Episode 1761 Scott Adams: Well, It Turns Out Everything You Suspected Was True. Let's Talk About It
Episode Stats
Summary
Coffee with Scott Adams. Today's episode features an update on my COVID quarantine, a Spider-Man update, and a discussion about hate speech and the future of the free speech debate. Plus, a special guest appearance from a very special guest!
Transcript
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Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the Highlight of Civilization.
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It's called Coffee with Scott Adams, and may I say that this will be the best one of all time.
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We're going to do the simultaneous sip first, and then let me tell you, it's going to go skyrocketing after that.
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And all you need to get this going is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or a chalice or a canteen jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind.
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And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine to the day, the thing that puts a tingle on the back of your neck.
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It's called the simultaneous sip, and a lot of simultaneous things are going to happen right now.
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So here's an update on my COVID quarantine situation.
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So Saturday was my first symptoms, and I tested positive with the home test.
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And I feel not just 100% better, but better than I've ever been.
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I realized the other day, because I had a little online side conversation, that some part of long COVID could be confirmation bias.
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You think you're going to have these lasting symptoms, then anything that ever happens to you for the next 10 years, you say, well, it's because of the COVID.
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You're basically going to imagine yourself into every symptom you were going to have anyway, being long COVID.
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Now, knowing that that's the case, what would be the defense?
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And I've employed what I call the Spider-Man reframe.
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Now, I don't know if this will work yet, but it seems to be working so far.
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And so instead of looking for whatever, you know, negative health consequences I might have in the future and saying, well, I think there's my long COVID kicking in.
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I'm going to look for anything that looks like things are going a little extra well for me.
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And I'm going to say, I think that's from the COVID.
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For example, just today, I was thinking, is it just me or do I look a little extra sexy today?
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Probably a lot of you noticed as soon as you signed on.
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Now, some people are going to get the, you know, the low energy and the, I don't know, all kinds of bad things, supposedly.
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They're creating the wrong future for themselves in this simulation.
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So, if, as we go on, it seems to you that I'm smarter, better adjusted, happier, or any of those things, it's not your imagination.
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Have you noticed that whoever it is that's in control of the truth would love to also limit hate speech?
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Because if I just said to you, hey, maybe we should have less hate speech, and that's the only variable, yeah, less hate speech.
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Your first instinct might be, hey, I'd like a little less hate speech.
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But what if somebody else is in charge of deciding what that hate speech is?
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Well, then suddenly it's the worst thing in the world.
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So, Rasmussen did a little poll here and said, found out that 58% of Democrats say the federal government should take action to suppress online hate speech.
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But that view is shared by only 31% of Republicans and voters not affiliated with either major party.
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So, 58% of Democrats want the federal government to do more about hate speech.
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Now, Democrats are also the ones who sort of are in charge of the government, or a lot of it.
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So, wouldn't this be the worst thing in the world?
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You just can't have these two things at the same time.
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Well, maybe you just need free speech, and that's the end of that conversation.
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And also, I saw a tweet by the Rasmussen account, which you should be following, Rasmussen Reports.
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You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.
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And I thought to myself, that needs to be updated a little bit.
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It was probably pretty clever back when Lincoln said it, and I imagine if I'd been there, I would have said, whoa, well said, well said, Abe.
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So, I'll give it to you again, see if you can hear it.
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Quote, you can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.
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That's the most important part, which matters today.
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You only need to fool half of the people all the time.
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And unfortunately, you can do that all the time.
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I feel it like this is something we can agree on.
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And although we all have completely different opinions all over the board, can we agree that the half that's wrong is the half that we're not in?
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If I were to write an essay on what is the one problem that's with this country, and maybe, yay, the world.
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Now, I know they think the same thing, but the difference is they're wrong.
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If you think about how other people act, well, it's just natural.
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Janet Yellen, Treasury Secretary, she admits that maybe she was wrong about this whole inflation thing.
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So, I thought it was a little bit more transitory than it was.
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I just love the fact that her last name is Yellen.
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Do you think that caused her to have to modify her behavior at all at any point in her life?
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I don't know if that's her born name or if that's a married name.
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But I hate to be a woman in a powerful position and have the last name of Yellen.
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But I was just thinking, you know, don't women always say,
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I don't have personal experience here, but correct me if I'm wrong,
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but don't women always say that, you know, they're judged more harshly if they're tough in business?
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She's at the top of her game in business, Treasury Secretary, doing pretty well.
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Yellen, I wonder if she had to be extra soft and she still scared people.
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I wouldn't want to go to a boss's office if her name was Yellen.
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Anyway, she says that she was wrong about this inflation thing.
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How many of you think she was wrong and how many of you think she was lying and knew it?
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I guess you'd have to know it if you were lying.
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Because the other possibility is that she's confessing that she's thoroughly incompetent at her job.
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And I think we should at least give her that benefit of a doubt.
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If she's saying, no, I'm not lying, I'm just really, really bad at my job and should never be in this position, maybe we should believe her.
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Now, the important part about this is that it's the New York Times.
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So New York Times is the paper of record, blah, blah, blah.
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So I'm not going to get into an argument too much about what's true or not.
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So New York Times had an article that says basically that what we know now is that masks do work, but mandates don't.
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Meaning that masks work, except that when you wear them, they don't do anything that you hoped would happen when you wear them.
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Now, I'm wondering if this is sort of the difference between the engineer and the politician or something.
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Let me ask you a question to see where your brain is at, all right?
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If you took a screen off a screen door, and then you took a bucket of water, and you poured it through the screen,
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would the screen door, you know, an actual screen from your door, would it stop the water?
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Let's say that was your intention, was to stop the water.
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Well, so, I guess it depends how much of an engineer you are.
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And I mean that in the best possible sense, because I always have the highest regard for the way engineers think.
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Because it's more the practical way of thinking.
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When I imagine pouring water through a screen, if you can touch the screen right after you poured the water,
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But if you could argue that it worked, or that you should put screens on your roof instead of shingles,
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So, I think when they did studies that say masks work,
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it did create some friction, but not enough to make a difference.
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And then the article hypothesizes that it's because people were bad at wearing their masks.
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Maybe it doesn't matter what you say about masks.
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If people go home and just take them off and do whatever the hell they want to do.
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Especially with their neighbors and their friends.
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Because I think there was such massive non-social distancing
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that there's nothing you could have done with masks that you would have noticed in the data.
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But at least the New York Times has said that you can't...
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that's not the standard for knowing if something worked.
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You can't just sort of look at two places or even two things that you think are similar
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And there are too many variables in there, etc.
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But, if you're making a social policy that's affecting a lot of people,
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and there's not enough of a positive impact that you can even identify it,
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Because freedom has to be the tiebreaker, right?
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If you can't tell if it makes a difference overall,
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Anyway, so I think you could say that masks worked in some minor way
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You know, do you ever think that you live in a simulation
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and it's designed just to F with you, personally?
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For about three years now, or whatever it's been,
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I've been trying to surf this pandemic and play it right.
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So, I was never worried about surfaces too much.
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But, you know, the fog of war, I played it that way.
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Even though I, you know, over, I exaggerated the risk in my mind,
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And it was, you know, just a few weeks, no big deal.
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But then as we learned, you know, more and more about it,
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I thought, okay, my best bet is to let other people get the vaccination first
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and I'd wait as long as I can without getting the virus
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before I get the vaccination, before I even decide.
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And then I decided I wanted it because I wanted to travel, basically.
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Now, getting the vaccination in my case never made any difference,
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They gave me a risk of a vaccination, however small.
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But I can tell at this point, because I actually didn't contract it
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and it's unlikely that the vaccination would have stopped me from contracting it,
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that I got the, that I took the risk of the vaccination.
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It just means that when you buy insurance, you don't always catch on fire.
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So if you think of it as an insurance policy, it wasn't wrong.
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As somebody says, the key thing here is it was my choice the whole time.
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Then I decided to not get the second set of boosters.
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And I said to myself, oh, now this Omicron's coming along.
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The Delta and the Alpha are behind us, I think.
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because apparently the vaccination doesn't do much for Omicron.
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And like, just yesterday, I said to myself, finally, finally,
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it's been a long, you know, long search through the swamp,
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Now I've got natural immunity to the thing that's the one.
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of the ultimate immunity in the perfect timing,
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allow me to say, fuck you, fuck me, and fuck all of us.
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Because that was the one thing that we were hoping for.
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is that if you get this fucking thing once, you're done.
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But now, it turns out, yes, if you haven't heard this,
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this is Bloomberg, I just tweeted it yesterday,
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Apparently, there are so many different Omicron variants
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that getting one of them gives you no protection from its cousin.
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And you're not likely to get the same one you got again.
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I mean, you might have some protection from the one you got,
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but there's so many out there, it's basically...
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Was it Jimmy Kimmel who got Omicron twice this month?
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And apparently, that's going to happen to all of us.
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Apparently, you don't get much natural immunity now from Omicron.
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you know, I'm done with it, never have to think about it again immunity,
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All right, well, that's the current thing there.
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And then there's this story that, I guess it came out, you know,
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that there's some hacking vulnerabilities to electronic voting machines.
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But the ones that they tested first were from a company called Dominion.
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I don't know if you've heard that name in reference to voting machines.
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But apparently, there were some vulnerabilities which could be exploited.
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that any Dominion voting machines were, in fact, exploited.
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Indeed, no court has found that any major fraud happened in 2016.
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And as you know, if you look in the wrong place for something
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and use the wrong sensor to find it, and you don't find it, it's not there.
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That's what we've been taught, and that's what I believe.
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while there is no evidence whatsoever that anything untoward happened,
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And there are at least, it seemed that some suggestion
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that these were bad enough that a vote could have been changed.
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But what we are not told is whether there would be any way
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for a vote to be changed that we wouldn't know about
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So, what I don't know is, would it be detectable?
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Is there everything, is every possible thing you could do
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to one of these vulnerabilities, are they all detectable?
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Now, I think the company said that their current procedures
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So, let me give Dominion a little bit of support here.
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I don't feel like their side of the argument got shown in this article at all.
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And this came from, was it AP or Reuters or something?
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But I'd like to hear their side of the argument.
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Maybe they can't tell us because it makes it even more dangerous.
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But I'd love to know, what was the worst vulnerability?
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that would have made that vulnerability not such a big deal anyway,
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And if somebody had gotten past it, how would you know?
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You know, there's just some basic questions like that.
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They might say, yeah, you know, I hear what you're saying,
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but there's no way that could have happened and here's why.
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I always thought that the big vulnerability in voting systems is the human beings.
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I feel like an insider could do sort of anything.
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So, you know, I always thought that to imagine that any system is unhackable
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So, now we know that the voting machines are hypothetically less secure than one would want.
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Well, in the surprising, non-surprising story of the day,
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that Sussman attorney guy that was being charged in the Durham case
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for lying to the FBI for saying that he was not working for Hillary Clinton, I guess,
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when he brought the Russia collusion lies to the FBI.
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And the spin that I'm seeing from, I don't even know if this is a spin, so that's unfair.
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The narrative, let's say, I've seen on Fox News is that it was a D.C. jury
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and they're all Democrats and Hillary Clinton supporters
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and there was no way that Sussman was going to get convicted
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even though the evidence was clearly shown that he lied.
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because on one hand, I'm willing to believe that a D.C. jury
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or often enough that it could explain what's going on.
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I mean, that's within the plausible range, I think.
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It doesn't mean it's true, but it's within the plausible range.
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The other possibility is that I've never once seen this story explained accurately.
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that you personally have never seen the real news?
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oh, yeah, it's obvious he wasn't going to be convicted of this.
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And I thought the evidence was pretty clear he did.