Episode 815 Scott Adams: Odds of Coronavirus Being a Bio Weapon, AOC Primaries Schumer? Dog-Faced Pony Soldiers
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Content:
Biden's "lying dog-faced pony soldier" reply
The contrast play, a President Trump favorite
Will AOC primary Chuck Schumer? Would she win?
AOC mixes up names of two famous economists
Chinese Ambassador doesn't deny coronavirus is bio-weapon
Whiteboard: Coronavirus facts and suspicions
---
Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scott-adams00/support
But most importantly, we will be enjoying the simultaneous sip.
It doesn't take much to participate.
It does not, really.
Merely have a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or chalice or stein, a canteen jug or flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine at the end of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
Simultaneous sip. Go.
Ah. Now you might note that I am sipping from The deplorable University Cup.
And that is your signal that there will be some learning today.
Yeah, that's my whiteboard over there.
There will be learning.
And let's get to it.
So, lots of fun stories, lots of important stories.
Apparently a critic of Vladimir Putin has been found with his throat slit And what police are calling a, quote, politically motivated assassination in a French hotel.
So, it seems like Putin has a free hand to assassinate anybody he wants, apparently.
Now, I can't say that that has no connection to the fact that he gets away with it, and apparently Saudi Arabia got away with it too.
So, we're taken out, you know, we took out Soleimani in what some would say was more of an assassination than an act of war.
That's debatable. I would call it just a typical killing of terrorists.
But I think we live in a world now where people are just going to get rubbed out for being critics.
I plan to do some criticizing of China today.
I would like to remind all of you, or tell you for the first time, I am not feeling suicidal.
So if I die in mysterious circumstances, you're all my witness that I was not planning to end it myself.
In fact, I would resist dying with all of my powers.
Elon Musk tweeted out Some photos of the new Tesla solar panels for roofs.
And I think Elon Musk did it again.
And by did it again, I mean I think he's made a product that probably has a lot of potential.
He's worth $46 billion already.
Maybe this will give him a little boost.
But what I liked about it is that when Tesla made a car, you know, the electric car, They didn't just make it functional and, hey, this saves you some money or it's good for the environment.
They made it sexy.
So if you did not look at a Tesla and say, well, that's a pretty good looking car.
If you didn't have that visceral feeling about it, it wouldn't be nearly as successful.
It would just be a boring GM Volt, Chevy Volt or whatever it is.
But he makes it sexy.
So that's the secret sauce.
It's sort of what Apple does.
Apple makes a phone.
Other people make phones.
But you still like your Apple phone because it's sexy.
You know, the design is so powerful.
And apparently Tesla has done that with their solar panels that look like roofing materials.
Because he showed some pictures and my immediate thought was, that looks better than a roof.
It wasn't just something that looks like a roof, but also gives you electricity.
That would be pretty good.
But that would just be a functional product.
And I don't know that that would be so successful.
I mean, maybe the economics of it would make it successful.
But he took it to the next level.
And when I looked at those houses, I immediately said, if I build another house, which I'd like to do someday, it's going to have those panels.
If only because they look great.
So, you know, I don't know the details, but I think he might have done it again based on the magnificence of the design element, the part that's always left out of solar.
The Oscars were last night.
I don't care. Do you?
I didn't watch it.
Did not watch a single movie.
And beyond that, I don't even know how anybody can watch a movie.
How does anybody watch an entire movie?
You have one of these, right?
You've got a phone. Hasn't your life taken the same arc as mine, that your attention span is getting smaller and smaller and smaller?
For me, watching a half-hour sitcom on television is so hard now.
It's like, I can't put my whole day into this, even though it's just half an hour.
So I don't think movies even have a purpose anymore.
There's just nothing I can get out of a movie that I need or want.
Now, there used to be a time when it was a shared experience and there wasn't much else going on, so I went to the movies like everybody else did.
But I would say that I only liked 1 in 10, maybe 1 in 20 were even worth the time I put into them.
So it was a pretty low-yield activity.
So I just don't know why movies are even a thing anymore.
I would expect them to become obsolete based on our ever-shrinking attention spans, plus the fact that there's so much other stuff to entertain us.
So I don't care about the Oscars, don't care about Brad Pitt, don't care about anybody's political statements.
Let's talk about Biden.
In a somewhat, I guess we could call it typical Biden situation, he said something so weird at a little town hall event in, I guess, New Hampshire, that everybody is yakking about it.
But of course, they're leaving out critical parts to make you understand the story.
So what happened was somebody in the audience asked him a question, and in responding to the question, he asked a question back.
Have you ever been to a caucus?
And the person in the audience who was asking the question said yes.
I think it was the same person who asked the question.
That was unclear. And Biden looks at the audience member who said yes and says, he goes, you're a lying dog-faced pony soldier.
Now, it took a while for social media to figure out what...
What the heck is a lying dog-faced pony soldier?
Why would you say that to somebody you want to vote for you in public?
What is up with that?
But it turns out it's not crazy.
It's just suboptimal.
Because apparently this is a sort of famous quote, but not famous enough that I had ever heard it before.
But it comes from John Wayne in a John Wayne movie.
I don't know which one. And apparently John Wayne called somebody a lying dog-faced pony soldier.
When Biden sat in, people laughed, and it was sort of a gentle ribbing because he just didn't believe that she'd ever been to a caucus.
So my first statement about it is it's a big nothing.
It wasn't a sign of him being senile and randomly spouting off things.
It wasn't that. He was making a joke based on a reference that not everybody got.
But, as people pointed out, do you want a president whose references are old John Wayne movies?
I mean, just by itself.
If you didn't know anything else about him, and he's speaking in public, and he's making John Wayne references, that automatically is a little bit of a red flag, right?
Maybe he's not of this generation, or of this world.
So anyway, one of the patterns that we're seeing is that Biden is getting in the face of citizens.
Now, the people he gets in their face are mostly people who have asked critical questions, people who probably aren't going to vote for him anyway.
But have you ever seen Trump go after a citizen like that?
Now, he does mock people who make disturbances at his rallies, but I would say that's people who have started the problem and he's just having fun with it, etc.
But you don't see Trump going after people for just their opinion.
Going after somebody for disrupting a rally is going after somebody for bad behavior.
That seems fair. Going after somebody...
For a differing political opinion and insulting them in public feels like not your best play.
And I'm noticing this pattern.
Let me run this by you and see if you see this pattern.
Democrats, as a group and as a philosophy, blame other people.
For problems. If you listen to Bernie talk, he says it's the billionaires, it's the bankers, it's the rich people.
Americans. So Bernie, his entire thrust is blaming people who have money, people who are making the rules, etc.
But it's blaming people.
And I think you would see that With all of identity politics, the whole point of identity politics is that one group of Americans, usually Democrats, are blaming another group of Americans.
So again, there's sort of an enemy, and it's always Americans.
It's the Americans you don't like.
But when Republicans talk, now of course there's a little bit of overlap, so what I'm going to say doesn't have some universal perfect truth.
I'm talking about in general and on average.
But on average, and in general, Republicans usually criticize systems.
So a Republican is going to say, taxes are too high.
That's about the system. A Republican is going to say, we have too many regulations.
That's something wrong with the system.
A Republican is going to say, we need stronger law enforcement.
That's just about the system.
A Republican might say we need more market influence on pharmaceuticals.
That's a system. So look for this pattern.
It seems to me that Republicans tend to criticize systems when they think there's something wrong with them, and Democrats tend to criticize other Americans.
It's fairly consistent.
Now, in both cases, They're blaming something.
Everybody likes to blame something.
But it feels a lot more productive to blame your system.
Don't blame the people for being evil and defective.
Now, I know, I know, I know, there are plenty of Republicans who blame people and accuse snowflakes of being snowflakes.
But mostly, it's about their opinions.
It's mostly about their opinions.
It's not really too personal.
But the Democrats really feel personal.
It's about people. And it seems that the Democratic philosophies seem to grow out of the concepts of fear and jealousy.
Wouldn't you say? If you look at the top Democrats, what they're talking about is fear and jealousy, mostly.
Republicans tend to focus on freedom and efficiency.
Having a good system, being free to enjoy.
Now, Democrats also use fear, but it usually is more of a campaign thing.
All right. So the president fired two of the people who testified in the impeachment process, Sondland and the two Vindmans.
The Vindmans weren't fired.
They were just reassigned back to where they came from.
And Sondland, I don't think, needed the job.
If I understand, he was a rich guy.
He wasn't a career politician, so he probably doesn't care that much.
So nobody really lost out.
The Vindmans didn't lose any money, and Sondland had as much money as he needed, I think.
So it wasn't like there were some real victims here in any kind of a serious, lasting way.
And everybody agrees that Trump had the right to do it, and he has to be comfortable with his staff.
So it's sort of a big nothing.
But I wanted to call out the contrast play.
Because there are people saying it's bad for him to do this, it's a bad look, it's unnecessary, blah, blah, blah.
But I would argue that Trump consistently uses the concept of contrast.
And the contrast that he consistently uses is if you do good things for him, you say nice things about him, he's going to say nice things about you.
But if you're a critic or you're a problem for him, he's going to go at you hard because he wants the distance to be as far as possible between being on his team and being opposed to him.
That's really good basic leadership.
Now the people saying, hey, don't go so hard on your critics and don't go so hard on the people who are fighting against you are missing the fact that the larger you can make that contrast, the more effective you are as a leader.
So you see Trump do the contrast play all the time.
This is just another one.
But you could say, hey, he really did it because he's mad at them and it's just personal and he didn't need to do it.
Maybe. Maybe.
Things don't get done for one reason.
Whenever you say there's only one reason something happened, you're probably wrong.
Because there's usually complicated...
You know, multi-part motives, so Trump probably liked it for revenge, just guessing.
I can't read his mind, so I don't know what he's thinking, but if you were in that situation, you'd like a little revenge, probably.
Probably also did it because he couldn't trust them, and that's fair for any employer.
But I think he also did it to establish that big gap between being on his team and not being on his team.
So if there are people in the middle trying to figure out, do I speak up?
Do I become a critic?
He just makes it harder for them to do that.
So it's good persuasion, even if you don't like it.
Trump, of course, is the greatest Twitter troll of all time, and so he did his Monday trick of saying something so provocative that you can't ignore it, and it will start to dominate the headlines.
So here's his tweet from this morning.
This is just delicious trolling.
I mean, it's hilarious, but here it is.
He says, because of how badly they did with the impeachment hoax, which he capitalizes now, impeachment hoax is capitalized now, he says, AOC will primary crying Chuck Schumer and win.
And Jerry Nadler has a good chance of losing to his far-left primary opponent.
It is all getting quite interesting.
Pelosi will lose the House again.
My poll numbers are great.
Now, the active part of this, and the hilarious part, is that AOC, we assume, based on what we've observed.
Again, I'm not mind-reading.
I'm just making an assumption based on what we observe.
AOC seems to be ambitious.
Would you all agree that that's true?
It's not an insult. It's just an objective statement.
Would you say that AOC is ambitious?
I think you'd agree with that, right?
So you've got ambitious AOC who has just hugely successful in dominating the thought process and even the policies and the candidates and everything else.
With the Green New Deal and anything else she says, it turns out.
So does she want to get a promotion, and it would be a promotion, from being in the House?
There are lots of people in the House, and it's an important job, but it's not like being a senator.
Senator is one step closer to president, if you know what I mean.
So does AOC... Any time in the future, have thoughts of becoming a senator.
Because apparently the only way she could do that is to wait for crying Chuck Schumer to retire.
I don't think that's going to happen right away.
Or to primary him.
And she might have a reason to primary him because he's not radical enough, according to her.
Now, what would happen if AOC primaried Chuck Schumer?
Who would win that?
Well, Chuck Schumer has, you know, he's got the base.
He's probably, you know, got plenty of funding.
He's got tons of connections.
He's got history.
He has lots of advantages.
Then there's AOC. AOC has so much more skill than Schumer.
It's very much like Trump going up against Hillary.
Hillary had every advantage a politician could have, money, connections, experience, everything you could have, except she wasn't nearly as good at persuading and communicating, at least in the way that Trump was.
So, hypothetically, if AOC ran against Schumer, could she win?
I'm going to say yes, which is different from saying she would win, but it's entirely within the realm of Sort of a coin flip.
I think it would be interesting, but I wouldn't assume that Schumer could keep his job.
What a baller play that would be for AOC to take out the leader of her own party because he wasn't radical enough.
It would be a real strong play.
Now, I have no idea, none of us do, if AOC has ever considered this play.
But because the President put it out there, we're all going to be chewing on it.
And it's going to sort of think it into reality.
Because the first step of making something happen is you have to imagine it.
If the people involved can't imagine a thing happening, they don't act on it.
Because you can't even imagine it.
Well, now we're all imagining it.
I imagine that AOC has already thought of it.
But, so that was fun.
So the president's ensuring new water.
Now also, AOC news.
I'll give you two pieces of AOC news.
The other one was, I had a chance to ask a teenager yesterday.
I said, hey teenager, can you name the vice president of the United States?
I just wondered, do teenagers pay attention to any of this stuff?
And the teenager said to me, Mike Pence.
Knew it like that. And I thought, oh, that's pretty good.
And then said teenager said to me, but I can't name anybody else in the government.
Those are the only two names I know, just Trump and Mike Pence.
And then teenager said, well, there's also that one.
Who's that one who they were making fun of his religion because of his vote?
And I said, Romney, Romney.
And teenager said, yes, yes, that's the one.
But the teenager didn't know any of the details, had just sort of heard the story passing through.
And then I thought I was done with the conversation, and said teenager said to me, well, I remember one other politician.
And I said, do you know who AOC is?
And teenager said, no, I never heard of AOC. There's only one politician, other one, that I can think of.
And teenager said, The name of the politician is Alexandria?
And I said, you mean AOC? And the teenager said, yes, that's it.
Alexandria, Octavia, Cortez, or whatever it is.
I can never remember her name, so I always use AOC. So think about that.
A teenager with the smallest understanding of I mean, just the most miniscule understanding, had four data points, and AOC was one of them.
Okay, Ocasio, not Octavio.
I'm sorry. There's a reason she has a nickname.
Speaking of mixing up names, that's the story I was going to tell.
So the first point is, do not underestimate How good AOC is at getting the attention of people.
So even the teenager knows who she is and doesn't know anybody else.
So there's a big story because AOC was talking on some kind of video stream and mixed up the names of two famous economists.
So instead of saying Milton Friedman and instead of saying John Maynard Keynes, she said Milton Keynes.
So she put the wrong first name with the wrong last name.
Now, of course, all the anti-AOC people said, oh, there she is again, being dumb in public.
How dumb can you be mixing up these two names?
To which I said, I don't know, have you listened to anything that I've said or written for the last three years?
Because here's what I think happened.
Everybody in the country just learned...
The AOC has a background in economics.
Now, in my tweet, I said a degree.
I think it's a minor, a minor in economics.
Do you call that a degree?
If somebody has a minor in something, is that a degree?
I don't know. I don't know which words to use for that.
But the point is, how many people in the general public have a background studying economics?
Not too many. So everybody in the country just learned, because of this little minor mixing up of names, which we all do.
In fact, I just did it.
I literally just did it with AOC's name.
Most common thing in the world.
Doesn't mean I'm stupid.
Doesn't mean you're stupid. Doesn't mean anybody's stupid.
It's just a common thing. But what did she get out of it?
The whole world...
Just found out she has a background in economics, because most people wouldn't know either one of those economists.
She knew it and mixed them up, but that puts her way out of most of the people.
So she came out ahead.
I tweeted that, and she liked my tweet within about 60 seconds, so I think she enjoyed that.
All right, let's talk about a few things, and I'm going to go to the whiteboard.
Oh, here's some potentially exciting news.
Now, when you hear these new scientific and technical discoveries, most of the time they don't turn into anything, but they're still fun to think about because they do show the potential, and they do show that we're a world that's inventing like crazy.
Some of those inventions work.
But it turns out that researchers at Ben-Gurion University, so Israel, They have a new technology in which they superheat water until the water becomes sort of in a strange state.
It's so hot. And then they can take the garbage and put it in that water.
I'm simplifying, of course.
And there's something about the highly pressurized hot water that turns the organic parts of your garbage into a gas that you can use for fuel.
And here's the cool part.
It only does that to the organic parts that can turn into fuel, and all the rest becomes just garbage.
So apparently this works.
They've already done it.
You know, it's not theoretical.
They're actually doing it in a lab setting.
Now imagine if this is something that could scale up.
And again, most of these technical things end up not being scalable and not really being what you think.
But this one might be.
Because it seems like they've already tested it, and there's not much to it.
In terms of how hard it would be to scale it up, because it's basic industrial stuff.
There's nothing exotic that needs to be invented.
So it could be that our garbage and some part of our energy problems just had a big turn.
Don't know. All right.
I'm having fun arguing with people about whether Trump was impeached or not impeached, and I think you know...
I think you know that I'm doing this just for fun.
In my book, Loser Think, behind me, in my book, Loser Think, I tell you that it's word thinking to argue about what label to put on something if everybody agrees what the something is.
So with this impeachment situation, we're all looking at the same set of facts.
So if you want to call it he's impeached and I want to say he's not impeached, that's not a real argument.
That's just, you like your word, I like my word.
It doesn't change the facts that we all agree on.
So I do this just for fun.
It's a complete long-term prank to make Democrats go crazy.
Now the argument that I heard Dershowitz make is that there's an analogy to a criminal trial.
And as Dershowitz said, if it were a criminal trial, and you got indicted, and then you had your trial, And let's say you were found not guilty.
At the moment you're found not guilty, you're also no longer indicted.
The indictment doesn't mean anything because the trial is over.
So he would use that analogy to say, well, if you get impeached by the House, but the Senate doesn't vote to remove him from office, it's like the impeachment has been nullified and it went away.
Of course, Democrats don't like that interpretation at all.
And in a way it's just word thinking, but it's worse than that.
It's analogy thinking.
So saying that impeachment is analogous to a criminal trial just makes people say, no it's not, because of these differences.
Now there are some differences, so I'm going to add this thought to it.
And again, this is just for fun.
It makes no difference what you call it.
It just will drive people crazy.
The argument goes like this.
If you wanted to compare it to a criminal trial, You're doing it wrong.
Because in a criminal trial, you have the indictment, which is like a mini-trial where some evidence is presented, but it's not the full thing.
And it's not until you have the real trial that everybody sees all of the evidence and all of the arguments.
So in that case, it makes sense that the only real trial is the trial, and the other one sort of didn't count.
So if the trial doesn't work, it makes perfect sense that the indictment goes away as well.
But in the impeachment, you've got two votes.
Instead of one jury trial, you've got the House votes to send it to the Senate, and then the Senate has to vote again to remove.
Now let me ask you this.
What is the point of impeaching?
The only point of impeaching, at least in terms of constitutional reasons, is to remove somebody from office.
So if you have an impeachment without the removing from office, have you impeached?
Or is it simply an attempted impeachment that failed?
And I would add this to it.
I would say that you are, if you're going to use the analogy to a jury trial, which again is completely irrational.
This is just for fun. Analogies are no way to argue.
But if you wanted to for fun, to drive a Democrat crazy, you would say, you know, if you want to make that analogy to a criminal trial, I would say that in impeachment, the jury...
It's the combined House that votes plus the Senate.
In other words, they're all looking at the same trial, which happens in the House.
Because the Senate doesn't have a separate trial, the Senate is just voting on what they see, which is the same thing that the House saw.
So it's as if the House plus the Senate are just one jury trial, they just vote in two parts.
So if you have a one jury trial, And the sum of that is that they find him acquitted.
Would it not make sense that the impeachment, which only had one purpose, to remove somebody from office, if it didn't happen, I would say the impeachment didn't happen.
So I'm adding that to the mix.
I don't think that makes much difference.
All right, let's talk about the coronavirus.
Chinese ambassador to the United States was on face of the nation.
And was asked if the coronavirus could have come from a bio lab in China.
Now, have I taught you how to detect lying?
Let me give you an example of a liar versus an honest person.
I would like to call in my assistant, Dale.
I'm going to accuse Dale of something he did not do.
And I want you to show how somebody answers the question honestly.
In this example, Dale is completely innocent.
Dale, are you a serial killer who just killed 15 people yesterday?
No. What the hell are you talking about?
Get out of here with that.
I'll kill you. I'm going to sue you if you tell anybody like that.
That's ridiculous. If the person says no and gets a little angry and wonders what the hell is wrong with you for even asking the question, Probably telling you the truth.
Now I'm going to give you a second example in which Dale is guilty.
In this example he's actually guilty.
Dale, are you a serial killer and did you kill somebody yesterday?
Why would you ask that question?
I think there's not really much evidence of who did the killing.
It's kind of ambiguous. People are looking at the evidence.
They're trying to figure that out.
What have you heard? That's guilty.
Innocent people say, no!
What the hell are you talking about?
Guilty people say, well, I'm going to leave the door open.
I'm not sure I'll give you an exact answer.
What do you know? What do you know?
Now I'm going to play for you.
The ambassador to the United States, his name, I don't know if I can pronounce it right, I hope I do.
Ambassador, I think it's Kwee Tienke.
Maybe Swee or Kwee.
I think it's Kwee Tienke.
So he'll be asked on Face the Nation, and I'll play it for you.
Now listen to his answer.
After this setup.
There's a lot of unknown and a lot of suspicion because of that.
And in fact, this week, Senator Tom Cotton, who sits on the Senate Intelligence and Armed Services Committee, suggested that the virus may have come from China's biological warfare program.
That's an extraordinary charge.
How do you respond to that?
I think it's true that a lot is still unknown.
And our scientists, Chinese scientists, American scientists, scientists of other countries are doing their best to learn more about the virus.
But it's very harmful, it's very dangerous to stir up suspicion, rumors, and spread them among the people.
For one thing, this will create panic.
Another thing is that it will fend up Yeah, maybe the United States.
How can you believe all these crazy things?
It's absolutely crazy.
It's absolutely crazy. We still don't know yet.
It's probably, according to some initial outcome of the research, probably coming from some animals.
But we have to discover more.
There's a lot of unknown.
So, did that sound like a no?
Now, I would add this.
It seems unlikely to me that the ambassador would actually know the truth.
Because, let's say hypothetically it was a bioweapon.
Would the people who know it's a bioweapon, again hypothetically, would they tell their ambassador?
No. No, they would not tell their ambassador.
So the first thing you should know is the ambassador doesn't know.
He doesn't know if it's a bioweapon, because they would never tell him.
Because you wouldn't want him talking to anybody else and saying, you know, hey Bob, don't tell anybody, but it was us.
It was a bioweapon. Because, you know, we've got, you know that we have this guy bugged from top to bottom.
There's nothing he could ever say that we wouldn't know he's saying.
Even on encrypted lines, we probably can get into all of that.
So I doubt that If China knew it was a bioweapon, if they knew it was theirs, just hypothetically, there's no way they're going to tell their ambassador.
That would be crazy. But let me ask you this.
If you're the ambassador, if you're the ambassador and you know that you're going to be asked this question, wouldn't you go to your bosses, whether that's President Xi or somebody else high up, wouldn't you go to your bosses and say something like this?
Hey boss, I'm going to get this question.
They're going to ask if it came from our bio lab.
Can I deny it flatly?
Apparently, nobody told them to deny it flatly.
Why would they not deny it when it would be such a bad thing if we were left to suspect it was true?
What recent history have we seen in which a government got caught doing something terrible That killed its own people and initially denied it.
Where have we seen that recently?
Iran. Iran denied that they shot down the Ukraine airline.
And then when they got cornered, they had to come clean.
What did that do to the government of Iran?
Destabilized it. A lot.
It was a gigantic mistake for Iran to try to cover up something that ultimately would certainly be discovered.
Just a complete mistake.
China might not want to make the same mistake and one way that you could avoid making that mistake Is to leave open the door that we just don't know what it is.
Because then if it turns out that some, I don't know, hypothetically if we could somehow prove it came from their bioweapons lab, and I don't know that that happened, but if it happened, they would still be a little bit cleaner than Iran's leadership was, which flatly said it didn't happen.
China did not flatly say that they were innocent.
They didn't say it. Worse, I taught you that a hypnotist learned that people say exactly the truth, but accidentally.
In other words, their choice of words is a tip-off.
Listen to the first word he says.
Just wait for his first words.
Tom Cotton, who sits on the Senate Intelligence and Armed Services Committee, suggested that the virus may have come from China's biological warfare program.
Listen. How do you respond to that?
How do you respond? I think it's true that the law is still unknown.
I think that it's true.
Now, the second part of that sentence is, it's true that it's unknown.
Which isn't even an answer to the question, right?
It's true that it's unknown?
She didn't say, can you address the unknown?
She said, did it come from your bio lab?
And his first words were, It's true that we don't know where it came from.
So a hypnotist would say that is a Freudian type of slip in which he told you directly that it's true.
Now, I don't think he knows whether it's true or not, but he's probably heard better rumors than we have, if you know what I mean.
And he sounds like he suspects it's true.
Now, we can't read his mind, but the choice of words leaves that open.
All right. Let us go through the facts and the evidence and see if we can get closer to understanding something about this coronavirus.
So here are some facts that seem relevant and important.
It's not every fact about the coronavirus, but they're the ones that matter if you're trying to decide, was it an animal in an accident or a bioweapons thing?
So here are some of the things.
Is it super viral?
Don't really know.
It seems it's difficult to find out if we're counting everything right.
So we actually don't know if it's more viral than, let's say, a normal virus would be that came from an animal.
Does it only kill people who are ethnically Chinese or Asian?
We don't know.
But there's some indication that there's a difference.
And I'll get to these in a minute.
We know that it's near the Wuhan Bioweapon Lab.
Is that a coincidence? It'd be a pretty big one.
We know that China is lying.
But they always lie, so that doesn't tell you much.
And we know that the ambassador was weirdly vague about this.
That's a red flag. And we know that the US did not act as concerned as some people thought they should.
In other words, they didn't immediately close the airport.
Why? Did they know something about it that we don't?
So, let's take these and decide.
Whether it's more likely that it was an animal or a bioweapon.
Now let's say the only things you knew is that there was a virus that acted a certain way and there are two theories.
One is that it's a bioweapon and one that it came from an animal.
If that's all you knew, there were no other facts, you didn't know any of this, all you knew is it's another one of these coronavirus things that usually come from animals, which would be the more likely explanation?
Well, I hate to make this less interesting than it could be, but by far the normal explanation is far and away the most likely explanation.
Because that's normal.
Animal to human is normal.
Happens all the time. How often has a bioweapon escaped from a lab?
I don't know. Never.
So one of these is really exotic and it would be hard to believe.
The other one is completely normal.
But let's look at the facts and see if one of them fits better.
If it's super viral, does that tell you it's a bioweapon?
Maybe, but we don't know that it's super viral.
And we also don't know what is the most viral that something could be coming from an animal.
So I'd say the super virality of it is first of all unknown, and so it doesn't tell you anything.
How about the fact that it might only kill a certain kind of person?
Well, that would indicate it's a bioweapon, right?
It turns out, no.
No. Because we know that there's experience with other viruses, that there are micro-differences in ethnicities, and sometimes that micro-difference, and it could be just Some have said that the receptors, a certain kind of, you know, what is it?
I don't know, ACE2 receptor or something in the lungs is different with Asian men than with anybody else.
And that those are the ones that SARS and coronavirus stick to.
So... It's possible.
You could have a normally occurring virus that comes from an animal and actually seems to target one ethnicity more than others.
Completely possible. Yeah, it's like the ACE2 receptors.
That's one hypothesis out there.
So the first two...
Are ambiguous, meaning it doesn't really tell you anything about which option it is.
Now, how about the fact it was near the main bioweapon place?
What about that? What are the odds that this virus that's so scary would just naturally and coincidentally come out right next to a bioweapons lab?
What are the odds of that?
Don't be fooled.
Because here's what the trick is.
You know, we can easily be fooled to think coincidences mean something.
Here's how you should see this.
There's one coincidence we know about, that that bioweapons lab was nearby where it started.
But you could almost guarantee that there would be some coincidences in this story.
Because coincidences are so common That you'd be surprised if there weren't one.
Now the odds of that specific coincidence may be one in several thousand.
Very unlikely. But the odds of some coincidence that is also unlikely was very good.
So the odds of some coincidence was very high.
And that's what you should be looking at, not the odds that this specific one was uncommon.
because something uncommon was likely to have happened, if not this, something else.
So you can't really rule out that it was just an animal.
It's a coincidence.
All right.
What about the fact that China is obviously lying about this thing?
Does that tell you that it's a bioweapon?
Unfortunately, no.
Because China lies about anything that would make China look bad.
So whether it started with an animal or it was a bioweapon, You're probably going to suspect that they're lying even if they're not.
So this doesn't really tell you as much as you'd think.
What about the fact that we just talked about the ambassador being vague and looking like he was lying about it?
Well, I don't think he knows.
Common sense tells you he doesn't know.
So he can't tell you anything.
And it makes sense if you're an ambassador to leave open all your options.
So it could be that he's doing nothing but leaving his options open, but he doesn't really know.
So you can't really determine from him.
What about the fact that the U.S. seemed a little under-concerned?
Could it be? Because we know it's a bioweapon that only kills people, a certain ethnic group, and it would be hard for that to take hold in this country because we're screening pretty well.
So maybe... The US knows more than you and I know.
In other words, the government does.
And maybe they didn't think it was such a big risk to us.
But far more likely, the government just acted slowly because there were competing interests.
Probably there were people who said, no, we'll lose a lot of money if you close down the airports.
Other people saying, no, we don't want to insult China.
It would look like a slap in the face.
That will cost us later when we're negotiating for the trade deal.
So you can't rule out it was just the government being the government and having competing interests and acting too slowly.
So all of these facts...
Support both hypotheses.
But one of them happens all the time, at least we know it's happened before, and one of them has never happened.
So, so far, I'd have to say by far the most likely explanation is it's an animal, it's a coincidence where it was, etc.
But those are not the only possibilities.
So just drawing this out, if it were a bioweapon, Again, I'm not saying it is.
I'm just walking through the thinking here.
If it were a bioweapon, it's either made by China or made by an enemy of China.
I think that's reasonable, right?
If China made it, I think you'd have to call it a mistake.
In other words, something got out that shouldn't have gotten out.
Now, if it turns out that it's only killing mostly local Chinese, ethnically Chinese folks, whether they're American citizenship or not, you'd have to say, that's a really big mistake.
Because why would they release something that only kills their own people?
That would be the biggest mistake you could make.
And why would they be building, why would China make a bioweapon That kills them faster than it kills their enemies.
Doesn't make sense, right?
Well, it is possible, under the mistake scenario, that they have lots of...
Let's say there are lots of viruses that they're working on, and they haven't tested them all, so they don't know exactly which ones do what.
So maybe this was on the list, hasn't been tested.
They didn't know it would affect one group more than another, because they hadn't tested it, and it got out.
So, China made a mistake.
Totally feasible. Fits every fact.
No problem at all.
It completely fits the facts.
That doesn't mean it happened. Or even that it's likely.
It just fits the facts. Now let's say it was an enemy of China.
Who would do such a thing?
Is there any such thing as an enemy of China who's such an enemy that they would do this?
And why this, of all things?
Well, what kind of enemies do they have?
There's the Uyghurs. Now, if it turned out that the virus only kills ethnic Chinese and doesn't affect Uyghurs, except maybe they get a cold, you'd say to yourself, that's kind of the perfect weapon.
If I were a Uyghur, well, let me ask you this.
If you were a Uyghur or a sympathizer and you had access to a bioweapon that would kill the Chinese people but not people who are ethnically Uyghurs, would you use it?
Yeah, you would.
Totally.
You would totally use it.
And I would argue that they would be justified.
Now you say to yourself, wait, wait, it's not justified to kill civilians by the thousands just because you've got this issue with the government.
In what world is it okay to kill citizens who have nothing to do with anything because you're mad at the government for putting you in concentration camps?
To which I say, totally legitimate.
Let me give you an analogy.
Now, analogies of course will not persuade you, but it'll make you think about it differently.
Let's say you were Jewish in World War II. You were living in Germany, and you saw the Holocaust starting, and you saw that the German citizens We're supporting.
Of course, they didn't have too much power to stop their government, but the German citizens, by being quiet about it and not protesting, sort of quietly supported this Holocaust.
Now let's say you invented a bioweapon that would kill only Germans.
It's not really possible, but just for kicks, let's say it only killed Germans, but it would kill all of them.
It would kill every German.
It would kill every citizen who had nothing to do with the Holocaust.
They were just minding their own business.
Would you be morally justified in using it?
Yes. Yes, you would.
Because all of the citizens of Germany were enablers for the Holocaust.
If your family or you were part of the Holocaust, meaning you were the victims, would you have any qualms about wiping out the entire civilization?
That supported it directly or indirectly.
Personally, no qualms.
I wouldn't lose a night of sleep under that situation.
Not a night of sleep.
So, here's a question for you.
I doubt the Uyghurs have access to this technology.
But you can imagine there's maybe a Uyghur sympathizer who works in the bioweapons lab.
But that person would be killing probably his own people because I doubt they let anybody who's ethnically Uyghur work in a bioweapons lab, right?
There are probably no Uyghurs working in the bioweapons lab.
So I would say that's very unlikely.
They have a reason.
They have the best reason, but very unlikely they have the access to do that.
What about never-againers?
You know the phrase, never again?
It refers to the Holocaust.
And it's a famous saying where people say, you know, it happened once because people turned their heads and they weren't fighting hard enough.
Not talking about the government.
We're talking about the people.
The people let a Holocaust happen, the people of the world, and never again.
Well, there are two versions of never again.
One is we'll never again let the Jewish people be rounded up into a Holocaust.
Perfectly reasonable interpretation.
Here's another one.
Do you mean it?
Are you serious about never again?
Because if you're serious about it, it's not limited to the Jewish population.
If you really mean never again, like you really mean it, like you're not just doing it for your people, If you really mean it, you mean it.
What does never again mean?
It means never.
It means under no circumstances, never.
Not for the Jewish population, not for the Muslim population, not for any population.
Never means never.
Now, if you were of that philosophy, and I would imagine a lot of people are, if you were of that philosophy and you had a chance To destroy a huge part of the Chinese population, maybe destabilize the country, destroy their government, kill tens of thousands of people, but at the end of it, there might be a good chance that the Uyghur population was released.
Would you do it?
Yeah, you would. Would you have a moral qualm about destroying tens of thousands, maybe millions, of people in the country Who had nothing personally to do with the Uyghurs being rounded up.
But they were enablers.
They are, right now, they are enablers.
They are allowing their government to do it.
Would you have any moral qualms about that?
Yeah, look at the comments.
Nope, you would not.
That there's nobody in the world, in any bio lab anywhere, no scientist.
Is there nobody who could have made a virus that would target the Asian population?
Now I think there's a good chance we'll find out that maybe it doesn't target anybody in particular.
Those are unknowns. So if it turns out it kills everybody equally, Well, then I think you could eliminate these possibilities.
Because nobody would build a bioweapon that kills their own people at the same rate as killing the enemy.
It kind of doesn't make sense.
Would it be the U.S.? I can't see any situation in which the U.S. would do this.
Can you? We don't even need to talk about it, do we?
There's no situation in which the U.S. government, the government, would do this.
But, is there one scientist In any lab, in any country, who says that never again actually means never again.
Does such a person exist who also has access to a bioweapon?
Almost certainly.
Almost certainly.
The odds of at least one person who has this kind of access and technology Being a never-againer, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to be, the odds of at least one person having this motive and the opportunity, pretty good.
Pretty good. Close to 100%.
Doesn't mean they did it, but their motive and their opportunity, probably 100% chance that that happened.
All right. So, if you're looking at the facts, unfortunately the facts support every hypothesis.
If you're looking at the odds, and you're going to bet money, if you're going to bet money, Bet on the animal.
Because given that all of these scenarios fit all of the facts that we know so far, take the common one.
Take the most common explanation, the one that you would expect.
Here's another one. It came from an animal.
It's a problem. We're going to take care of it.
If it turns out it's a bioweapon, and I don't think we're going to find that, So that's my prediction.
My prediction is that the ordinary will win.
But if we found out it was a bioweapon, what are the odds that China made a mistake?
Pretty good. Pretty good.
I would say that the China made a mistake is higher than enemy of China.
So I think this is the lowest odds is that it's some clever enemy of China doing a never-againer situation.
All right. I'm looking at your comments.
Alright, so what I wanted to do was just lay this out so you can see how the thinking works and maybe not draw conclusions yet, because I'm not sure if everybody knew that all of the facts we know fit the ordinary story, that it was an animal just like they say.
Now, what about the fact that it happened near the lab?
Coincidences happen. In fact, coincidences are so common There was going to be a coincidence, whether it was that one or some other one, that also made you suspicious.
