Episode 879 Scott Adams: Sip and Relax With me While I Tell You What the Future Holds

Hey, everybody, come on in here. It's time for another edition of Coffee with Scott Adams. Aren't you happy that you get to drink a simultaneous sip every day? Every morning, I never miss unless something bad's happening. But all you need is a cupboard mugger, a glass of tanker chalice or stand, a canteen, jag or 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. Day of the day, the thing that makes everything better, including the coronavirus. It's called the simultaneous hip. Go. Every time I use that little Trump phrase, I always smile to myself because it's so effective. You know, when Trump brands something or puts a nickname on it, he uses this phrase. He goes. It's called the simultaneous sip. As if he's not the one who named it. He'll say, jeb Bush. He's called Low Energy Jeb without reference to the fact that he's the one who started it. I always laugh when he does that. All right, well, it looks like in a new poll, the voters who are, quote, enthusiastic. Enthusiastic, not just supporting, but enthusiastic supporters of Joe Biden, 24%, 24% of Joe Biden's supporters are enthusiastic about it. To which I said to myself, really? Really, if I were to dig into these numbers a little bit, maybe get the name of one of these enthusiastic voters, drove over to that enthusiastic voter's house and said, you recently answered a poll question, and you're in the 24% of people who say you're enthusiastic, you're enthusiastic about Joe Biden. Did you really say that? Now, do you think that if you were in person with one of the people who said that they were enthusiastic about supporting Joe Biden, do you believe that you would detect said enthusiasm? Now, I do believe the polling was accurate in the sense that, you know, a question was asked, an answer was given, it was recorded correctly and tabulated. So I'm sure the polling is. I think it was Rasp. Who was it? I don't forget who it was. But whoever it was, I'm sure they did the polling correctly. But do you really think you would find that person really, like, is it a coincidence that I've never met anybody who supports him who's excited about it, ever? Have you ever seen one of his biggest supporters, Alyssa. What's her name? Alyssa, the actress whose name I'm forgetting at the moment? You know, she tweets about him and supports him and stuff, and even her tweets and her support for him looks like she's working at it. It looks like she had to swallow hard and say, well, vote for Joe Biden. I mean, it just everything about his supporters screams, I wish I didn't have to be doing this. But it's this or Bernie or Trump and what am I going to do? So that's the most ridiculous poll number I've ever seen. That 24% people are enthusiastic about Biden. There are none. Oh, yeah, Alyssa Milano. I'm sorry, forgot her name. How could I forget Alyssa Milano's name? I must be really tired. It's not like we don't hear her name enough. I'll say again, by the way, you know, I say this because it makes you mad. I think I enjoy it that I think I enjoy bothering you with this. I have a lot of respect for Alyssa Milano. While I would not agree with many of her positions, politically or otherwise, she's the real deal. She's not just a celebrity drive by, she's invested, she's got skin in the game. She is trying to make the country better in the way that she thinks would work. So while I don't think she should get all of the things she wants, I'm very happy about her being a high level player with good intentions and she's part of the process and she's effective. I have a lot of respect for that, same as I do for anybody on the other side who just does a good job, whether it's AOC or Van Jones or David Axelrod. I mean, you can find a lot of people who, you may not agree with their opinions all the time, but you say, well, okay, that's a reasonable person who's actually trying to do what's good, good for the country in their own way. All right, there was a poll, I guess this one was Rasmussen, I believe, and it showed that only Democratic voters believe by majority anyway. Only Democratic voters believe by majority that quote, It's so funny, it's hard even to read the sentence. I've told you before that the news humor have completely merged. There's no real difference between comedy and the news. But what you see as funny will be different than what I see as funny based on what team you're on, what direction you're looking at things. But there's almost no such thing as just comedies anymore. Almost nobody makes a comedy movie because people will be offended and nobody's going to go anyway. But politics is still funny and it's funny without even trying. And you tell Me, if this isn't funny, I'm just going to read, I'm going to read the sentence the way it was tweeted. I believe in Rasmussen's Twitter feed about the study, their own study. I'll just read it straight. And you tell me that this straight fact is now funny. All right, here it is. Only Democratic voters believe most reporters are simply trying to report the news in an unbiased fashion. Isn't that funny that there's somebody in this country and they can be easily identified with one side of the political divide, believe that the news is actually the news, that actually more than half of Democrats think the news is both legitimate and that the news people are trying to do it legitimately. How can you possibly see that no matter what news you're watching, I don't care which outlet you're looking at, how can you possibly think that? Aren't we way beyond that? Aren't we now? I still think there are, you know, individual news people who are, you know, just trying to report the news straight. That's true. But, but in general, I think it's fair to say that in general, the news is no longer the old fashioned news. It's really just different interests moving their interests. All right, question for you because I don't know, you're seeing everybody on. It seems like everybody on social media is blowing up over the World Health Organization and their statement that masks don't work, when obviously, by the way, my nose isn't running, it's itching and I'm trying not to touch my face in front of you. It's just psychosomatic. Let's see. So what was I saying? Oh, who told you this first? Where is the first place you ever heard this? So when all of our professionals were telling us that wearing masks. Oh God, the edge wouldn't help. Who's the first person you heard say in public, well, that's just a lie. It's just an obvious lie that wearing masks won't help you in any way. And the reason I'm asking is because I think I'm the first person who said it publicly because there are a lot of people saying it now. But it's harder to say it when you're the first person because I said it just looking at the news from the most qualified, professional, authoritative medical sources. Right. I mean, I looked at complete agreement across all the spectrum of medical sources and 100% of them said, no joke, these masks won't help, don't wear them. And alone among, I felt I Felt like alone among observers. And I doubt I was alone. One has to assume that in other places people were saying the same thing. But I didn't see it when I said it. And I said, well, that's just clearly a lie. Here's why I thought it was a lie. It's a little book called Lose or Think. It's my book. I'm sure you've all read it, and if you haven't, what's wrong? You've got all this time. And on page 153 of my future Forward book, there's a chapter called Friction. Allow me to read a small sample from my book. It says, in political discussions, you often see partisans talking in binary terms. For example, that a particular plan will completely stop some bad thing, or otherwise it will do nothing. But in the real world, often the best you can do is to create some friction to slow down the things you wish would stop completely. Now I go on and talk about the wall and border security and saying that, no, a wall is not meant to stop every person. It's meant to be friction. So it slows things down to a manageable level. Likewise, when somebody, the first time the expert said that the virus is spread through the air coming out of your mouth, and then the very next sentence is, but wearing a barrier over that air won't make anything better. That was sort of the end of the credibility, right? At that point, there was no point in even listening to the professionals anymore, or at least believing them, because if they would tell you something that's so obviously not true, I mean, something that your own eyes and ears and brain can say, no, no, a barrier stops air at least a little bit. You know, is the air coming out of your mouth going to go as far as if it has to go through a mask? Of course not. Of course not. So it's a clear case where the mask created friction. In this case, friction for the air and the virus. So of course it made a difference. Not 100%, but whoever said it would. So here's my problem with that. We watched our. I'll just pick one person from the experts. Our Surgeon General. So our Surgeon General has said this right to our faces in public multiple times. Do you think he knows it's a lie? Because there are one or two possibilities. Either the Surgeon General lied to the public in public multiple times about the effectiveness of face masks during a health crisis. Remember, this is a world pandemic. What is more important than the most important, credible health professionals telling you the truth? There's nothing More important than that, that's the most important thing, is that your most credible health professionals need to tell you the truth. Now, the weird exception might be if they're trying to prevent a run on critical supplies, which would not be in the interest of the greater good. But here's what I. I'm going to put this. I'm going to put a stake down right here. Okay? You ready? Here's my stake. Our surgeon general got in front of our country and lied to our faces in an obvious lie. Not even a little bit. Slightly not a lie. And he did it multiple times. In a crisis, should he keep his job? Should the Surgeon general keep his job? Should lying so grotesquely in a crisis to the American people, repeated times. Now, here's my answer to that. It's complicated. If after the crisis is over, or at least after, let's say, the shortages are over, let's say we get to the point where the press and the public and the politicians and the hospitals generally agree that finally we caught up and we have enough supplies, once the shortage is over and everybody agrees it's over, if the surgeon General says to the American people, I would like to apologize to you. I lied to you, but I did it intentionally. Here was my purpose. My purpose was to stop a run on these supplies, the masks, so that they could be used in the most, you know, the place where we could leverage them the best, which was with healthcare professionals and people who really needed them. If he tells us that after the fact, I might be okay with him keeping his job, especially if he was ordered to do it right. If he said, look, I work for the administration, the administration said, I need you to go out there and shade the truth a little bit. It's for the greater good. And so I went out like a good soldier, and I did it, I would say, okay. I would say, okay. I would say you can keep your job, you know, as my opinion as a citizen, because you've explained it, you've apologized, and you had a reason. I'll take that. But don't ask us to believe you again, you know, the next time you tell us something, can we believe you? I mean, that's a big problem, right? So I would say, if he does not later say, you know, okay, here's the deal. I intentionally was shading the truth because it was good for the country. If he doesn't say that, well, I think he needs to be fired, right? Wouldn't you agree? That's definitely firing offense. I mean, I can't even think of Anything that would be more grotesquely, obviously a firing offense than lying about the value of face masks to a country where people are dying because of bad advice. You know, don't you think there were some people who had face masks, could have worn them? They weren't going to, you know, donate their one mask to the hospital or anything. Don't you think you killed some people? I think you did. I mean, statistically speaking, probably somebody died who didn't need to because they didn't wear a mask and they had one in the closet because they had bad advice. So that's a pretty big deal. But let's, let's hold off, and I'm going to say this a few more times, let's hold off on, you know, shooting the people on our own team. Let's wait, because if he has a good explanation, I'm open to it, but otherwise he has to be fired. Of course. There's some tweets going around today, I guess on February 7th, Secretary Pompeo was tweeting a photo of American planes being loaded up or unloaded. I guess apparently in February 7, the United States sent many pallets of PPE, the protective stuff that we need in this country and we have a shortage of. We sent a plane load to Wuhan to help them with their shortage. Now people are saying, my God, you incompetent monsters, you. President Trump and Secretary Pompeo, how could you possibly be sending our limited supplies, which we're basically right at the ragged edge of running out of in our crisis? How could you send our critical national resources to a strategic frenemy, enemy, whatever you want to call China? How does that make sense? Well, let me tell you, everybody's a genius in hindsight. How many people in the United States, be they political or scientific, knew on February 7 that the United States would run out of protective equipment? Raise your hand. Raise your hand if on February 7, you knew that the United States didn't have enough of this stuff and couldn't make it fast enough or couldn't get it supplied. Raise your hand if you knew that on February 7th, you frickin liars. If you got your hands up, you didn't know. Pompeo didn't know. Trump didn't know. Of course there were scientists and of course there were probably individuals who were saying, oh, no, maybe you shouldn't do that. But nobody knew on February 7th. Here's why I know we didn't know, because we still don't know. Do you know if we have enough, let's say N95 masks not only available, but do we have enough in the pipeline so we'll be okay? Do you know? No. You don't know? You don't know? I don't know. Is there anybody in the world who knows? No. The reason I know we don't know is because Pence said yesterday we don't know. That was yesterday. How did he know? How could he have known on February 7th we wouldn't have enough. Do you think on February 7th Mike Pence knew we didn't have enough masks? He doesn't know. Today he doesn't know. Nobody knows. Nobody's even collected the frickin information. Did you know on February 7th that we had no mechanism for all of the hospitals in the country to report what critical supplies they might run out of in a crisis? That system didn't exist. So flying completely blind, the President presumably and the Secretary of State probably and others made a decision to give some supplies that they had access to to Wuhan. I don't know if those supplies made any difference at all. I don't even know if it's enough. Because even when they talk about millions and millions of anything when it comes to medical supplies, you actually go through millions of stuff really, really quickly. So you can see really big numbers of what we shipped. And it might have been one hospital rips through them in five days or something. So it's not as much as you think. That's the first thing. And as a percentage of the United States total supply of that equipment, what do you think it was? If you had to guess, of our total United States supply of whatever that medical equipment was, how much of it do you think we gave to China on that one airplane? Well, less than 1%, don't you think? Less than 1%. And at the time I don't think that our officials knew who made this stuff, knew we had a shortage. I don't think anybody knew. So if they made a decision back then to do something that would have obviously great diplomatic potential in establishing us as a credible world player and being helpful even to people who were maybe not as helpful to us while we're still negotiating part two of the trade deal, I think this probably made sense on February 7th. In retrospect, you could say it was wrong. But we're still in the battle. And if you're bayonetting people while the battle is still raging, you're not on our side. And I would like you to be be on our side for a while. Here's a reason you will get blocked by me on Twitter or Periscope. So I just want to put that out there. So in a comment on Twitter today, I responded to somebody, they responded back. And then some third person comes in and says of me, he won't respond anymore. You're blocked. So I will block people for telling me what I will do and what I am thinking. Those are the two things you can't comment on without getting blocked because you don't know what I'm going to do and you don't know what I'm thinking. If you're out in public telling people what I'm going to do or what I'm thinking, I don't want to have anything to do with you because you're not a. You're not a useful person. You're just being in trouble. So that's an immediate block. Just so you know, apparently, here's a weird outcome of this coronavirus is that the illegal drug business is struggling because they're not getting the necessary chemical components from China. To which I said, wait, what? Now, I knew that fentanyl was come. You know, the precursors were coming in from China, and then the cartels were mixing them up and sending them north. So I knew that China was the source of things through Mexico. And in terms of fentanyl, but I didn't know that that was also true for heroin and meth. So whatever chemicals, I don't know if it's the poppies or something else, but apparently China is also the source for other major drugs going through Mexico into the United States. I didn't fully understand that. I did not fully understand that. I thought it might be limited to maybe one bad laboratory or two doing the fentanyl stuff. I didn't know that. Apparently the majority, if you don't count marijuana, which is grown in this country now, it looks like the majority of the hard drug stuff, not counting cocaine, I guess, is coming from China, or at least the ability to make it. So this has completely revised my opinion of what's going on, because before I would have said to myself, yeah, yeah, China, you need to try harder to clamp down on those one or two laboratories that are scenting fentanyl products. But it felt like an individual problem, didn't it? You get blocked for that, too. The person who got blocked knows what they did. All right, so now that I know that there's a more robust, robust highway of illegal drug stuff coming from China through Mexico into the United States now, I think you could just say that's just war. I would Say, that's war now. So before I thought, darn it, China, you should try harder to stop your individuals who are sending bad things into Mexico and then into our country. But now it doesn't look like that at all to me. It doesn't look like that at all now. It just looks like a war. We didn't know we were fighting, or I didn't know. I guess our government knew, but maybe wanted to interpret it in a different way. But to me, this is just war. We're at war with China. They're sending weapons of mass destruction through Mexico into the United States and killing Americans by tens of thousands. Try not to swear. Those of you who have been with me for a while, you know that I lost my stepson in 2018 to a fentanyl overdose. And you know that my opinion about China is largely influenced by that. So I'm not a biased, I'm not an unbiased observer when it comes to China. But I don't think people quite understand that we're in a hot war, just doesn't happen to involve bullets and bombs. But if China is willingly, and obviously the crisis caused them to have a production stop, that was enough to rattle the cartels on the other side of the world. It's pretty obvious, not pretty obvious. It's completely obvious that the Chinese government is supporting the drug trade through China and killing tens of thousands of Americans a year. And that's war. You know, I thought, you know, I felt like it was a little bit war when it was just fentanyl and maybe it was individuals, but now that I know it's really a whole, you know, a system, well, that's just a war. So at this point, I would say to myself, oh, man, I'm trying so hard not to curse. I'm going to try to get through Sunday without cursing in public. See if I can do that. I can't tell you how much I hate China if that hasn't come through to you. And again, I want to be clear. Not the Chinese people. I don't think I've ever met any Chinese people I didn't like. But the government is pure evil and we can't do business with them anymore. So we have to decouple and we're going to have to take them down in the process. So I don't think there's any way that the future looks anything but this. China has some bad years ahead of it. I'm going to do everything I can to make sure that's true. I'm going to make sure that the country of China, as long as they keep their current form of government, which is a cancer, as long as they keep their current form of government, their future is worse. I'm going to work every day of my life, at least a little bit, at least persuasion wise, to take China off of the top shelf and make sure that they fall and get worse every year from that point on, economically, militarily, influence wise and reputation wise. And I'm sure a lot of people will be joining me in that fight. But I think at this point, if the United States just does business as usual with China when this is all done and we just start trading with them like normal, then I would say the government of the United States is then my enemy, at least in terms of whatever the administration is that's doing that. And if an administration came along that was promising to stop doing that, I would support them over the Trump administration. So it's war. And I don't play a war to lose. Do you? If you're in a war, do you play to lose? Do you play for a draw? This is war. Now we're at war with China. It's obvious we have been. We just didn't want to call it that, but now it's kind of obvious. And I'm not even talking about the, you know, the Chinese Wuhan virus. I don't know what the origin of that is. That feels more like a mistake than intentional. But they certainly didn't help us. They didn't help us the way we would have expected a reasonable country to help us. So at this point, I would say that closing the border of Mexico is how you win the war with China. And that anybody who, at this point, now that we understand that we're at a war with China, they're sending drugs through the cartels into the United States. If you still don't want to close the border with China, you're a lost cause. Maybe you just don't understand the situation. But I would say for anybody who now understands the situation and that it really is China at war with the United States, sending their weapons of mass destruction through the border with Mexico, if you're not ready to close the border now in whatever that takes, drones and military and walls in some places, whatever it takes. If you're not willing to do that now, whose side are you on? I mean, at this point, you just got to take sides. It's not even an opinion piece anymore. You just have to take sides. I'm on Team America. I would like to see China's fate turn very, very bad in the next few years, and I'm going to work to make sure that happens. Unless they reform their government, which would be fine. That's first choice. All right. There's an article speaking of this in the New York Times about maybe sending home the Chinese spies at media companies. What? Wait, what am I understanding the story, right, in the New York Times that the US Government is considering maybe sending home the Chinese spies that work for media companies in the United States? What? What are you telling me? That we know they're spies and they're working in the United States writing stories that you and I are reading? What? Of course you should send them all home. Should we care that China is expelling our journalists? Probably not, because I can't imagine journalists can actually operate in China anyway. Do you think it matters if we have journalists in China? Probably not, because they're probably just spies. Or at least some of them, not all of them. But do we care if we have spies or if we do, we care if we have journalists. US Journalists in China. Why would we care? They're not getting any stories, right? Because if they ever reported anything negative about China, they'd be kicked down anyway. So what is the point of having US Journalists? Any of them, Even one? Why would you even need one? They're not getting any stories. They're not breaking any news. That's not going to happen. What's the point? So they're kicking out our journalists, big deal. And then it's reported almost nonchalantly, that we somehow know about all these Chinese spies in our media structure, to which I say, why aren't they gone now? Like, why are we waiting for the end of today? Is it because we don't know exactly which ones are spies and which ones are just, you know, people born in China who are working over here? Is it because we can't tell? Maybe that's why. Now, let me say something else, which I cannot source, but I'll tell you, it's obvious you want to know something that's true and obvious at this point, that some amount of the, let's say the unexplained behavior of your social media platforms is foreign spies. So can I prove this? No, but I'm going to make a statement of fact, and I'm going to do it with high confidence. But I don't have a source. I'm just saying that common sense and everything you know about the world will tell you this is true. And this is one of the benefits of studying Economics, by the way, there's some things that you can predict to be true every time just because, you know, economics, you know, economics will have an influence on people that's fairly predictable on average over time. So, for example, in economics, if somebody, if the same product were being sold for, you know, $100 here and $10 here, you don't have to be psychic to know that as long as people know that it's the same product, that people will buy more of the cheap one. Right. So there are just some things in economics that guarantee you're seeing the future as close as that can be guaranteed. Right. Nothing's 100%. And the world is just very clear once you understand economics and psychology. Here's one of those cases. If you were Russia or you were China or you were even one of our allies, name an ally. I won't pick favorites. And you could, let's say it was possible, and you could put people who were loyal to your country but not the United States, if you could place them into jobs at the majority of social media platforms. You know, let's say your Googles and your YouTubes and your Facebooks and your Twitter and your Instagram, if you could do it, would you do it? Right. Is there any question about that? If they could do it, wouldn't you all agree that they would? You know, if we could put a spy in a major social media platform company in China, would we do it? Well, obviously, of course we would. If we could put an American spy into some important social entity or company or business in Russia, would we do it? Obviously we would. That's what we do. If China could influence somebody who's already working at one of the platforms, or longer term, like promote somebody, you know, help somebody's career until they get a job there, if China could put their own agents into the social media platform companies, would they do it? Do you have any question that they would do it? Well, no. No. No, you don't have any question? Yeah, I see people mentioning different countries. Yeah. So some countries are more active and more successful spying. So nobody would be surprised if Great Britain or Israel or even France or Germany or any of the big countries. So nobody should be surprised if any of the major countries are putting spies into any of the other major countries. So none of that should be a surprise. So here's the thing. I've been saying from the beginning that I doubted that whatever was happening on Twitter, that was hard to explain, that was either the most coincidental series of computer bugs or somebody's messing with us, those were the two possibilities, because it was obvious something was happening. You could look at it and track it and write it down and you could see that things were happening to some follower accounts and likes were being unliked and stuff like that. And I had told you that in my opinion, unless I'm the worst judge of character in the world, and I don't think I am, that Twitter management doesn't know what's going on. And my hypothesis is that foreign spies have embedded themselves or have access to the API or have access through apps that have. You've given control to your Twitter accounts. There might be 50 different ways they could do it. But I think some of the irregularities you're having, and I'll give you the. Here's sort of the canary in the coal mine. You know the problem I had with being unfollowed from Richard Grinnell. So Ambassador Grinnell of Germany, he was probably the most high profile ambassador, wouldn't you say? I think he's probably the most high profile ambassador. We all know him. Is there anybody who doesn't know the name of Richard Grinnell? Probably not. There's probably not one of you watching this who hasn't heard his name. Now name another diplomat. Go name one other diplomat for any country. An American diplomat working anywhere. Can you name one? Probably not. Right. So Richard Grenell, I think you would agree, the most famous diplomat who also has a good reputation. People like him. And I looked at his Twitter followers and it's like 215,000 or something. I have twice as many Twitter followers as our most famous diplomat, who is very active. He is far more famous than I am, far more active. And he has half as many Twitter followers. Now, a lot of people reported when I pointed out that I had been unfollowed from him, in other words, I had followed him and then I wasn't anymore. On two separate occasions that I know of. I checked it this morning and I'm still following him. And a bunch of other people said, hey. I asked people to check. They said, hey, it happened to me too. Happened to me, too. So all kinds of people said they're positive they followed him. It's not really something you'd forget because it's a conscious decision now. So let me ask you this. Do you think that there was a. Is it more likely that there was somebody who works for Twitter who was like some rogue employee, just some American who didn't like Trump, who decided to reduce the voice of Richard Grenell? Well, maybe. But doesn't it seem more likely that he would be targeted by another country, because most of what Grinnell talks about is our relationship with other countries. He doesn't really say grossly, just President Trump is the best president. I mean, he does some of that because he's part of the administration, but he's mostly talking about other countries and our relationship to them. That's sort of his deal. And his voice, probably. I would guess that his natural Twitter following would be over a million by now. I'm guessing just given his visibility and his importance in the world, I think he'd have a million Twitter followers by now being an active tweeter. So who is more likely to have reduced his voice? Now, if you were saying to me, hey, somebody reduced Jack Posavic's voice, I would immediately say, oh, that might be internal politics. Because there's some people who are talking more about domestic politics all the time, and if you saw their voice being reduced somehow by some unseen entity, your first thought would be, hey, is there somebody who works at Twitter who's doing this? Is this management, or is there a rogue employee? That would be a reasonable thing. But when you see Richard Grinnell being, I think, obviously targeted in some way for a reduced voice, and he's mostly talking about our relationship with other countries, who do you think did it? Isn't it more likely another country did it? So that's my hypothesis with no. No proof for any of that. So the official story is that we don't know. We don't know why it seems. I'll say seems, officially, nobody really knows why this stuff's happened. All right, So I saw a complaint that I think was on cnn. They were saying that the. The emergency relief bill had a gift in it for rich people. And I thought to myself, well, that probably didn't happen. Yeah, that was my first. My first impression when I saw the headline is like, really, really? Somebody is going to stick in a gift for the top 1%. A tax break for the top 1%. Somebody put that into this relief bill. Seriously. And so I thought, okay, fake news, I'll read this. And it won't. Just the headline won't even match the content, which is what we're getting used to. And I read the content, and I thought, oh, my God, is this true? You know, you can't believe anything's true. But here's the claim that there was a substantial change in the tax code so that real estate moguls can write off some capital gains losses in a way more favorable way than before to Which I say to myself, what did that have to do with the recovery? What? What did that have to do with the recovery? What a pathetic performance by our Congress. I mean, I think I'm beyond hate. You know, it starts with, well, I don't have a lot of confidence in Congress. Then there's some point where you just hate them. And I think I passed through hate. I'm at. This is pathetic. They should just be embarrassed every day. I mean, I guess we have to fact check whether this, this real estate depreciation, slash write off tax break for the rich. I guess we have to see if it's true. Because just because it's reported doesn't mean it's true, unfortunately. But if it's true, that's just pathetic. Just pathetic. And I would say that nobody in Congress should be reelected, be they Republican, be they Independent, be they Democratic. So, you know, in case you're wondering if I'm being partisan, I don't care if every Republican in the Congress and the Senate loses their job in the next election. That'd be fine with me. And moreover, I don't even care what the mix is when it's done. I don't care if there are more Democrats or more Republicans or more anything. I don't care. I think at this point they all need to lose their job. Because if that's true, is that true? I mean, first of all, I need to know if it's true, but if it is, they all need to be fired. I've seen two completely different medical opinions on how this coronavirus gets transmitted. I will tell you the two opinions I've heard and then I will tell you that I don't know how to know which one's right, but I'll just pass along. So both of these are not scientific studies. These are based on doctors who are working on the front lines and they're reporting. So some of this is anecdotal, but it's the people who are in the fight. So it's not people watching the fight. These are doctors who are actually intubating people and putting them on ventilators, you know, they're right in it. In New York City, one of them said, here's the good news, that if you're really good about washing your hands and social distancing you and not touching your face. So if you do those three things, this one doctor said, wash your hands like crazy, wear a mask, mostly to prevent you from touching your own face. It's just good. And do your social distancing this Doctor says the odds of getting it if you do just those three things are basically vanishingly small. Now, that's based on his experience, not based on studies. Okay? And the idea is, I guess he wasn't seeing people who had it unless they also had a story of close contact. And he defined it as, you know, maybe it could be a handshake, but also it could be spouse's hugging or something. So then another doctor had a very different story. He said that he's hearing from people who had no known contact with someone who had it, but they had been to the grocery store, and that was their only exposure. So the idea is that people went shopping, were also turning up in emergency rooms, and that was the only known exposure they had to the public. They just had to go buy food and come home. Now, that's still anecdotal. It doesn't mean that they got it from buying groceries. It still allows. And by the way, the first doctor who said your odds of getting it are very low did not say go shopping. So I think they're both on the same page that if you can avoid physically going to a store, especially if you're, you know, if you're in a danger zone or you're older or something, you should do it. So I think they're both consistent on that. But one is saying that the grocery store is a source if you go in person. And then the other doctor was saying that food that is delivered to your house, so long as you wear gloves when you're opening it up, or at least you're washing your hands after you've disposed of the outer bag. This one doctor said probably by the time you get to the food, your odds of getting something are very low. So he suggests getting delivery if he can. All right, here's. Apparently, President Trump has a 49% approval rating, which approaches a career high. And 60% of Americans now approve of his handling, including more than a quarter of Democrats handling of the crisis. Now, you might say to yourself, you might say to yourself, but what about all the things he should have done differently? How could even Democrats be happy with the president when it's reported on CNN every day that he's getting his facts wrong in public and that he should have done whatever sooner, but why is the public not responding to that the way they normally do? Why is the public saying, no, he's doing a good job even when the enemy press is telling him, is telling the public that he's not, he should have done things sooner, should have done things differently, should have talked about it differently. He should have not had those facts wrong. So why is the public seeing past the reporting this time when normally they don't? It's not everybody, but a lot of them are seeing past the reporting. And I hope it's this. I hope it's this. One of them is, we've learned that nobody knew how much inventory we needed or why we needed it or who had it. So I think we've learned that nobody had the basic knowledge that we weren't prepared and therefore didn't know we needed to prepare, because nobody even knew we were not prepared, probably in the government anyway. I mean, I feel confident in saying that before this started, probably nobody ever told President Trump directly or Pence, hey, if we have a pandemic, we're going to run out of all these supplies. I doubt anybody told them that. Right. So is it the President's fault that we got caught unprepared? Well, look at every other country. Every other country got unprepared. Was China ready? No. Was South Korea ready? No. Was Japan ready? No. 100% of countries weren't ready. So is the public saying, okay, I get what you're saying, CNN and msnbc, but you realize there are a lot of countries and none of them were ready. I mean, that context sort of changes how you feel about it. Secondly, a lot of people are making hay out of something that should have been done sooner. And this is one of those topics. So somebody writing said they think that Trump should have acted sooner to either close the airports or close travel. He should have acted sooner to do social distancing. He should have acted sooner to get supplies that are in shortages. Now, is it true, just objectively speaking, that we would be better off if he had acted sooner? Yes. Yes. We can all agree with that, right? No matter what political side you're on. We would all agree that things would be better if we had acted sooner. But I would like to make this standard. So here's a standard I would like to suggest. There was one smart person in the world, and all of the rest of us are assholes. Okay? That's the frame you should put on that, because we don't know who it was. Like, we can't put a name to the one person who's not an asshole. But we can know the rest of us are, and here's why. Whoever was the first person in the world, be they American, be they Chinese, be they whatever, but let's say American, let's just limit it to America. Whoever was the first American who said we should stockpile our supplies in case whoever was the first American who said we should close travel from China before even I did. I said it on January 24th. Jack Posavic said it a few days before that. Maybe somebody said it before us. I would guess there was probably somebody in the world who said it first. So I want to be very clear. We don't know who that was. But of all the 7 billion people in the world and of all the 370 million Americans, however many there are, there was one of us who was right and also first. The rest of us are stupid assholes, aren't we? Because we were too late. We were all too late. I mean, I was so proud. It's like, hey, January 24th. I was already yelling at the top of my lungs, close that airport. Look at me. Ha ha ha. I beat some other people. I got there before other people did. No, I'm an asshole. Why am I an asshole? Because I didn't get it first. Why wasn't I saying it when the first person was saying it? What's wrong with me? Yeah, so let me make this standard. If you don't know who the first person was who got to the right answer before you did, because now it's retrospect. We all have great hindsight, right? Now we know it didn't make sense. Now we know we should have gone sooner. But there was somebody, don't know who it was, who was way before me, way before anybody, and was probably already saying, hey, we better get some supplies in. Hey, we better close our borders. So if you're not that person, well, then you're an asshole because you weren't smart enough, wise enough to know we should have done it sooner. It doesn't help that you know it now. What good is that? What good is it that you know it now that we should have done it sooner? That's useless. Oh, we're all geniuses. Now about the past. But if you weren't the first person, then you're like all the rest of us. You're just an asshole who wishes you had been smarter in the past. All right. I guess I didn't make it through Sunday without using a bad word. I'm going to double down on my estimate for the total death toll in America from the coronavirus. So since the time I've been making an estimate, I think I've been consistent. So maybe not. We'll see. But lately I've been saying this. I think it will be 5,000. Now, you might say to yourself, Scott, Scott, Scott. That's way off. Because we're already at 2,000 right in this country. I think we have. Is that right? 2000. We crossed 2000 already for this country. And we're closer to the start than the end, at least some people think so. That's my estimate, 5,000 total, which would be way less than even the common flu. I think the common flu takes out like 30 to 80,000 a year or something like that in the United States. So that would be a tiny, tiny death rate. Now, does that mean that we have overestimated the crisis? No, my prediction is entirely based on people getting more clever and more serious and working harder. So, yes, I'm seeing a confirmation that it's over 2,000 deaths. So I think you're going to see when we hit around 4,000 deaths, which isn't going to take long, by the way. That could be by the end of the week, somewhere around 4,000 deaths. We're going to have this figured out. By figured out, I mean we'll have enough masks and we'll know to wear them or we'll start to have enough. We'll have meds that we know work and we'll start to use them. We'll have ventilators that we didn't have that now we have. And I think that you'll see, here's my prediction. I think that you're going to see one of the most amazing human feats of all time, and it's going to happen right in front of you. And we all get. We're all. We're all in the audience for this one, right? Everybody gets to watch how the coronavirus turns out. Nobody's not paying attention. And we're going to watch the human species pull together into one mega creature like a transformer. We're a bunch of individuals with something like a government. But when this coronavirus hit the body, human just suddenly formed and connected over the Internet and started acting like, you know, it took a while. We're still evolving into this greater creature, but we formed like a whole different species, which is whatever is the sum of us all working together. Normally, we're not working together, so it's not a species. It's like individual cells just doing what they do. But, boy, when we were threatened, we just formed up into a big old global brain with lots of arms and legs and just started flailing at this virus from every possible direction, learning what we could, taking casualties, putting field hospitals in there. And we went to war. And we're in it Right now. So that's my estimate. I don't believe anybody who is responsible will have an estimate that low. Because if your job is to be a scientist and to keep everybody scared so they do the right thing, you're going to use big numbers. And I think I'm okay with that. From a precision perspective. What you can't do if you're a legitimate scientist or even a politician is you can't say what I just did. You know, I can say that because I'm just observing. I don't have an official job. And so I can say, yeah, I think you're going to see something akin to a miracle. Not a God miracle, but a human miracle where the level of ingenuity will just be, I think, historic. It'll be crazy. You're seeing it already. All right, let's see what else we got going on. Those are the main things. Somebody says Stix was one of the first to call out the virus response. Well, if he was the first, then all of the rest of us have something to answer to. If somebody was before him, well, then he's just an asshole, just like you are and just like I am. We're all assholes if we were too late. And I don't think there's anything I'm going to have less patience for than people on our own team, meaning human beings fighting this virus. If people on the human being team are bayonetting people on their own team during the battle, while the battle is raging, I'm going to go after the bayonetters and I'm going to go pretty hard at the critics who imagined that they knew what the right thing was and they knew it on time. If you can't find that first person, you're an asshole. So am I. All right. We continue to watch with great curiosity the stories and, or lack of stories about the hydroxychloroquine. It feels like the only news we're getting about that drug that's being trialed along with azithromycin. The news we're getting seems to be from sketchy sources and foreign studies. And, you know, a doctor who just says, I tried it once, a patient who tried it and it seems to have worked, but it's not a scientific study. So it's beginning to be obvious to me that there's. I won't call it a cover up. Oh, okay, I'll call it a cover up. Let me give you an example. The New York Times just did a big article about why Germany's death rate is so low compared to others. So it's a whole article about what they did differently. You know, how their response is, what their demographic is, you know, the timing of things, the political decisions, the medical decisions. So it's a New York Times article. So it's, it's researched. There's a lot of detail in there about all the things the Germans did that's different from what everybody else did. Do you know what wasn't mentioned? Hydroxychloroquine. There was a whole article in the New York Times about what they were doing right and not doing right. And it didn't even mention the drug that one must presume they're using over there. Didn't even mention it. You know, it'd be one thing to say, well, they're also using this drug, but nobody has a good idea whether that's working or not. Right? Wouldn't that be what you would expect to see in that story? And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the dog that was not barking. It's the one that I've been telling you about for a while and I've been hinting about it, but I'm just going to tell you directly. Now, the dog that's not barking is if you see a story about another country that was or was not successful and it doesn't even mention hydroxychloroquine, doesn't mention that they used it, doesn't mention they didn't use it, doesn't mention they considered it. It just doesn't mention it. You are seeing manipulation on a level that should make you want to overthrow your government, meaning that the media and presumably the government are. They must be working together, at least in a limited way, to prevent you from having this information. Right. Because clearly the New York Times knows that the hydroxychloroquine is one of the biggest variables. We don't know if it works. I'll say this every time, but might work, might not. But it's certainly the most, you know, besides ventilators, it's probably the most important thing that people talk about. It's not even mentioned in a major feature story about Germany. Are you kidding me? You know, this is as bad as the. The government telling you that masks don't work even a little bit. And you just look at it, you say, well, that's not just a lie. That's a lie. Like, you think I'm really stupid. That's a sort of, what do you think of me? That you would tell me that fabric doesn't slow down air and you would expect me to believe it. Like, how dumb do you think I am? And then you see a feature story about Germany without mentioning this drug positively or negatively. And I look at that and I go like, how dumb do you think I am? How dumb do you think I am that I would believe that's anything like news that is just propaganda or something. I don't know. It looks like the government probably ordered them not to report on that is my guess. Or they voluntarily decided to because they may be part of reducing the hoarding of it. Maybe that's good. All right, here's some bad thinking I've been seeing. People have been saying to me, why is it that you don't see any celebrities and, or athletes dying? And of course the conspiracy thinking is, well, they must be getting the good drugs because they're not dying. Well, maybe, but how about there's a more likely explanation. The more likely explanation is that your celebrities and athletes are all in really good shape. And the one thing we know is that if you're youngish and, or you're in good shape, you do better. Now, Tom Hanks is, I think, right around my age, ish, but he's clearly in better shape than other 60 year olds. Wouldn't you agree with? I mean, you just look at Tom Hanks and you say, okay, he works out, he watches what he eats. It's pretty obvious. So he's not the kind you'd expect to have a bad outcome. Now, on top of that, they also probably got the hydroxychloroquine and the best possible treatment. But especially if you see like an NBA player and he doesn't die, well, there's a reason for that. He's an NBA player, he's an elite athlete. His body is a, his body is a sports car. Of course he can beat a virus. So it doesn't mean that there's some kind of special treatment, although there probably is. It just could mean that they're healthier and younger and they take better care of themselves. And there haven't been that many. And 80% of people get over it anyway. And so far none of the celebrities have been obese and elderly. So. Maybe there's very low death rate. Somebody in the comments says that Japanese girls have cute feet. Thank you for noting that. I think that fit the topic perfectly. Trump's motto is money over morals. Like, you know, those are like the lowest level of political comment. A person with no profile picture comes in. Trump has an inner thought that he likes money more than humanity. It's like, did you animate a fish? I mean, what kind of brain does it take to think, well, this will. I think this can add to the public discourse. I'll just pretend I can hallucinate what a stranger is thinking. That should be good. People are noting that Tom Hanks has diabetes. Yeah. You know, you've heard that diabetes is a risk factor, but I'm just going to put this out there as a hypothesis. The people who have diabetes tend not to look like Tom Hanks. Am I right? Now, I don't know percentage wise, how many still can maintain their weight and be healthy and also have diabetes, but I've known a lot of people with diabetes. They don't look like Tom Hanks, if you know what I'm talking about. Right. People with diabetes have a tough time generally keeping their weight down. They tend to have other issues that compound. You know, you get the diabetes, and it's one thing after another. So, you know, if you're on top of it as successfully as I'm guessing somebody like Tom Hanks would be, you, meaning keeping yourself healthy in general, et cetera, it's probably not the same risk as somebody who's £400 and has diabetes. All right, Let's see what else people are saying. Harvey Weinstein is in trouble, though. Yeah. You know, you can't believe anything about any Harvey Weinstein stories. Who knows what's happening in there? But certainly he would be the target for that virus. Are you working out more often now that you stopped going to the gym? The answer is yes. Well, I always worked out every day that I could, and I'm still doing that, but I think I'm working out better. So what I changed was it wouldn't be unusual if I went to the gym and tried to exhaust myself, you know, try to get the most benefit I could, and I don't have to do much later. So I just, like, wear myself out. But I don't do that because that would lower my immunity temporarily. So instead I changed my exercise habit. So it's long walks instead of, say, using the StairMaster, running or anything like that, because the long walk is just nothing but good. It's like. It's just good for you and you feel it. So I told you before that I'd skipped a day in the middle of this to see how differently I felt. And there was a big difference. You know, my whole. How much I. How well I slept, my attitude, my stress, everything was different just because I did or did not take a walk. And so I yesterday I just got overwhelmed with stuff to do and I didn't have time and it was raining and I didn't get out. And man, I felt it. At 1am this morning, I woke up and I was just up. I was just up for the day because I didn't exercise. So my body wasn't. Just couldn't sleep that long. If I don't exercise, I'm good for three or four hours of sleep. And then my body just. It's like it has to go do something. I can't sleep after that, but if I've exercised, I can. All right, Here's one way. You know, your government is failing on this crisis. I think we'll get to the end of it. We'll do what we have to do. But there's going to be a lot of mistake correction, mistake correction. And we should look at that generously when it's done, because nobody knows what to do. And that's just the fact nobody knows what to do. We got to try stuff and then quickly correct if it didn't work. But one of the things that you would have to say is clearly a mistake if it goes on much longer. And much longer would be, I'd say, end of time today. If you don't see good reporting on which hospitals need which supplies and what their peak need would be what they have and what's in the pipeline for them. If you don't see that reporting by, say, the end of today, it doesn't have to be perfectly accurate, but at least the beginning of that system for reporting. I would say we're not competently handling this because you don't manage something you don't measure. If you don't think that's the most profound statement in all of human psychology and management, then you have not studied those fields. This is the most profound and important thing you'll ever hear about. Getting groups of people to do something. And it's this. If you don't measure it, you're not managing it. You're just flailing around. So you have to be able to measure what the situation is and then on an ongoing basis, what am I doing to fix it and how much difference is it making if you don't have that mechanism in place. And we don't. It's obvious we don't because you watch the task force and they're just guessing. They're like, well, we got a shipment here and there's a plant working over here, but there's no kind of idea of the total of that and what it looks like for the hospitals. So at this point, the task force is not, it can be said as just a fact because that reporting is not in place. It's simply a fact that it's not being managed. Would you agree? You can't say that the task force is managing the critical supply because they're not measuring it. That's just a fact. Everybody's got a background in management and maybe even psychology in some cases. You'll see in the comments there's 100% agreement for the people with that, that skill set and that talent stack. Nobody will disagree with this, by the way. Nobody will disagree with the statement that if you can't measure it, you're not managing it. Right. Just that that is as hard a fact as there could ever be in the behavioral sciences and economics and management. So. But the good news is that Vice President Pence clearly acknowledges that need. And he said yesterday that they're working hard to talk to the hospitals and gather that. Now, once gathered, I would say they're managing. But I would also say that up until today, nobody's been managing it. People have been doing things, but they're just flailing, you know, and many of those things are productive. Of course, it makes sense to make more of the stuff. So there's some things you can do without actually managing it. You just know you need more of it. So everybody makes more of it if they can, but it's not being managed. Management happens the moment you see the reports, even if inaccurate, because they'll get better over time. That's when management begins. So don't think that we started managing. That hasn't even started yet. Look in the comments. Everybody's agreeing. All right, that's enough on that. I will talk to you tonight at 10pM Eastern Time, 7pM Pacific. Don't miss it. Bring your blanket.