Episode 844 Scott Adams: Biden's VP Pick, #Covid-19 and the Usual Fun
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Content:
George Takei's campaign video for Joe Biden
Kamala Harris's charisma makeover
Allowing doctors to practice across state lines
Balaji Srinivasan: Far UV light kills airborne viruses
Elon Musk says coronavirus panic is dumb
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Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scott-adams00/support
I hope you remember to set your clocks if you happen to live in a backward country where clocks get set twice a year.
Why do we do that?
I don't know. I've never heard a good reason for it actually.
Let's stop doing it.
But all that matters is you're here now.
And you are here for some of the best parts of your day, maybe the best, really, if I might be immodest.
It's called the simultaneous sip and you don't need much.
All you need is a cup or a mug or a glass or a tank or a chalice or a canteen jug or a flask or a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like my coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
It's called the simultaneous sip and it happens now Mmm-mmm-mmm I saw somebody in the comments say lock the clock and And I've been trying to think of clever little marketing sayings for coronavirus.
Because, you know, if you have a little clever marketing saying, like for sea belts in California, they have billboards that say, click it or tick it.
Reminding you to wear your seatbelt.
And I thought, well, we need something like that with the hand-washing and the face-touching with the coronavirus.
So we need a little rhyme.
It's something like clean it or die or something.
I don't know. It's got to rhyme. Put some work into that.
Get back to me. All right, let's see what's going on here.
CNN has a big piece on their website.
A video piece in which they're talking about women being paid 80 cents on the dollar for the same job as men.
What? Literally the most debunked statistics in all of life, and CNN unabashedly runs like it's a fact.
Now, do I need to get into that?
Now, if anybody's new here, You know that there are two movies on one screen.
And on one movie, it's a fact that women are paid eighty cents on a dollar.
And you just ask anybody.
Ask anybody. It's a fact.
But in the other movie, where people have actually looked at the studies, it just doesn't exist.
Now, it does exist if you looked at all jobs compared to all jobs.
Because women and men take different jobs, they have different amount of experience, etc.
But once you drill down to the variables, most of it disappears.
So I believe there's still some.
I'm certainly not the person who would say that sexism doesn't exist in the workplace.
I'm not going to tell you that men and women get paid the same, because that's probably not true.
But The 80 cents on the dollar is...
I don't think that's even close to the actual gap.
It's probably in the 5 cent range that's the actual discrimination part.
Anyway, it's amazing to see CNN just unabashedly run such easily disprovable anti-science fake news.
And then, also today, CNN's SE Cup...
Now, this is just the headline.
So I didn't read the article, and we know that sometimes the article doesn't match the headline, but the headline enough is worth commenting on.
So whether it's right or wrong, it's worthy of comment.
And the headline says, attributing this to SC Cup, says Americans panic over the coronavirus can be attributed to a lack of trust in both the government and President Donald Trump.
Can it? Can it?
Is that like a news fact?
The news fact is that we can attribute the coronavirus panic to a lack of trust in the government?
Is that what's happening?
That's just a fact, right?
Just report that right on the news channel.
Now, of course, Essie Cupp is an opinion person, so she doesn't have to adhere to the standards of the news journalists per se.
But, you need a little more meat on that opinion.
Because from my standpoint, it looks like the panic is caused by a combination of we have something to worry about that's real.
It's not unreal.
And secondly, it's the way the news covers it because it's 24-hour coverage.
It's the only thing happening.
So it's the news.
Is there anybody who thinks And this is an honest question.
Is there anybody who thinks that no matter what President Trump did about the virus, as long as it was also still spreading, he's going to get criticized and the news will treat it like a panic because everything is hyperbole to sell clicks.
So it is such a bold lie to say that it could be attributed to the government when it's so obviously the media and the nature of the problem itself is all you need.
It wouldn't matter which government you put in there.
Don't you think if you just switched the government to a democratic government, Fox News would say they're doing everything wrong, CNN maybe would say less of that, but there'd be exactly the same amount of panic.
It has nothing to do.
The one thing you could change is who's in charge.
It's the only thing you could change and have exactly the same result as you're seeing now.
But CNN reports it the opposite.
I went shopping yesterday.
I don't know how often I'll do that again.
So I'll be 63 in June, and I have a history of asthma.
So I take meds every day to suppress it.
So I rarely have any kind of feeling of asthma, so I don't have a bad case.
It's probably in the mild category.
And it's treated, so it doesn't have much impact on my life.
But I'm in the kill zone, meaning that if you're over 60 and you have any kind of history with a respiratory situation, you're supposed to just stop going anywhere.
And so I'm in that category.
So I'll tell you what I'm going to do.
I am going to, and I have already, so I've already done this, substantially modify my schedule.
So for the time being, I won't go to my gym.
I'll keep my membership and just work out at home.
Oh, I'm going to shift my hours a little bit for shopping.
So I'm still going to go to the grocery store because I was talking to Christine about this yesterday.
And this is how dumb I am.
And I was saying, you know, it might be a good idea if...
If you did the shopping, because usually we divide up some of the stuff.
And I like doing the shopping, she doesn't.
I talk about food shopping.
So since I like doing it, I was doing that and she was doing other stuff.
But I said, well, maybe you should do the food shopping.
And then I realized, well, if she got the coronavirus, I'm definitely getting it.
It doesn't make any difference if you send your spouse to the store or your girlfriend or your friend.
If they come back with the coronavirus and they live in your house, you're not buying a lot of safety.
You buy a little bit.
It's not a guarantee that a spouse is going to give it to a spouse, but it's pretty close to a guarantee.
So I'm going to keep shopping, but I'm going to probably move my hours a little bit to try to hit the store when it's the least amount of traffic.
And if I do that, I can actually avoid any line at all.
It'll just be me and a cashier.
And then I say to myself, Well, what good did that do?
Because I'm probably not going to get it from the customers.
I'm going to get it from the cashier.
Because if there's anybody in the store who had it, the cashier is going to get it.
So I'm not entirely sure how much of this is even real.
Yeah, obviously I'll do home delivery, but for food it's a problem because you can't get it the same day and same selection and all that stuff.
It's getting there, but not yet.
All right, so far the only impact I've seen in my state, I assume this will change, but the only impact I've seen in my state is a stimulus, which really brings to question how good we are at predicting the obvious, because you think it's going to be obvious, right?
That all the experts are saying, It's obvious.
The economy will slow down.
It's obvious. Because there's supply line problems.
People won't be going to things.
It's just obvious. The economy is slowing down.
And then I go to the store.
It's just freaking packed.
People are buying out Amazon.
Amazon can't ship enough stuff.
It's like freaking Christmas.
I've never seen so much buying.
So, maybe. I mean, maybe the net effect will be negative.
All the smart people say so.
And if you had to bet on it, you know, if you're going to put your money on it, I'd bet that it's going to be negative for a while.
But why isn't it happening yet?
I mean, at the moment, people are just buying like crazy.
I went to a restaurant the other night, and I was kind of thinking it might be the last time for a while that I go out to a restaurant that has a lot of people in it.
But I thought, well, I'll get it out of the way before the virus gets too close to my neighborhood.
So I go to the restaurant, it's just packed.
It's packed. And, I don't know, so far it just looks like we're spending a lot more money, not less.
Now, of course, the travel industry will get devastated.
There's no doubt about that.
So Stanford University decided to cancel all classes But not the cafeteria and, you know, I guess they got people they got to keep alive there, food-wise.
And I thought to myself, Stanford closing the entire campus, or closing classes, but not the campus, I guess.
They closed classes and they're doing it all remote.
Now they can do it because they have a very advanced online training system and apparently they can just switch over and make that work.
Now, not everybody can do that, but here's the important thing.
Stanford is not like other colleges.
What is it about Stanford that's different from every other college in the United States?
You could argue in the world.
There's one thing that's very different about Stanford.
Arguably, it's the top college.
And arguably, I mean, Harvard might disagree and Yale and those guys.
But Stanford's kind of the smartest school we have with the smartest people and the smartest instructors.
So when your smartest school goes first, what does that do to everybody else?
If it were a random school, just one you'd heard of, you'd say to yourself, well, it's just a school I've heard of.
There are lots of schools.
I'm not going to take anything from that.
It's just one school made that decision.
But Stanford's not just one school.
Stanford is frickin' Stanford.
If Stanford says they're going to make a change that dramatic, you've got to stop what you're doing, right?
You've got to put down your tools and listen.
Because this isn't your community college.
This is frickin' Stanford.
They got some smart people.
They put some thought into it.
They're not missing anything.
So I have a feeling that Stanford going first is going to have a gigantic psychological pressure on everybody else in a way that any other school would not.
Harvard may be the same, but I feel like Stanford is the lever that moves the whole thing.
So you're going to see a lot of school closings.
That seems inevitable. I was in an elevator.
Yesterday. And go shopping.
And there were a couple of fun-looking grandmother types.
I'm guessing they were 75 each.
And they were that, you know, spunky, full of life, you know, gonna live to 100 kind of 75-year-olds, the kind you want to hang out with.
A couple of old ladies.
And they had some political pins on them and they were chatting.
They were chatting out loud in the elevator about their favorite Democratic picks.
One of them liked Pete Buttigieg, but since he's gone, I think they were going to back Bernie.
And they're just chatting away in a crowded elevator.
And I thought to myself, I couldn't do that.
I couldn't. Could you, if you were a Trump supporter, well certainly in California, maybe it's different in your state, but if you were in California, you couldn't get in an elevator in California and just have a casual conversation with the person you came into the elevator with and say, yeah, yeah, we're getting ready to support Trump and we're going to a rally and stuff.
Now, there's somebody who says, you know, I do.
I think if you're a certain size, if you're male and you're a certain size, you know, and nobody's going to pick a fight with you, you can say anything you want.
That's just a fact. But I wouldn't.
I would actually be, I would feel unsafe In a crowded elevator of just normal citizens in the suburbs, you know, no scary-looking people, just normal citizens, I would feel unsafe to say anything positive about Republicans.
Now, you see in the comments, I'm not alone.
That has a lot to do with where I live.
And when I say unsafe, I don't mean they're going to beat me up.
I mean it's going to be some kind of unpleasant encounter.
And I thought to myself, I don't think there's enough reporting on that.
The fact that half of the country can't even talk out loud about their political opinions.
I've never seen that before.
Has that ever been the case?
I mean, I can't think of any situation where half the country was silenced in public.
You can do it on social media, because you have some distance here.
But that's a pretty bad situation.
And I think I have to, I've avoided saying this, but now I'm, you know, I've been tripped over the line.
The left is a violent hate group.
Now, that sounds like the things that somebody says in the political season, and it sounds like hyperbole, and it sounds like just something, it just sounds like something you say.
It doesn't sound like anything that's close to something real, to call an entire political party a hate group.
But why is it that I can't talk in front of them about just a normal political process, a normal, you know, well, I don't know how normal Trump is, but an ordinary Political conversation, I can't have.
I can't have that in public.
I couldn't even wear, I would not go out in public with a shirt that, you know, said Trump on it.
And, you know, I don't wear that kind of stuff anyway, but I wouldn't if I did.
So, is it hyperbole to say that the Democrats are a hate group?
Because an ordinary, well-meaning, citizen, church-going, loves the Constitution, has never discriminated, just likes low taxes, just having a conversation in an elevator, you couldn't do that.
You could not do that.
So I think it's not hyperbole to say that the Democrats have evolved, you know, not intentionally, but I think they've evolved into a hate group that can actively Actively execute their hate in public.
In public. Apparently people are okay with it.
Oh my God, I'm right on the edge of flipping out again.
I told you about that, the prednisone puts me right on the edge.
It's only the fact that I know it is not my genuine opinion that the meds are influencing me to be a little bit more combative.
It's only that that allows me to pull back, that little extra knowledge.
All right, here's my prediction.
And this is the most boring, ordinary prediction in the world, but it always comes as a surprise.
So how could something be ordinary, boring, happens every time, and when I say it, it's still going to sound like a surprise.
Watch this. The presidential race is a horse race and the media will cause the underdog to catch up so that the lead gets switched a lot of times.
So there's just an automatic universal pressure to let the underdog catch up so that it's a close race again.
So what happened? We had Bernie had a dominant lead.
What was the prediction?
Well, horse race, the prediction is that the dominant lead, no matter how dominant, would be challenged.
Sure enough, Biden has this big Super Tuesday.
So now Biden's the definite nominee, right?
Totally going to be Biden.
Nothing could happen now.
He's got a commanding lead.
Biden's going all the way.
Right? Well, no.
The prediction is that the media controls this stuff and they're going to make it close.
And I don't know that the media needed to do that, but have you heard this latest compilation clip of Biden's gaffes?
It really is a new level, and it feels like you can...
Again, this could be confirmation bias, but it feels like, as an observer, it probably doesn't matter if it's confirmation bias, because if I'm perceiving it that way, others are, and that's how people will vote.
But it looks like Biden is losing it in an actual predictable way that we're observing.
In other words, six months ago, I don't think he was as bad as he is now.
Is that my imagination?
Now, probably a lot of you will agree with it, but we have to be honest that that could be confirmation bias.
So you're seeing people agreeing with me.
But take the same caution that I'm giving myself, which is, it might look like that even if it weren't true, because we're sort of looking for it.
But let me see if I can play this latest clip.
It's just shocking.
Because we cannot get reelected.
We cannot win this...
So this is Biden trying to get in on a sentence.
Watch how mangled this is.
He actually worked hard on that sentence, struggled, and when he was done, he decided that what he wanted to say is that we should work hard to re-elect Donald Trump.
This isn't funny anymore.
Okay? That's not to say I won't have my laughs at future things, but it's not a joke anymore to say that there's a little bit of elder abuse going on.
There's something happening here that's deeply troubling that has nothing to do with politics.
Right? And I feel like...
Don't the Democrats see this?
You know, I'm sure the Democrats were saying the same thing, and maybe still do, that Trump has his own issues, blah, blah, blah, can't we all see it?
So they might be as equally puzzled about why we can't see what they see in Trump, but honestly, this is either a wonderful illusion That some people can see what's happening with Biden and some can't?
Or are we the ones who are wrong?
Don't rule it out.
Maybe we're the ones who are having a bad perception.
What if he's fine? Do you think there's any chance of that?
I don't. You know, you have to trust your own judgment because that's the world we live in.
I mean, you have to do something.
You have to act.
You can't just sit there and starve to death.
So you have to choose your judgment, but we really have bad judgment.
Just keep that in mind.
You have to act anyway.
All right. Let's see what else is going on.
George Takai. Do you all know George Takai?
He's a great Twitter account to follow.
He was, of course, played Sulu in the original Star Trek.
And he's a big anti-Trumper.
Now, most anti-Trump accounts are just painful to follow.
You probably don't.
If you're a Trump supporter, you probably don't follow any anti-Trump accounts.
But if you wanted to follow one that is often clever and funny and doesn't always have politics, George Takei is actually a fun follow, because even when I don't agree with him, Yeah, there's something entertaining there.
So he's, of course, very vocal in the celebrity world of being an anti-Trumper.
And he put out his own video in which it looks like he cut pieces from Biden official videos and put together basically his own little commercial, like a campaign ad, to show how great Joe Biden is.
But here's the embarrassing part.
He focused on Joe Biden going to have a burger with Beto at the Whataburger, where they just went into an ordinary fast food place and sat down and had a burger and talked.
And in order to sell Joe Biden, what George Takei had to do with his own little homemade video is remove the parts where Joe Biden is talking.
Just think about that.
In order to make a favorable video about Joe Biden, You had to edit out the parts where he's talking.
Now, he did say something, but it was just a brief statement.
Then all the rest was Beto talking or video of him walking in or some commentary.
They actually had to remove the parts where he talks.
I mean, just think about it.
Because, do you think that George Takei, you can tell from his Twitter account, he's a bright guy, he's paying attention, he's watching, and he cares.
He cares a lot. Do you think he doesn't see this?
Do you think he doesn't know that he didn't have a way to make Joe Biden look good if Joe Biden was speaking?
I just don't see how Bernie doesn't make a slight comeback.
So, here's what I think.
I think people are going to be talking about Biden's brain.
The President's already talking about it.
It has to be obvious to Democrats that he can't possibly win, right?
Am I wrong about that?
Isn't this the most obvious thing we've ever seen in politics?
Let me put it this way.
Has there ever been a potential matchup that had so little mystery to it?
This doesn't look close.
Now, I don't think Bernie can win either.
So they do have two choices of, you know, which way do you want to lose?
Let's talk some more about that.
Kamala Harris put out a little video today in which she, as anticipated, endorsed Joe Biden.
But here's the interesting part, according to me.
Maybe it's only interesting to me.
We'll find out. I had predicted when she dropped out of the race, keep in mind for context, that 18 months ago or so, I had predicted that she would be the nominee for the Democrats.
Obviously, she has suspended her campaign.
So my prediction that she would be the nominee, people said, not so good.
But I said, well, she might reemerge as Biden's vice president, but she would come back stronger.
And I had predicted this Correct me if I'm wrong.
You've heard me say this, right?
Because I think I've said it more than once.
That the Democrat experts would give Kamala a makeover.
A charisma makeover.
Because I think that's the main thing she needed.
And so she does this little video after disappearing for a while.
And the disappearing for a while was part of the prediction.
She would disappear. And like Batman, she would train to fix whatever flaws she had, and then she would come back, and she would be a different product.
Well, it might have just happened.
Because if you watch the video, and I just tweeted it so you can see it in my Twitter feed, here are the things that I criticized her about in the past, or thought about criticizing in one case, but didn't say it out loud, and then here's what she's done about it.
So, The old Kamala, old being, you know, a few months ago, she had, her dress, what do you call it?
The clothes she wore, not a dress, but she wore these boxy suits that made her look awful.
Am I right? The way she dressed was frankly awful.
Maybe as politicians go, one of the worst dressers.
Now, Before you say sexist, sexist, sexist, I'm on record of saying that Hillary Clinton did an excellent job of dressing.
And I will reassert that.
Hillary designed essentially like a uniform, if you will.
So she had a look and a style.
And you don't have to be a supermodel to dress fashionably and as well as you can.
And I think Hillary did a perfectly...
Good job in the fashion way.
And it matters. I think when the president wears his suit, it matters.
I think how they dress makes a big difference.
And Kamala comes back, and in her video, and again, we don't know if this is a trend yet.
We're just looking for it early.
She's wearing only a black, some kind of a top, that is very flattering.
So the boxy jacket is off with the little shoulders and stuff that make her look like a box.
And instead, she's wearing just a black top.
And I'm not your fashion guy, right?
I'm just saying that it was a world better A world better just look.
To have just a nice, simple black top.
Framed her nicely. She had a nice background.
It was different.
It was way better.
Now, is this a trend? We don't know yet.
We'll have to see her a few more times.
The other thing that she got right is that, and again, I don't want to make this sexist.
Because it's going to sound like that.
I make fun of Bernie's hair all the time.
Biden's hair. These are disasters of haircuts.
Trump is sort of a special case because his hair is more of a part of the brand.
But the men in the race have some issues with hair.
Because how you look does matter.
We're a shallow world. And I would say that Kamala's The hairstyle that she had been using mostly on the campaign was hit or miss.
It was different on different days, but I wasn't a fan.
In this video where she is promoting or endorsing Joe Biden, she's, in my opinion, her hairstyle has improved.
A little more, I don't know, it's just better.
Now, again, is that permanent?
Is it just, you know, women change their hair fairly frequently, maybe it was just a good day, but it's noticeably better.
Somebody says more feminine.
I don't know if it's that.
I think it's just better.
You know, if you've ever seen somebody who went from a bad hairstylist to a good one, it makes a big difference.
I think maybe she got a better hairstyle.
The other thing she did is no giggle.
This was my biggest complaint, is that she giggled.
It's just a mannerism.
She would giggle at her own jokes, and it would make her look unserious.
No giggle. She got through the entire video without the nervous girl giggle, and I think that really costs her when she does that.
If she got coached out of that, it's going to be a big change, because that's her biggest weakness in my opinion.
Now, she has one more thing that she needs to work on.
Which is she has a chihuahua-like shaking quality when she talks.
Have you noticed that? So she'll talk and her body will be moving.
So she'll be like this.
I'm talking. I'm going to endorse Joe Biden.
And you can't feel...
She doesn't feel confident because her body is not calmed.
There are moments in which she calms a little bit, and her voice is calm, and watch—somebody says you're obsessed—but watch how much power she projects when she calms down her body.
And I think the experts are probably telling her this, too.
So this is my speculation that she's being coached, finally, By good people.
Because it looks like there's a change.
If she can calm her body, the force of her voice just goes through the roof.
Because she does have a really good, powerful voice that she completely kneecaps by jumping around and being a chihuahua.
If she could calm it down, It's really going to be remarkable.
And she had a nice smile, and she was more likable on this, and that's part of her problem.
All right, now, given all this, there's also, here's a hypnotist observation.
While she was endorsing Biden, she was shaking her head no.
She needs to stop that.
Watch me shake my head no as I'm talking.
Which makes me wonder if I do it.
I wonder if I do that. But she's endorsing him while shaking her head no.
She's like, Joe Biden's the best person in the world and I'm so glad that I'm endorsing him.
I'm making this up. That's not exactly what she said.
And her head is shaking back and forth like a no while she's talking.
I'm not 100% convinced that that means anything.
It would be easy to look at a common mannerism and over-interpret it.
But keep an eye on her and see if she shakes her head no on other topics.
If she doesn't, maybe it does mean something.
All right. I still think Klobuchar would be the stronger choice for Joe Biden.
And the reason is that Klobuchar doesn't seem to have any negatives except maybe some personal likability that, frankly, voters don't care about.
People don't care too much if you're mean to your staff.
They really don't. And Joe Biden is so nice.
That Amy Klobuchar's one tiny little small weakness of, you know, she ate a salad with a comb or she was mean to somebody, it gets sort of erased because Biden's niceness will cancel that out.
But I think Klobuchar strikes you as somebody who could take the job right away.
Am I wrong about that? Even if you didn't like anything about Amy Klobuchar's policies, Would you agree with me that if the choice was Kamala or Klobuchar, let's say there was never any president, you just had to choose.
Klobuchar or Kamala, let's say you dislike their policies equally.
You just had to choose who's a solid sort of presidential quality.
I think head to head is Klobuchar.
Because she doesn't have negatives.
She has a solid success.
She's got success in those battleground states.
She's done things across the aisle.
She's been a senator for a long time.
She did better than Kamala did in the race.
I don't think it's even close if you're looking at her just as an individual.
But if you're looking at what balances the ticket, I've said cheekily before that you might need to add a person of color to the Democratic ticket.
So that white people will vote for them.
Because all the guilty white Democrats are going to need a person of color on the ticket to feel good about it.
I've said before that black voters apparently are more flexible than white voters, apparently are willing to vote for their self-interest as they see it, and apparently are a little bit more flexible about who they vote for.
So, kudos to that community.
CPAC, that big Big Republican convention.
Apparently there was an attendee with the coronavirus and was it AIPAC that had one too and somebody shook hands with somebody who shook hands with the president and the president says he's not concerned at all.
Now, is that a good answer?
If the President of the United States, in the middle of this crisis, which, you know, they're telling us to be worried.
No, they're not telling us to be worried.
They're telling us to be prepared.
Should the President say he's not concerned at all?
I think the answer is yes.
Because I think you want your president telling people not to panic, so long as they're also getting the message to prepare, and so long as they're also getting the message that there's a real thing out there that needs to be worried about.
I'm a little bit mixed on the Trump performance so far.
As I always say, you can't really tell If he's doing a good or bad job on the details of who's in charge and what decisions have been made and all that stuff, he can't really tell.
Because you don't know how somebody else would have done.
We're not close enough to it.
You just don't know. But you can tell the communication.
Because that's the part you can observe directly.
Does the president say things and go to, you know, create events and do things that make you feel comfortable and make you feel like the government's got this?
Is that sort of a mixed bag?
I would say, as I said yesterday, I think Trump's Trump's personality and the set of tools he brings to the job are extraordinary, like we've never seen before.
But that's different from saying, it fits every occasion.
You need the right president with the right tools for the right situation.
The war president is not the peace president.
They're different people, probably.
I don't think Trump is good at this.
We know he's a famous germaphobe.
I don't know if that has anything to do with how engaged he is in this, but he's not good at this.
Can we agree on that?
Now, again, being not good at this, I'm talking about just the communication part, doesn't mean anything about whether or not the government is being effective in dealing with this, because it's not the president who's doing the work.
There are a lot of professionals, smart people doing the work.
I imagine they're doing everything that they can do.
I imagine private industry is doing everything they can do.
And I've said before that this is different than any other situation in which normally the president would be the most important person and would be making decisions that would affect everything.
I don't know that the president is the most important person anymore.
Because the entire world has mobilized on this problem, and they didn't have to be asked.
Because it's a global threat, and humanity has focused its smartest, bravest, hardest working people on the problem.
When is humanity as a whole focused on one problem that's so immediate and this important?
Before, never. We're focusing the entire weight of human capability on this one problem, and it's phenomenal.
It's not really the president's job.
It's the globe as sort of self-organized, 99% of it, and then the president says, here's some money, I'll sign it.
But the president is not doing the work.
The globe has kind of self-organized, plus using existing, you know, CDC and state governments and stuff.
But it's beautiful.
To watch humanity act as one and become this global brain, as I've called it.
I called it a God brain, and then I deleted that tweet because I think it just confuses people.
People don't want their religion mixed in with their opinion, so I just deleted that.
But let's call it a global brain.
It is focused on the problem in a way we've never done before.
At a time when we can all communicate.
And let me give you some examples of what's happening.
So yesterday, I think it was yesterday, I tweeted that in order for telemedicine to work, meaning your doctor being on a video call instead of in person, in order for that to work efficiently, we need an executive order that would allow doctors to practice across state lines.
Now, why is it that I could make that tweet And I think it will actually make a difference.
The reason I could do that is because I have experience with my own startup in which we work with doctors on telemedicine.
And I learned that one of the biggest problems is that you can't practice across state lines.
And if you could, there would be far more availability.
Because let's say there's an emergency in one state, but it hasn't hit another state yet.
You'd have a lot of doctors in the other state who have a little excess capacity they're willing to give out.
Maybe at night or whatever, and they can help out across state lines.
At the moment it's illegal.
It's illegal. Can you believe that?
It's an emergency. The country's in an emergency, and a qualified doctor in Connecticut They've got pretty good requirements to be a doctor, don't you think?
Don't you think a doctor who's qualified to practice in Connecticut can give you an opinion in Pennsylvania?
I mean, right?
Is that dangerous?
Do you feel at risk because you talk to a doctor who can practice in Connecticut?
But you're in Pennsylvania? No, you don't feel at risk.
Obviously not. It's a ridiculous set of rules.
Maybe it's good for the states.
Maybe the AMA has something to do with it.
But the point is, I as a citizen had a little bit of exposure to that problem.
It's a gigantic lever In this crisis, you know, to free up more potential doctor advice, even remotely, could be a big variable.
And I happen to know that it would take one executive order To wipe all that away just for the emergency.
Now, you probably want to limit it and say something like, you know, it's just for coronavirus inquiries and assistance, and it's only for a limited time frame, because you don't want to go through the whole trouble of changing the whole system in the proper way.
Now, some people have said to me, can you do an executive order like that?
Because you'd be Wouldn't you be overruling all the states, and is it legal, and don't you need legislation, and wouldn't it take longer?
And here's the answer to that.
No. No.
That's what an emergency is.
An emergency is, you do things that you'd only do in an emergency.
And this is one of them.
Would it be legal for the President of the United States to do an executive order saying doctors could temporarily, and for this situation only, practice across state borders?
And the answer is, it doesn't matter.
If you're saying to yourself, you know, Scott, it would be illegal for an executive order, for that to be done by an executive order, it doesn't matter.
Who's going to complain?
This is very important. If nobody's going to complain, and nobody's going to complain.
I mean, nobody that matters.
If nobody's going to complain, and it's literally one piece of paper, executive order, I order doctors to be able to practice, you know, across state lines.
That's it. It's one piece of paper.
One piece of paper.
Nobody will complain.
Doesn't matter if it's legal.
It does not. Does not, should not matter if it's legal.
It's an emergency. It's transparent.
It's obvious. It's the right thing to do.
That's it. Somebody's saying malpractice insurance.
You would probably need an executive order to handle that in some way.
Yes. But that's a detail.
All right. So here's another little factoid.
So if you're not following Balaji Srinivasan, you should.
You can find his...
I retweet him a lot, especially during the coronavirus thing because his insight and expertise in this is tremendous.
And one of the things that he found is that there was a development recently In that a certain kind of UV called far UV, and I don't know the difference between regular UV and something called far UV, but there's a technical difference.
And apparently in a 2018 Columbia paper that Balaji was tweeting about, it can kill airborne viruses.
So you can actually shoot the virus out of the air with light, a special kind of light.
Now, I saw an estimate that you could build them for $1,000 a piece.
Doesn't it seem like we could get that price down pretty quickly?
And frankly, a lot of people would pay $1,000 a piece to put one in, let's say, in a public space.
Then I learned, and this made me a little angry, then I learned that China Ordered basically all of the robots, probably, that look like a Roomba.
It's a little robot that looks like a Roomba and has a big light on it that just drives around hospitals in China, shoots the UV light into the environment to kill the virus in the air.
To which I said, exactly what you're thinking right now.
What? Right?
When I told you that, and you heard that there are robots that already exist, using technology that I think we can check pretty easily, works.
You shoot some UV into the air and you either have the same amount of virus or you don't.
And they're already using them.
They're built. They're in China.
They're doing their job. They're running around the restaurants disinfecting.
Right? As soon as you heard that, didn't you say, where's my robot?
Does the United States have any robots?
Because they're not buying them from the United States.
I think they bought them from some European company.
But, as Balaji quite accurately says, this is not the sort of thing you want to run through some kind of long FDA approval thing.
Is it not fairly easy for scientists to tell whether a light killed a virus?
I feel as though we could figure that out Without all the double-blind experiments that you would normally do.
It's like virus, light, turn it on, dead, yes or no, try it again, try it in a couple different rooms, try it in a couple different settings.
I mean, it's not one test, but as Balaji says, you could very quickly get to the point where you were confident enough that it was safe enough.
I guess there's a safety issue, but it's not a big one.
Why don't we just go gung-ho with this?
Now, it could be that there are going to be a lot of false starts and things we try that don't work and A-B testing, but this would certainly be on my list of things to go hard at.
Now, where did the knowledge of this come from?
Did the US government already know that there existed robots with far-UV light on them?
Maybe not, right?
You assume that the government knows everything, but that's not my experience.
My guess is that people like Balaji, doing the job of a patriot and a citizen, just jumping in to do what he can do, same as I am right now, he's jumping in and saying, did you know about this?
By now, people in the government do know about it, because he's widely followed, and now a new piece of information is available for a potential solution.
So when you say, did the president do a good or bad job, I think you have to adjust that for the fact that it's 2020, and we don't need the president to tell us everything to do for a global threat that's this well-known.
People are just jumping in.
People are jumping in.
They're doing what they need to do.
We don't need the president to tell us.
Speaking of that, I like to tell you every day those things you can do to keep yourself healthier, keep your immune system high.
This is especially important to me because, like I said, I'm in the kill zone because I'm at that age where the virus will kill me, especially because I have the asthma background.
I'm keeping myself healthy and looking for tips on how to do that.
Of course, you all know about the sanitizing and the hand washing.
I've added to that, you should do some moderate exercise.
Get some sun every day.
Get some vitamin D. These things are all implicated in helping your immune system.
There was another study that was sent around today, and since this is a weekend especially, I'm going to try to say this in the most G-rated way I can.
So bear with me.
As for the benefit of the children, I will be talking indirectly now about a topic.
Wink, wink, you know what I'm talking about.
And it goes like this.
Apparently, if you're an adult, Who is enjoying, let's say, time with yourself.
Let's say your partner is unavailable, for whatever reason.
And you're enjoying time with yourself, if you know what I mean.
Wink, wink, wink. And that time results in, let's say, an experience which you might call a climax.
Sorry children. And, apparently, science is pretty clear that that improves your cortisol situation, which reduces your stress and improves your immune response.
So, it turns out that one of the best things you can do to protect yourself and, dare I say, the country, if not the world, because you're a patriot, you want to protect the country too.
Well, now you know what to do.
Get a little exercise, eat right, sleep right, And, wink, wink, enjoy a little time with yourself.
So, that's doctor's orders.
Let's see, what else we got going out here?
Italy's got a lot of deaths.
Oh, Elon Musk.
Let's talk about him. So Elon Musk makes a little news on the coronavirus.
And he says in a tweet, I think this was yesterday-ish, he said, coronavirus panic is dumb.
Which, of course, caused everybody to say, Elon Musk is very smart.
Why is he saying that coronavirus panic is dumb?
He's not saying the virus is a hoax or anything like that.
He's just saying the panic part is dumb.
Now, of course, he was asked to clarify what that means, and he did.
Here's what he said. So I want you to listen to Elon Musk's argument and see if it passes all the tests.
Just see if it makes sense to you.
One of the smartest guys on the planet.
We all agree with that, right?
Whether you like your Tesla or don't like your Tesla, Elon Musk is one of the smartest guys ever.
So let's see his opinion on this.
So he says, The virality of this COVID thing is overstated.
So he's saying the virality is overstated due to conflating the diagnosis date with the contraction date.
So far, so good.
So it is true that we don't know when somebody got the virus.
We only know when they were tested.
So we don't really have a sense of the virus.
The numbers are polluted by the fact of when we discover them, not when they started.
So that would ruin your virality measurements, and then over-extrapolating exponential growth, which is never what happens in reality.
So he's pointing out that we have lots of history with flus, and that they simply don't do what this one is projected to do.
Now, people are saying this one's different, so is his point that they don't That it's never what happens.
That's really about the past.
Is it true that this one is like the past?
Well, that's a gray area.
Some say yes-ish.
Some say no-ish.
He's on the side of it's more likely to be in the not exponential growth that we'll get a handle on it or something will happen.
He says, keep extrapolating and virus will exceed mass of the known universe.
So he's making the point that things don't increase forever.
It's just not...
History doesn't show that that ever happens.
There's always something that happens that stops things from increasing to infinity.
And then...
And he's right about that.
Then he says the fatality rate is also greatly overstated.
So let's follow his argument here.
He says, because there are so few test kits...
True enough. Those who die with respiratory symptoms are tested, but those with minor symptoms are not.
And then he says the prevalence of the coronavirus and other colds in general is high.
So, his point is that if I could sort of summarize it my own way, that this virus won't be that different from other viruses.
Therefore, the panic is overstated.
But here's what I asked.
And there was an amazing outpouring of loserthink in the comments after I asked this question.
I said, what about the cruise ship deaths?
It's more than normal.
So how do you explain that?
So there were six people died.
On the Diamond Princess, and of 707 infected, there were, I don't know, more than a thousand or whatever, a few thousand, I forget how many people were on the ship, but 707 were infected and six died.
Now, for Elon Musk's comments to be accepted as the reasonable view, it would also be true that cruise ships would not be experiencing unusual levels of death.
Would you agree? So I said, what is it that explains why the cruise ships had so many deaths?
I'm watching in the comments and every one of you are experiencing, not every one of you, but most of you are experiencing loser think.
If you said, because the people on the cruise ships are old, it's true and it's loser think.
That's not, you did not make a good argument there.
If you said it's because they're tightly packed, it's true, but it's loser think.
It's not a good argument.
It's not an answer to the question.
Can anybody tell me why?
Tell me why it's not a good argument.
It's completely nonsense to say that the reason that there were more deaths on this ship is because they were older.
Why is it nonsense?
Because there are a lot of cruise ships and there are a lot of flus.
We have plenty of history to know that a cruise ship in which the flu gets out, a normal flu, how many people does it kill?
Have you ever heard of one ship with six deaths?
Never, right? I mean, maybe there was some other epidemic in the past.
But if it were true that six people typically die on a cruise ship every cruise, then Elon Musk would be absolutely correct.
There would be nothing to scare us because we're not seeing anything out of the usual.
But if you just said it's because they're old, then you don't know how to compare things.
In the comments, I saw only one or two people who understood that it's a comparison problem.
You can't just look at one ship and say, it's got old people on it, no wonder they died.
Unless all the other boats have old people dying at a similar rate whenever there's a virus.
Is this the first cruise ship that somebody had a virus on?
No. How many cruise ships does at least some common virus get loose on the ship?
How often does that happen?
My guess?
Most of them?
Most of them. If you put a thousand people on the ship during flu season, you don't think there's a flu on that ship?
A normal flu? I think there is.
So if we had a history of five or six old people dying every time there's a flu on a cruise ship, I'd say, yeah, Elon, you're right.
This is just baseline.
There's nothing happening here.
But as soon as I asked that question, people couldn't understand that you can't look at this one ship And say they're old, and it doesn't mean anything, unless it's a common experience with the other ships.
And it isn't. Somebody else said, and this was a good comment, they pointed out, what about Italy?
Because the death rate in Italy seems through the roof, but they also have old people in Italy, and I've heard that their ventilation isn't so good, and closed spaces, and there's a lot of touching, and maybe their healthcare system isn't as good, etc. So you can't really tell too much from Italy, but these are the right questions.
But I think the cruise ship deaths and the nursing home deaths, if you have a nursing home in which several people die from the same virus, that only is meaningful if you've looked at all the other nursing homes who have had viruses.
If it's common to have six people die or ten people die in the same nursing home from the same problem, And it happens every flu season with the regular flu, then you'd say, oh, this is like that.
But I don't think that's the case.
So to Elon, I would say you need to answer that question.
What about the cruise ship?
What about the high death rates in the nursing homes?
If you have an answer to that, then I would say your position is strong.
And he might.
He's smarter than I am, so he might have an answer for that, but I haven't heard it.
All right, let's see what else we got going on here.
CNN reported that there's a caterpillar that could eat plastic, which would be good because you throw a bunch of caterpillars on your plastic and it eats it all up and no more storage problem.
Except, you read the article and way down it says there's only one problem.
That the caterpillar's poop becomes toxic if they eat plastic.
And I'm thinking, okay, well that didn't really move the ball forward.
I'm very happy that there's a caterpillar that can eat our plastic, but if the outcome is that the caterpillar poops toxic waste, I don't think we came out ahead.
So maybe that story didn't need to be told.
Speaking of telemedicine, I'm going to take a risk here.
I'm going to take a risk.
I realize this could blow up in my face.
You all know I have this startup.
It's called WenHub, and it has a product called Interface that allows you to do a video call to an expert.
Now, when there was a hurricane, A while ago, and I had offered in public, hey, people could use this app to get information from people who were on the scene.
And everybody said, hey, you're trying to profit from a disaster, to which sometimes I'm more of a robot than I need to be.
And the robot part of me said, no, it's just a tool.
When people need that tool and they don't have to even charge for it.
So it's not even up to me if anybody makes any money.
I'm just saying it's a tool you can use.
But that argument fell on deaf ears and people said, no, there are people dying and you're trying to sell a product.
And I thought, okay, I will take that criticism to heart.
And I will not do that again.
So when the coronavirus came up, it's an obvious situation where you should have medical experts talking to people.
It's an app that does that.
And I stayed silent about it.
So I stayed silent about it because I didn't want to do that same thing where you're trying to sell some product in that concept.
But this feels different.
And I'm noticing that a number of remote software Some companies are promoting their work and other people are promoting them, and nobody's complaining.
And I was trying to think, well, what's the difference?
Like, why is it that Zoom can promote their product for telecommunity?
It's exactly the tool that people need.
It's a profit company.
Why is nobody complaining about that?
And I think there's a difference.
The difference is that we're all threatened by this virus.
And so nobody's a spectator on this one.
We're all in the game or know we will be.
And so if you're in the game and somebody says, here's a tool for you, you know, might help you win the game, people are much more comfortable with that than if they're spectating and saying, hey, you know, we're just watching this and you seem to be doing something, you know, that as spectators we think is, you know, inappropriate.
But as soon as you need the tool, Suddenly you feel different about it.
So let me make this offer.
If there's anybody out there who knows how to get to The right person.
Just connect me on social media.
And it's this question. If the CDC or the government wants to do effectively a buyout, in other words, just take over the app for the period of the emergency, that I would have that conversation.
And we can do it quickly because the app is already built.
So if there's anybody in the government who would like to promote telemedicine, And I think it would be important to have an executive order to let doctors practice across borders, at least for the purposes of the emergency, coronavirus. If there's anybody in the government who would like to immediately spin up an app that would allow anybody in the country to talk to a doctor who's willing to put themselves on the app, we could do that immediately.
We could do it in a week.
And I would In one week, I will pivot the entire company toward dealing with this emergency.
But something says it exists.
And I would imagine that there will be a whole bunch of products in that space Because obviously there are telemedicine products, but there isn't one that isn't part of a service.
So most of the existing products are people who have a subscription service or that sort of thing.
There isn't one where you can just say, I need to talk to a doctor and I don't have money and it needs to be free.
So the government The government is putting pressure to lower the cost if somebody doesn't have healthcare to get a test, and this could be part of that.
So anyway, if there's anybody who knows anybody in the government or the CDC who wants to look into an app to connect a doctor for no charge, just to get advice about should I quarantine myself, what should I do, I can make that a bit long.
All right. So...
Yeah, I'm just looking at your products, or looking at your comments.
All right, I think that's...
Let me check my notes here while I got you here, see if there's anything I wanted to say that I didn't say.