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
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.