et coronavirus. And they determined, and I won't tell you the answer yet, but what do you think? What do you think was the result? Did the people who wore the masks more often get fewer infections or more of them or the same? In the comments, tell me what you think.

It turned out, I see somebody says the same. No difference. No effect. No less likely to get sick. Same. No difference. So most of you have not seen this survey obviously. Same, blah blah blah. Fewer. Here's the answer. Gigantic difference. Which way did it go? There was a doubling. So one of those conditions, either wearing a mask or not wearing masks, one of those two conditions doubled your risk of getting an infection. Doubled. All right, so we're not talking about a small difference. Doubled.

Which was it? Was it the people who wore the masks who were safer, or was it the people who didn't wear masks who were safer? What do you think? Because there are a lot of people who think the masks are causing problems, right? The answer is, according to the Ipsos Axios poll, that people who did not regularly wear masks had twice the infections. The people who didn't wear masks were twice as likely to be infected based on self-reporting. Right now, thank you.

In the comments somebody says this is not a gold standard of reporting or a gold standard study. No, it's not even a study. It's more like a poll. I would call it a poll, not a study. So this does not pass scientific rigor. Can we all agree on that? There's nobody who thinks that this passes any kind of scientific gold standard, right?

So the fact that there's this one survey that does show a really big difference, though here's where I would be more skeptical. If the mask difference showed a difference of say 10 or 20 percent, let's say hypothetically, I'd say to myself, I don't know that you can measure that really. Ten to twenty percent sounds like, I don't know, that's too small of a hypothetical difference to be sure there weren't other variables in there mucking up your result. So ten to twenty percent I would have said that doesn't tell us anything.

But what if it's double? Well, you know, let's just say hypothetically, let's say the polling was done well. It's still not a scientific study. It's not a gold standard controlled anything. But double? All right. When I do a Twitter poll I know it's highly unscientific. It's as unscientific as you can get because you know my followers are not even close to any kind of a random sample. And still if I run a Twitter poll and the results are ten to one in one direction, I still think it means something. It just isn't scientific.

But if it's, you know, 50-50, obviously it means nothing. I don't know. I would say this is not conclusive or close to it, but it certainly agrees with my opinion. And the best way to know that something is true is if it agrees with your prior opinion. Now that's the standard I use. So this agrees with what I already thought to be true, which is masks are more likely to work than not.

One of the obvious problems with this is that people don't wear masks for the same reasons and risks are different. And you know one of the reasons you might wear masks a lot is because you perceive a risk, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. So there's a million problems wrong with the poll. But I'll bet it will hold up.

If I had to bet, let me put it into money. If somebody said to you, Scott, you can't avoid making this bet. We'll kill you if you don't participate. So you have to participate and you have to put all of your money on whether masks made a difference or they didn't. I would bet all of my money that it made a difference. I bet all of it.

Now this is under the assumption that I had to bet one way or the other. I would prefer not betting because I'm not that confident. You know, I'd need something like 99 percent confidence to bet everything I have. But in this hypothetical where I had to bet, yeah, I would bet that they work.

Now, am I unbiased? Nope. Because I have committed to a position early on in the pandemic. Do you remember early on when the experts were saying masks don't work? And I believe, and by the way I would love a fact check on this if there's anybody who can give me a fact check, I believe but I can't confirm it yet that I'm the first public figure to call on Fauci, et cetera, saying that masks don't work.

Now given that I've made such a public commitment to that view that masks almost certainly work, this was my view early on before we had data, it just seems logically that they would. Given that I made that commitment, I am no longer able to be objective when I look at, say, a result like this poll. Because I want it to agree with me, right?

Who doesn't want to be right on their birthday? Everybody wants to be right, especially on their birthday. So you should not take me as a credible source when I tell you, hey, this poll looks pretty credible. Because I want it to be true. I want it to be true because that makes me feel good and me look good. So I have no credibility on this question. You get that, right?

That doesn't mean I'm wrong. I actually think I'm right. But in terms of you judging my credibility on this question, it should be zero. Because I've set up the perfect condition for cognitive dissonance. I set myself up for that by taking a public stand and putting my reputation behind it. And it's a big question, right? It's not a trivial question. If it were trivial I'd say, ah, who cares. But it's big. People may have lived or died, literally lived or died, on the question of whether they believed masks worked or didn't. May have. Right? That's unclear at this point.

So yeah, you should not believe me on that topic. But I'll report what I see on the topic. I will report it if it says masks don't work. If there's a big study that disagrees with me, I'm not going to like it, but I promise you I'll report it. So you've heard it. That's the best I can do.

You know, I've been reading a lot about China lately. You got a fentanyl problem, a Uyghur genocide problem, they've got a stealing IP problem, maybe not too forthcoming on the virus. And you know when you put it all together, I'm starting to think that China doesn't have our best interests in mind. All right, moving on.

CNN reports that I guess now we have a recording of a 2019 phone call in which Rudy Giuliani was, according to the CNN headline, this is how they said it, Rudy Giuliani cajoled and pressured Ukraine to investigate baseless conspiracies about Biden.

Now the reporting on this is very interesting because it suggests that CNN knows how investigations turn out before they're started. Is this a pattern? Well, yes it is. It is. Because it turns out that CNN has done this with the election audits. CNN is already reporting the result of the audit that didn't happen yet, or at least it's not complete yet. This is really happening right in front of you. CNN is telling you the outcome of an audit before the audit's over. And people are just accepting that. They're accepting it as if that makes any sense.

Now it would certainly be fair for them to say, based on everything we've seen and reported, we're not expecting that the audit will come up with any surprises. That's fair. That's fair. Completely fair. Based on everything we've seen and reported so far, we have no reason to believe that the audit will kick up some surprises. I would say that's fine.

But when you say it's baseless, you're kind of suggesting you know how it's going to turn out. And you don't. They did, I would say, similar things with Russia and collusion. There was obviously the Mueller investigation was ongoing, but it seems to me that CNN reported it as a fact all along before it was done. And now this Ukraine investigation that never happened, but somehow CNN knows what the result would be for the investigation that never happened.

So these are three clear, I think clear, examples of where CNN knew the result of an investigation before the investigation. How did they even remain as a TV network? They are so far into ridiculousness now.

Let me ask you this. Am I biased in favor of Fox News, or is it true that Fox News doesn't do this? Now I'm not saying that Fox News doesn't do their own stuff you can criticize, right? So we're not saying Fox News good, CNN bad. That's not what I'm saying. But I'm saying this specific trick where they know the outcome of something before the end, isn't that only CNN? I don't know if MSNBC does it, but I can't remember any time that Fox News ha