Real Coffee with Scott Adams - October 19, 2020


Episode 1159 Scott Adams: I Teach You How to Evaluate Trump’s Coronavirus Performance, Masks, Biden Laptops, Herd Immunity


Episode Stats

Length

1 hour and 11 minutes

Words per Minute

148.51973

Word Count

10,545

Sentence Count

741


Summary

Joe Biden's laptop is found in Ukraine, and it's not the first time someone's laptop has been found belonging to an associate of Joe Biden. Plus, how to get a fixer-up mansion, and a tip on how to take bribes when you become a senator.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Oh, wow. Are you lucky? You are lucky today. Come on in here, everybody. Let me tell you
00:00:18.040 how lucky you are. Some days you wake up and you say to yourself, I don't know, I'm not
00:00:23.620 feeling lucky today. And other days you wake up thinking, I think something good is going
00:00:28.580 to happen today. Well, today is your lucky day. You know why? Because you're here. You
00:00:35.880 just started off the day with the best possible way. You could not have beaten the way you
00:00:42.400 started today. Absolutely nailed it. So good for you. And all you need to maximize your
00:00:48.640 experience, some of you probably know, but it doesn't take much. All you need is a cup
00:00:54.720 or mugger glass, a tank or chalice or a canteen jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind. Fill
00:00:59.620 it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure
00:01:05.800 of the dopamine here of the day, the thing that makes everything better, except the coronavirus.
00:01:12.000 It's called the Simultaneous Sip. It happens now. Go.
00:01:14.340 Oh, I was wrong. I was wrong. It made the coronavirus better, too. Just when you think
00:01:25.380 there's something coffee can't do, it can do it. So a lot of you heard the news that there's
00:01:35.200 yet another laptop that's been discovered belonging to allegedly an associate of Hunter Biden.
00:01:42.560 One. This one's in the Ukraine. So I believe the count is now four laptops. Three of them were
00:01:50.540 left at a repair shop. And one of them was left in Ukraine. And when I saw that story, I started
00:01:58.320 thinking, I wonder where else there are laptops. Because I didn't even know that was a thing. I
00:02:04.720 haven't really ever, I don't think I've ever forgotten a laptop anywhere. But I thought, what if I have
00:02:11.420 one? So I started looking through my house to see if I have any Hunter Biden laptops? And I do.
00:02:19.580 I found one. So there's at least five Hunter Biden laptops. I've got one in my house.
00:02:26.860 It was in the garage. It was behind some rags. I don't know what it was there. I'm not sure why it
00:02:33.680 was there. But I'll be checking it later for emails. You should check your house too. Because
00:02:40.480 there are Hunter Biden related laptops freaking everywhere. Check behind the couch. If you've
00:02:49.060 got cushions, look under the cushions. You probably have a couple of Biden laptops. I mean, why wouldn't
00:02:55.020 you? So I see the news today that Biden was double masking at church. So he had two masks
00:03:05.580 on. He had a white mask below a darker colored mask. And I'm thinking, that's a good start.
00:03:14.220 That is a good start. But two masks? Could you really be safe with just two masks? Because I'm
00:03:23.120 thinking, you know, I value my life. I'm thinking three to five masks would be safe enough to go to
00:03:33.780 church. Now, considering he was also in church, so there was that extra risk of some religion getting
00:03:39.760 in through the mouth area. Satan, for example. Maybe when Biden went to church with his double
00:03:47.880 masking, he was thinking one mask for the coronavirus, one mask to keep Satan out of his
00:03:53.540 mouth hole. Because that could be a problem, couldn't it? So I'm thinking I might triple, maybe
00:04:01.260 quadruple mask. Just cover all bases. I've got a tip for you on how to accept bribes when you become
00:04:11.540 a senator. Now, nothing about what I'm about to say is to suggest that Joe Biden has taken bribes
00:04:20.400 from anybody. I have no data, no information that would suggest that. All right, so let's start with
00:04:27.520 no information to suggest he did anything illegal. Swampy, perhaps. But illegal? I don't know of
00:04:37.600 anything. But hypothetically, let's just say that you were just elected to Congress. Let's say you're a
00:04:46.500 senator. Let's say you thought that you would like to accept some bribes, but you don't want to get
00:04:52.060 caught. What would be the way to do that? Would you just say, hey, why don't you give me a check? I'll put
00:04:59.760 that check in my bank. That'll be safe enough. No, you would not do that, because that would create a paper
00:05:06.460 trail, a digital trail, and you would not want anybody bribing you in any way that could be
00:05:11.600 discovered later in any easy way. So one thing you might do, and there are lots of ways to do this,
00:05:19.200 but I'm just going to throw out one suggestion. One thing you could do is buy a fixer-up mansion.
00:05:26.980 Something that you could just sort of barely afford, but you definitely couldn't afford to fix it up.
00:05:33.080 You might be able to afford to buy it, but you don't have enough money to fix up a mansion.
00:05:42.060 So suppose you had subcontractors coming in there, and they're working on your mansion.
00:05:47.360 They're fixing it up. Is there any paper trail about who paid them in cash? Let's say they were
00:05:54.880 paid in cash. Have you ever heard of a subcontractor who was willing to accept cash
00:06:01.940 as opposed to checks? Yes, you have. It's called every subcontractor. I'm sure there's some
00:06:10.060 subcontractor in the world somewhere who will take a check. But if you offer them cash, if you make it
00:06:17.560 an option, most subcontractors would say a cash check, it's all the same. Sure, I'll take the cash.
00:06:27.220 I don't mind that. And they may or may not declare those earnings on their taxes because if it's cash,
00:06:34.560 it's hard to track. So imagine if you will, some rich person who wants to bribe you is not bribing
00:06:43.020 you directly, but maybe they're giving you the cash that you give to your contractors.
00:06:49.680 And how would that be discoverable? How in the world would anybody know anything was wrong?
00:06:56.780 The contractors would be getting cash, but they would be getting it from the homeowner.
00:07:01.320 The homeowner would just give them cash. If that cash came from someplace illicit,
00:07:07.600 some contractor doesn't care. All they know is they got paid. And it's not the homeowner's fault
00:07:13.000 if the subcontractor doesn't pay their taxes. It's not your responsibility to make your
00:07:19.500 subcontractor pay the taxes. Somebody says a 1099. Well, there's no 1099 if you pay cash.
00:07:27.660 And if your subcontractor just wants to stay under the radar. Now that would not be legal. And I'm not
00:07:34.380 suggesting that anybody in this story actually did that. I'm just saying that if you wanted the perfect
00:07:40.560 set up to accept bribes without it ever being evaluated or without it ever being discovered,
00:07:48.300 it would be a really good strategy to buy a fixer-upper mansion. Just saying.
00:07:58.060 Here's an opinion about... I'm going to make you smarter today. So I'm going to give you a...
00:08:05.060 somebody says a 10k IRS form. No, there is no tax form. There's no tax form that is going to show
00:08:14.960 whether a subcontractor got paid cash. That's not a thing. I'm looking at your comments. You think that
00:08:21.520 they could find that out, but they could not. They could not. At least not without a lot of work.
00:08:27.980 So here's a little piece of knowledge to make you smarter than all the people you know when they
00:08:37.400 talk about coronavirus. You know about herd immunity. You know that the experts say that
00:08:43.700 you probably need something like 60-70% of people to be infected before you can have a good herd
00:08:51.940 immunity. But I heard a modification to that that's really important, which is it depends on
00:08:58.820 the season. So for example, there's evidence from Adam Kucharski on Twitter. You can see me
00:09:07.620 retweeting him in my Twitter feed. And he's a mathematician and epidemiologist. And he's written
00:09:14.360 a book, The Rules of Contagion. So it's somebody who knows how to do math, knows epidemics,
00:09:20.320 and he informs us this. That if you looked at the regular influenza, the ordinary seasonal flu,
00:09:28.980 he did some serology data study, and he found that 40-50% of younger people get infected each year.
00:09:39.620 So they might not have symptoms. They might not know they were infected. But up to half of younger
00:09:44.880 people get infected with influenza each year. One assumes that's from school. And 15-20% of older
00:09:52.400 groups. Now, the influenza seems to come and then go each year. It doesn't completely disappear as I
00:10:00.020 understand it, but it becomes a non-issue in subsequent years. And I looked at that and I said,
00:10:05.620 that doesn't make sense. Because if only 10-20% of older people, and most citizens are older than
00:10:13.940 kids, if only 15-20% of them is enough for herd immunity, that doesn't make sense. Because shouldn't
00:10:22.480 it be closer to 60% or something like that? And as Adam informed me, and I hadn't really made this
00:10:30.540 connection before, it depends on the season. If it's the winter, and you're indoors, and you're
00:10:37.000 really spreading it around a lot, then your herd immunity has to be pretty high, because your risk
00:10:44.260 of infection is also so high. So you need a little extra herd immunity if people are going to be
00:10:50.040 indoors. But if it's the summer, and they're outdoors, and they're not in this super spreaders
00:10:56.880 kind of situation, then a lower herd immunity, and it could be a lot lower, would be enough
00:11:03.420 to burn it out. So you got two factors that both have to be considered. How much does the herd
00:11:10.660 immunity need to be? And then what season is it? Because the herd immunity can be a different amount
00:11:16.340 depending on the season. Got that? That's kind of an important concept to hold in your mind. It'll
00:11:24.040 help you explain what happens as the winter approaches. And then coming into the conversation
00:11:33.640 was Andres Backhouse. I always mention him because he's got a background in economics. So he's better
00:11:42.820 at comparing things than most of us. So he's better at picking apart these claims and telling you what to
00:11:50.460 believe. And here are a couple of quick facts that Andres points out. The one thing is that you can't
00:11:59.840 look at charts that show mask mandates coming into effect, and then show that the virus still was
00:12:09.140 raging. And so people say, look, here's my chart. And you can see that the virus was going up. And here's
00:12:15.600 the day that the masks went into effect. And the virus kept going up. So therefore, masks don't
00:12:23.200 work. That's what people say on the internet. And you'll see even smart people saying that. But here's
00:12:28.960 the thing. There's no control group. So how much would the how much would the infections have gone up
00:12:37.640 without masks? Because masks tend to go into a situation where you've got a known problem. So the
00:12:45.520 first part is, was there such a problem that was out of control? That's why you put masks on in the
00:12:51.460 first place. So the correlation might be backwards. People are saying, wait, the mask didn't work because
00:12:58.680 the infections went up. Whereas maybe what's happening is infections are going up. So that's why people are
00:13:05.060 wearing masks. So you might have the correlation and causation backwards. So we don't have anything to
00:13:12.000 compare it to. And we don't know if we've got the causation right. So you you could easily over interpret
00:13:17.740 the fact that somebody introduced masks in a location, and the coronavirus continued to increase. It doesn't
00:13:27.480 mean that alone, by itself, doesn't tell you anything. And we even saw, I think, Rand Paul,
00:13:37.400 making that kind of a claim that, you know, where masks were introduced, you didn't see much of a
00:13:42.700 difference. But countering that, we have Dr. Fauci. Now, don't you think that Dr. Fauci,
00:13:51.140 you know, probably more than anybody in the planet Earth, or at least in the top 1%, is somebody who's
00:14:00.540 looked into it. You and I probably have not looked at every mask study. And you and I may not be
00:14:08.640 qualified to look at a mask study and know if it tells you something useful or it doesn't.
00:14:15.300 But Dr. Fauci has, and people he's talked to has, and other experts have. And as of yesterday,
00:14:23.060 Fauci says the meta-analysis showed that masks really do work in preventing infection.
00:14:32.740 And so Fauci says, if you look at, you know, all of the information, masks work. Now,
00:14:40.820 does that mean that masks have been tested in one of those reliable kind of tests, the kind where you
00:14:48.140 do the randomized controlled study? Well, in order for it to be controlled, you would have to have some
00:14:55.960 group that you said, hey, there's going to be a whole bunch of coronavirus in your environment,
00:15:00.360 but we don't want this group to wear masks. You can't do that study. Because you can't say to
00:15:07.680 people, you shouldn't wear masks during a coronavirus, because the expectation is that
00:15:14.360 they probably work. So given that there's such a strong feeling among experts, who could be wrong?
00:15:21.360 They could be wrong, right? It's possible. But they have a strong feeling that the masks work.
00:15:26.720 And under that condition, you can't do a controlled test, because you can't ask anybody in a coronavirus
00:15:32.040 environment to not wear them. It just can't be done. So the meta-analyses have to do with other
00:15:40.300 viruses or other bacteria or other kinds of infections. So you might say to yourself, wait a
00:15:47.140 minute, those other things are not like this thing. This coronavirus is not the same size as other
00:15:54.240 things. It's not a case of protecting the person with the mask. It's more about protecting the other
00:16:00.280 people. It has a higher R value, meaning it's more infectious. Does that make a difference? Probably.
00:16:09.700 But there you have it. Dr. Fauci, who has looked at the data, says, and somewhat unambiguously,
00:16:17.020 he says this. He's not really hedging it too much at all, really. He's not hedging it at all,
00:16:22.180 I'd say. He's saying, mass work. Is he right? We'll see. We'll see. All right.
00:16:31.500 We'll get back to this coronavirus stuff. I got some more fun stuff to talk about.
00:16:38.680 I was watching a movie last night. And every now and then, I say to myself, you know,
00:16:45.100 I'm going to try watching a movie again. Because some of you might know, I bailed out on watching
00:16:51.400 movies because they're so bad. First of all, they take too long and they're all hackneyed and it's
00:16:58.780 the same movie, just rewritten over and over. There's always a car chase. There's somebody
00:17:04.100 killing a lot of bad guys. There's somebody tied to a chair. You know, they're just all boring and
00:17:10.380 predictable. So I watched this movie with Jessica Chastain. I forget the title of it. You certainly
00:17:17.480 don't need to watch it. And she was some kind of a super spy who, you know, everybody was trying to
00:17:24.760 kill her. And so it was one of these action movies in which the hero, in this case, played by Jessica
00:17:31.020 Chastain, kills lots and lots of bad guys from the beginning to the end. It's just death count,
00:17:38.820 death count, death count. And I'm watching it and I'm thinking to myself, okay, I don't, you know,
00:17:44.240 I get that there are far more female heroes in action movies and maybe the market wants that.
00:17:50.000 I don't know. I'm no expert. But I thought to myself, in what situation, in what other situation
00:17:57.380 do you get one person from one demographic group, in this case a woman, who can slay unlimited numbers
00:18:06.400 of people from another demographic group, in this case men, and that's okay? And you can make a movie
00:18:13.740 about that. What other situation could you do that? Has there ever been a movie in which a male hero
00:18:21.220 violently dispatches dozens and dozens, if not hundreds, of female characters? No, you're not going to see
00:18:31.340 that movie. How about a movie where there's a white star, an action star, who is only killing
00:18:39.700 people of a different ethnicity? Well, you used to see those movies when I was a kid, right? It was
00:18:46.240 either like a, you know, a war movie from World War II, where the only people dying were the Japanese
00:18:52.520 characters in the movies, etc. But you don't see those in 2020. You don't really see a person from one
00:19:00.980 group exclusively killing people from another group, because that's no longer politically correct.
00:19:08.200 It would just send some kind of a, some kind of a message. Yeah, even the Rambo movies are now
00:19:14.620 quite aged. I don't think you'd see a Rambo movie where only one kind of person gets killed by another
00:19:21.320 kind of person. And so I ask you this, what is the impact on our youth of watching a female
00:19:30.980 character killing unlimited male characters, but never the reverse? You never see it the other
00:19:37.120 way. You can certainly see male characters killing unlimited other male characters. You'd accept that.
00:19:45.240 I feel like it's devaluing men, and sufficiently so, that we probably ought to ban those movies.
00:19:54.780 I think if we've gone so far, and we've gone pretty far with this political correctness,
00:20:00.960 you either have to make everything okay, and say, all right, anybody can kill anybody. It's just a movie.
00:20:07.000 Don't take it too seriously. Or you have to say, I don't think the one thing we can not only allow,
00:20:14.560 but feature? In fact, find me an action movie that does not include a female lead character killing
00:20:22.840 hundreds of males. That's the basic movie right now, right? Birds of prey, female characters killing
00:20:30.820 male characters. That's it. That's the movie. And I think you're going to see a lot more of that.
00:20:39.220 I find that unacceptable. And so I will boycott any movie that has a female character who is killing
00:20:46.760 exclusively or almost exclusively male characters as entertainment, because I'm not sure that's
00:20:55.500 entertainment. All right. Somebody is countering with The Handmaiden's Tale. I feel like The Handmaiden's
00:21:05.240 Tale is from the perspective of the victim. If the movies I was talking about were very sympathetic
00:21:13.140 to all the hundreds of henchmen who got killed, it's like, let's do a movie from the perspective
00:21:20.380 of all of the bad guys who got killed. That's what The Handmaiden's Tale is. That's from the
00:21:27.600 perspective of the victim. See? That's more of the same. It's not the counter example. That's more of
00:21:34.260 the same. All right. Let's talk about the polls. And let's talk about who's going to win. Do you want
00:21:41.740 some optimism about Trump winning the election? I got some. You ready for some optimism? I told you
00:21:48.920 this was going to be the best part of the day. It's going to be incredible. All right. So first of all,
00:21:54.280 the major polls and the polling average would show that Trump is not only behind, but behind by
00:22:00.880 fairly large numbers. But we know from 2016 that the polls in general, not every poll,
00:22:09.200 all right, we still, we love our Rasmussen's and, you know, Zogby's and a few others, Trafalgar.
00:22:18.020 But the polls in general appear to be, I feel like I can say this as just a fact, they appear to be
00:22:26.100 illegitimate. Can I say that as just a fact that is so well established that I don't need to defend it
00:22:34.380 with any reasons anymore? Have we reached that point where everybody's like, yeah, those are fake?
00:22:39.840 I think we have. And I think we would also expect that the fake polls would close in the final week,
00:22:46.860 so that they don't, they don't lose all of their credibility. Oh, it's something happened the final
00:22:52.920 week, and the polls closed. How about that? But I would think that Joe Biden's success with
00:23:01.860 fundraising recently, because he's, he's raising massive amounts of money, has a lot to do with
00:23:08.060 the polls. Because people like to give money to winning causes. They don't like to give money to
00:23:13.840 something that looks like it's going to lose. So as, as Biden's poll numbers look better,
00:23:19.480 he's raking in big numbers, not a big surprise. But besides the polls, are we seeing anything that
00:23:27.400 would suggest that maybe Trump has a better chance than the polls are indicating? And yes,
00:23:33.420 we are. And it turns out that just about everything that isn't those illegitimate polls
00:23:38.420 looks pro-Trump. Almost everything. Let me give you an example.
00:23:46.120 So first of all, there's a pollster, Patrick Basham, who, no relation, who has indicated that there are
00:23:56.760 something like four or five percent shy Trump supporters. So according to this one researcher
00:24:02.880 slash pollster, they are absolutely there. And it's not just because some rural people are hard to poll,
00:24:10.620 but that there is an absolute, no doubt about it, shy Trump supporter. And it's going to come out
00:24:17.560 on election day, similar to 2016. Now, apparently, there's also the internal polls don't show what the
00:24:25.420 external polls show. And the reason that Obama, I think Obama is going to Pennsylvania to help out
00:24:33.360 Biden. You don't send Obama to Pennsylvania if the polls that say Pennsylvania is going to go to Biden
00:24:40.660 are accurate. That is an indication by the Biden people that they don't believe the polls either.
00:24:47.660 So they're sending Obama there to nail down a state that, in theory and on paper, Biden's already
00:24:55.680 got in the bag. So that should tell you something. Also, the Trafalgar group, I think this is recent
00:25:03.780 enough, has Trump ahead in the battleground states. So it doesn't really matter what the national polls
00:25:09.760 say. The battleground states are enough. And so in at least five battleground states,
00:25:14.760 Trump is ahead, according to the Trafalgar group, who has done better in the past than other
00:25:21.460 pollsters. So you look at the ones who are the closest in 2016, and say, how are they? And once
00:25:28.800 again, the ones that have the best results in 2016 are looking really good for Trump. Surprise.
00:25:35.380 And we're also seeing polls that Trump is earning a higher percentage of black and Hispanic voters
00:25:45.440 than he did in 2016. How would you like to be the Biden campaign and realize that Trump is doing way
00:25:52.840 better with black and Hispanic voters? Pretty scary. Now, apparently, Biden is doing better with
00:25:59.300 seniors. But I don't know if I believe that, because that may be also coming from the same
00:26:05.640 illegitimate polls. But I suppose I could believe it. But I don't know if I do. It's possible just
00:26:15.540 because Biden, you know, Biden's a Democrat, and Biden is promising things and scaring people
00:26:21.840 with a bunch of lies about what Trump's going to do. So maybe, maybe. But I would think getting
00:26:27.880 back the black, or gaining in the black and Hispanic voters is going to make a big deal.
00:26:35.100 And also, the, if you just look at the enthusiasm, I think the enthusiasm gap is just so obvious.
00:26:44.320 If you look at any Biden rally, it's, you know, three cars and two reporters standing in circles.
00:26:51.640 And you look at any Trump event, and it's gigantic. Apparently, the polls show that Trump,
00:26:57.420 Trump likely voters are twice as enthusiastic as other voters. So twice, two times more enthusiastic
00:27:08.020 than Trump voters. That's not even close. Twice as enthusiastic. And it's pretty obvious. I mean,
00:27:15.340 it matches your observation. Also, I think Trump was shown in one poll, maybe it's already changed,
00:27:23.460 but 56% were better off, they thought. 56%. If that was the only thing you knew, that would pretty much
00:27:33.580 determine what's going to happen. And apparently, Trump's approval rating is high enough, even with
00:27:40.840 coronavirus and everything else, his approval rating is high enough that it actually predicts
00:27:45.940 re-election. So we don't know, but we shall see. Here's a, we'll talk about Trump and coronavirus in
00:27:54.200 a minute, but here's something I'm feeling, but I can't measure it. So tell me if you're feeling this
00:28:03.500 too. The thing we're worried about is that the election results will not look credible to one side
00:28:10.480 or the other, maybe both. And that could cause some kind of civil unrest leading to a breakdown of
00:28:17.220 civilization or something. I'm feeling the opposite, and I'm feeling it strongly. Now, anecdotally,
00:28:25.260 we're seeing lots of individual threats against, you know, we're going to hunt you down, you Trump
00:28:30.600 supporters. We're seeing individual acts of violence on the street. And a lot of Trump supporters
00:28:36.660 are thinking, if Trump loses, or even if he wins, and it's a contested election, are we going to be
00:28:44.500 hunted down? Because it's feeling like that? And I'm going to tell you, it's starting to feel the
00:28:51.380 opposite. And here's why. The very act of having an election, and the act of voting, and the act of
00:29:01.320 getting, let's say, getting dirty, in analyzing the election, and really looking at the data and
00:29:07.820 trying to understand what the candidates are proposing, looking at their policies, watching
00:29:13.340 the debates, all of this stuff that is really super concentrated in the last month has an effect
00:29:21.320 on us. And it has an effect of reintroducing us to democracy. Let's call it the republic, to be
00:29:29.920 technical. But the principles of democratic government are, they've gone from something
00:29:36.160 we know exists, but are not front of mind. It's now, it's not now going completely to front of mind.
00:29:43.580 And in the world of persuasion, if you can get somebody to do a small thing, it's easier to get
00:29:50.020 them to do a slightly bigger thing. It's how cults work. They get you to do small stuff, and then they
00:29:54.960 gradually get you to do more stuff. But getting people to actually physically vote, physically
00:30:01.980 fill out a ballot, physically deliver it, physically drive to the voting area, is very self-persuasive.
00:30:11.320 Meaning that we are brainwashing ourselves back into the love of democracy, the love of the republic.
00:30:19.860 And nobody's in charge of this, right? There's nobody whose message is, love your democracy.
00:30:27.420 There's nobody who's, I mean, I guess the politicians say that sometimes, but you wouldn't identify with
00:30:32.520 anybody. We are instead re-hypnotizing ourselves to love the country and love the system, even while
00:30:40.480 we're complaining, right? Because you can complain like crazy and still love the thing you're complaining
00:30:46.140 about, such as, you know, your own family. You can complain about your family, but still love them.
00:30:52.500 And I feel like there's a thing happening. And you're going to feel it more and more right up to
00:30:59.660 election day. And that thing is people buying into the system. If we do have a record turnout for the
00:31:07.520 election, that also means we had a record number of people who bought into the system. And that
00:31:15.260 is a very stabilizing thing. Very stabilizing. And the more people you see simply participating
00:31:23.260 in a peaceful way, and those number of people are going to be, how many? Over 100 million?
00:31:31.100 How many? Can somebody in the comments tell me how many people actually are likely to vote?
00:31:36.100 100 million? Now add up all the people who have protested in 2020. All of them. Every person
00:31:43.680 who went on the street, not just violent people, I'm not talking about looters, just every single
00:31:50.620 person who went on the street, every person who's threatened a Trump supporter, every person
00:31:57.220 who did violence, if you add them all up, how many are there? 20,000? What would be the total number
00:32:07.820 of people who seem to be revolution minded? You know, actually marched? 20,000? Maybe 100,000?
00:32:16.640 But we're talking about 100 million Americans just reminded themselves that they were Americans.
00:32:23.280 And we're going to keep reminding ourselves. And we're going to remind ourselves all the way to
00:32:27.400 election day. And when this election is over, no matter which way it goes, and we fight about it,
00:32:34.880 because we will. Will it go to the Supreme Court? I'd say more likely yes than no. More likely yes than
00:32:41.920 no. But when it's all done, we will be immersed in the system. We will have participated. We will
00:32:50.800 have done our part. We will have looked at the Supreme Court and watch it do its part. It will give us
00:32:56.980 an answer that we will respect, because it won't be stupid. It's some of the smartest people in the
00:33:04.180 whole freaking country are on the Supreme Court. They're not going to be stupid. You're going to
00:33:09.560 be proud of it. You're going to be glad of it. You're going to be happy that you live in a system
00:33:13.740 that can do this. It can do this. We can do this. Meaning the system can do this. And we can do it as
00:33:21.540 well. So my feeling at the moment is that no matter which way it goes, there will be the required paid
00:33:35.480 demonstrators. But I think the people demonstrating will largely be the organized people who have an
00:33:42.660 agenda. The Marxists, anybody who's getting paid by an outside authority, some organization that's
00:33:49.980 trying to get power. But what I don't see happening is the bulk of the country, or enough of them,
00:33:57.940 rejecting our system or rejecting the results. We'll complain about it forever, no matter which
00:34:04.220 way it goes. We're going to complain forever. But we probably, and I'm going to say 99.9% chance,
00:34:12.240 we will still be the United States in a year. We will still be the strongest country that the world has
00:34:19.260 ever known. And we're not going to be beaten by the fake news. Because it's the fake news that winds
00:34:26.400 us up. It's the AI that drives the fake news and drives the social engagement. Those things are not
00:34:35.520 working on our side. But the AI wants to keep us alive. The AI doesn't want the country to be destroyed
00:34:44.360 because that gives you less AI. So the AI wants the country to live. The public wants the country to
00:34:53.900 live. The few people, the few people who don't, are going to have to deal with a country that is more
00:35:00.780 armed than it has ever been before. If you think this country can be overthrown, I will give you what
00:35:07.800 I call the ISIS analogy. ISIS looked unstoppable until their ambition got bigger. As soon as they
00:35:16.340 tried to hold property and hold land and territory, they became an easy target. You knew exactly where
00:35:22.740 they were. Oh, look, they are. This is their territory. There's their standing army. Let's blow
00:35:28.940 them up. So things that work on a small scale do not necessarily work on a big scale. So if you take all
00:35:37.660 these protesters, etc., they found this little niche, niche, niche, say it any way you like, translated into
00:35:46.280 your head to your favorite pronunciation. So they found this weird little time and place that they could have
00:35:53.900 unlimited trouble. They'd have to find a democratic location. They'd have to get enough people that, you know,
00:36:01.100 the police were sort of outnumbered. They'd need to have just the right political situation. They'd need to have
00:36:07.680 funding from the outside. They'd have to have the right organizers. They'd have to have the right weather. And they
00:36:13.560 would have to have a whole bunch of things. It has to be sort of perfect. But one thing they really, really need is that
00:36:21.240 these citizens in the area they're causing trouble are not heavily armed. And that's not true once you
00:36:28.660 get out of the middle of the city. Soon as you get into the suburbs, people are armed to the teeth. And
00:36:35.740 it's only going to take... I would be amazed if there's not a mass casualty event, let's say, working
00:36:44.020 against the protesters. Now, the fact that it hasn't happened yet tells you a lot. As someone else was
00:36:52.940 opining on social media, the fact that conservatives who are armed to the teeth, we all agree on that,
00:37:01.820 conservatives are armed. But they have, I would say that they've held back the level of violence that
00:37:09.780 they are capable of delivering. They have held back almost completely. You know, the Proud Boys
00:37:17.460 actually like to fight. That's literally part of the culture. So they sort of look for trouble. They
00:37:22.840 like fights. But they don't represent, you know, conservatives or anything like that. You know,
00:37:28.320 they have some overlap, but they certainly don't represent them. So it would take a lot,
00:37:34.980 apparently, to get conservatives mad enough to be violent in some general way. But if you move into
00:37:42.480 the suburbs, you got it. If these protests move into the suburbs, it would be like ISIS trying to
00:37:50.660 hold property. You're going to move all these people into the kill zone, and somebody's going to
00:37:56.560 do something that we don't recommend, but it's predictable, right? And once there's a
00:38:04.960 mass casualty event among the protesters, they may be less inclined to protest again. But it would
00:38:11.200 take getting to the, probably takes getting into the suburbs before that happens. But I don't see
00:38:17.320 any chance that the, that the unrest can grow to destroy the country. I think that risk is basically
00:38:24.340 zero. So there's that. Let's talk about Trump's performance on the coronavirus. Oh, by the way, I,
00:38:32.980 I'm scheduled to be on MSNBC today. So later today, which would be sometime in the Eastern time zone,
00:38:42.220 it would be between six and seven. I don't know when between then. So if you're in California,
00:38:47.480 between three and four, if you're in East Coast, six to seven on MSNBC. So that's happening.
00:38:57.400 But let's talk about whether we know Trump is doing a good job or a bad job on coronavirus. And here are
00:39:05.880 some things to make you smarter. So if you remember everything I tell you, it's an Arie Melber show on
00:39:13.580 MSNBC. Somebody's asking. Here are the things you should ask yourself if somebody tells you Trump has
00:39:23.600 botched the coronavirus. So Trump closed China travel. And I think most people say he did it soon
00:39:32.240 enough, but he didn't close it completely because a lot of Americans who needed to get back home were
00:39:38.520 there. And there's some thinking that he should have forced them into quarantine or not let them come
00:39:45.640 home, I suppose. I don't know how that works. How do you not let Americans come back home?
00:39:50.740 That's a tough one. And we didn't really have the testing resources. And there were so many of them,
00:39:56.700 apparently lots of them, that you couldn't test them all or quarantine them all. It just didn't seem
00:40:01.820 practical. But here's the question I haven't seen asked or answered. What did the experts recommend
00:40:08.600 about the, I think it's mostly American citizens who were allowed back in from China? Did Fauci and
00:40:17.220 Birx say to President Trump, yes, you should close travel from China, but make sure you close it all?
00:40:25.060 Don't let the American citizens back in? Did that happen? Do you know if that happened or it didn't
00:40:30.940 happen? Because I don't know. That feels like it's pretty important, right? Because if the experts were
00:40:37.940 not terribly concerned about the number of people who were going to get back in, then why should the
00:40:44.820 president have been concerned? If what we're asking of the president, somebody says, yes, Fauci did.
00:40:53.820 So if you have a source for that, I'd like to see it. I'd like to see anything that would suggest
00:41:01.360 Fauci said it should be closed completely versus allowing the Americans back in,
00:41:06.780 which would be a smaller number compared to total travel. So that's a question that I don't know. But
00:41:15.840 if somebody says that too many people got back in, throw it back at them and say, what did Fauci and
00:41:23.000 Birx say? Did they say not to let those people in? Some says they were quarantined. I don't believe
00:41:30.540 that's true. I don't believe that the people coming in from China were quarantined. All right. So the
00:41:38.500 number one question there is, what did Trump do that's different from what the experts told them
00:41:43.200 to do? If Fauci and Birx had told Trump, no, no, no, you have to stop everybody. If that happened,
00:41:52.380 wouldn't we know that? Because that would be the number one headline, wouldn't it? Trump doesn't do
00:41:57.500 what experts say, right? If he violated what they recommended, we would know that, wouldn't we?
00:42:05.200 And I don't know that. All right. Here's the other thing. If you think that Trump's treatment of masks
00:42:13.120 caused fewer people to use them, and therefore more deaths, here's the question you would have to ask
00:42:19.480 if you were good at comparing things. Would Obama have been better at getting conservatives to wear masks?
00:42:26.260 What do you think? Is there any evidence to suggest that a President Obama or a President Clinton,
00:42:34.840 or I'll even extend it, how about a President Mitt Romney? What tells you that any of them, Obama,
00:42:43.580 Clinton, or Romney, which of them would have done a better job at getting conservatives to wear masks,
00:42:50.680 and young people to wear masks? I think that's where the problems are. I have no reason to think any of
00:42:56.940 them would have been more successful. It hasn't been tested. And certainly, there's no common sense
00:43:02.360 that would suggest that they would be better at it. And I'm not even sure that Trump's example is really
00:43:12.200 what's driving people. It might be. I mean, you have to worry about that. But I can't imagine that a
00:43:16.880 Democrat would get Republicans to wear masks, or that the young people would say, oh, it's a Democrat
00:43:23.200 asking. I wasn't going to wear a mask to my college, you know, party, my illegal college party. But now
00:43:32.780 that I know that a Democrat has asked me, I'm going to wear that mask. Said nobody. Said no college student
00:43:38.660 ever. So I would say that the idea that Trump has not handled the mask wearing fits common sense.
00:43:48.000 In other words, as you're watching him, you're saying, surely the way you're talking about this
00:43:52.340 is suboptimal. But that's not the end of the analysis. You still have to compare him to any
00:43:58.920 other President who would have been in that situation. And you'd have to know that that other
00:44:03.400 President would have achieved greater mask wearing. Do you know that? Because I don't see that.
00:44:10.980 It is not obvious to me that some other President would have somehow achieved this magical mask
00:44:16.680 wearing thing. I think our desire to not wear masks has more to do with Americans than it does with our
00:44:24.400 President. How about this? If you took a leader from another country that you thought did a good job
00:44:32.180 with the coronavirus, let's say South Korea or New Zealand, and you just plop that leader into the
00:44:38.960 United States with all of our problems. We've got more international travel than a lot of places
00:44:44.460 coming in from different directions. We might have a less compliant populace who is more freedom-loving
00:44:50.860 than compliant. We've got states' rights that add a wrinkle. How would that other leader do in the
00:44:58.880 same situation? Well, there's no way to know. And therefore, you don't really have any knowledge
00:45:04.720 of whether Trump did better or worse than some other leader would have done with the same scenario.
00:45:12.080 How about this? How do you compare countries that have different preferences for freedom over safety?
00:45:18.780 If the United States, by, let's say, historical and cultural reasons, we tend to, we value freedom
00:45:27.560 over safety. More so than some other places, which I believe, if you did a poll, I don't know if
00:45:34.620 anybody has done that, but if you did a poll, I think you would find that some countries value
00:45:39.720 health and safety over freedom, or at least their leaders do. Because if the leaders value it,
00:45:46.720 maybe they can force it to happen. But if the United States favors more freedom
00:45:52.980 at the expense of safety, how would you compare our death rate to a country that had a different set
00:46:01.380 of priorities? How is that a fair comparison? We should only be compared to countries that have the
00:46:07.800 same, let's say, preference for freedom over safety. And who would that be? I don't know. Do you?
00:46:17.520 Because we didn't do exactly the same thing as Sweden, so that's not a good comparison.
00:46:23.100 So people who are good at comparing things know that we don't have anything to compare.
00:46:29.220 And how about this? We still don't know why one country does better than another country.
00:46:34.760 We don't. If you read experts, and I'm talking about actual experts, who are talking about,
00:46:41.900 let's say, Sweden's experience, they don't even agree. There's no expert consensus on why Sweden
00:46:50.300 is having the experience that they are. We don't even agree if it's a good experience. The experts
00:46:55.580 can't even agree if things are going well there or poorly. I mean, think about that. We don't even know
00:47:02.540 if they're doing well or poorly. And we don't know why some countries mysteriously have good effects
00:47:08.720 and others don't. We have lots of hypotheses from cultural distance things to, I think,
00:47:16.680 vitamin D might be a big part of it, age, ethnicity, maybe masks, maybe distance. Who knows?
00:47:25.920 We don't know. So if you don't know, and I think that's fair to say, I feel like that's completely
00:47:32.320 fair to say that we don't know why some country does really well and some country doesn't. And if
00:47:38.940 you don't know why some country is doing well and another one isn't, why are we attributing that
00:47:44.700 difference to the leaders? Because there's no evidence that it's the leaders that are the problem
00:47:51.780 or the solution. All right. Now, so that would be the defense of the president's performance. And
00:48:01.240 it's mostly around the fact that you really can't tell how anybody's doing. So that's the summary.
00:48:07.140 You just can't tell. The fact that we have different outcomes only tells you there are different
00:48:12.440 outcomes. The different outcomes do not tell you the quality of the leadership. It doesn't tell you
00:48:18.800 that. All right. And when you imagine it does, you're in purely irrational territory. But that
00:48:25.680 said, are there some things we can say about the president's performance that you could still
00:48:30.420 clearly say are suboptimal? And the answer is yes. Here are the things that I would put at the top of
00:48:35.980 the list. On day one, I can forgive that we didn't have good testing because apparently there was a
00:48:42.320 technical problem. We didn't know we had it. We got a late start. It's not exactly the president's fault.
00:48:48.800 It was the fault of the experts who were doing the test kits, etc. But now it's been, what,
00:48:55.420 seven months in or something? Seven months later, I heard somebody else ask this on a news show.
00:49:02.400 So I'll just borrow this thought. Why is it that seven months in, the most capable country in the
00:49:09.460 world, I'd like to think we are, maybe not. Why is it that I can't just walk down to CVS and get
00:49:16.420 myself a coronavirus test as often as I want? Ideally, I'd like to have the results, you know,
00:49:23.200 same day, 15 minutes. But are you telling me that if we put, you know, balls to the wall,
00:49:31.140 you know, War Powers Act, pull out all the stops, stop at nothing to make sure every citizen could get
00:49:40.080 tested every freaking day. Every citizen, every day. How would we look in terms of the coronavirus
00:49:47.540 if we could do that? Well, a lot better, right? It would be a lot better. Has the president done that?
00:49:54.900 No. No. And although he has done a lot, and there's a lot happening with testing, a lot of different
00:50:04.080 companies are working on it, it does feel to me, just sort of as an observer, that by now,
00:50:12.920 if our president was doing everything that, you know, hindsight tells us he should have done,
00:50:17.960 we would be a lot further along in all of us being able to get tested as much as we wanted.
00:50:24.600 I feel like that's a safe statement. So if somebody said that's a problem, I don't know if I could argue
00:50:31.000 that. I have argued in the past that contact tracing only works when you have just a few
00:50:38.680 infections, and it doesn't work if you're already massively infected, as we were by the time we had
00:50:44.840 enough tests to even think about that. So I think I would not blame the president for doing less
00:50:50.800 contact tracing, because we didn't have the ability to do it until it was sort of too late.
00:50:55.780 But we should be able to test sort of everybody by now. And if we can't do it by now, can you tell
00:51:04.440 us when we could do that? Is that sort of a late November, you're going to be able to go into any
00:51:09.820 Walgreens and get a test? Yes or no? I'd love to know if that's on track. Somebody says disagree in
00:51:19.120 the comments. You've got more room for text than the word disagree. So while testing is more
00:51:29.100 available, it's certainly not available enough. Why don't you have an oxygen meter in your house?
00:51:36.460 How many of you have your own oxygen meter? You know, it's an inexpensive device. You just
00:51:41.660 clip it to your finger and it tells you your oxygen level. Why don't you have one of those?
00:51:46.600 Because those are really one of the first indicators you've got a problem, even before
00:51:52.440 a test, probably. Now, a lot of you have them. But why isn't a national effort to put one in every
00:52:01.660 house? Wouldn't you feel better if the president had said, look, we're going to fund one of these
00:52:08.260 companies that makes those oxygen meters, and we're going to just mail one to every house with a
00:52:13.880 ballot? You know, we'll probably mail them to the wrong addresses too. We'll just mail one to every
00:52:18.740 house. There will be no house that doesn't have an oxygen meter. That would feel like better
00:52:23.520 leadership, right? That didn't happen. Why are we not being continuously reminded to take more vitamin D?
00:52:33.900 Wouldn't that feel like good leadership? If every time you saw the president, he said,
00:52:38.080 make sure you're supplementing with vitamin D. Because, you know, he does mention wash your
00:52:43.960 hands and wear a mask if you're in close social distancing range. But wouldn't you like to see a
00:52:50.980 little more on vitamin D? You're probably doing it on your own. But wouldn't you like to see more of
00:52:55.220 that? Why have we not done a test of two different cities, one where masks are required, one where
00:53:06.020 they're not, if they have enough in common that maybe you could tell there's a difference? I would
00:53:11.200 feel like we had better leadership if we had more tests going on. You know, a test this versus this,
00:53:17.860 A-B testing. I don't see that. I'm not sure that would be easily organized by the federal government.
00:53:25.220 But they could at least call it out if there are two cities that went two different ways. I'd like
00:53:31.100 to see the president say, okay, we've got a good test case. We've got Cleveland going this way. We've
00:53:35.800 got Miami going this way. And hypothetically, let's say they had enough in common with infection rates
00:53:42.180 or whatever, that now we can see if these, if these procedures make a difference in the curve.
00:53:47.700 Curve. Wouldn't you like to see that? And then, of course, Trump has claimed that he does a bad job
00:53:56.600 explaining masks and the efficiency of masks. He made the claim that 85% of people who wear masks
00:54:03.280 caught COVID. So he kind of butchered that explanation. It wasn't about masks working or not.
00:54:10.380 So he's definitely said things which probably discourage people from wearing masks. That
00:54:17.820 feels safe. But again, would Obama have done better? How would you know? I don't see conservatives
00:54:25.740 saying, oh, Obama said it. I guess I'll go wear a mask now. Doesn't feel like that would happen.
00:54:30.420 All right. So those are your pros and cons for Trump and coronavirus. I sent a tweet this morning.
00:54:42.660 I said that listening to the experts is the dumbest smart sounding idea of all time. There's some things
00:54:49.440 that sound smart, but they're really the dumbest thing ever. I'll give you another example. Be yourself.
00:54:55.060 Have you ever gotten, have you ever heard that advice? So be yourself. Just be yourself. That's the best
00:55:02.840 thing you can do. Worst advice ever. There's no advice that's worse than be yourself.
00:55:12.420 Now, here's better advice. Try to be a better version of yourself. Try to be better than yourself.
00:55:20.120 All right. Now, that's good advice. Try to continuously improve. Try to not accept where
00:55:28.160 you are as good enough. Don't try to be yourself because you wouldn't wear clothes. You wouldn't,
00:55:34.420 you wouldn't bathe. Uh, you know, you wouldn't obey the law. If it was just up to you, just be in
00:55:41.500 yourself. You'd be the worst person ever. Do you ever have a friend who, uh, tells you that they're
00:55:48.680 just being honest? Oh yeah. I know. I know it's, it might sound rude, but I'm just honest. I'm just
00:55:54.440 being honest. Do you want that? Wouldn't you rather be around somebody who wouldn't be that honest if
00:56:01.540 the only purpose is to hurt you? Can't help you. Didn't, didn't help you at all. It was just honest
00:56:07.840 that it hurt. Maybe you don't want that person to be around you. All right. So listening to the experts
00:56:13.780 is the seriously, the stupidest advice anybody ever gave. And still, and still I'm going to give
00:56:22.900 you that advice too. It's both the stupidest advice ever given. And I'm also going to give it to you
00:56:29.960 right now. Yeah. You have to, you have to listen to the, the experts. You have to, you'd be an idiot
00:56:35.740 not to, but believing them. That's another story because you have to, you know, you want to reach
00:56:43.860 the level of maturity where you can say this to yourself. If the experts don't agree, how do you
00:56:52.220 know which expert is right? You're not the expert on experts. You're not an expert on coronavirus.
00:56:59.120 You're not an expert on climate change. And if you talk to the experts, you don't know if they're
00:57:03.920 lying to you. You can't tell you're just trusting the experts. So are you really trusting science?
00:57:11.100 Are you really listening to science? Are you really listening to the experts? Well, you might be
00:57:16.900 listening to them, but should you, you don't know, you don't know. How do you know that science is at
00:57:24.680 that early stage where they might be more wrong than right on some topic, or they've progressed to the
00:57:31.520 point where they're more right than wrong? How can you tell where they are on that progression? Can you
00:57:37.120 tell that something is really settled versus something that's not yet settled? You can't tell.
00:57:43.100 There's no way to tell. Even an expert can't tell that. So you certainly can't tell. So if you don't
00:57:49.220 know which experts are right and which ones are wrong, what does it mean to trust the experts?
00:57:55.400 It's nonsense. It's complete nonsense. So instead, you know, on questions like, you know, masks and
00:58:04.400 hydroxychloroquine and lockdowns, clearly there are experts on both sides. So what about going with
00:58:11.880 the majority? How about that? Should you go with the majority? Because most experts, if they're all on
00:58:20.040 one side, let's say it's 90-10, would you go with the 90 just automatically? Well, again, you don't know
00:58:28.020 if this is a mature science in which when 90% of the people are on the same side, it tells you a lot.
00:58:35.360 It tells you that that is a solid opinion. Or is it the beginning where 90% of the people are wrong,
00:58:42.600 well, we won't know for a while? How do you tell? You can't. So what I do is risk management instead.
00:58:54.280 So instead of saying that those experts are certainly right, I say to myself, if I follow
00:58:59.840 this expert, what's the upside and what's the downside? So with masks, for example, I don't
00:59:07.040 believe the experts because that would be stupid. And I don't believe them because there are more
00:59:12.320 they say it's that they work than don't, although I'm biased by that. I admit I'm biased by that,
00:59:18.540 but it's not automatically true because most experts say it. It's not true because there are studies,
00:59:26.080 metadata, meta-analysis, as Dr. Fauci says, that doesn't make it true because there are probably
00:59:32.680 plenty of things that there's meta-analysis and it's wrong. And we know that 50% of the studies
00:59:38.960 that are submitted to journals and published, peer-reviewed and published, something like half
00:59:44.780 of them turn out to be not reproducible. So science isn't one thing that's right and all the smart
00:59:51.960 people believe it because it's one thing and it's right. Science is this big mess of stuff that is more
00:59:58.260 wrong than right because there's more stuff that you're working through the early parts than there are
01:00:04.240 things that you've settled. And you don't know what's wrong and you don't know what's right.
01:00:09.040 So I go with risk management. And I stated myself, for example, I don't know anybody who died from
01:00:15.200 wearing a mask. Do you? I don't know anybody. I don't know anybody who got a, like some incurable
01:00:22.100 disease from wearing a mask. Do I believe it's possible? Yeah. Yeah, totally. Do I believe that
01:00:30.200 some people might be worse off wearing masks and that the downside for those certain medical
01:00:36.940 conditions, et cetera, is worse than the risk of getting coronavirus? Yeah, those people certainly
01:00:43.040 exist. I would say so. But until I see people dropping from mask-related illness, I'm going to go with
01:00:53.580 the meta-analysis and the Fauci that says we think it works. It might work. Could be wrong. But we don't
01:01:01.440 see people dying from wearing masks. But the meta-analysis strongly suggests people will die
01:01:07.440 from not wearing masks. So it's a risk management question. That is how smart people act. Trusting
01:01:16.920 experts is the dumbest frickin' thing you could ever do in your life, even though they're usually
01:01:23.220 right. They're usually right. I would bet that if you looked at all expert opinions over time,
01:01:31.520 you'd find they're more right than wrong, depending on the category.
01:01:35.840 All right. And that's about all I wanted to talk about. How about that?
01:01:48.460 Scott doesn't have to wear a mask for four hours like teachers. Well, I would grant you that wearing
01:01:55.560 a mask for a long time is way riskier than wearing it for a short time. So that's true. And there again,
01:02:05.060 I would go to, if we see a massive health issue from wearing masks, and we would see it first in
01:02:13.440 the people who have to wear masks for longer periods, I would say we should take that seriously.
01:02:18.500 But until we do, there's been enough people wearing masks. I mean, look at Asia. In Asia,
01:02:25.340 it's fairly common for people to wear masks, you know, all day long. Do we have data from Asia that
01:02:32.720 says, oh, all those mask wearers were worse off? Don't think so. Now, there's another thing
01:02:38.100 happening. I don't have confirmation of this. But it looks like the regular influenza rates are low
01:02:43.480 this year. I need a fact check on that because I didn't see a source I trusted. But I'm very curious
01:02:51.120 what regular influenza will look like this year. If masks work, you would expect it would be lower
01:02:58.700 than ever. If there's some kind of cross immunity thing, maybe it'll be less than ever because of
01:03:08.720 that. But here's something that I would at least put out there as a possibility. I've told you before
01:03:15.280 that the regular influenza death rate is fake, and that you've never met anybody who died from regular
01:03:23.520 flu. Have you? Now, there's always going to be somebody who says yes. But we all know somebody
01:03:30.520 who died of coronavirus. You know, maybe not directly. But you know somebody who knows somebody
01:03:36.700 who died of coronavirus. You see them in the news, etc. That seems real. There are real people dying of
01:03:42.860 coronavirus, and a lot of them. You don't know a lot of people who died of influenza. I know exactly
01:03:49.600 zero in 63 years of life. Apparently, 20,000 to 50,000 people around me have been dropping dead
01:03:56.600 from this influenza, and somehow I never noticed. It escaped my view. I certainly know people who died
01:04:04.620 in traffic accidents, and that's about the same number per year, right? Ask yourself this. Do you know
01:04:12.120 anybody who died of an overdose or anybody who died of a traffic-related accident? Yes, you do.
01:04:22.760 How many of those are there per year? About the same as alleged influenza deaths. I mean, it's in that
01:04:30.600 range, you know, the low tens of thousands per year. Same range. Why is it you know somebody who died of
01:04:37.660 AIDS, probably? You know somebody who died of a car accident? I know somebody who died in a parachute
01:04:43.740 accident. But I don't know anybody who died of influenza. So I'm going to say that, and this is
01:04:49.760 one of the tips I have in my book, Loser Think, that if you're trying to figure out what's true and
01:04:55.100 what's false, here are some tips. If the news on the left and the news on the right says a fact is a
01:05:02.920 fact and they say it the same, it's probably true. If either the news on the left or the news on the
01:05:09.180 right are the only ones that say it's a fact, but the other news says it's not a fact, it's probably
01:05:14.760 not a fact, all right? Whoever says it's not true has the advantage. It's usually not true if somebody
01:05:21.460 says it's not true. All right. That's a weird comment. And the other way you can tell if
01:05:33.860 something's true, or at least it's a flag, is if the official data completely conflicts with your
01:05:40.500 observation. All right. For example, most of my life, I was taught that if you ate within, I don't know,
01:05:49.260 half an hour or whatever of swimming, you would get a cramp and you would die because you ate food
01:05:55.260 too close to swimming. And yet I lived my entire life without hearing of a single person who died
01:06:02.780 because they got a cramp because they ate food too close to swimming. Do you know how many times
01:06:08.560 everybody I know ate food too soon to swimming? Basically everybody. So the whole world is full of
01:06:17.100 people who are violating that, eating food and swimming, and I'd never heard of anybody who got a
01:06:23.080 cramp and died from swimming. And then decades pass, and sure enough, the science comes out and it says,
01:06:29.420 um, there was never any science to suggest you would get a cramp from eating before swimming.
01:06:36.180 Sure enough, the observation was that none of it was happening. The data, what I thought was the science,
01:06:42.880 probably was never real science, but I thought it was science, said that people were dropping like
01:06:47.980 flies, or at least they could. So this, the influenza thing is the same.
01:06:55.780 Um, it's the same that it doesn't match observation. And I still have a big question on the Spanish flu.
01:07:02.380 I'm seeing in the comments, somebody mentioned that. How did the Spanish flu ever go away?
01:07:07.460 If everything that we've been told by the experts is true, and remember, we're supposed to trust the
01:07:13.940 experts. But the experts have told us that unless you have herd immunity, a virus isn't going to go
01:07:21.480 away. Spanish flu didn't reach herd immunity, did it? But it went away. So is that because there was
01:07:30.460 some other immunity that was cross-immunity? Was it because there's a genetic thing where all the people
01:07:36.500 could get it got it? There's a big, big unknown about the Spanish flu. And I see people even
01:07:43.240 disagreeing about whether masks worked during the Spanish flu. I feel like we would know that,
01:07:49.620 wouldn't we? But I guess we don't. Um, all right. That's all I got for now. I think that's plenty,
01:07:58.660 don't you? I hope you enjoyed today's episode of Coffee with Scott Adams. And I will see you
01:08:06.300 tomorrow. Well, if you're watching me on MSNBC, you'll see me later today. Otherwise, I'll see you
01:08:11.180 tomorrow. All right, YouTubers. Um, Periscope is off. I'm just watching you right now, looking at
01:08:21.480 your, uh, somebody says that they wore gauze for the Spanish flu. Yeah, that wouldn't work as well,
01:08:28.600 would it? Um, influenza is generally not listed on, uh, death certificates. Um, that is correct.
01:08:39.080 Uh, influenza is actually not counted. It's estimated based on excess, uh, mortality,
01:08:45.000 but I got a feeling there's some other reason that people are dying. So, um, why are you doing
01:08:51.780 this Periscope YouTube difference? Um, I don't know the question, but I'll, let me give you a
01:08:59.320 general answer. In order to do a live stream on both Periscope and YouTube, I had to use two
01:09:06.820 different iPads that are just, you know, nailed up to the two different services. And I just put them
01:09:12.260 in front of me together so that I'm on both. But every other technology, such as this device you see
01:09:18.180 behind me, that's a $13,000 worth of equipment, high-end equipment to be able to live stream
01:09:25.140 different, uh, to different destinations doesn't work. Now, technically it works, but you would need
01:09:32.720 to be a full-time engineer to, to debug it every time it goes down. Uh, unfortunately, if you have
01:09:39.420 a Windows platform, and I don't know why anybody would use Windows, frankly. Do you use Windows for
01:09:45.720 anything? Because every time you turn it on, it just starts begging you for updates and, and downloads
01:09:51.960 and, and you just can never use it. When I open up my Macintosh, I just start working.
01:09:59.720 Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. If I open up a Windows machine, I can spend the next hour just debugging all
01:10:07.080 the things that, uh, degraded since the last time I opened my computer. You know, all the software's
01:10:12.560 on a date and it's just a mess. So, uh, anyway, so all those, the systems that, um, try to stream to
01:10:21.120 multiple, uh, outlets, they use Windows machines, which are not dependable devices. And so you can't
01:10:28.400 really use them for production. And that's all I got for now. And I'll see you later.
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