped but i think i'll do it now i'm not sure we'll ever see vaccinations i'm just not sure vaccines are going to be the answer as other people have noted we've never successfully made a coronavirus vaccine so are you wondering why is it we've never been able to make one in the past but now you know six or ten different companies suddenly can all make one and they can make it all with different techniques so suddenly the thing that was impossible every year until now is now so possible that you can do it ten different ways there's something wrong right there's some there's something terribly wrong with what we're being told now maybe it was always possible and there was some financial or other reason it wasn't being done maybe it was a timing thing maybe those coronaviruses weren't so bad so we didn't have to try so hard but we're definitely not getting good information about what's going on in the world have you seen the latest polls uh it looks like the polls are starting to show biden with a commanding lead what do you think do you buy it apparently this is the same week in 2016 relative to election day the same week that hillary was at her maximum poll numbers now does that mean that this will go the way i went last time well i certainly suspect that people are lying to pollsters first of all we'll see how much um but it's also true that this might be one of the president's worst weeks wouldn't you say and we also see that these numbers can swing wildly in one week so what it is today is really not terribly predictive of what the election is going to be as we know from 2016.

so i wouldn't worry yet but if things don't change it's not looking good that's for sure all right let's talk about persuasion and the strongest elements of persuasion to see if we can get a little visibility on what's going on here as i've told you before the strongest persuasion especially for the presidency is fear you could pretty much predict that whoever does the best job of scaring voters in the way that they want to scare them that's probably who's going to win the election fear is the big persuader it's the one thing that'll get people off the fence it's the one one thing that'll make you show up to vote and it'll certainly get you to switch parties if you're afraid you might not do it for other reasons but if you're afraid you might switch parties so let's look at the fear filter so number one fear is kovid right so the democrats quite wisely decided to focus on cronovirus as the primary you know push against president trump it works for two really good reasons number one there's a general impression that he has not performed as well as he could so they've got something to say about his performance now i of course have said that those those opinions are probably ridiculous it won't matter because we make decisions based on ridiculous thinking but my point is this what do we know about how well let's say a different leader would have been in the united states let's say if we picked the leader of germany the leader of new zealand pick anybody who you think did a good job on the coronavirus and and tell me that you know for sure if that other leader had just been born american and had been the president instead of trump that we would have gotten a better result because you can't say that it's unknowable and if you use your common sense to just think it through he probably whoever that other president would be hypothetically would probably get the same result because they would have the same limitations they would come into a administration that faulty tests from the cdc wasn't the president's fault but they were faulty you would have the states jockeying for power we have a system where the states have a lot of control they would be making a variety of different decisions just the way the system is supposed to work that's exactly what it's supposed to do i don't know that some other leader would have gotten a better result but the country is not good at analyzing so they won't make that comparison they won't know enough to say wait wait the only thing that matters is what another leader would have done in the same situation as president of the united states it doesn't tell you anything to know how somebody did in another country because they're just too many different variables so point is fear is always the big the big motivator persuasion wise coronavirus has been our biggest fear and the president is vulnerable to criticism because people aren't good at analyzing so they quite rightly went after this but the president and i don't think i don't think this is getting enough attention the president's instincts to downplay the fear of the coronavirus is politically probably right on point because you might say to yourself scott i think the country would do better you know if people were more afraid maybe they would take more precautions or something maybe that's entirely possible but from a political perspective if the president can take the fear off it he can take the criticism and it won't hurt as much politically so if you are on a scale of one to ten if your fear of coronavirus was let's say a nine or a ten and he can bump that down to us to a seven he probably wins now what what do you feel about the risk of the coronavirus when you see a 73 year old 73 or four year old man who's got some comorbidities got a little extra weight on him what does it make you feel when you see him going to the hospital and shake it off in a few days less afraid right now you might say to yourself well i'm not going to get the same you know health care as the president but even so when you watch him go through it you you sort of relate to it more because it's somebody you sort of know and and you feel okay i just watched the cycle from beginning to end and there was nothing that happened there that looked extra dangerous it could have been if he had not gotten the right treatment etc but your impression of it right or wrong just your impression of it is less scary so i think that the president is knocking that down from a nine or a 10 to about a seven and you don't really see it it's sort of an invisible play because what people are concentrating on is what that will do to let's say the actions of the citizens will the citizens then expose themselves to greater risk than they should because they're less afraid they might that's entirely possible they might but that will count much less let's say that you know the the death rate is 235 000 but it could have been 232 000 just to pick in numbers would you notice would the public say ah that was an extra two thousand people if the president had just said different things about his own infection two thousand people would be alive well we'll never be able to demonstrate that anybody died because of what the president said it just won't be studyable we won't know and certainly won't know by election day that's my dog making all kinds of noise if you hear that so here's the thing the president is doing a good job on the fear reduction now in order to win they've got to amp up the fear on the in the other direction so right now there we don't have enough fear about what would happen if joe biden got elected what would be the thing you would fear the most well you can think of all kinds of stuff he's like well maybe he's a little you know too friendly with china but you don't feel that is going to kill you tomorrow it feels like some kind of long-term you know sub-optimal situation um and then you say okay well he might do something with your healthcare but it might not affect you personally it might take a while maybe it would be okay it doesn't scare you you just have a preference so the president needs to apply some fear to his persuasion or it probably won't get done meaning he won't win what would be the scariest thing that they could persuade on well street violence and crime revolution uh socialist taking over and destroying the planet so i would be expecting that mike pence in his in his uh debate tonight i think he's going to be pushing hard on the the risk of socialism and that would be my guess i think he's going to push hard on how that will destroy the country and we're all in trouble um the the democrats are also doing a better job lying as it turns out they're telling people that they're going to lose their health care if if trump gets reelected that they'll you'll lose pre-existing conditions there's no evidence that any of this is true and there's evidence that is false but because the country is so in such uh information poverty you can make any claim on on the left and it will never be fact-checked because they don't fact-check themselves and the people watching the news from the left just will never see the other argument so the the democrats can literally just say anything just anything so they can push the fine people hoax as you know they can tell you that trump's taking your health care that he's going to cut social security none of this is true none of this is based on anything but they can just say it just put it out there now i'm not saying that the president isn't also making wild claims but i think his wild claims get fact-checked but they don't get fact-checked on the left i would go for starvation as the fear that the that the republicans can push um so joe biden gave this speech at uh gettysburg this the scene of the gettysburg um i'm going to talk about sweden in a little bit i see your comment there um and i would say that i listened to a little bit of binding speech and i'd have to say high marks i give it high marks i would say that biden uh in terms of going to gettysburg because it's you know a place of you know famous for civil war national unrest so image-wise pretty good speech-wise pretty good you know if if i'm being objective he did he did a solid job there i would say just a really good job and i thought the content of his speech was strong as well but as uh joel pollock pointed out in his article in breitbart that he was doing a unity speech in which he led off with the most most divisive lie in american history the fine people hoax so he goes to give a speech on national reconciliation and he leads off with his own bad behavior the worst thing that's happening in the country and that's i don't think that's an exaggeration his lie about the fine people hoax is the alpha problem in the country if you even more than coronavirus in my opinion because to the extent that people believe the fine people hoax and apparently people on the left do that makes everything that they do okay it's the approval to be dangerous it's the approval to be extreme because they think they're fighting something extreme which as it turns out just didn't happen doesn't exist um so but he can get away with that because again there will be no fact checking of his false claims um let's see there's a big story of course which will only be shown in the right landing media so maybe that what would be normally the biggest story in the country will be non-existent on cnn and msnbc it just won't exist now i've told you in the past that that's usually an indication of fake news fake news is usually when either only the left or only the right report it as even happening and the other one just doesn't act like it didn't happen that usually means it didn't happen if both of them reported happened it probably did if you know they might have a different spin on what it means but if they both at least report it happened probably happened so right now we've got this story that only exists on the right and may only exist there and it may never be covered by the left that the the president has now you know ordered declassification of all of the uh all of the russia collusion uh stuff now i don't know what that means but does it really mean it's all declassified really all of it because most of the stuff we've seen had redactions like crazy is he really getting rid of all the red actions so first of all i don't believe it you know it seems like too much of a claim i feel like there have to be redaction somewhere but that's not the big story the big story is that what's already released shows that john brennan was aware and must have briefed i think he briefed obama he must have been aware that hillary clinton had a scheme to detract from her own email problem by creating a fake scandal about trump and russia which she did and with the help of her you know helpers in the department of justice and the fbi or whatever cia and with her helpers almost succeeded in overthrowing the country almost succeeded and you know what she's almost there again we're at the brink of hillary clinton succeeding in in the coup that she attempted in 2016.

now when i say she's on the brink of succeeding if you look at the polls it would suggest that the collective lies coming out of the uh and the left would have done their job and that those lies collectively might you know get bite and elected which puts the hillary obama crowd back in charge we don't know exactly who but it's starting to look like hillary's coup attempt which is now clearly documented in 2016 um is actually going to work like right now because this election will be completely fraudulent because none of the information the voters have to vote on is real all of our information is just made up which is fake now of course the russia collusion thing was fake news that was an attempt to overthrow the country this is just more of that it's just more fake news the the fine people hoax being the prime example it's just a whole bunch of fake news that collectively the left gets together and promotes that is so strong when you put it all together it might actually cost trump the election i'm still predicting he'll win but at the moment that's what it looks like so that should be the biggest story in the world right not just the biggest story in the country it should be the biggest story in the world won't even be covered on cnn won't even be covered now there's a race to the finish line that's really interesting because brennan and maybe some others in the government might be in a whole lot of legal trouble but only if trump gets reelected because otherwise they can stall until biden gets in office and then everybody's home free so it looks like we have documented evidence of an actual coup in 2016.

we have an actual coup that's in progress right now a fake news coupe it's it's you know the the fake news creates you know the the coup basically and and the people that we know are involved are on a path if things go the way the polls are indicating they're on a path to completely get away with it not only get away with it but it might be your next head of the cia brennan could be that next out of the cia that's completely possible at this point i can't think of a worse outcome but we're we're certainly on the precipice of that being possible um let's see what else we got going on here the the stimulus is off and this is another example of how the fake news can overthrow a government the accurate news would be like this nancy pelosi put a bunch of things in the stimulus bill that anybody would have known would make it impossible for republicans to pass it anybody would know that so it's quite obvious that nancy pelosi knew that that bill was impossible to pass the way it was designed and she wasn't going to negotiate it which further tells you it was never intended to be passed it was intended to fail so they could blame it on the president that's right nancy pelosi is actually starving americans starving starving americans for political gain but because they control the media so much of it anyway that story will turn into the opposite of that they can just say it's the opposite it's the opposite it was a perfectly good bill and this president trump he decided not to negotiate and walked away so it's all on him right of course the president has said that he would be perfectly happy to sign a a clean bill that just had stimulus checks and i think one other thing but they won't send that to him because they can starve the public and blame it on trump because they control the news amazingly uh yeah so and also since the the media doesn't understand how negotiating works when they see trump walk away from the negotiating table they say hey trump stopped negotiating which is exactly the opposite of what happened they can report exactly the opposite of reality and get away with it completely when he walks away from the table that's negotiating that's what it is and he's told us specifically he wrote a book about it walk away from the table otherwise you can't get what you want so he's negotiating but the news will treat it as he stopped negotiating because they can they just can they just have the power to report things as the opposite of what is obviously true and they can get away with it it's amazing um and of course the ignorance of the public really helps them there um i'm seeing more reports about that drug that uh trump is apparently on this dexa dexamethasone and some doctors are saying it has the side effects including aggression agitation and confusion now most people won't have those side effects but i don't like those side effects and i gotta say as much as i i love my president trump any president who has a was taking a drug that might have those side effects i think you have to take the nuclear codes away from them i really do and i you know it's so close to a election that i can't imagine that would happen but under normal conditions yeah yeah no matter how much you love your president that's a pretty big risk right i you you would find it no value in my commentary if i if i just agreed with the president on everything that would be no no use to you at all so that's my opinion on that here is the strangest simulation thing um as you know kellyanne conway has been tested positives and as well as her daughter so both kelly ann and her daughter have the coronavirus i i was googling this morning to try to determine if george conway has tested positive for coronavirus you would think that if two family members have tested positive his odds are pretty high now this opens up the following completely possible scenario you've seen george conway right he doesn't look let's uh how do i i don't like the fat shame but it's important in the story so i'm not going to fat shame him i'm just going to say he's got an obvious comorbidity what would you agree and far more i think if i can remember what he looked like far more than trump and there is a non-zero chance that trump through the coronavirus will take out his biggest critic and that would be first of all tragic i'm not i'm not hoping that that happens i'm not a george conway fan but we don't we don't hope illness on anybody we don't hope you know we don't wish for any violence or any kind of bad outcomes for anybody i hope you don't either but in terms of the simulation this is really possible now it's entirely possible that trump's number one critic could be susceptible to this and if it turned out that um well if it turned out that that happened i i don't know what i would think about reality after that it would just be so mind-bogglingly looking like a movie script i just wouldn't know what to think of it here's another one like that i saw a chart of various countries opinions of china and if you look at you know the various countries and what they thought of china over the years it's you know up and down but about 2018 the dislike of china just went through the roof so every every country in the world just had a big change around 2018 boom now here's the simulation part of that okay and i know i know from experience that at least a third of you are going to misinterpret what i say next so i'll just let that happen because i can't help it i can only say this as clearly as i can knowing that a third of you will permanently misinterpret it goes like this in 2018 my stepson died of a of a fentanyl overdose fentanyl of course comes from china and they do it intentionally to hurt the united states at that time i declared that china was my mortal enemy and i was going to take them down or certainly try as hard as i could so exactly the time that i publicly announced i was going to take down china and destroy their reputation first their reputation just fell off a cliff and all over the world people were hating china now i'm not going to say and here's the part you'll misinterpret i'm not claiming i did that a third of the people listening will go go away and say he just claimed he did that i'm just i'm telling you i'm not claiming that i'm claiming it as a coincidence but it's a big one and by itself it wouldn't mean anything right because a lot of people probably turned a negative on china around the same time so if you just looked at it in isolation wouldn't mean much but i got to tell you the number of times in my life that i've you know picked a desirable uh global thing to happen and then watched it happen just when i decided it should happen is really freaking me out a little bit just a little bit so the point of the story is not that i'm changing world events it's that i don't understand why they change when i want them to am i just good at guessing what will happen i'm genuinely confused by it because it happens so regularly you know someday i'll give you the list of things that happened just about the time i started persuading that direction i feel like somebody says breaking news is something breaking right now tell me in the uh tell me in the comments if you see something um somebody says hey you costed i know you did well i don't make that claim but i will tell you that i was trying to make exactly this happen and at the time you would have said it would be unlikely wouldn't you if in 2018 when i said publicly as i did a number of times that i was i determined that china was my enemy and i was going to try to take them down you probably didn't think much would change did you you probably thought 2020 would look a lot like 2018 in terms of china you probably wouldn't think much would be different except we're decoupling and there's a lot different there's a lot different but i don't take credit for that all right facebook has decided to ban q anon across all of its platforms what do you think of that do you think it's reasonable for facebook to ban q anon based on the fact that they spread i guess this would be their argument that they spread untruths that presumably are you know potentially dangerous untruths do you think that's reasonable here's what i think it might be reasonable i i could totally see how it would be reasonable to remove conspiracy theory bs from your platform but don't you have to be a little consistent that's my only issue why can they allow joe biden to to base his campaign on an obvious falsehood the fine people hoax when you just have to look at the transcript to know that it's not true just look at the transcript it's that easy now why is it that the most divisive and dangerous hoax in the history of america that's my claim for the fine people oaks the most dangerous hoax in all of american history why is that okay now you could say well you know it's a political claim and there's lots of political claims and we can't really fact check all that and people will just put it in context it's just a political claim is it i would say no here's here's a political claim president trump will cut your social security it's not true it's the opposite of what he says he'll do and he's been pretty good about doing what he says he'll do and not doing what he says he won't do he's been pretty good at that so it's not true is that okay is it okay to have something that's clearly not true that's a political claim i would say probably that's okay because as soon as you get into the business of determining what's true and not you it's just a forever rabbit hole you can't get out of that hole right because you know there's lots of things that are gray area some people could say it's true some people would say it's not true you could never really use that standard of that it's true or not true you'd have to use the standard that is not true and on top of that it's dangerous i think that's what put q anon over the top not that it's untrue but it's that it's untrue and has a fairly obvious potential for for danger that's what define people hoax is the fine people hoax isn't just something that's untrue it's not like saying i'll raise your taxes it's not like saying i'll cut your social security it's not like saying you know although you can keep your doctor yeah it's not like any of those things those are just untrue they're not dangerous the fine people hoax could get me killed me personally i could get killed because of that hoax and all that it supports because it supports a whole structure of beliefs that you know i think that's the the strongest pillar and it's not real so that's the world you live in all right so i think facebook just needs to be consistent i wouldn't mind them banning q anon uh if they also banned the fine people hoax i would say those are equivalents um interestingly a fellow named glenn lowery who's a scholar he's got together with a bunch of other scholars and they're calling for the pulitzer board to revoke the pulitzer prize awarded earlier this year to nicole hannah-jones for her 16-19 project and they're asking for the pulitzer prize to be revoked because the scholarship in that piece of work is lacking meaning that there's a claim in there that's ridiculously untrue specifically the claim that the american revolution was fought in large part to preserve slavery apparently there's no historical evidence that that was the case but that's that's part of the learning and somebody got a pulitzer surprise for that completely false claim uh of course you're all going to watch the vp um debates tonight i think the vp debate is going to be more interesting than you think might be more interesting than you think um of course the big drama is that kamala harris is going to ask for a plexi glass walls and pence is wants to have no wall now if it turns out that kamala is in a plastic glass box and pence is not who wins who wins does kamala harris win because she's the one playing it safe and she's got her little plexiglass cubicle or does pence win because he's clearly far enough away from people to not infect anybody but he's also not being a little in a plastic box who wins well it might depend you know people will pick sides with their political favorite i think pence wins that in terms of the optics you don't want to be the bubble girl all right if pence is a free-range chicken on that stage and kamala harris is a bubble girl bubble girl does not beat free-range chicken in optics it's not even close all right so i don't know if it'll turn out that way one's in a bubble and one isn't but bubble girl doesn't have an advantage now here's the other stuff the first thing you need to know about vice president debates is that that's a good place to test out messages so what you might see is uh you might see pence framing one of the issues or more in a way that you haven't seen before which would be really interesting because if you see that it means he's testing it because that would be a normal procedure you let the vice president test it if it doesn't work you just don't do it yourself if it becomes a big controversy and it's a problem then the president could say well that was the vice president you know just listen to me and sort of make it go away because that's typical too vice presidents do sometimes say something that the top of the ticket has to has to modify fairly ordinary i think it's happened in a lot of different races so it's a it's a low risk thing for pence to try on a new argument so see if he does that and here's what's uh interesting and i've said this a number of times and i'm just going to keep saying i think pence is the most underrated public servant in america the most underrated in terms of how good he is because the job of the vice president is primarily not to cause trouble right you don't want to become a problem you just want to be a steady spare tire and i think he does that better than just about anybody's ever done it i think that he stays out of trouble like nobody's business he also can win debates i believe he was considered the winner of his tim kaine debate in 2016.

he's good at it he's excellent in in public you know he's not going to have a weird gaffe you know he's going to be prepared you know he's going to present well you know he's not going to have a an emotional flip out moment you know he's strong enough to handle whatever is coming he is really solid now do you know that about kamala harris would you say to yourself yeah i know kamala harris is just as strong as all those things i said about pence nope she could have some moments so she is capable of moments you know to to capture the news cycle and that could be dangerous but she's not in his class he's he is just a better debater and if i were her i'd be a little bit worried because people are going to look at the vice presidential debate a little bit harder than they would normally because people are looking at kamala as maybe the top of the ticket think about this pence could i'm not predicting this because this would be an unlikely outcome but he could he could he could end the election tonight that's possible here's how he'd have to do it he would just have to expose kamala and just destroy her and eviscerate her in the debate if he does that suddenly joe biden doesn't look like such a good package because you've always thought all right really it's about the number two right if he destroys number two he destroys number one that wouldn't be true the reverse if pence were to lose the debate what's anybody going to say really you know are you going to say therefore i change my vote nope you're not going to change your vote so first of all it's very unlikely he's going to lose it'll be a tie or he'll win i would say that's a fair estimate but he might win and this is the thing i don't think people are counting on he has the skill he does have the skill compared to kamala harris to eviscerate her now probably not i think she'll rise to the challenge and usually these things look closely even even if you think somebody won but he does have the talent he has the talent to completely take her out and then and i don't think the risk works in the other direction in this case so if he exposes her as unusually weak could change the race we'll see um have you noticed let me just do a little uh recap here on oh i want to talk about sweden before we do that so i was looking at a tweet by uh i don't know how to pronounce his name yainan weiss i think yennan or yainan and he showed some graphs about showing sweden compared to some other countries uk france and spain and the the point he was making is that sweden is doing great in terms of death rate and infections so very low and i think trending down whereas there are at least three countries he mentioned and the us i think you threw in there too so uk france and spain where they're having you know more infections now his point was the sweden has essentially stopped the lockdown they've gone back to something closer to normal and he's saying that sweden is doing great doing none of the things that the countries that are doing poorly feel they need to do like the lockdowns and the masks and stuff now i don't first of all i don't think the sweden story is that clean i think that the swedes are wearing masks and i think that they are voluntarily socially distancing so it's not really a clean comparison but he makes he tries to make this case and i am not convinced and here's why number one every every time you see somebody say i'm gonna compare one country no matter what country to these three or four or five countries you can just forget what they're saying because nothing they say is useful if out of all the countries in the world i don't know 180 whatever there are if you're going to take six of them and say i can tell something from these six that's probably not true it's probably cherry picking if you would pick other countries you might get a different result so first of all anytime you see a coronavirus graph with three or five countries don't believe anything you see on that graph that is cherry picked data it might be true but you shouldn't assume it's true because it's non-credible by design just a few countries so but here was uh in part of his twitter thread he had this little throwaway line he said and yes other nordic countries did better than the swedes what wait a minute his point was that sweden is doing a great job without the lockdowns and the masks but he compared it to uk france and sweden but then in the tweet he throws in this line yes other nordic countries did better than the swedes but that is not proof lockdowns work because the other nordic countries did the lockdowns it may just be proof that the swedes should have protected their nursing homes better maybe here's my take in other words the nordic countries the ones that supplement with vitamin d all year round because they don't get enough vitamin d so apparently in sweden it's typical to take you know fish oil on a daily basis to get your vitamin d is that true in the uk do people in the uk supplement with vitamin d don't think so france nope spain don't think so so here's what i see i see that when yainan weiss was trying to make the case that the mass and lockdowns don't help that much because sweden is doing well that's not the story i saw i looked at his own tweet thread and said um there's more evidence in your own tweet thread that the vitamin d levels are the main or the main thing because if it's true that it doesn't matter if you have a mask or a lockdown or not you get wildly different results but that the people who do well all seem to be the vitamin d supplement people is that a coincidence is that a coincidence it could be so the first thing you should say to yourself is yes scott that could be a coincidence it totally could be a coincidence but what i'm saying is that all of the other correlations or causations that you imagine you see don't believe them they're just not credible is the vitamin d correlation incredible no no not based on the little bit of data that i just mentioned it's not credible at all but it's not less credible than the idea that masks and lockdowns don't work and then sweden is telling you that all right how many of our stories today uh stories in the news are based on just lies all right let's go through them so we've got the coronavirus situation which you know that that's been filled with lies we've got the uh russia collusion thing and who's behind it that's filled with lies it's all about lies we've got the stimulus deal being off but the stimulus deal was never really being negotiated it was a lie that it was ever being negotiated because it wasn't so that's just a lie um see what else uh facebook is banning q anon because those are lies uh the pulitzer prize might get revoked or at least some scholars are asking for it because the the document that got the pulitzer prize had a big lie in it do you see a pattern yet the pattern is pretty clear all of our biggest problems are based on the fact that we don't have a credible news media anymore as soon as your news source becomes completely non-credible then all of your news becomes it's just all every one of our problems is but the problem is real but what people are saying about it is just just not true all right um somebody says that i'm conflicted about kamala because she's my creation see you get blocked for saying stuff like that because that's a mind mind reading thing so hold on a second i have to move something in order to block you yeah it's not worth it i'll block you next time i'll catch you next time so uh if if that confuses you the the blocking is when you uh when you ascribe opinions to me that are inaccurate you can ask me my opinion and you can certainly criticize my actual opinion but when you assign an opinion to me that i do not hold and then criticize it you get blocked um depends somebody's saying pence is more disciplined than trump i think that's true that's that's true he's more disciplined less interesting all right um that is all i have for now and i will talk to you periscopers tomorrow and you youtubers still with you you look at your comments here as we close up um is anybody enjoying the youtube experience better so you might have noticed i took out my um my air pods that i was using for a microphone i i'm not seeing anybody oh somebody's saying the sound is echoing okay that's what i was going to ask so you should hear a little echo let me give you a little update on the sound because so many of you have asked for it now people have said to me scott you should upgrade your sound system yes yes i should i've got every kind of sound device you could possibly think of i've got a whole rack of iron sound equipment i've got i've got this i've got i've got this and all this and here's what i've learned because i've experimented with all of this stuff if you do the super end stuff like the shure microphone and the sound boards etc you can make that work but only if you have a soundproof room because this kind of microphone will pick up too much room noise and you get way too much the the preferred um method which i just bought um i bought another lavalier to use that the lavalier when it clips on doesn't give you the full richness of the the high-end sound system with a soundproof room but you can use this in a non-soundproof room without the echo so on periscope the sound is pretty good it's not as good as the the best that could be but it's fine and i had to order a second one of these so that i could use it with youtube so here's the bottom line the sound will be different in a few days on youtube without the echo um and i think that will be the best it could be i have tried for four years every possible sound and video combination and this is what i've learned you can't beat the video from an iphone or an ipad so this is just my iphone that you're you're watching right now it's it's the best video uh if you get any kind of high-end camera you can get a better video but the complexity of a high-end camera because you have to run it through other equipment and other software it basically makes it completely unusable because you can get it to work but the very second time you want to you want it to work some software will need updating something went off something time down it just never works twice so the iphone or the ipad is the number one way to get a clean uh video that works every time but to get the sound uh like i said i've purchased expensive sound boards such as this one such as this thing and you know i've learned to use it i've hooked it all up i've got ever i've soundproofed a room you know different room in the house i've tried every combination of microphones and the best kind you know i'm buying some pretty high-end stuff and nothing works as well as a 20 plug-in lavalier microphone on an ipad nothing comes close now i could come close if i had a full-time engineer and a a room that was designed for sound and then this high-end equipment and then the engineer troubleshooting it every day because you have to troubleshoot it every time you use it all right so i just thought i'd give you that uh update and i will talk to you tomorrow

hey everybody

come on in come on in

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i feel all my vital signs improving

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yep it's all coming together now

so what's happening in the news

apparently fbi chief

christopher wray has something to tell

us this morning

if you find out what it is

while i'm yammering away here tell me in

the comments what the news is some big

news

i saw somebody saying they thought he

was gonna resign

but i don't think that's

anything like confirmed

so we'll see could could be a whole new

news cycle could be interesting

all right here's a question

uh i wonder about whenever we talk about

death rates for coronavirus we're always

talking about averages

and the averages are useful

but they could be misleading as well and

here's what i'm wondering

how many people in trump's position

meaning they they were diagnosed early

so there was sufficient testing to

to to catch it before the symptoms were

bad

and they got the full suite of let's

call it the trump protocol

every drug that trump got

the same way that he got it and let's

say they were in their 70s and let's say

they had one comorbidity

they had some extra pounds

how many people in that situation

who were lucky enough to get treated as

well as the president which would be

rare

but we could get there

how many of those people would die

because i'm starting to think that the

number is so close to zero

that we should just forget about it

i mean if we can get to the point where

we can catch people early

and give them exactly what trump got

and whatever else comes along

i feel as if

vaccines are not going to be the answer

you know

one of my predictions i made

months ago

which i haven't i haven't

re-upped but i think i'll do it now

i'm not sure we'll ever see vaccinations

i'm just not sure vaccines are going to

be the answer

as other people have noted we've never

successfully made a coronavirus vaccine

so

are you wondering why is it we've never

been able to make one in the past

but now

you know six or ten different companies

suddenly can all make one and they can

make it all with different techniques

so suddenly

the thing that was impossible every year

until now

is now so possible that you can do it

ten different ways

there's something wrong right

there's some there's something terribly

wrong with what we're being told now

maybe

it was always possible and there was

some financial or other reason it wasn't

being done

maybe it was a timing thing maybe

those coronaviruses weren't so bad so we

didn't have to try so hard but we're

definitely not getting good information

about what's going on in the world

have you seen the latest polls

uh it looks like the polls

are starting to show biden with a

commanding lead

what do you think

do you buy it

apparently this is the same week

in 2016 relative to election day the

same week that hillary was at her

maximum poll numbers

now

does that mean that this will go the way

i went last time

well i certainly suspect

that

people are lying to pollsters first of

all

we'll see how much

um but it's also true

that this might be one of the

president's worst weeks wouldn't you say

and we also see that these numbers can

swing wildly in one week

so what it is today is really not

terribly predictive of what the election

is going to be as we know from 2016.

so i wouldn't worry

yet but if things don't change it's not

looking good

that's for sure

all right let's talk about persuasion

and the strongest

elements of persuasion to see if we can

get a little visibility on what's going

on here as i've told you before

the strongest persuasion especially for

the presidency

is fear

you could pretty much predict that

whoever does the best job of scaring

voters in the way that they want to

scare them

that's probably who's going to win the

election

fear is the big persuader it's the one

thing that'll get people off the fence

it's the one one thing that'll make you

show up to vote

and it'll certainly get you to switch

parties

if you're afraid you might not do it for

other reasons but

if you're afraid you might switch

parties

so let's look at the fear

filter

so number one fear is kovid right

so the democrats quite wisely decided to

focus on cronovirus

as the primary

you know

push against president trump it works

for two really good reasons number one

there's a general impression that he has

not performed as well as he could

so they've got something to say about

his performance now i of course have

said

that those those opinions are probably

ridiculous

it won't matter because we make

decisions based on ridiculous thinking

but my point is this

what do we know

about how well let's say a different

leader would have been in the united

states let's say if we picked

the leader of germany the leader of new

zealand pick anybody who you think did a

good job on the coronavirus

and and tell me that you know for sure

if that other leader

had just been born american

and had been the president instead of

trump

that we would have gotten a better

result

because you can't say that

it's unknowable

and if you use your common sense to just

think it through

he probably whoever that other president

would be hypothetically would probably

get the same result

because they would have the same

limitations

they would come into a administration

that faulty tests from the cdc

wasn't the president's fault

but they were faulty

you would have the states jockeying for

power we have a system where the states

have a lot of control they would be

making a variety of different decisions

just the way the system is supposed to

work that's exactly what it's supposed

to do

i don't know that some other leader

would have gotten a better result

but

the country is not good at analyzing so

they won't make that comparison they

won't know enough to say wait wait the

only thing that matters

is what another leader would have done

in the same situation as

president of the united states

it doesn't tell you anything

to know how somebody did in another

country

because they're just too many different

variables

so point is

fear is always

the big the big motivator persuasion

wise coronavirus has been our biggest

fear

and the president is vulnerable to

criticism because people aren't good at

analyzing

so they quite rightly went after this

but the president

and i don't think

i don't think this is getting enough

attention

the president's instincts to downplay

the fear of the coronavirus

is politically

probably right on point

because you might say to yourself scott

i think the country would do better

you know if people were more afraid

maybe they would take more precautions

or something

maybe that's entirely possible

but from a political perspective

if the president can take the fear off

it

he can take the criticism and it won't

hurt as much

politically

so if you are on a scale of one to ten

if your fear of coronavirus was

let's say a nine or a ten

and he can bump that down to us to a

seven

he probably wins

now what what do you feel about the risk

of the coronavirus when you see a 73

year old

73 or four

year old

man who's got some comorbidities got a

little extra weight on him

what does it make you feel when you see

him going to the hospital and shake it

off in a few days

less afraid right

now you might say to yourself well i'm

not going to get the same

you know health care as the president

but even so

when you watch him go through it you you

sort of relate to it more because it's

somebody you sort of know

and

and you feel

okay i just watched

the cycle from beginning to end

and there was nothing that happened

there

that looked extra dangerous

it could have been if he had not gotten

the right treatment etc but your

impression of it

right or wrong just your impression of

it is less scary so i think that the

president is knocking that down from a

nine or a 10

to about a seven

and you don't really see it it's sort of

an invisible play

because what people are concentrating on

is what that will do to let's say the

actions of the citizens will the

citizens then

expose themselves to greater risk than

they should because they're less afraid

they might

that's entirely possible they might

but

that will count much less

let's say that you know the the death

rate is

235 000

but it could have been

232 000

just to pick in numbers would you notice

would the public say ah

that was an extra two thousand people

if the president had just said different

things about his own infection

two thousand people would be alive well

we'll never be able to demonstrate that

anybody died because of what the

president said it just won't be

studyable

we won't know and certainly won't know

by election day

that's my dog making all kinds of noise

if you hear that

so

here's the thing

the president is doing a good job on the

fear reduction now in order to win

they've got to

amp up the fear

on the in the other direction

so right now there we don't have enough

fear about what would happen if

joe biden got elected what would be the

thing you would fear the most

well you can think of all kinds of stuff

he's like well

maybe he's a little you know too

friendly with china

but you don't feel that is going to kill

you tomorrow

it feels like some kind of long-term

you know sub-optimal situation

um

and then you say okay well he might

do something with your healthcare

but it might not affect you personally

it might take a while

maybe it would be okay it doesn't scare

you

you just have a preference

so the president needs to apply some

fear

to his persuasion or it probably won't

get done

meaning he won't win what would be the

scariest thing

that they could persuade on well street

violence and crime revolution

uh socialist taking over and destroying

the planet

so i would be

expecting that mike pence in his

in his uh

debate tonight i think he's going to be

pushing hard on the

the risk of socialism

and that would be my guess i think he's

going to push hard on how that will

destroy the country and we're all in

trouble

um

the the democrats are also doing a

better job

lying as it turns out they're telling

people that they're going to lose their

health care if if trump gets reelected

that they'll you'll lose

pre-existing conditions

there's no evidence that any of this is

true and there's evidence that is false

but

because the country is so in such

uh information poverty

you can make any claim on on the left

and it will never be fact-checked

because they don't fact-check themselves

and the people watching the news from

the left just will never see the other

argument

so the the democrats can literally just

say anything just anything

so they can push the fine people hoax as

you know they can tell you that trump's

taking your health care that he's going

to cut social security none of this is

true

none of this is based on anything

but they can just say it just put it out

there now i'm not saying that the

president isn't also making wild claims

but

i think his wild claims get fact-checked

but they don't get fact-checked on the

left

i would go for starvation as the fear

that the

that the republicans can push

um

so joe biden gave this speech at uh

gettysburg this the scene of the

gettysburg

um i'm going to talk about sweden in a

little bit i see your comment there

um and i would say that i listened to a

little bit of binding speech and i'd

have to say

high marks i give it high marks i would

say that biden

uh in terms of going to gettysburg

because it's you know a place of you

know famous for civil war national

unrest

so image-wise

pretty good

speech-wise

pretty good

you know if if i'm being objective

he did he did a solid job there i would

say

just a really good job and i thought the

content of his speech was strong as well

but as uh

joel pollock pointed out in his article

in breitbart

that he was doing a unity speech

in which he led off with the most

most divisive lie in american history

the fine people hoax

so he goes to give a speech on national

reconciliation

and he leads off

with his own bad behavior

the worst thing that's happening in the

country and that's i don't think that's

an exaggeration his lie about the fine

people hoax is the alpha

problem in the country

if you even more than coronavirus in my

opinion

because to the extent that people

believe the fine people hoax

and apparently people on the left do

that makes everything that they do okay

it's the approval

to be dangerous it's the approval to be

extreme

because they think they're fighting

something extreme

which as it turns out just didn't happen

doesn't exist

um

so but he can get away with that because

again there will be no fact checking of

his

false claims

um

let's see

there's a big story of course

which will only be

shown in the right landing media

so maybe that what would be normally the

biggest story in the country

will be non-existent on cnn and msnbc it

just won't exist

now i've told you in the past

that that's usually an indication of

fake news

fake news is usually when either only

the left or only the right report it as

even happening

and the other one just doesn't act like

it didn't happen

that usually means it didn't happen

if both of them reported happened it

probably did

if you know they might have a different

spin on what it means

but if they both at least report it

happened

probably happened

so right now we've got this

story that only exists

on the right

and may only exist there and it may

never be covered by the left

that the

the president has now

you know ordered declassification of all

of the uh

all of the russia collusion

uh stuff

now i don't know what that means

but does it really mean it's all

declassified

really all of it because most of the

stuff we've seen had redactions like

crazy

is he really getting rid of

all the red actions

so first of all i don't believe it you

know it seems like too much of a claim i

feel like there have to be redaction

somewhere

but

that's not the big story the big story

is that what's already released

shows that john brennan was aware and

must have briefed

i think he briefed obama he must have

been aware

that hillary clinton had a scheme

to detract from her own email problem

by creating a fake scandal about trump

and russia

which she did

and with the help of her you know

helpers in the department of justice and

the fbi or whatever

cia and with her helpers almost

succeeded in overthrowing the country

almost succeeded and you know what

she's almost there again

we're at the brink of hillary clinton

succeeding

in

in the coup that she attempted in 2016.

now when i say she's on the brink of

succeeding if you look at the polls it

would suggest that

the collective lies coming out of the

uh and the left

would have done their job

and that those lies collectively might

you know get bite and elected which puts

the hillary obama crowd back in charge

we don't know exactly who

but

it's starting to look

like hillary's coup attempt which is now

clearly documented in 2016

um is actually going to work

like right now

because this election

will be completely fraudulent because

none of the information the voters have

to vote on

is real

all of our information is just made up

which is fake

now of course the russia collusion thing

was fake news

that was an attempt to overthrow the

country

this is just more of that

it's just more fake news the the fine

people hoax being the prime example

it's just a whole bunch of fake news

that collectively the left gets together

and promotes

that is so strong

when you put it all together

it might actually cost trump the

election

i'm still predicting he'll win

but at the moment that's what it looks

like

so

that should be the biggest story in the

world right

not just the biggest story in the

country it should be the biggest story

in the world

won't even be covered on cnn

won't even be covered

now there's a race to the finish line

that's really interesting

because brennan and maybe some others in

the government

might be

in a whole lot of legal trouble

but only if trump gets reelected

because otherwise they can stall until

biden gets in office and then

everybody's home free

so

it looks like we have documented

evidence of an actual coup in 2016.

we have an actual coup that's in

progress right now a fake news coupe

it's it's you know the the fake news

creates

you know the the coup basically

and

and the people that we know are involved

are on a path if things go the way the

polls are indicating

they're on a path to completely get away

with it

not only get away with it but it might

be your next head of the cia

brennan could be that next out of the

cia

that's completely possible at this point

i can't think of a worse outcome

but we're we're certainly on the

precipice of that being possible

um

let's see what else we got going on here

the

the stimulus is off

and this is another example of how the

fake news

can overthrow a government

the accurate news would be like this

nancy pelosi put a bunch of things in

the stimulus bill

that anybody would have known would make

it impossible for

republicans to pass it anybody would

know that

so it's quite obvious

that nancy pelosi

knew that that bill was impossible to

pass

the way it was designed

and she wasn't going to negotiate it

which further tells you it was never

intended to be passed it was intended to

fail

so they could blame it on the president

that's right

nancy pelosi is actually starving

americans

starving starving americans for

political gain

but because they control the media so

much of it anyway

that story will turn into the opposite

of that

they can just say it's the opposite it's

the opposite it was a perfectly good

bill

and this president trump

he decided not to negotiate and walked

away so it's all on him right

of course the president has said that he

would be perfectly happy to sign a a

clean bill that just had stimulus checks

and i think one other thing

but they won't send that to him

because they can starve the public

and blame it on trump because they

control the news

amazingly

uh

yeah so

and also since the

the media doesn't understand how

negotiating works

when they see trump walk away from the

negotiating table

they say

hey

trump stopped negotiating

which is exactly the opposite of what

happened

they can report exactly the opposite of

reality and get away with it completely

when he walks away from the table

that's negotiating

that's what it is

and he's told us specifically he wrote a

book about it

walk away from the table

otherwise you can't get what you want so

he's negotiating

but the news will treat it as he stopped

negotiating

because they can they just can they just

have the power

to report things as the opposite of what

is obviously true

and they can get away with it it's

amazing

um

and of course the ignorance of the

public really helps them there

um i'm seeing more reports about that

drug that uh trump is apparently on this

dexa

dexamethasone

and some doctors are saying it has the

side effects including aggression

agitation and confusion

now

most people won't have those side

effects

but

i don't like those side effects

and i gotta say as much as i i love my

president trump

any president who has a was taking a

drug that might have those side effects

i think you have to take the

nuclear codes away from them

i really do

and i you know it's so close to a

election that i can't imagine that would

happen

but under normal conditions yeah

yeah no matter how much you love your

president

that's a pretty big risk

right i you you would find it no value

in my

commentary if i if i just agreed with

the president on everything that would

be no no use to you at all

so that's my opinion on that

here is the strangest simulation

thing

um as you know kellyanne conway has been

tested positives and as well as her

daughter

so both kelly ann and her daughter have

the coronavirus

i i was googling this morning to try to

determine if george conway

has tested positive for coronavirus

you would think that if two family

members have tested positive his odds

are pretty high

now this opens up the following

completely possible scenario

you've seen george conway right

he doesn't look

let's uh how do i i don't like the fat

shame but it's important in the story

so i'm not going to fat shame him i'm

just going to say he's got an obvious

comorbidity

what would you agree and far more i

think if i can remember what he looked

like far more than trump

and there is a non-zero chance

that trump through the coronavirus

will take out his biggest

critic

and that would be first of all tragic

i'm not i'm not hoping that that happens

i'm not a george conway fan

but we don't we don't hope illness on

anybody

we don't hope

you know we don't wish for any violence

or

any kind of bad outcomes for anybody i

hope you don't either

but in terms of the simulation

this is really possible now it's

entirely possible

that trump's number one critic

could be susceptible to this

and if it turned out that um

well if it turned out that that happened

i i don't know what i would think about

reality after that it would just be so

mind-bogglingly

looking like a movie script i just

wouldn't know what to think of it here's

another one like that

i saw a

chart of various countries opinions of

china

and if you look at you know the various

countries and what they thought of china

over the years it's you know up and down

but

about

2018 the dislike of china just went

through the roof

so every

every country in the world just had a

big change around 2018

boom

now here's the simulation part of that

okay

and i know i know from experience

that at least a third of you are going

to misinterpret

what i say next

so

i'll just let that happen because i

can't help it i can only say this as

clearly as i can

knowing that a third of you will

permanently misinterpret it goes like

this

in 2018 my stepson died of a of a

fentanyl overdose fentanyl of course

comes from china and they do it

intentionally to hurt the united states

at that time

i declared that china was my mortal

enemy and i was going to take them down

or

certainly try as hard as i could

so exactly the time that i publicly

announced i was going to take down china

and destroy their

reputation first

their reputation just fell off a cliff

and all over the world people were

hating china now i'm not going to say

and here's the part you'll misinterpret

i'm not claiming i did that

a third of the people listening will go

go away and say he just claimed he did

that

i'm just

i'm telling you i'm not claiming that

i'm claiming it as a coincidence

but it's a big one

and

by itself it wouldn't mean anything

right because a lot of people probably

turned a negative on china around the

same time

so if you just looked at it in isolation

wouldn't mean much

but i got to tell you the number of

times in my life

that i've

you know picked a desirable uh global

thing to happen

and then watched it happen just when i

decided it should happen

is really freaking me out a little bit

just a little bit

so the point of the story is not that

i'm changing world events it's that i

don't understand why they change when i

want them to

am i

just good at guessing what will happen

i'm genuinely confused by it because it

happens so regularly you know someday

i'll give you the list of things

that happened just about the time i

started persuading that direction

i feel like

somebody says breaking news

is something breaking right now

tell me in the uh

tell me in the comments if you see

something

um

somebody says hey

you costed i know you did well i don't

make that claim but i will tell you that

i was trying to make exactly this happen

and at the time you would have said it

would be unlikely wouldn't you

if in 2018 when i said publicly as i did

a number of times

that i was i determined that china was

my enemy and i was going to try to take

them down

you probably didn't think much would

change did you

you probably thought

2020 would look a lot like 2018

in terms of china you probably wouldn't

think much would be different

except we're decoupling and

there's a lot different

there's a lot different

but i don't take credit for that all

right

facebook has decided to ban

q anon across all of its platforms

what do you think of that

do you think it's reasonable for

facebook

to ban q anon based on the fact that

they spread i guess this would be their

argument that they spread untruths

that presumably are you know potentially

dangerous untruths

do you think that's reasonable

here's what i think

it might be reasonable

i i could totally see how it would be

reasonable to remove

conspiracy theory bs

from your platform

but

don't you have to be a little consistent

that's my only issue

why can they allow

joe biden

to to base his campaign on an obvious

falsehood

the fine people hoax when you just have

to look at the transcript to know that

it's not true

just look at the transcript it's that

easy now why is it

that the most divisive and dangerous

hoax in the history of america that's my

claim for the fine people oaks the most

dangerous hoax in all of american

history

why is that okay

now

you could say well

you know it's a political claim and

there's lots of political claims and we

can't really fact check all that and

people will just put it in context it's

just a political claim

is it

i would say no

here's here's a political claim

president trump will cut your social

security it's not true

it's the opposite of what he says he'll

do and he's been pretty good about doing

what he says he'll do

and not doing what he says he won't do

he's been pretty good at that so it's

not true

is that okay is it okay to have

something that's clearly not true

that's a political claim i would say

probably that's okay

because

as soon as you get into the business of

determining what's true and not

you it's just a forever rabbit hole you

can't get out of that hole right because

you know there's lots of things that are

gray area

some people could say it's true some

people would say it's not true you could

never really use that standard

of that it's true or not true you'd have

to use the standard

that is not true and on top of that

it's dangerous

i think that's what put q anon over the

top

not that it's untrue

but it's that it's untrue and has

a fairly obvious potential for for

danger

that's what define people hoax is

the fine people hoax isn't just

something that's untrue it's not like

saying i'll raise your taxes it's not

like saying i'll cut your social

security it's not like saying

you know although you can keep your

doctor

yeah it's not like any of those things

those are just untrue

they're not dangerous

the fine people hoax

could get me killed

me personally

i could get killed

because of that hoax and all that it

supports because it supports a whole

structure of beliefs

that you know i think that's the the

strongest pillar and it's not real

so that's the world you live in all

right so i think facebook just needs to

be consistent

i wouldn't mind them banning q anon

uh if they also banned the fine people

hoax

i would say those are equivalents

um

interestingly a fellow named glenn

lowery who's a scholar

he's got together with a bunch of other

scholars

and they're calling for the pulitzer

board to revoke the pulitzer prize

awarded earlier this year

to nicole hannah-jones for her 16-19

project

and they're asking for the pulitzer

prize to be revoked

because the scholarship in that piece of

work

is lacking

meaning that there's a claim in there

that's ridiculously untrue

specifically the claim that the american

revolution was fought in large part to

preserve slavery

apparently there's no

historical evidence that that was the

case

but that's that's part of the learning

and somebody got a

pulitzer surprise for that completely

false claim

uh of course you're all going to watch

the vp

um debates tonight

i think the vp debate is going to be

more interesting

than you think might be more interesting

than you think

um of course the big drama is that

kamala harris is going to ask for a

plexi glass walls and pence is

wants to have no wall

now if it turns out that kamala is in a

plastic glass box

and pence is not

who wins

who wins

does kamala harris win because she's the

one playing it safe and she's got her

little plexiglass cubicle

or does pence win

because he's clearly far enough away

from people to not infect anybody but

he's also not being a little in a

plastic box

who wins

well it might depend you know people

will pick sides with their political

favorite i think pence wins that

in terms of the optics you don't want to

be the bubble girl

all right

if pence is a free-range chicken on that

stage

and kamala harris is a bubble girl

bubble girl does not beat free-range

chicken in optics it's not even close

all right so i don't know if it'll turn

out that way one's in a bubble and one

isn't but bubble girl doesn't have an

advantage

now here's the other stuff

the first thing you need to know about

vice president debates

is that that's a good place to test out

messages

so what you might see is uh you might

see pence

framing one of the issues or more in a

way that you haven't seen before

which would be really interesting

because if you see that it means he's

testing it because that would be a

normal procedure you let the vice

president test it if it doesn't work

you just don't do it yourself

if it becomes a big controversy and it's

a problem

then the president could say well that

was the vice president you know just

listen to me and sort of make it go away

because that's typical too

vice presidents do sometimes say

something that the top of the ticket has

to

has to modify

fairly ordinary i think it's happened in

a lot of different races

so

it's a it's a low risk thing for pence

to try on a new argument so see if he

does that

and here's what's uh interesting and

i've said this a number of times and i'm

just going to keep saying

i think

pence is the most underrated

public servant

in america

the most underrated in terms of how good

he is

because

the job of the vice president is

primarily not to cause trouble right you

don't want to become a problem you just

want to be a steady spare tire and i

think he does that better than just

about anybody's ever done it

i think that he stays out of trouble

like nobody's business

he also can win debates

i believe he was considered the winner

of his tim kaine debate in 2016. he's

good at it he's excellent

in in public

you know he's not going to have a weird

gaffe

you know he's going to be prepared you

know he's going to present well you know

he's not going to have a an emotional

flip out moment you know he's strong

enough to handle whatever is

coming he is really solid

now do you know that about kamala harris

would you say to yourself yeah i know

kamala harris is just as strong as all

those things i said about pence

nope

she could have some moments so she is

capable of moments you know to to

capture the news cycle and that could be

dangerous but she's not in his class

he's he is just

a better debater

and if i were her i'd be a little bit

worried because people are going to look

at the vice presidential debate a little

bit harder than they would normally

because people are looking at kamala as

maybe the top of the ticket

think about

this pence

could

i'm not predicting this because this

would be an unlikely outcome

but he could

he could he could end the election

tonight

that's possible

here's how he'd have to do it he would

just have to expose kamala and just

destroy her and eviscerate her in the

debate

if he does that

suddenly joe biden doesn't look like

such a good package because you've

always thought

all right really it's about the number

two

right if he destroys number two

he destroys number one

that wouldn't be true the reverse if

pence were to lose the debate

what's anybody going to say really

you know are you going to say therefore

i change my vote

nope

you're not going to change your vote

so first of all it's very unlikely he's

going to lose

it'll be a tie

or he'll win

i would say that's a fair estimate but

he might win and this is the thing i

don't think people are counting on

he has the skill

he does have the skill

compared to kamala harris

to eviscerate her

now

probably not i think she'll rise to the

challenge and usually these things look

closely even even if you think somebody

won

but he does have the talent

he has the talent to completely take her

out and then and i don't think the risk

works in the other direction in this

case

so if he exposes her as unusually weak

could change the race we'll see

um

have you noticed let me just do a little

uh recap here on

oh i want to talk about sweden before we

do that

so i was looking at a tweet by uh i

don't know how to pronounce his name

yainan

weiss i think

yennan or yainan

and he showed some graphs

about showing sweden compared to some

other countries uk france and spain

and the the point he was making is that

sweden is doing great in terms of death

rate and infections so very low

and i think trending down

whereas there are at least three

countries he mentioned and the us i

think you threw in there too so uk

france and spain where they're having

you know more infections now his point

was the sweden has essentially stopped

the lockdown they've gone back to

something closer to normal

and he's saying that

sweden is doing great

doing none of the things that the

countries that are doing poorly

feel they need to do like the lockdowns

and the masks and stuff

now i don't first of all i don't think

the sweden story is that clean i think

that the swedes are wearing masks and i

think that they are voluntarily socially

distancing

so it's not really a clean comparison

but

he makes he tries to make this case

and i am not convinced and here's why

number one every every time you see

somebody say i'm gonna compare one

country no matter what country

to these three or four or five countries

you can just forget what they're saying

because nothing they say is useful

if out of all the countries in the world

i don't know 180 whatever there are if

you're going to take six of them

and say i can tell something from these

six that's probably not true

it's probably cherry picking if you

would pick other countries you might get

a different result so first of all

anytime you see a coronavirus graph

with three or five countries

don't believe anything you see on that

graph

that is cherry picked data it might be

true

but you shouldn't assume it's true

because it's non-credible by design just

a few countries so

but here was uh in part of his twitter

thread

he had this little throwaway line he

said and yes

other nordic countries did better than

the swedes

what

wait a minute his point was that sweden

is doing a great job without the

lockdowns and the masks but he compared

it to uk france and sweden but then in

the tweet he throws in this line yes

other nordic countries did better than

the swedes

but that is not proof lockdowns work

because the other nordic countries did

the lockdowns

it may just be proof that the swedes

should have protected their nursing

homes better

maybe

here's my take

in other words the nordic countries

the ones that supplement with vitamin d

all year round because they don't get

enough vitamin d

so apparently in sweden it's typical to

take you know fish oil

on a daily basis to get your vitamin d

is that true in the uk do people in the

uk supplement with vitamin d don't think

so

france

nope spain

don't think so

so

here's what i see

i see that when yainan weiss was trying

to make the case

that the mass and lockdowns don't help

that much because sweden is doing well

that's not the story i saw

i looked at his own tweet thread and

said um

there's more evidence in your own tweet

thread

that the vitamin d levels are the main

or the main thing

because if it's true that it doesn't

matter if you have a mask or a lockdown

or not

you get wildly different results

but that the people who do well all seem

to be the vitamin d supplement people

is that a coincidence

is that a coincidence it could be so the

first thing you should say to yourself

is yes scott

that could be a coincidence

it totally could be a coincidence

but

what i'm saying is that all of the other

correlations or causations that you

imagine you see

don't believe them they're just not

credible is the vitamin d correlation

incredible no

no

not based on the little bit of data that

i just mentioned it's not credible at

all

but

it's not less credible

than the idea that masks and

lockdowns don't work

and then sweden is telling you that

all right

how many of our stories today

uh

stories in the news are based on just

lies

all right let's go through them

so we've got the coronavirus situation

which you know that that's been

filled with lies we've got the uh

russia collusion thing and who's behind

it

that's filled with lies it's all about

lies

we've got the stimulus deal being off

but the stimulus deal was never really

being negotiated it was a lie that it

was ever being negotiated because it

wasn't so that's just a lie um

see what else uh

facebook is banning q anon because those

are lies

uh the pulitzer prize

might get revoked or at least some

scholars are asking for it

because

the

the document that got the pulitzer prize

had a big lie in it

do you see a pattern yet

the pattern is pretty clear

all of our biggest problems

are based on the fact that we don't have

a credible

news

media anymore

as soon as your news source becomes

completely non-credible

then all of your news becomes

it's just all

every one of our problems

is

but the problem is real

but what people are saying about it is

just just not true

all right

um

somebody says that i'm conflicted about

kamala because she's my creation

see you get blocked for saying stuff

like that because that's a mind mind

reading thing

so hold on a second

i have to move something in order to

block you

yeah it's not worth it i'll block you

next time

i'll catch you next time so uh if if

that confuses you the the blocking is

when you uh

when you ascribe opinions to me that are

inaccurate you can ask me my opinion

and you can certainly criticize my

actual opinion but when you assign an

opinion to me that i do not hold and

then criticize it

you get blocked

um

depends somebody's saying pence is more

disciplined than trump i think that's

true that's that's true

he's more disciplined less interesting

all right um that is all i have for now

and i will talk to you

periscopers

tomorrow

and you youtubers

still with you you look at your comments

here as we

close up

um

is anybody enjoying the youtube

experience better so you might have

noticed i took out my

um my air pods that i was using for a

microphone

i i'm not seeing anybody

oh somebody's saying the sound is

echoing okay that's what i was going to

ask so you should hear a little echo let

me give you a little update on the sound

because so many of you have asked for it

now people have said to me scott you

should upgrade your sound system

yes

yes i should

i've got

every kind of sound device you could

possibly think of i've got a whole rack

of iron sound equipment i've got

i've got this

i've got

i've got this

and all this

and here's what i've learned because

i've experimented with all of this stuff

if you do the super end stuff like the

shure microphone and the sound boards

etc you can make that work but only if

you have a soundproof room because this

kind of microphone will pick up too much

room noise and you get way too much

the the preferred um method which i just

bought um i bought another lavalier to

use that the lavalier when it clips on

doesn't give you the full richness

of the the high-end sound system with a

soundproof room but you can use this in

a non-soundproof room without the echo

so on periscope the sound is pretty good

it's not as good as the the best that

could be but it's fine

and

i had to order a second one of these

so that i could use it with youtube so

here's the bottom line the sound will be

different in a few days on youtube

without the echo

um

and i think that will be the best it

could be i have tried

for four years

every possible

sound and video combination and this is

what i've learned

you can't beat the video from an iphone

or an ipad so this is just my iphone

that you're you're watching right now

it's it's the best video uh if you get

any kind of high-end camera

you can get a better video but the

complexity of a high-end camera because

you have to run it through other

equipment and other software

it basically makes it completely

unusable

because you can get it to work

but the very second time you want to you

want it to work some software will need

updating something went off something

time down it just never works twice

so

the iphone or the ipad is the number one

way to get a clean uh video that works

every time but to get the sound

uh like i said i've purchased expensive

sound boards

such as

this one

such as this thing

and you know i've learned to use it i've

hooked it all up i've got ever i've

soundproofed a room you know different

room in the house i've tried every

combination of microphones and the best

kind you know i'm buying some pretty

high-end stuff

and nothing works as well

as a 20

plug-in lavalier microphone on an ipad

nothing comes close

now i could come close

if i had a full-time engineer

and a a room that was designed for sound

and then this high-end equipment and

then the engineer troubleshooting it

every day because you have to

troubleshoot it every time you use it

all right so i just thought i'd give you

that uh update and i will talk to you

tomorrow