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March 1, 2020 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:07:09
Episode 836 Scott Adams: The Biden Bounce, Bernie's Math, Iran's Zombie Apocalypse, Uighur Slave Sneakers

My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a Content: AOC's impressive skill set (healthcare video) Biden's lack of passion and platform Bill Kristol and #HOAX8 The "Mike Pence Rule" looks smarter every day Uighur slave labor in China says Wapo article Turkey/Syria situation ISN'T a war? An optimistic prediction about coronavirus --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scott-adams00/support

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Hey everybody!
Come on in! I'm glad you noticed that it's time for Coffee with Scott Adams.
I'm your host, Scott Adams.
Today's episode is brought to you by the three amazing books behind me.
If you haven't purchased any of those books and read them, Well, you're not operating at peak efficiency.
Let's just say that.
I pity the people who haven't read my books.
So don't be part of the people who are left behind.
Well, I think it's time.
We have enough people here, and it's time for the best part of the day, the simultaneous sip.
And all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or a chalice or a stein, a canteen jug or a flask or a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
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It's called the simultaneous sip, and it happens right now.
Yup. Before and after, you can almost feel it.
Before the simultaneous sip, the day was okay.
But after? Oh, after.
Much, much better.
Alright, let's talk about the stuff that's happening.
In my life, I'm up to almost 390,000 followers on Twitter.
I have predicted that should I reach a million followers, I will effectively control the world.
Now, I know you don't believe that, but that's part of the fun.
And the reasoning goes like this.
That influence is a function of how big your platform is.
In other words, how many people know you exist and can hear you.
And skill. So it's not enough to have a lot of people following you.
Kim Kardashian has that.
But she may not be skilled in persuasion in quite the way that I'm talking about, where the actual techniques and methods of persuasion have worked.
But if somebody who has my kind of I'm a trained hypnotist, if anybody's new to this.
And I've been studying and writing about persuasion for years.
But if anybody with my kind of skill set ever had a million Twitter followers, my hypothesis is that that person would run the world.
And it wouldn't matter if it's me or somebody else.
It would have to be somebody who had those skills and had an interest.
Now, could Tony Robbins Run the world.
I think he could.
I really think he could.
But he doesn't seem to have any interest in doing that.
His interests are elsewhere.
So you'd have to have somebody who's interested, has the talent stack, and has the followers.
And in maybe a year and a half, that'll be me.
So you'll get to find out yourself.
All right, speaking of influence, I tweeted, I can't even believe I ever did this.
I did something today that if you had ever asked me if I would ever do, I would say, probably not.
But I retweeted a Lawrence O'Donnell tweet in which he was retweeting a clip of AOC giving a little talk.
It looked like it was in Congress.
And the reason I tweeted it without comment is you really have to see it.
And here's the thing you have to see.
She's making the case, which I don't agree with, that we should be providing free healthcare for anybody who comes across the border illegally.
Now, her argument is not the one that I subscribe to, which is that it's the most godly, religious, biblical way to treat people, treating everybody well.
And while that's true, It ignores the implications in what would happen if we just started giving all our stuff away.
It would be very godly, but it wouldn't be a very lasting system, and in the end it would all fall apart.
That said, you have to see how well she makes her case.
It's just crazy skill set.
Just skill set.
Forget about whether you agree with it or disagree with it.
You just have to see it.
It's one of the It's really impressive.
I saw online, I was talking with somebody who was saying that they thought it was scripted.
That maybe somebody wrote it for her and she was just doing a good actress-like job of performing it.
To which I say, I'm not sure there's a gigantic difference.
Because you would still have to know whose words to speak.
You would still have to feel them.
You'd still have to be able to perform them.
You'd have to remember them.
You'd have to really incorporate it into the way you're thinking.
So I'm not sure it matters if somebody helped him with the speech.
Somebody helped Reagan with his speeches too, right?
Somebody helps people. Leaders get helped with speeches.
That's not today's news.
Winston Churchill had some help, I'm sure.
But just see it to see the skill level, that's all.
All right. Have you noticed that the election has only become about Trump?
Now, when I say that, you say, well, duh.
It's always, always been about Trump.
But listen to the way people talk about the election.
The Democrats have completely stopped talking about what good they're going to do, although Bernie does.
He talks about his health care and stuff.
But if you look at Biden, Biden only talks about beating Trump.
So Biden sees the world in sort of a binary world.
There's Trump, and then there's Beat Trump.
But he doesn't have any kind of a positive message.
And there was somebody in the crowd who asked him a really good question.
Asked Biden what was his passion.
What's driving him?
What's his main calling?
Why he's putting himself through all this?
And what he said was that he wanted to return decency and honor to America.
That's what Biden's passion His fire, yes.
The question was, what's your fire?
It was a good question. He wants to return decency and honor to America.
Does that feel like your fire?
Does Joe Biden's fire match yours?
Because here's the thing.
I don't even know if it matches his base.
Does it? Because when you hear the professional pundits, the people who literally get paid to talk on TV, they say things like this.
They say, oh, the president is destroying our credibility and our honor and our decency and stuff like that.
But that's pundit talk.
Have you ever met a voter who is really fired up about America's brand?
Not me. I've never met one.
Not one that I believed.
I mean, I suppose you can find somebody who will say anything.
But when the pundits are talking about it, it's because they're paid to talk about conceptual things and decency and honor and the reputation of the country, blah, blah, blah.
I've never met an actual real person.
Like, hey, Bob, have you noticed that your life is worse Because the United States is losing its honor and its decency?
And Bob would say, you know, I haven't noticed.
I haven't noticed.
So the great fire in Biden, the thing that's driving him, is something that his base hasn't even noticed.
Literally. Doesn't have any sensation of it being a thing.
When you go to the store and you buy some groceries, do you say, oh, I can't complete this transaction because the decency and honor of my country has been so degraded.
No, you don't. You just buy your groceries, take them home, unbag them, cook them up and eat them.
And you are completely oblivious to the decency and honor degradation of this country because it's never been real.
And it's part of every campaign.
And it's just blah, blah, blah.
So Biden has bought into a world in which there are just two things.
There's just Trump and less Trump.
He's not even trying to make your world better.
It's not even part of the plan.
It's not part of the plan.
He's not even talking about what he can do to the world that's real, except for this decency and honor stuff.
All right. So, of course, the big news is that Biden got a big victory in South Carolina.
It's probably because he got an important endorsement from a prominent African-American leader there.
A lot of people who voted said that actually did make a difference.
So we're in this weird world right now between now and Super Tuesday.
And here's what all the smart people who need to talk about the news for a living They're going to say, Biden got this great advantage from South Carolina.
Let's talk about that and all the things that means because Biden did so well.
It's the Biden bounce and Biden's back.
And then, almost within a period, in the same breath, everybody smart is going to say the same thing.
And it doesn't matter a bit.
None of it. South Carolina, if you were a godlike figure and you could take the historical timeline and you could just find the South Carolina primary and you could just get rid of it like a flick.
Just flick that out of the timeline like it never existed.
Nothing would be different.
If you were a time traveler and you went back in time and completely changed the results of the South Carolina primary...
The entire timeline of the future would be unchanged because nothing could be less important than the South Carolina primary.
But it's what happened recently.
So we have to talk about it.
I'm talking about it. There's something wrong with our brains that we can simultaneously say, you know, this thing we're going to talk about, I know, you know, everybody in the world agrees, has no importance whatsoever.
No implications, no ramifications, no implications.
Completely meaningless. Let's talk about it for a week.
And we're all doing it.
I just did it. I can't stop myself.
What's wrong with us?
Alright, so the smart people are saying that Super Tuesday will be a good day for Bernie.
He'll get California, probably Texas.
And that's going to be the end of it in terms of who has the most votes.
Not a majority, but the most votes going into the convention.
And... Then I think Biden's got an actually pretty good chance compared to other people.
And here's a question for you.
Name some people who most want Joe Biden to be president.
Just make a list.
Here are the people who, famous people, people you've heard of, who would most like Joe Biden to be president.
I'll make my list.
Top of my list would be the Ayatollah.
Comedy. Comedy.
I think the Ayatollah would like a Biden presidency.
That's not wrong, is it?
Wouldn't you say that it feels obvious to me that the Ayatollah would prefer a Democrat and one who's going to be kind of friendly?
Now, Bernie might even be better, but I think the Ayatollah would be happy with Biden.
What about Hillary Clinton?
Happy. Happy. Because I think she would get a vice president installed who responds to her.
So I think Clinton would effectively be a shadow leader if Biden got in there.
So she'd be happy.
I tweeted this morning that I think 75% of the country doesn't want Bernie to get elected.
Because it's 100% of Republicans.
I'm exaggerating, but it's something like 100% of Republicans.
100% of Republicans don't want Bernie, but also about half of Democrats.
So somewhere in the general range of 75% of the country doesn't want Bernie to get elected, and he's their leader, their best vote-getter right now.
And I think the 25% who want Bernie to get elected may have confused him with Obi-Wan Kenobi.
Because it seems like they only want him to do something magic, you know, to use the force.
There's something completely disconnected.
The Bernie supporters seem somehow disconnected with math and whatever the rest of us think is reality.
I guess they have their own reality.
But it feels like Bernie has become almost a mythical person.
character who doesn't need to do real stuff.
He can be a hologram.
You can still worship him as a hologram.
He doesn't need to do anything.
He can just talk.
And Obi-Wan is the only one that can save you from the Darth Vader of Trump.
Alright. I'm having this image of Elizabeth Warren as Princess Leia and Obi-Wan being Bernie and Darth Vader being Trump.
Have you noticed that you can take characters from movies and they so often will map into real people?
You can do that with chess as well.
It's just weird how well the Dilbert Cartoon characters map onto a chess set.
If you spend a few minutes thinking about it, you can agree that each of the characters in my comic strip, you could pretty easily map them to the characters on the chess set.
Now, I didn't develop them that way, but it's a phenomenal coincidence that they map so easily to those characters.
And I don't know if it's a coincidence.
There may be something about chess that speaks to the universal way we sort things in our minds.
So it's probably not a coincidence that chess has lasted so long.
All right. Let's see.
So the big story that's a non-story is that Biden got a massive amount of the black vote in South Carolina.
So people are going to say Bernie can't get the black vote, but then the Bernie supporters will say he has most of the black vote nationally.
It was just a weird state thing.
So that'll be the conversation.
It won't be interesting. The other big thing that's coming out of this, well, Steyer dropped out.
So Steyer's 1% will go to somebody else, I guess.
I heard Jesse Waters on The Five insulting Steyer, and I've been laughing about it for two days.
I have this belief that once you see somebody's animal, You can never unsee it.
And here's what I mean by that.
Have you ever known somebody who, and I'm going to try to make this sound not racist, because nothing I'm talking about should be construed that way.
So everything that I say next, just assume it's universal, doesn't apply to any one group.
But there are times in my life where I'll be looking at somebody, I've seen them forever, somebody I'm familiar with, and one day...
You see them as their animal?
Has that ever happened to you?
Have you ever looked at somebody and you say, you know, I know you look like a human, but just at this moment, I don't know what it is, but you also look like a weasel.
I don't mean conceptually.
I mean, there's something about your look or your mannerism that's a little bit weasel.
Now, a famous example of that is McConnell looking like a turtle.
Now, the first time you hear that Mitch McConnell looks like a turtle, can you ever unsee that?
No, you can't.
You cannot unsee Mitch McConnell as a turtle.
I'm sorry. It's all over.
And I'm also seeing Bernie as Obi-Wan Kenobi.
But who was I talking about?
Oh, Steyer.
So Jesse Waters says that on The Five the other day, mentioned in his little monologue he was doing about the candidates, that Tom Steyer reminded him of a lizard.
And once you hear it, once you hear it, it's just there forever.
And I didn't know what it was about Tom Steyer that I didn't like.
And some of it was about, it wasn't even about the things he was saying so much.
It was about his mannerism, his, I don't know, his vibe, his something.
But as soon as you see that, as soon as you imagine him as a lizard, because I think he does something with his tongue, doesn't he?
Alright, so I think Steyer's done.
Well, he says he's done.
Elizabeth Warren, interestingly, is going to stay in the race to degrade Bernie's chance of getting a majority by the convention.
Now, Warren is being misinterpreted by her side because that's what they do.
The Democrats only have one mode.
Republicans do this too.
I shouldn't say it's one side.
It's pretty much both sides.
But at least half, maybe more, I'd say at least half of all the jibber-jabber about politics is people misinterpreting what somebody said and then criticizing their own misinterpretation.
It happens both ways. Elizabeth Warren is the recipient of that today.
So when she said she's going to stay in the race, and then she said, why?
Because she's trying to keep Bernie from getting it before the convention.
People said, oh, she's just doing it to screw Bernie.
And I thought to myself, well, that's not what I heard.
That's just your misinterpretation.
When I read it, I read it the way a normal person would read it if they were not biased.
Elizabeth Warren saying she would stay in the race.
Why do politicians say they will stay in a race?
To win! To win!
Because I think Elizabeth Warren, like everybody else, believes that this will be a brokered convention.
Okay, not everybody else thinks that.
But If Elizabeth Warren goes into a brokered convention in, let's say, fourth place, maybe she could build herself up to third.
She might optimistically think that's possible.
But suppose she goes in at third or fourth place.
Does she believe that she has a chance of being the brokered nominee?
Well, maybe. Maybe.
She might have enough friends and contacts that she has a sniff that that's possible.
But I don't think it's fair to say that she's staying in the race just to screw Bernie.
That might be the outcome.
But why would that be her motivation?
Nobody stays in a race just to screw another person.
That's not a thing. That's a lot of work to be in a presidential race.
You don't do it just to get revenge on one of the other candidates.
Alright, so I think the fix is in for the convention.
We'll see. Somebody says Perot did that?
Different situation.
Alright, here's an update on the rumor.
So this was the fake news that was going around, not so much from the news people themselves, but rather from social media.
Bill Kristol was one of the several people, prominent people, tweeting this fake news.
And their version of it is, the fake news version of it, is that President Trump called concerns about the virus, or the virus itself, depending who you're talking to, a hoax.
And of course he didn't.
He talked about how the Democrats are framing it as the hoax part, as opposed to the virus itself.
So, of course, it's a ridiculous, stupid misinterpretation and an obvious one, and all you have to do is look at the video, and it's obvious what he really said versus what he was reported to have said.
So, what I tried to do was get in really early, and I don't remember...
Help me out on this.
Was I the first person you saw call this out as fake news, that they were misinterpreting what the hoax part of the virus was?
Probably other people were doing it at the same time, because as soon as you saw it, you probably said, ah, fake news, and I'm sure I wasn't the first.
But I tried to get in early.
So whether I was first or just early, the point is the same.
I tried to get in early and ruin it.
Because if you can kill it fast, it might stay dead.
But if you don't kill it, it's like a virus.
If you don't shut the border the first time you get a reported case, it's just going to spread and there's nothing you can do.
That's what happened with the fine people hoax.
The Fine People hoax became hardened as a fact before people like me and Steve Cortez and Joel Pollack started hammering on it just all the time, saying, no, just look at the transcript.
It's fake news. So I tried to get this one early to see if I could kill it, and one of the tricks I used was to say that the only people dumb enough to believe it were artists.
Now, I don't know if that made any difference.
There's no way to know.
But I know that if I were one of the people who was inclined to believe it, but before I had been, let's say, infected by it, the first thing I saw, or somewhere near the beginning of my belief system, if I saw somebody say, only artists are dumb enough to believe it, just speaking for myself, that would immediately reset my brain.
And I would say, oh, maybe I ought to look at this myself.
Because I don't want to take sides with just the artists if I know that the economists and the lawyers and the scientists and the engineers are all going to be on the other side.
Now, that doesn't mean that's true.
But if the first thing I saw was that only artists believe this BS, I would immediately be biased against it.
So that's what I was trying to do.
I was trying to basically strangle this fake news in its crib.
Interestingly, I saw Jake Tapper tweet on this subject.
Jake is the most interesting personality at CNN. And he's interesting because I can't think of an example where he's ever said an outright lie.
And you could probably think of some people on CNN, the opinion people, who maybe you think have.
But remember when the fine people hoax was raging?
And when Jake tweeted about it, even though CNN was widely reporting the hoax as true, when Jake tweeted about it, he simply referred to the controversy and then connected to the full transcript, or the full video, I think it was, not the transcript, so you can see for yourself.
And I thought to myself, okay, okay, I would prefer you went stronger at it and said, you know, this is a hoax.
But he did tweet the actual, the full video, which shows it's a hoax, without comment.
And at least one time on the air, when one of the guests brought up the hoax, Jake did add the context.
Now again, without opinion.
He said the context is that the president went on to say, I'm not talking about the racists there.
So Jake added that so we know that the president said clearly, that's not who I'm talking about.
So this comes up. Very similar situation.
It's a misinterpretation of something that the president said, and Jake tweeted about it again in the same technique, which is, he said, this is what people are saying, basically pointing to the issue, and then just included the full video so you can see for yourself.
Fair enough. You know, I think it is reasonable to assume that, you know, Fox News and CNN and MSNBC, they know who pays the bills, they know who watches the network, and, you know, there's a limit to how far anybody's going to go in the constraints of their job.
But I'm going to give him a thumbs up for that, because he just played it straight, said, here's what they say, see for yourself.
So I appreciated that.
I'm following a guy on Twitter who seems to know a lot about Iran.
So he's got family there.
I saw somebody else, I think it was Balaji Srinivasan, pointed him out as somebody to follow to keep up with the Iran coronavirus situation.
We think he's real.
I mean, it's hard to know in today's world, but he's had his account for a long time, and he seems to know stuff.
So, here's what he's telling us.
Oh, his name is Ali Osted.
You can see him in my Twitter feed, but his handle is at A-L-I-O-S-T-A-D, and he is a good follow.
And this is what he says about the coronavirus in Iran.
Four points. He says the regime hid the initial cases since, number one, it was just before the election and it needed high turnout.
Now, I don't know if that's true, so that's an allegation.
That they had an election coming and they needed high turnout.
And it would have been suppressed if they said there's a problem out there.
Number two, due to political need, did not stop flights to China.
Again, that's an opinion, because we're not inside anybody's heads, but it's a reasonable suspicion, right?
It's certainly in the category of, yeah, it could be.
Number three, sources seem to be cleric students from China arrived in Qom, or however you pronounce Q-O-M. I don't think anybody knows that, but he seems to have some information about That it was just a normal, you know, travel from China situation.
And apparently that Iran did not close their religious shrines, which of course causes transmission to be greater.
But here's the thing.
The same observer, who seems to be quite insightful, I can't vouch for the So these items seemed a little opinion-y, but he's got a little more very opinion-y as opposed to factual.
But he's speculating that Iran is going to implode and that it's going to happen quickly.
He thinks that law and order is actually going to break down in Iran and that it's a matter of days.
Now, do you believe that?
Do you think law and order will break down in Iran in a matter of days?
So this falls into the category of anything's possible.
I don't think in a matter of days you're going to see Iran's social fabric breakdown.
I think it's more likely people will bond together and just try to get through it.
And they're not going to want to have...
I don't think the Iranian citizens want to have a revolution...
And a coronavirus outbreak at the same time?
So I think he's wrong.
I think that the citizens will say, let's handle one problem at a time.
Current problem, emergency.
Alright? Gotta put a tourniquet on this virus.
Now later, later, once we've got a handle on this, it might be a year from now, it might be later, but later, We're going to take a close look at how our government handled this, and then maybe the revolution is on.
But I don't see somebody in the middle of a medical emergency also wanting a revolution.
It's the worst possible thing they could do.
So as much as I would like to see the Iranian people fulfill their wishes and dreams and have the government that they want, which is probably not the one they have, as much as I'd like that, And as much as I would like it to happen quickly, my advice to the people of Iran is don't do it now.
Because the last thing you need is a breakdown of society at the same time you've got a medical crisis.
So I'd say no breakdown of society.
I think the Iranian people are going to be smart collectively.
And I think that they're going to keep their priorities in order.
And I'm on their side.
So if the citizens of Iran need our help, I hope we give it to them.
I know we've offered. And this is probably not the time for a big change.
Twitter user B Machiavelli, one of my favorite follows, makes this question slash observation.
He asked me on Twitter, what are the chances...
Given their ages, because the coronavirus affects older people more, what are the odds that, given their ages, that Bernie, Biden, or Bloomberg end up in the ICU? In other words, what are the odds that one of our very senior politicians gets the coronavirus before Election Day?
What do you think the odds are?
Well, here's the thing.
They can't really stop shaking hands, can they?
And I don't want to give anybody ideas, but I think in this case everybody has the same idea, so it's not like I'm going to cause this to happen.
People are going to be evil.
And the odds or the ability to spread this thing intentionally is easy.
Pretty soon all of us are going to know somebody who has the coronavirus.
Feels like it. It's not going to be hard to send somebody to a rally to shake some hands.
So one of the things I expect, and I hate that I'm even saying this, is I expect dirty tricks in the campaigns, and there's probably as much chance that they will all get infected than there is that none of them will.
So let me say that again.
There's as much chance that all of the elderly candidates get infected All of them.
Same chance as none of them.
It's like a 50-50.
So I think it's going to happen.
Here's a weird optimistic thought.
Are you ready for it? This is a horrible thought on its surface.
So I don't want to make light of this.
So there's no joke here.
But it's actually optimistic, and it goes like this.
There's a really good chance that the coronavirus is already in the United States in a much bigger way than has so far been detected.
So the number of cases that have been detected is in the low few dozens.
The number of cases that we assume must be active, because you couldn't have a few dozen confirmed, Unless certainly there's a larger group of people who also have been exposed.
But what is that group?
Is it hundreds? Is it thousands?
So here's the good news disguised as bad news.
If I had to guess, and this is just speculation, I saw somebody on Twitter saying they thought 50,000 people were infected in the United States.
I think that's probably a reasonable, I'm not saying it's true, But that's a reasonable speculation.
That feels well within the area of if you found out later that 50,000 people were infected already today, you'd probably say to yourself, yeah, could be.
But here's the thing.
If 50,000 people are already infected, it means it's almost below our notice.
Not almost, it means it's below our notice.
Which means that if we had, let's say we were less clever and nobody had ever identified the coronavirus.
Suppose nobody ever knew what it was or that it was special or that it was more viral.
Suppose nobody knew any of that.
And you just woke up every day and went to work, and some of you got a cold, and some of you didn't, but it's winter, so everybody gets a little something.
We all get the flu, take a few days off, go back to work, talk about it.
Oh, you got the flu? Yeah, I got the flu too.
It was pretty bad. Had a bad week.
Wasn't too bad. Not the worst flu I ever had.
Did you hear somebody's great-grandmother died?
Oh, that's too bad. How old was she?
85. What killed her?
Ah, you know, she...
Pneumonia. So it would be really easy to imagine a world in which if we didn't know the coronavirus had a name and it's special, that you could live your entire life and never know it had destroyed the entire country.
The thing which I equate to this is climate change.
So the... The people who are most afraid of climate change, they did some economic estimates, and they said that in 80 years the GDP could be down 10% because of climate change.
Now what they say is down 10% from wherever it would have risen to in 80 years.
Which is about 5 to 10 times bigger than it is now.
So if it grew by 5 to 10%, 5 times or 10 times, and then at the end of that, you know, we saw that, well, we could have gotten another 10% more, we wouldn't notice it.
It would both be a multi-trillion dollar problem, because 10% of the global GDP is many trillions of dollars.
At the same time, you wouldn't notice.
Because you've gone up 5% before you lost that 10%.
You just wouldn't even notice. So it's possible that if we'd never heard of the coronavirus, we would hear that a lot of people in their 80s are dying of pneumonia.
And we'd think to ourselves, oh, we'll miss them.
It's terrible that they died.
But they were 85 and they were going to die.
It wasn't going to be that long.
So just keep that in mind.
If you find out tomorrow that this is already...
Massively taken hold in America?
That's good news.
Because it means you didn't notice.
Am I right about that?
That's not crazy, is it?
That the best news could be that 100,000 people in the United States already have it.
Now, we still don't know why people are dropping dead, apparently, in Iran just walking down the street.
We don't know why China has a high death rate.
And we don't know why the United States has not yet experienced that, except one person died who was elderly.
Somebody says, Scott's writing off the 85-year-olds.
That's not what's happening.
So maybe you missed the first part of this, when you said that...
When you said that...
Anyway, you probably missed the first part of my periscope when I was talking about misinterpreting people and then criticizing the misinterpretation, which is what you're doing.
Of course, everybody cares about every single person, but I'm just saying you wouldn't notice it, which is different from saying it's not important.
All right. I noticed on...
I'm going to jump around a little bit.
I noticed on Saturday Night Live that the actress which they brought back to the show to play Amy Klobuchar is Rachel Dretsch.
And that's the whole story.
I'll give you my opinion on it, but you probably already filled it in.
If you know who Rachel Dretsch is, she's a very, very funny comedian that had been on Saturday Night Live in the past.
But what she's most famous for, and here I'm not being cruel, because she's accepted this as sort of her brand, but she's sort of famous for looking strange-looking and sort of not attractive.
And I'm not saying she's not attractive.
I'm just saying that that's her brand.
That's the comedic role she takes as sort of that person.
And so they've got that person playing Amy Klobuchar...
And there's something about that that is, first of all, hilarious.
But second of all, it's just so...
It just so gets that irrational part of your brain where you look at her and you look at Rachel Dredge and you say, okay, she doesn't look like Amy Klobuchar.
Like, if they showed up together at a party, you wouldn't confuse them.
They don't look like each other.
But you still get it.
You kind of get where they're going.
Which is hilarious. But I also think it's sort of the end of Amy Klobuchar.
She's going to get... I think there's a hashtag, you know, hashtag Amy Klobuchar quit or, you know, get out of the race or something.
So she's going to have tremendous pressure on her.
Adam Schiff is in the news.
Adam Schiff says that...
Somebody's mentioning Larry David.
Playing the part of Bernie Sanders.
Now think about that. Larry David is an incredibly popular comedian, playing a popular politician.
It's sort of a compliment. Even though he plays him in a humorous way, he doesn't really insult Bernie.
He just has fun with his personality.
But when you see Saturday Night Live drop the hammer on A.B. Klobuchar, That might tell you where the left's mind is at the moment.
All right, so Adam Schiff is back in the news because he has, quote, profound concerns about how the White House is handling the coronavirus situation.
So watch how often the criticisms of this president are not about anything you can measure.
Just keep that in your mind every time you see a criticism.
Every time you see something that the president did well...
Isn't there a number attached to it?
Unemployment. Here's my number.
Number of people who died from overdoses.
Here's the number. It went down.
So all of his accomplishments have a number.
Something you can measure.
But all of the bad parts of President Trump fall into the category of profound concerns.
We're no longer just concerned.
We're profoundly concerned.
That's right. The good parts of what President Trump are doing are all things you can measure.
But the bad parts, profound concern.
And it's a weird kind of profound concern because it's the kind that doesn't activate in the first four years of the President's term.
But rather, it only activates in the second term.
Now Schiff hasn't said that, but I think we can all figure that out on our own.
If the profound concerns about all the ways that the president is ruining the country, if they could be active in the first four years, the first term, we'd already see it.
We wouldn't have to use words like profound concern because he could just point to the stats and say, look, this went in the wrong direction.
Chris Matthews got, at least reportedly, was excluded from the coverage of the debates and The thinking is because he got the allegations of him being inappropriate in his language, if not actions, mostly language, I guess, to a woman who was on the set for a guest.
And I try to look at sort of the national consciousness and And how do we feel about these stories?
Because if a story is about one person, then it's just about one person.
But your brain can easily start forming patterns where there was no reason for a pattern to be there.
In other words, you can see false patterns quite easily.
Here's one that's starting to form.
The people who have been in the news recently because of sexual improprieties include Chris Matthews.
He's not accused of anything sexual, just the way he talked.
But it's in that domain.
So your brain puts it in that bucket.
You know, the Me Too bucket.
Then, of course, you've got Epstein, you've got Harvey Weinstein, and you've got Bloomberg accused of saying uncomfortable things as well.
Again, not accused of doing anything sexual, just his language in the past.
Now, what do they all have in common?
They're all Democrats.
Somebody says, watch out, Scott.
Why? Watch out for what?
So here's my point.
You've got four Democrats in the news for this MeToo-ish behavior.
And at what point does the public start...
All right, so we've got the anti-Semites coming on board saying that three of the four are Jewish.
That is true. It's not relevant.
But you're correct in saying that people will form a false pattern and it will give them one more reason to be prejudiced if they already are.
I wouldn't make anything out of the religion of the people involved.
But it is true that we'll form false patterns.
And I think part of the false pattern will be that we'll think the Democrats are the ones who are creepy in the MeToo way.
And that the Mike Pence rule is getting smarter every day.
Now, do you remember when Mike Pence was first mocked because he said he wouldn't go to, let's say, a meal, like lunch or dinner or something, with a female colleague unless he brought his wife?
And do you remember how roundly mocked he was for that?
How's it sound now?
Every day, Mike Pence's rule about not going to lunch with a woman unless he brings his wife gets just a little bit smarter.
You know, it's not all the way up to, yeah, we're all going to do that, that's the only thing that makes sense.
But it started out as ridiculous, right?
The first time you heard it, even if you were pro-Pence, even if you were Republican, the first time you heard it, Didn't you say to yourself, that's a little bit ridiculous.
It's a little bit too far.
Now what do you think? Now what do you think?
You don't think it's ridiculous, do you?
You might not do it.
You might think it's a bad idea.
You might think that you'd rather not.
You might wish the world wasn't like that.
You might wish a lot of things.
But I'll bet you don't think it's dumb anymore.
Now, I've mentioned before that to the best of my recall...
I have been following the Pence rule.
Now, not as specific as bringing a wife, per se, but as specific as I wouldn't have a solo meal or a meeting, even, with a woman.
Now, I've had some awkward situations where, let's say, there was some reason to be interviewed or something, and it was just a professional reason, and I've honestly made excuses.
I shouldn't say this in public, but I've avoided, I believe, 100% of those situations.
And I'm also feeling smart about it.
Because, you know, all public figures get accused of stuff falsely.
I don't know if you know that, but is it the first time you've heard that?
All public figures are falsely accused of sexual improprieties.
All of them. I've told you before about my Canadian stalker.
There's a woman in Canada.
I've never met. She lives in Canada.
I live here. But she comes off her meds every now and then and calls people I work with, newspapers, when I ran a restaurant, she called the restaurants, and accused me of traveling to Canada to, let's see, what was I doing? I was ransacking her apartment, going through her computer, hacking it, and various sexual improprieties.
Now, Literally, I've never even met her.
Now, how common is it for a public figure such as myself to be accused of that sort of thing?
It's almost 100%.
Pretty much all of us.
And I'm only giving you one example because that one's so clean.
I mean, it's literally somebody I never met.
Now, extend that and imagine the rest of my life, right?
Being accused of things by...
People you don't know or things that didn't happen.
It's just the most common thing in the world if you're famous.
All right. Kyle Bass, who's a big anti-China regime person, almost as big as I am.
Well, he's bigger in terms of his influence, but maybe not in terms of his internal thoughts about it.
So he's tweeting, and I guess there's a story in the Washington Post, so it's got some credibility.
That China's Uyghurs are being used as slave labor, reportedly, at factories that supply Nike, Apple, and Dell.
Now, is it true?
Well, any reporting out of China, you have to put a little grain of sand by.
And any reporting from the Washington Post, unfortunately, you have to say to yourself, maybe, maybe not.
It could be political. But here's the thing.
The Washington Post... Typically leans left and is anti-Trump.
But this doesn't seem to have any internal political element to it.
In other words, I don't think the Washington Post is acting...
I don't think it's fake news for any bias reason.
It could be incorrect. It could be correct.
But I don't think there's any bias being expressed because they're talking about another country, not our internal politics.
And they say Uyghurs are being used for slave labor.
Now, I think this is just part of an overall trend in which decoupling, I think, is guaranteed at this point.
Wouldn't you say? I think that decoupling from China is guaranteed.
It will happen slowly.
Maybe it will happen faster than we think.
But I think it's a done deal now.
Don't you? Can you imagine a Fortune 500 company?
Let's say it's year 2021.
Fortune 500 company, they say, we want to relocate our manufacturing outside the United States.
First, do you think you're going to get away with it?
Do you think that your company can take the hit of making a decision to move your manufacturing out of the United States in 2021?
You're going to get a lot of pushback for that, because the move to manufacturing in America is pretty strong right now.
I don't think you could make a decision to move your manufacturing to China anymore.
I think it's done.
Now, all the stuff that's already there, you could easily see people who are already doing business there.
Feeling it's easier to do more business there than to remove it.
So you'll see that. But I don't think you're going to see a new business of any scale go into China.
You'll still see small companies do it because maybe they don't have options.
I think it's done for the big companies, which means that decoupling is a matter of time.
There's a weird situation happening between Syria and Turkey.
And I don't know what to make of it, so I'll give you the details and see what you think.
So what we know is that Turkey has claimed that they've got into a scuffle with Syria, and they say that Turkey has neutralized within Syrian territory at Idlib, which is kind of close to the Turkish border.
Turkey says they've, quote, neutralized more than 2,200 Syrian troops, 103 tanks, Eight helicopters, and today two jets.
So Turkey, whatever neutralized means, so some number of the 2,200 Syrian troops were killed or wounded or made irrelevant.
103 tanks, eight helicopters, and two jets.
And that's just happened in the last few days.
And apparently they're avoiding war with Russia directly.
Rather, they're trying to go after Syrian troops, even though it might have been Russia involvement that killed some Turks earlier.
Now, here's the part that I'm curious about.
The reporting on this, this is from the headline, Tensions Soar.
Tensions Soar?
If the United States had taken out 103 tanks, 2,200 Syrian troops, 8 helicopters, and 2 jets...
On another side? Would you refer to that as tensions soaring?
Or would you say that's a war?
How is that not a war?
Do you see where I'm going here?
The headlines are treating this like it's not a war.
Why is that?
I don't know, but here's a question slash suspicion.
I think NATO is the issue.
Because at the moment that we say Turkey, our NATO ally, is at war, what does that do with NATO? Does NATO have to join the war by agreement?
I mean, that's what NATO is, right?
If a NATO member gets into a hot war, doesn't NATO have to join?
Now, I'm not saying they should.
I'm seeing somebody saying, no, don't do it.
Yeah, I'm not in favor of it either.
But I'm wondering if the way we report it in the West is all designed to keep NATO out of it.
Because there's no way I don't call this a war.
That's a war. 103 tanks?
Do you know how much firepower it takes to take out 103 tanks?
This didn't happen in an hour.
That's a lot of war going on right now.
That's a hot war. It's active.
It's a war. But we're going to call this tensions soaring in the headlines?
It's got to be because of NATO. If I'm wrong about that, somebody fill me in.
But I guess the And Turkey is making sure that they don't directly fight with Russia because I think that would trigger it for sure.
We don't want a NATO war with Russia.
It's the last thing we want.
So I think that's why Turkey is doing that.
But they're doing this clever thing, Turkey is, by opening their northern borders to let the refugees stream through Turkey into Greece and Europe.
And I guess this threat had been made before.
That if Turkey doesn't get more help from Europe, they're going to say, well, okay, now you're going to have the same problem we do.
Now, on one hand, I hate that Turkey is doing this.
It's a really messed up thing to do because they are intentionally causing Europe a pretty big problem because Europe is not helping them avoid that same problem.
And I look at this and I think to myself, Why is it that Turkey is responsible for the refugees and Europe is not?
Is it just because Turkey is bordering them?
Turkey says that's not good enough, apparently.
Just being on the border doesn't mean we have to take them.
I think Turkey is making a move here that from a, let's say, a moral standpoint and even a political one is kind of solid, even though I hate it.
I mean, I hate that All the problems that the refugees are going to cause.
All the problems that Turkey is causing by letting them pass through to Europe.
I hate all of that.
But I have to admit, if I were Turkey, and I had to manage this situation, I think I'd do the same thing.
I think I'd open the border and say, you know, we don't need to be the solution to your problem, Europe.
Because Turkey Doesn't have the responsibility for these refugees.
They don't. The world has responsibility, you could argue, but not Turkey specifically.
And so Turkey is saying, this doesn't have to be our problem.
Watch this. It's actually a pretty good move.
I've got to say. I don't know what Europe does in response, but that's a pretty strong move.
All right. So, enough of that.
I think that's about it for today.
Let's see if I missed anything.
Benjamin Netanyahu has a new campaign slogan.
Benjamin Netanyahu's campaign slogan is Keep Israel Great.
Remember I talked earlier about how everything is about Trump or no Trump?
The entire world is just a Trump or no Trump world.
We've completely stopped talking about things which are not Trump.
And even Israel is in it now.
Alright. I think that's about all I wanted to talk about.
You guys got anything to say?
Alright. So today and tomorrow I'm going to be testing some new equipment for live streaming a guest.
I don't know if it's going to work.
But with any luck, I will have a very special guest Monday-ish.
Not for necessarily the Periscope in the morning, but later.
So I'm going to wait on that, because if my technology doesn't work, I have to do a little tap dance here.
But assuming everything works, you're going to see some guest interviews that I think you're going to like a lot.
So there's that.
Oh, you love my audiobook.
Thank you so much.
Bitcoin. Somebody's asking me about Bitcoin.
Nobody knows about Bitcoin.
So there's that.
Okay. Let me give you my coronavirus prediction, and then I will sign off.
And it goes like this. I believe the United States is in this race.
So our race is to suppress the coronavirus as much as possible so we can buy time.
Now, the time that we need to buy is about a year to get some kind of vaccination.
Can we buy a year?
Well, obviously Iran can't.
Iran cannot buy a year.
Sorry. But can the United States?
China can't buy a year.
But can the United States?
I don't think we can.
I don't think the United States will be able to be somewhat free of the coronavirus for a year.
I would expect by summer it will be raging.
But most people will just have a cold and go home.
So that's where I think it's going to go.
But let me tell you something you don't know to add to this coronavirus story.
So do you remember in the year 2000, there was going to be the year 2000 bug and it was going to destroy all the computers, but then the technologists got involved and they got really focused and serious, and somebody figured out how to do it quickly, maybe more than one person.
They built programs to automate the task of reprogramming, exactly as I predicted they would, and it all worked out great.
Of course, the medical world is working as hard as I can in the scientific world to try to find a quick response to the coronavirus.
Now, if you imagined that this would go the way other things go, you might be wrong, because we've never had this much attention so concentrated on something so important and so time-related.
It's a lot of science focused in one place.
And there's one development or field of development that you don't know about, and I'm going to tell you because I do.
Several years ago, about three years ago, I was working with the College of Berkeley, the University, for startups that were coming out of the Berkeley world.
And I got to see a bunch of startups that you haven't seen.
In fact, I invested in several of them.
And so I got to learn about something that you don't know about yet.
And it's good.
And it's this. After 9-11, the government of the United States wanted the government labs to figure out how to quickly diagnose So the government wanted the labs to develop a quick,
simple, portable way to test for I assume that any kind of blood test, etc.
What came out of that was some technology, specific technology, to make it really cheap and easy.
So I don't know the details, but basically there's some microchips involved, and there's some tiny needles in some cases.
There's basically a set of technologies that the government labs developed, which are now available to private industry.
So private industry can license these technologies for, I don't know, nothing or cheap or whatever it is, because the government came up with it.
I've seen these devices, so it's not theoretical.
I've seen sitting on a table, several actually, several different devices that you can put on a table, easy to lift, easy to carry, you could probably put it in a backpack and just plug it in.
And you can take blood tests right there.
Now, the diagnosis part might be a little harder.
That might take a special chip, special piece of equipment.
But here's the thing that I want to tell you.
From where I saw it three years ago, these were already well-developed devices.
From those well-developed devices, I don't think it's the biggest leap in the world To customize those for the coronavirus.
And here's the other big technological change.
The reason that we used to send stuff to China and other places for manufacturing is because they could do it more cheaply.
That has changed.
What changed is automation.
If the best way to build something is robots, then China pays the same for robots as we do.
And you don't want it to be made by Chinese robots because then you have to pay to ship it back here.
So the least cost way to manufacture used to be China because you could have people do it.
But as long as it's robots, the United States is actually the best cost.
So here are the trends to look for that could come together really quickly.
Robots building test devices.
They could ramp up a lot faster than you think.
So getting the robots built to build it is going to take some work.
But once they're built, they're going to build some machines.
And we could do that quickly.
And then the second part is the diagnostic part.
Diagnostic part that these new low-cost devices are very close to being able to do.
So, here's the thing.
What I knew that you didn't know until just now Is that the physical technology to be able to rapidly test everyone is way better than you imagine it is.
We're way closer.
Doesn't mean it'll all come together and all work out.
It's a little unpredictable.
But the technology is right there.
So, two points of optimism.
One, It's entirely possible that 100,000 people are infected in this country that we didn't even notice, which tells you we might not notice it if it gets worse.
But also the technology that looks like it's far away, in three months, you're going to see things come online that you thought were impossible.
Oh, here's my prediction. My prediction.
In three months, You'll see technologies, technology, let's say, solutions for coronavirus.
And it might be only a solution for testing, not necessarily a solution for a vaccine.
But in three months, you're going to see things that you didn't think were physically possible or technologically possible.
That's my prediction. That's the good news.
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