Episode 1224 Scott Adams - When to Disagree With the Experts Because That is an Essential Skill

you're right on time well at least some of you are the rest of you i call you laggards laggards yeah it's time to up your game and be here exactly at 7am california time 10 a.m eastern time for the best part of your day it's called coffee with scott adams and the simultaneous zip it's amazing have you experienced it yet well if it's your first day hold on to your hat it's that good oh it might sneak up on you but it's that good and all you need to enjoy it is a copper bugger glass attacker jealous or stein a canteen jugger flask a vessel of any kind fill it with your favorite liquid i like coffee and join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine hit of the day the thing that makes everything better including the moderna vaccine go well speaking of the modern uh vaccine i guess that got approved so we got a second vaccine um and the interesting thing is how do you decide which one to take because i'm starting to hear reports of you know the modern one might have some advantages over the other one what would you do if your health care provider offered you let's say the the other one but you wanted the moderna one what would you do would you wait if the only one you could get is the other one because maybe you're in a your hmo or something just as one of them i don't know it's going to be it's going to be an interesting question my advice to all of you will be the same this is what i'm i'm going to do in terms of my decision of what vaccination to take or not i'm going to wait till the last minute and you should too you don't need to make a decision until somebody says you can come in and get it until somebody says that you personally can go get a vaccination don't decide don't decide because there might be extra information by then so if you decide now before you have to why would you do that wait until the last minute you could be quite sure you're going to take it or quite sure you're not but don't decide yet wait until the last minute that's the smartest place place to make the decision here's the most controversial story that i have completely changed my opinion on you saw the story about the ethicist who i guess in new york times had his article and the ethicist claimed that it might be better for society if before older people get to the vaccination that the frontline health care workers get taken care of and part of his argument which made the headlines was that he thought that old people shouldn't get the vaccination first because they're mostly white and that frontline healthcare workers are more diverse and so if you favored the front line workers you would get a more diverse and more fair distribution and the way that was reported is a racist oh it's quite racist really really racist is it yes so let me agree with the first part of the criticism unambiguously it's totally racist it's unambiguously overtly plainly transparently racist but here's the part you're not gonna like you're ready but no matter what you do it's racist sorry sorry no matter what you do it's racist there isn't the non-racist option if we had a non-racist option i would say my god why are we even obtaining this idea from this clearly racist proposal but that's not our situation it's not and we can't get to a situation where there would be any kind of a non-racist uh you know non-racist uh process here's why no matter what rules you pick no matter what group you say even if you don't use race if you just say well we'll do people over a certain age well mostly white right it wasn't your intention but it would just turn out that way so things are racist by outcome no matter what your intention was right so would you agree with the first point that the outcome has a racial element to it even if nobody was thinking in those terms even if even if racism was nothing to do with the decision you'd all agree that there's always an outcome that favors one group or not no matter what you do you can't avoid that so let's talk about intention because if the outcome is going to be racist no matter what you can't get rid of the racism part so why would you worry about the thing you can't change right that just can't be changed but you can question motive that's always fair you can question intention if i thought that someone uh had suggested in public that white people should not get the violent not get the vaccination you know in an early way even if they're old um you know what's your first impression of that sounds pretty bad right but let me ask you this so suppose somebody came to me all right let's personalize this take it out of the the realm of public policy take it down to you personally somebody comes to you and they say uh scott you're over 60.

you know i'm 63 and i'm in a you know i've got a little asthma so i've got some comorbidities i'm not old old but i'm you know the beginning of the the older category and suppose they said to me um i'd like you to make the decision scott it's up to you we know that uh let's say older black people have much worse outcomes would you mind socially distancing a little bit longer and we're going to focus on black citizens not because they're black but because we know they have worse outcomes so if you're looking at the greater good you want to give the vaccination to whoever gets the best outcome right it just happens that they're black that's not anybody's choice it's nobody's intention it's just a biological reality so if somebody said to me scott would you personally and you're not making a decision for anybody else right it's just you personally it's not a public policy it doesn't apply to anybody else it's just you would you personally socially distance a little bit longer and take a little more risk for the benefit of black citizens in the united states who are at greater risk what would i say i'd say yes i'd say yes if somebody asked me that question directly and said look it's up to you i'm we're not there's no penalty you will not be punished you won't be punished it's just up to you it's your own conscience your own risks your own risk reward calculation you can be selfish if you want it's up to you if you want to get it first we'll put you right in the front of the line and nobody will ever give you a hard time for it it's up to you i think i'd still wait i think it's the weight because that's actually a pretty fair proposition if they can identify people for whatever reason you know be they black or have a comorbidity or be they a certain age or be they health care workers on the front line if you can make a strong case that this person is in a high risk group and i'm in a slightly less high-risk group yeah i'm okay with that absolutely because you know it's a war right it's a war and sometimes you've got to be the one that does the dangerous stuff so that somebody else doesn't have to do it sometimes you've got to you know brave the bullets to pull back your wounded comrade off the field right so we're in a situation where personal sacrifice should be a pretty big part of the equation if you're not thinking of it that way then you're not in a let's say a military mindset and maybe we should be we're we're in a war against a virus maybe let's let's act more like soldiers right so somebody says white guilt am i suffering from white guilt because i would say the same thing no matter who the risk category was so would you would you criticize me if i said i think people over 80 should get the uh should get the vaccination before may would you criticize me for that if i said that frontline healthcare workers should get it before me would you would you criticize me for that if i said that people who what's the worst co-morbidity maybe it's diabetes let's say diabetes is i don't know if that's true but let's say it's the worst one if i said that everybody with diabetes should get the shot before i do would you criticize me for that why would you criticize me if i say no there's an obvious category black citizens in this country clearly have far worse outcomes why is that different than diabetes why is that different than being 80 years old all right so there's your provocative thought of the day i didn't think you'd like it but i feel it's worth mulling on and i would say that the story about the ethicist and his opinion was presented a little bit out of context so when i first heard it it just sounded straight up racist and that was my first impression but when you hear the actual argument and you understand that there is no non-racist outcome you can't get there it's not a possibility it's only who gets who gets the advantage and if you decide that it's going to be a little racist but you're going to do it based on the greatest risk that's about as good as you can do it's about as good as you can do now if you told me that every black person would get the vaccination before every white person that doesn't make sense but if you're talking equal to equal let's say a black guy who's 63 years old and has a little asthma i would i would put him in front of me in line because it's a war if this were a competition and i were competing against my fellow citizen yeah i'd push him off the cliff right if i treated this as a competition i'm gonna get mine and i'm gonna make sure you don't get mine before i get mine but it's not it's a war so if i were competing against black people sure i'll do what i have to do to compete but they're on the same team so i'm going to treat it like like a military operation all right there's a new site that's sorting the news in a useful way i think a lot of testing on how to get our news better you know better platforms or better ways to present the news so it's less biased would be good for testing so i'm not going to say that this particular one and its url is tidyreport.com tidytidyreport.com what they do is they organize the tweets which of course usually connect to the news directly so they organize the i think it's mostly the political tweets by positive neutral and negative so in other words whether the tweet is saying something positive or negative about the topic or neutral and whether the person saying it is associated with the left or the right i'm not sure exactly how they figure that out but they're probably close so it's called tidyreport.com i neither recommend it nor disrecommend it the important part of the story is that people are starting to a b test different ways to present the news to get past this immense bias situation so check it out maybe maybe that's one of the ones pompeo uh so mike pompeo says that uh we're that the russians are quote pretty clearly behind the cyber attack what does pretty clearly mean does pretty clearly mean we're sure of it is that the same is pretty clearly i don't know if that means they're they're positive it's an interesting choice of words but it's somewhere in that neighborhood of high high confidence or high likelihood and some experts are saying what what i think is unfortunately obvious that the only way you would be able to get rid of whatever access russia has had for apparently a long time the only way you'd be able to get rid of it is to replace all of your software all of it because the the apple the the allegation which is probably pretty reasonable is that once they had god access to all of the systems they could embed you know viruses in different places to be activated under different situations or open up different doors etc so it wouldn't matter how how good you were at finding a problem because they would just open up a new door as quickly as you found it so you pretty much have to get rid of all of it i wonder if we have the technology to do that let me give you uh let me flush this out a little bit flush it out or flush it down a little bit i always get those confused flesh it out you flesh it out right that's that's the saying so the idea is this could you write a software application that's main purpose is to remove all the software in a company and replace it with the clean version of the same software so in other words could you write some kind of a master god program that would take every piece of software at ibm delete it and i don't know how hard you have to delete it maybe there's like you have to extra delete bleach it or something just get rid of all of it and reload the same fresh you know things so you keep your databases so none of your data would be directly affected so i don't think there's a problem with data i guess i'm not that technical that i can answer that question would we have any issue with a just a raw database i don't know if that can hold a virus but if you get ever get rid of everything just wipe everything that has any software element to it in your system could you write one giant program that just rolled through a fortune 500 company took it down for an hour it is just done for an hour but an hour later is reloaded all of its software rebooted in the right order and and brought everything back up could you do it is it is that a thing yeah let me give you um a little bit of history do you remember when the year 2000 bug was coming when the year 2000 bug was coming all the experts experts said we don't have enough time we're in real trouble because the companies are not taking it seriously and that date is coming when year 2000 bug will hit and all computers that were you know designed before a certain date can't handle the year 2000 as a date and they'll all crash and the world will will end and as that was approaching and we were getting cl we were actually in the year 2000 and we're getting you know or no we're getting close to the year 2000.

yeah because closer and closer and closer i was saying in public we're fine we'll be fine now here's the reason that all the experts said no it can't be done it's too much work you know if everybody worked on it full time you just couldn't get it done we're doomed and i said exactly the opposite i said no we'll be fine what happened what happened is we were fine now why is that well exactly what i predicted that it would take a long time to do it manually but it wouldn't take a long time to figure out how not to do it manually in other words it wouldn't take that long to write programs that would do what the humans would have to do that would take a long time and what happened people wrote programs that looked for these bugs and corrected them and then they ran the programs the bugs were corrected the year 2000 came bam we're fine so until you could imagine that it was possible to write software that would fix you know universally go out there and find and fix all the bugs that you didn't even know where they were uh you thought you were doomed i think we might find a similar maybe an industry could be a whole industry pops up maybe a consulting industry with some kind of technical background and i would guess that we will probably birth an industry because of this because of the hacks that go in and shut down your whole network and wipe it and then reload it and you know they control the process so nothing gets out of control and and they just go rescue one company at a time i feel like that's going to be in the industry really soon and should be and i think that'll be the only answer because the we should assume that people will get so far into our systems again that we'll just be right back in this situation right so even if we found every bug and got rid of it it would just reproduce i mean you know even if we got them all which is impossible probably but even if we did they would just hack back in and you know we'd you know they'd find another way in so you need some way to wipe all of your software every now and then every bit of it and that i think that'll become an industry um here's the funniest thing that's happened uh lately if you don't follow this twitter account you really should it's a parody account uh and the name on the account is uh titania mcgrath and there's a little photo of a youngish blonde woman with sort of glasses like mine and what's brilliant about it besides the fact that it's brilliantly written is that it's a parody account that is so close to reality people are often fooled which is part of the joke so a lot of people who see this account for the first time really can't tell and and something happened that uh a thread that uh to titania or whoever runs the account tweeted that just is amazing and here's why i've been telling you for a while that parody and reality have merged such that there's not really that much difference between a wild parody and what you're actually observing you want to see an example of that titania in her thread gives you several examples of predictions that she or whoever runs the account made that were pure parity that have already happened in other words the parody came before the reality but listen to this list it's freaking mind-blowing all right you ready so these are the claims in titania's thread um she said on december 2018 i calls for biological sex to be removed from birth certificates now that was parody we're gonna take your biological sex off of your uh birth certificate said that in 2018 in 2020 the new england journal of medicine concurred so the new england journal of medicine is now recommending in 2020 what titania said as purely a joke in 2018.

purely a joke is that the only one well i mean if this had only happened once if it only happened once you'd say oh that's a funny coincidence right if it only happened once so uh on and also in 2018 titania criticized julie andrews who played mary poppins in the movie for having chimney soot on her face because you know that was in the middle of the blackface stuff so as purely a joke she tweeted that and criticized julie andrews for having chimney smoke on her face in the movie that was in 2018.

in 2019 the new york times concurred so the new york times basically took on julie andrews for having so on her face and blackface it was literally a joke two years before it became real is that the only ones oh no i'm not even close to being done so the thing that's funny is not the individual examples because they're they're sort of trivial what's funny is how often it happened it's the often part that makes the makes the joke all right here's another one uh march 2019 titania published a book called woke in which i argue that sky skyscrapers are oppressive phallic symbols in july 2020 the guardian concurred so in 2019 literally joking the sky creep skyscrapers are you know some oppressive phallic symbols and then the guardian writes a serious article one year later saying exactly that uh in that same book in 2019 here's here's the like the finisher uh she go in 2019 in her book also the same book woke i called for i called out helen keller for her white privilege time magazine just did that in reality now this is just a sample the the actual thread is longer i just picked out some of the fun ones but when you see how many times parody in reality overlapped it's it changes you i mean this is this is one of those things where you know i've i've predicted this i predicted it often and in public that parity and reality were on the way to merging and then to watch it in real time it actually merged did that sound like a real prediction when i said it the first time you heard me say parody and reality are merging that didn't sound exactly technically real right it sounded more like humorous hyperbole no i meant it and it happened so there you go all right speaking of predictions one of my other predictions is that history would get complicated because we would no longer have one of them we would have more than one history and then if you went to school it might be a problem because you're trying to learn history and there are two of them and they're different which one do you believe did you think that that was going to happen my prediction that there would be two histories well here we are president trump he unveiled his choices for the president's advisory 1776 commission so this will be a commission to make recommendations about how to push against the 1619 project that is already in schools so the president has literally created a commission to create an alternate history to compete with the history that's already being taught in the schools two histories literally being taught in schools now when i said to you we get a problem here because we have two histories like we've never had before did that sound real to you the first time you heard that's like no we'll we'll still agree on one history nope literally we're teaching two histories if if this commission goes forward i don't know how much time they have before biden scraps it so i don't i can't imagine they get much done but there you are two histories all right um the most interesting claim about election fraud that i've seen comes from kane koa the great uh it's a twitter account so uh i think maybe kanakoa k a n e k o a the great al all one word kind of coed the great a good follow he's got lots of stuff i don't know who he is but he's got lots of good content so he made a twitter thread which i'll talk about uh but before i talk about it do you remember the the golden rule of all election fraud claims the golden rule well it's not golden but it's a rule 95 of all the election claims you hear are fake or not real or mistaken or out of context or something but i also believe there's a hundred percent chance the election was stolen because it was easy and people had the motive to do it so of course it's still it's always stolen under those conditions but any specific claim you hear probably bs now i'm going to give you a specific claim after telling you that every specific claim is probably bs i will i'm going to apply the same standard to this one now this one sounds really good okay so i'm going to give you an argument here that on paper you know on paper it's really really strong but is it true i don't know i would just apply my standard to it 95 chances not but here it is so there is a uh a working professional statistician somebody who is very capable and experienced and in the in the sweet spot of his career so somebody who really really really understands statistics so this is the source and there's a video from the statistician explaining what he did so the first thing you need to know is that the person making the claim is very qualified right now that doesn't mean it's true right because we'll talk about experts and when you should trust them but just know that he's very qualified and what he did was he was just sort of messing around with a lot of the data you know he explained it as almost a hobby something that the statisticians liked it was like oh i wonder if there's a correlation between this thing and that thing and he discovered somewhat just by poking around a correlation that almost is impossible to be natural meaning it's a signal for fraud with something like a greater than 99 chance that it is really fraud and not some fake signal now does that mean it's true no remember we're only dealing with claims that you and i can't check i don't have the skill to check it i don't know where the data was i can't really check it so no matter how credible this sounds just keep this little tape playing in the back of your head no matter how credible it sounds there's a 95 percent chance it's not real okay just keep that playing in the back of your head here's what he found if you took the 3 000 u.s counties i always wondered how many counties there were which is weird i was wondering that exact question there are over 3 000 counties now counties have a lot in common right there could be a lot of diversity within a county but you can make some claims about their consistency over time and the statistician started out by predicting predicting who would win each county based on a number of demographic variables so he would say how many democrats are in the county what's their age a bunch of stuff and he found that he could predict with 90 percent accuracy who the county would go for based on their demographics and you could apply it retrospectively to other elections and i guess it works so it's about 90 good and knowing in advance who would win and then he looked at who actually won and he found eventually he poked around and found this strange data oddity that there were lots of uh there are lots of counties that did better than his model would predict and there were lots of counties that did worse than his model would predict and that's quite natural so if you've got 3 000 data points they're they're going to be spread around but his point was you could draw a line through the middle and that would be his prediction and and the the differences would just be sort of equally on both sides of the line so if there was if he was off it was just as likely he was off you know in one way versus the other so it'd be just as much below the lines above the line and then he found that in those counties that used dominion voting systems and one other kind i think heart heart or something there was another company hart h-a-r-t so there i guess there are maybe six or so different machines and different counties and different ways to account but in those counties they had dominion or heart systems they were consistently over five percent more votes than would be expected for a biden now here's the interesting part the correlation holds in trump counties so counties that trump won biden did five percent better in counties that you knew that biden was going to win because they always go democrat also a little bit more than five percent better so the amount that the uh dominion and heart machine counting counties were off was um was consistent meaning that there was a gigantic difference let me see if i can say this simply because i'm watching this if you looked at what you expected these counties to do based on their demographics and past behavior etc the ones that had dominion and heart machines were uh way way i think 73 percent of them had a biden advantage that was very similar now the odds of only those two machines having 73 percent of the oddities going in the same direction but in the other counties those oddities went in both directions equally but only where you had the dominion or heart machines you didn't have an even distribution it's the only time and it's very consistent and according to the statistician not according to me that the odds of any of that being anything but fraud are vanishing vanishingly small you know you could say it might be something else in the you know in the extreme you know it was alien invasion or something but not really not really now this is very different from the quadrillions argument the quadrillions argument was debunked right so the quadrillion argument is that um if there's let's say a belt a bellwether place that always went to republicans and this is the only time it didn't you know that that's a signal and then there's this other signal and this other signal that is not good analysis because all it would take is one big effect that could affect all of those things right so that's not a guaranteed signal of fraud but this is really specific because it you can trace it all the way down to this specific vendor and if you can trace the difference down to specific vendors that's a really stronger case i think now i don't know if uh andreas beckhaus is watching this uh video but if you are uh uh that he'd be the best debunker of things that i say so debunk me on twitter if i've uh missed any anything obvious so i took this and uh i sent the link to my democrat friend that i always mentioned that my anti-trump democrat friend who has the qualities of being very smart and well informed and yet appears to act crazy he's completely rational in fact one of the most rational people i know in all other domains he's just like this really rational guy it practically defines who he is he's so rational and i sent him this the uh sent him the statistical analysis and as luck would have it he's also good at statistics so one of his talent stacks is statistics so i send him a statistical argument to a guy who really knows statistics now it's not the same harris it's a personal friend nobody you know and and here's why i did it my friend says and has been saying that there's no evidence that there is anything fraudulent so that that's his view no evidence so i sent him this evidence but here but the evidence has a special quality to it that no matter how much you know about statistics you can't really just look at it and know if it's right right you you can't tell so this expert is making an argument that unless you probably unless you really dug into his work you can't tell if it's real so i did this intentionally not as uh here i've proven my case because i don't think anything like that's happened remember 95 of all evidence is fake this is no different so i didn't think it was a kill shot but the reason i showed it to him is because i knew he wouldn't know it wasn't and he wouldn't know if it was because it can't be known it's just too hard to know it based on what we have available to us and i wondered if he would reject it or would he say okay this does not prove fraud and i would agree with that but it certainly tells us we should look into it so that's what i was looking for i was looking for a rational response that says you know scott i know a lot about statistics too but i don't have access to all the data he has if he did this analysis right it would be very meaningful and it does look like he's capable capable of doing the analysis if it's right this is something that would be important and should be looked into so that's what a reasonable person would say right do you think he said that nope perfectly reasonable to say it didn't prove anything and i agree here's what he said you can find any correlation in lots of data now this is what i would call the bible code theory the bible code is a debunked it was a an idea that if you looked in the bible and you did various schemes to find secret messages you would find all these messages such as i'll just pick one this is random not a real one if you took the second letter of the first sentence but you took the third letter of the next sentence and then the fourth letter to the next sentence so there's all these little algorithms that would run against the bible and it would spit out things that you didn't think could possibly be you know uh natural so it'd be like little predictions and you'd say yes look it's like a full sentence prediction and it actually happened so there was a time when people thought the bible had these secret codes that was debunked by some scientists who took their same algorithms and ran it against any big book like war and peace turns out war and peace is full of secret messages and predictions that actually came true because it turns out that if you've got something as complicated as a big book filled with letters you can find some algorithm that will produce full sentences just by trial and error and they will look like predictions that happened so it can work with any book it's obviously not the bible code so his argument was that this statistician had basically fallen for the bible code error does that sound like a good response to here's a video by a hugely qualified statistician are there any hugely qualified statisticians who don't know about the bible code there are none there are none that's not a thing there's no such thing as a professional a professional statistician who's never heard of this problem with the bible code that's not a thing obviously the statistician was aware that that's you know one of the risks that you have to guard against so i feel as if this is a pretty clean example of cognitive dissonance the reasonable reaction would have been i can't evaluate this but if it's right it's meaningful right is that not the only reasonable response to something you can't analyze but looks important and an expert did it all right so uh or the other the other thing my democrat friend said as a response is that the courts have rejected all of the evidence that was presented it's just mind-boggling so my my democrat friend because the the news is so fake he believes that courts have looked at evidence of fraud that never happened he actually thinks that happened it didn't happen apparently he was unaware that the cases are being thrown out for technicalities without actually looking at the claims you know it's about standing and doctrinal latches and you know whether or not you can bring the case and who's got you know you know who's got jurisdiction it's all that stuff but as far as i know the the claims per se have not been judged in any court of law i haven't i don't know that the witnesses who make direct claims of observing fraud have they had their day in court no right so here's a well-informed really well-informed guy but his information comes from the left and actually thinks an alternate history of the united states is happening right now he believes there's an alternate history happening in parallel with the one you're experiencing in which those claims are being debunked by courts nothing like that's happened nothing even close to that has happened they've never even looked at it beyond that would it make any difference that other claims were debunked does it matter how many people are found innocent of a crime let's say this let's say three people were accused of a crime and you found out they didn't do it does that tell you the the fourth person who is accused of an unrelated crime does that tell you the fourth person didn't do it it doesn't really work that way right anyway trump signed some legislation that would kick chinese companies off of the u.s stock exchanges unless those companies allow financial audits that are required for you know american companies that are on those exchanges to which i say why did this take so long are you telling me that there are chinese companies on american exchanges who simply decide not to abide by the very very very important rules of transparency that all american companies abide by or else they get penalized greatly are you telling me that china can just be on our stock exchange and ignore all the rules that were required the important ones not even the trivia ones like the most important one is you've got to have some transparency that's that's like right at the top that's not a detail right and so trump signs this legislation that will kick them off if they don't allow these audits and i'm thinking why did that take so long you know and do you think this would have happened under biden do you because i feel like probably it wouldn't um it's going to be fun watching trump try to get things done you know between now and inauguration day we'll see how much trouble he can cause all right let me teach you when to disagree with the experts because of course we all do it but there's a good way to do it and a bad way to do it and this will be your important lesson of the day you ready okay here's what you should not do do not disagree with experts and then cite as your reason for disagreeing with the experts a fact which all the experts know okay i just gave you an example that all the experts in statistics know about the bible code so stating that as the reason for your argument doesn't make any sense because the expert knows that right here's some more examples of that um i've heard the argument that co2 can't be causing a climate crisis because co2 used to be much higher in the in the past you've heard this argument right people say climate change isn't real because co2 used to be way way higher in the past and there were there was no civilization back then if there were no humans and co2 was way higher in the past and things seem to be fine so it's all hoax right here's the problem with that every climate scientist knows co2 was higher in the past do you see where i'm going all the experts who say climate change is a problem they know what you know that co2 was much higher in the past that's not a reason to argue against them what that proves is you don't know why they have you don't understand their argument basically now um i believe that i read once that co2 was higher in the in sort of the distant history of the the earth but it was the same time that i believed the sun was less strong so there was some countering force that is easy to to demonstrate and well known so in general if you're disagreeing with experts but you're using as your basis for disagreement a fact that every one of those experts knows you're almost certainly not making a good argument you could be right because experts sometimes are wrong and you don't know why so you can be right by accident but you should check yourself and say wait a minute my argument is based on one fact that the other people already know there's got to be some other argument or that's nothing all right look at me here's another example when i predicted that trump would win in 2016 i i was going against all the experts and all the pollsters was that smart was it smart for me to disagree with the experts when i was using their same data because they knew what the polls were we're all looking at the same data right so i should not have disagreed with the experts wouldn't you say if all i were using was the same data they were using because they would know more than i do plus they know the same data i know except here's what's different i was not using their same data i was using my expertise which is different from theirs my expertise was persuasion and as a trained persuader and other trained persuaders saw at the same time i did they said this isn't like the past we've never had this skill set running for president and you guys don't see it coming but i'm kind of an expert in this persuasion stuff and i do see it coming just like a train like i can see it i can see it coming right so if you disagree with the experts because you're bringing knowledge that they don't have or expertise that they don't have that might be a reasonable disagreement again doesn't mean you're right and they're wrong could go either way but at least you'd be reasonable that would be a reasonable way to disagree with an expert because you're bringing something new that they don't have but if you're only bringing the stuff they already know i think i'd lean toward the experts not you in that case i had one other expertise in the case of calling trump's 2016 victory which is that i know a lot about my white males as a white male of a certain age i kind of have a little more insight into white males of a certain age and i know what they're willing to say out loud in public and i know what they privately think it's a little bit different so i'm not sure that all the experts had maybe the same you know experience with this group of people who ended up being influential in the final final outcome so whenever you think you have some extra insight or expertise or data then maybe disagreeing with an expert makes some sense here's another one i've disagreed with climate change experts about their uh projections of how bad things will be in 50 to 80 years does that make sense i'm not a climate change expert right so if i'm disagreeing with the experts aren't i being irrational because there's no fact that i know about climate change and this is true there's no fact i know about climate change that they don't know so they know all the facts that i have plus lots more would it be reasonable for me to disagree with them when they know everything i know plus the scientific method has backed them up they say plus the majority of experts are on the same side plus they know way more than i do is that reasonable for me to disagree in that case well if that's all the variables that were involved the answer is no if there were no other variables it wouldn't really be reasonable for me to disagree i don't have anything to add to it but when you're predicting what's going to happen financially you're now in my ballpark because i worked as a person who made financial predictions for big corporations did it for years and i have expertise in it so when i'm criticizing climate change the part i don't criticize is the science park the science part is that if you add co2 to the atmosphere no matter how it gets there human or other no matter how it gets there all things be equal would that warm up the earth probably i'm not disagreeing with experts because i don't have any extra data what extra data do i have what extra science do i have none so when they make a claim that co2 should warm the atmosphere all things be equal i say i don't have anything to add to that i'm not going to doubt it and i'm not going to confirm it i'm just going to say well you're experts you know i don't know but when you get to the second part which is they make a financial not a not a scientific but a financial estimate of what it's going to do with the world economy you're in my expertise so if i criticize you from my expertise and you're a scientist you should listen to me literally if a scientist tells you to believe a financial estimate or a financial prediction and a financial expert who makes these predictions or has for a living says no who are you going to believe the person who knows the most about financial predictions or a scientist because scientists are not financial predictors so when i disagree with climate change i'm not disagreeing with scientists on science i'm disagreeing with scientists on my expertise not theirs my expertise i have another expertise too which is again persuasion and so i have a theory of why maybe scientists could be you know fooled or biased or subject to confirmation bias at least on the financial part financial predictions and it is you know everything that you already know which is that there's a group think and there would be a penalty for going against the green so if you're going to disagree with the experts at least have a theory of why they're wrong so sometimes i have a theory that um there are just too many penalties for them to say you're going against the grain you know so it's cognitive dissonance or confirmation bias or that i have extra facts or extra information all right here's another example of the same thing i see this argument all the time about wearing masks and it goes like this this was tweeted at me today the problem with this uh i'm sorry it was tweeted at me today that um we know masks can't work because the the tiny holes in the mask are way bigger than the even tinier virus now most of you have probably made this argument right how many of you have made this argument scott scott scott the scientists have looked they've seen that the masks have these big holes on them when you go microscopic and and the hole is this big the virus is the size of a p you know let's say relatively speaking the virus is the size of a p the holes the tiny holes in the mask would be the size of let's say a basketball hoop how does a basketball hoop stop something that's the size of a p right have you made that argument yourself raise your hand if you've ever made that argument if you did you're just you would know you're disagreeing with the majority of experts who say the masks work now here's my test do you think that the do you think that the experts who say masks don't work who say that masks do work do you think they're unaware of your pee going through a basketball hoop brilliant analogy because if they're aware of that fact then you're adding nothing to it it's a fact they know it's a fact you know that the size of the holes in the masks are so big and the virus itself is smaller do you think they don't know that the experts i'm pretty sure all of the experts know that but they know everything you know which is let's say that fact and more all right so they know everything you know they know that big hole and little virus exists but the other thing they know is that it's been tested in a variety of real real world um situations and in the real world the evidence is very strong that mask work so they're aware that when you test it in a laboratory you can you can come up with a very good reason why maybe you wouldn't but it might have to do with the water droplets being bigger than the virus itself so maybe they don't get through the the basketball hoop could be that it changes the direction or the viral load we don't know why don't know why but the point is if the experts know everything you know about the size of that virus there's something you don't know and that's what you should take away from it you shouldn't take away from it that the the experts are lying if they know more than you do now how often have i uh disagreed with the experts and let me let me see if i'm consistent with my own rules of knowing when to agree or disagree with experts when the question came up of closing travel from china the virology experts said in the very early days no you don't need to do that and i disagreed with vehement cursing public statements that we should close the travel from china immediately now who was right well i was right i think history shows that i was right that we should have closed china travel as early as i said which was well before trump did it which i think was a week later and but was i so even though i was right let's examine if i was right for the right reason okay so what was it that i added to this to the experts if the expert says say it's not a risk why should i say it you know what do i know that the experts don't know and here's what i do know risk management are scientists experts in risk management because if you study the economics and if you have an mba and a lot of experience in business as i do i would consider myself not like a world expert in risk management but certainly it's my expertise so understanding risk and making decisions in the context of risk management is what you learn when you get an mba it's what you learn in business i'm good at it so when i looked at this situation i didn't say i'm smarter than epidemiologists i said i don't think they understand risk management because they're there the risk is catastrophic and here we are right we knew the risk was catastrophic we knew that it would be expensive to close travel but it would be better than catastrophic so from a risk management perspective it was kind of a no-brainer that anybody who understood my expertise risk management would have found that an easy decision and in fact who was it who famously you know followed on pretty quickly was trump would you say that trump is also uh an epidemiologist no is he an expert on risk management yes yes that's exactly what he is in in the same way that i am if you're experienced with business you are somebody who's been making risk management decisions for decades yeah trump is very very experienced at risk management so if you're disagreeing with the experts because you bring a different expertise that can be valid doesn't mean you're right but it could be a valid disagreement when the experts were first saying that masks don't work before they said they do i called that a lie on day one now did i call it a lie because of my expertise and virology and the physics of masks no i brought a different expertise to that and that different expertise is that as the creator of dilbert and somebody who's worked in business for a long time i know how big organizations work and i know that big organizations will routinely lie to manage behavior and it occurred to me that since we were talking about a shortage of masks at the same time we were talking the experts were saying nah you don't need a mask but maybe the healthcare workers do need them no you don't need them save them for the healthcare workers it won't make any difference it seemed very likely to me that they were making the decision to manage the shortage and it was not an actual scientific statement so in this case my expertise in bureaucracies and how they lie to manage resources i applied to this situation and with no understanding of epidemiology or the size of the physics of the masks i correctly predicted that they were lying and that was the truth how about what i said early on in the pandemic and i was saying that we should at least do a major test and really really quickly on hydroxychloroquine because if it worked as claimed it would be huge if it didn't work well it's not much risk it's pretty low risk compared to the pandemic now my current thinking is hydroxychloroquine almost certainly at this point we could say wasn't the game changer i don't know if it works a little but it certainly isn't working so well that everybody's adopting it we would know that by now in my opinion but was i right or wrong in saying we should go hard at hydroxychloroquine in the in the environment of not knowing whether it worked or not i was 100 right as was trump not right that it works but right that there's enough evidence that works that we should go hard at it and know for sure because we tested it rigorously that we should just go at it as hard as possible and at least eliminate it as a possibility at least eliminate it so i think i was right on that as well all right so swalwell it turns out the the information is that there's some confirmation that he did actually have a sexual fling with the chinese spy um fang so here's my take we know that swalwell pushed the russia collusion hoax harder than anybody except adam schiff and we know that it was a hoax and we know that that was very bad for the country and so what swalwell did was unambiguously very bad for the country but it could have also been just a mistake right and i think that you have to allow that your people that you elect in congress are going to make some mistakes so i don't know that you would necessarily fire somebody for pushing the fine people i'm sorry for pushing the russia collusion hoax because maybe he believed it right maybe he was just wrong that's not the worst thing in the world and if democrats said well we like him in general and even though he pushed this hoax or maybe they believe the hoax i don't know so maybe that's not enough to lose your job you could argue it is but maybe not for the at least his voters and then there's a question of having a fling with a chinese spy let's say he didn't know it that's the reporting right the reporting is he didn't know she was a chinese spy should you lose your job if you had a relationship with somebody that you didn't know was a spy and the moment you found out you cut contact i don't think so i don't think you should lose your job for being fooled by a spy if especially if there's no damage that you can identify so you got two things that are sort of really close to something you should get fired for but individually i don't know now suppose you added them together he did two bad things he didn't do one bad thing he did two bad things is that enough to fire him well i don't know i so i suppose that would be subjective but here's the thing those two things he did wrong are not unrelated meaning that a chinese spy you would expect to want you to put pressure on russia and away from china now we don't know if that's why swallowell did what he did we don't know if swallow was motivated persuaded or brainwashed in any way to push the russia collusion hoax all we know is that we watched it and if these two facts are true that you saw uh swalwell going balls to the wall to do something that a chinese spy would certainly want him to do which has put all the pressure on on russia and you know hurt the integrity of our elections and question everything et cetera he did exactly what a spy would want him to do a chinese spy now that doesn't mean he did it because of that but we don't know that's grounds for removal the fact that we don't know if the only reason he damaged the country so badly is because he was influenced by a chinese spy it doesn't matter if you can prove there was a connection between those stories the fact that what he did was so perfectly exactly what a spy would want him to do that's enough even if he's completely innocent you can't have that person in public office and i feel that that could be you know unfair to him now i've told you before i've i've met uh eric swalwell a few times because he knows some people i know and in local you know local parties and stuff so he's been around a little bit and so i i don't have bad feelings about him as a human being and i don't like people who lose their jobs over politics and stuff like this but this is sort of a no-brainer this isn't one of those situations where you can put the the well-being of eric swalwell over the well-being of the credibility of the republic he's just less important than the republic and i think he's got to go i don't think i and and by the way i'm positive i would say this if he were republican i don't know if you would you know your your mileage might vary but i'm positive i would have the same opinion no matter his politics so i said provocatively that although i oppose all violence and i do that if conservatives don't start planning now to control the streets they'll never win another election there's no point in having an election because for all practical purposes whoever controls violence in the country runs the country let me say that again because it's one of those things it takes you a while to like connect the dots whoever controls violence meaning you can get away with it is the government effectively right even if they're not the government in name whoever can control violence is in charge there's no exception to that that's not like a a bias or a hey there's a correlation is is it's a definition whoever controls violence in the country runs the country every time no exception all right and we watched that the um you know antifa and black lives matter and democrats they controlled violence in the streets and there's good reason to believe that that affected the supreme court to want to stay out of the election because they didn't want more violence so under this situation where violence appears to be our political system now if you want to not have that be your government you know street violence the only response to that since the police appear apparently are have been neutered you know politically neutered the police aren't going to help you and it looks like we're not going to employ the army and because that would have its own problems the only way that this gets fixed that i can think of is that the number of conservatives who show up is way more than the number of other people who might have violence on their mind now don't bring guns don't bring knives or bombs like i'm not suggesting that anybody bring weapons of death to any kind of uh an event but if antifa were outnumbered five to one in in the street where they were trying to make trouble five to one would probably make a lot of these things go away so uh i would say that uh if i if if conservatives don't actually literally organize and have names of people who have signed up to literally go onto the street the moment it's needed and you don't have you know five times as many of them there's no point in having an election there really isn't because and the proud boys have up everything let me say this i don't have a problem with uh the proud boys stated philosophy i know they're accused of things which is not within their stated philosophy they're accused of being racist or whatever but that's not part of their their deal i don't know if any of them are racist they're probably racist everywhere but the proud boys unfortunately they brought their their brand into the mix and while i believe that they were well-intentioned in many cases sometimes i think they just like to fight but i think they were sort of well-intentioned they're patriots but they completely up the situation because you know they they drew all the attention and they were too easy to paint as the bad guys the people who need to be in the street needs to be everybody but them even though they're the most capable in terms of fighting uh the most effective the most effective would be people who are not part of an organization you don't want them to show up and say hey we're proud boys you want people to show up and say we're conservatives or we want to save the country or patriots or something you don't want them part of a club as soon as you make them part of a club then anybody who does something bad in the club messes up the whole thing right so as soon as you say it's a club any one bad apple in that club ruins the whole club in terms of political opinion so just don't bring a club i mean an organization club you can you know the other club probably a bad idea too so you think lawyers are pretty good at arguing right you'd say that maybe artists are not good at it but lawyers are real good at it and i hear a lawyer ross garber who is literally a an impeachment lawyer and he teaches at tulane law school so a very qualified guy in the law and he tweeted this to me he said i have done election investigations mostly on behalf of republicans so he's saying that he's sort of unbiased here and then he and he said i have seen lots of misconduct and irregularities so here's a person who's experienced and he knows that elections can have lots of conduct and irregularities because he's seen it himself so far so good and he said i expressed concern heading into this election even better he's not only seen a lot of fraud in elections but he warned us about this election so far so good and then he said but i have not seen evidence of potentially result changing problems and then he referred to my analogy about the no melted ice cream does that seem like a good argument is that a world-class lawyer argument there because i'm pretty sure there are a lot of things in this world that i haven't seen that actually happened for example suppose you were to witness a murder by gunfire and you saw the person take out the gun aim it at the victim pull the trigger bang and then the victim gets a hole in their body and they go ah and they die and that's what that's what you you witnessed can you say that you witnessed the person with the gun shooting the victim who the bullet entered and died can you say you saw that no because you can't see the bullet right you saw the gun go off and you know what guns do you saw the person with a bullet hole and you logically connected them but did you see it no because if you can't see the bullet you don't know the bullet actually came out of the gun you don't know if somebody behind him shot him now of course if you do the ballistics you'll find out but in terms of witnessing there are a lot of things we don't see such as actually watching the bullet that you know happened because you heard the gun go off you saw it where it's aimed you saw the result you don't have to see it all you don't have to see every bit of it so likewise the uh here's a guy who has seen enough election fraud personally that he knows it can happen so he knows it can happen because he's seen a lot of it and he knows that the incentive to do it this election was sky high that's all you need to know it can be done which he confirms because he's seen a lot of it and the and the motivation was sky high you don't need to see the bullet to know that it happened i think his argument was poor um and i got a few other things that i don't think are interesting enough to talk about so i won't and that my friends is the end of coffee with scott adams for today i think it's maybe the best one i've done so far today don't you think all right i'm just going to look at your comments for a moment because i've been looking at my notes oh yes the space force how did i skip that one the space force has decided that the name for their uh fighters the name for their military people will be guardians they'll be called guardians what do you think of that i don't like it at all i wanted to like it but i don't number one it reminds you of the you know movie guardians of the galaxy so automatically it feels silly because you know there's a talking raccoon in that movie and so guardians of the universe makes that's what i think of and so it makes it seem less serious so that's not good but here's the other part the problem for me is that they're in heaven meaning that they're in space so they're they're sort of up there like like god basically you know in an analogy sense and there's something about the word guardian that feels religious guardian doesn't sound military and maybe that's what they wanted but guardian doesn't really sound like the right word guardian feels like a cult i guess that's what it is i just realized that that's what it is the word guardian doesn't sound like a military term it sounds like a cult in in nexium the uh the cult we've been talking about what was the name they had for uh or at least in the the subpart of nexium where uh keith randiri had his his uh uh let's say his disciples i don't know lovers disciples um so he was called vanguard so in the context of an actual alleged cult uh the name that they used for their leader was a vanguard guardian feels like that word doesn't it it feels just a little bit more like a cult than it does like a military thing so that's my opinion um i don't think it's important i think any name you put on it's gonna be fine and uh somebody says vanguard yeah yeah i understand that a guardian is one who guards and you know it's not that it's not technically accurate enough i don't have any better ideas so i'm not i don't think it's a big deal that's all i got for now and i will talk to you tomorrow all right all you youtubers i'm still here for you for a moment um she should have gone with starch startership at troopers troopers wouldn't be bad um orbiteers the orbiteers that's not bad tara keepers what's that mean that's right i love you the most on periscope it's true space force tubins i don't think that's going to catch on did they ever admit about lying about masks they did yeah fouchy did in a sense in a sense because they admitted there was a shortage problem um have i seen stand-up math's channel no where's my cat i don't know she needs to he needs to give me some love all right that's all for now and i will talk to you

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the thing that makes everything better

including the moderna vaccine

go

well speaking of the modern uh vaccine i

guess that got

approved so we got a second vaccine

um and the interesting thing is

how do you decide which one to take

because i'm starting to hear reports of

you know the modern one might have

some advantages over the other one what

would you do

if your health care provider offered you

let's say the

the other one but you wanted the moderna

one

what would you do would you wait

if the only one you could get is the

other one because maybe you're in a

your hmo or something just as one of

them

i don't know it's going to be it's going

to be an interesting question

my advice to all of you will be the same

this is what i'm i'm going to do in

terms of my decision of

what vaccination to take or not

i'm going to wait till the last minute

and you should too

you don't need to make a decision until

somebody says

you can come in and get it until

somebody says

that you personally can go get a

vaccination

don't decide don't decide because there

might be extra information by then

so if you decide now before you have to

why would you do that wait until the

last minute you could be quite sure

you're going to take it or quite sure

you're not

but don't decide yet wait until the last

minute

that's the smartest place place to make

the decision

here's the most controversial story that

i have completely changed my opinion on

you saw the story about the ethicist

who i guess in new york times had his

article

and the ethicist claimed that it might

be

better for society if before

older people get to the vaccination

that the frontline health care workers

get taken care of

and part of his argument which made the

headlines

was that he thought that old people

shouldn't get the vaccination

first because they're mostly white

and that frontline healthcare workers

are more diverse

and so if you favored the front line

workers you would get a more

diverse and more fair distribution

and the way that was reported is a

racist

oh it's quite racist really really

racist

is it yes so

let me agree with the first part of the

criticism

unambiguously it's totally racist

it's unambiguously overtly

plainly transparently racist

but here's the part you're not gonna

like

you're ready but

no matter what you do it's racist

sorry sorry

no matter what you do it's racist

there isn't the non-racist option

if we had a non-racist option

i would say my god why are we even

obtaining this idea

from this clearly racist proposal

but that's not our situation it's not

and we can't get to a situation

where there would be any kind of a

non-racist uh

you know non-racist uh process

here's why no matter what rules you pick

no matter what group you say even if you

don't use race

if you just say well we'll do people

over a certain age

well mostly white right it wasn't your

intention

but it would just turn out that way so

things are racist

by outcome no matter what your intention

was

right so would you agree with the first

point

that the outcome has a racial

element to it even if nobody was

thinking in those terms

even if even if racism was nothing to do

with the decision

you'd all agree that there's always an

outcome that

favors one group or not no matter what

you do you can't avoid that

so let's talk about intention because if

the outcome is going to be racist no

matter what you can't get rid of the

racism part

so why would you worry about the thing

you can't change right that just can't

be changed

but you can question motive

that's always fair you can question

intention

if i thought that someone uh had

suggested in public

that white people should not get the

violent not get the vaccination

you know in an early way even if they're

old

um you know what's your first impression

of that

sounds pretty bad right but let me ask

you this

so suppose somebody came to me all right

let's personalize this take it out of

the the realm of public policy

take it down to you personally somebody

comes to you and they say

uh scott you're over 60.

you know i'm 63

and i'm in a you know i've got a little

asthma

so i've got some comorbidities i'm not

old old but i'm you know the beginning

of the

the older category and suppose they said

to me um

i'd like you to make the decision scott

it's up to you

we know that uh let's say older

black people have much worse outcomes

would you mind socially distancing a

little bit longer

and we're going to focus on black

citizens

not because they're black but because we

know they have worse outcomes

so if you're looking at the greater good

you want to give the

vaccination to whoever gets the best

outcome right

it just happens that they're black

that's not anybody's choice

it's nobody's intention it's just a

biological reality

so if somebody said to me scott

would you personally and you're not

making a decision for anybody else

right it's just you personally it's not

a public policy

it doesn't apply to anybody else it's

just you would you personally

socially distance a little bit longer

and take a little more risk

for the benefit of black citizens in the

united states

who are at greater risk what would i say

i'd say yes i'd say yes if somebody

asked me that question directly and said

look

it's up to you i'm we're not there's no

penalty

you will not be punished you won't be

punished

it's just up to you it's your own

conscience your own risks

your own risk reward calculation you can

be selfish if you want

it's up to you if you want to get it

first we'll put you right in the front

of the line and nobody will ever give

you a hard time for it

it's up to you i think i'd still wait

i think it's the weight because that's

actually a pretty fair

proposition if they can identify people

for whatever reason you know be they

black or have a comorbidity or be they a

certain age or

be they health care workers on the front

line if you can make a strong

case that this person is in a high risk

group

and i'm in a slightly less high-risk

group

yeah i'm okay with that absolutely

because you know it's a war right

it's a war and sometimes you've got to

be the one that does the dangerous stuff

so that somebody else doesn't have to do

it sometimes you've got to

you know brave the bullets to pull back

your wounded

comrade off the field right so we're in

a situation where

personal sacrifice should be a pretty

big part of the equation

if you're not thinking of it that way

then you're not in a

let's say a military mindset and maybe

we should be

we're we're in a war against a virus

maybe let's

let's act more like soldiers right so

somebody says white guilt am i suffering

from

white guilt because i would say the same

thing

no matter who the risk category was

so would you would you criticize me if i

said

i think people over 80 should get the uh

should get the vaccination before may

would you criticize me for that

if i said that frontline healthcare

workers should get it before me

would you would you criticize me for

that if i said that people who

what's the worst co-morbidity maybe it's

diabetes let's say diabetes is i don't

know if that's true but let's say it's

the worst one

if i said that everybody with diabetes

should get the shot before i do

would you criticize me for that why

would you criticize me

if i say no there's an obvious category

black citizens in this country clearly

have far worse outcomes why is that

different than diabetes

why is that different than being 80

years old

all right so there's your provocative

thought of the day i didn't think you'd

like it

but i feel it's worth mulling on

and i would say that the story about the

ethicist and his opinion

was presented a little bit out of

context

so when i first heard it it just sounded

straight up racist and that was my first

impression

but when you hear the actual argument

and you understand that there is no

non-racist outcome

you can't get there it's not a

possibility it's only who gets

who gets the advantage and if you decide

that it's going to be a little racist

but you're going to do it based on the

greatest risk

that's about as good as you can do it's

about as good as you can do

now if you told me that every black

person would get the vaccination before

every white person that doesn't make

sense but if you're talking

equal to equal let's say a black guy

who's 63 years old and has a little

asthma

i would i would put him in front of me

in line

because it's a war if this were a

competition

and i were competing against my fellow

citizen

yeah i'd push him off the cliff right

if i treated this as a competition i'm

gonna get mine

and i'm gonna make sure you don't get

mine before i get mine

but it's not it's a war so if i were

competing against black people

sure i'll do what i have to do to

compete but they're on the same team

so i'm going to treat it like like a

military operation

all right there's a new site

that's sorting the news in a useful way

i think a lot of testing on how to get

our news better

you know better platforms or better ways

to present the news so it's

less biased would be good for testing so

i'm not going to say that

this particular one and its url is

tidyreport.com tidytidyreport.com

what they do is they organize the tweets

which of course usually connect to the

news directly

so they organize the i think it's mostly

the political tweets

by positive neutral and negative so in

other words whether the tweet is saying

something positive

or negative about the topic or neutral

and whether the person saying it

is associated with the left or the right

i'm not sure exactly how they

figure that out but they're probably

close so it's called tidyreport.com i

neither

recommend it nor disrecommend it the

important part of the story is that

people are starting to a b

test different ways to present the news

to get past this

immense bias situation so check it out

maybe

maybe that's one of the ones

pompeo uh so mike pompeo says that

uh we're that the russians are quote

pretty clearly behind the cyber attack

what does pretty clearly mean does

pretty clearly mean

we're sure of it is that the same

is pretty clearly i don't know if that

means they're

they're positive it's an interesting

choice of words

but it's somewhere in that neighborhood

of high high confidence

or high likelihood and some experts are

saying

what what i think is unfortunately

obvious that the only way you would be

able to get rid

of whatever access russia has had for

apparently a long time

the only way you'd be able to get rid of

it is to replace all of your software

all of it because the the apple

the the allegation which is probably

pretty reasonable

is that once they had god access to all

of the systems

they could embed you know viruses in

different places to be activated under

different situations

or open up different doors etc so it

wouldn't matter

how how good you were at finding a

problem

because they would just open up a new

door as quickly as you found it

so you pretty much have to get rid of

all of it

i wonder if we have the technology to do

that

let me give you uh let me flush this out

a little bit flush it out or flush it

down a little bit

i always get those confused flesh it out

you flesh it out right that's that's the

saying so the idea is this could you

write

a software application that's

main purpose is to remove all the

software

in a company and replace it with the

clean version of the same software

so in other words could you write some

kind of a

master god program that would take every

piece of software at ibm

delete it and i don't know how hard you

have to delete it maybe there's like you

have to extra delete bleach it or

something

just get rid of all of it and

reload the same fresh you know things so

you keep your databases so

none of your data would be directly

affected so i don't think there's a

problem with data

i guess i'm not that technical that i

can answer that question would we have

any issue with a

just a raw database i don't know if that

can hold a virus

but if you get ever get rid of

everything just wipe everything

that has any software element to it in

your system

could you write one giant program that

just rolled through

a fortune 500 company took it down for

an hour

it is just done for an hour but an hour

later is reloaded all of its software

rebooted in the right order

and and brought everything back up could

you do it

is it is that a thing yeah let me give

you um

a little bit of history do you remember

when the year 2000 bug

was coming when the year 2000 bug was

coming all the experts

experts said we don't have enough time

we're in real trouble because the

companies are not taking it seriously

and that date is coming when year 2000

bug will hit

and all computers that were you know

designed before a certain date

can't handle the year 2000 as a date and

they'll all crash and the world will

will end and as that was approaching

and we were getting cl we were actually

in the year 2000 and we're getting you

know

or no we're getting close to the year

2000. yeah because closer and closer and

closer

i was saying in public we're fine

we'll be fine now here's the reason that

all the experts said no it can't be done

it's too much work

you know if everybody worked on it full

time you just couldn't get it done

we're doomed and i said exactly the

opposite i said no we'll be fine

what happened what happened is we were

fine

now why is that well exactly what i

predicted

that it would take a long time to do it

manually

but it wouldn't take a long time to

figure out how not to do it manually

in other words it wouldn't take that

long to write programs

that would do what the humans would have

to do that would take a long time

and what happened people wrote programs

that looked for these bugs and corrected

them

and then they ran the programs the bugs

were corrected

the year 2000 came bam

we're fine so until you could imagine

that it was possible to write software

that would

fix you know universally go out there

and find and fix all the bugs that you

didn't even know where they were

uh you thought you were doomed i think

we might

find a similar maybe an industry

could be a whole industry pops up maybe

a consulting industry with

some kind of technical background and i

would guess

that we will probably birth an industry

because of this because of the hacks

that go in

and shut down your whole network and

wipe it and then reload it

and you know they control the process so

nothing gets out of control

and and they just go rescue one company

at a time

i feel like that's going to be in the

industry

really soon and should be and i think

that'll be the only answer because the

we should assume that people will get so

far

into our systems again that we'll just

be right back in this situation

right so even if we found every bug and

got rid of it

it would just reproduce i mean you know

even if we got them all

which is impossible probably but even if

we did they would just hack back in

and you know we'd you know they'd find

another way in so you need some way to

wipe

all of your software every now and then

every bit of it

and that i think that'll become an

industry um

here's the funniest thing that's

happened uh lately

if you don't follow this twitter account

you really should

it's a parody account uh and

the name on the account is uh titania

mcgrath and there's a little photo of a

youngish blonde woman with sort of

glasses like mine

and what's brilliant about it besides

the fact that it's brilliantly written

is that it's a parody account that is so

close to reality

people are often fooled which is part of

the joke

so a lot of people who see this account

for the first time really can't tell

and and something happened

that uh a thread that uh

to titania or whoever runs the account

tweeted that just is amazing

and here's why i've been telling you for

a while that parody and reality have

merged

such that there's not really that much

difference

between a wild parody and what you're

actually observing

you want to see an example of that

titania in her thread gives you several

examples of predictions

that she or whoever runs the account

made

that were pure parity that have already

happened

in other words the parody came before

the reality

but listen to this list it's freaking

mind-blowing all right you ready

so these are the claims in titania's

thread

um she said on december 2018 i calls for

biological sex to be removed from birth

certificates

now that was parody we're gonna take

your biological sex off of your

uh birth certificate said that in 2018

in 2020 the new england journal of

medicine concurred

so the new england journal of medicine

is now recommending

in 2020 what titania said as purely a

joke

in 2018. purely a joke

is that the only one well i mean if this

had only happened once

if it only happened once you'd say oh

that's a funny coincidence

right if it only happened once

so uh on and also in 2018 titania

criticized

julie andrews who played mary poppins in

the movie

for having chimney soot on her face

because you know that was in the middle

of the blackface stuff

so as purely a joke she tweeted that

and criticized julie andrews for having

chimney smoke on her face in the movie

that was in 2018. in 2019 the new york

times concurred

so the new york times basically took on

julie andrews for having so on her face

and blackface

it was literally a joke two years before

it became real

is that the only ones oh no i'm not even

close to being done

so the thing that's funny is not the

individual examples because they're

they're sort of trivial what's funny is

how often it happened

it's the often part that makes the makes

the joke all right here's another one

uh march 2019 titania published a book

called

woke in which i argue that sky

skyscrapers

are oppressive phallic symbols

in july 2020 the guardian concurred

so in 2019 literally

joking the sky creep skyscrapers are you

know some

oppressive phallic symbols and then the

guardian writes a serious article one

year later saying exactly that

uh in that same book in 2019 here's

here's the

like the finisher uh she go in 2019

in her book also the same book woke i

called for

i called out helen keller for her white

privilege

time magazine just did that in reality

now this is just a sample the the actual

thread is longer i just picked out some

of the fun ones

but when you see how many times parody

in reality overlapped

it's it changes you i mean this is this

is one of those things where

you know i've i've predicted this i

predicted it often

and in public that parity and reality

were on the way to merging

and then to watch it in real time it

actually merged

did that sound like a real prediction

when i said it the first time you heard

me say

parody and reality are merging that

didn't sound

exactly technically real right it

sounded more like

humorous hyperbole

no i meant it and it happened

so there you go all right speaking of

predictions one of my other predictions

is that

history would get complicated because we

would no longer have one of them

we would have more than one history and

then if you went to school

it might be a problem because you're

trying to learn history

and there are two of them and they're

different

which one do you believe did you think

that that was going to happen

my prediction that there would be two

histories

well here we are president trump

he unveiled his choices for the

president's advisory

1776 commission so this will be a

commission to make recommendations about

how to push against the 1619 project

that is already in schools so the

president has literally

created a commission to create an

alternate history

to compete with the history that's

already being taught in the schools

two histories literally

being taught in schools now

when i said to you we get a problem here

because we have two histories

like we've never had before did that

sound real to you

the first time you heard that's like no

we'll we'll still agree on one history

nope literally we're teaching two

histories

if if this commission goes forward i

don't know how much time they have

before biden scraps it so i don't i

can't imagine they get much done

but there you are two histories

all right um the most

interesting claim about election fraud

that i've seen comes from kane

koa the great uh it's a twitter account

so uh i think maybe kanakoa

k a n e k o a

the great al all one word kind of coed

the great a good follow he's got lots of

stuff i don't know who he is but he's

got lots of good content

so he made a twitter thread which i'll

talk about uh

but before i talk about it do you

remember the the golden rule

of all election fraud claims the golden

rule

well it's not golden but it's a rule 95

of all the election claims you hear are

fake

or not real or mistaken or out of

context or something

but i also believe there's a hundred

percent chance the election was stolen

because it was easy

and people had the motive to do it so of

course it's still it's always stolen

under those conditions

but any specific claim you hear

probably bs now i'm going to give you a

specific claim

after telling you that every specific

claim is probably bs

i will i'm going to apply the same

standard to this one

now this one sounds really good

okay so i'm going to give you an

argument here

that on paper you know on paper

it's really really strong but is it true

i don't know i would just apply my

standard

to it 95 chances not but here it is

so there is a uh a working professional

statistician somebody who is very

capable and experienced and in the

in the sweet spot of his career so

somebody who really really

really understands statistics

so this is the source and there's a

video from the statistician

explaining what he did so the first

thing you need to know is that the

person making the claim

is very qualified right now that doesn't

mean it's true

right because we'll talk about experts

and when you should

trust them but just know that he's very

qualified

and what he did was he was just sort of

messing around with a lot of the data

you know he explained it as almost a

hobby something that the statisticians

liked it was like oh

i wonder if there's a correlation

between this thing and that thing

and he discovered somewhat just by

poking around

a correlation that almost is impossible

to be natural

meaning it's a signal for fraud with

something like a greater than 99

chance that it is really fraud and not

some

fake signal now does that mean it's true

no remember we're only dealing with

claims that you and i can't check

i don't have the skill to check it i

don't know where the data was

i can't really check it so no matter how

credible this sounds

just keep this little tape playing in

the back of your head no matter how

credible it sounds

there's a 95 percent chance it's not

real

okay just keep that playing in the back

of your head here's what he found

if you took the 3 000 u.s counties i

always wondered how many

counties there were which is weird i was

wondering that exact question

there are over 3 000 counties now

counties have a lot in common

right there could be a lot of diversity

within a county

but you can make some claims about

their consistency over time and the

statistician started out by predicting

predicting who would win each county

based on

a number of demographic variables so he

would say how many democrats are in the

county

what's their age a bunch of stuff

and he found that he could predict with

90 percent accuracy

who the county would go for based on

their demographics and you could apply

it retrospectively to other

elections and i guess it works so it's

about 90 good

and knowing in advance who would win and

then he looked at

who actually won and

he found eventually he poked around and

found this

strange data oddity that

there were lots of uh there are lots of

counties that did better than his model

would predict

and there were lots of counties that did

worse than his model would predict

and that's quite natural so if you've

got 3 000

data points they're they're going to be

spread around

but his point was you could draw a line

through the middle

and that would be his prediction and and

the the differences would

just be sort of equally on both sides of

the line

so if there was if he was off it was

just as likely he was off

you know in one way versus the other so

it'd be just as much below the lines

above the line and then he found

that in those counties that used

dominion voting systems and

one other kind i think heart heart or

something

there was another company hart h-a-r-t

so there i guess there are maybe six or

so different machines and different

counties and different ways to account

but in those counties they had dominion

or heart

systems they were consistently

over five percent more votes than would

be expected

for a biden now here's the interesting

part

the correlation holds in trump counties

so counties that trump won biden did

five percent better

in counties that you knew that biden was

going to win because they always go

democrat

also a little bit more than five percent

better

so the amount that the uh dominion

and heart machine counting counties were

off

was um was consistent

meaning that there was a gigantic

difference let me see if i can say this

simply because i'm

watching this if you looked at what you

expected these counties to do based on

their demographics and

past behavior etc the ones that had

dominion

and heart machines were uh way way

i think 73 percent of them had a biden

advantage that was very similar

now the odds of only those two machines

having 73 percent of the oddities going

in the same direction

but in the other counties those oddities

went in both directions equally

but only where you had the dominion or

heart machines

you didn't have an even distribution

it's the only time

and it's very consistent and according

to the statistician not according to me

that the odds of any of that being

anything but fraud

are vanishing vanishingly small

you know you could say it might be

something else in the

you know in the extreme you know it was

alien invasion or something

but not really not really now this is

very different

from the quadrillions argument the

quadrillions argument was debunked right

so the quadrillion argument is that um

if there's let's say a belt a bellwether

place

that always went to republicans and this

is the only time it didn't

you know that that's a signal and then

there's

this other signal and this other signal

that is not good analysis because all it

would take is one big effect

that could affect all of those things

right so

that's not a guaranteed signal of fraud

but this is really specific because it

you can trace it all the way down to

this specific vendor

and if you can trace the difference down

to specific vendors

that's a really stronger case i think

now i don't know if uh

andreas beckhaus is watching this uh

video but if you are

uh uh that he'd be the best debunker of

things that i say so debunk me on

twitter if

i've uh missed any anything obvious so i

took this

and uh i sent the link to my democrat

friend

that i always mentioned that my

anti-trump democrat friend

who has the qualities of being very

smart and well informed

and yet appears to act crazy

he's completely rational in fact one of

the most rational people i know

in all other domains he's just like this

really rational guy

it practically defines who he is he's so

rational

and i sent him this the uh sent him the

statistical analysis and as luck would

have it

he's also good at statistics so one of

his

talent stacks is statistics so i send

him a statistical argument

to a guy who really knows statistics now

it's not the same harris

it's a personal friend nobody you know

and

and here's why i did it my friend

says and has been saying that there's no

evidence that there is anything

fraudulent so that that's his view no

evidence

so i sent him this evidence but here

but the evidence has a special quality

to it

that no matter how much you know about

statistics

you can't really just look at it and

know if it's right right

you you can't tell so this expert is

making an argument

that unless you probably unless you

really dug into his work

you can't tell if it's real so i did

this

intentionally not as uh here i've proven

my case

because i don't think anything like

that's happened remember 95

of all evidence is fake this is no

different so i didn't think it was a

kill shot

but the reason i showed it to him is

because i knew he wouldn't know it

wasn't

and he wouldn't know if it was because

it can't be known it's just too hard to

know it

based on what we have available to us

and i wondered if he would reject it

or would he say okay this does not prove

fraud and i would agree with that but

it certainly tells us we should look

into it

so that's what i was looking for i was

looking for a rational

response that says you know scott i know

a lot about statistics too

but i don't have access to all the data

he has if he did this analysis right it

would be very meaningful

and it does look like he's capable

capable of doing the analysis

if it's right this is something that

would be important and should be looked

into

so that's what a reasonable person would

say right

do you think he said that nope

perfectly reasonable to say it didn't

prove anything and i agree

here's what he said you can find any

correlation

in lots of data now this is what i would

call the bible code

theory the bible code is a debunked

it was a an idea that if you looked in

the bible

and you did various schemes to find

secret messages you would find all these

messages

such as i'll just pick one this is

random not a real one if you took the

second letter of the first

sentence but you took the third letter

of the next sentence and then the fourth

letter to the next sentence

so there's all these little algorithms

that would run against the bible

and it would spit out things that you

didn't think could possibly be

you know uh natural so it'd be like

little predictions and you'd say yes

look it's like a full sentence

prediction

and it actually happened so there was a

time when people thought the bible had

these secret codes

that was debunked by some scientists who

took their same

algorithms and ran it against any big

book

like war and peace turns out war and

peace

is full of secret messages and

predictions that actually came true

because it turns out that if you've got

something as complicated as a big book

filled with letters you can find some

algorithm that will

produce full sentences just by trial and

error

and they will look like predictions that

happened so it can work with any book

it's obviously not

the bible code so his argument was that

this statistician

had basically fallen for the bible code

error does that sound like a good

response

to here's a video by a hugely qualified

statistician

are there any hugely qualified

statisticians

who don't know about the bible code

there are none there are none that's not

a thing

there's no such thing as a professional

a professional

statistician who's never heard of this

problem with the bible code that's not a

thing obviously

the statistician was aware that that's

you know one of the risks that you have

to guard against

so i feel as if this is a pretty clean

example of cognitive dissonance the

reasonable reaction would have been

i can't evaluate this but if it's right

it's meaningful right is that not the

only reasonable response

to something you can't analyze but looks

important and an expert did it

all right

so uh

or the other the other thing my democrat

friend said as a response is that the

courts have rejected

all of the evidence that was presented

it's just mind-boggling so my my

democrat friend because

the the news is so fake he believes that

courts have looked at evidence of fraud

that never happened he actually thinks

that happened

it didn't happen apparently he was

unaware that the cases are being thrown

out for technicalities

without actually looking at the claims

you know it's about standing and

doctrinal latches and

you know whether or not you can bring

the case and who's got

you know you know who's got jurisdiction

it's all that stuff

but as far as i know the the claims per

se

have not been judged in any court of law

i haven't

i don't know that the witnesses who make

direct

claims of observing fraud have they

had their day in court no

right so here's a well-informed really

well-informed

guy but his information comes from

the left and actually thinks

an alternate history of the united

states is happening right now he

believes there's an alternate history

happening in parallel with the one

you're experiencing

in which those claims are being debunked

by courts

nothing like that's happened nothing

even close to that has happened

they've never even looked at it beyond

that

would it make any difference that other

claims were debunked

[Laughter]

does it matter how many people are found

innocent of a crime

let's say this let's say three people

were accused of a crime and you found

out they didn't do it does that tell you

the

the fourth person who is accused of an

unrelated crime does that tell you the

fourth person didn't do it

it doesn't really work that way right

anyway

trump signed some legislation that would

kick chinese companies off of

the u.s stock exchanges unless those

companies

allow financial audits that are required

for

you know american companies that are on

those exchanges

to which i say why did this take so long

are you telling me that there are

chinese companies on american exchanges

who simply decide not to abide by the

very very very important rules of

transparency

that all american companies abide by or

else they get penalized

greatly are you telling me that china

can just be on our stock exchange

and ignore all the rules that were

required

the important ones not even the trivia

ones like the most important one

is you've got to have some transparency

that's that's like right at the top

that's not a detail right

and so trump signs this legislation that

will kick them off if they don't allow

these audits

and i'm thinking why did that take so

long

you know and do you think this would

have happened under biden

do you because i feel like probably it

wouldn't

um it's going to be fun watching trump

try to get things done

you know between now and inauguration

day we'll see how much trouble he can

cause

all right let me teach you when to

disagree with the experts because of

course we all do it

but there's a good way to do it and a

bad way to do it and this will be your

important lesson of the day you ready

okay

here's what you should not do do not

disagree with experts

and then cite as your reason for

disagreeing with the experts

a fact which all the experts know

okay i just gave you an example that all

the experts in statistics

know about the bible code so stating

that as the reason for your argument

doesn't make any sense because the

expert knows that

right here's some more examples of that

um i've heard the argument that

co2 can't be causing a climate

crisis because co2 used to be much

higher

in the in the past you've heard this

argument right people say climate change

isn't real

because co2 used to be way way higher in

the past and there were

there was no civilization back then if

there were no humans

and co2 was way higher in the past and

things seem to be fine

so it's all hoax right here's the

problem with that

every climate scientist knows

co2 was higher in the past

do you see where i'm going all the

experts who say climate change is a

problem

they know what you know that co2 was

much higher in the past

that's not a reason to argue against

them

what that proves is you don't know why

they have

you don't understand their argument

basically now um

i believe that i read once that co2 was

higher in the in

sort of the distant history of the the

earth but it was the same time that i

believed the sun was

less strong so there was some countering

force that is easy to

to demonstrate and well known so

in general if you're disagreeing with

experts

but you're using as your basis for

disagreement

a fact that every one of those experts

knows

you're almost certainly not making a

good argument you could be right

because experts sometimes are wrong and

you don't know why so you can be right

by accident

but you should check yourself and say

wait a minute

my argument is based on one fact that

the other people already know

there's got to be some other argument or

that's nothing all right

look at me here's another example

when i predicted that trump would win in

2016

i i was going against all the experts

and all the pollsters

was that smart was it smart for me to

disagree with the experts

when i was using their same data

because they knew what the polls were

we're all looking at the same data right

so i should not have disagreed with the

experts wouldn't you say

if all i were using was the same data

they were using

because they would know more than i do

plus they know the same data i know

except here's what's different i was not

using their same data i was using

my expertise which is different from

theirs

my expertise was persuasion and

as a trained persuader and other trained

persuaders saw at the same time i did

they said this isn't like the past

we've never had this skill set running

for president

and you guys don't see it coming but i'm

kind of an expert in this persuasion

stuff

and i do see it coming just like a train

like i can see it i can see it coming

right so if you disagree with the

experts

because you're bringing knowledge that

they don't have

or expertise that they don't have that

might be

a reasonable disagreement again doesn't

mean you're right and they're wrong

could go either way but at least you'd

be reasonable

that would be a reasonable way to

disagree with an expert

because you're bringing something new

that they don't have

but if you're only bringing the stuff

they already know

i think i'd lean toward the experts not

you

in that case i had one other expertise

in the case of calling trump's 2016

victory which is that

i know a lot about my white males

as a white male of a certain age i

kind of have a little more insight into

white males of a certain age

and i know what they're willing to say

out loud in public and i know what they

privately think

it's a little bit different so i'm not

sure that all the experts

had maybe the same you know experience

with this

group of people who ended up being

influential in the final

final outcome so whenever you think you

have some extra

insight or expertise or data

then maybe disagreeing with an expert

makes some sense

here's another one i've disagreed with

climate change experts about their

uh projections of how bad things will be

in 50 to 80 years

does that make sense i'm not a climate

change expert right

so if i'm disagreeing with the experts

aren't i being irrational because

there's no fact

that i know about climate change and

this is true there's no fact i know

about climate change that they don't

know

so they know all the facts that i have

plus lots more would it be reasonable

for me to disagree with them

when they know everything i know plus

the scientific method has backed them up

they say

plus the majority of experts are on the

same side plus

they know way more than i do is that

reasonable for me to disagree in that

case

well if that's all the variables that

were involved the answer is no

if there were no other variables it

wouldn't really be reasonable for me to

disagree i don't have anything to add to

it

but when you're predicting what's going

to happen financially

you're now in my ballpark because i

worked

as a person who made financial

predictions for big corporations

did it for years and i have expertise in

it

so when i'm criticizing climate change

the part i don't

criticize is the science park the

science part is

that if you add co2 to the atmosphere no

matter how it gets there

human or other no matter how it gets

there

all things be equal would that warm up

the earth

probably i'm not disagreeing with

experts because i don't have any extra

data

what extra data do i have what extra

science do i have none so when they make

a claim that co2

should warm the atmosphere all things be

equal i say

i don't have anything to add to that i'm

not going to doubt it

and i'm not going to confirm it i'm just

going to say well you're experts

you know i don't know but when you get

to the second part

which is they make a financial not a not

a scientific

but a financial estimate of what it's

going to do with the world economy

you're in my expertise so if i criticize

you from my expertise

and you're a scientist

you should listen to me

literally if a scientist

tells you to believe a financial

estimate

or a financial prediction and a

financial expert who makes these

predictions or has for a living

says no who are you going to believe the

person who knows the most about

financial predictions or a scientist

because scientists are not financial

predictors

so when i disagree with climate change

i'm not disagreeing with scientists

on science i'm disagreeing with

scientists

on my expertise not theirs my expertise

i have another expertise too which is

again persuasion

and so i have a theory of why

maybe scientists could be you know

fooled or biased or

subject to confirmation bias at least on

the financial part

financial predictions and it is you know

everything that you already know which

is that there's a group think and there

would be a penalty for going against the

green

so if you're going to disagree with the

experts

at least have a theory of why they're

wrong

so sometimes i have a theory that um

there are just too many penalties for

them to say

you're going against the grain you know

so it's cognitive dissonance or

confirmation bias

or that i have extra facts or extra

information all right here's another

example of the same thing

i see this argument all the time about

wearing masks and it goes like this

this was tweeted at me today the problem

with this

uh i'm sorry it was tweeted at me today

that

um we know masks can't work

because the the tiny holes in the mask

are way bigger than the even tinier

virus

now most of you have probably made this

argument right how many of you have made

this argument

scott scott scott the scientists have

looked

they've seen that the masks have these

big holes on them when you go

microscopic and and the hole is this big

the virus is the size of a p

you know let's say relatively speaking

the virus is the size of a p

the holes the tiny holes in the mask

would be the size of let's say

a basketball hoop how does a basketball

hoop

stop something that's the size of a p

right have you made that argument

yourself

raise your hand if you've ever made that

argument if you did you're just

you would know you're disagreeing with

the majority of experts who say the

masks

work now here's my test

do you think that the do you think that

the experts

who say masks don't work who say that

masks

do work do you think they're unaware

of your pee going through a basketball

hoop

brilliant analogy because if they're

aware of that fact

then you're adding nothing to it it's a

fact they know

it's a fact you know that the size of

the holes in the masks are

so big and the virus itself is smaller

do you think they don't know that the

experts

i'm pretty sure all of the experts know

that

but they know everything you know which

is let's say that fact

and more all right so they know

everything you know

they know that big hole and little virus

exists

but the other thing they know is that

it's been tested in a variety of real

real world um situations and

in the real world the evidence is very

strong that

mask work so they're aware that when you

test it in a

laboratory you can you can come up with

a very good reason why

maybe you wouldn't but it might have to

do with the water droplets being bigger

than the virus itself so maybe they

don't get through the the basketball

hoop

could be that it changes the direction

or the viral load we don't know why

don't know why but the point is

if the experts know everything you know

about the size of that virus

there's something you don't know and

that's what you should take away from it

you shouldn't take away from it

that the the experts are lying

if they know more than you do now how

often have i

uh disagreed with the experts and let me

let me see if i'm consistent with my own

rules of knowing when to agree or

disagree with experts

when the question came up of closing

travel from china

the virology experts said

in the very early days no you don't need

to do that

and i disagreed with vehement

cursing public statements that we should

close

the travel from china immediately

now who was right well i was right i

think history shows that i was right

that we should have closed

china travel as early as i said which

was well before

trump did it which i think was a week

later and

but was i so even though i was right

let's examine if i was right for the

right reason

okay so what was it that i added to this

to the experts if the expert says say

it's not a risk

why should i say it you know what do i

know that the experts don't know

and here's what i do know risk

management

are scientists experts in risk

management

because if you study the economics and

if you have an mba

and a lot of experience in business as i

do i would consider myself not like a

world expert in risk management but

certainly it's my expertise

so understanding risk and making

decisions in the context of risk

management

is what you learn when you get an mba

it's what you learn in business

i'm good at it so when i looked at this

situation

i didn't say i'm smarter than

epidemiologists

i said i don't think they understand

risk management

because they're there the risk is

catastrophic

and here we are right we knew the risk

was catastrophic

we knew that it would be expensive to

close travel but it would be

better than catastrophic so from a risk

management perspective it was kind of a

no-brainer

that anybody who understood my expertise

risk management would have found that an

easy decision and in fact

who was it who famously you know

followed on pretty quickly was trump

would you say that trump is also uh

an epidemiologist no is he

an expert on risk management yes

yes that's exactly what he is in in the

same

way that i am if you're experienced with

business

you are somebody who's been making risk

management decisions

for decades yeah trump

is very very experienced at risk

management

so if you're disagreeing with the

experts because you bring a different

expertise

that can be valid doesn't mean you're

right but it could be a valid

disagreement

when the experts were first saying that

masks don't work

before they said they do i called that

a lie on day one now did i call

it a lie because of my expertise and

virology

and the physics of masks

no i brought a different expertise to

that

and that different expertise is that as

the creator of dilbert and somebody

who's worked in business for a long time

i know how big organizations work

and i know that big organizations will

routinely

lie to manage behavior

and it occurred to me that since we were

talking about a shortage of masks

at the same time we were talking the

experts were saying nah you don't need a

mask

but maybe the healthcare workers do need

them no you don't need them save them

for the healthcare workers it won't make

any difference

it seemed very likely to me

that they were making the decision to

manage the shortage

and it was not an actual scientific

statement

so in this case my expertise in

bureaucracies and how they lie to manage

resources i applied to this situation

and with no understanding of

epidemiology or the size of the physics

of the masks

i correctly predicted that they were

lying

and that was the truth

how about what i said early on in the

pandemic and i was saying that we should

at least do a major test and really

really quickly on hydroxychloroquine

because if it worked as claimed it would

be huge

if it didn't work well it's not much

risk

it's pretty low risk compared to the

pandemic now

my current thinking is

hydroxychloroquine

almost certainly at this point we could

say

wasn't the game changer i don't know if

it works a little

but it certainly isn't working so well

that everybody's adopting it we would

know that by now

in my opinion but was i right or wrong

in saying we should go hard at

hydroxychloroquine

in the in the environment of not knowing

whether it worked or not

i was 100 right as was trump

not right that it works but right that

there's enough evidence that works that

we should go hard at it

and know for sure because we tested it

rigorously that we should just go at it

as hard as possible

and at least eliminate it as a

possibility

at least eliminate it so i think i was

right on that as well

all right

so swalwell it turns out the the

information is that there's some

confirmation that he did actually have a

sexual

fling with the chinese spy um fang

so here's my take we know that swalwell

pushed the russia collusion hoax

harder than anybody except adam schiff

and

we know that it was a hoax and we know

that that was very bad for the country

and so

what swalwell did was unambiguously very

bad for the country

but it could have also been just a

mistake

right and i think that you have to allow

that your people that you elect in

congress are going to make some mistakes

so i don't know that you would

necessarily fire somebody

for pushing the fine people i'm sorry

for pushing the

russia collusion hoax because maybe he

believed it

right maybe he was just wrong that's not

the worst thing in the world and if

democrats said well we like him in

general

and even though he pushed this hoax or

maybe they believe the hoax i don't know

so maybe that's not enough to lose your

job

you could argue it is but maybe not

for the at least his voters and then

there's a question of

having a fling with a chinese spy let's

say he didn't know it

that's the reporting right the reporting

is he didn't know she was a chinese spy

should you lose your job if you

had a relationship with somebody that

you didn't know was a spy

and the moment you found out you cut

contact

i don't think so i don't think you

should lose your job

for being fooled by a spy if

especially if there's no damage that you

can identify

so you got two things that are sort of

really close

to something you should get fired for

but individually

i don't know now suppose you added them

together

he did two bad things he didn't do one

bad thing he did two bad things

is that enough to fire him well i don't

know

i so i suppose that would be subjective

but here's the thing

those two things he did wrong are not

unrelated

meaning that a chinese spy you would

expect

to want you to put pressure on russia

and away from china

now we don't know if that's why

swallowell did what he did

we don't know if swallow was motivated

persuaded or brainwashed in any way

to push the russia collusion hoax all we

know

is that we watched it and if these two

facts are true

that you saw uh swalwell going

balls to the wall to do something that a

chinese spy would certainly want him to

do

which has put all the pressure on on

russia and you know

hurt the integrity of our elections and

question everything et cetera

he did exactly what a spy would want him

to do a chinese spy

now that doesn't mean he did it because

of that

but we don't know

that's grounds for removal the fact that

we don't know

if the only reason he damaged the

country so badly

is because he was influenced by a

chinese spy

it doesn't matter if you can prove there

was a connection between those stories

the fact that what he did was so

perfectly exactly what a spy would want

him to do

that's enough even if he's completely

innocent you can't have that person in

public office

and i feel that that could be you know

unfair to him

now i've told you before i've i've met

uh eric swalwell a few times

because he knows some people i know and

in local

you know local parties and stuff so he's

been around a little bit

and so i i don't have bad feelings about

him as a human being

and i don't like people who lose their

jobs over politics and stuff like this

but this is sort of a no-brainer this

isn't one of those situations where you

can put

the the well-being of eric swalwell over

the well-being of

the credibility of the republic he's

just less important than the republic

and i think he's got to go i don't think

i

and and by the way i'm positive i would

say this if he were republican

i don't know if you would you know your

your mileage might vary

but i'm positive i would have the same

opinion no matter his politics

so i said provocatively that although i

oppose all violence and i do

that if conservatives don't start

planning now to control the streets

they'll never win another election

there's no point in having an election

because for all practical purposes

whoever controls

violence in the country runs the country

let me say that again because it's one

of those things it takes you a while to

like connect the dots whoever controls

violence meaning you can get away with

it

is the government effectively

right even if they're not the government

in name

whoever can control violence is in

charge

there's no exception to that that's not

like a

a bias or a hey there's a correlation

is is it's a definition

whoever controls violence in the country

runs the country

every time no exception all right and we

watched

that the um you know antifa and black

lives matter and democrats

they controlled violence in the streets

and there's good reason to believe that

that

affected the supreme court to want to

stay out of the election

because they didn't want more violence

so under this situation where violence

appears to be our political system now

if you want to

not have that be your government you

know

street violence the only response to

that since the police appear

apparently are have been neutered you

know politically neutered

the police aren't going to help you and

it looks like we're not going to

employ the army and because that would

have its own problems the only

way that this gets fixed that i can

think of is that the number of

conservatives who show up

is way more than the number of

other people who might have violence on

their mind now

don't bring guns don't bring knives or

bombs

like i'm not suggesting that anybody

bring weapons of death

to any kind of uh an event but if antifa

were outnumbered five to one

in in the street where they were trying

to make trouble

five to one would probably

make a lot of these things go away so

uh i would say that uh if i if

if conservatives don't actually

literally organize

and have names of people who have signed

up to literally go onto the street

the moment it's needed and you don't

have you know five times as many of them

there's no point in having an election

there really isn't because

and the proud boys have up

everything let me say this

i don't have a problem with uh the proud

boys

stated philosophy i know they're accused

of things which is

not within their stated philosophy

they're accused of being

racist or whatever but that's not part

of their their deal

i don't know if any of them are racist

they're probably racist everywhere

but the proud boys unfortunately they

brought their their brand

into the mix and while i believe that

they were well-intentioned

in many cases sometimes i think they

just like to fight but i think they were

sort of well-intentioned they're

patriots

but they completely up the

situation because

you know they they drew all the

attention and they were too easy to

paint as the bad guys

the people who need to be in the street

needs to be everybody but them

even though they're the most capable in

terms of fighting uh the most effective

the most effective would be people who

are not part of an organization

you don't want them to show up and say

hey we're proud boys you want people to

show up and say we're conservatives or

we want to save the country or patriots

or something you don't want them

part of a club as soon as you make them

part of a club

then anybody who does something bad in

the club

messes up the whole thing right so as

soon as you say

it's a club any one bad apple in that

club ruins the whole club in terms of

political opinion

so just don't bring a club i mean an

organization club you can

you know the other club probably a bad

idea too

so you think lawyers are pretty good at

arguing right you'd say that

maybe artists are not good at it but

lawyers are real good at it and

i hear a lawyer ross garber who is

literally a

an impeachment lawyer and he teaches at

tulane law school so a very qualified

guy

in the law and he tweeted this to me he

said i have done election investigations

mostly on behalf of republicans so he's

saying that he's

sort of unbiased here and then he and he

said i have seen

lots of misconduct and irregularities so

here's a person who's experienced

and he knows that elections can have

lots of conduct and irregularities

because he's seen it himself

so far so good and he said i expressed

concern

heading into this election even better

he's not only seen a lot of fraud

in elections but he warned us about this

election so far so good

and then he said but i have not seen

evidence of potentially result

changing problems and then he referred

to my analogy about the no melted ice

cream

does that seem like a good argument

is that a world-class lawyer argument

there

because i'm pretty sure there are a lot

of things in this world

that i haven't seen that actually

happened

for example suppose you were to witness

a murder by

gunfire and you saw the person take out

the gun aim it at the victim

pull the trigger bang and then the

victim gets a hole in their body and

they go ah

and they die and that's what that's what

you you witnessed

can you say that you witnessed

the person with the gun shooting the

victim

who the bullet entered and died

can you say you saw that no

because you can't see the bullet right

you saw the gun go off

and you know what guns do you saw the

person with a bullet hole

and you logically connected them

but did you see it no because if you

can't see the bullet

you don't know the bullet actually came

out of the gun

you don't know if somebody behind him

shot him now of course if you do the

ballistics you'll find out

but in terms of witnessing there are a

lot of things we don't see

such as actually watching the bullet

that you know happened

because you heard the gun go off you saw

it where it's aimed you saw the result

you don't have to see it all you don't

have to see every bit of it

so likewise the uh here's a guy

who has seen enough election fraud

personally that he knows

it can happen so he knows it can happen

because he's seen a lot of it

and he knows that the incentive to do it

this election was sky high

that's all you need to know it can be

done

which he confirms because he's seen a

lot of it and the

and the motivation was sky high you

don't need to see the bullet

to know that it happened i think his

argument was

poor um

and i got a few other things that i

don't think are interesting enough to

talk about so i won't

and that my friends

is the end of coffee with scott adams

for today i think it's

maybe the best one i've done so far

today don't you think

all right i'm just going to look at your

comments for a moment because i've been

looking at my notes

oh yes the space force

how did i skip that one the space force

has decided that the name

for their uh fighters

the name for their military people will

be guardians

they'll be called guardians what do you

think of that

i don't like it at all

i wanted to like it but i don't

number one it reminds you of the you

know movie guardians of the galaxy

so automatically it feels silly because

you know there's a

talking raccoon in that movie and so

guardians of the universe makes that's

what i think of

and so it makes it seem less serious so

that's not good

but here's the other part the problem

for me

is that they're in heaven meaning that

they're in space

so they're they're sort of up there like

like god basically you know in an

analogy

sense and there's something about the

word guardian

that feels religious

guardian doesn't sound military and

maybe that's what they wanted

but guardian doesn't really sound like

the right word

guardian feels like a cult

i guess that's what it is i just

realized that that's what it is the word

guardian doesn't sound like a military

term it sounds like a cult

in in nexium the uh

the cult we've been talking about what

was the name they had for

uh or at least in the the subpart of

nexium where

uh keith randiri had his his uh

uh let's say his disciples i don't know

lovers disciples um so he was called

vanguard so in the context of

an actual alleged cult

uh the name that they used for their

leader was a vanguard

guardian feels like that word doesn't it

it feels just a little bit more like a

cult

than it does like a military thing so

that's my opinion um i don't think it's

important

i think any name you put on it's gonna

be fine and

uh somebody says vanguard yeah

yeah i understand that a guardian is one

who guards

and you know it's not that it's not

technically

accurate enough i don't have any better

ideas

so i'm not i don't think it's a big deal

that's all i got for now and i will talk

to you

tomorrow all right all you

youtubers i'm still here for you for a

moment

um

she should have gone with starch

startership at troopers

troopers wouldn't be bad

um orbiteers the orbiteers

that's not bad tara keepers what's that

mean

that's right i love you the most on

periscope it's true

space force tubins i don't think that's

going to catch on

did they ever admit about lying about

masks they did yeah

fouchy did in a sense in a sense because

they admitted there was a shortage

problem um have i seen stand-up math's

channel no

where's my cat i don't know she needs to

he needs to give me some love all right

that's all for now and i will talk to

you