Evidence Supporting The Theory That D&P LIED About Keeping The PINOF 1 Questions:
Following my friend Erika sharing her theory that d&p did NOT save the questions from pinof 1 but wrote them down around 2014 in order to include them in tabinof, I went looking for what evidence I could find. This post is a compilation of said evidence, and it's going to be a little longer than I initially thought it might be so I'll put the rest underneath a readmore.
Okay, first and foremost, it is provable that the question list in tabinof is NOT original, and there is also some evidence suggesting that the same may be true of the list they keep in Dan's memory box, which they showed us in a recent tiktok as well as in their most recent livestream.
As you can see above, the questions in tabinof are written on lined paper with two holes punched into the left side. However, in their recently posted tiktok, we can clearly see that the questions are NOT written on lined paper, and there are no holes punched in it.
Additionally, if you look closely at the lower hole in the tabinof page, you can clearly see that the i overlaps the hole, which makes absolutely no sense unless the text was edited in on top of it, which means the paper itself is a stock image. The fact that the writing begins well into the left margin of the page supports this theory, because nobody ignores the margin when they first start writing; it's pretty instinctive to leave that space empty at least until you've run out of space elsewhere on the page.
I would also like to point out that in the tiktok, we can see that several of the bullet point dashes are cut off by the edge of the page, which means that this may not be the original document either, as it's unnatural to write so close to the edge.
Interestingly, there is something scribbled out on the back of the tiktok copy but I wasn't able to make out what as the video quality just isn't good enough and it's not quite in focus. Still, I thought I would mention it in case anyone has any idea what that might be!
I tried lining up both versions of the document in Photoshop, and i can confirm that they are at least both copies of the same document as the text matches up near perfectly (some allowance must be made for perspective issues since these are not images that were scanned flat) with the exception of the title, which doesn't match up even when the questions surrounding it are aligned perfectly. This implies that the title was moved, probably on the tabinof copy so the cat whisker post it above wouldn't touch the title.
Perhaps the most important piece of evidence is that the list is actually missing a question entirely; at timestamp 2:02 Dan reads out "what would you do if a goat—" only to be interrupted by Phil. The question is abandoned after the interruption, but if this is indeed the original question list it SHOULD be written down in full. Yet, the goat question is nowhere to be found.
I considered that it might have been one of the scribbled out sentences, but what we can see of those scribbled out segments suggests that this is not the case, as one seems to read "if you could lose(?) one person(?)—" and the other, less visible but shorter, says "I am naked right now" (which was really only decipherable because dan wrote the same thing just below it. his handwriting is atrocious) Neither of the scribbled out sentences fit with the missing question.
Now, I can't prove that they never had an original question list written in 2009, but the above evidence is reason enough to cast doubt on the copies of said list that we have seen.
I can't remember exactly when they first mentioned having kept the question list, but if it was sometime in 2014 or 2015 as I suspect, then they likely did so deliberately in order to lend credence to the lie that the question list in tabinof is real. If they mentioned it earlier than that, then most likely it was real but was lost or damaged or is for some reason not suitable to show us (and isn't that an intriguing thing to consider!)
The earliest mention I can find of the list, currently, is this screenshotted tweet from October 2015; if anyone knows of earlier mentions PLEASE let me know so I can update my findings. I'm afraid it might have been mentioned in a younow or something like that and i simply cannot go through all of those, it would be like looking for a needle in a haystack.
I must also add that when Erika first mentioned this theory, she said that the questions were written in chronological order as they appear in pinof (this thought is what initially made her consider that the list might be fake!) However compelling that is, it's unfortunately been proven false, although it is closer to being true than it being chronological in the order in which it was actually filmed would be.
On the left, we have the order that each question appears in pinof, and on the right, the order they would have been filmed in. As you can see, neither fits perfectly. If the list was real, they must have jumped around in reading the questions, which is a bit chaotic but still possible, and it still doesn't explain the missing goat question.
Finally, I would like to point out that while they are both definitely sappy enough to have kept the list, the idea that they managed to keep a piece of paper for nearly 17 years without it ever getting creased or folded, especially considering Dan would have had to travel with it to get it home to his secret box... It seems a bit unlikely. They've said themselves that Dan has a tendency to throw out random bits of paper without looking at them (or he drops them down behind furniture!) and both have been kind of messy in the past, and neither of them knew at the time that pinof would be anything more than a throwaway q&a video.
I think that's about everything I've got right now; if anyone else has anything to add please let me know!!!
