My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a Content: Don Lemon flip-out Sean Hannity is the mothership of coronavirus Loserthink Additional coronavirus Loserthink examples Ian Sams Loserthink tweet...and resume Joe Biden and Kamala Harris chemistry --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scott-adams00/support
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| Alexa, turn on studio. | |
| I know. | |
| Hey everybody! It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams, the best part of the day. | |
| I think you'd agree. | |
| It's pretty obvious, really. | |
| Hello, Dr. Burris. | |
| Hello, the rest of you. | |
| Jack, good to see you. | |
| Come on in here. It's time for the simultaneous sip, and all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass or 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. | |
| I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything, including the Wuhan virus, better. | |
| It's called the simultaneous sip. | |
| It happens now. | |
| Go. So, as I often do, I was watching myself in replay, so I play back my periscopes now and then just to see what it looks like and see if I can make it better. | |
| And I gotta tell you, one of the systems you should implement in your life, and it really, really helps you understand yourself, Is making a real concerted effort to monitor your personality after certain conditions have changed. | |
| So for example, monitor your personality after you've had a good night's sleep, and then compare it to a bad night's sleep. | |
| You're going to see a difference. | |
| Hungry versus not hungry. | |
| And as you all know, I've mentioned it, I'm coming off of prednisone. | |
| So I had some prednisone for some sinus stuff. | |
| And it completely changes my personality. | |
| And so I note it before I take it so that I can watch myself like an observer, which is really hard. | |
| Because when it's you, you don't really feel like you're observing yourself, you're just you. | |
| But you can do it if you practice. | |
| So I've been watching myself sort of objectively to see if I turned into a different personality. | |
| I'm prednisone. And when I watched myself on the playback, I really did. | |
| So I'm on the tail end of it now, so it should be normalizing. | |
| But as I was watching myself, I thought, I don't think I'd watch that guy. | |
| He seems kind of Kind of intense and angry and a little belligerent. | |
| So my judgment of myself is that I was a little belligerent yesterday and a little bit unkind. | |
| I was definitely hard on the president. | |
| I doubt I've ever been harder on Trump than I have this week. | |
| I think you'd probably agree. | |
| But let's talk about all that stuff. | |
| Anyway, so it's just a good technique to learn to watch yourself objectively and say, hey, is that my normal personality? | |
| Or is that because of the meds I'm on or I didn't get enough sleep or something? | |
| All right, there's a whole bunch of stuff happening. | |
| Number one, I understand that the Chinese government... | |
| Really, really, really hates it when you call this any kind of a Chinese flu or the Wuhan virus. | |
| Now, once I learned that the Chinese government really hates it when you call the virus that, I decided that from now on I'll only call it the Wuhan virus. | |
| Now, I don't love calling it any kind of a Chinese virus. | |
| Because Chinese refers to, you know, variously the country, the people, etc. | |
| And that's a little close to making an accidental racist sounding statement. | |
| But Wuhan is literally the name a government gives a piece of real estate. | |
| So that to me feels like more government. | |
| And it's the government of China that I hate with a passion. | |
| The people are quite awesome. | |
| In fact, let me thank the people of China right now. | |
| The people of China as opposed to the government, who sacrificed a lot to slow this virus down. | |
| And you guys did a great job for the world. | |
| Certainly the people working on containing it in China were not the people Responsible for releasing it, if anybody is responsible. | |
| Who knows where it came from? | |
| But the Chinese people, A+++. And a big thank you for the sacrifice that you guys did. | |
| Because I know you were fighting for your own lives and for your families and for your own country, but it helped the world as well. | |
| So thanks. And it looks like things are maybe slowing down over there, so China is really getting a handle on it. | |
| In these times of global crisis, it's good to take stock of the more sober-minded among us. | |
| So leadership sort of bubbles up where you don't expect it. | |
| You see this in a whole bunch of different ways. | |
| People are just sort of stepping up and taking a position. | |
| On the Wuhan virus, taking a position, meaning they're saying, what could I uniquely do that would help? | |
| What's the thing that I can do that's my skill set? | |
| And you see me doing it as best I can. | |
| I was just noticing on Twitter that famous... | |
| I never know what to call him because he's so many things. | |
| But among others, Naval Ravikant is a famous investor. | |
| An advisor of startups and things like that. | |
| Now, he probably wouldn't call himself that. | |
| But within his talent stack, there's this tremendous range of investment, business understanding. | |
| And so he tweets, I think it was last night, he said, current market panic feels overblown. | |
| Now, when somebody like Naval says that, it means more, right? | |
| So if the smartest, most experienced people are saying the market looks overblown, they're saying it for a reason. | |
| They're saying it for a reason. | |
| Because the economy is a psychology machine. | |
| And the people who understand that and have important positions in the world where they can say, look, I'm experienced. | |
| Listen to me on this topic. | |
| That's what Naval's saying. | |
| He's saying that the current market panic feels overblown. | |
| This is a short-term shock. | |
| Asian countries show social distancing, assisted by seasonality in the Wuhan flu, that's my word, works. | |
| Headlines will worsen as mass testing begins. | |
| So in other words, it's going to look worse just because we're discovering more of it as we get better at testing. | |
| He says, take it seriously for yourself. | |
| Wear masks for others. Don't panic. | |
| Trade. He says, I don't. | |
| So don't do panic trading. | |
| So, you know that old saying that I'm not a big fan of it, but there's nothing to fear but fear itself? | |
| Whichever president said that, Roselle? | |
| And this is one of those cases where that's purely true. | |
| The only thing that would destroy the financial markets is bad thinking. | |
| So if we just decide to be too afraid, well, we'll all go, you know, basically run off a cliff together. | |
| But it takes people like Naval, and I hope that my voice adds to this a little bit, to say this is temporary. | |
| Because it is. I would say the one thing that you could bet on with the greatest certainty of anything you've ever bet on is that it's temporary. | |
| Most things are. And so we'll be fine. | |
| Just keep your psychology strong. | |
| This is not the time to panic sell. | |
| And I find that a helpful message. | |
| So when people at that station tell you to relax, that means something. | |
| And that's helpful. So there was apparently a fascinating interaction last night on CNN where Don Lemon, Was interviewing John Kasich. | |
| Now, Kasich, of course, is no fan of President Trump, but he's a moderate Republican. | |
| And Lemon was trying to get John Kasich to say bad things about Trump's national address last night about the Wuhan virus. | |
| And Kasich wouldn't do it. | |
| Kasich basically said, yeah, it was pretty good. | |
| Yeah, it was 98% okay. | |
| He had to clarify a few things. | |
| Big deal. He was reading it from a teleprompter, so obviously he was prepared and all the right people saw it and everything. | |
| And I guess Don Lemon was flipping out because he couldn't get Kasich to say something bad about Trump in a crisis. | |
| Now, I don't think I've ever liked John Kasich better than last night. | |
| So much so that I thought if he had re-registered as a Democrat, I appreciate him a lot last night, just sticking up for the fact that the President's address And I'll give my own criticism, so I'm not agreeing with Kasich's view. | |
| I just appreciate the independence of it. | |
| The fact that he wasn't going to take a side during a crisis when he so easily could have criticized the president because he's criticized the president a lot. | |
| It's not like Kasich doesn't know how to criticize the president. | |
| He knows how. But he chose during this panic Not to nitpick on something that wasn't worth nitpicking on. | |
| So, good job, John Kasich. | |
| Appreciate the leadership. Here's a question for you. | |
| None of this is going to be in any particular good order today, but why don't we know more about ventilators? | |
| Here's my question for the news media. | |
| And I would actually like you, the news media, to send a reporter somewhere. | |
| Send somebody out and get a report on this. | |
| Who's making our ventilators? | |
| And how quickly are we ramping up? | |
| Why is that not the biggest story? | |
| Because it's the most crucial piece of equipment, the thing that will be most in demand if things crest the way we think they will. | |
| But who makes them? Do we even make them in the United States? | |
| Are they hard to make? | |
| If we wanted to suddenly go from making 100 a week to 10,000 a week, could we do it? | |
| I don't know. So, in World War II, One of the most amazing things was that the United States industry just sort of immediately transitioned into making tanks and war materials, etc., and did it pretty quickly. | |
| I don't know what quickly means in that context, but it was quick. | |
| So here's a question I ask you. | |
| How close are we In terms of the totality of technology, from robots to 3D printers to you name it. | |
| How close are we to spinning up a factory to make a product that's, let's say, robot run, starting from scratch? | |
| How quickly could we build, even if it's a temporary facility? | |
| You saw China build these entire hospitals, temporary hospitals, but they built them in like a week. | |
| What would it take for the United States, with all of its resources in an emergency, to spin up a robot manufacturing facility for ventilators? | |
| Because, you know, you could skip a lot of safety stuff, you know, it's a temporary building, it's an emergency, you just wave all the red tape out of the way. | |
| So if you got rid of all the red tape, What could the best engineers with unlimited resources of the federal government, highest priority working day and night, how fast could we do it? | |
| And why don't we have... | |
| Because somebody's doing it right now, right? | |
| I mean, somebody is making more ventilators, I think, right? | |
| Nobody's making new ventilators? | |
| I believe they are. | |
| And how about if you wanted people to help? | |
| Suppose it's an assembly line situation. | |
| Do you think you could find enough people to work on the assembly line temporarily to make these ventilators? | |
| Yeah, of course. Unlimited labor. | |
| You want labor to assemble ventilators? | |
| You got it. I'll do it. | |
| I'll volunteer tomorrow. | |
| I'll make you some ventilators. | |
| It's an emergency. Of course, you have all the labor you want. | |
| So you have all the money, all the labor, all the knowledge. | |
| How fast can we put them together, and why isn't the news showing us videos of the people who are actually doing that? | |
| A real curiosity about that, because it seems like the main... | |
| There might not be anything that's more important in the end. | |
| That's what's going to keep people alive, I think. | |
| All right. I was pretty disgusted watching the news last night. | |
| I don't know if this is the prednisone still talking. | |
| So here's one of those points where I have to catch myself and I say... | |
| Alright, is the next thing that comes out of my mouth, because I know what it is, you don't, is the next thing that comes out of my mouth, is that my normal personality? | |
| I don't really know. | |
| It doesn't feel like it. | |
| It feels a little more aggressive than normally I would be. | |
| But I'm going to do it anyway. | |
| I've been trying to figure out why there's so much loser think on social media. | |
| More than usual. And specifically around the Wuhan virus. | |
| At first I thought to myself, oh, it's just because I'm noticing it more, because there's a new topic for people to be dumb about, so I'm just tuned to it, so I'm just noticing it more. | |
| But there was a similarity to it that I kept saying to myself, why is there this weird similarity to the things people are saying that don't make sense? | |
| And unfortunately, I found the source. | |
| I found the mothership. | |
| And here's what I'm talking about. | |
| I keep seeing people comparing the Wuhan virus to regular flu death rates. | |
| And people will say, well, regular flu death rate is tens of thousands a year. | |
| The Wuhan virus has only killed a few relative to that. | |
| There you go. And every time somebody does that, I just say to myself, stop it! | |
| Stop it! | |
| The stupidity is drowning me! | |
| Stop comparing the wrong things. | |
| Who compares a problem which by its nature is going to be logarithmically, exponentially increasing, but it's just starting? | |
| Who compares that to something that's already run its full course? | |
| Well, not smart people. | |
| Smart people do not compare a regular virus that's already done a full year of killing people to something that just started. | |
| Because wouldn't you expect the regular flu would be a big number, because it's already done, and the new one has just started. | |
| Who compares those? Who is so fucking dumb to say that in public over and over again besides the President of the United States? | |
| Sorry. Sorry. | |
| The President did the same thing. | |
| I'm not going to give him a pass on that. | |
| And then I turned on TV last night to Fox News. | |
| And I'm watching Sean Hannity say that. | |
| And I thought to myself, well, Sean, you're a smart guy. | |
| You know, It's good context to say the regular flu kills this many. | |
| I think that's good to know. | |
| I'm happy that people are reporting that. | |
| But then he says, and the Wuhan flu has only killed this many. | |
| And then I'm waiting for Sean to say, but it's just starting, so you shouldn't compare something just starting to something that's already done. | |
| So I'm waiting for Sean to say that. | |
| And then he changes the topic. | |
| He keeps talking, and I'm like, oh, okay, well maybe he'll circle back to it. | |
| And then he doesn't. | |
| He doesn't. And I'm thinking, that's where this shit is coming from. | |
| That's where it's coming from. | |
| It's coming from Fox News. | |
| I read an article last night. | |
| Who was it? Was it Margaret Sullivan or something? | |
| Who said that it would save lives if... | |
| If Rupert Murdoch would bear down on Fox News and tell him to stop saying basically that. | |
| And when I read that, I thought, come on, you know, this is just inside baseball and, you know, it's not going to save lives if Fox News reports things differently. | |
| And then I watched Sean Hannity's show. | |
| And I thought, no, I agree with that. | |
| I agree with that. If Rupert Murdoch wants to be responsible during this crisis, he should talk to Sean Hannity and tell him to stop doing that. | |
| He should actually just say, look, I'm the boss. | |
| It's an emergency. | |
| Normally I don't bother you. | |
| You know, you do your show. | |
| That's our deal. It's not my opinion that's your show. | |
| It's your opinion, Sean Hannity. | |
| But stop comparing it to the flu and then stopping. | |
| It's fine to compare it to the normal flu and say, but people, we're just starting. | |
| So, you know, this new one is 10 times more dangerous. | |
| We think it could be far bigger than a regular flu. | |
| That would be great. | |
| But, Sean Hannity, I think you need to raise your game a little bit for the greater good. | |
| I'm not going to put this... | |
| Because it's an emergency, I don't like to be hard on people. | |
| I'd rather that I would coerce people to be on the same side. | |
| So, Sean Hannity, and by the way, I'm a huge... | |
| Admirer of Sean Hannity's skill stack. | |
| I think I've talked about that before. | |
| If you look at the number of skills that Sean Hannity puts together to do what he does, it's jaw-dropping. | |
| I mean, he has a lot of skills that fit together really well. | |
| But I don't think one of them is economics, as far as I know. | |
| I don't think it is. And economists and scientists are better at comparing things. | |
| And I think because it's a national emergency and people do need to take this seriously, I think that, Sean Hannity, I would like to ask you directly to... | |
| You can still make... Obviously, it's still helpful to say that normal flu kills a lot of people, but put it in context. | |
| Please. Please. | |
| I mean, it's an emergency. | |
| We need to have the best information out there we can. | |
| All right. So here's some other... | |
| We'll talk about the President's address in a minute. | |
| Well, actually, let me talk about it now. | |
| So, it's a political season, so it's impossible to separate the politics from any of this stuff, even though we should. | |
| Here was my take on the President's address. | |
| First of all, it was somber but low energy. | |
| I don't know. I heard a lot of people say they loved it because it was the right tone. | |
| It's very weird to watch Trump be low energy and read off a teleprompter, because you can tell he's not in his comfort zone. | |
| My take on it was it was fine, in terms of the presentation. | |
| It was fine. It wasn't great, and he's capable of being great. | |
| But fine was all we needed. | |
| We just needed to hear from the President. | |
| We needed to feel like he's in charge. | |
| Taking it seriously. He had all those notes. | |
| So I would say there was... | |
| I didn't see anything I would criticize in it, but it wasn't a home run or anything. | |
| It just was a good, solid presidential speech. | |
| But interestingly, he decided to close traffic to Europe. | |
| Air traffic. Now, here's the way I think you should look at Trump's... | |
| Performance. Because none of us are really good at evaluating presidents. | |
| We're not. We think we are. | |
| We all think we're geniuses at evaluating presidents, and I'm no different. | |
| But we're not good at it, and it's good to keep that in mind. | |
| One of the reasons that we're not good at it is we forget that the valid comparison would be this president and this situation. | |
| Versus a different president, but the same situation. | |
| And that can't be evaluated. | |
| Because there is no way to evaluate a different president in this same situation. | |
| It can't be done. So all you know is how one person did it, and then you imagine how it could have been done differently, and you end up comparing your imagination of how it could have been done differently to what was actually done. | |
| And that's not a valid comparison. | |
| Because your imagination is not some kind of standard to which all things can be compared. | |
| That said, here's a useful way to break out your opinion. | |
| There aren't that many parts of this emergency that the President actually does. | |
| The President is one of the least important people in the emergency. | |
| I know that's weird, but he's actually bordering on irrelevant. | |
| And when I say that, that assumes he does the right things. | |
| The small things he does are right. | |
| So he needs to focus the country's attention... | |
| Done. I'd say 100% effective. | |
| He needed to do the things that only a president can do, such as closing the traffic from China and now closing it from Europe. | |
| I would say that he did those aggressively and decisively, and I give him an A for full grades for doing the things a president can do, specifically just the president's job. | |
| Then he asked for $2.5 billion. | |
| Congress said it's going to be closer to $8.5. | |
| He said, that's fine, I'll take it. | |
| You could argue he should have asked for the $8.5 first. | |
| But I don't take... | |
| That's just small ball. | |
| In the real world, if you've ever done anything important in the real world, a situation like this is not aim, fire, hit the target. | |
| That's not the world we're in. | |
| We're in the world of aiming wildly in the general direction because it's an emergency. | |
| You shoot, you see how far off you were, you adjust. | |
| So the world we're in is a take a shot, adjust, take a shot, adjust, adjust, adjust, adjust. | |
| It's an adjustment world. | |
| It's not a laser-focused hit-the-target world. | |
| And so when I see the President ask for $2.5 billion, but then Congress says, no, we're smarter, it's $8.5 billion, Nine and a half, whatever it is. | |
| You know, let's adjust. Happened quickly. | |
| Happened without any friction, right? | |
| There was no friction to the adjustment. | |
| So as long as you're seeing people take a shot and then adjust quickly, that's everything you can hope for. | |
| That's your government working exactly the way you want it to. | |
| Adjust, adjust, adjust. | |
| So the things that the president can do, I think he nailed it. | |
| Like the decisions the president does. | |
| He put the money there, he got the right person, gave it the right attention, did the presidential address, closed the airports early. | |
| Those are all the things he can do. | |
| Beyond that, his messaging, I thought, was poor, but also irrelevant. | |
| Because as long as he's willing to say, blah, blah, blah, here's what I think, now let's listen to my expert. | |
| And I think it's entirely obvious that Dr. | |
| Fauci... Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that the experts that the president has chosen are strong personalities who understand the nature of the threat. | |
| I believe Dr. | |
| Fauci, and probably the others, would stand right next to the president in public and contradict him. | |
| Because they have, right? | |
| Now, would a plain political person contradict the president if they were on the same party while standing in front of him in public? | |
| Well, not so readily. | |
| You know, a lot less likely. | |
| But I think these professionals are different cats. | |
| When you listen to Fauci speak, there's nothing political there. | |
| There is nothing. | |
| Nothing. And that's hard to do. | |
| I mean, he is so... | |
| Fauci is so clear of political, even vibration, that I put a lot of credit in that guy. | |
| So I have complete trust that the experts are telling the president what needs to be told, doing the things that need to be done, and when they do it wrong, they're adjusting. | |
| So one of the things that was wrong was the test kits. | |
| How much? I don't know what the details were, but the early testing stuff was too little, didn't work, too late, whatever. | |
| So there are questions to be answered there, but Was the President of the United States aware that we didn't have enough test kits? | |
| Well, no, but of course the buck stops at the top. | |
| So they're adjusting. | |
| But here too, the same story I said with the ventilators, we should know about the test kits. | |
| I'd love to see the news reports actually standing in the factory floor Watching the people try to scramble to make more test kits than they've ever made before. | |
| I want to see that process. | |
| Maybe there's something we could add to it. | |
| Do they need labor? | |
| Do they need funds? Do they need expertise? | |
| Do they need me to call somebody who can make something happen faster? | |
| I'd help. Anyway, so I thought the President's presentation was adequate. | |
| Hit all the notes. Any complaining about it would not be substantial. | |
| So I think we're on the right track. | |
| And I agree with Naval that the beauty of this problem is that it has a timer on it. | |
| We know with a very high degree of certainty, because of the Chinese and South Korean experiences, we know that we can get a hold of this. | |
| We know it'll be hard, but we know we can do it. | |
| So let's treat it like a short-term thing that it is. | |
| I saw Mike Sertovich noted that if everybody starts doing online education, if the colleges stay closed for a while, or maybe even the schools, the lower schools, people might find out that they like online education better. | |
| And they might. | |
| That's definitely a possibility. | |
| You have some other unintended consequences that are starting to form. | |
| One is that I think telemedicine might have a resurgence. | |
| It's already growing, but I think telemedicine will get a big boost. | |
| So you'll see that. | |
| And I think you'll see online shopping for groceries just become a thing. | |
| I just tweeted, I think I tweeted it or liked it, I forget, a story that broke my heart. | |
| Today, so I'm going to tell you to break your heart. | |
| It was a woman who was tweeting, who was telling the story, a young woman. | |
| She was in the parking lot of her grocery store, and she heard somebody yelling from inside a car. | |
| It was two elderly people who were inside the car. | |
| They cracked the window open, and apparently they'd been sitting in their car for 45 minutes trying to yell to a passersby. | |
| That they were afraid to get out of their car and go in public to shop for groceries. | |
| They didn't have food. | |
| And they were yelling to people to help them. | |
| Apparently they didn't have much of a social family support system. | |
| So these two elderly people went there and sat in their car and yelled through a crack in the window. | |
| And finally this woman said she'd buy them some groceries so they put out some money and a shopping list. | |
| And so she shopped for some things and put them in her trunk. | |
| Now, there might be a lot more of that going on. | |
| There might be a lot more seniors who are panicked and don't have the capacity to get through this the best way. | |
| So I would say if you know anybody in that over 70 age group, you might want to check up on them. | |
| And one way to help them might be to set up some online grocery shopping. | |
| And maybe you have to do it for them, but just have their address and their credit card on it so the food will be delivered to them directly. | |
| So I don't know how to help the old people in your life, but put some work into it. | |
| So figure out who is your most vulnerable person in your circle, and then figure out what you can do to help them. | |
| This Wuhan virus is not a spectator sport, as I say. | |
| This is all of us. | |
| This is all of us doing different things. | |
| And you're going to have to help out with some elderly people. | |
| Tom Hanks and his wife apparently have the coronavirus. | |
| They're in Australia doing a movie, and it's reported that they have it. | |
| Their symptoms are mild. | |
| But here's the thing that got me a little close to home. | |
| So Tom Hanks is 63 years old, and reportedly... | |
| Somebody will have to confirm this. | |
| He has type 2 diabetes. | |
| Is that true? And that's one of the top risk factors. | |
| So he's over 60. | |
| That's a risk factor. And he has a special condition. | |
| I'm sure it's well treated and monitored. | |
| And he would have, you know, obviously the finest health care. | |
| But here's why this scares me in particular. | |
| I'm going to be 63, his exact age. | |
| And I also have... | |
| A risk condition, in my case, asthma. | |
| And so I'm watching Tom Hanks like he's the canary in the coal mine for me. | |
| So if Tom Hanks survives, and he's still alive in a month, I'm going to feel a lot better about myself. | |
| Selfishly speaking, I'm sort of using him as my surrogate. | |
| If he survives the coronavirus, I'm pretty sure I can. | |
| Because, you know, he's a very healthy 63. | |
| I'm a very healthy 63, except for that one issue. | |
| Now, of course, my problem is a lung problem, so I probably have higher risk. | |
| If we are checking our prediction models, I would like to check mine for you. | |
| Number one, did you see the video of Kamala Harris and Joe Biden together, in which they They pretend they're doing an endorsement and Kamala says she's endorsing Biden. | |
| And then they do a staged, artificial conversation after the director yells cut, in which Kamala talks about her, I guess her supporters are called the K-Hive, for Kamala, K-Hive. | |
| And Joe Biden talks directly to them in hopes that they will support him in his campaign. | |
| But the actual most interesting part of the little video, because we know that the Democrats are lining up behind Biden, so that's not surprising. | |
| But the part of the video that is most interesting is their chemistry. | |
| Watch the, if you have a chance, watch it or watch it again. | |
| Watch the chemistry between Kamala Harris and Joe Biden. | |
| It's really good. It's actually really good. | |
| To me, anyway. I mean... | |
| I suppose I could be fooled by it. | |
| But from an observer's perspective, they look actually like a good pair, like they have some genuine affection, and apparently the backstory is that they do, because Kamala was apparently very close with Beau Biden, and therefore Joe Biden. | |
| So I think Kamala's going to be it. | |
| Best prediction I ever made, because as vice president, she would be effectively the presidential candidate. | |
| But here's another one. | |
| So I think it was fact checking me on this, but I think I'm right on this. | |
| It was January 28th that President Trump called for the ban on travel to China. | |
| January 28th. | |
| On January 24th, most of you watched me go absolutely crazy on Periscope yelling that we should close the borders. | |
| So that's a four-day difference. | |
| So January 24th, I was aggressively calling for the Chinese travel to stop. | |
| And when I said it, I don't know if anybody else had. | |
| Somebody says, Wow, Scott, you love that Harris lady, don't you? | |
| Apparently you're new here. | |
| Nobody has criticized Kabla Harris more than I have. | |
| But that doesn't change the fact that demographically she's a good fit for the ticket, and it doesn't change the fact that she has really good chemistry with Joe Biden. | |
| Honestly, let's look at it this way. | |
| If you assume that Joe Biden It has some declining mental situation there. | |
| Who do you want as the vice president? | |
| Do you want somebody that he picked who's just some governor that he doesn't have any connection with, that just fits well within the ticket, but wouldn't have any special connection to him? | |
| That would be kind of dangerous, wouldn't it? | |
| Because if the risk that you're looking at is that Joe Biden might be not fully able to complete a term as president, you want that vice president to not just be capable of taking over the job, but you want them to have a really good connection with the boss. | |
| Because that's a delicate conversation. | |
| And it might not be a case of where a medical doctor says, okay, I'm calling it, I'm a medical doctor. | |
| We need to replace the president. | |
| I don't know if you wait for that. | |
| You want somebody who's close enough to the president to say in a private conversation, you know, Joe, you saw what you did yesterday. | |
| I'm worried about it. | |
| I think we ought to have a serious conversation about this. | |
| I think Kamala Harris might be close enough to him personally that she could have that conversation. | |
| I don't know if a governor could, just some random vice president he picks because it fits good on the ticket. | |
| So I think she's a guarantee. | |
| Anyway, so what I'm going to say about, I called for the travel ban on January 24th. | |
| The president did it on the 28th. | |
| He's being praised for doing it early. | |
| I would like to add this to my correct predictions, even though it wasn't in the form of a prediction. | |
| Because I don't know if anybody in the country said it before I did. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Can anybody confirm that for me? | |
| Was there any public person? | |
| I'm sure there were private individuals, plenty of them. | |
| But was anybody in public calling for the Chinese travel to be shut down completely before I did on January 24th? | |
| Let me know. Because I like to feel like I was a constructive voice in that. | |
| But there's no way to really know. | |
| Alright. Let's see. | |
| How's the social distancing coming for all of you? | |
| I just want to... | |
| I sort of track my social distancing, you know, put numbers on it. | |
| I'm doing it in my mind. I'm not keeping a spreadsheet. | |
| But yesterday, for example, I shook zero hands, and I was in zero crowds, and the only person I touched was Christina. | |
| So, I'm doing okay. | |
| I've not stood. | |
| And by the way, have you noticed that everybody in public is squirrely? | |
| Have you noticed that? | |
| Somebody says, shut TF up. | |
| Kamala sucks, and everyone knows that. | |
| Maybe some of you are new, but on this Periscope, we're allowed to say that somebody does things well, but also does some other things not well. | |
| If you can't handle that, you're on the wrong Periscope. | |
| The minimum requirement for being able to watch this Periscope is that you have to be able to say that people are not all bad or all good, and groups are not all bad or all good. | |
| Well, okay, there's probably some groups that are all bad. | |
| But we don't talk about them too much. | |
| So, you know, try to improve your game so that you can accept that people could be good at things and bad at other things. | |
| It's a thing. It really is. | |
| NBA got cancelled. | |
| All the rallies are cancelled. | |
| Remember I told you yesterday that the president should have gone first. | |
| Because whoever goes first just looks like they're the smart one. | |
| Because you know it's all going to happen. | |
| Might as well go first. The weirdest, just the weirdest story about this NBA cancellation is that the, so there was one player, Gobert, G-O-B-E-R-T, or is it Gobert? | |
| Gobert. This, again, makes me feel like this simulation is winking at me. | |
| The guy who's in this story has Bert as the last part of his name, Gobert. | |
| Anyway, so he's a basketball player, and prior to being tested and finding out that he is the first NBA player confirmed to have the coronavirus, prior to testing, this is the funny part, Before he was testing, he's giving one of these little pressers where each of the players come out by themselves and talk to the press. | |
| And he jokingly stands up and makes a joke about the coronavirus. | |
| And then in front of the cameras, he jokingly touches all the microphones at all the places like he's joking that he's going to spread the coronavirus to whoever comes next to the microphone. | |
| He did that on camera. | |
| Joking. And at the time he did it, he didn't know he would be the first person tested to actually have coronavirus. | |
| What is happening? | |
| Is the simulation, is it just screaming at us to know that this is made up? | |
| I mean, does that seem real? | |
| Was there one other basketball player that we could find video footage, video meaning that you actually see it, In which they were joking about having the coronavirus? | |
| Was there even one other player anywhere in the professional athlete world? | |
| The only one who joked about it on camera is also the first one to be confirmed to have it? | |
| What's happening? | |
| How is that even possible? | |
| Somebody says he's pronounced Gobert, which sounds correct. | |
| All right. So I think the world of large social gatherings, I can see two things happening. | |
| I had always predicted that large gatherings would have to be cancelled, at least outdoor gatherings, because of drones and terrorists. | |
| It just seemed like that was obvious. | |
| But maybe the other reason will be pandemics. | |
| And by the way, it's officially a pandemic which changes nothing. | |
| Let's talk about The worst forms of loser think I'm seeing here. | |
| I mentioned one. And I'm just going to run through this list. | |
| You've heard some of this, but it's worth reminding you. | |
| Because you're going to see so much of it. | |
| One is that people are comparing Italy, who's having all kinds of trouble with their hospitals. | |
| Their hospitals are overloaded with Wuhan virus patients. | |
| And People are saying, but don't worry about that, Scott, because that's Italy. | |
| You know, Italy is not the United States. | |
| We're not going to have that kind of problem. | |
| They just have, you know, whatever lesser healthcare services or whatever. | |
| Now, that's loser-thick, and here's why. | |
| You do not compare, or you should not, rationally, compare the Italian situation right now to any future American situation. | |
| The accurate... A useful comparison is Italy now with the coronavirus versus Italy with a normal virus. | |
| In other years, with just the normal flu, have their medical facilities ever been overrun? | |
| And the answer is no. | |
| So that's why you need to know that this virus is not like other viruses. | |
| Don't feel that you're safe because that's only going to happen to some country that has less resources or something. | |
| Because even in the top hospitals, the really high-end hospitals in Italy, they're still having the same problem. | |
| It has nothing to do with the quality of the medical care or anything. | |
| It's just a bad flu. | |
| So, the first loser to think is comparing other countries to us. | |
| You should only compare those other countries to themselves in the past with the regular flu. | |
| That's your best comparison. Now, other people say, Scott, Scott, Scott, if you think this flu is bad... | |
| Explain to me why South Korea has already got, apparently, control on it, so their number of new cases was declining. | |
| To which I say, that's the exception that proved the rule. | |
| South Korea did what nobody else could do, just massive testing and social distancing and fast acting and, you know, just really dramatic changes very quickly. | |
| And it worked. | |
| Apparently. Or at least it worked in the sense of slowing it down. | |
| I don't think we're going to eradicate it right away. | |
| But what you should learn from that is if you take drastic action, you can slow it down. | |
| That shouldn't tell you anything about what's happening in Italy, because they didn't do that. | |
| It's just a different situation. | |
| And of course, don't compare the regular flu to this flu, because the regular flu has already run its course. | |
| We know its full numbers. | |
| This one's just starting, and the risk is that it ramps up faster than those other ones. | |
| So understand the difference. | |
| So those are the main things. | |
| Alright. Here's some more loser-think in the form of analogy. | |
| This is from Actor Kumail Nanjiani. | |
| I think he's the actor on Silicon Valley, if I'm correct. | |
| He might be a stand-up comedian, too. | |
| I'm not sure what he does. Anyway, he offers this analogy about closing the flights to Europe, from Europe. | |
| He says, trying to fight the coronavirus by limiting travel between Europe and the U.S. is like trying to clean a coffee spill by washing the coffee cup. | |
| So it's actually a clever analogy. | |
| So in terms of cleverness, it's an A+. And it's basically a version of closing the barn door after the horse got out. | |
| So he's basically just saying it's too late. | |
| To which I say, what? | |
| What is wrong with your brain? | |
| If there's a new virus coming in from Europe... | |
| All the time. It's never too late. | |
| It can't be too late if new virus is coming into the country and it's not already here in the same amount or worse. | |
| So, using an analogy of a coffee cup is so non-rational, non-thinking craziness. | |
| Now, what are the odds? | |
| I didn't look at his biography, but what are the odds that Kumail Nanjiani, who's an actor by profession. | |
| What are the odds that he also has a background in science or STEM or economics? | |
| Probably low. You know, unless he just thought it was funny, I suppose. | |
| And he knew it wasn't logical, but it was funny. | |
| Can't rule that out. Here's another one. | |
| Another opinion. And the funny part is who it comes from. | |
| So I'll tell you the opinion first, and then I'll tell you who it comes from. | |
| Okay? So that's the fun part. | |
| Alright, so this is from a tweet. | |
| It says, we're weeks past the point when suspending travel from Europe could have even remotely been seen as a strong measure to prevent coronavirus spread. | |
| And then the tweet goes on, this is Stephen Miller orchestrated xenophobic sleight of hand. | |
| So that the real clever plan here is xenophobia. | |
| And the tweet goes on, we need solutions for the crisis we're facing at home right now. | |
| Alright, so this is somebody who thinks we're weeks past the point when suspending travel from Europe would have been seen as a strong measure. | |
| What? I'm pretty sure everybody who was surprised by it last night thought it was a pretty strong measure. | |
| What would be a stronger measure than closing travel from Europe? | |
| Which, by the way, a lot of Europeans are white. | |
| Just saying. Just saying. | |
| Doesn't seem so racist. | |
| So this is one of the dumbest, if I'm being honest, this is one of the dumbest Lowest level of thinking and awareness I could ever see. | |
| You've got this ongoing flow of problems, and the president stopped it before anybody even thought it was on the table, and this guy says it should have happened sooner, which is literally a chapter in my book, Loser Think. | |
| If you look back on that shelf, Well, maybe it's not there anymore. | |
| Oh, there it is. It's this one. | |
| It's called Loser Think. | |
| You can't see it because of the light. | |
| But there's actually a section in there where I'm talking about exactly this. | |
| All right. We're talking about exactly the fact that you can always say that something should have been sooner. | |
| So that's actually a chapter in a book called Loser Think about bad ways of thinking is that no matter what you do and how good it is, somebody's going to say you should have done this sooner. | |
| Right? Because you can always do it sooner. | |
| There's no exception To you should have done it sooner. | |
| In the real world, I mean, hypothetically there could be, you know, in a technical sense. | |
| But in the real world, there's never an exception. | |
| You always could have done it sooner. | |
| So that's the dumbest complaint, because it's just universally true. | |
| So who is this guy who makes the dumbest point in public Without knowing it's so dumb you should not say this sort of thing in public. | |
| What kind of job would this guy have in which he's so dumb? | |
| And so I checked his profile and he was the communication and strategy for campaigns and candidates and he was the former national press secretary for Kamala Harris. | |
| That's right. The guy... | |
| The guy who was part of the campaign that I had identified months ago as the worst, really the worst campaign I've ever seen, he was on that campaign. | |
| And sure enough, I had identified him as extra stupid from his tweet, and then I looked to see where he works, and I find that I had already identified him. | |
| That campaign is extra incompetent. | |
| Coincidence? I don't know. | |
| Yeah, his name is Ian Sams. | |
| Not that that matters. Alright. | |
| I think that's about what's going on. | |
| I don't know what's happening with this Kamala Harris thing. | |
| It's sort of weird. | |
| Because I feel like I'll say ABC, and then I'll watch right in front of me, and people will say, Scott, why are you saying XYZ? | |
| And I'll say, well, I'm not. | |
| I just said ABC, and I reject XYZ. | |
| And then within five seconds, somebody will say, but why do you love XYZ? | |
| And I'll say, what's happening? | |
| What's happening? | |
| No, my view on Kamala Harris is that she's likely to be the Vice President. | |
| I don't think she is my first choice for anything. | |
| But there you have it. | |
| She's got some skills and she's got lots of issues that she needs to improve. | |
| Why can't I say that? | |
| What's wrong with that? Let me say... | |
| So I'm seeing somebody in the comments. | |
| I think it was James Woods who tried to nickname Kamala Harris as Heels Up because she has some history of a relationship with Willie Brown, a politician in California that helped her career. | |
| Both Willie Brown and she admit that's true. | |
| And for me, that's the end of the story. | |
| Once all the people who were involved said, yeah, that's kind of true. | |
| That's true. Aren't we done? | |
| I mean, once you get people to say, yeah, that's totally true. | |
| Yeah, my relationship, yeah, that helped. | |
| That helped my campaign. Aren't we done? | |
| What else is there to say about that? | |
| Blaming people for things that they acknowledge is a true statement of fact should be the end of the story. | |
| Should be the end of the conversation. | |
| I think I'm going to start blocking people Who say Scott has a crush on AOC. I saw that go by in the comments. | |
| I'll give you one day of amnesty. | |
| But after today, you will be blocked for dumbness. | |
| For accusing me of being in love with some female politician just because they're part of the conversation. | |
| We can be a little better than that. | |
| So we'll just block you going forward. | |
| Bitcoin. Bitcoin just fell off the cliff this morning, right? | |
| But you have to check it every five minutes. | |
| Good lord. Holy hell. | |
| The stock market's really taking a dump. | |
| Bitcoin is down to seven. | |
| I'm sorry, it's not down to 7%. | |
| I'm looking at a fund, so that has a different pricing. | |
| But it's down 19% today, so it looks like it's down to a new low. | |
| Twitter, down 9%. | |
| Amazon, down 4%. | |
| Wow. | |
| Now, all of that, I would refer you back to Naval's comment. | |
| This is no time for panic selling, but it looks like a lot of people are doing panic selling. | |
| Somebody's testing me by saying Scott has a crush on AOC, and your test was successful. | |
| You got blocked. You love her? | |
| Block. A lot of people want to get blocked today. | |
| I don't know why. | |
| Somebody says, you said you never mentioned racist AOC, but that was a lie. | |
| Did I ever say that? | |
| If I did, I didn't mean it. | |
| Did you see Pence's interview? | |
| I did not. Dow is down 2,000. | |
| Yeah, you know, I just wouldn't worry about the stock market, honestly, because it's going to do what it's going to do, and your share of stuff will be the same. | |
| Alright, slaughter meter. | |
| Well, the slaughter meter is in a state of flux right now. | |
| You know, if the election were held today, it would be a total slaughter, and the president would win gigantically. | |
| But there's so much happening with the coronavirus, and you know this is going to be a frothy year. | |
| Whatever problems we have, we're going to have new ones in the summer. | |
| It's just that kind of year. | |
| So nothing's predictable anymore, but if the election were held today, President Trump would win in a slaughter. | |
| Somebody says, hope you took your money out. | |
| I don't do that. So market timing is not something I do. | |
| So if you're doing market timing, good luck. | |
| Some of you win, some of you will get wiped out. | |
| It's just not my thing. | |
| Somebody says, "You need to go to my interface@winhubprofile." Yeah. Blocker's gonna block. | |
| Alright, we're just looking at your comments. | |
| You know, if you don't follow Mark Schneider on Twitter, you really should, because there's all kinds of stuff happening in the nuclear energy field. | |
| And you could argue it's the biggest news in the world that doesn't get covered. | |
| Because what could be more important to the future of civilization? | |
| What could be more important Then developing these new miniature nuclear power plants and we've got free, safe, clean energy that solves any risks that you might imagine from climate change, etc. | |
| It's like the biggest story and almost every day there's a new story about something got funded, something's going into a test site, the government approved something. | |
| There's a ton of stuff happening in the nuclear energy field But I think all of it is in the getting ready for stuff, you know, kind of domain, so that when stuff starts getting online, it's going to happen really quickly. | |
| So in other words, there's a point where you're not going to see anything tangible, but there's just a ton of activity, and that's what we're in right now, for nuclear power. | |
| But you're not going to see the plants for, I don't know, maybe in five years people will start showing you pictures of the nearly completed plant and stuff. | |
| But it's going to happen quickly when it happens. | |
| It's just not happening yet. One of the weird things about this economy is that not everybody is going to be affected. | |
| There will be businesses that just do better. | |
| I've been trying to game it out in my head, like what's likely to happen, because we've never seen a situation where everybody stopped traveling for three months. | |
| I don't think we've seen that situation. | |
| So we're all just guessing what happens. | |
| Now one thing that happens is a bunch of people save their money. | |
| So for everybody who loses a paycheck, and I hope we can figure out something to do about that, because that's a pretty big problem. | |
| A real big problem. | |
| But for everybody who loses a paycheck, for every small business that loses customers, and there will be a lot of them, I feel as though there are maybe an equal number of people Who still get their paycheck, just like always, even if their employer is not doing so well. | |
| They're not losing money yet, so they'll still get their paycheck, and they won't be spending as much. | |
| So you have this weird situation where there's a whole bunch of people who just by luck were not affected. | |
| They get their paycheck and they don't spend as much. | |
| So they're building up their little savings account while other people are suffering. | |
| What happens the day things... | |
| Let's say when things go back to normal, what happens with the people who have extra money? | |
| Do they spend it extra fast or does it become part of their permanent savings? | |
| If the people who actually gained money during this... | |
| And I might be one of them, by the way. | |
| So I'm a perfect example. | |
| As far as I know, at least in the short run, my income will be roughly the same. | |
| Because, you know, at least for the next three months, everything was sort of in the pipeline. | |
| Most newspapers will still be in business and all that. | |
| So, at the end of three months, I will have saved a bunch of money that I normally would have spent. | |
| I would have traveled, I might have bought more stuff, I would have gone out more, I would have gone out to restaurants more. | |
| What happens to that money? | |
| Now, in my case, maybe I have enough money so it doesn't make any difference in the world, but it could be half of the country has extra spending that's pent up, and they've been locked in their houses for three months. | |
| You might see an outpouring of spending like we've never seen before just because it's possible. | |
| The people who are living paycheck to paycheck, let's say as a server for a restaurant, they weren't going on big, expensive vacations anyway. | |
| So for them, the job is to survive, to buy the basics. | |
| But there are a lot of people who are going to have some extra cash and are going to spend like crazy when Unless they just put it into the stock market, which is also possible. | |
| Oh, by the way, all that cash that came out of the market, that's got to go somewhere, right? | |
| People don't sit on cash in the long run. | |
| It's not a thing. Nobody does it. | |
| It won't happen. So all of that, like trillions and trillions of dollars that just people took out of the market, they parked it somewhere. | |
| Where's it going? It doesn't disappear. | |
| It just moved. And as long as it's still there, it's going to move back when it needs to. | |
| So, here's the long story short, that you're going to see a recovery that happens so fast it'll make your head snap. | |
| So anybody who's not in the market when the turnaround happens, because it's probably going to be like, you know, just two or three days, the whole world is going to say, well, it's back, it's back, it's back, get in, get in, get in, get in. | |
| So when it turns back up, You're going to miss a lot of gain as it goes up. | |
| So, it's not a time I would be out of the market, but I'm not giving you financial advice. | |
| That's all I got for now. Oh, I'm over time. | |
| Let's go back to our day. |