Episode 943 Scott Adams: Join the Best Coffee With Scott Adams of All Time. There Will Be Anger
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Content:
People who think nobody has thought of doing increased testing
Airline changes for coronavirus safety
Removing inaccurate claims from the internet...who decides?
Jay Rosen's belief that President Trump's briefing spreads misinfo
Whiteboard: Flatten How?
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Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scott-adams00/support
It's time for another episode of Coffee with Scott Adams.
Today will be the best one ever.
Best one of all time.
Some people accuse me of hyperbole, but I think those people are so wrong.
About everything all the time.
Yeah, there will be whiteboard.
I'm saving it for the end, because it's sort of a big finish.
Well, you know, if you would like to get in here early, like the early birds, you get a little extra.
Something that the people who come in late don't get.
It's called the simultaneous sip, and all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tankard, a chalice of stein, a canteen jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine of the day, the thing that makes everything, including the pandemic, better.
It's called the simultaneous sip and it happens now.
Go! A little bit later, I'll be...
Tweeting about moving some of my content to the Locals platform.
Have you heard of it?
Locals.com.
Local with an S in the end.
Locals. It's Dave Rubin's platform in which creators such as myself who do not like to be captives of the algorithm can put their materials and you don't have to worry about the algorithm hiding it and you don't have to worry about getting about me getting cancelled and you don't have to worry about me getting censored.
You can also send me messages and you can support me.
So I'm going to ask people who are supporting me on Patreon To just stop doing that.
And if they want to keep supporting me to do it on the Locals platform, I'll Google something about that a little bit later so you know where the links are and everything.
Just because I know you're wondering, I know you're wondering, it won't have any effect on the Periscope.
So, sorry, I didn't mean to worry you.
So the periscopes will be just the same.
You can watch them here just like always.
But in addition, in addition to me putting them later on YouTube, and I also put them on Rockfin and BitChute, I think at this point, I will also be putting them on Locals.
But Locals will have also extra stuff.
So you can get all of my normal periscopes the normal way.
But if you want extra stuff, you'll know where to get it.
And if you want to support me as a creator, that's the place to do it.
Alright, I'll tell you more about that later.
Bill de Blasio, mayor of New York City.
Now, I have to admit, because I don't live in New York City, I have a hard time getting interested in a mayor.
A mayor of anything.
Any kind of mayor just doesn't interest me, usually.
And people...
At least TV shows, pundits and stuff have been calling de Blasio dumb.
And I thought to myself, well, is he?
I mean, really. He made it to be mayor of New York City, ran for president.
He's not dumb, right?
And then the news comes out that he decided to tweet, I don't know if he tweeted or announced it, that he was singling out the Jewish community for...
For potential harsher treatment for not self-isolating as well.
I guess there was some funeral and too many people got together and de Blasio got mad about that.
And I thought to myself, okay, okay, it can be true that these people caused a little bit of danger by getting together.
So it can be true that maybe they shouldn't have done what they did.
At the same time, it might not have been the best play, from a political standpoint, to single out the Jews for special law enforcement treatment.
How do you think that went over?
Now, if you think that the Jewish community said, huh, looks like we're being singled out for special law enforcement treatment, Do you think that the Jewish community said, well, that's okay.
What's the worst thing that could happen?
No. No, it didn't go that way.
It went exactly the way you think it would go.
But the funny part is, de Blasio didn't see that coming?
There was nobody who warned him.
Hey, Bill, just give this another thought.
I know you're mad right now, But maybe just rest this until the morning.
Maybe write it down, and before you hit send, maybe just read it out loud.
Maybe read it out loud to somebody just to get a second opinion.
I don't think that happened, which is hilarious to me.
Now, I don't think this story has any real legs, because obviously de Blasio is not anti-Semitic.
I don't think there's, you know, nobody really thinks that.
It was just sort of inelegant.
And it's always worth...
I always think it's worth the brushback pitch.
You know, if you're Jewish, you're not going to let that go, right?
And I think that that's appropriate.
But I would say it's just a brushback pitch.
Nothing of real consequence in the long run.
The Center for Disease Control, the CDC... Indicates that the current average U.S. overall death rate, even during the coronavirus pandemic, is lower than it has been for much of the past seven years, and well below the long-term average.
So we're experiencing an unusually low rate of death in the United States.
Who predicted that?
Now, I shouldn't say who predicted that, because it sounds like I'm saying the World Health Organization predicted it, but they did not.
I did. So I'm still predicting.
I'm going to stick with my prediction, as I like to do, even when they're apparently going to be wrong.
Because I like to call out when I got it wrong as well as when I got it right because the whole point is we're tracking our predictions.
So I do it in public.
If I get it right, I'll brag about it so you don't forget about it.
You'll get mad, but you won't forget it.
And if I get it wrong, I'll make a big deal about that too because I think that's equally important.
Certainly I make no claim that my predictions will all be right.
I hope nobody thinks that, right?
Does anybody think that I think my predictions will all be correct?
Because that would be crazy.
Nobody thinks that. I mean, no matter what you think of yourself, you couldn't possibly think your predictions are all going to be right.
So we'll keep an eye on that.
You know my old joke about the canvas on the roof?
You know, it's from a joke.
The cat is on the roof is sort of a way to tell you that there's not trouble yet, but there's trouble coming.
I'm just softening you up for the bad news that's coming.
Because from the joke, the cat is on the roof is somebody is softening the message that the cat died.
So they're trying to break it to you slowly.
Alyssa Milano tweets yesterday, I think, or the day before.
She says, I'm aware of the new developments in Tara Reade's accusations against Joe Biden.
I want Tara, like every other survivor, to have the space to be heard and seen without being used as fodder.
I hear and see you, Tara.
Hashtag Me Too. Now, of course, you know Alyssa Milano got tons of grief for being a strong backer of Joe Biden, but also being a strong backer of Me Too, which are hard to be It's hard to be on the same team as both of them because of Joe's credible-sounding accusations of MeToo-ing.
And I feel like the cat's on the roof, don't you?
Because when Biden loses Alyssa Milano, and of course she's not saying that, but that's what I'm interpreting.
Because I don't think she would even bother making the statement, unless the cat was on the roof.
If you know what I mean? Maybe in her own mind, since I can't read her mind, let me make sure that I'm not interpreting her thoughts.
But I'm saying that if you're trying to read the breadcrumbs, this is sort of a tiptoe in the direction of, yeah, we should listen to her.
We should definitely listen to her.
Maybe in a month or so, you'll see Alyssa.
You might see her say, you know, I was just with Joe Biden and I think he's got the flu or something.
I feel like Biden is going to have to fake a health problem to get out of this.
I don't know how else you can do it.
Speaking of that, did you watch the so-called town hall, which was really a digital interview, split screen, at least part of it, between Joe Biden and then he was being endorsed by Hillary Clinton.
So it's a split screen with Hillary and Joe Biden.
Now, the first thing, which is obvious, is if you're accused of me tooing, do you want Hillary Clinton to be in your split screen endorsing you?
I don't know. It's a bad association.
So, I don't think he won by the association, at least in terms of the me too stuff.
I'm seeing in the comments that...
A number of people thought that Joe Biden fell asleep while Clinton was talking.
I didn't see that.
Meaning, I looked at it, it didn't look like he fell asleep to me.
It's funny. It's funny because you could imagine he was falling asleep, but it didn't look like that to me.
So I would call that fake news if he thought he actually fell asleep.
But it looked enough like it that it was funny.
But I think that's all it was.
But what was far funnier is, I don't know who did it, but you know the meme?
I think Carpe Dunctum did most of these, where you see Joe Biden, he's been photoshopped into other pictures, and he's behind somebody sniffing their hair.
Well, the best version of that yet, It was a screenshot from the split screen with Biden on one side and Hillary on the other.
And the side that normally would have Biden was empty.
It was just the background.
And he was photoshopped into the Hillary picture, sniffing her hair from behind.
I didn't think that meme could get funnier.
Because when it first came out, you saw all the memes of Biden peeking out from behind people.
Every one of them was funny.
I think I laughed at every single one of them.
But you think, okay, now we've seen them all.
You can't take that any further.
There's no place that could go.
It's really just the same thing.
It's just Biden smelling hair.
And then you see the empty frame on the digital town hall.
That was really funny.
So somebody needs to tell me who did that because I'd like to give them a call out.
Because that little extra...
Of the fact that he magically disappeared on video and appeared in her video.
That's really good.
That is good meme-making, that is.
So we've got to call that out.
So I've said before that the most worthless people in the coronavirus situation are the people who act as though nobody thought of increasing testing.
Have you seen these people?
They're like the NPCs of the coronavirus.
They don't have any thoughts.
You just say, what do you think of the coronavirus?
Well, we should increase testing.
Yeah, that's something nobody thought of.
Speaking of which, Elizabeth Warren says in her tweet, once again, if we're only testing people with symptoms who make it to the hospital, then we are far from understanding this crisis.
And then she gives us helpful advice.
Keep in mind this was yesterday.
Yesterday. She goes, we need to drastically ramp up testing.
What? We do?
That's the first time I've heard of this.
Why? Where has she been this whole time?
Did you know that increasing testing would help?
Who knew? My God!
We should elect this woman president immediately.
Because she's come up with this out-of-the-box idea of increasing testing.
And I love that she says it in public like nobody freaking thought of it.
Nobody thought of it?
Come on, Elizabeth Warren.
Are you trying to be the most useless person in the United States?
Because you're succeeding.
All right. Speaking of that Biden town hall with Hillary...
One of the interesting things about watching all the famous people broadcast from home, the way I am right now, is that they're having a tough time with their hair and makeup.
Have you noticed that? I just watched a clip from Chris Cuomo's show.
It looks like Chris Cuomo is giving himself a haircut.
It didn't go well.
I hate to be unkind about people's appearance, except when it's funny.
And I can say this about Cuomo because he's an unusually good-looking guy.
So you can't take that away from him.
He's a good-looking guy, but whoever cut his hair, it's all I can look at.
I was looking at a clip for some other purpose because I was interested in the topic.
I don't even know what the topic was.
I was just looking at his hair. I was like, how do you even do that?
If you had a contest to ruin somebody's hair, I guess it would look like that.
That would be the winner. So he just looks atrocious.
The other thing is the people who don't know how to do online stuff.
So the one thing you'll see is the people who are too close.
And they're fish-eyed.
There's something with the lens that makes them look distorted.
So they're way up close.
By the way, that's something I learned the hard way from input from you guys.
When I first was doing the periscopes, I would disturbingly do this.
Because I thought to myself, well, obviously, don't you want me to, like, fill the screen with my face?
Of course you do. And then I looked at my face, and I said, hmm, I think we can improve on that.
Better. Better.
Better. Better.
Nail it! Yeah, distance is your friend.
Take that to the bank.
If you don't have a professional makeup artist, go with distance.
Make sure your background looks a little interesting.
All right. But anyway, I was going to say that Hillary either had really bad makeup, or the room was too warm, or she has coronavirus.
Or she was having a hot flash.
I'm not making fun of that.
I'm just saying that health-wise, I mean, I know that this seems like I'm just regurgitating the same rumor from when she was running from office, but she didn't look well.
She looked flushed.
Did anybody see that?
Scott is right. Camera needs to be even with the face.
Yeah. And that's the other thing.
This needs to be on the same plane.
Most of the TV people are doing this.
They're doing this view.
And then they're looking down.
It's just terrible.
So anyway, there's a lot going on today.
All right, so here's an idea for you.
Just mull this a little bit.
So we've got all these airlines.
It doesn't look like they have a business model because nobody wants to be on an airplane packed in little seats next to people who might be infected.
So let me throw out this suggestion.
Suppose you removed all the middle rows from Coach.
So let's say Coach has no middle seats.
Well, of course, now you've lost a third of your income, right?
So could the airlines find a way to make back a third of their income if they get rid of all the middle seats so that people have some separation?
And the answer is, I'm just speaking for myself, but I would definitely pay 20% more than the normal tickets cost for a coach to have a seat that isn't next to somebody else, to have a little room.
And I would pay that, coronavirus or not.
And wouldn't you pay 20% extra?
Now keep in mind, you're paying 20% extra, but so is the person on the other side of the aisle.
Right? So if you've got two people who are willing to pay 20% extra, then at least you're getting close to the 30% that you lost.
Now throw on top of that that fuel is really cheap.
Right? Fuel is historically cheap.
Now throw on top of that, that a third of your human cargo is gone, including your...
So your cargo load goes down by a third.
So if your cargo load goes down by a third, that won't reduce your fuel by a third, because the plane has weight as well.
But if you were to add up 20% extra ticket cost on each side of the missing aisle, and then the savings from fuel...
Somebody's saying OMG with a little eyes looking up.
Somebody says they're already empty.
They're already empty, the middle row.
Well, you wouldn't necessarily have to remove them.
I mean, you don't have to physically remove them, although that would be cool.
Somebody says you're rich.
Well, that is correct.
You are correct. Do you know who flies?
Not poor people.
Poor people don't fly.
If you go to the airport, you won't see any.
And, you know, I'm not saying it's good or bad.
I'm just saying poor people don't fly.
So, probably the people who fly, I would say, represent the top...
60% of income, maybe, in the country.
I would guess that if you're in the lower 40% of income, this is just off the top of my head, probably if you're in the lower 40% of income in the United States, you'll literally never fly in an airplane.
I'm guessing. Fact check me on that, but I'll bet that's close to true.
Now, that doesn't mean you wouldn't fly once in a while if you had to.
You know, it's just a death in the family or something.
But I'll bet the bottom 40% of income just don't ever fly.
So could the top, let's say the top half of people who fly, could they afford 20% extra on a coach ticket?
Most could. Most could.
And who knows if they have to even increase that much.
It could be that the reduction in fuel costs is so much that you don't have to increase the ticket costs.
Maybe only 10%.
Would you even know the difference?
Let me ask you this. Given that flight costs are all over the map, you can buy a ticket today and then the price tomorrow drops by $200.
Nobody even knows what a ticket is supposed to cost, right?
Does anybody even know?
If you paid 10% too much for your ticket, would you even know?
Because what are you going to compare it to?
So, first of all, you wouldn't even know if they raised it.
All right. There's something called the Epidemiological Model.
Sometime at about the time that this crisis is over, I'll be able to pronounce that on the first try, but we're not there yet.
So it's a different model for predicting the deaths, and this model has been updated, and the current best prediction, and I think this prediction takes into account The going back to work.
So the loosening of the social distancing.
And their model says they're predicting that there will be a total of 153,000 deaths in the United States with a predicted range of from 87,000 to 302,000.
So the current updated This is a model that's used in 40 countries, so it has some credibility with model people.
It doesn't have any credibility with me, of course, but it has credibility with model people, I guess.
So what would happen? Let me ask you this.
So a few weeks ago, I asked people who were saying that coronavirus is no big problem.
I asked them, What would be the number of deaths, gross, not nat, what would be the total number of people that were identified as dying from coronavirus that would make you change your mind after the fact?
So at the moment, you, skeptic, think that the coronavirus is not that much bigger deal than the regular flu, what would it take for you to say, ah, I guess I was wrong, that is bigger than the regular flu?
What's that number? It's somewhere around 200,000.
I think most people would come in at about that range, right?
If it's over 200,000, yeah, maybe that was a bigger deal.
Now that doesn't mean that's different from saying that we should have handled it the way we handled it, that we shouldn't open up the places that don't have much of a problem.
I'm not making any kind of argument about whether you should open up or how.
I'm just saying that if it comes in at 200,000 people died because we opened up, It still might be the right choice, but it'll be interesting to watch these models converge.
Now, the total number of dead might be negative or zero because of all the fewer people dying from other purposes.
And even the regular flu, I guess, came in at the lowest death rate in a while.
All right. What happens if this model is correct?
Let's say it comes in at 87,000 deaths.
Would you then say that the...
Yeah, I think that would be wrong then, $87,000, because that would be without mitigation.
Now, let's just wait and see.
All right, so you've heard me talk about these two doctors, the Erickson and Masihi, and the viral video that YouTube took down because they said it wasn't accurate, and there were two medical boards who rebuked these people.
And the backstory, which you've already heard, I'm going to give you an update so it's not the same story you've already heard, but the backstory is that people asked me, before this was debunked by medical people, to give my opinion on it, and I looked at five minutes of it and said it's complete horseshit, it's not credible, there's a whole bunch of math mistakes, there's comparison mistakes, there's lack of knowledge, it's just completely worthless.
So that was my hot take.
Having no medical training whatsoever.
Within a day, that was completely backed up by medical professionals who said, oh, these guys are not even doing the math right.
And basically the same thing I said.
It was reckless.
So here's the interesting part.
At the same time that Tucker Carlson was showing the video as valid and something that we should listen to, at the same time, Over at MSNBC on Chris Hayes' show, they were debunking it.
So literally you could see the two movies on different screens.
It's the same screen, but you'd have to change the channel.
And literally at the same time, the same news was reported as true on one and completely debunked at the other.
Somebody says, show your work.
Don't have to. Don't have to show my work.
Because the medical professionals have debunked it, and I would defer to them.
So you can ask them to show their work.
And let me take a page from my book, Loser Think.
Now when people said to me, Scott, you're saying that this is all BS, but you're not giving us any examples.
And I talk about that in my book.
You should never fall for the trap of arguing all the examples.
It's better to pick the best one.
And you just say, can you send your champion?
Instead of having our armies battle, because there are a whole bunch of different points and you don't want to get into arguing every one of them, why don't you pick your best champion?
And I'll have my best champion fight, and we'll decide it that way.
Now, best champion in this context means, what is the strongest argument that you think the doctors made?
Just pick out one point, and I'll tell you why it's wrong.
Or I'll agree with it and say, yeah, but we already knew that.
So there's a whole bunch of stuff they said that falls into the category of, we already knew that.
Which is, It's bad for the economy to stay closed.
We already knew that.
Some people might die because the economy is shut down.
That's not new. We kind of knew that.
So, if anybody wants to debate me, don't just tell me any specific claim, and then I'll tell you what I think of it.
The main claim, of course, is that he'd done his own samples, and then he said, based on my samples, I predict that this is true about the country, and that's just crazy.
Because his sample was not in any way representative, and nobody imagines that it could be.
So it all sort of started with that, and if you take that error and then you work from there, everything else was nonsense, which is what it was.
Now I guess Tucker also talked about the fact that this video was taken down.
Which creates a whole new interesting topic.
Because separate from the question of whether it was accurate, do you remove inaccurate claims from the internet?
And who gets to decide?
Who gets to decide what is inaccurate enough?
At what point is it a violation of free speech?
And at what point is it just good common sense that you don't want a bunch of conspiracy theories mucking up things during a crisis?
Well, of course, the standard we all compare it to is yelling fire in a crowded theater, the most classic comparison.
I heard people argue that data should always be allowed on the internet because you always have the opportunity for the commenters to say it's not true.
So you can get the claim and you can get the counterclaim and then the reader can make up their own mind.
To which I said, yelling fire in a crowded theater is also data.
That's what it is.
It is somebody who stands up in a crowded theater And has information to give the rest of the people in the theater.
Could be right.
There might actually be a fire.
Could be incorrect.
Maybe there is no fire.
But you see, it doesn't matter.
Because if the point is that you should always just present the data and let people decide, would it matter if there's no fire?
It's just information.
So the point is that there is information that can kill people.
And we do make very rare, very rare exceptions because the yelling fire in a movie theater is less about transmitting data and more about immediately causing a panic that gets a bunch of people killed.
So that's the most immediate, obvious, clear danger.
That's why that example is so good.
Is it the same in a coronavirus emergency that you put information out That people might take as true, might act upon it, and what would that cause?
Well, in this case, it could cause, oh, I don't know, the collapse of civilization, the death of hundreds of millions of people.
That's the downside, right?
If you get the coronavirus thing wrong, the downside is, I don't know, 100 million people die, whatever it is.
So, it's pretty big stakes.
Speaking of that, Jay Rosen, Who I believe is a journalism professor somewhere.
And he tweets that a group of professors, including him, have written an open letter to the heads of ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNN, petitioning for an end to live coverage of the president's briefings.
And the reason given is because the president's briefings, in his opinion, spread misinformation.
Now, number one, is that true?
Is it true that the president's briefing spreads misinformation?
Totally true, right?
Totally true. It's totally true that some of the information that comes from the president is wrong, later gets corrected.
But how unusual is that in a pandemic?
Given that nearly 100% of our information is wrong, In the early stages, almost all of it.
And yet we expect our politicians to tell us what they know and keep us up to date, even if it's wrong.
Just tell us what you know.
We'll understand if it's wrong, but tell us why you think you know.
Keep us informed. So, under those conditions, would it be reasonable to expect that any president would be giving only accurate information?
And my answer is no.
No, it's not reasonable to expect it would all be accurate.
But is there some line beyond which you say, okay, we know it's normal to have some inaccuracies, but is there some line that gets crossed that's just crazy talk?
And I would say that line has not been crossed, in my opinion, because this is just subjective, right?
But I've watched most of the president's briefings, And I'm pretty sure that when Jay Rosen is talking about dangerous and reckless information, he's really talking about what the press does, not what the president does.
Because was it the president who suggested in public that maybe we should think about or consider injecting Clorox and Lysol into our bodies with a hypodermic needle?
Did the president suggest that?
No, he did not. Now, that fake news came from The news that came from ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, MSNBC, CNN, and as of today, Fox News.
Fox News has an article, I'll talk about that in a minute, which also claims, without any context given, that the President of the United States suggested, I don't think they used the word suggested, but wondered aloud,
According to even Fox News, today, there's an article today on the Fox News site saying that the president talked about injecting disinfectants with no context given.
What is the reader of that article going to think disinfectants means?
Well, they're going to think it means Clorox and Lysol.
That's the fake news.
The real news is that the context he was talking about was UV light, which is a disinfectant, And it is inserted into the body in a variety of ways.
It can go through a vein.
It can go down your trachea.
It can go into your lungs.
But in each case, it's injected.
It's a disinfectant.
It's what the president was talking about.
It's real. It's being tested in Cedars-Sinai.
There are commercial products already built around it that disinfect hospitals using the same technology.
And this guy, Jay Rosen, thinks that the president should not be allowed to talk Because the following entities completely misinterpreted, I don't know, I don't even know if it was willful, but they completely got the wrong information.
Who got the wrong information?
ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News.
Do you know who got that story right?
Breitbart. Breitbart got it right.
So it's obvious that you can get it right.
You know, on Fox News Channel, if you watch The Five, they got it right.
They knew the context.
They talked about the context.
So it's not like you can't get it right.
It's not like this is hard to get right.
This is easy to get right.
It's really easy.
And So, you know, this Jay Rosen thing, this is just a violation of free speech, and it's based on a complete misinterpretation of what's happening, because the fake news is coming not just from the president.
Yes, he's had some facts that don't match the fact-checking.
True. But there's the worst parts of it, the reckless parts, the parts that are actually dangerous.
Lately, they're coming from the press.
They're not coming from the president.
But they both have some stuff to explain.
All right. And if we were to ban organizations who give us fake news that's also reckless, would you have to also ban the Surgeon General of the United States?
Because he told us masks don't work.
How about the World Health Organization?
Whose information is pretty much all bullshit.
Should the World Health Organization be banned from reporting except to report that they said silly stuff?
Maybe. I don't know.
Here's an idea that I was thinking about and it turns out that others are thinking about it too.
I was planning on talking about it.
Maybe it's just obvious.
But the Belgian government is considering allowing people to form what they call social bubbles.
of, you know, ten people or so.
Meaning that rather than having a full end to social isolation, if you could identify ten people that could be, you know, friends and family, whatever combination, and you just agreed to mostly hang around with that ten people, that you would get a little extra freedom.
To which I say, you know, in the short run, I'm willing to listen to anything in an emergency.
Willing to listen to anything.
But I don't know if this will work.
That's the reason I didn't talk about it.
I like the thinking behind it.
But I don't think it's practical.
Let me explain to you how a normal family would manage this idea.
Hey, normal family. Family, let's say, two kids.
Two adults, two kids.
And they hear that they can form a pod of ten.
There's four people in the family.
And they can only be in a pod that has a maximum of 10.
Now, those of you who have been parents, game this out.
It's a disaster, isn't it?
It's a disaster. Ban Scott for being a sociopathic liar, somebody says.
I'm glad that the Chinese have decided to join us.
I'm not done with China, by the way.
Oh, I'm not done with China.
There's more coming on that.
So yeah, the way it would go in any normal family is that the kids would say, all right, great.
So I'll have my friend Brittany and my friend Bob, and they can bring their two friends.
And then the parents say, um, no.
Because that would max out our whole ten with just one kid.
Because, you know, we adults want to have a few of our friends, and it just becomes this big shootout in the family.
So I think this social bubble idea, while it's well-intentioned, and one could imagine that there would be some situations, especially with young people, where it works.
You know, if you're single, It's probably a pretty good deal if you could find 10 people who only want to hang out with each other.
But for families, this would be a nightmare trying to negotiate that.
I would like to correct a framing of something which snuck up on me.
So, as you know, I like to crow about my successful predictions, especially when the experts have predicted otherwise.
And you've heard all the examples, but just mention them quickly.
When there was a Cuban sonic weapon story, and I said, nah, that's not true.
And there was the masks don't work, and I said, nah, that's not true.
And there was the video of the doctors that I just talked about, and I said, nah, that's all bullshit.
And quite reasonably, And these are just a few examples of which there are many.
Many of them you already know.
So you've seen quite a few examples in which I have taken the opposite side of experts.
Have you not? So let's first establish that on many occasions you've seen me take the opposite side from experts and the consensus of experts.
And you've seen that that's worked out extraordinarily well for me.
The whiteboard's coming up.
Somebody asked about that. It's worked out really well.
And I've had weird success going against the experts and then being right.
It includes in my personal life, too.
Because in my personal life, I found a solution for my incurable voice problem when my doctors couldn't.
I tracked down the one place in the world I could get it fixed.
So I have a long track record from childhood on In which I have gone against experts, and it works out way more than half the time.
Way more than half. Closer to 90%, I would guess.
And I can't even think of any time it didn't work out.
But I'll say 90% just because there must have been times it didn't.
But here's the framing that I think everybody gets wrong, and that's completely my fault.
Because I've never framed it correctly, so let me do that now.
All right? Allow me to do that now.
The framing that's incorrect is the one that I allowed to spontaneously pop up because of the poor way I talked about it.
And that frame was that I'm against the experts.
And that naturally makes you think, Scott, how much medical training do you have?
None. How much legal training do you have?
None. I know you majored in economics, but did you get a Nobel Prize like the person that you're criticizing?
No, I did not.
How about your technical expertise?
Did you get that at MIT? No, I did not.
So that's the wrong frame, and I let that happen.
So that's all on me.
So I'm taking full responsibility.
Here's the frame I should have presented from the start.
I'm an expert. I'm an expert.
But I'm a special kind of expert.
Because of my studies of persuasion, etc.
Because of my experience, which is fairly broad in terms of my talent stack.
I've been in a lot of places, seen a lot of things from finance to you name it.
And my claim is this.
That my pattern recognition for bullshit is better than the layperson.
In other words, I do claim expertise, but not on the topics I'm talking about.
I don't claim medical expertise.
I don't even claim financial expertise.
I could, probably.
I mean, I could. But I don't even claim that.
I claim that I have a special skill, and other people do too.
I'm not the one person who can do this.
But there are people who have similar skills that I do, who can detect bullshit from other experts.
And I should have always framed it that way.
Because when I was looking at the doctors, I was not saying to myself, Oh, doctors, you got it wrong.
This is what you should prescribe.
Because that would be me being an expert.
I didn't say I could be a better expert than the doctors.
I was just saying, I'm listening to them, and my bullshit filter is just going crazy.
I mean, I don't think I've ever had more flashing lights for bullshit than I did when I was looking at those doctors.
Now, here's the interesting part.
There's a book called Blink by Malcolm Gladwell.
And he talks about the fact...
I don't know if this has been debunked, but it makes a good story anyway.
He talks about the fact...
The experts make decisions before they know why.
And the example given is that an art expert can often identify a fake, you know, a painting by the masters, but it's a fake one.
They can usually identify it right away, but they don't know why.
In other words, the answer comes first, and then they have to say, um...
And the reason it's a fake is because...
And then they think about it, like, I don't know, maybe it's because the brushstroke over here looks different, or he never...
He was born before the iPhones.
No, that's a bad example.
So there couldn't be an iPhone sitting on the table.
But anyway, the experts...
Know something's wrong before they know why.
I would argue that I have that same sensation.
So when I looked at the doctors, I knew it was bullshit before I knew why.
And that's part of the reason that when people said, give me the reasons, I was demuring.
I can give you a reason, but it's sort of an after-the-fact reason.
It's me like the art expert saying, okay, I already told you it's bullshit.
But now I guess I've got to give you a reason why.
Well, I guess it's that brushstroke thing right there.
So, you should judge me that way.
So the way I would like to be judged is not that I'm an expert or pretending to be an expert, because I'm not, and overruling experts.
I'm simply my own expert at identifying bullshit.
That's it. Likewise, when I look at climate change, I'm not a scientist, but I can tell that the odds that the scientists got the temperature part right, that there's something happening with CO2 and temperature, I can't guarantee that's right.
But if I had to look at the pattern of my life and the odds and how many ways they've looked at it and measured it and how long they've been correcting it, I would say they're probably, probably right on the temperature part, but not the models.
To say that the prediction models are accurate is just crazy.
There's no such thing as that.
They might tell you that there's something you should think about, and they do, but they don't tell you what the temperature is going to be in 80 years.
That's not a thing. So my bullshit filter on climate change says, can't be sure about the temperature part.
More likely true than not.
But it doesn't mean that we're doomed, because that's in the models.
That part's ridiculous.
Could be doomed, maybe not doomed, but using those models to determine it is ridiculous, in my opinion.
In large part because they can't predict human achievement and human ingenuity and any changes that happen.
Which climate models predicted that the pandemic would remove pollution in three months?
It's not going to make a difference in the long run, but there's so many things that the model can't.
All right. Funniest political story of the day is that former Democratic Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams is embarrassingly campaigning to get the vice president nomination for Biden.
And she recently said she totally believes Joe Biden's denial, totally believes Joe Biden, that that Me Too thing didn't happen.
And I thought to myself, Whoever gets the nomination is gonna have to say that, aren't they?
Think about that. Whoever gets the nomination is gonna have to say what Stacey Abrams said.
They're not gonna be able to get away with It's unproven.
They're not going to be able to get away with, she should be heard.
They're not going to be able to get away with, women should be believed, but let's look into it.
They're not going to be able to get away with, it was a long time ago, let's not dredge up the past.
There's just nothing they can get away with.
The vice presidential candidate will have to look in the camera a whole bunch of times and say, I believe Joe Biden didn't do that.
How is anybody going to do that?
Really? How is anybody going to do that?
Even Alyssa Milano, who is clearly as in Joe Biden's camp as you could be.
I mean, she said it publicly.
She's endorsed him. She's hugged him in public.
She tweets about him all the time.
And even she can't go all the way to say, I believe Joe Biden is telling the truth.
Even she won't do that.
But the vice presidential candidate is going to have to do it.
And I think that Stacey Abrams, I have to give her credit because I've consistently under, I guess, underappreciated her talent because I haven't seen much of her, so I didn't know what kind of talent she has or not.
I don't think she's necessarily a great persuader, but Look at how close she is to being President of the United States.
For somebody who...
Somebody says, Stacey Abrams did that already?
Did what already?
Is there an update to this?
But what's funny...
Well, the whole thing is funny.
But what's funny is that Stacey Abrams is closer to becoming President of the United States than all the people who didn't do this.
So all the people who are not willing to blatantly lie about this are not really in the running for Vice President.
They're not. And given that Biden himself might not last, and given that President Trump, you have to assume he's on at least a little bit of shaky territory because of the coronavirus, Stacey Abrams, by this bald-faced lie, is it a bold-faced lie or a bald-faced lie?
I never get that right. But this is clearly a lie.
Stacey Abrams, I don't think you have to be a mind reader to know that the most you could know is that you don't know what happened.
That's the most you could say.
But to say you believe Joe Biden, well, that's just a lie.
That's just a lie, right?
I mean, do we agree?
I know I'm not...
I always warn you against mind-reading, but in this case, this one's sort of simple, right?
I guess we can't rule out the possibility that she's the most gullible person in the United States.
It's possible. Can't rule it out.
All right. Remember I always tell you that I've often complimented Mike Pence not for being a force of nature like the President, but rather for not making errors.
And the Vice President has violated that pattern.
So the Vice President goes to the Mayo Clinic and he's the only person who doesn't wear a mask, and he'd been told to wear a mask.
And I thought to myself, that is so non-Mike Pence.
Because really, Mike Pence is all about not making unforced errors.
And that was just an unforced error.
Now, I don't think it's important.
You know, it doesn't rank up there in the things that are going to move the election.
But it has to be called out because he's so consistent at not making that kind of error.
It just is worth noting.
Hillary Clinton's getting pushback from the right because she said during the Biden thing that you don't want to waste a good crisis and maybe this would be a time to get health care.
Everybody who's complaining about Hillary Clinton saying don't waste a crisis, you're all hypocrites.
You're all hypocrites.
Because every conservative has quoted that And use the same sentence in different contexts.
Don't want to let a good crisis go to waste.
It's something everybody says.
It's just smart. It's not bad.
And if you're trying to find something bad about Hillary Clinton saying a common political thing that literally everybody says, left and right, and exactly in this context, it's a real crisis.
Maybe you can find something good out of it.
I've said it. Everybody said it.
Most common thing in the world.
And the dumbasses in the news, the pundits, are like, oh, we got one.
We got one on Hillary Clinton.
She said a common thing, so that must be bad.
It just makes me want to throw up into my mouth when I see people wasting their time on that criticism.
Here's a good story. So China's puppet, you could say bitch, but China's puppet, the World Health Organization, they quote, accidentally...
Published some negative data on the drug remdesivir.
So this was a while ago.
This isn't brand new news.
But not too long ago, the World Health Organization accidentally, they say accidentally, published negative information on remdesivir.
Now, of course, a lot of people saw it, and then the World Health Organization said, oops, oops, we didn't mean to do that, and they took it down.
So hold that in your head.
Hold it in your head.
That the World Health Organization, who is China's puppet, accidentally put negative information about remdesivir on a public website.
At the same time, China was actively trying to steal Gilead's, Gilead is the maker of remdesivir, their intellectual property by trying to patent remdesivir in China.
I bet you didn't think that was possible, right?
If you don't follow intellectual property and patents and copyrights, you're saying to yourself, wait a minute.
Remdesivir is already patented, obviously, because it's a drug that Gilead has had for a long time.
Clearly patented. Well, China can do anything they want, because patent law is made by a government.
And apparently the government of China is going to let China, or somebody in China, Patent Gilead's drug after they told the world it didn't work through that clever little leak on the World Health Organization.
Do you see how bad this is?
Now, I can't automatically say this is all part of a large plot and that the leaked data was all part of the same scheme as stealing the intellectual property of the remdesivir, but given our recent experience with China, I think you have to assume it's at least likely.
It's probably more likely than not, given recent experience.
You can't know for sure, but I'd say more likely than not.
Can we do business with a country that would lie to us about a promising drug that could cause 100,000 deaths in this country because we didn't have the right information, if it works, at the same time that they're actively stealing the intellectual property for the drug?
Can you do business with that country?
No. No, you cannot.
You cannot do business with that country.
So I think we need to kick out every Chinese student in this country who's in any kind of a STEM job, especially.
Because mostly they're the elite's children, and they really, really do care about getting an education in the United States for status, etc., but also for stealing our stuff.
The Chinese students over here are stealing stuff.
So I think we should ship them all back.
Howard Stern doubled down on his statement that the president's followers should all drink disinfectants and die.
And of course, it's an outrage.
But it's Howard Stern.
Don't you have to keep it in context?
If a politician said that, I'd say, outrage!
How can you say such a thing? But Howard Stern is literally a shock jock.
If he says something like that, why is that news?
Except that he seems to believe the fake news.
I think Howard Stern, who I used to think was smart, turns out he's not, because he believes the fake news that the president suggested drinking Clorox and Lysol.
So if you believe that, if you believe that, You're just dumb.
There's no way around it.
If you believe that the President suggested injecting or drinking Clorox and Lysol, you're just dumb.
There isn't any way to soften that.
I'm sorry. There's no way around that.
I wish there were. Let's see.
And there's an account on Twitter that I follow called COVID-19 Crusher.
So it's all one word, COVID-19 Crusher.
I don't know who this is.
And I'm a little concerned because I don't know who it is.
Because it mostly tweets promising therapeutics and things that could crush the COVID. But it seems to concentrate on hydroxychloroquine.
And it publishes a number of graphs and stuff in which it's starting to compare countries that are using hydroxychloroquine with countries that are comparable in some way but are not.
Now here's the part I need to fact check on.
If you are to believe the charts coming from this Twitter account, And they're public, so I suppose you could check the math.
They allege that they can show, say, the curve in Ireland where they're not using hydroxychloroquine versus the curve in Morocco, for example, in which they are, and the Morocco number shows a drop exactly where you'd expect the drop in severity at the time they introduced the drug, you know, a few weeks after that.
So I got my questions about whether this account is real or not.
So if anybody can look at any of those graphs and tell me if they passed the sniff test, because there might be some context left down or something.
Elon Musk's getting in trouble because there's an old tweet of his back in April, I guess, maybe early April or March.
I'm not sure when he said it, but early on.
He said, based on current trends, probably close to zero new cases in the U.S. by end of April.
And that prediction is not coming true.
But I would like to reiterate, I don't think we can blame people for making bad predictions based on bad data.
I just don't think we should go back and start slaying people for that.
It just wouldn't work.
Alright, here's my whiteboard presentation.
I'll make it quick. And this will blow your mind.
Alright, this is what we're looking to do.
This is not drawn to scale, right?
So, the deaths were going to go up in the United States, and they would have kept going up except for the mitigation, we say.
That should flatten it.
Some people say it's not because of the social distancing.
Maybe it just would have done that on its own.
I don't think that's supportable, but that's what people say.
And then at some point, I don't know when, maybe 2021 or something, it's supposed to drift down towards zero.
Now that's our plan, right?
Wouldn't you say that this represents our plan?
Except... How does that happen?
Now you're saying to yourself, oh, Scott, that happens because of the herd immunity.
To which I say, no, it doesn't.
Not really. Because if you get all the way to 2021, you're going to have hundreds of thousands of deaths before you get to herd immunity.
So you need somebody to answer this question.
What exactly would make that go down?
Because I've not heard anything in the plan that even proposes to do that.
I've not heard somebody say herd immunity would do it, and there's even some question whether this one even has herd immunity.
I put the odds at 75% that there is such a thing.
This is before we get a vaccination, and most people won't have it anyway.
Therapeutics might be working, but which ones?
So here's my point, is that we have a plan in which the most important part of the plan, which is something we do here that makes the virus trend toward zero, is unstated.
Is it not? Now, people are saying, what about vaccines?
What about therapeutics?
And what about testing?
And what about vaccinations?
Those are all the right things to ask.
Is that our plan? And the answer is, I don't think so.
So, if you can get some expert to answer this question and say, okay, what exactly is driving it down?
Because at our current rate of testing, we'll never get there.
It looks like we're never going to be anywhere close to having enough tests.
Yeah, I don't think we'll ever get there.
And if we did get there, how often would you have to test each person?
I don't know. So, is the idea that we don't know exactly what will happen, but we think it's some combination of testing and herd immunity and social distancing, etc., therapeutics?
My only point is that there is an assumption in weather patterns.
Yeah, weather patterns too.
But Dr.
Fauci is assuming that there's going to be a second bump.
So that tells you that it doesn't die in the summer.
And if it doesn't die in the summer, it just comes back in the winter.
No vaccine from your evil buddy, Gates, says somebody.
You get a block for that.
Would never submit to a test, somebody says.
40% get flu vaccine.
How many will get COVID vaccine?
Good question. All right, so I'll leave you with that thought.
The thought is that we have a plan that things will go down, but I don't believe we have a plan that actually shows why it goes down.
It's just sort of a hope, I think.
All right. Somebody says mutations weaken it.
Maybe. But I'd like to see that on the plan.
So I'd like our press to ask that question.
Now, don't assume that it can't happen, because I think the odds of it happening are very high.
I think the odds of us getting on top of it are basically 100%.
It just depends how long it takes.
The only thing I'm adding is that I don't see a scenario where the cost in lives is not in the few hundred thousand.
I guess that's all I'm adding to this.
We don't have a plan that would keep the deaths under 100,000.
We do have a plan that I think, even if the plan goes according to the way we want it to, I think the plan is to lose a few hundred thousand people.
