Episode 1000 Scott Adams: Twitter Fact Checking, Police Versus Suspects, Ballot Harvesting

My shirt's all wrinkly. Hey, everybody, come on in here. You found it. You found the place with all this stuff happening, the good stuff. And it's gonna be time for the simultaneous sip. Yeah, it's gonna be a good one this morning. And all it takes is a cup of mugger glass, a tanker jalser stain, a canteen jugger fl. A vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. And join me now for the un. The dopamine hit of the day. Wait, I forgot my own. I forgot my own introduction. Join me now for the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better, including the damn pandemic. It's called the simultaneous hip. Happens now. Go. Mmm. Ah, yes. I can feel the freedom and the justice breaking out everywhere. So is it my imagination? I want to see if anybody. Have you noticed this? Have you noticed that a lot of people are tweeting about me lately? Have you noticed that there's something happening? You know, there's sort of a. It feels like the energy of the universe is changing somehow. Well, for some reason, every time I wake up now, somebody's retweeting either an interview I did some time ago or a book I wrote or a chapter from my book. There's something happening in the last 30 days or so. It's just going crazy. I'm trying to figure out if this is some kind of, I don't know, a shift in the zeitgeist or something. Somebody says you shouldn't impersonate Biden. It's contagious. Are there more people doing that? Unparalleled pleasure. Thank you. I forgot my own opening saying now, if you couldn't tell, I overslept, meaning that I'm a little bit unprepared and I have not had the requisite amount of coffee. But will that stop us from having an incredible, incredible periscope? No. No, it won't. And let's jump into it. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the CDC guidelines say that we should stay six feet away from other people. Can you fact check me on that? Six feet away from other people, Am I right? But why is it that Joe Biden says that he needs to stay 12ft away from people? Has the CDC given special guidance to Joe Biden that 6ft is just for the COVID But we're gonna. We're gonna throw on another six feet just for the sniffing, because I haven't heard anybody else say 12ft. And then I saw that interview with Dana Bash. And sure enough, he was 12ft away. And I thought, I don't know. Is that 12ft just for Joe Biden. Oh, congratulations on episode one. Thousand people are telling me, well, apparently this is my 1,000th episode. How about that? I think I've probably done more by wheeling. I think we only labeled them. Labeled them a thousand of them. A thousand. Really? I've done this a thousand times. Does that seem possible? Does it seem even possible that I've done this a thousand times? Wow. All right, so let's talk about the Twitter fact checking and the vote harvesting. So rarely do you get a situation where there are two interesting topics and they intersect. So here we have the interesting topic of the vote harvesting and the cheating with the mail in votes. Allegedly. Is it true or is it not true? That's what we'll talk about. And then you have separately the question of Twitter becoming the fact checker for facts exactly like this one, to find out what's true and what could make this story more interesting. If you had heard that Twitter has a new fact checking feature, what could make that the most interesting story in the world? Well, obviously the first time you ever hear about it in action, the first time you know that it's been used is against President Trump. All right, so already you've taken something that was an interesting story, huh? Twitter's going to be doing some fact checking. I wonder how that's going to work, because how do they decide what's a fact and what's not? So it's already interesting, and then they decide. I don't know how many other fact checks they've done, but the first time we've heard of it happens to be the President of the United States. But it gets better. It's not just the President of the United States. He's actually talking about a topic that will determine the fate of the Republic, which is whether our voting system is secure and fair. So it's like the biggest thing in the world in terms of stuff you should be talking about. I mean, we really, the public, needs to grapple with this question. We don't know what's true, we don't know what's not. But we need to grapple with the question. Now, here's the thing. The President's made this claim that mail in votes are subject to massive fraud. My understanding is that the reason that it was given the fact checking label, it wasn't removed. They just label it with a link so you can go see what their version of the truth is. And so They've labeled this thing and do you think there's any chance the president's wrong about this? Because what are the odds there's no cheating with mail in ballots. Now I'm kind of really confused by it because this is a question of how much cheating, because is there anyone on the planet who could stand here and tell you to your face, you know, there's never been a problem with a mail in ballot. There's never been one case in which somebody filled one out for an elderly person. It's never happened. There's never been a case where somebody picked one up to help you deliver it and then when they saw that you're a certain demographic group decided to just throw it away because in all likelihood you voted for the other candidate, the one they don't want to win. I wonder if that's ever happened. Do you think anybody's ever thrown away one mail invalid ballot that somebody else had given them to deliver? Do you think that's ever happened even once? Well, of course. I mean, of course it's happened at least once. And all the millions and millions of people now, of course happening just once wouldn't change the election in all likelihood if just one vote got changed that one time with that one mail in ballot. But how many votes do you need to change before it's a true statement that mail in ballots have a little extra risk? Would three be enough? Maybe not. Would 3,000 be enough? Let's say we could know. And of course there's no way to know this, but let's say we could know for sure. Just pick a number that 3,000 votes had been changed across the entire country in a national election. Maybe they're spread out in different ways, but 3,000 of them, would that be a problem? Maybe, maybe not. It depends entirely where they are. Do they change the election or not? Well, how about 3 million? How about 300,000? How about 30,000? How about 5,000? But they're in exactly the swing state. How in the world could you possibly judge it not true that there would be cheating with mail ins? Let me tell you how I would do it. Here's how I would do it. If I were a big old cheater, if I were going to break the law, it would go like this. I would just organize my neighborhood and say, look, we got some people. We're going to help all you elderly avoid the COVID and we're going to take your mail in ballots. So we'll be knocking on your door and we'll pick up your ballots and then I would just throw away all the ballots from people that I could statistically assume were going to vote the way I don't want them to vote, Just throw them away. That's it. Can you imagine an easier way to cheat? Here these things in my hand, instead of carrying them over to the mailbox while nobody is looking, I'll carry them over to the dumpster where nobody's looking. Did I get away with it? Can I get away with this crime? Carry a bag of garbage to the dumpster? How often do people get arrested for carrying a bag of garbage to the dumpster? It's sort of the perfect crime. So for Twitter to fact check that as false, I think I need a little more information about that. Don't you think? Don't you think you need a little more information about that? Because if somebody has a counter argument that such an obvious way to cheat would not be used, when in fact, we have historical examples where cheating happens pretty much whenever you can. It happens all the time. So what would be the only way to make this story more interesting? Well, suppose, hypothetically, suppose that the person in charge of Twitter's, let's say the head of site integrity, suppose he had a history of tweeting anti Trump things, because that's the only way this story could be more interesting. And certainly Twitter would never have in charge of their head of site integrity, the person in charge of fact checking. They certainly would not put in charge of that somebody who had a documented history of tweeting anti Trump stuff, would they? I mean, they wouldn't do that, would they? Okay, they did that. Apparently. Now, I don't know if this is true. So let's, let's put a question mark on the fact checking of this. But allegedly there's a gentleman named Yoel Roth who, according to Fox News, he boasts, you could tell what news. You can tell which news I'm reading by the words they use to describe the people in the news. So they say he boasts. I don't know if he's boasting, but he says. Let's just say he says, we won't say he's boasting that he's in charge of developing and enforcing Twitter rules. Boasting. Don't you love the fact that the news will just put in those little. Those little words that have just a little flavor of bias on them? No, he doesn't simply state that he is in charge of developing and enforcing Twitter's rules. If you read it on the Fox News site, he's boasting of it. Do people boast about their job? I think you just say what your job is most of the time. I mean, it's not like he's not the governor. I believe he's just saying his job, which everybody does. He's not boasting. All right, so I'll start by defending him from that claim that he's boasting. So here are some of the things that Mr. Roth has said about Trump. Where are the quotes? Oh, he's previously referred to Trump and his team as, quote, actual Nazis. Actual Nazis. Okay. So there's a fair and balanced. Fair and balanced kind of a guy. He's also tweeted, quote, we fly over those states that voted for a racist tangerine for a reason. So now not only does he think that Trump is a racist tangerine, but. The entire middle of the country is worthless. He's in charge of your fact checking. Allegedly. I'm not even sure it's even the right guy. Or he's, you know, maybe. Maybe he's got a boss who's really in charge, who knows, you know, So I wouldn't, I wouldn't even assume that that's just totally his responsibility or anything, but that's the news that we're dealing with. So he couldn't. He couldn't possibly be a worse choice. Goody. So I'm sure he's good at his job. I'm not questioning whether he knows how to do his Twitter job, but if you were trying to build a credible system for fact checking, you probably wouldn't want the guy who called half of the people of the country racist and said the middle of the country is worthless. Could this be better? Come on, come on. This story could not be more perfectly crafted for our entertainment. It really couldn't. This is just as perfect as it could be. So just to make it better, in my mind, when I heard about the fact checking on the President's tweet, in my mind, there was a little recording that started playing. And the recording was going to bug me forever until the real world served it up. And within hours, within hours, the real world served up the little recording that was in my head. I swear, I'm living in a simulation. And here's what it looked like. It looked like it looked like Joel Pollack at Breitbart writing an extended article about all the people in the media and on Twitter who have referred to the fine people hoax as real. In other words, calling out all the people who need to be fact checked for the fine people Hoax. That was exactly the little recording that was going in my head, which was, hey, if Twitter is going to fact check, I got a fact for them. I got a fact to run past them. Hey, hey, let's run one fact past them. Let's see what they think about that fine people hoax. Let's see if we can get a little label on that. Now, of course, you can see where this is going. The fine people hoax is clearly fake news. So clearly that needs a fact check. All you have to do is link to the transcript. It doesn't even require linking to a different article. You could literally just link to the transcript, fact check it. So here's the question. The next time somebody on CNN or otherwise, who is a blue checker, let's say, mentions the fine people hoax, the hoax being that the President called neo Nazis fine people, which is the opposite of what happened, will that get fact checked? And if it doesn't, what are people going to do? What would you do? What would I do? What would anybody do if we see that come out of another blue check's mouth and doesn't get fact checked? But how about this? Let's make it more interesting. You ready? What if it does? You didn't see that coming, did you? What if it does get fact checked? I mean, just think about it. What if they actually fact checked it and said, yeah, the fine people hoax is not a fact. Here's the transcript. What if they did? Because it's not impossible, is it? Now, I don't think that they're going to go back in time and relabel tweets that have already happened. But we're just waiting now because somebody's going to tweet that hoax. They always do. I mean, it's one of the most commonly tweeted hoax on all the Internet. So what's going to happen? Because I think you and I will point it out. Should it happen again, I'm pretty sure that you or I, or maybe some combination of us will point it out to Twitter as something that maybe needs that little label. So I think you can all see where this is going, which is there's just no way that this could be enforced because Twitter wouldn't be able to do anything but slap liar labels on pretty much everything. So you pretty much either have to do none or all of it. But it's hard to do some. And if they try to do some and they don't do it in a way that everybody thinks is unbiased, what's going to happen? What's going to happen. Well, that is why this is so darn interesting. Well, the President is threatening that there will be some kind of antitrust action. And I wonder to myself, I wonder if, I wonder if that would work because there are competing social media platforms. You could argue that as long as there's Facebook and Twitter, people have a way to get their message out. They're not completely closed off. So it'd be an interesting court case. Just the existence of competition. Is that enough or does it have to be the right kind? Exactly. So we might see. It seems to me that on this question that they fact checked about the cheating with the mail in votes. Don't you sense kind of a loser attitude there from the gop? I feel as though the Republicans are just taking a sort of a loser position on this mail in votes. And what I mean by that is who says only the Democrats can cheat? Is there some law that says if we do mail in votes, only the Democrats are allowed to cheat? Is that some kind of law I don't know about? Because it seems to me that the GOP is pretty darn good at doing stuff like that. Historically. Now we're talking about the local people, not the, not the federal people, but at the local level. Do you think that the Democrats can out cheat the Republicans? I say game on. If you're going to do mail in votes, if mail in votes are the thing, the Republicans should mobilize the entire Republican base to do Bella harvesting. Now, not illegally. That would be against the law. They should not illegally do any ballot harvesting with any shenanigans, no malarkey. But on the other hand, they can't police everything. I mean, it's not like the, it's not like the President could watch every person in every, every precinct pick up, pick up the ballots. You can't police everything. But if you feel more comfortable if the Republicans are picking up the ballots than if the Democrats not saying what anybody's going to do with these ballots, that part's unknown. But are the GOP going to just let the Democrats play this game? Because it feels like if mail in ballots are going to be the standard, the GOP is going to wade in pretty hard to cheat like crazy. So I feel like the, the Republicans are maybe playing this wrong. It could be that you're not allowed to say in public, hey, let's cheat as much as the other side. And I'm certainly not saying that either. Just to be clear. I am not suggesting that anybody cheat in an election. That would be very bad. And you should go to jail if you get caught cheating in an election. So don't do that. All I'm saying is the opportunity to cheat is exactly the same size for both parties. It could be that the best way to make mail in votes go away if you wanted to, if you wanted to just strategically would be to embrace it. What would the Democrats think about mail in votes tomorrow? If today every Republican in the state said, hey, you know, guys, hey, you're right, you're right, let's go with the mail in votes. How about that? You know, we've decided, we've looked into it. You're right. There's no way you could ever cheat with these mail in votes. So you've won the argument. We've decided that we will go with your, your process and we'll just do mail in votes because they're so darn fair. Okay, Democrats, are you, are you okay with that? You okay with that? Good. Let's go. Because I think the day that the Republicans embraced mail in voting, it would be over, wouldn't it? I think it would be over. So anyway, so those are fun stories. What else we got going on here? I'm going to take a, a very unpopular opinion. Are you ready for this? You come here for the unpopular opinions. And when I say it's unpopular, I mean you won't like it on the left, you probably won't like it on the right. It goes like this. We're all watching this like disgusting story of the. Was it Minnesota? The police officer who put his knee on the neck of the African American gentleman and the person who was on the ground, the suspect who was under police control was complaining that he couldn't breathe. He was in pain and he just died. The guy just kept his knee on the guy's neck and he just died while people were just standing there. Now, in terms of the horribleness of this story, that's sort of a 10, you know, that's a 10 and a 10 for horribleness. But I would like to send a message to my African American fellow fellow that seems racist. Not racist, that seems sexist. I would not say fellow citizens because that's sexist. Right. What's the term that would replace fellow citizens? That would be non sexist. Well, anyway, whatever that term is to my African American citizens, my teammates, people on my side, I say I'm horrified by this, but here's one thing you need to know. White people want to kill that guy. The cop, not the suspect. White people are not happy with that. White cop do you know what that white cop did to my brand? Like to me personally? He messed up my brand. That's a white cop. That made me, as a white citizen look like a fucking idiot. Look like. How did that make you feel? If you happen to be, let's say, a white male, just to keep it as specific as possible. So this cop who's on this video doing this horrible thing is a white adult male. If you are also an adult white male, how the fuck do you feel about that? Right? So if the black citizens of this country are, let's say, enraged by that, first of all, yeah, yeah, you should be. Secondly, the one thing you can trust is that white men are going to fry this motherfucker. He's gonna get fried because he didn't help us. You know, he's not on my side. This guy. This guy's gonna get fucking fried by white people. Just give us a minute, okay? Just take a pause. My. My black friends, you know, my African American citizens. You're pissed we are too, right? He didn't help me. He's not making my life any better. So just give a little time. Let the system work. I'm pretty sure white people are going to fry this guy one way or the other. You know, fry beating. There'll be consequences, not necessarily execution, but I think I'd let the system go with this one. Because if you think you can find a white person who thinks it's okay to, like. I don't just kill a guy who's in custody and not in any danger of hurting anybody. Good luck. You're not going to find any white people who agree with that. How about we just be on the same fucking side for a change? Can't we do that? Can't we be on the same side? I mean, really, seriously, who is on the other fucking side of this? Nobody. If there was ever. If ever there was a cause that should bring us together, it should be this one. Now, you want the controversial part. The next part you might not like as much. It goes like this. There is some report that he resisted arrest, which is a separate question from what happened after he was controlled by the cops. Once he was completely controlled, there is no excuse for what happened. And nothing I say will change that. No excuse for what happened. But I'm just going to tell you my personal opinion. We don't know if you resisted arrest. That's just part of the story. And you can't really trust anything at this point. But I'm going to give my personal opinion. I no longer have empathy for anybody who resists arrest. That's it. People who resist arrest, I just don't have any empathy for them. Now, in this case, I don't know if this guy did. That's reported. So I think we should wait and see. I assume the way it looked, the police looked like they had an attitude, meaning there was a little extra. It looked like the cop who had his knee on the guy's neck may have had some prior situation that made that seem more right to him than it should have. So I'm going to go on record and say, anybody who resists arrest and then gets killed, I don't care. I just don't care. I just don't fucking care about anybody who gets killed resisting arrest. And I'm not going to change that opinion. If you resist arrest and you get killed, don't fucking complain to me. I don't care how nice you were the day before. I don't care how good your grades were. I don't care how much your family loves you. It's a tragedy. And I'm not even talking about this specific latest situation. I'm generalizing, just generalizing. If you resist arrest and you get killed, don't look to me for sympathy at all. Not at all. If you can't fucking get through an arrest without fighting the police and getting yourself killed, I mean, that's just can't be my problem. It just can't be my problem. Right? That's your problem. You got fucking killed because you resisted arrest. That said, once the guy was under control, the police had no. There's just no excuse for what we saw in video. Now, it could be. I'll give you this general caution. Here's a general caution. Even videotape that says clear as this one, where you say to yourself, scott, there's not really any doubt what's happening in that videotape. Just remember, you've seen a lot of videotape in which you also thought there was no doubt what was happening on the video, only to learn that it was completely misleading. Now, I can't imagine how this would be misleading. I mean, again, it looked pretty clear. But remember, if this goes to court, it probably will. You could learn anything. I mean, you could be amazingly surprised about what you learn about this situation. But that said, the video seems pretty clear. I'd be surprised. All right. Somebody says, so you're a bootlicker. I'm sure that makes complete sense to whoever I'm blocking. A bootlicker. There is such a thing as Wrongful imprisonment. Sure. Cops are brutal to resistors regardless of skin color. We think that is true. But, you know, why is it, do we have video of police killing white suspects by just putting their. Putting their knee on their neck? Well, I'm learning by text that neck restraints are authorized by, by the police when suspects resist arrested too, that will be the cop's defense of the trial, especially if the on scene commander authorized it. So there can be a situation in which a necrostate would be authorized. We don't know the details of this case, but that could be the defense that a necrostrate would be authorized if there was some resisting arrest that went on. So that's a good point. So to my earlier point, you might be amazed when inevitably there will be a trial. I'm sure you might be amazed that this isn't quite exactly what you thought it was. All right. Somebody says, is that a real copy? I think so. Somebody says the Karen story in the park changed quite a bit. Did it? You know, I said this last night, but I'll say it again. The African American man who is the bird watcher in the park with that Karen situation and the dog. You all know the story. I just love that guy's, that guy's attitude that she was punished too much for the situation. That is such, and that is such a productive, good citizen, you know, kind of framing of that. And I would like, and I suggested this last night, I think that the Christian Cooper, a perfect ending to the story. I'm not saying he should do it because it's his life. He can do whatever he wants. But a perfect way to put a bow on this to make the world a better place is instead of just leaving it with this negative taste in their mouths, you could make the world a better place. And I feel like Christian Cooper might be the kind of guy who gets this and could make this happen. Just call the woman's employer and say, look, I think she needs a second chance. And let's not make this a life ending situation. I mean, he could change her life, the direction of her life with a phone call. And I hope he's. I hope he's. He's inspired to do that. All right? I doubt it, but I wish he would. All right. The officer in question committed career suicide. He certainly did. Neck restraints seem like torture. Yeah. I don't even understand the neck restraint because if you've got somebody on the ground and presumably by then he was handcuffed, and if he wasn't already handcuffed, why not. So if somebody's on your back and you're handcuffed behind your back, how in the world are you at risk? Because you can't get up and you can't use your hands. So there's a lot of explaining to do. I could see why somebody would use a neck restraint if it was still the heat of the moment. Like if that's the first thing you did to get control of somebody, I could see that. But once you had control of them and you had other officers around, isn't he immediately handcuffed behind his back? And then you have all the control you need. So I guess we have lots of questions about it. All right, that's all I got for now. Yes, he already denounced the firing. The. The Audubon bird watching guy did. And I thought that that was. That was just good being a good citizen. So I appreciated that. All right, that's all I got for now. And I will see you tonight.