Episode 1073 Scott Adams: I'm Late. Grab Coffee.

Hey, everybody. You caught me a little bit behind the times. I've got to get my studio in shape here. And printing off my notes, closing my blinds, getting into full coffee with Scott Evans mode. A little late because I wanted to put together a little whiteboard situation here. So I was doing that while you were getting ready to come on live. And is this the best day ever? We don't know yet, but it might be. It might be the best day ever. Good morning. Hey, Omar, thanks for joining me. And wouldn't you like to do a little thing we call the simultaneous sip? I know you would. And all you need is a cupboard mug or a glass of tanker gels or stein, a canteen jug or flask, a vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. And join me now for the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better. It's called the simultaneous sip, and it happens. Now go. Excuse me while I grab my notes. Thanks for waiting. All right. Well, I would say the biggest story of the day is those doctors. I'll bet you all know what I'm talking about, right? So there was a. I guess Breitbart filmed a group of doctors who are pro hydroxychloroquine, and they were giving a little press conference outside somewhere, and they were talking about what they believed were the obvious medical benefits of hydroxychloroquine for fighting coronavirus. Now, of course, they are not in the. Well, I don't know if they're in the medical majority, but maybe the degree to which they trust the hydroxychloroquine might put them in the minority. I think there are other doctors who would say, well, we don't know, but might be worth a shot. So let me give you my full analysis of the doctors. Now, what makes the story interesting is that Facebook banned it after it had, I don't know, 14 million views. And then Facebook banned it for giving the wrong information. So it was bad medical information, according to Facebook. I think today that Twitter has banned it. Am I right about that or not? I might be wrong about that. I know that Twitter was waiting, but I saw a few clips posted this morning that were blank. And I wasn't sure if that's Twitter or where it was being pointed to that blanked it out. But. So we have two stories in one story. Number one is censorship. Is it censorship if a social platform takes incorrect information off its platform? Wait, wait, you're going to say, Scott, Scott, Scott. But it wasn't wrong. We're not talking about that yet. So we'll talk about whether it was right or wrong separately. The real question is, does Facebook get to decide why does Facebook get to decide what is correct medical information? Now, I think what they do is that they look at the doctors and the FDA and they look at the World Health Organization and the cdc and I imagine what they do is say, well, if these people are making claims that are outside of the experts, the experts say they're wrong, who are we to, you know, argue? But we're in this weird situation in which the experts have been consistently wrong. And in the case of face masks, intentionally lying, think about that. We're right in the middle of a situation where the experts have even admitted, in terms of face masks, they've admitted that they lied to us about a life and death medical situation. Now, they had a good reason. They had a good reason for doing it. They were trying to maintain the supply so that the healthcare workers could get it. And frankly, that was a good reason. If they'd given us the good reason, I think maybe I could have acted appropriately and said, I want to get that face mask maybe for myself, but I will allow the N95s to be more available, but other people might not. So I don't even, I don't even fault the experts for lying to the public in that case because they had a higher mission involved. And, you know, you could argue it, but that's not something I care about too much. The point is, if we know that your experts can lie to you, we don't have to wonder. They just told us. They said, yeah, we had a good reason, so we lied to you. You don't have to wonder if it's a thing anymore. It's now a thing. They will lie to you for effect because they think there's some greater value there to somebody. So here's the, here's my take on the medical part of it. There's no right answer because you really can't run a country where you can promote bad information to people the way it's being done now. I wouldn't object to Facebook tagging the arguments to it if they just said this has been tagged as a suspicious or non confirmed medical opinion. We're going to tag it so that you can't miss it. And here's the counterpoint. I'd be okay with that. Wouldn't you be okay with this is a controversial or unproven medical claim. Here's the counterpoint that would be okay with me. Now it would still Confuse some people, because people would still buy into the less credible view. But the less credible view isn't always wrong. That's the problem. The less credible view just might be the new. What will be the new mainstream understanding later, but it hasn't grown yet. So it's a real. It's a real tough one. But I would go with showing both sides. That would be where I'd come out on this thing. Now let's talk about the credibility of the doctors. I would say none. None. If you thought those doctors were credible, I'll tell you why I think they're not. And then you can make your decision. First of all, how hard is it to get, I don't know, 20 doctors who are against the mainstream thinking? Not hard at all, especially on social media. I think they said that they had met on social media before getting together. So having a few dozen doctors who disagree with anything is easy. So what should you make of the fact that there were a few dozen doctors who have a different point of view? The credibility should put on that is nothing. Just nothing at all. Because you can get 20 people to say anything, especially if they're on the Internet so they can find themselves. Because you'd only need what you need one person in every other state in the Union to get 25 people. I mean, it's a really low bar to get, you know, a dozen or 20 doctors to say the same thing. That's different from the mainstream. So the fact that they are doctors and they had Dr. Coates on and they have doctor experience, you should count that as nothing. Nothing. So in your mental calculation, the weight you should give their experience in this specific case, just nothing. Because you could get somebody to say anything. Secondly, let's look at the quality of their arguments and I'm just going to say the thing that everybody's thinking, but since it sounds racist, you have to say it carefully because it's not racist. The woman who is the most featured in that was a doctor who grew up and I guess she practiced in Nigeria before she came here. And I don't have to tell you that Nigeria is a company that is a country that is famous for scams. If you say Nigerian email, what's the first thing you think? It's not racist because Nigeria just happens to be a country. There's nothing about. Nothing about being black in this story. So if you're hearing it, you're hearing the wrong thing. It's just a country, but it's a country that's famous by brand for scams. So when your main doctor says, you know, I practiced in Nigeria, what does your uncritical brain do? It just goes click, oh, somebody from Nigeria. And again, has nothing to do with ethnicity. It's the country. The country is simply famous for scams. Now, that doesn't mean that this doctor is therefore not credible. It just means that's how it feels. Right. So I'm going to separate the things which are logical and you can count on from the things that you're just going to feel. And that's in the category of things. Well, I'm feeling like there's some lack of credibility, but it's not fair because it's not as if all doctors coming out of Nigeria have something in common. They don't. They don't, but it feels that way. So that's the first thing that works against them. But it has nothing to do with whether they're right or wrong. Here's the part that really got to me. So the same woman, the doctor whose name I can't remember, said that she studied. She had treated 350 patients, given them all hydroxychloroquine with or without the other combo, I'm not sure. And claims that none of them have died. So Nobody out of 350 people who came into her for treatment, none of them, not one person out of 350 died. So that's credible, right? That's pretty good information. That's somebody who's really living it and doing it and working with real people. And if 350 of them came in with this and none of them died, that's pretty useful, right? I mean, that tells you something. Does it? No, no. Doesn't tell you anything. You should have learned exactly zero from that information. Number one. Is it true? Is it true you don't know. Do you know that she treated 350 patients with COVID You don't know that. You might know. You might know that she had 350 patients who came in with some kind of a symptom that she thought, you know. I don't know. The tests take a long time. They're not available. I'll just give you some hydroxychloroquine and if you don't die, I'm going to count you as one of my cures. Is that what happened? I don't know. You don't either? We have no idea what happened. We don't know if they were correctly identified or not. How about this? And I'm just going to throw this out there. Would she know if 1% of her 350 people had died, would she know? I don't know. Maybe not. I don't know if she'd know or not. Do doctors track each of their patients so that they could tell you that three weeks later they died under somebody else's care? I don't know. Were these all her own patients or are they people who just needed care and paid for it in cash? Does she really know what happened to her? People don't know. Next. How hard, how unusual would it be if no people died out of 350? I don't know that it's that unusual because here's what I'm thinking. If you have severe Covid symptoms, where do you go? Do you go to your general practitioner or do you go to the emergency room? Because if the only people that this doctor sees are the people who had such mild symptoms they weren't even quite, quite sure if they were sick, isn't that the group that gets better anyway? That's the group that just gets better on their own. If all the people who really felt like there was something going on, it was kind of advanced to the point where they couldn't breathe well, or they had pretty bad symptoms, they might go to the hospital first. So it's not clear that what she's seeing is a broad sample, but rather the people who have self selected for mild symptoms, if they have self selected for mild symptoms and she gives them the mild symptom treatment and every single one of them avoids hospitalization, what have you learned? Nothing. I don't think you've learned anything. Statistically you've learned that it's maybe something you could look at, that's definitely enough to say, well, we should study this. If what you took away from it is, oh, we should look into this, it's worth putting some money into a rigorous study. Yes, but if you're saying, well, we have the answer now, no, that's not even close to being credible. All right, let's see. So there's the main thing. Now I have to tell you about this conversation that I just had on online with. There's a doctor that you might be familiar with, Dr. Eric Feigal Ding with a, what do you call it? A hyphen? Feigl Ding is his last name and he's an epidemiologist and health economist, senior fellow at Harvard. Sixteen years of public health at Harvard and he works on the COVID task force steering committee and the COVID updates and analyses. So it's somebody who, with a Harvard degree, lots of experience, and he works in this field. So that's credible, wouldn't you say? Very credible guy. But I tweeted at him, and then we had some exchanges. I won't go into the details, but I gave him some advice. And the advice is not medical advice, obviously. Rather, I gave him communication advice. And it took an interesting turn. And here was my point, that the people who believe hydroxychloroquine has potential, they generally believe that its potential is limited to early use, as opposed to, I'm already in the hospital and I'm in bad shape. And there's a reason for that, a very specific reason, which that by the time you get in the hospital, your medical condition has changed to this cyclotene storm or whatever. I don't know what I'm talking about. But the point of it is that the COVID progression is two different phases. The first one where the virus is growing, which is where people think the hydroxychloroquine with the other two drugs might be useful. And then there's the part where it turns into a monster of a problem. That's almost a different problem. People do not believe largely that it works in that situation where you're near death. That has been tested and tested a number of times now in trials that look like they would pick it up if it did work, and they show that it didn't. So not only did they use too much of a dose on the people who were hospitalized, a dose that we would know would have some side effects or expect, but it was too late. It was the wrong use in the wrong situation, and in some cases, they didn't use the three drugs. So I pointed out to Dr. Eric Feigelding that when he responds to people saying that hydroxychloroquine might be useful, that when he responds to them with showing studies of the wrong thing, it makes him look less credible, not more credible. In other words, it looks like somebody who's trying to scam you as opposed to someone who's trying to help you. Let me be very careful in my wording here. I'm not making an accusation that this doctor or any doctor is trying to scam you. It's a communication point. If I say to you I think hydroxychloroquine works for an outpatient, and you as the doctor professional, say, no, it doesn't, because we tested it on a completely different set of patients with a different situation who are near death and had a different medical problem, and it didn't Work for them. Does your credibility go up or does it go down? Well, it goes down. Right. Because what I hear is, how come you're not talking about the thing I'm talking about? Why are you giving me studies about the wrong thing? So I mentioned this to the doctor and he accused me of cherry picking, which was essentially correct, his accusation, because I did cherry pick out of a number of studies that he had in his thread. So I had picked one to point out, why do we keep looking at the wrong thing? And he said, but you're also not looking at the other ones I showed that were outpatient. One of them was an 800 person outpatient study. And then it goes to this bringing in the whiteboard kind of turns into this. Why are you looking at only the hospitalized patients? Oh, okay. If that doesn't tell you the right thing, we don't have to look at them anymore. But look at my studies of outpatient. That's what you wanted, right? You wanted to see some outpatient stuff, not hospitalist stuff. So look at my study of hydroxychloroquine being used alone. To which I say, no, that's not it either. I want to see. And then, and then the next thing goes to is hydroxychloroquine with one of the two things, either zinc or azithromycin. You've seen the doctors say that they think it's one or the other or both. That might be the key ingredient. So I don't care about a study that only has one. So what happened when I pointed out to the Dr. Eric Feigel ding, I pointed out to him that the only three things that would tell us whether hydroxychloroquine in combination works for outpatient would be a study that studied it. There's no study studying the only thing that people wonder about, the people who think hydroxychloroquine might work. And I haven't given you my opinion on this yet, so. So hold on for that. But the people who think it might work are very specific. No, we didn't say it would work on the near death people. No, we didn't say it would work alone. No, we didn't say that. We know which one of the two things is the magic. Some people do, but they shouldn't. We said the three of them together, given early. Can you tell us if that works? And you know what the answer is? You can't. So this is Dr. Feigel Ding's response was when I pointed out that the very study that we would like to either debunk or confirm this assumption doesn't exist. He didn't say it does exist, because it doesn't. Rather, he pointed out how difficult it is to do studies. And he pointed out that this would be an exceptionally hard study because there would be three drugs involved and you'd have to follow them for a while. They're expensive. It's something like 50. He mentioned there's something like $50,000 per person studied. You would need thousands of them. You'd want to do it fast. It's really hard. And then he mentioned that I don't quite understand the field, which is true, of course. Now, what does this make you feel like if your proposition is this? The hydroxychloroquine with these two drugs might be good for outpatient only. What happens when somebody shows you the wrong study and you say that's the wrong study? And they show you another wrong study? You say, that's the wrong study. So they show you another wrong study and you say, that's the wrong study. Because this isn't really hard to understand. Give me the three things for outpatient only. That's it. That's all I want. And then once these three types of studies, which are the wrong study, have been debunked as being useful in this conversation, it turns into, it's hard to study things. Well, isn't that a reason to use it? It's hard to study. Is the reason to prescribe it because it's hard to study? And the upside benefit would be if it worked. And I'm not saying it does. If it worked, it would be incredible. It would be incredible. So given that the risks at the very small dosage that these doctors on this banned video were talking about, they're talking about a pill or two every week, something like that. I mean, a really low dosage as a prophylactic. And again, it hasn't been studied as a prophylactic in a way that shows it works. So I have to ask you, what is your impression of somebody who would take you through the argument in this direction by only misdirection? So my conversation with doctors who are anti hydroxychloroquine and others always follows the misdirection path. You can't really get them to talk about the thing that you need to talk about. They want to talk about other stuff. Why is that? Now, here's how I left my conversation with Dr. Feigelding. I said that I obviously, I agree that it would be hard to do the studies I'm just pointing out that they don't exist and therefore we can't make a conclusion about something that hasn't been studied. Somebody says there's a lot of rumors about Dr. Fauci having once been in favor of hydroxychloroquine for coronaviruses in general, but I haven't looked into that to know if that's true or not. And then some people are asking whether Fauci himself is on hydroxychloroquine, which would be a real interesting question. We'll never find that out, I don't think, but it is an interesting question. Here's what I would settle for. If we can't have a study. And I want you to see how much trouble this will get me into, okay? So I'm going to say something very unscientific, and all of you should be smart enough to know what's wrong with it. If you can't tell what's wrong with it, you haven't been paying attention. Here is what would make me happy. Tell me, how many people have gotten the three drugs, not just hydroxychloroquine, but all three, the zinc and the azithromycin? 2. How many people got them as outpatients and then later died? Because I'll bet we could find that out. Could we find that anybody has ever died taking these three drugs early? Like, ever? Has anybody ever died? Do you know the answer to that? I don't. Because these doctors yesterday in this banned video were claiming that it's. They even used the word cure, which is, I think, why they got banned. But don't you think that we could, without doing a formal study, could we not at least know that one piece of data is that discoverable without resort to formal study? If we have the death certificate, do we also know how soon before the death. Which would tell us if they got it early enough. Do we know how soon before the death they had all three drugs in their system? Would it be on the records? Because if you told me. Scott, we've looked and we haven't found anybody who's ever died. If they got this prior to hospitalization and they took all three, what if it's zero right now? If you had to make me bet, I would bet it's not zero. I would bet at least people who had comorbidities would die. Maybe there are plenty. There could be hundreds of thousands. I don't know. But wouldn't you like to know if hundreds of thousands of people who took the three drugs in combination early as outpatient. Wouldn't you like to know if even one of them died? Even one? You don't know that, do you? Tell me how many died and let me decide if that matters to me. So let's say, for example, that we could find that information, or we could find it, at least statistically, from, let's say one hospital. Somebody says, yes, FDA did a study. No, they didn't. No, they didn't. But here's the thing, maybe just one hospital, and they. If they could study just their patients, if there were enough of them, and tell us, did even one die with these three drugs in them? And if so, was there anything, comorbidity wise, that we should know about that person? But here's my bottom line. It is obvious that there's either by intention or by mistake, we are being misled on how to look at this. Which is different from me saying, oh, this is a great drug, you should all be taking it. How the hell would I know? I'm not a doctor, don't take my medical advice. I'm just saying that the way this is being presented to us is as a fraud would present it. Which is not to say that the people involved are frauds. It's just saying that the way it's being presented is the way you would present it if you were trying to defraud somebody, it would look exactly like this. So if you're in a situation that looks exactly like a fraud, doesn't mean it is this time. Could be that everybody's telling you the truth. It just doesn't feel like it, if I'm being honest. It doesn't feel like it. All right? I spend most of my time looking at that thing. So here's some other things going on in the world. I told you that the biggest factor in Trump's reelection would be something completely outside his control, which is what happens to other countries who got a handle on coronavirus early. My assumption has been that since there is no. There's no workable vaccine yet, and nobody's really that close to herd immunity, I doubt anyway, I don't know that, but I don't think herd immunity is too close. My assumption was that between now and election Day, the countries that had done such a good job because they're so smarter and their leaders are so better, and they're way better than mean old orange man bad, that they would, instead of them doing a good job and then just taking it to the finish line, it seemed almost guaranteed, from what we know about the virus, it Seems almost guaranteed that the other countries are going to have the same experience we did, which is you get a handle on it, then you try to loosen up, then you have to get a handle on it again, then you try to loosen up. So we're already seeing the first headline of this in cnn. Quote from CNN this morning, even countries that got coronavirus under control are now struggling. That's deeply concerning for the rest of the world. That sentence says, Trump gets reelected 100%. I'll read it again. Just listen to the sentence and then even try to imagine that Trump would not get reelected. Here's the. Even countries that got coronavirus under control are now struggling. That's the election. That's it. That's the whole election right there. Because if the other countries, with all their wisdom and not burdened by an orange man bad, if they have some kind of average experience and we're somewhere in the average, all it's going to show you is that leadership didn't matter. That's all it's going to show you. Leadership didn't really matter. And I think that's where we're going to be. Now. Here's another thing that was predictable yet funny. The black people in Portland who were protesting are feeling there's a little lack of clarity about what the protests are about these days because apparently the white people who have completely taken over the Black Lives Matter protest. You know, I swear I can say this because I'm a white person. Do white people ruin everything? Is there any exception? If black people get anything going that's good, isn't there going to be some white person that comes in and just freaking ruins it? I gotta say, if there's one complaint that black people make, all the times that I just shape, you know, I just nod my head and go, yep, you're right on that one. I might argue about some other stuff, but no, anytime black people do something good, white people will come in and ruin it. It's so consistent. And it looks like that's what's happening with the protests. I think if the protest had stayed with, you know, the George Floyd thing state a black people trying to make the world better, white people helping them out, you know, supportively, that could have been a good thing. But it looks like Antifa just hollowed them out and is using them as a, you know, a disguise for whatever they're trying to do to take over the country. I guess. So I believe that we could, we could predict at this point that the white and black protesters who believe they were on the same side are soon discovering they are not so much on the same side anymore. Somebody's asking me in the comments, will you take the vaccine? Well, there's not the vaccine. There are vaccines. I saw a clip in which Bill Gates was being asked about, I guess one of the first vaccines, I forget which one, maybe Moderna, but that it has pretty, pretty hard side effects because the dosage is pretty high. Now, if the first vaccine that's available has known side effects, meaning you're definitely going to get a side effect and it's ugly. I might wait. I might wait. So I don't have an answer to your question. I would need to know a little bit more about the first one that's available. I wouldn't rule out taking it. I wouldn't rule it out, but I'm not 100% there yet. I'd need to know a little bit more if it's knowable. Now, the other thing that's going on with the protest slash looting, violence is the question of whether it's violent or non violent. Now you've seen probably by now the videos of Jerry Nadler being asked if the protests are violent and he says they're not. And then they cleverly put the scenes of all the fires and the protest stuff in the background. Now, I don't know that it's useful to argue about whether they're violent or nonviolent because it's clearly mostly nonviolent people with a core of violent people and everybody agrees with that. So whether you want to call that nonviolent or call it violent is really just the word you're putting on it. It's not really helping anybody's understanding. But clearly there are people trying to overthrow the country and they say that directly. I don't think there are many of them and I'm not terribly worried that they will succeed in overthrowing the country. I do think that some of these cities have very weak mayors and that they just don't have a solution for what do you do about the federal courthouse, etc. But the most amazing thing that's happening about all this, if we could maybe take a moment to show appreciation for how unviolent the police and DHS have been, because I don't know if I would have the same level of restraint as the police that we're seeing. They are really, really restrained. Of course you're going to see the video of somebody you think went a little too far. But as a rule, the law enforcement in every forum that's handling these Things, they're doing a really good job, like an a job, in my opinion. Now, of course you'll have incidents, individual incidents that are imperfect. But overall, am I wrong? Overall, I would say that the law enforcement, including dhs, are not just doing a good job. I mean, it looks like they're doing really good job, like really good job. Like one of the best jobs you've ever seen anybody do a job. And here's why I say that they have limited the damage now to certain blocks. So that's good. So it's not growing, it's now constrained. They did it without causing revolution. In other words, it would have been easy to overreact. A number of them are being blinded, intentionally blinded by lasers. If somebody intentionally blinds you, or let's say somebody intentionally blinds your partner right next to you and you see where it came from, in my opinion, you should be able to shoot to kill. Because a laser attack on somebody's eyes, maybe not legally, is a lethal force. I don't know how you define that, but trying to blind somebody, I can get where you say it's not technically lethal, but in my opinion it should be the death sentence. Blinding somebody with a laser should be the death sentence if you did it intentionally. So the restraint of all these people is just incredible. They're being hit in the heads with objects. Have you seen the amount of solid objects that are flying toward them and they just are taking it? It's amazing. Amazing. And you know, you don't take a moment to kind of put yourself in the heads of these other people and say, how hard was this? Remember in Portland, it spends 60 days of this. How many of those police officers have been out there for much of that entire 60 day period having stuff thrown at them? Do you know how much PTSD you would have if you went out every night and solid objects were whizzing past your head and you're watching your co workers go down blinded. Concussions. And every day you go out there and do that again and nobody's asking you to fight back, they're asking you to take it. Incredible. Incredible. So little applause for the law enforcement people. Now, of course, as you know, the bad protesters are trying to get some violence going because that will work for their cause. But the longer the law enforcement people can hold the line, the longer that doesn't work. And you know, you can maybe decrease their energy over time. It hasn't happened as quickly as I hoped, but I think it's happening. All right, Somebody says serious bodily injury is typically enough for lethal self defense. But, you know, that's generally true. But serious bodily injury is usually in the context of it could have killed you. If somebody stabs you and you didn't die, obviously that would be a case where you could shoot them if they were trying to stab you or already had, but that's a case where you could have died. In the case of the laser, there really isn't any chance you could die. It is just grievous bodily injury. So it's weird in that sense. You know, you wouldn't bleed out per se. So I don't know what the law would say about that. No reports on daytime troop relief. Yeah, we don't know too much about how often they're being relieved, but I don't think you could assume that any of them are going to be mentally the same after this is over. How many days could you be outdoors at night with people throwing hard objects at you? And you only have to be looking in the wrong direction to be basically have your brain scrambled. It's pretty bad. All right, let's brainstorm about what it would take for Trump to get reelected. You ready? What would it take for Trump to get reelected? Well, I think the economy probably is not going to be a full V, because if things don't reopen, there won't be enough new jobs. So I think you're going to see the economy improved but stalled in terms of jobs. I think you're going to see the Republicans being a little cheap on the relief package for people. I think that will hurt them, but maybe not with the people who are necessarily going to vote. So it might not hurt them that much. Oh, the AG Barr hearing is starting pretty soon, and that's going to be amazing. So here's what I think Trump should do to improve his chances. Number one, avoid an obvious mistake. Because at the moment, I think he's on a glide path to victory. Because until Joe Biden has a vice president, there isn't going to be much of a target there. And whoever he picks as vice president will probably hurt him. That's the funny part about it. No matter who he picks, it's going to hurt him because it's going to be a new person who has a new set of targets, like it's somebody who did something wrong, something that even Democrats don't like. It'll be there, trust me, whoever he picks. So going after Biden is kind of a hard challenge for Trump because Biden does not seem up to the task. And it feels like you're beating a baby harp seal, it doesn't feel like a fair fight. There's something about it that just doesn't feel right because Biden is so degraded. If that changes, then maybe Trump could go harder at him. But as long as he's looking feeble and hiding in his basement, Trump can't do what Trump does best, which is go hard against somebody you hate. One of the best things that Trump had going for him when he ran against Hillary Clinton was Hillary Clinton, because no matter how excited you were about voting for Trump, weren't you also a little bit excited about voting against Hillary? That was a twofer. You could get Trump, but you could also hurt Hillary if he didn't like Hillary. But there are any. I don't think I've heard. I can honestly say I've heard zero people searching my memory, I've heard zero Republicans say that they want to vote against Biden, meaning that there's something wrong with him in particular. Now, of course, some people don't want his mental situation in the job, and some people don't want a Democrat. But you don't hear the talk like you heard about Hillary. Hillary Clinton was hated. Hated individually. Now, some are going to say it's because she was a woman. And I don't think so. I don't think that's why. I think there's some personalities that attract hate the way that Trump attracts hate from the left. It's just the same thing. It's not a gender thing. But Biden doesn't do that. Biden does not make us hate him. I actually kind of like Biden. Could I hang out with Biden and have a good time? Probably. Probably. Even people on the other side say this all the time. They say he's a good man. So that really takes the biggest club away from Trump, which is he would love to be just pounding on Biden every day and having his audience love it, because it's like, ah, did you see what he did to Biden today? But it doesn't feel as good as when he would go after Hillary. When you heard Crooked Hillary, it made you happy because you knew it made her sad. Right? There was a little bit of Schadenfreude in there. If you hear the president say something that would be devastating for Biden to hear. Let's say something about his mental decline. That's got to hurt. That's got to hurt. It doesn't feel as good, does it? So he needs a vice president, so there's a stronger target and it will give Trump something to work with. So maybe that'll make a difference. I think, as I said, this coronavirus, if it gets out of control in other countries, it will make Trump look better and that will matter a lot. And then, you know, there are all these wild cards. What if it turned out that hydroxychloroquine actually works? What if it does? You know, I'll give you my current estimate based on what we know at the moment, 50% chance, sort of a 50, 50, that it would make some difference. Because, as I say, the studies are not conclusive, but neither are they dismissive. So I think Trump also has the opportunity to do a bunch of things that are, let's say, counterfactual to the rumors about him. So here are some things, and these are really important, and they're in the category of the dog not barking. So these are the things he's not doing that are important in the ones that he is doing. So one of the things he's doing that's important is that he can do things like the executive orders for lowering drug costs. So Trump can go into elections saying, I just did these executive orders and I lowered your drug costs. Now, let's say he succeeds. I don't know if he will, but it looks like it's a good shot. If he succeeds, he's going to be going into the election with health care success. He should claim also the telehealth across state lines and he should take some accomplishments. Now, Biden, of course, will be fighting with his own team who says anything short of universal health care, single payer is not good enough. So. So Biden won't even have an argument that his own side completely likes at the same time that Trump is going to say, well, you guys keep arguing, I just lowered your drug costs. It's going to be a pretty strong argument. So he should look good on health care. He's going to look good on immigration. Because people are thinking about it differently now in coronavirus times. I think that the George Floyd stuff has discredited very much. I think it discredited the people trying to discredit President Trump, meaning that the Black Lives Matter people, by teaming up with Marxists, by teaming up with Antifa, have discredited that whole thing. And as we watch the cities on fire, at least small parts of things on fire, it just doesn't feel good, doesn't look right, and it makes Trump look good, stronger. So every day that there's a new protest, Trump gets stronger in the public because they like Law and order. Now, Trump has been weak with the law and order. I'm sorry, he's been weak with the, I guess the suburban moms. What is it that suburban moms like more than law and order? Not many things. So the group that will be most concerned about this lack of law and order should be the very group that he wants to attract. I would be surprised if the President doesn't take advantage of packaging up all the hoaxes and trying to convince Democrats that their view of the world is hoax determined, in other words. He talks about the Russia collusion hoax a lot, but I think it's powerful when you put them together. So he could say, look, you believe the Russia collusion hoax. You believed. It's hard for him to say this because would cause more trouble, but I can say it. You believe the fine people hoax, you believe the ingesting disinfectants hoax, and you can go right down the line of all the hoaxes. And I think that the more it's pointed out how many hoaxes have defined the Democrat point of view, that you can at least give them some uncertainty about their news sources, which might help a little bit. So I think he'll be good enough on the economy compared to Biden, good enough on health care compared to Biden, who won't have a good, coherent plan that everybody likes. I think he'll be good enough on race, weirdly, because I think all this, the race riot stuff backfired. And I think that whenever Biden gets a vice president, he will be weakened, buy it, because there will be somebody who doesn't like that vice president on his own team. So. And everybody will think the vice president is going to be the president anyway, so that will matter. Your comments are all over the board. Bong is a stoner's best friend. Okay, that totally goes into our topic. I don't bet on it. I'm just looking at your comments. The hydrochloroquine hoax will bust this baby wide open. I don't think that we're going to know if hydroxychloroquine works or doesn't by election day, do you? I think the president might do something shocking on immigration, maybe more shocking than he's done just to get his base fired up. That might happen. Yeah. You can actually hear my dog snoring, can't you? The red pill about the media. I don't know if people are ready to understand that the thing they thought was the news is not the news. I had this conversation with one of my smartest and most well informed friends. Who buys him to completely, the New York Times, cnn, npr, View of the World. And I tried to explain to him that he's living in the past, a past when those news sources could be trusted to give you something closer to an objective view of the world. But he doesn't understand that we don't live in that world anymore and that the news is literally just propaganda at this point. And he's believing the propaganda just the way he believed the news back when it was something like news. Somebody says, my liberal boyfriend is coming around to the hoaxes. You know, the hoaxes are the most. I think the hoaxes are the most brittle part of the, of the left's bubble. Once you point out how many hoaxes have informed their entire worldview, it's got to start to chip away a little bit. Just a little bit. Oh, this can't be true. Somebody is saying in the comments that Nadler was in a car accident and so the bar hearing is delayed. Is that true? Can somebody confirm that? Because that would be the weirdest thing in the world. Set up the border catapults. Be nice. All right. Hearing is delayed. Nadler is involved in a car accident. Well, I guess we'll have to find out about that. Tariffs against China for climate justice. Well, you know, I think the China situation is also incredibly good for Trump right now because I can't think of a better contrast. If you looked at, you've got Joe Biden, who you think is a little too close to China, right at the same time that China has gone from friendly adversary, if I could say that, a frenemy, if you will, somebody that we want to do business with to somebody that we can't trust whatsoever and are going to try to do less business with and are intentionally or entering a cold war with. I think the country's mood either is or will be so anti China, partly because the coronavirus, so anti China, that the anti China candidate is going to look like the right choice. That's Trump. Now when I say anti China, it's the best possible situation because Trump was so pro xi, pro trade deal. So in a sense, Trump became Nixon goes to China, if you will, sort of the reverse of that. So Nixon, you know, the famous Nixon went to China story, he was the hardest voice against China. So if he could go and be their friends, that meant it was okay because he was the hardest voice against them. So his team would say, all right, all right, if you're, if you're okay with them, I guess we can at least talk to them. Trump did the opposite. Trump went in with the, I'll be your friend, I'll show you full respect. We can both get rich. This would be great. Let's work together, hand in hand. And then it didn't work. So Trump has showed us that the Nixon goes to China doesn't work. He proved it. He proved it by giving them every benefit of the doubt, working with them legitimately, seriously, trying to really make something work, and then finding out it doesn't, and that they were wildly stealing our intellectual property, even right now. That's why the Houston consulate got closed, the Chinese consulate, because they had stolen so much intellectual property, allegedly. So Trump is just 100% right on China. It looks like it. He was right to try it the way he did, and he was right to find out for sure if that could work or not. And he does now. Now he found out we would not have gotten that with Biden. So he's better on China. I think basically he's better on everything except climate change. And he has a kill shot for climate change if he uses it. Do you know what the kill shot for climate change is? That even Biden is in favor of nuclear energy. That's pretty much the whole argument. Trump will be running against a candidate who is also in favor of nuclear energy. That's it. That's the whole argument right there. You could take climate change right off the. Right off the table. Somebody says it's easier to accept a lie than to accept you are lied to. Yeah, that is. That's another way to explain cognitive dissonance, I suppose. Somebody says in the comments, no one can say that Trump did not give Xi every opportunity to salvage the situation. That's exactly right. And he did that really, really well. He really gave China every opportunity to be a, you know, a credible, good player, and they did not take it. At least that's the version we hear in America. Who knows if that's accurate. I also am wondering, there's somebody in the comments I have to block here. So Cynthia in the comments says Scott has had three months of reporting that hydroxychloroquine works and today is backpedaling on it. Now, I'm going to block you because I block anybody who misrepresents my opinion in public. So I have only ever said that there is a percentage chance that hydroxychloroquine is a game changer, and I've raised that from 30 to 50 to 70, depending on the news as it trickled down. So My view is that I don't know, but I know it's not been studied. So that's my view. And if it's not been studied, then you could use your risk management judgment, which doctors are to prescribe it or not. So you have grossly mischaracterized my opinion of saying that. I've reported that it works because I've never once done that. Now you are consigned to the blockbin of history. Somebody says, legalize cannabis and I'll vote for Trump. Well, of course, legalizing it at the federal level would not be enough, but if I were Trump, I would release every person on a federal marijuana charge. I would just do that between now and election day, because there's no way that's wrong. Just isn't. Now, a lot of those marijuana charges might be things that were pled down from more serious charges. So that might be a little sticking point there. But I don't even understand why Trump is not active in taking marijuana off the debate. Because it's just free money. If he doesn't do it, probably the Democrats will or have. I think that's in their platform. Yeah. There's a weird story about seeds being sent from China with no packaging, as if maybe if we planted those seeds, something bad would happen. I don't know if we know what those seeds are yet. Somebody says, will I be blocked for not caring about your opinion? Sure, I'll block you for not caring about my opinion. Sometimes you can get your way that easily. You always said 50 or less. Pretty consistently, yeah. How many debates will actually be held? I would say zero. I don't think there will be any debates. Why did China not take the opportunity? I believe, but I'm not an expert. My understanding is that China doesn't see the world as a win win scenario. Meaning that in a deal, the typical Western idea of a good deal is where you both win, I win, and you win what I'm told, and I'm not an expert here, so don't take it from me, is that the current Chinese government point of view is that the Chinese have to eventually dominate the world and that it's sort of more of a Hitlerian kind of situation. So why didn't Hitler make a good deal with Neville Chamberlain? Because it was never the point. Any deal that Hitler made was only just a military technique to, you know, to put your guard down, it appears, and that's what's being reported. I'm not in anybody's head and I'm not an expert on China. So you shouldn't take my word for any of this. But the reporting is that China wants to dominate, sees its future that way, and doesn't have any interest in a deal that isn't just good for them and bad for us. So that's the proposition. What's my guess on the seeds? My guess on the seeds is it's some kind of a crazy person situation or marketing. I think the odds of the seeds being some kind of a terrorist attack are low, but not zero. What excuse to cancel the debates? Usual, just no crowds. I think that Trump would have been really weakened if he had gone ahead and held his convention. Holding the convention would have been a huge mistake under the current uptick. Yeah, zero sum is the phrase I should have used for China's opinion. They think that for somebody to win, somebody has to lose. Yes, my. My nose operation is still scheduled for tomorrow, so with any luck, you will not hear my whistling. Sinuses and bad conditions, but we'll see. So I should tell you that, I don't know, I might do a periscope before I head off for surgery. Haven't decided yet. Your comments are funny. Those of you who are listening to this on podcast. I'm sorry. All right, thank you. And I will see you tomorrow, maybe. And the day after. Well, I don't know about the day after. I may not be able to wake up if you don't see me on periscope for two days. Might be longer. I'll at least tweet out my status, but you should assume that I'm doing well. Okay, good. And I'll talk to you as soon as I can.