Episode 846 Scott Adams: Which Presidential Candidate Might Survive to Election Day, Social Distance

Hey everybody, come on in. It's time for coffee with Scott Adams. That's why you're here. Best part of the day. Yeah, it is. It really is. You think those parts of the day where you're off having all kinds of adult fun are the best parts, but no, no, it's right here. This is the best part. And all you need to participate is a cup or a bugger, a glass of tanker chalice or stein, a canteen, jugger flask, a vessel of any kind, fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine hit of the day. The thing that makes everything better. It's called the simultaneous sip. Go. Now that's how to do some social distancing, right? Am I right? There's some social distancing right there. Let's talk about all the stuff in the news. So over in Italy, I saw a thread from, I guess was a doctor in a hospital over in Italy where they're being hit hard with the coronavirus and apparently it's night of the living dead bodies piling up. Whatever's the worst you could imagine that's happening in the Italian hospitals right now because of the coronavirus. Meanwhile, some as yet publicly unnamed individual was shaking hands at cpac, including with all kinds of senators and politicians. And we have a president who's been shaking hands and apparently is still going to have his rallies. Here's my opinion as of around today. This is sort of a tipping point for me. I think it's irresponsible to have political rallies because if you're looking at what's happening in the other countries, and you really oughta, because it's not good. But if you look at Italy, for example, they're in a world of hurt and it's because the medical resources were overrun. Now there are people saying to me, Scott, Scott sucked. Don't be so panicky because you know, it just affects old people and you know, most people will just get a cold. Well, yes, except that in Italy there's no health care services anymore. It's just for one purpose, their entire health care system. At least the high end stuff, you know, where you've got a hospital just doesn't exist anymore. So if you break your leg in three weeks, do you know what your health care plan is in the United States? Limp, right? If you break your leg in three weeks in the United States, there's a good chance that your health care solution will be the limp, because there won't be any health care, and it might last for a couple months. Now, that's the situation in Italy, and that's the situation if we don't keep it under control, but will we keep it under control? It turns out the South Korea is actually getting handle on theirs, and they're not doing extreme social distancing. They must be doing a lot of it, but it's less extreme than some other places. So we do see some progress in South Korea. China allegedly is getting a handle on it, but we don't know what that really means. Japan is doing better than Italy because they have way more. A lot more hospital resources. So Japan is not overrun yet. They're doing better, but they're. They're having some issues there, apparently. And I'm hearing also from people in Japan, social media is great because you can hear individuals telling. Telling you what their actual life is like. And there was one person in Japan who says that there's plenty of goods in the stores and people are just. Just immediately went into extreme social isolation. And it seems to have worked. So here's what we know. We know that extreme social isolation is absolutely effective. And we know we're not doing it. And we know that the President of the United States is modeling not doing it. And the people he's competing against to be the next president are not doing it. I don't know how much longer we can put up with that. Do you? Because let's put it this way. On one level, it's up to the president whether he has a rally. It's up to Biden. It's up to Bernie. It's not up to us, is it? No, it's up to us. It's not up to them. It's not up to them. Don't let it be up to them. We're sort of in this together, right? The president doesn't get to decide to have a rally. And then there's a rally. We have to decide, too. Everybody has to decide or else there's no rally. If only one person decides there's a rally, then it's a rally of one person. So I'm not sure we should continue to allow. And allow is the right word, because we could stop it. We could stop it today. I don't think we should allow our politicians to continue to do rallies, given that we know exactly what works. Social isolation and we know exactly what doesn't. Continuing business as usual. It's not a mystery anymore. We know and we know that if we don't get it early, it's going to get us. So I think it's completely irresponsible. And I would go so far as to say if we have another week of rallies, maybe this week's sort of an edge case. But if next week we're still doing rallies, we don't have anybody running for president who's qualified to lead us, at least in this situation. Let me say that as directly as I can. If President Trump next week, you know, this week, again, it's on the edge. But by next week, if they're still doing rallies and things are still worsening in the coronavirus global situation, none of them, none of them are qualified to be president, unfortunately, that's my opinion. So now let's talk about some other stuff. The dumbest thing that I hear in politics lately is coming from Bernie Sanders and people who say the same thing, and they say that President Trump doesn't believe in science. Now, I don't think there's anybody who doesn't believe in science. What does that even mean? There's nobody who doesn't believe in science. Now, of course, they'll point to climate change, but that's because the critics can't tell the difference between economics and science. What President Trump called a hoax, he wasn't saying, I'm a scientist, I've looked at the science, blah, blah. He was talking about the Paris Agreement and the economic implications, which clearly were pretty sketchy. Now, was it hyperbole? Who knows? But, you know, we can't read his mind. But the point is, there's no point at which the president didn't believe in science. That's different than not believing scientists. And it's different from believing that scientists might have a control of the science, but no control of the economic implications, which are the part you actually do something about, you know, beyond inventing stuff. So it is so dishonest to call anybody anti science. It just bugs me more than other stuff. You know, it's different than other lies because you could say this person did X, maybe it's a lie, maybe they did not do X. That's just a plain lie. That's bad enough, but to blame somebody for doing something that isn't a thing is sort of like a double lie. It's a lie on the stupid. It's something like blaming your opponent for dematerializing and traveling to another planet by his thoughts and throwing a revolution on the other planet and returning by beaming himself back to the planet. Okay, that was a terrible example. But the point is, it didn't happen. And it is. It couldn't happen. So blaming something for something that doesn't even exist is just the height of political stupidity and people are buying it. All right, Let's talk about Joe Biden because I think we have to, as the New York Times put it, I read this somewhere. I think I'm Fox News site, quote, prominent Democrats began publicly insisting that the ticket, the Joe Biden ticket included, include a woman, preferably a black woman. So now it's being widely reported that the important Democrat people want a black woman on the ticket with Joe Biden. Well, who's that going to be now? Some people say, no, it can never be Kamala Harris because she attacked him at the debate. Well, it turns out there's a backstory. Turns out. And I was just learning this in its depth today. I was aware of the story that I'm going to tell you, but I didn't know the depth of it. It's the depth of it that makes the difference. Turns out that Kamala Harris and Joe Biden's now deceased son, Beau Biden, were really close. And not just professionally. They were close. They talked to each other all the time. They were both attorney generals at different places. And so she was sort of close to Joe Biden because of that. And apparently they've rekindled whatever that was and they got past whatever happened. That's a debate. So does anybody doubt that she's the first choice? Now, are we at the point where Stacey. It's not going to be Stacey Abrams? If it's Stacey Abrams, I don't know anything about anything because I've watched her act and it's so weak. I can't believe that the people in charge, the Democratic leadership, would allow that. And I don't think that's the winning formula anyway. Somebody says, okay, you were right in the comments. That's all I wanted to hear. I would like to remind you that I made the most ridiculous prediction you've ever heard. The first ridiculous prediction was that I could pick the candidate back in 2018 when there were lots and lots of people running. And I peered into the crowd and I said, I think it's going to be Kamala Harris. And then when she, when she suspended her campaign. This is the fun part, I said, I still predict it will be Kamala Harris. What would be a weirder prediction than predicting the person who dropped out of the race was going to get the nomination? Was that the most unpredictable prediction you've ever heard in your life? Well, let's see if it happens. I Think everybody would agree at this point if whoever the vice president pick is, is going to be the shadow president. So I'm technically wrong. And, you know, my predictive bet, I lost money because they're very specific, what it means to be the, you know, the presidential candidate, obviously. But in effect, I kind of got this right. I think it's looking that way. Now, if she doesn't get nominated, I'm wrong. Just flat out wrong. But if she does, it would be my best prediction of all time, I'm pretty sure. Here are some things that people are saying about Joe Biden, Dr. Jill Stein, you know her for ruining Hillary's chances because she was working with the Russians. No, not really, but that's what people are saying. And she. So she ran in 2016 and got some votes, and people say it siphoned them away from Hillary. Probably did. And so Jill Stein is saying directly that Joe Biden has, you know, mental decline in public. Did I mention it's Dr. Jill Stein, medical doctor Jill Stein, Harvard trained medical doctor Jill Stein is saying in public. Okay, now, it's just obvious paraphrasing, but basically she's saying. She's kind of implying that you don't need to be a medical doctor to see this. I tweeted another medical doctor, and I've been reading some other folks weighing in who are actual experts at working with dementia patients and Alzheimer's people, or at least they say they are on Twitter. You can never be 100% sure if anybody is who they say they are. But people who are professionals are saying in public unabashedly, that it's obvious there's a problem. Now, do you remember when people were saying this about Trump? And do you remember there was just a tremendous blowback from medical professionals, as they should, to say, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. You know, medical ethics, medical ethics, we do not diagnose people who are not our patients. You don't diagnose people you haven't met, haven't examined, never. There's no ever, period. You do not diagnose from a distance. Well, do you? Let me give you an example. Suppose you were a doctor and somebody showed you a picture of an automobile accident, and there was a headless body over here. And then a very clear picture, no doubt of what you're seeing. The actual head, which has been severed 10ft from the body. Doctor sees this picture and the person on the scene says, what should we do, Doctor? Should we give them cpr? And the doctor looks at the picture and says, no, I'm not there. But I think it would be unnecessary to give CPR because, you see, the head is not actually attached to the body. Probably dead. No, certainly dead, because head is not attached to the body. Now, would that be an ethical failure because the doctor's not there, the doctor has not examined the patient, the doctor is simply just looking at a picture. Would that be unethical? No, because the head is missing. It's obvious. You don't have to be a doctor. A person within a head is dead. And we haven't reached that point with Joe Biden where he's a headless corpse. But we have reached the point where medical professionals are willing to say in public, okay, just look. Am I right? We've crossed that line where it's no longer medically unethical for a working professional, a medical professional to say in public, yeah, just look at that. That's obvious. That's a big deal, because the medical profession did not cross that line with Trump. Am I right? And when somebody did, the other medical professionals poured in and said, whoa, too far. And people walked it back a little bit and tried to tap dance. Well, I'm not saying for sure that sort of thing, but we're not seeing that this time. It's different. All right. Did you see the video of the Biden rally in which there were some protesters? I forget what they were protesting, but they held a big sign up and Joe got a little flustered. Did you see how he handled it? If you want to see who's not going to be your next president, you have to watch that video. Watch Joe Biden try to not be Trump, because Trump would have said, get those bums out of here. And the security would take him out and Trump would tell jokes and the crowd would love it, and it would be part of the show. That's the way Trump handles it. How did Joe Biden handle it? Well, he needed to be different, so he had to handle it in some way that's not Trump. Like, so he starts saying, that's all right, let him go, leave him there. And as he's saying that, the security guards are coming in and grabbing the guy. And then Joe Biden taking control of the room is like, okay, just let him go. He says, this isn't a Trump rally. We don't need to do that. Just let him stay. Let him stay. And here's the funny part. The security guards absolutely ignored him. It was like he wasn't there. And these big, beefy security guards just grab these guys and lock them up and Just start dragging them out of the room on their feet. But they're pulling them out and you watch them. And Joe is. Even as they're being taken out, Biden is, it's all right. Just leave them there. And I thought I was seeing in my mind like one of those expired. What do you call it, a dandelion. When it's just the little white stuff that blows away in the wind. An old dandelion. It looked like an old dandelion up there on the dais. Just. There was nothing there. There was no leadership. There was no power. There was no control. It didn't look like he was in control of himself, much less the room. He did not control the room. And wow, is it obvious? It is so obvious that there's no leadership skill there whatsoever that you could. I don't know how you could watch that and vote for him. That'd be hard. All right, let's see what else we got here. Well, looks like Russia is trying to attack the United States with oil prices. So I'm learning a little bit more about this situation. So if you're not up on it, it goes like this. So every country that produces oil produces it at a different cost, partly because of the technology they use and partly because of how they're getting the oil. So it's expensive to get it in a shale. It's less expensive in some other ways. Russia, as it turns out, both through investment and luck about the type of oil they have, has maybe the lowest, possibly the lowest production costs, or it's right in that category somewhere. And they've decided to start a price war because the US Shale business in particular had been so good that it was taking market share from Russia and everybody else. And we replaced Russia as the biggest producer. So Russia wants to find out how to get his money back when oil prices are low, were already low. So Russia was already in trouble because prices were low. Ish. But they decided to go right at OPEC and Saudi Arabia by lowering them and starting a price war, which Saudi Arabia immediately matched. So we're in a price war. And if the price war continues, it will bankrupt the shale producing parts of our energy industry, which is pretty big. It's going to bankrupt them. And this is really aggressive because the intention of Putin, according to the people who know what they're talking about, his intention is to bankrupt them. It's actually a direct, obvious, you know, nobody's hiding the plan, but it's all legal because it's business. Right. In business, you're allowed to do whatever you want. If it's legal, it's legal. And lowering your prices is completely legal. If Russia can do it, they can do it. So they're going to take out our shale business, which is a continuation of this theme, which you've seen under Trump, which is that all war is economic war. Let me say that again. I would say that the Trump Doctrine, which has never been named that. I'm just going to name it that myself. Let's call it the Trump Doctrine of War, or the Trump War Doctrine. Now, of course, I would be putting words into his mouth, so this is not coming from the president or anything like it. But by observation, I would say that Trump believes that all war is economic war, and that if you simply treat the economics as the war, well, it's still war. So Russia basically just declared war on the United States, but I think we declared war on them first by taking over their primary business. Now, here's the problem. A lot of smart people think the price of oil may never go up high again because there's just so much of it and we're so good at getting it. And, you know, the economy is slowing down this year anyway. And then there's green energy, and we've got new developments in nuclear power, etcetera, Coming online all the time. But the problem is that Russia's income is selling weapons and oil. Pretty much Russia is sort of like a criminal enterprise that sells oil and weapons. And if they can't sell oil and weapons and make money, the whole country is in trouble. And guess what they can't do right now? Sell weapons and oil and make money. So the only two things that they can do, because there's not a major war, most of the big wars seem to be winding down. Now, I don't know this for sure, but it seems like that would be bad for the arms business, the Russian arms business. Now, it could be that they have a robust business even in peacetime, as people are arming up. I don't know the details there, but I have to think that a peaceful world is bad for Russia because they sell arms, and obviously the oil situation would just put them out of business if it stayed low. So this is a really, really big change coming. And. And it kind of speaks to this question which I've been asking for a long time, which is, why are we enemies with Russia? You know, I've been saying this forever. Why don't we just say, hey, Russia, you know, if we get along, we're both better off? It's obvious so let's just get along. You can see we do it with our other allies. When we get along with them, we all get rich. When we don't get along, we don't. So let's just get along. And I always wonder, why wouldn't that work with Russia? And I think we just got the answer. The answer is they can't sell their oil if we're selling our oil to the same people. In other words, Russia can't really coexist with the United States being a gigantic oil producer because they need all of that money to stay alive. So I'm not sure that they can be our economic partner because they have to compete with us so directly. It's way more directly than other countries compete with us and on that important industry, the energy. So maybe there's just nothing we can do there. With Russia, we'll just always be enemies until one of us gets out of the oil business, I guess. I think it comes down to that. So I think Russia. Well, let me say it directly based on the current trajectory of things. The Russian state is doomed, right? Because they can't survive low gas oil prices. And it doesn't look like anything is going to change the low oil prices. So that doesn't mean that they're actually doomed, because people are pretty good at scrambling and surviving and doing what they need to do. But the trajectory for Russia is doom. Just if nothing big changes, and I don't see anything big that's going to change. So that's a big problem. Might make them flexible, but it might make them the opposite. Gavin Newsom did something that shocked and amazed me yesterday. The governor of California, much maligned, much criticized. Governor, and for context, there are people like me who've been saying critical things about the homeless situation and nuclear energy and some other things, but with this coronavirus stuff. He was giving a press conference, Gavin Newsom was, and he was asked whether President Trump and the administration are helping him. And he gave an unabashedly positive response and essentially said, everything that we've asked them for, they have everything they promised they did, which is a big thing to say in politics. It was very clearly supportive of the administration's efforts on coronavirus, and it wasn't hedged. It would be easy for a politician to say, well, for once they're doing something right, to kind of hedge it, or to say, well, we're not getting everything. Want to keep the pressure on, but we're getting a lot of. That would have been easy to say, but he didn't he didn't. Gavin Newsom stood in front of the world and he said that the federal government is absolutely doing everything he needs, everything he's asked for. And I thought to myself, that's some good leadership there. I like to play a fair, you know, because I've criticized this guy quite a bit. I'm not sure he needs to be our mayor. I'm not sure. I'm sorry, I'm not sure he needs to be our governor much longer. But this was really strong leadership. That was exactly what I wanted to see him say to make me feel the way I needed to feel and do the things I need to do. He made me feel that the government is effective. And I'm sure there must be tons of little hiccups and problems. Don't you think that the reality is that things never move as smoothly as the politicians say when they say things are going well? But just for him to come out and give this little bit of positive reinforcement that the government and the state is working well together was powerful. It was useful. It was right. It was good for the common good. It was not political. It was pure leadership, and I appreciated it. So thank you, Gavin Newsom. Great job. There are a bunch of free technology platforms for people who are going to work at home. So you're seeing the. And again, this is beautiful and inspiring to watch that the country, the United States, the citizens are just sort of jumping in and saying, what can I do? And you're seeing the tech companies do this. And I tweeted around a list of technology platforms that are good for working at home, like Dropbox and webex and those kinds. So if you're. If you're in a company and you've just been told to work at home and you don't know what all the good tools are for doing that, you know, how do you share files and how do you work remotely and stuff? Look at my Twitter feed for the list of Twitter platforms that are free. They're free during the crisis. So you got that going on. All right, So let me give you an update on demonetization and YouTube. So I complained yesterday that I'd learned from Google. So this. What I'm going to say now is not my opinion or guessing. This is actually from my contact at Google who is the right person for this. Not just an employee at Google, but the person who does this job, who is my contact. And I've been assigned this contact because I was complaining about demonetization and they were demonetizing any reference to coronavirus. And I believe they still are, but they have now. They've stated publicly now that they recognize that that's an issue because most of the coronavirus coverage is people trying to be helpful. I'm doing nothing talking about coronavirus except trying to be helpful. So the demonetizing has two impacts, but one of them is a little, I'm a little uncertain of. So my Google contact told me yesterday something that I believe I don't understand correctly or I disagree with or there's something going on that I need to figure out. But anyway, she said that demonetizing doesn't change how many people see it. But I'm almost positive that's not true. So I'm going to verify that. And I think maybe we're talking about different things because here's what I believe to be true. I believe that the recommendation engine favors monetized content because why wouldn't it, right? Why wouldn't it favor its own monetized comments? You know, if it's going to suggest things for people to see. Things which are monetized are by definition things that are great for YouTube. Right. Somebody says they're thieves, but I don't, I don't think there's any evidence that adds are playing that people are not getting paid for. I don't think that's going on. I've, I've not seen any evidence of that. I think they either show ads or don't show ads. They don't show the ads and then keep the money. That's the opposite of it wouldn't make sense. The, the reason that Google demonetizes things is on behalf of their advertisers. If Google made all the decisions with nobody else giving input, they would monetize everything. Why the heck wouldn't they if they're going to allow the content on their platform at all? Of course they would monetize it if they could. So be careful about who's Google making a decision and who's the advertisers making a decision. I have confirmed because the experience I'm having is identical to what David Pakman is experiencing on YouTube. I just saw an update from him and his experience. He's a anti Trump, left leaning guy and his demonetization experience is identical to mine. So if you're thinking, oh Scott, Scott, Scott, they're blaming the advertisers, but really it's Google that's doing it. There's no evidence of that. The evidence is that the liberals and the conservatives are both being demonetized because of the Content. If you mention politics or coronavirus, it's just automatic. So we're trying to work through that, but there appears to be no solution to that, as far as I can tell. Somebody says it's both the advertisers and the Google bias. That's a speculation. I don't see evidence of it, but neither can I disprove it. Can't prove a negative. Somebody says Google has proven to be biased in search engines. Yes, but this isn't search engines. So I'm not saying they're not biased. I'm just saying I don't have any evidence that would lead me to say that. Given that liberals and conservatives are both affected. What's going on with your show with Christina? We have ab tested that and rejected it. So Christina and I were going to do a separate thing with the two of us, and we filmed a few and played it back to see if we liked what we saw. And we just didn't enjoy doing it enough. So I think if it had been bad, but we loved doing it, we probably would have done it until we could do it well, but it was bad and we didn't love doing it. A lot of it has to do with just two people trying to schedule the same thing at the same time and agree on it. And it just added a level of relationship complexity that we didn't need. So we tried it. So that's always my strategy. My strategy is, if you don't know, give it a try. Worst thing that happens is you get embarrassed and you don't do it. Oh. But separately, Christina will be producing more piano solos. So she's. She's working on her. Working on her repertoire, building up her number of songs. So every day I go downstairs and she's practicing Chopin and she's working up to Liszt. I guess he's the hardest one to play. So, yeah, she's. She's super gifted. Watch. Watching Christina play Chopin, which I've just learned, is among the hardest of all pieces to play. It's really remarkable. I just look at it, I go, I don't know. I don't know how anybody could do that. It just seems impossible. Somebody says, corona meeting, wedding. Well, here's the thing. We were, you know, we're engaged and we're talking about our wedding plans. So we have not finalized anything. But of course, all of our plans were built around some kind of travel. And one of the main places that we're planning to travel this year, or at least I was, I was going to tell her about that. Later, but was Italy. And Italy, of course, is off the list, as is travel, basically. So here's the good news. Here's the good news. This coronavirus is bad for extroverts, but it's not bad for everybody, if you know what I mean. Introverts and people who didn't like crowds. Anyway, just saying. Are you serious? I just got an excuse for being exactly the way I want to be anyway. And the answer is. Yeah, you did. You just got an excuse for being exactly the way you wanted to be anyway, which is stick to yourself. Keep your. Keep your numbers low. So we don't have a plan yet, but you are right, it probably will be a coronavirus wedding. Which means. Do you know that awkward part where you don't know who to invite? I think we might be able to avoid the awkward part where you don't know who to invite. Because that's coronavirus. We'll invite nobody or just a few people anyway. We'll work that out. Yeah, introverts are kind of winning in this. I have to admit that I'm sort of a converted introvert. I would say that I'm genetically inclined to introversion. And I like lots of alone time. I need lots of alone time. I need hours every day where I don't see other people. Or else I get a little squirrely. So I have the periscope wedding. Oh, my God. That's a good idea. That's a good idea. I don't think I could convince Christina, but I'd do it. If it were up to me, I'd do it. I don't think there's any chance she would agree to it. But that is a damn good idea. I'll bet you get to see a bunch of video weddings, right? Because nobody wants to go infect all their own relatives. That's the worst thing in the world. So, like I said, I'm going to be enjoying my alone time. I think I'm going to. After reading the experience in Italy, which was really scary. I think I'm going to be doing a lot of social distancing. I told you that it's helpful to have a project. So if you too are going to be social distancing, and I hope that you do, you should have a project. And the project is not something you're working on all the time, but just something that you have as a. You know, a fun thing that you want to improve a system you're working on. And in my case, I've decided to work on my arms. And again, it doesn't matter what it is, just something you always wanted to do that you wouldn't have had time to do before because of your busy life. But now you're going to be home a lot. So my goal is I'm going to try to work on my muscles so you can look at it before and after. So I'm telling you now that three months from now, since I'll have so much time in my home gym, I hope to make a muscle and it's bigger. And then I'm going to say, ah, well, I was locked up for three months. But look at these guns. Now, of course, that's a vain and not very important objective. You might want to learn a language, you might want to pick up a skill, take an online class, but take advantage of it because I'm not entirely sure we're worse off by pulling back and maybe having a little alone time. Maybe learn to meditate. I hear that's good for your. Your body. All right. You could periscope and what? So the AJAC program. Yeah, I think I'll just be doing my own thing here. Working on yoga, writing, math and quilting. Very good, very good. So I think we'll, you know, I'm inch size. I don't know, I'm just looking at. Just looking at your comments. All right, thanks for the comments and I will talk to you later.