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May 4, 2020 - American Countdown - Barnes

01:46:59

20200504_Mon_Barnes

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	Welcome to American Countdown.
	Monday, May 4th, 2020.
	They...
	In some places, you have a little bit of freedom today in America.
	In some places, you're in day 30, day 40, day 50, day 60, depending on where you are in the country or where you are in the world, and having your rights deprived of you completely in some context and in some cases.
	Tonight, Resolve.
	Loser Think has infected the policy decision makers and a lot of our politicians concerning the political and policy response to this pandemic.
	Tonight, we'll have the privilege to discuss that, debate that, dialogue on that issue with the author of Loser Think, Scott Adams, also an author of other books, How to Win Big Lee, and others, including about mindset and the rest.
	Many of you may know him as the famous author of the famous comic Dilbert.
	In my experience, in general comedians have a wide, broad scale skill set that is relatively unique in the world of authors, in the world of actors, in the world of performers, in the world of persuaders.
	Scott Adams also even has a background in hypnosis, one of the great forecasters and predictors of the 2016 election.
	Even though it came at great personal and professional expense, because backing Trump in an age of Trump derangement syndrome has not been a profitable enterprise in general, but has moved forward with it because he believes in the public benefit of improving the way we perceive issues, the way we understand issues, the way we dialogue and interact in the world, not only on matters of public policy, but on matters of mindset for our own personal lives and well-being.
	He is one of the truly great inventive minds of America today.
	And so it'll be fun to discuss and debate the issues.
	There is areas where we agree, areas where we disagree.
	And it'll be fun to get into that dialogue and how much Loser Think has infected the aspects of our politicians and press in covering this pandemic and in responding and reacting to it.
	In that regard, we have, let's get to the COVID-1984 update for today, Monday, May 4th.
	First, another article from Medical Review Studies by some Japanese authors about how closed environments are what facilitate the secondary transmission of coronavirus or COVID-19.
	They go into great detail about what we've been talking about in this show for six weeks in one way, shape, or form, which is that the way COVID-19 spreads is by close, continuous contact in confined quarters with recycled air.
	It does not spread out on the beach.
	It does not spread, or it doesn't spread with ease.
	You'll have, you know, some tiny minutiae of cases.
	So far they've found some cases none, in some cases one in a thousand, a tiny tiny tiny minuscule percentage of cases.
	In many cases in many areas they can find no cases that have spread by taking a walk in a public park, by simply reading a book in a public park, by
	Strolling down your sidewalk by taking a playing t-ball with your daughter in the in your backyard or at a local park by going taking your child to play at the Amusements in these just just take a swing at the local parks do all of those things all the public outdoor activities swimming surfing paddleboarding being out on a boat none of these things have any meaningful risk at all and Of spreading COVID-19.
	And here's another study, another survey that confirms it.
	And yet, our politicians, including Governor Newsom of California, or they're calling him Governor Grusome of California, has shut down more beaches.
	As other public health officials have noted, the beaches are probably one of the safest places to be due to the wind.
	Due to the sunlight, due to the open air, due to the heat, due to the humidity.
	You combine all of those aspects or aspects that someone has found somewhere to be a key in defeating the transmission and spread of this virus.
	So more and more we're seeing politicians with policies that don't even have any correlation whatsoever or in many cases an inverse correlation to reducing the spread or transmission of this disease.
	Even if you did see this disease as the next plague, Rather than simply the second coming of the Asian flu and the Hong Kong flu that hit us in the late 50s and again in the late 60s, which was about three to five times worse than a severe flu.
	More serology tests in that regard today.
	Also confirming...
	That, in fact, when they look at how many people have been infected in a region, you may remember there was a Santa Clara study a couple of weeks ago.
	And a whole bunch of Twitter experts declared that you could not rely upon it.
	They picked it apart every little way they could.
	Well, then almost the identical results of that Santa Clara study have been reproduced in L.A., New York, Boston, Italy, Germany, and in large parts of the rest of the world.
	They keep finding it again and again and again in community after community after community that the infection spread at a much higher rate had already been present and prevalent in the community at a much higher rate.
	And what does that mean?
	It means the hospitalization rate was far less than they said.
	It means the ICU rate was far less than they said.
	It means the mortality rate, the lethality rate was far, far less than what they said.
	Indeed, so far, the average mortality rate of this virus is actually only about either the same as a severe flu, up to two times a flu in what they're finding.
	The worst scenarios is five times the flu, which, by the way, would be like the Asian flu of the late 1950s, like the Hong Kong flu of the 1960s, not like the Spanish flu of 1918, 1919, and 1920.
	And even in all of those cases, including the Spanish flu, we did not shut down our entire civil society.
	We did not shut down large parts of our economy.
	Now, on the other side, let's look at the consequences and costs of this pandemic.
	Panic response by our politicians.
	Another headline, this one from Daily Beast.
	Don't forget the other pandemic killing thousands of Americans, documenting that there has been a surge in addictions and a surge in opiate deaths, as some of us predicted was going to happen.
	Suicides go up when you decide to shut down the economy, cause mass unemployment, deprive people of their public purpose, and isolate them and lock them up in their own homes without home detention overnight.
	That is in fact so.
	What we're seeing is we're seeing suicides rise, domestic violence rise, child abuse rise, and now we're seeing opiate deaths and addiction and alcoholism rise as well.
	These are the deaths they never calculated when they did their pandemic policy shutdown response.
	Meanwhile, other countries that have been reopening, countries like Sweden that stayed open, and like Singapore that mostly stayed open, South Korea stayed open, Taiwan stayed open, Japan stayed open, Iran's economy stayed mostly open, China's all the way back to being mostly open, and Denmark also opened several weeks ago, and there was predictions of doom and gloom.
	Clearly the roof would fall in the big devastating models that forecast tens of thousands of deaths as soon as anybody opened up their civil society or their public economy at all.
	Well, it turned out they were wrong again.
	In this case, just as they were wrong in their predictions and forecasts of what would happen in Sweden, and they were wrong about that by analogy for South Korea and Taiwan and Japan and Iran, and to some degree China, they're now wrong about Denmark.
	Denmark reopened their economy, and here's the headline.
	Denmark, the coronavirus spread has not accelerated following the reopening of the economy.
	If we look at a three-day moving average, if we look at chart number one, someone charted the impact of the various shutdown time periods.
	And it's a three-day moving average of daily COVID-19 deaths per million people looking at countries in a light that should have been favorable to critics of Sweden.
	They look at Ireland, they look at Finland, they look at Norway, they look at Denmark, they look at the United Kingdom, and they look at Sweden using different methodologies to calculate, including the more aggressive ones.
	And what do they find?
	They find that there is no significant difference whatsoever in the death rate since the shutdowns have gone into force.
	In other words, you're seeing the same relative decline in the growth of the disease and the growth of the death rate from the disease in Sweden that you're seeing in the countries that have used extreme techniques of shutdown.
	There's increasingly no evidence that the shutdown provides any material impact on the growth rate of the death.
	That is happening by studies done within the United States by comparing various states depending on the timing of their shutdown.
	Florida, for example, reopened.
	They predicted there was going to be doom and gloom in the Florida beaches.
	There was going to be this huge death trap on the Florida beaches.
	Never happened.
	Famously, people, sports writers like Peter King forecast that against other sports commentators like Clay Travis who said it was not going to happen.
	Clay Travis is now down on the beaches in Florida enjoying the sunshine, which helps kill this virus, while Peter King is back in shame in New York.
	So, the predictions of doom and gloom, the predictions that these methods of shutdown, confining people to closed quarters, like what they did in New York, like what they did in New Jersey.
	In fact, increasingly, what they did is they took people that were the most vulnerable, the elderly with multiple conditions of underlying medical conditions, in nursing homes, and they locked them into those nursing homes.
	They not only locked them into those nursing homes, closed the windows to those nursing homes, Prevented anybody from interacting with them.
	Prevented them from going outside the nursing homes.
	They sent people that they knew had COVID-19, who had tested for it at the hospital, back into those nursing homes to spread the virus.
	Indeed, in country after country after country, in state after state after state, more than half, on average, of all COVID-19 deaths are from nursing homes.
	This is due to a, some of us were warning six weeks ago that there should be a targeted public policy focused on protecting the health of those in nursing homes.
	But they didn't.
	Instead they were busy locking up six-year-olds.
	Instead they were busy making sure a mother couldn't take her daughter, her son, to the local park.
	Making sure somebody couldn't go for a morning swim.
	Making sure someone couldn't go paddle boarding in Malibu.
	Shooting at surfers in some parts of the country just for trying to surf.
	Because our politicians around the world were worried about that, and not worried about the elderly, in fact facilitating the death of the elderly en masse by their public policies, that's why we have the consequences and outcomes that we do.
	Indeed, coronavirus deaths, according to this headline from the Chicago Sun-Times, double in one week at Illinois nursing homes, have surged past 100.
	When you see problems in Chicago, which you're often seeing, or any other city, Boston, For a little while in Tennessee, other places, what you're really seeing is a nursing home problem.
	You're not seeing a broad transmission problem.
	And this nursing home problem is a product of the policies being instituted, not because of any efforts to deter that from happening.
	And of course you have Governor Gavin Newsom, or Grusom, has been sued by the ex-Newport Beach Mayor over the closures in Orange County.
	In fact, there's more and more lawsuits in California every single day due to the inanity and insanity of Governor Grusom's public policies.
	Meanwhile, in the same context, we have circumstances about masks.
	It's important to note that there's been contradictory information about masks from day one.
	So first, our own Surgeon General and the World Health Organization and major politicians and the press and major doctors said, do not use masks.
	Don't go out and buy them.
	Don't go out and get them.
	You're causing problems.
	It's not going to benefit you, so on and so forth.
	A few weeks later, not based on any detailed medical literature, we should note, all of a sudden there was a reversal and said absolutely you should go out and get masks and now it's mandatory.
	You can't even go to your job in some places without having a mask.
	You can't walk out in public without having a mask.
	You can't go into a store without having a mask.
	This medical sharia law is removing the choice.
	From ordinary people to decide for themselves.
	The reality is, when the politicians and the public health officials were telling you that masks could never be beneficial, they were lying to you.
	There was no data and information to say that it could not be beneficial.
	The data was simply contradictory as to how beneficial it could be.
	In the same vein, for them to say you have to have it, this other one-size-fits-all approach, just as we've done with our pandemic policy response across the nation, taking New York City's policy and applied it in rural Montana in ways that made zero sense, this literal one-size-fits-all mask policy has an equal problem.
	Because, again, there is also no data and documented information that this will necessarily stop the transmission of the disease.
	That this will, in fact, benefit you and protect you from getting it.
	In fact, to this day, the formal position of the World Health Organization is that there's no assurances that wearing a mask will do anything to prevent you from getting the disease.
	And yet you're being forced to wear it by employers, by retailers, by governments.
	Does that make sense?
	Does medical Sharia law make any more sense than any other form of Sharia law?
	So this should be voluntary.
	This should be choice-driven.
	This should be self-informed, self-educated action.
	It should not be the coercion of the state, particularly where the medical literature is far from clear as to any benefit.
	And we know for some people, there is clearly detriment for masks.
	There are people who get headaches from it.
	There's people who actually increase the risk of transmission of them getting it from it because of the constant use of the mask and putting it down, putting it up, and other issues related to it.
	It's why there's so inconsistent data on the utility and the ubiquitous utility of masks to defeat the transmission of influenza-like viruses, airborne-like viruses.
	So, given that we don't even know whether it's medically beneficial or not, and we know that for some people it will not be, or likely will not be, how should we be compelling it and coercing it and forcing it as a condition of living your everyday life?
	As a condition of employment?
	As a condition of purchasing groceries?
	As a condition of walking outside?
	And in that context, by the way, The New York Times had a relatively informative piece for once entitled, Masks become a flashpoint in the virus culture wars.
	They point out what others have pointed out in other publications that wearing this mask outdoors by yourself or wearing it in your car by yourself makes no sense at all, period.
	There's no version of the science that says wearing the mask while you're jogging improves anything in terms of your health.
	Or that by being on the beach with the mask improves your health.
	Or that being by yourself in the car, on a boat, improves your health.
	This is becoming a sort of subservient signal.
	Look at me, I'm wearing my mask, even when it's utterly insane for me to be wearing it.
	That's really not a self-attribution that one should be seeking out in the modern age.
	And these masks will continue to be a legal flashpoint, a constitutional flashpoint, as we move forward and progress in this particular environment.
	In the same time frame, we have of course the continued problems on the economic side of the equation as the Daily Wire reports something that some of us could have forecast or foreshadowed before with this headline.
	More than 40% of small businesses may close in the next six months.
	I am here currently in Texas.
	I was this past weekend up in Tennessee.
	Both states that have started opening up.
	What is significant is how many restaurants are still not reopening even though they're legally allowed to.
	What is significant is how many small businesses are reporting back to their employees, no intention of reopening maybe ever.
	And we're waiting to see whether they even have the financial wherewithal or means to do so.
	And the public effect of this Shock of this shock and awe on the public consciousness of terrifying them about the nature of this disease and breeding all of these Karens across the country have in fact led to a diminished interest in some part of the population from even participating in public life or public society.
	We've done a mass psychological shock in this real-life Milgram experiment on people's mindsets and mentalities.
	That may be so detrimental that we will never be able to restore our economy, at least in the near short term.
	That is the risk we face and a risk that the politicians failed to meaningfully weigh when they made these policy decisions in the first instance.
	In other news, the COVID-19 keeps having a sort of peculiar effect on a wide range of court cases and legal matters across the world.
	The Julian Assange extradition trial was postponed until September based on COVID-19, which could in fact benefit Assange because it will allow him the opportunity to meaningfully consult with his counsel prior to that hearing, something he's been consistently denied under the guise of COVID-19 by the British authorities in recent times.
	Meanwhile, the Daily Caller News Foundation is suing for documents regarding China and the World Health Organization, concerning particularly Anthony Fauci, Dr. Birx, and other potential conflicts of interest that may be present, conflicts of information that may be present, That are clearly pertinent and relevant to the inquiry.
	The fact that they're having to use the Freedom of Information Act to get it says something about our government's continued unwillingness to openly and transparently share information.
	Indeed, the government has mostly shut down the sunshine laws in the states and the Freedom of Information Act federally under the guise that they do not have time to comply under COVID-19 for a wide range of other requests that are parallel and that are pending about issues of potential public misconduct across the nation.
	Meanwhile, more and more information comes out about the absurdity of shutting down schools.
	If you'd read a lot of the medical literature prior to COVID-19, you would find that generally the medical consensus, the medical advice, and the medical literature was that you should not shut down schools for an influenza-like virus, unless you had a very unique risk like the Spanish flu, which posed a unique risk to young people especially, and had a mortality rate far, far, far in excess.
	Of a typical flu.
	It was more like 20X a typical flu during that time and season.
	Well, they're finding out of course, but the relative advice, Hong Kong flu, Asian flu, past flu, SARS, we've never shut down the schools in the United States for any of those.
	And the advice was that generally it's not required and in fact can become more of a problem than a benefit.
	For example, almost 40% of nurses who we need to be active in the, particularly when there's a medical crisis, ...are single moms and have children at home and are their primary caregivers for their children.
	Even if they're not single moms, they're primary caregivers for their kids.
	Having their kids back at home often creates economic and social problems for medical care for the provision that's needed and necessary in medical crises.
	So in that context, we have more information that not only is it extremely rare for kids to get COVID-19 in any consequential manner that could require a hospitalization or that could kill them, On top of that, it turns out it appears that kids are not even carriers.
	That they're finding increasing information that they simply do not transmit the virus.
	They do not spread the virus at any significant rate or risk at all.
	So that means we are depriving them of their public education for no positive purpose of any great consequence, while inflicting substantial pain on them because they cannot recover the lost time.
	They cannot recover the lost association and lost education that they are being denied and deprived in this time period.
	So that is why Daniel Horowitz, who was on this show a couple of times before, mentioned his latest piece is, the schools should be the first things to reopen, not the last.
	Going through that, in fact, there is close to a 0% death rate among school-age children.
	And, in addition, settled fact, the COVID death rate amongst children is astronomically low.
	And on top of that, the evidence is that kids do not transmit COVID to adults in any significant numbers.
	This includes studies from Switzerland.
	This includes studies from the Royal College of Pediatrics in the United Kingdom.
	This includes studies from the Australian National Center for Immunization Research and Surveillance and other medical data across the world, including Singapore and Hong Kong and Europe.
	Given that fact, our schools should be reopened, but instead our politicians are talking about not only closing them for the rest of this year, but maybe even closing them in the fall.
	That is the inanity and the insanity as these power-mad politicians continue infected with loser think, and some infected with Trump derangement syndrome, continue on a perilous path that has no basis in medical literature or science and cannot conform to the constitutional protections and entitlements of ordinary Americans.
	In the same way, there's an additional medical study on COVID-19.
	Full lockdown policies in Western European countries have, this is the headline of the medical literature article, full lockdown policies in Western Europe countries have no evident impacts on the COVID-19 epidemic.
	That's worth repetition.
	The full lockdown policies in Western Europe have no evident impact.
	None on COVID-19.
	Zero.
	So all these mass lockdowns that are the only basis to justify them, given the cost they inflict on civil society, given the cost they inflict in human health, given the cost they're going to inflict in human life, Given the cost they are going to inflict on not only the quantity of life, but the quality of life for people around the world because what happens in the West impacts the world.
	That's why they estimate more than 130 million people are now at risk of starvation within the year because of this shutdown in the West.
	It turns out that it doesn't even have any benefits.
	There's no evidence that it achieves any meaningful impact at all in reducing the death rate, in reducing the hospitalization rate, in reducing the ICU rate, or reducing the transmission rate.
	It doesn't even achieve its purported objective.
	Indeed, as we saw with the nursing home example earlier, it may cause even more problems.
	One illustration is in New York City, where they required people to get into fewer subway cars and made them more compact, more condensed, and had them have to ride those subway cars often longer because of the reduction of subway routes.
	And what did that do?
	That likely led to a spike in the transmission of the disease, not its reduction.
	So increasingly, we see these policies backfire.
	Sending young people home in intergenerational homes where they're in close confined quarters with continuous contact with older vulnerable relatives.
	Bad idea, it turns out.
	While telling them not to go outside and stay inside where it's most likely to spread.
	So it appears these shutdown policies have no positive evident benefit in reducing the COVID-19 disease at all.
	They're a joke.
	They're the worst public policy, public health policy in the history of the Western modern world.
	in the history of the United States of America.
	That's the increasing evidentiary reality, which some of us forecast a month ago.
	We're starting to see more and more and more evidence of it based on the history of COVID-19 and light viruses, based on the data about how influenza works, based on the way viruses work, based on what public policy responses have previously been, have evidence of support.
	These public policies are completely novel, completely unprecedented, completely unparalleled, and increasingly showing no positive benefit while wrecking the economy, killing lives and destroying people's liberties. - Indeed, on that destroying liberty context, we have headlines like this.
	Taser-wielding New York PD officers punch a bystander.
	What were they busting him for?
	Maybe they're busting him for robbery, busting him for a serious crime.
	No, it was a social distancing bust.
	Imagine a social distancing bust.
	Just that headline.
	And by the way, there's increasing articles and studies and surveys and comments today by various experts that point out there's no clear evidence that any of this just social distancing achieves any positive benefit in the reduction of this virus in a meaningful manner.
	But putting that aside, we're actually having cops bust people, wielding tasers, punching and beating people because they weren't social distancing enough.
	That's the insanity of what we're facing today in America.
	Meanwhile, people like Professor Ioannidis, published in the UK Times.
	In fact, yeah, I think we have a video of it.
	So they actually showed the video of someone who was tracking it and tracing it of these cops.
	I mean, look at all these police officers taking this guy down solely because he wasn't social distancing enough.
	You need four officers to pull a Rodney King on someone because they weren't social distancing enough?
	That is the insanity.
	Meanwhile, of course, the same New York City and other officials across the country have been letting people out early, have been letting rapists out, letting murderers out, letting dangerous immigrants out from ICE, all of that.
	And here they're worried, chasing down, holding up, hazering, punching.
	And look at this guy, he punched this guy too.
	Yeah, why not?
	This is what happens when you create a culture that says you can do whatever you want.
	You have all the power you want.
	You get South Park, Cartman's character, respect for my authority.
	All because look at this guy.
	He's not social distancing enough.
	Let's beat him.
	Let's just grab this other guy.
	Let's beat him.
	Because just like the power-mad politicians go insane, the power-mad police go insane.
	So it's going to bring out the worst instincts and the worst impulse and the worst cops.
	They're the ones who are going to be famous and well-known across the country and the world for these extraordinary violations and civil rights abuses.
	This is similar to what happened in Wisconsin, where they harassed a lady simply because she let her child play at a neighbor's house.
	This is what's happened in terms of people being arrested because they were playing t-ball with their daughter, taking their son to the amusement park, surfing, going for a morning swim, simply going for an afternoon paddle boarding, trying to go out on a powerboat in the afternoon, trying to take a walk along the beach, someone coming back from surfing.
	These are the people being targeted.
	They even did undercover investigations of people because they were doing scary, scary news.
	Haircutting and salon work.
	There's been announcements of bust in multiple places across the country with massive undercover work to find out that undercover person helping to do your hair.
	Can you imagine?
	That's America today.
	This is supposed to be reasonable?
	This is supposed to be proportionate?
	This is supposed to be sane?
	Isn't this more evidence of not only loser think, but loser think that has led to a madness in our political class and police class that have been mad with power and now that they have tasted a little bit of it.
	Meanwhile, Professor Ioannidis points out in the London Times, the UK Times, the science is becoming clear.
	Lockdowns are not the right medicine.
	Professor Ioannidis from Stanford, one of the prominent epidemiologists, one of the prominent biostatisticians in the world.
	He's been warning of this since March, and he's been proven right again and again and again, while the public policy makers have been proven wrong again and again and again.
	Meanwhile, the Australian officials are saying the same thing as Daniel Horowitz is saying here in the United States.
	Get our kids back to school.
	It's simply a matter of trust.
	Noting that the damage being done to kids' mindset and mentalities about what they're being conditioned to accept as normal is leading them to a dangerous and perilous place, not only for their mental health and educational well-being, but for what they see as civil society's norm.
	Additional more medical articles out today talking about what in fact the actual rate when you do serology testing is.
	And the serology testing tests how many people have ever had the virus within the local community.
	It won't test for people who recently have it or had it.
	It'll only test people who no longer have it but had it before.
	And what they're finding again and again and again is that the ratio of people that had it is anywhere from 10 to 100 times the number of people that had tested positive for having it in that local community.
	And what that does is that dramatically reduces the hospitalization rate for anyone who gets the virus, dramatically cuts the ICU rate, dramatically cuts the mortality rate.
	So that's what they told us.
	So when we come back after the break, we'll be with Scott Adams to discuss and debate and dialogue on the core issues of what is happening in the country today and whether loser thing has infected our politicians in this pandemic policy response.
	Welcome back to American Countdown.
	We're gonna be up with Scott Adams.
	You can find him at www.scottadamsays.com.
	You can find him at twitter at scottadamsays.
	You can read one of his books.
	One of them we'll be talking about a lot tonight is Loser Think.
	You can also read books like Win Bigly or How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big.
	You may know him most famously as the great comic writer for Dilbert.
	I began to follow him in more detail.
	You can get little pearls of persuasive wisdom every night on his periscope, where he gives them out for free for about 20-25 minutes, 30 minutes a night.
	He famously forecast the Trump election correctly.
	I'd always been a fan of Dilbert, was a fan of his persuasive books.
	Now he's a loser thinking an excellent way to filter out and frame out information in policy debates like this one.
	But also books like How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, I gave to my son.
	It's a great mindset book.
	A way to live your life.
	Little cues, little clues about how to improve your everyday mindset to make your life better.
	Whether it's stacking your skills for an effective skill set, or communicating with those you care about, or communicating about matters of public interest.
	So Scott, glad you could be with us tonight.
	Thanks for having me.
	What's been fascinating to me is if we took a lot of the ideas from LoserThink, I've seen a lot of indicia of that in what I think our politicians have been using as the premise for a lot of their pandemic policy response.
	And so that's why I wanted to explore that at least in part and explore in part first why some of those sort of little proverbs, little pearls of wisdom are good for understanding, putting an objective filter on looking at anybody making a decision and what their persuasive logic is, or in some cases, putting an objective filter on looking at anybody making a decision and what their persuasive logic is, or in In that context, you do a great job.
	I remember years ago seeing in one of your periscopes, you introduced this idea even before the book about how models, particularly models that are forecasting things long into the future, one should be fairly skeptical of.
	And I think you were describing it in the context of your own prior employment.
	And basically the goal was, you know, just create the model so that somebody feels happy upstairs, not necessarily so that you can actually predict it.
	Because you point out in complex matters, multivariate matters, The ability to forecast past six months is going to be more like rolling dice than it's going to be like a science.
	Could you explain that for people a little bit?
	Yeah, as you said, I used to do long-range forecast models for my job.
	They were financial ones, but you see the same dynamics, which is as soon as you get a few variables in there and you make a few assumptions and you iterate it for a year or two, Everything goes so wildly in different directions based on small changes of assumptions that really it's the person who's making the model who engineers the result.
	And I saw that over and over again because if I got the wrong result.
	My boss would say, well, maybe change that assumption a little bit.
	So that's in the real world.
	That's the way it works.
	Now, the thing that people don't understand is that there is no way to predict the future.
	If anybody could do it in any context, reliably, they would be, you know, a trillionaire.
	So the first, the first thing you need to know is that it can't be done.
	And you can know that for sure.
	Because somebody would get rich on it.
	You just have to, you know, bet on it or whatever you needed to do.
	So that's the first thing.
	The second thing is they're not intended to predict the future.
	And that's what everybody misunderstands.
	The best thing a model can do is to show you a range.
	If you, you know, if you put it in the worst case scenario variables, what's the high side?
	And the best case, what's the low side or vice versa?
	And then you say, OK, it's going to be somewhere in this giant range.
	But then the dumb thing happens where they say, let's take the average and we'll say it's this thing in the middle of this line.
	And that's where it all goes wrong, because they shouldn't do that at all, because that makes it look like they believe they can predict the future.
	And that's not even what the models are for.
	They can't do that.
	They shouldn't be even interpreted that way.
	Exactly, and there was a second subcomponent of that that I thought was really good in the book Loser Think, which is to be very wary of people doing straight line forecasting.
	So that where they're saying because something has been happening ABC in the past, we're going to assume it's just going to keep going like that in the future, because in the same way the future is both multivariate and something's going to happen that you didn't forecast, or sometimes couldn't, but sometimes wouldn't.
	It could explain why straight line thinking is not the best, is a form of loser think.
	Right, so if you just take our current situation with the COVID, look at how many news stories have broken in the last 30 days that might have been, probably they're not, but could have been a complete game changer.
	It's like maybe this therapeutic works, maybe this vaccine comes in way earlier than any ever has.
	Maybe the ventilators, if you stopped using them, you'd get better results.
	Maybe there's something genetic.
	You know, maybe they've got a dog that can sniff it.
	I read that today.
	They're training dogs to sniff it out.
	Maybe there's a test that's instant.
	You know, there's some of that coming too.
	So, you know, if you were to try to tell me where will the COVID thing be in just 30 days, In 30 days, could you confidently tell me what's going to happen in 30 days?
	Because there's a whole bunch of human ingenuity that's not just sort of casually walking past this thing.
	This is the whole 7 billion people, the smartest people that we can find on the whole freaking earth on this problem.
	And as you've heard some of the researchers talking, that now that they're talking to each other more efficiently than has ever happened before, some are expecting immense lasting benefits from learning how to work internationally so efficiently.
	So that's completely unpredictable.
	You take climate change, the obvious one, they say, well, if you keep polluting this way, the CO2 rises this way, the temperature rises this way.
	And they wouldn't say it's a straight line, but more of a predictable curve.
	But that too is an 80 year prediction.
	Are you kidding me?
	80 years?
	Now, for people like me who understand what the model is for, it's actually fine.
	If you understand what it really is for, it shows you this giant range.
	It says, if things go the way our scientists think, we have trouble.
	We don't know how big, but you better start getting ready for this.
	But the thing that they can't model is The coronavirus happens.
	They can't model that somebody invents something, that Elon Musk's solar roof tiles catch on and everybody wants them.
	So there's just so many things that could change in 80 years.
	It's absurd.
	And then you add on to that what I call the Adam's Law of slow-moving disasters, which says we're really, really good at solving things when we see them coming.
	Coronavirus caught us a little off guard.
	We're dumb because we weren't as ready as we could have been, but we couldn't have really been ready for this specific one.
	You know, we maybe could have generally been ready.
	But yeah, so it's really ridiculous to ignore human ingenuity when you're predicting 80 years in advance.
	I mean, I don't even know if humans will be here.
	We might all be cyborgs or living in a computer simulation.
	80 years?
	That's a long time.
	No doubt about it.
	Well, I think Elon thinks, sometimes at least, that maybe we already are in the simulation, and sometimes I think maybe we are too with some of the peculiarities that happen, and both you and Mike Cernovich have had fun with that upon occasion over the last year, year and a half.
	One of the other things I thought, and while some of this is basics in the sense of economics planning and the rest, but it's always astounding to me how often people miss And doing a cost-benefit analysis of any policy, particularly comparing it to alternatives.
	That we don't live in a world of the real versus the ideal.
	We live in a world of two reals.
	And it's amazing how people either only focus on the cost of one or only focus on the benefits of the other.
	Could you explain the importance of that and why it's lose or think when you see someone only talking about cost of one or the benefits of the other?
	Yeah, and that's the risk of letting medical professionals driving the decision.
	Because they're sort of biased toward don't kill anybody who has a name.
	And so you know their decision is going to be, well, I don't want anybody to die that will ever have a photograph on the news that says, Mary died because of your decision.
	So you can't trust doctors to make that kind of decision.
	They're going to minimize that if they're human.
	But will the doctors take into consideration all of the economic machinations that would cause people to die in more indirect ways?
	But you're never going to have a picture on the news.
	You're never going to say Carl died because the economy went down seven percent.
	You know, even if he did, we will never know if that's why Carl died.
	So you certainly have to have people who are even capable of taking the expert opinions and say, all right, here are all the costs.
	You're all the benefits.
	And you see terrible decisions being made.
	Let me give you the best example.
	The hydroxychloroquine.
	All right.
	What we know about it is that it's been used forever on other conditions.
	So it's relatively safe from that.
	We know that it might work, but it might not.
	I'm personally giving it a 40 percent chance of working.
	But given the enormity of the economic and other disasters and the tiny risk, It's no surprise that doctors are taking it on the down low.
	You know, you hear a lot of reports of, oh, yeah, all the doctors are taking it.
	You know, the ones that are on the front line, just to be careful.
	Oh, yes.
	So you see that.
	Go ahead.
	Sorry.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	So you see that and you know that it has to be somebody like a Trump, you know, a business person who's going to say, OK, the medical is part of it.
	And up till now, I've done exactly what you said.
	I did the mitigation, basically letter of the doctor's law.
	I've been following it.
	But now, this isn't your decision anymore.
	You're just input.
	Now it's my decision.
	And that's when the adults get involved.
	And here's my other caution.
	Our government is not designed for this decision.
	Because the government, the president should never say, well, here's my decision.
	I'm going to be honest with you.
	We're going to kill poor people to keep the old people alive or vice versa.
	We're going to let the old people die.
	I'm going to favor the poor people.
	There's no way our elected government can do that.
	We've designed it so they can't.
	And I think this could require almost a revolution, a peaceful one, from the population to say, look, we get it.
	We sacrifice.
	We get that you don't know exactly when to go back.
	No expert knows exactly what's going to happen.
	We get that we could try something and pull back if it doesn't work.
	But just let us go.
	Like at this point, just let us take a shot at it.
	Because you don't know more than we do at this point.
	Right?
	Because we've seen the experts just giving us the worst information.
	I mean, just blatant lies.
	Masks don't work.
	Are you kidding me?
	You know, this doesn't spread from person to person.
	Seriously?
	This is what our experts are telling us?
	And we're going to decide the fate of civilization on the next thing they tell us?
	I hope not.
	I hope it's somebody like Trump.
	Doesn't have to be him, but somebody with that skill set who says the medical is just part of the input.
	Exactly.
	Part of that cost-benefits analysis, part of that comparing alternatives.
	And you're right.
	We are put in this extraordinary position.
	Particularly, one of the things you mentioned in Loser Think is the risk of anecdotal thinking.
	So that, for example, in particular here, all the anecdotal thinking, for the most part, waits on one side.
	In other words, everybody knows somebody.
	I know my dad's a doctor at such-and-such a hospital, and he's seen terrible things.
	And I know my grandma and my grandma.
	I know a young person who got this.
	Something like that.
	And there isn't, well, okay, I know somebody who went and got overdosed on opiates because they were alone for too long.
	There's not that kind of easy anecdotal evidence.
	But in general, to explain my anecdotal evidence is often a sign of loser think, because of the tendency to exaggerate its import and its consequence and whatnot.
	Well, our brains are kind of limited machines in this big complicated universe.
	So we can only focus on the few things we can focus on and we have to ignore the rest.
	And the way your brain is wired is whatever you focus on, you irrationally think must be more important because your brain is spending so much time on it.
	So anecdotes take up your brain power and then they influence you to think, well, I only heard two stories.
	But I haven't heard any other stories.
	Well, I'm going to go with it because in the real world, you don't get to do a scientific study for every decision in your life.
	It's not practical.
	You kind of say, well, you know, Bob did this and it worked for him.
	I'll try it.
	So unfortunately, that's the best we could do sometimes.
	But if you have the option of a scientific study, well, then it's just crazy to look at the anecdotal and prefer it.
	The other thing I thought that was really good throughout Loser Think is, and having witnessed this, as a lawyer I deal with a lot of experts.
	So, I'll just put it this way, it doesn't tend to lead to an increased estimation of the opinion of experts.
	Not to discredit them, but when I know that I can basically call one expert and if I offer this amount of money and I call that one and offer this, I can get them to conflict and contradict one another.
	I think you brilliantly put it in the book is you can get one expert to say the other experts as good as a monkey pounding piano keys, which is a nice visual imagery, but it's deeply universally true, at least in my professional experience as a lawyer.
	And so one of the things I found unsettling throughout the public policy debate about the pandemic Was a lot of people telling us, let's just defer to the experts.
	Whomever the experts may be, whichever side they may be.
	Because as you know, the World Health Organization has been literally opposite sides of the same issue.
	And they're supposed to be the premier public health expert organization.
	The UK said, let's do herd immunity, and then turned around and said, let's not do herd immunity.
	So, can you explain why deference to experts, particularly in cases of complexity, cases of novelty, is not always the best strategy and can be a sign of loser thing?
	Well, you've got to be very careful with it, because I would never be the person who says ignore the experts.
	That would be crazy.
	But you have to have enough experience to be able to catch it when you're not getting the right advice.
	So you've got to be looking for their financial interests.
	Do they have one?
	You've got to see if they have the right kind of talent stack to even give you a well-rounded decision, or is it very narrow like a doctor would?
	So you're going to go through.
	All of those calculations in your head.
	Wait, what was the question?
	I think I rambled too far.
	No, that's fine.
	I mean, it's a version of it.
	I have like a two-compound provision.
	One is that just because someone is an expert doesn't mean necessarily they're an expert in this particular issue.
	In other words, they may be like a broad expert in epidemiology.
	That doesn't mean that how to assess the economic collateral consequences is right within their bandwidth.
	I say that about climate change.
	I say, yes, all the experts seem to, well, most of the experts seem to be on one side, but each of those experts only knows their little channel.
	They don't really, they're kind of trusting the other experts.
	It's not like there's an expert who is an expert on being an expert.
	I say that about stocks too.
	You can pick a stock professional to help you pick stocks, but how do you pick that stock professional?
	It's the same as picking a stock.
	There's no basis by which you can guess which one will do the good job.
	You might as well just pick stocks, which is also a bad idea.
	You should diversify, but get a fund.
	So that's what I say.
	And then there was a mind-boggling expert thing I heard just before I got on here, and I have to share this with you because I know it's right up your alley, if you don't mind.
	Sure, absolutely.
	So, of course, the big question is, you know, people comparing the coronavirus to the regular flu and the numbers.
	And there was an ER doctor who made the same observation I made and I heard Trump make on his town hall, which was, I've never known anybody who ever died of a regular flu.
	So how could it be?
	That 50,000, 60,000, 80,000 are dying and I've never even heard of it because my, you know, have you heard of people who died of overdoses?
	Yes.
	How about my stepson?
	How about, you know, their friends?
	How about lots of people died in car accidents?
	Yes.
	Died in, I know people who died in 9-11.
	I mean, I know all kinds of people died.
	So anyway, this ER doctor, seven years as a doctor said, Why have I never seen anybody die of the flu, the regular flu?
	So he called his doctor friends and said, have any of you ever seen anybody die of the flu?
	And a few of them said that over their career, a few, one or two.
	Other doctors said their entire career, they'd never seen one.
	And so the doctor did a little more digging and it turns out that that 50, 60, 80,000 number that they say for the regular flu is completely made up.
	Yeah, basically what they do is they try to take an excess fatality assessment.
	It's entirely projections.
	It was one of the things early on that unsettled me when they were making compares.
	So, like, as soon as they were comparing the flu to COVID, I was like, well, what, how precisely are they making that comparison?
	My view was that COVID was worse than the flu or otherwise China wouldn't have shut down.
	Now, when I saw the things happen, I was concerned about our response being disproportionate and disparate, and people seeking it for objectives that did not have the... When they were shutting down the beaches, that did not make sense to me.
	Especially people swimming by themselves, surfing by themselves, paddle boarding in Malibu.
	I've lived a long time in Malibu.
	The idea that they were going to chase after paddle boarders and surfers.
	But leave it to the skateboarders.
	They put the sand in the skateboarding park, and talking to your inventiveness, they just go and make it a dirt bike park.
	God bless them.
	They're the last independent folks left in parts of California, I'm afraid, where we both reside for a long time.
	But yeah, Mike, early on, the flu, when they were starting to say, hey, this death rate is this, this death rate was this, and I had two issues with it.
	One, I was like, COVID-19 is new, so we're not really going to know its mortality rate probably for six months.
	We're going to be guessing at it.
	And maybe our guesses are good, maybe they're not good, but we're probably going to be guessing at it just due to the nature of the way viruses emerge.
	And then with flu, we're always guessing at that.
	Because that's why you get these, going to your talk about ranges, usually the CDC each year will say anywhere from 25,000 to 75,000.
	So it's like, well, that's sort of a big range under those particular metrics.
	And then you realize they don't include it usually in cause of death on death certificates.
	Medical staff are not trained to identify it.
	And apparently they throw pneumonia in that number for the regular flu.
	And I'm thinking, it's just garbage number.
	There's nothing there that you could make a decision on.
	In studying flu viruses in the past, for other reasons, as soon as a lot of the discussions started coming out, not only comparing the flu, but also talking about COVID, it was like they're talking about language that doesn't really usually apply in this context.
	We usually don't do mass testing on the flu.
	We don't, I mean, there's some people who get it, but it's a, who do the testing, but usually by the estimates of the CDC, for every person that they test, that have a confirmed test, they think another hundred people got it.
	And now it's just based on estimates, based on various studies and surveys, but it's very loose kind of data.
	It's not, it's not the strongest.
	That's why you get crazy ranges that say, well, maybe the death rate is 0.1, maybe it's 0.3, maybe it's 0.2.
	I mean, you know, at some point that starts to get a little bit variable.
	So I did a little calculation in the back of my envelope and I said, if the rest of the country got the same result as New York City, let's say it takes longer because they're not as dense, but there's nothing that at this point that would stop the virus.
	So if everybody acted, you know, in their normal way, what would happen in terms of the death?
	If we had just the same experience as New York City, it's just multiplied by the rest of the country.
	And according to my calculations, it's several hundred thousand dead.
	And so it's a pretty big deal.
	But we don't really know if the rest of the country would go like New York City.
	And I'll tell you that, speaking of experts that you're not quite sure who to trust, the top virologist in France the other day, I forget his name, Dr. Didier Raoult, maybe, I think, was saying that we don't actually know why any virus peters out.
	And I'm listening to that and saying, what?
	It's obvious, herd immunity, vaccines, of course that's why they disappear, but apparently not.
	They just disappear, and it's a mystery.
	And I'm thinking, we've gone this far, putting our whole lives in the hands of experts, One of them tells us that masks don't work.
	I'm screaming on the internet, you idiot!
	You're lying!
	It obviously works.
	And then this guy tells us after months of dealing with this that we don't even know what makes it go away.
	And we're going to spend a trillion dollars making it go away?
	We don't know what makes it go away.
	But apparently it's not vaccines.
	Apparently it's not herd immunity.
	We've ruled those out.
	What's left?
	Exactly.
	I mean, what's fascinating about like the study of like when I started to look at this and I was thinking, well, when they do these studies, they're going to go through the history of past things, look at past analogies.
	I'll get some empirical evidence for this.
	And I was unsettled that it was almost all futuristic, projective modeling.
	That says, hey, I'm just going to assume this and I'll just assume this.
	And, you know, doing sports betting, doing political betting, it's the great danger of any model.
	But there will always be somebody says, hey, I got an algorithm that magically is going to save you, make you lots of money in the sports betting markets, sometimes the political betting markets.
	They're almost never that accurate because their assumptions are poor and their assumption that the model can, in fact, forecast things that have too many variables in them to predict are also a systematic and systemic flaw in them.
	But when I studied the viruses, what was fascinating to me, and this is what blew my mind, is one of the other good points of Loser Think, was to be very careful of great certainty about future, long-term future predictions, issues of novelty, issues of complexity, and this virus was screaming that at multiple levels.
	Because when I study the history of viruses, they do just tend to vanish.
	And then sometimes, like Spanish Flu, they'll all of a sudden come back twice, and then other ones will never come back.
	90% of them never come back.
	And it's like, holy cow.
	Apparently, we know why the Spanish flu did that, because it was a late, late season flu.
	So it was unusual.
	This one's not like it.
	So the French guy says, second hump?
	No, there's not going to be a second wave.
	That was unique to that one situation.
	I'm thinking, really?
	The experts can't even agree if there's going to be a second wave?
	Because I was pretty sure that we were certain about that.
	But apparently not.
	Well, exactly.
	And when I'd reviewed the history of that, and that's what made me concerned.
	Maybe you could talk about the risk of certainty.
	That like, when we come back after the break, we can get into that.
	And then Scott can ask me a few questions since he's been generous enough to answer all of mine.
	We can talk about why when someone tells you they know something with certainty in a case of complexity for long-term future predictions, that's right away when you should start to tune them down in terms of reliance.
	Come back with us after the break.
	Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh.
	Welcome back to American Countdown.
	We're going to go back with Scott Adams here in a few minutes.
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	So let's go back with Scott.
	We're talking about certainty.
	Now whenever you hear a politician, in particular in my view, but almost anyone, a so-called expert as well, an official expert even, a recognized one, whenever they say something with certainty, particularly when there's complexity, when they're projecting or predicting something that's not in the near-term future, the very methodology of that certainty is itself a warning sign, is itself a risk sign, as identified in Loser Think.
	I recognize it in cross-examining expert witnesses.
	When I start this here or see certainty, I know that in fact I have an opening to start to take them apart slowly but surely on the witness stand.
	And the same thing is true in life.
	So could you explain, Scott, for me, one of the things that terrified me about a lot of the mayors and county officials and governors doing things that have never been done before was their degree of just certainty.
	This will absolutely work.
	This is an absolute risk.
	I always thought one of the great things you said years ago about politics is you don't have great certainty about any particular view because you've disagreed with yourself at different times over time.
	Now that was a great way to understand political viewpoint and why we should be aware and particularly cognizant that when certainty is being bounded about, that's times to second-guess someone saying it, not times to entrust it.
	Yeah, I tell people to keep track of their own errors.
	Keep an actual something like a diary.
	Tell people what you're predicting and then when you're wrong, somebody will remind you.
	So if you're on social media, a great way to keep yourself humble is to make your predictions public because, man, people are going to remind you when you get those wrong and that tells you how good you are as an expert.
	But to your point, Anybody who doesn't think in terms of odds or percentages is not really part of the intellectual conversation.
	If you're speaking uncertainty about something that nobody should be certain about, it's got too many variables, could go too many different directions, you know, you could make an exception for something really simple.
	Yeah, maybe you can be sure about that.
	But mostly, these are big, complicated decisions.
	Nobody really knows which is the right way to go.
	So if I hear somebody say, it's 100%, this is the way to go, doesn't matter which way they say, I just discount it and say, okay, let me talk to somebody who knows what it means to talk in percentages and odds and statistical likelihood.
	So, yeah, don't believe anybody who is certain.
	Exactly.
	And the other thing that I my view is to be cognizant and careful of people who don't want you to listen to opposing and differing viewpoints.
	One of the points you point out in Loser Think is that that by itself, someone that you may be in a cult like mindset if they're making predictions about far future things and telling you you can't listen to anyone else.
	If you listen to anyone else, that by itself is a warning sign.
	And that's my response.
	Like when I see everybody agreeing, I automatically get a little bit worried.
	I would rather have a few dissident voices in the room and I would have more confidence in the opinion if I thought, okay, this is, like Trump I think does a brilliant job of this.
	He likes multiple voices in the room because he has confidences in the conflict of ideas, him coming to some confluence of a policy decision.
	Whereas if he has everybody saying the same thing, and it's one of the things that's worried me throughout this whole pandemic.
	Too many of the public health officials all had the same motivation.
	Nobody wanted to be the dissident.
	Nobody wanted to be the outlier.
	Nobody wanted to say, well, like the French guy.
	Nobody would say, well, you know, actually, we don't really know that.
	Nobody wanted to say that until late in the ballgame when they're starting to, you know, things are going a different direction.
	So you talk about like Christopher Lash always described it.
	We expose our ideas to the people that have the greatest incentive to attack them because it helps improve our own understanding of the ideas.
	We may not convert our, change our opinions, maybe sometimes we do, but often it makes us say, like, I find whenever I want to research something, it's because somebody told me something that I disagreed with.
	And I was like, no, that can't be right.
	And I'd go, and sometimes I'd find out I was wrong and they were right.
	Sometimes I'd find out more information that would explain why what they thought was true was not necessarily true.
	So can you talk about the importance of that methodology?
	Well, I have a method that I learned when I was working writing scripts for Hollywood when I was doing a Dilbert TV show years ago.
	And it was the idea of putting out the bad idea that you know is imperfect and then other people will fix it.
	So I'm a big fan of embarrassing myself in public saying, you know, I haven't thought this through.
	But would this work?
	And then you just see what people say.
	Sometimes I put it out with a little more confidence and people come back and say, ah, you read the data wrong, idiot.
	And I go, oh, okay, I'll change my mind.
	So it's good to be flexible and humble, but also I like to see all, let's say all understanding.
	I like to see as a process that never ends.
	Now you and I, I'm just going to predict that this is true.
	I believe that you and I have a similar experience in this one regard.
	That you're close enough to politics and people that you've seen the real story, and then you've seen how it was written in the press.
	And they're almost never the same.
	And once you get a peek behind the curtain, and you say, OK, that's the real story.
	How'd they write it?
	Not even close.
	Wait a minute.
	Behind the curtain?
	Am I sure?
	Yep.
	Not even close.
	And of course, when you're the subject of stories, as I have been countless times, then I can see all the errors more clearly.
	But the public reads the news and says, well, it's experts and the press people talk to the experts.
	Why wouldn't I believe this?
	But it's pretty well established that the experts would look at almost any article and say, you know, I wouldn't have said it that way.
	And if you get, I also like to remind people, I don't think there's an exception to this, but you could take every complicated decision, scientific, political, etc., and there will be brilliant people on all sides, every time.
	So if intelligence and being well-informed helped you make decisions, you would expect really almost everybody would be on the same side with stuff, but it just doesn't work that way.
	Experience can pull you on completely opposite sides.
	So we're kind of on our own to figure out which experts we believe in.
	And, you know, I take a combination of track record and look at the context and, you know, see if there's anything I could decide on my own, such as I think masks do work.
	You know, there's some things that you don't need to be the expert to decide on.
	Well, I think in that way, where people follow, sort of follow their common sense, which is sort of a lifetime of experience, its own form of learned education, and it can be a critical counterbalance to expert opinion, particularly where expert opinion can be disconnected from an everyday reality that other people have experienced.
	So, like the case of masks, you see mass use of it by people that have experienced particularly bigger outbreaks like SARS in Asia, throughout Asia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Almost everyone's using it, and then somehow it became something you couldn't use here in the States, which made no sense.
	But now, of course, it's becoming mandatory, which I also find, too.
	I find it's like we're either on one side too far, or all of a sudden the people think the solution is, oh, let's go completely the opposite too far.
	It's like there's somewhere there's a balance between those two, maybe, that we don't have to go nuts.
	We don't have to deprive people of individual consent to be able to achieve Good public health policy consequences.
	But so we'll see how that goes.
	I think one of the other great filters that you talk about in Loser Think and in other books and other texts and have lived it is what you were talking about, which is a near short-term predictive filter.
	Like I think you described that you're probably in a cult if somebody can't even get or you're probably doing Loser Think if you continuously can't predict the near short-term future correctly.
	but are absolutely certain at the same time that you are going to be correct.
	People say this would be a telltale indicator, in my view, of Trump derangement syndrome.
	If somebody says Trump is going to do this in the next 10 days and he does just the opposite of what they said.
	But, you know, the only flaw with that is if you're tracking your successes and your failures, you know, I would look at the Trump administration, let's say prior to coronavirus, and I would say, huh, you know, whether you liked him or didn't, you'd have to say he made X promises, He's done a pretty darn good job at delivering promises.
	The ones that aren't fully delivered, you can see he's working as hard as he can, like border security, et cetera.
	But another person will look at it and say, well, I told you this would happen if he got elected.
	Look at everything that's gone wrong.
	The country is divided.
	And I'll be like, I don't know, more than usual.
	It doesn't seem to affect me when I go buy groceries.
	You know, I'm not seeing that.
	So people are imagining that they're living in this hellscape, and I'm living in exactly the same world.
	And I'm thinking, you know, at least until the coronavirus looked pretty good to me.
	Sounds like things are kind of working here.
	So I don't know what world you're looking at.
	So you can't even keep track after the fact.
	And in fact, when this Coronavirus thing is all said and done.
	We will never agree what was the right thing to do, whether we did it or whether we should have done something else.
	It is unsolvable and we will argue it forever.
	Yeah, that's probably true.
	It's the nature of alternatives you can't live out.
	You can't live out the alternative universe.
	You can only sort of guess at it.
	You can speculate at it.
	You can have evidence of a kind of evidence, but it's evidence that's by its inherent nature speculative because you didn't live it.
	You know, you didn't take that other train.
	You didn't take that other road.
	Yeah, the simple example of that is, I say, if somebody says, Is your president, doesn't matter which president, is your president doing a good job or a bad job, the dumb people will say yes and the dumb people will say no.
	The smart people will say, compared to what?
	Because it's only a comparison problem.
	Where was the other president doing the same job on the same situation during the same time?
	Didn't have one.
	You couldn't have one.
	So you can never really know if the imaginary perfect president in your mind Would have done the better job.
	So I usually default to this and I say, I don't believe there's such a thing as good presidents and bad.
	I believe that there are presidents who are suited to certain tasks and it might be a different president for each task.
	For example, if I want somebody to negotiate tough with China, I want a Trump.
	If I want, if I've got a coronavirus and I just need somebody to cry with the country.
	Maybe not Trump, right?
	So he's optimized for certain kinds of tasks.
	And if that's the thing the country needs, well, you're in luck.
	But if the situation changes, you're like, let's just see if we can get by this.
	And then, you know, the next phase Trump promises is an amazing comeback.
	Now, who would you rather have in charge if the next phase is we have to try as hard as we can.
	To have an amazing economic comeback.
	I'm sorry, there's nobody on the planet that would be better than Trump for that.
	But if there's another tragedy and you need to see him cry, just not the right guy.
	He's not the right guy for that.
	Exactly.
	I thought for political purposes, the quicker he could get this off of pandemic, pandemic, pandemic and into a comeback story and maybe particularly a comeback story that involves bringing back jobs and decoupling from China.
	Which really was our greatest national security risk.
	Some of his, to do the pun, trump card has been that all the things he warned about China in terms of over dependence on supply chains in China, national security implications of China, lost wages and jobs connected to China.
	China went from 3% of world manufacturing to 22% in 20 years because they bought off a lot of US politicians.
	Well, we saw the middle of America get just gutted.
	And now we have, in my view, the perfect opportunity and the perfect reason to completely decouple, aside from them dumping fentanyl and doing business with Mexican drug cartels.
	Aside from all of the other issues, they're going to send us viruses every couple of years.
	So maybe it's time to really shut down the supply chains, bring jobs back here.
	You know, whenever we have some big emergency or a world war or something, you know, you're, of course, as you should focus on the tragedy and the problems.
	But when you're done, it's very common that suddenly it's like, oh, we've got a space program now.
	We've got nuclear power now because you've invented and, you know, because necessity causes you to invent faster than you normally would.
	So there's a non-zero chance that what we're seeing is what I like to call the third act in movie script writing terms.
	Uh, about, you know, toward the end, there's something called the third act where the, the hero is in such trouble that you can't even imagine how this problem could be solved and then it gets solved.
	So the coronavirus, it feels like Trump's third act, like this just crushed everything that was good about the Trump economy, his primary calling card.
	And how does he get this back?
	It doesn't look possible.
	Especially with this election coming up, right?
	There's not much time to get something going before that election day.
	So it's sort of this perfect setup.
	But let me give you the optimist view.
	Like you said, this might be the only thing that would have ever gotten us to decouple from China.
	If that's true, and I think it is, the gains will far outpace the cost of the coronavirus.
	Even at trillions, the gains will be far greater than that.
	Then you add in, for example, the scientific or medical gains of putting so much attention on viruses.
	It's possible we won't have another pandemic because we might actually get to the point where we say, you know, we just figured out how to make a vaccine in 30 days, you know, and we can run it through the supercomputer.
	We don't need to test it on humans.
	I'm just making that up.
	I don't think that's a thing.
	But you can imagine that the scientific concentration Creates such lasting enormous, I mean, we could have a vaccine for the common cold.
	We may have given up handshaking, which would, you know, save a hundred thousand lives a year just because you didn't shake hands and catch whatever the hell they had.
	So I think we may be approaching a golden age in which we learn how much not to trust our experts.
	Very important because that's like if this were a video game, I feel that we just leveled up.
	The entire humanity just went from, of course experts are right, to, oh my God, I always thought they were right, and I just watched them be as wrong as you could possibly be wrong across a whole range of things, one right after another.
	I no longer question.
	Whether they could be totally wrong.
	And then what does that do for your climate change?
	What does it do for everything?
	I mean, it just changes how you think.
	So I think we might be on the cusp of a golden age.
	And humanity has a way.
	I mean, we do have a way of turning these into these situations into gold and Americans especially.
	Americans have ways to make profits off of just any damn thing.
	Like it's what it's what we do better than anything.
	So, you know, people are going to figure out how to turn a profit on this as well.
	So basically if Trump is sort of like Rocky, it looks bad early, it's looking bad in the middle rounds.
	He's got only a round or two left and really it's to the 12th round.
	But he's just like Rocky.
	There's nobody you would want more in that 12th round to give you the shot at the knockout comeback of the ultimate comeback.
	Yeah, that's right.
	And in the first election in 2016, you could say that the third act was when the Access Hollywood tape dropped.
	And I was, you know, I'd been predicting he'd win from the start.
	And I gotta tell you, that week, I lost my confidence.
	I lost it that week.
	Now, I got it back before Election Day.
	You know, it came back.
	But if you had told me that any candidate could get past that, I don't know if I would have guessed that.
	Oh yeah, I mean I was talking, I was over in Dublin and London at the time trying to place bets on him everywhere I could, but all of my friends were telling me I was totally insane after that access Hollywood tape job.
	I had my theories, I had my interpretation as to why I didn't think it would be consequential, in part because Trump is Trump.
	But he definitely lost votes.
	I think he lost the popular, I think the quote unquote popular vote would have gone for Trump, but for that.
	I think he had like maybe a padded lead of types, I think he was up by one or two, but he was still up just enough.
	To hold on in the key swing states and win big.
	I gotta say, I've never met anybody who said they changed their vote because of that.
	Because I think for his supporters, that was pretty baked in.
	He's the only politician who ever said in these exact words, I'm no angel.
	And I thought, it was just a throwaway line in some interview during the campaign.
	And I thought, well, okay, now that you've said that, If something comes out, because you knew there would be, right, that proves you're no angel, I'm going to look back at that and say, well, you did warn us.
	You know, you warned us.
	What were we expecting?
	So I think people said, OK, this is on me.
	This isn't just on him.
	He told us.
	And we still chose him.
	This is sort of on us.
	We'll take ours.
	We'll get our Supreme Court nominees.
	Let's accept a little bit is on us.
	No doubt.
	Do you have any questions for me since you've been generous enough to answer all of mine?
	Have you changed your opinion at all on the dangerousness of the coronavirus?
	It's still mostly the same.
	My initial prediction was it would be somewhere around twice, three times the Asian flu, Hong Kong flu, a severe flu.
	So now that's operating within the parameters that as you note there's a lot of doubts about what those parameters are.
	But so basically I was assuming somewhere around between 100, 200,000 deaths, something that would increase our excess fatalities.
	That when we do it by the year's end, somewhere around 5 to 10 percent, I'm still mostly in that range.
	So now I am more concerned about whether we may get a spike in deaths due to two things.
	I still don't understand what our nursing home provisions are.
	I haven't understood them from the get-go.
	And I keep seeing, and there doesn't seem to be any fixing them.
	I'm getting people now that are nurses at those nursing homes texting or emailing and messaging me about problems that are happening.
	They brought warning signs.
	They're getting fired if they're whistleblowers.
	By the way, there's talk there.
	They're trying to the smart ones are treating them with hydrochlorine.
	The but they're supposed to keep that quiet, not supposed to let anyone know about it, even though it appears it may actually reduce the number of deaths in nursing homes.
	So I'm I'm that has me concerned that we may have more deaths there than I would have other than I think would have had to have been the case.
	And then my say my other concern in that area is that I didn't expect the degree of hospital.
	I was a critic of this degree of shutdown because I thought there would be collateral consequences.
	They had not priced in to the equation effectively.
	You call it allocating the risks effectively.
	I thought they'd failed to allocate those risks.
	It was a sign of loser think in my view.
	But even I did not think that the hospital collapsed, the hospital capacity collapsed outside of the epicenters.
	Getting rid of elective care, I think, was a bad idea.
	I'm getting people who want to bring wrongful death suits because someone got appendicitis and didn't go in until two days later.
	Now some of this may have been unintended, but it was foreseeable.
	I think if our public policy officials would have thought through, okay, what's all the cost of whether I do this policy?
	Well, you know, I've been trying to take the position on everything about the coronavirus that I'm not going to judge anybody's mistakes.
	Doesn't matter what party they are, what job they are, expert or politician.
	I am not going to judge them by their mistakes because everybody is operating with no data.
	I mean, all the data is questionable.
	So, of course.
	But I am going to judge them by how quickly they fix an obvious mistake.
	And you can see, you know, adjustments have happened all along.
	And I say, OK.
	Good adjustment.
	Don't have ventilators?
	Make some.
	Good adjustment.
	Don't have enough PPE?
	Adjust.
	Did you adjust properly?
	We have enough.
	Good.
	But then you watch things like not allowing people out on the beach.
	And I'm thinking, that was an easy adjustment.
	All right?
	I would have had no problem with making the original mistake of saying you can't go to the beach or the beach is closed.
	But the fact that you don't fix that after a while?
	I mean, you know, anything that's so easily fixable, the nursing homes is another situation.
	I'm thinking, I don't know how many tests we have, but we must have enough of the five minute tests that you could just surround these nursing homes and nobody gets in or out within a test that you have a result in five minutes.
	I mean, isn't that fixable?
	And if it's not fixable, where are our experts saying, look, we've got to get this around, we've got to surround these These nursing homes with the bulletproof tests, we're halfway there.
	Give us another month.
	Where's that?
	Right?
	So I've said from the start that if you're not measuring, this is a management truism, if you're not measuring the effects of what you're doing and then adjusting, of course, you're not managing.
	So if you say to somebody, what are your stats?
	How close are you?
	And they say, well, we made a thousand ventilators.
	I go, well, that wasn't what I asked.
	Of the ones that you need, are you halfway there, 90% there?
	And then Mike Pence will say, and we've made 500 other ventilators.
	No, you're just naming numbers of ventilators.
	You're not measuring what has to be done and how you are to it, and therefore you're not managing it.
	And if you're not managing it, what result should we expect?
	Well, exactly.
	A large part of this that was concerning to me was a lack of consistently objective metrics we could measure things.
	I didn't see public policy, even at least, I was like, even if you're not even doing it internally, at least pretend you're doing it for persuasive purposes.
	But there was a lack of confidence installation by their course of behavior.
	And things like the nursing homes, when I found out they had ordered the nursing homes to take people who had COVID.
	And I was like, well, uh, it just, my confidence level in government has not gone up during this pandemic response.
	But, but even then, you know, they did adjust that, right?
	So they, they changed that.
	So, and, and, and so again, I'm going to try to be consistent.
	It looks to me like a terrible decision to put them in there in the first place.
	Who knows what variables they were working with?
	They adjusted.
	That's good.
	That's all I'm going to ask from anybody.
	Right.
	Any other questions?
	Do you have any bets about this upcoming election?
	This has been a total red herring.
	So my traditional old school metrics from the time I was a kid was a very simple basic, which was whether or not, hey, the cat's interested.
	Maybe a secret UK gambler.
	Basically was, if the incumbent party did not face meaningful opposition, then the incumbent party, at least in American history, tended to win at a very high rate.
	And then once you dug into why, you could start to figure out the logic behind it and to where people had sort of really made up their mind a year in advance.
	They just didn't know they had made up their mind a year in advance.
	And at least everything so far was looking perfect for Trump.
	No meaningful incumbent opposition.
	And when the incumbent party doesn't have meaningful opposition, the party in opposition obsesses more with voting for an electable person than they do voting for the person they like the most as a future president.
	In which case, they always pick the worst possible person.
	Though I will say, that's how you get Mondale 1984, Bob Dole 1996, John Kerry 2004, Mitt Romney 2012.
	All the people that when the voters looked at it, they said, that guy remains to be the most of a politician.
	Not, that's the guy I want to be in the Oval Office when the proverbial S.H.
	hits the fan.
	But in that context, Joe Biden is clearly the weakest possible candidate I have ever witnessed.
	And what I've been telling people is, if you're going to bet against Trump, don't bet on Biden.
	Bet on somebody else getting nominated at the last minute, of them subbing him out.
	Because Biden, as long as the alternative, as you put it, you're compared to what?
	As long as it's compared to Biden.
	I think Trump, he could shoot someone on Park Avenue and get reelected because I think the fear factor with that guy is off the charts in terms of his mental capacity and other issues.
	So that's where I'm mostly at.
	If they replace him, I worry about Trump.
	If they don't, I don't.
	Now, do you think the replacement, I think most people think there's going to be a replacement.
	I mean, even Biden talks like there is.
	Do you think they'll use the vice president as the, well, let's get him past the election or even Flip the ticket before the election day, or do you think that they'll just brute force We just have to replace you, Joe.
	Can you just say that you've got a health problem and we'll take care of this?
	Yeah, that's a good question.
	So I have friends of mine in Vegas that are putting all different bets.
	They liked Cuomo early because Cuomo was getting so much attention connected to the pandemic.
	I don't.
	Cuomo himself has said he's not going to run.
	He can't.
	He can't run because he would give up all of his goodwill because the thing that makes him popular is he's all hands-on.
	Focus on this problem.
	The minute he said, I'm also running for president, bam, gone.
	Exactly.
	If you know, if I were them, I would pick someone like the Montana governor.
	The, you know, some, you know, small town, small state, red state kind of governor, someone like a Clinton, someone like a Carter, at least by demographic profile, doesn't have much baggage.
	People say, oh, that's a good, you know, get something done guy and doesn't scare me.
	Not, you know, Governor Gruesome from California, not Cuomo from New York.
	So but I think the odds are about.
	25% they replace him.
	But thanks, Scott, for joining us.
	So my current bet is still with Trump, but I'm on a hedge until I see whether he can do the rocky comeback you talk about.
	Thanks for being with us, Scott.
	All right.
	Thank you.
	And come back after the break and we'll take your calls.
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	To the wrap up of the discussion with Scott Adams on the pandemic policy response, there was a reason of course to the going through all of the different examples of loser think that he's explained and articulated well in his book.
	You can of course go to his Twitter feed at Scott Adams says.
	You can also follow him on the web where he blogs at www.scottadamsays.com.
	You can get his books, which are just fantastic.
	Well, you don't have to agree with every idea, every concept, but really quite brilliant little key cards, sort of cue cards, sort of keys, sort of heuristics to understanding debate, understanding discussion, understanding the world, understanding your own mindset mentality, understanding your own personal approach.
	It's good sort of personal self-enrichment.
	And self-education at the same time, and being able to interact and engage with the world in a more meaningful manner, in a more effective and impactful manner.
	That's the utility of books that he has authored, like Loser Think, like Win Bigly, like How to Fail at Almost Everything, and still Win Big.
	All of them great books.
	I highly, highly recommend them.
	They're in my top 10 list for anybody.
	One of the great predictors and forecasters of modern American life.
	You can follow him on Periscope or usually or on YouTube.
	Scott Adams says on YouTube.
	You can as well and you can find his morning sessions sometimes evening sessions where they do the simultaneous zip and he'll give you pearls of proverbial wisdom and predictive analysis that is way above average.
	One of the truly great inventive minds of the modern world.
	So he's a great follow in general.
	One of the great utilities to loser think is as we go through the things that Scott was talking about and why he concluded with one of the key lessons of this pandemic policy responses, do not always defer to experts.
	It is first, don't trust models that have complex information about novel issues that try to predict long term in the future.
	That is precisely what the Imperial College folks did.
	That is precisely what the University of Washington, Bill Gates backed IMAG did, and those models of course turned out to be notoriously inaccurate, even as to the near short-term, not just to the long-term future predictive power, which appears increasingly inaccurate and incorrect.
	In the same capacity, don't rely on people using straight-line thinking.
	That's saying that because, say, a virus has grown endlessly exponentially, that that means straight-line thinking is, it'll just keep going in a straight line.
	Well, it turned out, of course, that was completely inaccurate.
	That was completely untrue.
	That, again, was a warning sign that our politicians were making loser-think-based decisions.
	That they had been infected with loser-think logic in their policy response to this pandemic.
	Relying upon models, and they were trying to predict long-term futures in complex, novel circumstances.
	Relying on models that employed straight-line thinking, predominantly using that straight-line thinking themselves, as the press has been accustomed to doing additionally.
	Only trust those policies by politicians and public officials that do a full, meaningful, cost-benefit assessment with comparative alternatives.
	Not the ideal versus the real, but the real versus the real.
	What are the two alternatives?
	What are the costs of both?
	What are the benefits of both?
	So, for example, in this Tell me about the governor, or tell me about the mayor, tell me about the county official who went out and publicly explained the evidentiary empirical verification and validation of their arguments was a detailed cost-benefits analysis.
	Indeed, there was no cost-benefits analysis that was simply done at all.
	In fact, all they did was assume that the shutdown would have a whole bunch of benefits.
	Benefits based on straight-line thinking from dubious models.
	Models that were ahistorical in their orientation.
	Models that did not incorporate any of history in looking at the nature of viruses and what we know about viruses.
	Models that were entirely based on incredulous assumptions meant to propagate a certain political agenda.
	Of a lot of the patrons.
	In this case, Bill Gates is a major patron of both Imperial College and the IMHE.
	In fact, he helped create the IMHE.
	And these were, in fact, the basis of major policy decisions across the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Western world.
	And so here you had people, one of the points that Scott Adams made was distrust experts or be careful with experts who have a monetary or political incentive to have the information go in a particular way because there's so much control of the assumptions that go into the output of the algorithms.
	And that is in fact what happened here.
	We had Bill Gates influence people.
	Bill Gates has a particular view of the world.
	He views overpopulation as a great risk.
	He believes vaccines are the solution to that.
	He believes pandemics are the best political pretext to get popular acceptance of vaccines.
	And so consequently, he wanted his institutions, logically, it's a fair interpretation, that his incentive, that his interest would be aligned with them putting out a apocalyptic forecast, an apocalyptic prediction.
	And that is in fact what they did.
	And now we know that that apocalyptic prediction wasn't even right on a near short-term basis.
	Indeed, IMHE brought me a set of record for the number of errors made by a model because it managed to be wrong within days.
	It couldn't predict two days later, not to mention two weeks later, not to mention two years later, like it was pretending it could.
	So you had models using straight line thinking that failed to look at the actual cost benefits across the board.
	They just forecast a bunch of benefits they didn't have an empirical evidentiary basis for, while at the same time did not look at what's the benefits of an alternative Procedure.
	Like, for example, during the Spanish flu.
	Like, for example, during the Asian flu.
	Like, for example, during the Hong Kong flu.
	Like, for example, during SARS, where all we did was employ reasonable restrictions.
	So in the case of the Spanish flu, no mass gatherings indoors.
	That was the focal point.
	No mass gatherings indoors.
	Otherwise, restaurants, businesses, bars, almost all of them stayed open.
	Few bars were closed because of concerns with it.
	But there was no mass shutting down of the entire economy.
	There was no mass shutting down of every factory.
	There was no mass deprivation of property, takings of property without compensation of any form.
	There was no deprivation of being able to go to church, like drive-in Easter services.
	There was no deprivation of political public protest.
	There was no deprivation of circulating petitions for signatures to get access to office or recall.
	No denial of the ability to purchase a gun for your own self-defense.
	All preserved by the first, second, fifth amendments to the U.S.
	Constitution.
	Nor was there a mass invasion of privacy, requiring testing and tracing contact apps as being proposed throughout the world and coming soon to the United States.
	Nor the mass house arrest.
	The deprivation of the right of movement, the freedom of movement.
	That is a core fundamental liberty of an American.
	Not only between states and within a state, but just outside one's own home.
	We impose mass house punishment.
	All of these costs that they never fully explicated, that they never even fully analyzed, that they never even fully explained why they were worth it.
	These costs were never even considered while they presumed benefits that there wasn't any evidence of.
	Whereas alternatives, like in the Spanish flu, like in these past flus, where we just said, hey, let's limit mass gatherings.
	Here, there they protected schools.
	Here they could have protected nursing homes.
	They could have had reasonable, proportionate remedies that, okay, if you want to, you can use masks.
	Masks have a benefit, but masks have that benefit predominantly indoors.
	You don't necessarily have to wear it, and you don't have to wear it outside.
	All of these things could have been imposed or proposed, got popular acceptance sufficient to reduce the and to contain the contagion of the virus without imposing these massive costs that we did with the shutdown.
	That we did by not allowing people go to the park, people go to the beach, people take a jog outside.
	So the proportionate costs were never looked at, the benefits of an alternative were never looked at, and the benefits of this were just presumed rather than had an evidentiary empirical basis.
	So we had models, straight-line thinking, bad cost-benefit analysis, failure to look meaningfully at comparative alternatives.
	Uh, certainty in a time of complexity, a surefire sign that these public health officials and politicians did not actually know what they were doing.
	The more certain they were meant the more uncertain they should have been or likely in fact were.
	So they were making certain declarations that these would have certain benefits and would not have certain costs when it turned out the only thing that was certain was the cost rather than the benefit.
	But that mere assertion of certainty about a matter of such complexity and novelty was itself a surefire sign that our politicians and the policy response to this pandemic was more panic than play.
	In the same context, as we go through and we look at sort of the groupthink and the herdthink, the lack of iconoclastic opinions, the lack of respect for conflicting and diverse and different opinions, anybody who had a different opinion gets attacked.
	It's onslaught.
	The media attacks them.
	The professional class attacks them.
	The public health officials attack them.
	You know, you have a few states that refuse to do a shutdown, all attack.
	Any state that does reopen, attack.
	Any state that delayed a shutdown, attack.
	Any government or country around the world that chooses to go a different path like Sweden, attack, attack, attack, attack, attack.
	So why all those attacks?
	Because they wanted conformist thought because they lacked confidence in the truth of their They lacked confidence in the wisdom of their actions.
	That's why and how we got to where we are at.
	It was loser think on steroids.
	It was loser think infected into the veins of our public policy decision-making biological process, if you will.
	That's what happened.
	And it had all of the surefire signs of the highest warnings and risks of loser think were reflected in these decision-making approach.
	So we thank Scott Adams, brilliant mind, inventive mind, creative mind, wise mind, a useful person to follow, a useful person to pay attention to, a useful person to get pearls of wisdom from on a daily basis on his periscopes or social media or blogs or books.
	So the and all of that was great wisdom.
	If you'd read Loser Think, you could have used that as the filter to understand what politicians and policymakers were doing and understand they were making one big fat mistake.
	And that is, in fact, what they did in the policy response to this.
	And while the fog of war May morally exculpate them from responsibility or accountability.
	It does not justify the fact that they so easily and so evidently used loser think to get to their decisions in the first place.
	And that's why it's good to use loser think as a filter and a frame to understand people's decisions.
	And then you can spot early bad decision making that was taking place as the policy response to the pandemic was the ultimate form of loser think.
	Let's go to your questions that you have been generous enough to call in and ask about.
	Let's go to Craig in Washington.
	Hey, how are you doing?
	I enjoy your mind, so it's a pleasure just listening to you think.
	It's very nice.
	So I was hoping to talk, I always bring in the Federal Reserve about how I think they've really kind of They've screwed this whole policy up with their easy money.
	Hello?
	Yes, oh absolutely.
	Well, I think, in fact, probably the biggest thing that has been overlooked in the pandemic policy response has been the central banks.
	That outside of people like George Gammon, who have been on our show, people in that particular economic world, the outside of that world, there have been too little and too few people looking at what the Fed is doing.
	Looking at how the Fed, like, for example, most people believe When I talk about trillions of dollars being spent in the last six weeks, and understand that our economy on average produces about two trillion on a monthly basis, the entire GDP, all right?
	We have spent about three times that between the stimulus and the Fed in the last six weeks.
	So the amount of money that is going out there is massive.
	And it is extraordinary.
	They are shifting power, shifting it.
	I mean, why is it, as the doctors in Bakersfield and other people pointed out, why is it that Walmart can sell you something, but your local, small, locally owned store cannot?
	Why is it that Costco can sell you something, but your locally owned store cannot?
	Why is it Target can sell you something, but your locally owned store cannot?
	How does that make any sense at all?
	Indeed, the more stores that are open, the less crowded any store would be.
	So if your goal and objective was, we think social distancing works.
	By the way, there are studies that question the scope and scale of how that works.
	But let's go with that assumption, that social distancing works.
	Well, wouldn't you want policies in place that encourage and maximize the amount of social distancing?
	And that would mean more stores being open, not fewer.
	That would mean you wouldn't want to concentrate and force people to only go to a limited set of stores, and only go to those stores, and only buy there.
	So it appears the goal and objective is not public health.
	The goal, because even by its own standards, it fails to meet it.
	Instead, the suggestion and the reasonable inference is, The goal and objective is people who want to favor Walmart, favor Target, favor Costco, favor the big players, favor the big box stores over the little local guy.
	And that is why 40% of your local small businesses may fail within the next few months and never come back.
	So the Fed is instituting policies that bail out big banks, that bail out big institutions, while our local politicians and county politicians and state politicians favor the big box operators that are also favored by Wall Street and the Fed against the little guy.
	The little guy is getting sunk.
	The little guy often didn't even get the SBA loan money that they were supposed to.
	They had to do a whole second round to get any cash to them, and many of them were still left out.
	And so while the little guy is left out of the local shutdown policy, left out of the Fed policy, left out of the stimulus policy, the big institutional actors are getting trillions of dollars thrown at them.
	The Fed's balance sheet has gone up trillions, as you wisely point out.
	And the question is, what will be the impact of that?
	Will it have an inflationary impact or a deflationary impact?
	Will it ultimately lead to the currency being devalued?
	Or will it lead to the currency inflating to such a degree, along with the devaluation, that you can't buy the things that you need at a reasonable price?
	So you're right, there's no question that the Fed's reactions are one of the critical, most overlooked panic reactions in this pandemic, and often had nothing to do with the pandemic, and appeared to favor the politically favored, the politically privileged, the politically powerful, at the expense of the ordinary everyday American and business person in this country.
	So thanks for your call.
	Let's go to Jay in Florida.
	Jay?
	Hey.
	Hey, how are you?
	I'm so glad, uh, thank you for taking my call.
	Um, I had a real positive thought about all this going on, you know, like, you know, they tried to take Trump's economy down, they tried to bring this down, you know, they tried to make us sick and tried to make us scared and alone, but I believe once, you know, we're tired of all this, and once we do get a chance to get out, we're gonna, like, bring the economy back like you're never gonna believe, and we're just gonna, like, I believe, you know, it's just, we just, we're just gonna defeat it, because no matter what they do, it always backfires, you know, you know that.
	Yeah, I think that what you're talking about basically is what Scott Adams is forecasting, and is this sort of Rocky-style comeback for President Trump that could save his presidency and save America in the same time.
	And I hope that is the outcome.
	My concern is that this pandemic policy response has gone on too long, and if it keeps going on in the same manner, that his ability to pull that off will be hamstrung.
	That the later this gets into the match, that's one thing to do this in the 12th round.
	It's another thing to try to do it in the last 30 seconds of the fight.
	And increasingly, we're getting closer and closer to the latter 30 seconds of the fight.
	And I think that is where there is real risk from a political forecasting perspective.
	If anyone could do it, though, no doubt that President Trump is the one that could do it.
	And I understand Scott Adams' perspective.
	It's my general view that there's not enough Scott Adams in the world, is my concern.
	There's not enough inventive, creative people in positions of influence to make a meaningful, inventive difference that can change the world.
	There's a conformist Corrosively conformist, corruptingly conformist culture in academia and in our intellectual world that is the reason why we have gone almost a half a century without major inventions in a wide range of scientific and medical areas of exploration as articulated and explicated by both Peter Thiel and Eric Weinstein, and that that is an ongoing real risk to us as we move forward.
	But I do hope that there are more Scott Adamses out there that will be inventive and creative, and the human experiment will go on in ways that challenge and contest and overcome any obstacle that may be thrown at us, and that President Trump may be the penultimate version of that.
	But time will definitely tell.
	Thanks for your call.
	Let's go to David in Chicago.
	Hi, Robert.
	I'm fine.
	Thank you for your excellent program.
	I have a very quick and stern question.
	I live here in Illinois, and there's been a couple of lawsuits filed against this governor.
	One from a church, and I think one from a state representative.
	The state representative is redoing his lawsuit, and the church decided he wanted to govern.
	Do you think Attorney General William Barr really will act?
	Is this going to be talked?
	I haven't seen any action.
	I know it's still early.
	Well, I want to know, in your opinion, from what you're seeing, or is it we're going to wait and see, maybe, if he will take action like he said he would.
	Well, I mean, your concern is definitely right.
	I mean, let's take a look at video clip number four from the dear mayor of your neighboring Chicago and the kind of comments she was making this weekend, which were basically of the kind that Mayor Di Stasio made in New York City when he was attacking Jewish people and Orthodox Jewish people for their religious activities.
	Let's take a look at video clip number four.
	Now I've directed Superintendent Brown to order all police districts to give special attention to these parties.
	And this is how it's going to be.
	We will shut you down.
	We will cite you.
	And if we need to, we will arrest you and we will take you to jail.
	Period.
	There should be nothing unambiguous about that.
	Don't make us treat you like a criminal.
	But if you act like a criminal and you violate the law and you refuse to do what is necessary to save lives in the city in the middle of a pandemic, we will take you to jail.
	Period.
	And then let's take a look at video clip number three, where we have helicopters patrolling beaches, telling people that they can't go outside.
	Attention on the beaches in the border.
	All state beaches have been ordered closed by the state.
	Please remain clear of the beaches in the border.
	Still further notice.
	We apologize for these convenings.
	It's a huge cooperation.
	It's a difficult situation.
	And in that dystopian world, we also have this from video clip number nine, where they did a major bust.
	They found somebody doing something truly dangerous, doing tattoos for people.
	We look at video clip number nine, we're going to see the police arresting a tattoo artist for doing tattoos.
	That's the scope and scale of the world in which we currently reside.
	So the questioner's point is well taken.
	There is no doubt that, in fact, if Attorney General Barr is serious, that things like this should not be happening in America.
	Things like the Mayor of Chicago's statement should not be happening in America.
	Things like helicopters and drones going over people on the open-air beaches of Southern California should not be happening in America.
	It's people like Governor Grusome in California who should be under investigation.
	It's people like the Mayor of Chicago who should be under civil rights investigation.
	It should be people like the Mayor Di Stasio who should be under investigation.
	Just like it's people like Peter Strzok and Lisa Page and the people who corruptly did the investigation and wrongful prosecution of General Flynn who should be under investigation.
	And Attorney General Barr has been making many big, big, big, big promises.
	He's talked a big, big game.
	He talked to Big Ang about how he's going to go after big tech for their monopolistic practices in abusing speech rights and manipulating elections and interfering with everyday commercial activities in ways that disproportionately and disparately favor them in violation of the end of the Sherman Act and the antitrust and pro competition provisions of our federal law.
	We're yet to see any meaningful action.
	He said he's going to clean house of the deep state operators in the high ranking provisions within the State Department, within the FBI, within the Justice Department especially.
	And yet General Flynn is still facing criminal prosecution.
	Roger Stone is still facing potential prison while all of the bad actors are yet to see a single case brought against them.
	Indeed, even when there are referrals from the Obama-appointed Inspector General of the Attorney General's Office to do criminal cases against James Comey and Andrew McCabe, back-to-back FBI directors, we have yet to see any criminal prosecution move forward.
	And in that same vein, we've heard big talk, and he's right about the talk, that these cities, counties, and states are routinely and flagrantly violating the First, Second, Fourth, and Fifth Amendment rights of ordinary Americans all across the nation, increasingly without any evidentiary basis, increasingly without any scientific foundation. increasingly without any scientific foundation.
	And yet, he has yet to take actual action.
	Even we're seeing tattoo artists arrested, raids on people for doing people's hair in their houses, cops showing up because a mother let her kid play at her friend's house next door, police arresting a mother for taking her son to swing at the swings of the park.
	Swimmers getting arrested.
	Surfers getting arrested.
	Paddle boarders getting arrested.
	People getting arrested for walking on the beach.
	Threats with helicopters in the air.
	Threats with drones in the air.
	Threats by mayors on the ground, on social media and in front of the camera.
	And yet to date, we're yet to see one serious, significant, substantial action by the Attorney General of the United States.
	There are those who believe the Attorney General talks a big game to deter the President from taking action himself.
	Increasingly, the President is going to have to bring more political and public pressure On the few times that the President has done so, Attorney General Barr has whined and complained about it.
	So if we're serious about real civil rights in America, if we're serious about real constitutional protections in America, if the Department of Justice is actually about justice, then yes, it is long overdue that Attorney General Barr start taking real action.
	There's no question that he sits at the fulcrum.
	He sits at a key turning point in the future of the credibility of the integrity of the Justice Department in our justice system and its actual independence and integrity in upholding constitutional liberty.
	The president has done all that he can.
	Now it's time for Attorney General Barr To live up to his name, to live up to his words, to live up to his promises.

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