My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a Content: Test kits...how many do we need and when will we have them? Decisions in the face of extreme uncertainty We need IQ tests, not blood tests...for coronavirus Nancy Pelosi's weak cover-story Joe Biden disappears for several days --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scott-adams00/support
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| Well, it's time for Coffee with Scott Adams. | |
| And that means it's time to crank up the studio. | |
| We've got the studio lights on. | |
| The windows are going down. | |
| So cold in here today I can see my breath. | |
| Well, happy 420, everybody. | |
| Welcome to the best coffee with Scott Adams of all time! | |
| No, seriously, this will be the best one. | |
| You can judge it for yourself, but I think you'll agree by the end. | |
| Now, many of you have gotten primed for the day. | |
| Guess who isn't commuting today? | |
| You aren't. No, you're not commuting today. | |
| Do you know what you can do today? | |
| Finally, you can enjoy the holiday the way it was intended. | |
| Yeah, by starting off with Coffee with Scott Adams. | |
| And all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or chalice or stine, a canteen jug or flask, a bong, a vessel of any kind. | |
| Fill it with your favorite liquid. | |
| I like coffee. Join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine hit of the day. | |
| Well, Maybe the second dopamine hit of the day. | |
| It's called the simultaneous sip. | |
| And it happens now. | |
| Sublime. | |
| Well, should we talk about all the things? | |
| Oh, somebody's nephew is born today. | |
| Congratulations. I don't know if that's good or bad, to be born on 420 in the middle of a pandemic, sort of. | |
| Little this, little that. | |
| Kind of good, kind of not. | |
| All right, here are some things that are happening today. | |
| I understand that in this pandemic, one of the biggest problems is we don't have enough tests. | |
| And I'm talking about IQ tests, because what we really need is to IQ test everybody in the country, just so we know who to listen to. | |
| Because I get on Twitter every day and I feel like I'm listening to a lot of dumb people. | |
| Wouldn't it be good to have a filter on Twitter just during the emergencies? | |
| Because I like to hear the dumb people for entertainment on normal days. | |
| But during the pandemics and other emergencies, I'd like at least the option of filtering them off. | |
| So wouldn't you like a filter that you could dial it to whatever IQ you're willing to listen to? | |
| And I think during the pandemic, I'm not really willing to listen to an opinion from anybody under, let's say, IQ of 130-ish. | |
| Now, I realize these tests are not totally accurate. | |
| You know, you could get a false positive from Jim Acosta, for example. | |
| So I'm not saying it's 100% accurate IQ tests, but until we have enough IQ tests to get everybody tested, I don't see how we can go back to work. | |
| Because without knowing who the stupid people are, how do I know whose advice to take? | |
| Should I wear a mask? | |
| Should I not wear a mask? | |
| Kind of depends who tells you. | |
| They have to, of course, subtract from the smart people anybody who has a financial interest. | |
| So I'm sure that the director of the World Health Organization, If you were to give him an IQ test, I'll bet he'd do great. | |
| He'd probably score really high. | |
| But you have to take him out of the sample size because he has a potential financial interest. | |
| Alright, so speaking of testing, I've reached the end of my patience in not getting useful information from my government. | |
| And Tell me if this is off base. | |
| But I think the public can listen to its government, even when the government maybe doesn't have full constitutional authority in an area. | |
| Maybe it's just a guideline. | |
| I think it's a real good idea to listen to your government and take their advice, if you assume that they have your best interest, and they do, and that they're on top of it. | |
| But your government has a responsibility to be credible. | |
| They have to act in a way that the public can say, oh, you know, maybe you don't get everything right. | |
| You know, we get that you can't see the future. | |
| We get that you're working with estimates. | |
| But, you know, you're generally doing what looks like a credible job. | |
| You know, nobody else is really doing much better, except maybe by luck, or they have different demographics. | |
| So it looks like, okay, it looks like you're doing your job. | |
| You care about the citizens? | |
| Alright, that's good enough. What you ask us to do, even if it's hard, I'm willing to do it. | |
| Because you've established yourself as a credible leadership entity. | |
| Is that what we have today? | |
| You know, I'm willing to put up with a little bit of fog of war early on in a problem. | |
| But as of today, do you think that Mike Pence should not be able to tell you How many tests we have? | |
| Who has them? | |
| How many are in the pipeline? | |
| And how many do we really need before we have whatever we decide is enough to get back to work? | |
| Do you think we'll have any information like that today? | |
| I'm going to predict, and I know I'm going out on a limb here, I'm going to predict that we will not hear the most important piece of data In the world, right? | |
| The most important piece of data in the world, period. | |
| Most important data in the world is probably not that hard to get, at least in estimate form. | |
| The government surely knows who makes the test kits by now. | |
| They surely are in contact with them. | |
| They can surely ask, how many have you produced? | |
| How many do you have in the pipeline? | |
| How many can you produce this month? | |
| Surely that can be obtained. | |
| If your government does not present that information to you today, even in estimate form, it could be wrong. | |
| It could be wrong because we don't ask perfection. | |
| If you're asking for perfection in this fog of war, emergency, nobody's ever been here before, well, that's just unrealistic. | |
| That would be a child's view. | |
| It would be a child's view that your government is going to do everything right and also do it As soon as it could be done and better than all the other governments in a brand new emergency that nobody's seen before and nobody really had the right information. | |
| It's not reasonable. But here's what is reasonable. | |
| On April 20th, many weeks into this, knowing that having enough test kits is really going to be the whole game, right? | |
| Because you can't really do anything else without that base information. | |
| And we don't even have the base information of whether the kits are available or in what quantities. | |
| So, let me give my government a failing grade, F. That's not to say they haven't done a bunch of things correctly. | |
| I'm strongly in the camp of agreeing with Trump that closing down travel from at least Wuhan early was a very strong sign that this is a big deal. | |
| There's no way you can interpret an unprecedented closing of air traffic from a major superpower. | |
| You can't interpret that as he didn't think it was important. | |
| There's no way you can go back in time and say he closed travel from China to China. | |
| Without thinking that there was a big emergency? | |
| You can't reasonably think that. | |
| Now, you can certainly look at his language and say, we wish he had said it was more of a problem early on. | |
| But you also have to understand that it is President Trump. | |
| He's going to put the positive spin on everything, even if he's acting, even if his actions are proving that it's a big problem. | |
| And they did. He did what needed to be done there. | |
| Now, lots of people are saying, and I think this is a fair criticism of the government, just of the government in general, that we didn't have the ability to quickly ramp up testing. | |
| I don't think it's a criticism that we didn't have a test for a virus that didn't exist yet. | |
| I mean, that's not a fair criticism. | |
| But shouldn't we have had at least some kind of a quick ramp-up plan for testing in general? | |
| It looks like we did not. | |
| So you'd have to say that one major part of the Trump administration's responsibility, which is to have a reasonable plan for a pandemic, that doesn't mean having enough test kits. | |
| That means having a plan for quickly having enough, which is different. | |
| And I think it's fair to say we didn't have that, right? | |
| Have you heard anybody say that we had any kind of a plan for quickly ramping up testing? | |
| If we didn't, Then I would say the government is in complete failure on that topic. | |
| Now, do you say that that is therefore President Trump's failure? | |
| Well, the buck has to stop the top, so yes, yes in the sense that everything is the boss's problem. | |
| But, if we dig down a level, do you think that there was ever a meeting in which somebody in the CDC said to President Trump... | |
| You know, the only way we can really be ready in case of a pandemic... | |
| And by the way, these pandemics are almost guaranteed. | |
| It's not like we even have to worry if we'll have one. | |
| Pretty much guaranteed. | |
| Would you like to fund the preparations... | |
| To be able to quickly ramp up testing should we have a pandemic. | |
| Do you think that conversation ever happened? | |
| And do you think the president said, no, no, I don't think that's worth any money. | |
| I'm not going to get behind that. | |
| I don't think that happened. | |
| So if we could be adults for a moment, it's very unlikely that President Trump ever even was presented with a decision about how to prepare the country in case of there was a pandemic. | |
| I'll bet he never even had that meeting. | |
| Now you could argue That he should have called that meeting. | |
| And I think that would be a fair point. | |
| But just look at the entire context. | |
| I will go further and say that if we don't hear more about testing, and today, really, because there's no reason not to hear it today. | |
| I mean, even if Pence came out and said, I know how important it is to give you visibility on testing, We're about 80% of the way to adding it up and giving it to you. | |
| I'll give it to you tomorrow. | |
| That would be good enough. | |
| That would show that they have some sense of how important that is to be not only important, they know it's important, but important to communicate it. | |
| If we're in the midst of a pandemic and there's protests in the street and we don't know exactly when we can reopen the economy, I've said this before, that if we don't have at least a target date for each area that they can rely on, as opposed to, if you meet these conditions, you can go back to work. | |
| If you meet these conditions, it comes with a condition of its own. | |
| You have to have test kits that you don't have. | |
| So the government has created a situation and presented it to the public like this. | |
| Here are the guidelines to get back to work. | |
| By the way, it's not possible to achieve them. | |
| That's what happened, right? | |
| Am I wrong? Because you would need a certain amount of testing to be able to achieve it, and we have no information that would suggest we will ever have that. | |
| Ever. Right? | |
| Now, one assumes that we're working toward it, But what information do you have? | |
| So if your government is just telling you that, hey, you can go back to work as soon as you complete this checklist, what's on the checklist? | |
| Well, one thing that might be impossible, and we don't know if it will ever be solved before the economy totally crashes, thanks for nothing. | |
| Thanks for nothing. | |
| So without the information on the testing, your government is in complete fiduciary default. | |
| And if Trump loses the election because of this, totally fair. | |
| Now, I don't want Joe Biden to be president. | |
| That's a problem in itself. | |
| But if Trump loses the election because he won't tell us basic information, remember, they wouldn't tell us about the ventilators, but he got lucky. | |
| It turns out it didn't matter because we made so money, it didn't matter. | |
| But that was a complete failure of management that we, the public, didn't have visibility on that. | |
| Now we're in another complete failure. | |
| We don't know how much hydroxychloroquine there is, or really even if it makes a difference for sure. | |
| And we don't know anything about tests. | |
| That's a complete failure. | |
| There's no other way to say that. | |
| So I'd say the government is in complete failure, federal government, as of today, easy to fix, could be completely fixed by this afternoon. | |
| So when I say it's a complete failure, I don't mean it's over. | |
| I mean, if they don't fix this really fast while there are protests in the street, largely because of this lack of visibility, I would argue. | |
| You know, people are not saying that. | |
| Nobody is saying we're protesting because we don't think we'll get testing in time. | |
| But if you haven't given them a practical, believable plan with a date, even if it changes, You have given us nothing. | |
| Nothing. And so, if the public reacts as though the government has given them nothing, don't be surprised. | |
| Don't be surprised. | |
| If you give them nothing, and then they act like you gave them nothing, that should be what you expect. | |
| All right. I've got a huge influx of new followers on LinkedIn who are doctors. | |
| Most of them follow me from Twitter or someplace else. | |
| And it's really interesting. | |
| I guess it's just because of coronavirus stuff. | |
| I think doctors are probably more interested today in what the non-doctor community is thinking about this than ever before. | |
| Because the doctors' fates depend almost, I mean, to a huge degree, the fate of the doctors depends on what people who are not doctors are thinking about medical questions. | |
| Right? I'm not sure we've ever had this situation before. | |
| Because the doctors, you know, are on the front line, of course, making the front line decisions. | |
| But where we go in terms of opening things up, etc., will be medical decisions, essentially. | |
| You know, balanced with economic decisions, but medical decisions made by non-medical people. | |
| So given that I'm one of the people who talks about this stuff all the time, it kind of makes sense that doctors are pouring in to see what the non-medical people are feeling and try to sample as many windows into that as they can, because their fate depends on it. | |
| If we, the pundits, get this wrong, it's a big problem. | |
| It's a big problem because the doctors will suffer from what the public decides, ultimately. | |
| And so I do appreciate that many of those doctors have sort of stepped up to become my mentors and informers. | |
| So quite often I'll be engaging on some topic on Twitter and I'm very, very happy to see actual medical doctors pouring into the comments and To clarify and fix misinformation. | |
| So it's a tremendously good... | |
| It's a really good trend to watch the doctors start following the non-doctors because it's important right now. | |
| And to fix our thinking, specifically. | |
| You know, there's going to be a lot of polls between now and Election Day. | |
| And I would argue at this point the only thing that matters to re-election is the coronavirus, I think. | |
| You know, maybe the Supreme Court, but it feels as though because people are more influenced by whatever happened recently, and also whatever was the biggest, and this is the biggest, and it will be the thing that happened most recently. | |
| So really, I would say that the few people who are swing voters probably are going to be mostly affected by the coronavirus response. | |
| But I would say that when you're in the middle of the battle, The polling is useful and entertaining. | |
| It tells you something about what the middle of the battle looks like. | |
| But it doesn't predict. | |
| Because the only thing that we'll predict is winning or losing. | |
| And by November, we're going to have a much better consensus. | |
| Of course, the country never agrees on everything. | |
| But it'll probably be at least a two-thirds consensus, one way or the other. | |
| That what our government did either worked or didn't work. | |
| So that's what's going to depend on the election. | |
| The election will depend on that. | |
| So we don't know how that will go, because we don't know if we win or lose, and we probably won't know for several months. | |
| But I like to use this phrase because it really explains so many situations. | |
| You've heard it before. Winning fixes everything. | |
| I've said that in my books. | |
| I think somebody famous said it first. | |
| But winning kind of fixes everything. | |
| If you win, people will almost instantly stop complaining about how you got there. | |
| If you lose, they will complain forever about all the things you did wrong. | |
| But the day you win, if you win, then all the criticisms of the dumb things you used to be doing, they just go away. | |
| Do you remember when Trump won the election... | |
| What happened to all those criticisms about the way he was campaigning? | |
| All the criticisms of all the things that Trump was doing wrong, and we were all little experts, right? | |
| We were all experts on the thing Trump was doing wrong to campaign. | |
| Well, he's not spending enough money. | |
| Well, he doesn't have the right endorsements. | |
| Well, he seems to be insulting people. | |
| That can't be good. What's all this tweeting about? | |
| And so we, the brilliant pundits, Had all these criticisms about what the president's doing wrong to campaign to be the president. | |
| And then he won. And then all those criticisms went away. | |
| Because as soon as you win, you realize they were either overblown or didn't matter, or maybe were wrong in the first place. | |
| All right. I got into an interesting conversation, which I don't understand a bit. | |
| Because I'm not qualified. | |
| On false positives versus false negatives. | |
| And specifically looking at the tests in Santa Clara that showed there were a lot of people relative to what we expected. | |
| There were a lot of people with antibodies. | |
| Now, when I say a lot, it was, you know, a few percent. | |
| You know, somewhere in that, you know, 1 to 4 percent, depending on how you're looking at it, etc. | |
| So let's say 2 percent. And unfortunately, that's also right in the range where you could get false positives. | |
| But, so, then Naval was, you know, dealing with this question. | |
| He's smarter about this stuff. | |
| And he was pointing out that the tests probably are calibrated so that they take into account what they know about the accuracy of the testing so that that's all, you know, figured into it. | |
| And then other smart people came in and said, well, in order to do that, the only way you could be sure your test worked is to calibrate it against a test you know works. | |
| But that doesn't exist. | |
| So apparently there are no really reliable tests that could be calibrated against something that you know is reliable. | |
| Now, I'm not sure I believe that. | |
| Because the manufacturer of the tests presumably is testing it against some other standard. | |
| And it seems like if you got any kind of a positive, you would just retest it. | |
| Say, okay, are we getting too many false positives? | |
| And they would just retest with other devices until they were sure that it was real or sure that it was a false test. | |
| So I think the manufacturer could use just a variety of other test kits to see if it was at least in agreement. | |
| That would get you pretty close to knowing if you had a false positive. | |
| What if you had a false negative? | |
| If you tested a thousand people and you got one positive, well, it's pretty obvious that you should run that one positive through some other tests just to see if it's real. | |
| But what about the 999 negatives? | |
| With the manufacturer of the test that we're talking about, Would they have rerun all 999 through all of the other tests which are available to see if they all get the same result-ish? | |
| And if some don't, then rerun again to make sure that they know what's going on? | |
| I don't know. I'm guessing not. | |
| But it would only be a guess. | |
| I mean, you could imagine that they would say, yeah, that's the only way we would do it. | |
| Of course. You have to test and retest and retest against all the standards. | |
| Otherwise, you don't really know what you have. | |
| Maybe. Maybe. My experience in the real world is that probably not. | |
| But maybe, because it's a medical world and one has to assume that they have higher standards than most of the world. | |
| But my point of it is that really smart people who are operating at a level that I can't quite reach, in other words, people who understand this world and can deal with the statistical ambiguities of it more capably than I can, are not quite on the same page about whether these tests are reliable or not. | |
| Now, I can't really judge because, again, I'm not qualified, but isn't it interesting that something you would think would be as easy to know the truth of it, even that you can't. | |
| So, let me back you up to a bigger thought about all of this. | |
| Wouldn't you say That the most standard information you've gotten is that we should use facts to make decisions. | |
| And we should really know the facts. | |
| Or anything we do with this coronavirus thing would be just nonsense. | |
| We've got to know the facts. | |
| But isn't it also true that all of our facts are unreliable or total bullshit? | |
| Am I wrong about that? | |
| Haven't all of our facts so far proven to be either unreliable or you can't be sure? | |
| Might be true. | |
| Might not be true. | |
| So I don't trust any results of the tests. | |
| I don't trust anything that comes from any government source. | |
| I don't trust anything that comes from a private source. | |
| I don't trust anything that comes from a pundit. | |
| So how are we supposed to make decisions with facts when the only fact we can be sure of is that our facts are wrong? | |
| And you wouldn't have to have many facts that were wrong to have the wrong decision, right? | |
| So let's say you had all the facts were right except, let's say, face masks either make things much worse or they fix everything. | |
| So let's say you had all the facts correctly, which is impossible. | |
| But only just one fact was wrong. | |
| Well, that one wrong fact could totally blow your strategy. | |
| We certainly have at least one fact wrong. | |
| We don't know which ones exactly. | |
| We don't even know the denominator of how many people have recovered. | |
| We don't know exactly why this is... | |
| We don't know a lot of things. We don't know the genetic differences. | |
| We're not entirely sure if smoking is good or bad for you. | |
| We don't know how many people really died in China. | |
| We don't know why Sweden is doing better. | |
| We don't know why South Korea is doing better. | |
| We have gases. Masks, blah, blah, blah. | |
| We don't know if social isolation works. | |
| We don't know if it worked great. | |
| We don't know if it works well. | |
| We don't know if it's working better in some places. | |
| We don't know anything. So we should sort of abandon the childlike fairy tale that we're going to make this decision based on facts. | |
| Because we're not. The reason we're not is because there are no facts we can rely on. | |
| There are only facts we've heard. | |
| Facts sometimes come from credible sources and are also not true. | |
| As evidence, the World Health Organization, the CDC, the Surgeon General, and our government, all of them have told us things that are so insanely obviously not true, face masks being the obvious one, that we don't have any facts. | |
| Yeah, we're still arguing about Dr. | |
| Shiva, whether all you need is some vitamins. | |
| We are so far from facts. | |
| And the Bill Gates rumors, I mean, we're not close to facts. | |
| So, here's the question. | |
| How do you make a decision in the face of such extreme uncertainty? | |
| You know, there's some general things we know, such as if you do nothing, more people will get the virus. | |
| So we know that. | |
| So using just those general things plus some risk management, you're generally going to look for things that you can test and then pull back if you need to. | |
| So if you don't know what is the right answer, it usually makes sense. | |
| Every situation is different. | |
| But it usually makes sense to take the strategy that is the most adaptable if it doesn't work out. | |
| That you can immediately say, oops, take it back. | |
| Now, if we were to reopen the economy and just say, all right, let's see what happens, just reopen everything, and the virus took hold and, you know, a million people got infected in a week, could you easily reverse that? | |
| Not really. It can be kind of hard to reverse it once a million people were infected. | |
| Although I think we have a quarter of a million already. | |
| But likewise, it would not be easy to reverse shutting down the economy. | |
| But which one would be easier to reverse? | |
| Well, it depends how much you care about the deaths. | |
| If you don't care about deaths, just open up the economy. | |
| If you do, well, you've got a tough decision. | |
| All right. So, we'll have to make a decision without facts. | |
| I hope that goes well. Here's one of the things that made me think that we need an IQ test, not a blood test, or not a test for the coronavirus. | |
| So I tweeted this, which is a lot of people who believe that Trump is He talks complete BS 99% of the time. | |
| So his critics believe that pretty much everything he says is a lie, it's hyperbole, or it's BS. And yet they can't understand why Trump would say that President Xi is an awesome guy and China's doing a great job at the same time that he's trying to get a trade deal done. | |
| Do you really not understand how that works? | |
| Are there people who are really so dumb that they don't understand that President Trump is standing right in front of you on camera and winking as hard as he can? | |
| Yeah, I love President Xi. | |
| He's wink, wink, doing a great job. | |
| Great job. Oh yeah, I'll be concerned if they give us bad information, but President Xi, he's my friend. | |
| Wink, wink, wink, wink, wink. | |
| Could he wink any harder? | |
| Do you believe him when he says that China is awesome? | |
| I believe that he's smart enough to know that you're not going to get anywhere with China if you try to humiliate them. | |
| That I know. Do you think the president knows not to humiliate somebody he's trying to do a deal with in the middle of the deal? | |
| Oh sure, maybe before and after. | |
| But not in the middle of the deal. | |
| If you're actually negotiating with somebody, You're going to be insulting him in public? | |
| You need to get your IQ checked if you think the president should be insulting the president of China while we're trying to get something done. | |
| Check your IQ at the door there. | |
| It made no sense, but you know what I'm talking about. | |
| I don't think the Roger Stone upcoming pardon... | |
| Or whatever the word is for it. | |
| What's the other word? | |
| It's a pardon or a clemency? | |
| I don't think there's any question about it anymore, is there? | |
| The president has so clearly signaled that he's going to pardon or grant clemency to Roger Stone. | |
| It's just a matter of timing at this point. | |
| Now, Manafort is another situation because That's just a darker situation. | |
| But I think the Roger Stone pardon is essentially guaranteed. | |
| Nancy Pelosi was asked by Chris Wallace yesterday to explain how she was saying that the president was underplaying the virus and yet at the very same time she was publicly going to Chinatown and telling everybody to enjoy Chinatown And the big crowds during the pandemic. | |
| And of course, Chris Wallace was calling that out and saying, you know, you're criticizing the president for not taking you seriously at exactly the same time you were doing that, not taking you seriously and inviting people to hang around in big crowds. | |
| And what was Nancy Pelosi's response to that? | |
| It's a real head-shaker. | |
| She said that the real point of that was to counter... | |
| President Trump's racism. | |
| Because she was worried that because he was calling the virus the Chinese virus or the Wuhan virus that it would stoke racism. | |
| And so she decided to go to Chinatown and get all the Chinese American citizens infected with coronavirus and maybe die so that they wouldn't feel bad that a virus was named after a country that they don't live in. | |
| So, this might be, if you could have some kind of an award for the most pathetic answer you've ever heard from a politician. | |
| I'm not even going to call it a lie, because it's so obvious a lie that you don't really need to call that out. | |
| You should at least, if you were going to lie, you should at least... | |
| Take a stab at making it sound a little bit believable. | |
| Do you think there's anybody, even in the Democratic Party, so... | |
| Sorry about that technical glitch. | |
| Is it because of something I said about China? | |
| I don't know. We'll find out, because I'll test that again. | |
| Anyway, so whatever Nancy Pelosi said, I'm wondering, were there Democrats who were thinking to themselves, gosh, you know, that is a good question, Chris Wallace. | |
| Why did Nancy Pelosi criticize President Trump at the same time she was inviting people to a big crowd to get infected in Chinatown? | |
| Why did she do that? | |
| And then they hear the answer. And Pelosi says, oh, it's to counteract President Trump's racism. | |
| Is there anybody who is a Democrat who heard that and said, oh, yeah, that makes sense now. | |
| I was thinking, God, do I want to swear. | |
| I want to swear so much today. | |
| I guess I swore too much already. | |
| I'm going to pull it back. | |
| Serenity now. Is there any Democrat who heard Pelosi say, That she was trying to counteract President's racism by going to Chinatown. | |
| Does anybody believe that? | |
| Is there any Democrat who's dumb enough to believe that? | |
| Really? Because at least, to the credit of Trump supporters, when Trump says something that we know is not true, we kind of know it, don't we? | |
| Don't you know it if he says, I had the biggest crowd size since the gladiators in the Coliseum? | |
| You listen to it and you go, maybe, maybe not. | |
| It doesn't really matter. It's not really the point. | |
| It doesn't really matter if you exaggerated that. | |
| I feel like Trump supporters generally know when he's saying things that are complete BS, but I don't know if Democrats know it when Pelosi says it. | |
| I just can't tell. Has anybody seen Joe Biden since Friday? | |
| This is an actual question because I don't know. | |
| Has Joe Biden been televised since Friday? | |
| I'll wait for your comments because I want to see. | |
| I can't tell if that comment is for this or the last one. | |
| People are still talking, wanting me to swear. | |
| By answering that question, has... | |
| Joe Biden... | |
| Put Biden in the answer so I know that's what you're answering. | |
| Has Joe Biden shown himself in two and a half days? | |
| Because it feels like... | |
| I'll wait for your answer. | |
| So I'll get over my skis a little bit. | |
| If we haven't seen him... | |
| Oh, let me make a general... | |
| I'm going to make a general observation. | |
| If we did not see Joe Biden for two days, and I need a confirmation of that, so I'll make it a general statement. | |
| If there ever is a time that we don't see Joe Biden, at least on video, for two days, it means he's going to be out of the race. | |
| That's my prediction. | |
| If you ever see a two-day gap with no Joe Biden live video, at this point, from here until the election, Any two-day gap means he's out of the race. | |
| That is my assumption. | |
| Now, the way he leaves the race, of course, is a great question. | |
| But I would think if he went dark for two days, and I don't know if he did, I'd need a confirmation of that. | |
| I saw a tweet on it, but he may have reappeared right after the tweet. | |
| Okay, people are saying no on Joe Biden. | |
| So if it's true... | |
| That we haven't seen him for two days, it means the Democrats are talking him into leaving the race. | |
| Because I see no scenario that he would stay out of the public eye unless Democrats were talking him into getting out of the race and being replaced. | |
| I think that's happening right now, if he's been gone for two days. | |
| Because otherwise there's no reason. | |
| Now you can say to yourself, no, no, Scott, the reason is he's not mentally capable, so they're keeping him off the airways, which I would say is really the same thing I just said. | |
| Because if they've kept him off video for two days because they don't think he's mentally competent at the moment, that also means they're having the conversation about replacing him. | |
| There's no way you would separate those two things. | |
| And then I saw one article, an opinion article on CNN, saying that Elizabeth Warren was the obvious best choice for vice president. | |
| And of course she made things interesting by saying that if Biden asked her to be vice president, she would say yes, which is sort of a weird thing to say. | |
| Usually you say, well, I'm not talking about that today. | |
| So what if it's Warren? | |
| Because if they replace Biden with Warren, you end up with Bernie. | |
| Right? Because Warren is basically Bernie in different clothes. | |
| So Warren gets you the woman. | |
| So good for the woman vote. | |
| And it gets you Bernie. | |
| So the Bernie voters can say, we wanted Bernie, but okay. | |
| She's younger. She's pretty close. | |
| So you could probably get the Bernie bros. | |
| Many of them. And I think the mainstream Democrats have proven by their nominating of Biden that they literally don't care who's running. | |
| Right? So you'd have the Bernie bros who would be back in if it's Elizabeth Warren, maybe. | |
| At least you'd have an argument to get them back in. | |
| You'd have the... | |
| And then the mainstream people just wouldn't care because they were going to vote Democrat. | |
| It didn't matter who it was. I don't know if anybody would vote against Warren if they're a Democrat. | |
| I could see people voting against Bernie, but Warren has that, I haven't been a communist all my life kind of vibe, so maybe she could soften her stance a little bit and still get in there. | |
| So Warren's actually an interesting choice. | |
| I'm going to stick with my prediction of Kamala Harris, in part because I think she has a better relationship with Biden, and Biden sort of has to be part of the decision. | |
| All right. So China, somebody official in China has stated that China is not the enemy of the United States. | |
| So that's good. | |
| Isn't it great to know that China is not the enemy of the United States? | |
| But I would point out that China, who is not the enemy of the United States, has already killed more Americans this year with coronavirus and fentanyl Am I right about that? | |
| Check my math. | |
| But I think that China, who says they're our friend, has probably killed maybe approaching 100,000 Americans in 2020. | |
| I think we'll hit 100,000 between fentanyl and coronavirus. | |
| Probably over 100,000. | |
| And if you were to add up all of the Americans killed in By every enemy country over 10 years, it wouldn't come close to 100,000, would it? | |
| Because you'd be adding up the two wars, and they don't even come close. | |
| Massachusetts doesn't even like war, some people say. | |
| All right. And I'll go back to something I said earlier. | |
| If I didn't say this on the morning periscope, I'd like to reinforce it. | |
| We, of course, are going to decouple from China now. | |
| The question of whether we'll decouple has been answered. | |
| It's just a question of how long it takes. | |
| Because the government doesn't even have to be involved in it anymore. | |
| There's enough social pressure that if you were to move a production facility to China from this day forward, it would be news. | |
| In the past, that would not be news, right? | |
| If a Fortune 500 company moved production to China, that wouldn't be news. | |
| Until now. Now it's news. | |
| So they kind of can't do it. | |
| So social pressure and consumer pressure will completely stop any big company from moving to China. | |
| They could move to another country. | |
| I mean, they could probably get away with Vietnam or Mexico. | |
| But, no, the decoupling, that's just going to happen. | |
| So there's no question about that. | |
| But the way we should present it is to avoid humiliating or offending China because there's nothing in it for us. | |
| I think it's okay to hate China, but they have a different reaction to... | |
| Obviously, every country has people that hate them. | |
| People are sort of used to being hated, but people don't like being disrespected and they don't want to be humiliated, etc. | |
| So we should look for the way to decouple That sounds the most like, you know, it's not you, it's me. | |
| You know, when you break up with somebody, it's not you, it's me. | |
| And we need a version of that for China when we decouple. | |
| And my version of that is we should say our systems are not compatible. | |
| It has nothing to do with you. | |
| It has nothing to do with you, President Xi. | |
| You're awesome. It's just that you've chosen a system that sadly doesn't fit with our system. | |
| And we have transparency. | |
| You don't have transparency, and those are two systems that can't fit together. | |
| So if we became non-transparent, well, maybe we'd have some... | |
| Well, that probably doesn't work. Two non-transparent systems are not going to be very successful. | |
| But if they were to become transparent, and of course, we're not your boss. | |
| We're not going to tell China they need to be more transparent. | |
| We're just not going to be in their game. | |
| So I don't think we should be in the business of telling China what to do. | |
| Because it doesn't work, and it would be humiliating, and there's no upside. | |
| But we could certainly tell them that while they're doing whatever they want to do, that system is not compatible with our system, so we're going to take our ball and go home. | |
| It's nothing personal. | |
| We wish they fit together, but transparency and non-transparency are just two systems that don't fit. | |
| No way around it. We tried. | |
| It was worth trying. | |
| All right. Something weird happened this morning that I just have to call out to see if anybody noticed it. | |
| So I woke up around 3.30 this morning, which is not unusual, and I just got up, went to work, because that's not unusual for me. | |
| I hate sleeping. I hate sleeping more than I hate really anything in my life right now. | |
| I don't like getting into bed. | |
| I don't like staying there. I don't like being asleep. | |
| I don't like anything. Because I like my life. | |
| And I realize that I get up so early in the morning that I've effectively had two lifetimes when most people have had one. | |
| And what I mean by that is, if you look at your 24-hour day, those 24 hours are not equal, right? | |
| Because there's the hours you're asleep that are like you don't exist. | |
| And then there are the hours that you're commuting. | |
| There are the hours in the afternoon that you're so sleepy you can't get anything done. | |
| So the hours are all different. | |
| They're not equal quality. | |
| And I would argue that because the first hours of the morning are the premium hours of the entire day, that people like me who routinely get up at 4 in the morning, by the time the rest of the world wakes up, let's say people are just starting by the time the rest of the world wakes up, let's say people are just starting to get up at 8-ish, or getting to work at 8-ish anyway, that I've got a four-hour head start, sometimes five hours per day on people who are getting | |
| I'm going to start sometimes five hours per day on people who are getting up and living their life and their normal schedule. | |
| And I often feel that by my current age, it shows that I'm going to be a little bit more. | |
| Because I feel like I present myself like somebody who lived two lifetimes, because it actually physically feels like that to me. | |
| I have a whole lifetime that I lead before most of you wake up, and I do the great majority of all my useful, creative, and productive work happens before most people wake up. | |
| Now, Jocko Willek, somebody mentioned in the comments, and he's one of the people who made me wonder. | |
| So this morning... He showed that he was up at 4 in the morning. | |
| And I saw at least three other Californians who were clearly up at about 4 a.m. | |
| this morning and tweeting. | |
| I send a text message to my brother at about 4.45 a.m. | |
| or whatever it is, and I get an instant response. | |
| You know, people... | |
| I think California has just stopped sleeping. | |
| And I think Californians are just getting up really early. | |
| So, I don't know. | |
| Maybe they were getting up at 4.20 for a reason. | |
| Those were my comments. | |
| What time do you go to bed? | |
| I go to bed whenever, whenever, whenever. | |
| I like to be in bed At least during the coronavirus, I like to be in bed at 9.30ish, 10 o'clock. | |
| During normal times, it's not unusual for me to stay up later, you know, stay up till 10. | |
| But it doesn't matter when I go to bed, I just don't like sleeping, so I just get up. | |
| If I wake up any time after 3 a.m., I just stay up. | |
| Yeah, maybe that's why. | |
| God. | |
| I do two times eight hours per day. | |
| You sleep 16 hours a day? | |
| Okay. Yeah, it's easier when you don't have to. | |
| That's true. It's easier to wake up early when you don't have to. | |
| Maybe all the successful people who moved to California. | |
| Well, you know, California has one advantage, which is for getting up early. | |
| When Californians get up early, they have somebody to talk to because we can talk to the East Coast because the East Coast has been up for a while. | |
| If you're on the East Coast and you wake up early, the only people you have to talk to are people on the East Coast. | |
| All right. Do you take naps? | |
| Rarely. I do. | |
| I do. | |
| Naps are definitely in my toolbox, but I'd say maybe a couple of months. | |
| I've changed to get up now for you. | |
| Well, thank you. Thank you for getting up for my periscopes. | |
| Yeah, I think people are different. | |
| I'm not sure that everybody can learn to be a morning person. | |
| I wish you could because the morning is definitely the best part of the day. | |
| Yes, the Brits. | |
| There's always the Brits that the East Coast could talk to if they get up early. | |
| Good point. Alright, that's all I got for today. | |
| I'm just babbling. I will talk to you tonight. |