 So if you notice that the people who are promoting conspiracy theories about the 2020 election results are the same people who are promoting conspiracy theories regarding COVID vaccines. So the best analogy in my mind between COVID vaccines and what was an analogy to COVID vaccines. I saw a cartoon today, you've got a building on fire and the flames are just leaping up everywhere and then you've got this crank saying well what about the long-term consequences of fire extinguishers. So that's my attitude towards those who are all skeptical about COVID vaccines, meaning those COVID vaccines that have been approved for use in the United States after undergoing extensive research, it's the equivalent of standing in a burning building and when you're offered a fire extinguisher you're saying oh but what about the long-term consequences to fire extinguishers? So why do people believe such ludicrous things such as that COVID vaccines are really dangerous or that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump, why do people believe such ludicrous things without any evidence? So I think part of it is people just love to feel smarter than everyone else that they've got the real truth and everyone else are just sheep, everyone else just following conventional authorities but the conspiracy theorists they really know the truth. So there's this bloke Julian Sanchez and he is an analyst at the Kato Institute and he's got a good Twitter thread here on cranks about the election and cranks about COVID vaccine. So he says, because I like exterminating any residual shreds of faith in humanity. I looked through the overwhelmingly hostile comments on a YouTube video by a doctor debunking some COVID misinformation tonight. So by the way, for people who are hospitalized and dying of COVID, between 94 to 99 percent of them are unvaccinated except fire extinguishers have been proven to be useful and so have COVID vaccines. If you're being hospitalized or dying of COVID, the odds are about 95 out of 100 that you have not been vaccinated. So those states with high levels of vaccination, they're very low rates of people getting hospitalized for COVID. So the evidence is just overwhelming, overwhelming how effective COVID vaccines are. You have to be a person who just wants to put your hand in the sand and ignore all the evidence. If you think there's something particularly heinous or dangerous about those vaccines for COVID that have been approved for use in the United States. So there are a lot of parallels between those who believe in election theft and those who think that COVID vaccines are dangerous. So what you've got, you've got vaccines have risk. Yeah, the risks of getting COVID are about 100,000 times worse than the purported risks of taking the vaccine. So everything is a balancing act. So on the one side, COVID, 100,000 times more dangerous than any possible repercussions from the vaccine. So we've got cranks on both election theft and COVID vaccines. And they often like the trappings of real science. So I've had all these people send me Bret Weinstein's videos on COVID-19 vaccines. Do fire extinguishers have risks? Yes, they have risks. All right. Everything has risks. So I will post relevant links in the video description. So what you've got with cranks on both COVID vaccines and purported election theft is you've got people who want to use all the superficial trappings of real science. So you'll have links to, you know, Bret Weinstein, biologist, right? I don't think there's a burning building. No, we've just got four million plus dead people from COVID. But hey, what do you care? Like when has the unnecessary deaths of four million people bothered you? All right. So you've got links to like journal articles. And then you've got all these impressively hackery looking hex dumps and spreadsheets full of IP dresses. And it's like, see, I'm giving you the evidence. Here's a link to Bret Weinstein, right, Bret Weinstein biologist. He made a video where he talked about this. So there's an article in the Washington Post about the long con of Mike Pillow CEO Mike Lindell is just kind of winding down. So he's just putting on a summit trying to claim that China stole the 2020 presidential election. And he had a breakout session where Lindell's team claimed to have provided evidence. And it's just a collection of files. We don't have four million dead in the world. There aren't four million dead from COVID, yes, there are over 600,000 in the United States. Why do you care? Look. I care that people are dying unnecessarily. I care that regular Americans, taxpayers have to spend upwards of a million dollars taking care of those who are too irresponsible to get the vaccine. So if they can't provide pay for their health care, who do you think puts the bill when the idiots who won't get the vaccine and then hospitalized extensively? Who do you think puts the bill? People are so stupid that they don't get the vaccine. Do you think they have up-to-date health insurance? Do you think they have comprehensive health insurance? No. Regular people have to pay the health bills for people who are too stupid to get the vaccine. So their stupidity, who pays the price for their stupidity? Well, they pay the price if they get badly sick. But the rest of us pay the price because we have to pay for the treatment that they get because usually they're too irresponsible to carry sufficient health insurance, right? So 10 days in the ER, that's going to run well over a million dollars, right? So who puts the bill for fat people and people with other preexisting conditions? We do. So that's why I have so much contempt for people who don't take care of themselves and allow themselves to degenerate through obesity, lack of exercise, not looking after basic health issues. So Mike Lindell's kind of released all this digital gibberish, a list of computer internet protocol addresses and rich text format files trying to prove that China hacked the election. And apparently hundreds of thousands of people have watched his videos on election fraud. That's an ethical solution, assuming that what you're saying is true. I don't know. I don't know. I'm just doing my little bit to call out stupidity. And like when you've got all these people, particularly on kind of my side of the political spectrum or pushing bogus theories about vaccines and bogus theories about election fraud, in particular because this is on my side of the political spectrum, I just want to point it out. So that's why I find it particularly interesting because they generally tend to be people from the distant right. Now what you get is the trappings of real science, trying to make these cranky cases event against COVID vaccine or for electoral fraud. But the evidence is completely bogus, right? So we had what Joseph Cotto presented as evidence for massive 2020 election fraud, a New York Post article with zero supporting evidence and nobody following up to provide anything additional on the New York Post article. You just had a New York Post article that essentially repeated all the claims of Donald Trump about mail-in voting, but without any evidence. But for Joseph Cotto, this is like compelling. Then his other piece of compelling evidence was this poster Patrick Basham, who doesn't understand the basics of politics and political analysis and polling analysis, just wrote a completely pathetic piece, which I've discussed many times. So people, they want to believe in voter fraud or they want to believe that the vaccines are dangerous, evidence is irrelevant, but they want to make their case with what sounds like evidence. So that's kind of amusing. They like the superficial trappings of real science like, here, listen to this Brett Weinstein video. Now the evidence is always absolutely useless, absolutely pointless, because the people making these cases, they don't have the training, they don't have the context, they don't have the ability to evaluate the quality or the relevance of the links or the technical articles that they're claiming. They don't even understand what they're promoting in most cases and same on the election fraud side. So the people who want to believe this, they have no idea what real evidence would look like in these cases. They don't know whether it makes any sense that someone would have that kind of information claimed in the spreadsheet full of numbers, but they are flattered by the invitation to assess the evidence for themselves. It's like, oh, do your own research, make up your mind. I'm just asking questions. When you have someone is using the approach, I'm just asking questions. Actually that's a real tip-off that they're offering a bogus line of inquiry, because if you have a point to make, make the point. Don't just try to make your point by saying, oh, I'm just asking questions. That's like the lowest level way of trying to make a point by claiming, oh, I'm just asking questions, bro. What do responses from actual experts look like? Well, they're almost always completely dismissive of these cranks, understandably so because experts can tell the evidence is nonsense and they're not interested in spending hours going into granular detail about why, throwing around citations to technical matters they know full well, a lay audience isn't equipped or even has the ability to understand. The people who are equipped to understand this technical material don't need a popular debunking. People who have expertise, they will generally do a quickie explain of why some particular claim is wrong in lay terms, they're not going to bother with a bunch of citations that might be relevant to a peer specialist. Then to the audience, once they believe in these cranks, this comes across as arrogant. The crank, he is flattering me with a display of technical jargon and a mountain of citations to provide evidence. I'm not equipped to evaluate that evidence, but I can not along and say, oh, yes, I see. I feel like I've been treated as a peer. People with real expertise understand that this would be performative and pointless. So past this fairly superficial point, they go with some version of 99% of us who spent years studying this are on the same page and you have to trust us, which does feel patronizing. What the crank is doing is more condescending. The crank is the equivalent of a child giving a child a fake cell phone so they can make calls just like mom and dad. They're pretending not to ultimately rely on trust and so they get trust. The actual expert is honest. I can't take you through medical school. I can't give you a computer science degree in a YouTube video. I can give you some papers, but even if you're extremely smart, you won't understand that without that training. So to the insecure, that feels bad. At the bottom of these conspiracy theorists is just insecurity. When the expert says, look, you need to do years of study to be after understand this, or you need to at least do a couple hundred hours of study to understand this. That's going to feel off-putting to the insecure. So all this is a byproduct of a culture that valorizes the ideal of being an independent thinker who questions to receive wisdom, doesn't just accept things on authority. Now, there are healthy aspects of that, but almost everything we know about the world and about history is because we've accepted it from authority. Aside from very limited number of things that we have deduced from our own life experience, especially everything that we think we know comes to us because we've accepted it from some authority. So the vast majority of human knowledge is beyond any individual's ability to personally verify. So we have to take most things on authority. And folks who are trusting a crank, of course, are also taking things on authority. So what the crank does is give people the illusion of not trusting authority. Unlike those sheep who just trust the authorities, it's like the media elites win large followings by telling you not to trust media elites. So the expert is treating you like an adult is the one who at some point is saying, I'm sorry, you don't have the math skills. You're not willing to do the work to understand what's going on here rather than pretending that common sense conquers every domain of knowledge. So let's have a look at the chat. What is my fundamental point here? My fundamental point is about the similarities between cranks on COVID vaccines and cranks on election fraud and how they it's amusing how they love the trappings of science without any understanding of what they're actually dealing with. And it's also a point about how almost everything we have to that we think we know about reality because we have accepted it from authority. So in strictly logical terms, argument from authority is a logical fallacy, but it is the way the world works. Obviously everything we know is because we accept authority. Why are the numbers of deaths in San Francisco being at zero weeks on end? Because by and large, people who live in San Francisco are way above average in intelligence and I would assume there are fairly high rates of vaccinations in San Francisco. So you find an area where you have more than 50 percent of the population that's vaccinated. They have relatively low death and hospitalization rates from COVID. You find an area where less than 50 percent of the population is fully vaccinated and you start getting much higher rates of hospitalization and death from COVID. So those who are getting hospitalized by COVID now or dying from COVID now, between 95 percent, 99 percent of them are not vaccinated. You imagine that if 100 percent of America gets the vaccine, that this will go away. It's not a matter of this will go away. It's a matter of can you reduce the death rate and the hospitalization rate because putting people in ERs is very expensive and the people are so moronic that they're not vaccinated, they're unlikely to have adequate health insurance to pay for their $500,000, $2 million worth of ER bills. So we can use that money for better causes than paying for the emergency care for people who are too stupid not to get vaccinated. So it's not a matter of, oh, 100 percent vaccination, then all our problems go away. We're going to need booster shots for years, right? We're going to need approximately annual booster shots to deal with COVID for years from here. Are people in non-high risk groups dying of COVID? So the average COVID death costs 16 years of life, according to the most comprehensive study on that, 16 years of life. Right, so most people who die from COVID are not otherwise at death's door. So you might think, ah, 16 years of life, not a big deal. Who cares? To me, 16 years of life is a very big deal. So we have 610,000 or so COVID deaths in the United States, average death costing 16 years of life. Yeah, to me, that's a big deal. Let's go through the chat. So, yeah, I assume that we're going to need booster shots approximately annually from here on out. And so the longer that you've gone since your COVID vaccine and apparently the less effective the vaccines are at preventing you from getting COVID, but they still retain great effectiveness at preventing you from getting hospitalized or dying. So Israel is already providing booster shots. I'm sure we'll be getting booster shots in the United States in the next few months. Vaccines have risk. It's so tiny for COVID vaccines like AstraZeneca. Like one in a million person has like some blood clot problem. And it's not even clear that that blood clot is coming from the AstraZeneca. That's there's been so much shoddy discussion of media reporting about AstraZeneca and blood clots. They talk about blood clots linked to AstraZeneca where you can link everything. Linking is a really inexact term, all right? You can link watching the Luke Ford show to, you know, 100 horrible outcomes, right? You can link drinking water to 100 horrible outcomes. Like you can link this and this, noting that there's some kind of correlation between A and B is not causation. So all this media talk about AstraZeneca linked to blood clots, it's just such, you know, fuzzy talk, right? We don't have evidence that AstraZeneca has been killing people. We do have evidence that people have taken AstraZeneca have also died because everyone who's died, they've also died because they've also had water. They've also had food. They've also breathed air. They've also gone for a walk, right? So just because they took AstraZeneca and then three weeks later they died doesn't mean that AstraZeneca killed them. And so this argument that AstraZeneca is linked to blood clots is just very inexact talk because we don't have any clear causation between AstraZeneca and blood clots. Thomas Bergman says Britain reports 35% of hospitalizations involve people who are fully vaccinated. I don't believe you. I don't believe you because in the United States of the people who are hospitalized or dying from COVID, 94 to 99% of them are not fully vaccinated. So why do you care, Luke? If it works, then you're safe up there on your high horse. Like, why do I care about anything? I could do a show about some things that happened in the Middle East 3,000 years ago. So I could try to give you an explanation for why I care, but I may not even be cognizant of it. I may not be fully aware of it. You don't fully know your motives. I don't fully know my motives. I just know some things click and it's like, oh, yeah, I want to talk about this. So we don't even know our own motives. I've seen how they count the numbers. They count anyone who pops a PCR test, says Thomas Bergman. All right, Thomas Bergman, what have you read about how death certificates are filled out? I suspect you haven't done that much work. So industrialized nations take death certificates very seriously. Now, does that mean there's never a mistake in a death certificate? Of course not. Everything that is human contains mistakes. But industrialized nations want to get a clear picture of how their population is dying. So if you look at the serious way that death certificates are taken industrialized nations, and yes, there are going to be errors, there are going to be mistakes. But overall, there's not some massive overcounting of COVID cases, right? So from the available evidence, it appears that COVID cases are undercounted by a factor of three. So we've got numerous academic studies arguing that COVID cases are undercounted by a factor of three. That means there are three times as many COVID deaths as what have been reported. So that's the consensus of the academic studies that I've seen until now. They could be wrong. Science is constantly changing. Skinny, healthy people aren't a problem. I suspect that skinny, healthy people in general are much less susceptible to a whole range of things, including respiratory illnesses. There's more number of people who are allergic to peanut butter, but most people aren't. Can the government mandate people eat peanuts because studies show that peanuts are safe? Well, from what I've read, if people are introduced to peanuts earlier in life, it's highly unlikely that they will develop these peanut allergies later in life. So there's no analogy between peanut allergies and bad reactions to COVID vaccines. So there are far more peanut allergies proportionately than there are bad reactions, severe reactions, disturbing reactions to COVID vaccine. But I believe that the government should operate on the basis of greatest good for the greatest number. Yeah, 160 million people get vaccinated with AstraZeneca and the anti-vax people think that like 160 blood clot cases are statistically significant. Right, so COVID will never go away. We're going to need booster shots annually. The third world will not be jabbed. Well, we've had great success of vaccinating the third world with all sorts of different diseases. So the globalist health authorities who you despise, they've effectively doubled our lifespan at last 120 years. So what was it, 150 years ago, you had this doctor saying, hey, it's a really good idea to wash your hands before you perform surgeries or childbirth. Right, so we have people who are protesting chlorine and swimming pools. We have people protesting the equivalent of fluoride in water. We have people protesting all sorts of different vaccines. All the major significant public health changes have come with their critics. And guess what? Overwhelmingly, the public health authorities, the global minded public health authorities have most of the time been right and the critics have been wrong because the global health authorities with the things they've done such as vaccination putting fluoride in water, putting chlorine in swimming pools, getting everyone vaccinated. All the measures that public health authorities have taken, the major measures have doubled our lifespan in the 120 years. Yeah, non-vaxxers are made an identitarian. So the much of the Trump crowd has climbed on this crazy election fraud, you know, vaccine dangerous bandwagon as a part of their identity. I remember Biden getting a jump of 150,000 votes on CNN. Yes, because votes come in and there are areas where 90% of the vote is going to go for the Republicans and other areas votes are going to come in where 90% of the vote is going to come in for the Democrats. And also guess what? In the tabulation of vote counting, sometimes people make an error. So they take 130,000 from this candidate. They rectify the error, send it over to that candidate. So the electoral system in the United States is overwhelmingly staffed by volunteers. So they do make mistakes. That's very different from voter fraud when defined as a crime, which people get prosecuted and convicted for. Mike Lindell went on CNN, said he's going to drop the bombshell info on faxes, going to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Yeah, he's holding a three day symposium in South Dakota. Not very impressive what he's coming up with. Yeah, Mike Lindell is going to release the Kraken. So there's another article here about something that I've been banging on about for approximately a year now. So there's this Chinese real estate company. It's got like 300 billion dollars in debt. So you think the United States has bad debt? You think the United States has bad corporate debt, bad private sector debt? Where is this? Where's this story I just saw now on this Chinese business? If there's no voter fraud, why is there opposition and hostility toward voter ID law? So number one, of course, there's always going to be some fraud. My argument is that it's not significant. Now, the hostility to voter ID fraud. So I think much of it is just arousing the base. Right. So voter ID would make very little difference. Right. Having voter ID will not reduce voter turnout significantly. It would have a very small effect, but it fires up your base. Right. So I think that's that's why people get so fired up about it. Where is this story that I just read in the New York Times? Oh, Evergrande. Evergrande went from China's biggest developer to one of its worst debtors. So Evergrande has 300 billion in debt. It has far more in debt than it has in assets. And Evergrande is a Chinese real estate company. It epitomizes the vulnerability of the world's number two economy, which is China. So it does more money than it can pay off. So China has all sorts of problems like this. There's even a special term for these Chinese problem companies. They are great rhinos. They are so large. They are so entangled in their country's financial system. The Chinese government must ensure their survival. So failure on the scale of just one of these great rhinos would just ripple across the country, spell ruin for millions of Chinese. So China is very much a paper tiger. As I've been going on about for more than more than a year. Yeah, in America, we call it too big to fail. So yeah, if there's no better for ways, there's so much opposition, hostility and passion about voter ID laws. So a lot of passion. A lot of opposition, not a lot of hostility. It's not really about the thing that they're saying. It's a way to drive up turnout and to fire up your base. Just like the opposition to Donald Trump that said the 2016 election was not legitimate because Russia interfered with our election. That wasn't really about concern that Russia rigged the 2016 election. It was a way of putting a damper on the Trump administration's ability to execute its agenda and it was a way to fire up its base. Just like voter fraud for Republicans these days isn't primarily about voter fraud. It's a form of identity and it's a way to cope with disappointing news. And it's a way to fire up your base. So Roberta Kaplan, who's suing all those alt-right people on Charlottesville. She has been implicated in the downfall of Governor Andrew Cuomo. She's resigned from a fundraising organization. She founded it. So apparently Roberta Kaplan had been going after what Jason Kessler, Richard Spencer, Mike Enoch and company. She had been attacking Andrew Cuomo's accusers. Yeah, Evergrande will need a bailout from the Chinese Communist Party. But there's a whole host of companies in China, just like Evergrande. Oh, did you see a big boom in productivity for the pandemic productivity boom last? So we've got fewer workers now and they're making more stuff. So we've had this enormous productivity boom and is this significant? And I think it is because the the COVID crisis has forced a lot of individuals and companies to learn new technology and more efficient ways of doing things. So I don't know about you. I'm 55 years of age. I don't generally like change. I only like learn new things and make significant changes when I have to. And now because of COVID, our economy is being forced to make all these significant changes. More and more people are working from home and working from home. It's far more efficient. So you the average person will save an hour or two a day from commuting. And we've probably got more automation and companies have invested in new software, new technology, all sorts of businesses are found that they can do with fewer workers. So the workers they do have maybe working more efficiently, maybe working harder. So the theory of efficiency wages suggests that employers get what they pay for. Paying more means a higher performing workforce. So if you want extra effort, you pay people extra. So now that people are getting higher wages, people I think may be working harder in general. Then the work from home effect. So employers are embracing working from home is a long term solution. They're investing in appropriate technology. More and more offices are paper free and not keeping paper files. If your office is all in the cloud, then people can work from anywhere. So businesses going forward, they're going to have fewer offices, smaller offices, fewer desks. We're going to have higher total factor productivity. So not just the efforts of workers, but the capital investments that they use to do their job. So we're going to have less office space going forward, fewer desks, fewer cubicles. So working from home has generated apparently a 5% boost to productivity. And most of that gain comes from save commuting. Now, official labor productivity statistics do not include commute time and hours worked, but people now have an extra hour or two in their life if they're working from home. And this pandemic has forced all sorts of innovation for individuals like learning Zoom, learning the cloud, learning technology and forced innovation that would would not have happened as rapidly. So we've got got an adoption of technology that has accelerated new firms to being created at a historic pace. We've got a shift to remote work, which is going to outlast the crisis. So these four forces are going to lead to sustained productivity. Joe Biden received more votes than any other presidential candidate in history. You receive more African-American votes. I don't get a popular vibe anyway, because it doesn't matter. People didn't vote for Joe Biden because they liked Joe Biden. Most of the people who voted for Joe Biden voted for Joe Biden because they hated Donald Trump. Joe Biden does not have to be liked. He does not have to be respected. He does not have to be adored. There doesn't have to be any passion for Joe Biden because it's a binary choice in American presidential elections. So in the suburbs, there was a 2 percent shift against Donald Trump and the Republicans. So that's where the election was decided. So people didn't vote for Joe Biden and overwhelming numbers because of the intrinsic qualities of Joe Biden. They voted for Joe Biden because they thought he was a better choice than Donald Trump. Halsey and Turd flinging monkeys says the American economy is going to collapse, going into a hyperinflationary mode. A la Venezuela is in Barbway. Why am I a republic going forward after Joe Biden's trillion dollar infrastructure plan? Count me skeptical. I think we're going to be fine. I think America is going to dominate the 21st century just as much as it dominated the 20th century. Yeah, we may have more inflation than we expected. We may have, oh my God, we may even have five percent annual inflation this year. We may have inflation going forward, say two percentage points higher than what we expected. So instead of two percent annual inflation for the next five years, it may be something like four percent annual inflation. How are we ever going to survive four percent annual inflation? Oh my God, it's just like the Why Am I a Republic? Joe Biden couldn't fill an arena or a stadium. Like Trump or Obama couldn't hold an event attracting more than a thousand people. That's true, but you don't have to be charismatic. You don't have to attract large crowds to get people to vote for you. What you have to do is be the better two options in people's mind. The people that didn't like Trump didn't trust Trump voted for Biden, no matter how they felt about Biden. As long as they thought he was the least worse of the two options, they voted for Biden. And so there's just no correlation between crowd size and voter turnout on election day. That's just a complete delusion. You think, oh, someone attracts hundreds of thousands of people to his rallies. Therefore he's got a lot of uncounted support. There's just no evidence for that. I remember Gough Whitlam was running against Malcolm Fraser in Australia in 1975. Gough Whitlam like attracted, you know, enormous turnout to his rallies, but he still got absolutely thrashed in the election. So look at any political science analysis. What's the connection between rally turnout and election day results? There's none. There's none. People aren't voting for the most charismatic candidate or the most entertaining candidate. They're voting for who they fear less of the two major choices. Bye-bye.