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May 1, 2020 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
51:20
Episode 946 Scott Adams: Biden Versus Trump, Food Psychology, Your Questions and More
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Hey everybody, come on in.
It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams.
Here's a little thing I do with my pen.
Because I can. Yes, I used to practice doing this.
Throwing my pen in the air and then catching it in a way I can still write.
Watch this. Impressive?
If you're listening to this on audio, it's really boring.
Well, hello everybody.
It's another amazing evening in one of the coolest weeks ever.
Yes, we feel bad about those who are suffering with coronavirus, their families and the victims, but We don't necessarily have to dwell on it, do we?
Not every hour. We can pay our respects and then we can live our lives.
How about that? Who's with me?
Let's find a way to enjoy at least part of this weird experience we're having.
So did you all catch the President's press conference today?
Dana Prino beat me to it on Twitter while it was going on and she said that The President's answer about Biden was really good.
And I had to say, it was really good.
We'll talk about that. But in general, I thought maybe one of his best press conferences.
And let me tell you what he's getting right.
And man, is he good at it.
And you might not have noticed.
Well, you probably noticed, but maybe I'll add something to it.
Which is this. When the President has a message, Whether it's build the wall or whatever.
He is the most disciplined repeater of messages.
He will just hammer that simple message to death.
So he's really good at hammering the message home.
And one of the things that he's been hammering, and maybe you haven't noticed it because he does it so well, is that no matter what the question is, what's the first thing he always answers with?
You probably know the answer at home.
No matter what the question is, because it's all at least roughly about the coronavirus or politics, he answers with, first, respecting the victims.
Have you noticed that?
He's been really, really disciplined about that, and I thought by now he would have departed a little bit, and of course he gets heat whenever he talks about himself or gets off a message, but he was really good At every question saying, well, you know, one death is too many, people have died, and then he starts to answer the question.
But did you catch how he answered the question about the accusations about Biden?
I think it's the first time the president has, at least maybe in a press conference, answered this question.
And how does he answer it?
With one of the best answers you'll ever see a president give, On any question.
Let me tell you what he did right.
The president, going completely against type, when he's asked about it, he starts saying that it could be a false accusation, and that false accusations are real, and that he's been the victim of false accusations.
But he doesn't know what happened, and certainly she should have her moment to talk, and he should answer to it.
Now, by going first, And saying it could be a false accusation.
Didn't you just fall under the chair?
Yeah, somebody's prompting me in the comments, thank you.
But he seamlessly went from, it could be a false accusation, it's happened to me, and if he'd stayed with that, that would have been a mistake.
And when I was watching, I thought, oh, don't stay with that.
Don't bring the focus to things you've been blamed for.
It's the worst place to take this.
But he goes through himself, says he recognizes the problem, admits that false accusations are a real thing.
He doesn't limit it to Me Too stuff.
He's just saying false accusations.
But then he seamlessly goes into Kavanaugh.
The energy goes over to Kavanaugh, which we At least his supporters all agree was completely illegitimate.
So now he's basically giving Biden all the out an opponent could ever give you, because he's saying, could be a false accusation.
It's happened to me, but my God, look what happened to this poor guy, Kavanaugh.
Now Kavanaugh of course is a much better example Because people actually believe Kavanaugh was innocent, at least people on the right do, whereas the president, you say to yourself, well, maybe you have some false accusations, but then again, maybe you have some actual just accusations.
So he very cleverly took it through him all the way to Kavanaugh and left clean this idea that he's open to the possibility that it's a false accusation.
Did you see that coming?
I did not see that coming.
And I'll tell you, it blew me away.
Because first of all, it's a repetition of the pattern.
The pattern is, do you see the pattern yet?
The pattern is that no matter what the question is, the first thing he says is he recognizes the victim.
So he recognized that the woman has the story to tell.
We should listen. But he also recognized that Biden is the subject of an accusation.
If he were to be innocent, I'm not giving you an opinion on that, but if he were to be, he would be a victim too.
And so the President quite deftly used his pattern that has worked so well before, which is first, recognize the people who are getting it the worst.
Then, tell your story.
And man, when he keeps to that pattern, He is powerful.
I mean, because that's when his charisma is highest.
Because remember, charisma is power plus empathy.
He always has the power, and of course he's president, so duh.
But he doesn't always show the empathy.
But man, when he does the empathy first and then follows with power, wow, that is really a good package.
So I hope that That he's doing this consciously, which would suggest he's found something that works, and he'll just keep doing it.
There were a number of other things that he did well.
Oh, and let me just finish that point.
Now, the president can afford to be generous with Biden, partly because Biden is falling apart.
There's not much there to attack, but partly because a tie goes to Trump.
If Biden is accused of MeTooing and the president has his own accusations, let's say it's a tie.
Because people are going to believe Biden or not, Trump or not, maybe more or not, but it's going to look like a tie.
Biden can't get elected if he's only as bad as Trump, because the only thing he's offering is better character.
That's it. The only thing he's offering is better character.
He's not really offering better judgment, because I don't think anybody thinks that.
He's not really offering he's smarter.
I don't think anybody thinks that.
They might think he's as smart, but nobody thinks he's smarter.
So if you've got somebody who's done the job and performed for four years and he's got some accusations and you see it made no difference, didn't affect his performance at all, but you don't know about the other guy.
So a tie is going to go to Trump, in my opinion.
Yeah, now there's some more reporting that maybe Biden was not the angel that some people thought he was.
I am going to take some questions here in a little bit, so if you have any, why don't you think of them?
Get ready. But before that...
I saw another video of Biden from his basement studio.
Can somebody do a fact check with me?
When was the last time he appeared without his wife sitting next to him?
Because are you starting to feel what I'm feeling?
That having the wife there is not just to add another I don't think it's that.
Don't you get the sense that she's there for, let's say, health guardian purposes?
You get that, right?
Now, I don't think she was on camera when Biden was getting Hillary's endorsement, but that makes sense.
That really had to be a one-on-one.
Otherwise, how often are we going to see his wife sitting next to him clearly in a protective mode?
That's how you take it, right?
You take it as a caretaker mode, right?
You take it as protective.
Handler, caretaker.
I mean, how long can that go on?
I mean, really? Are we the only ones that see that?
I don't think so.
I think everybody's seen it.
Here's an interesting thing.
I love it when people who I think are smart agree with me.
Because when that happens, I say, oh, that person I think is smart just agreed with me.
That might mean I'm smart, at least on this one topic.
Although I know many of you vehemently disagree on this following point.
I would simply like to note that it's a very smart person, even if you don't like him.
You will admit he's smart, even if you don't like him.
And he agrees with me.
And whereas Bill Gates...
Who said today, I just saw, I think it was on CNN, that the testing for the coronavirus in the United States is just crap, and that it doesn't come anywhere near the right way to do it or the right degree.
We're not doing it in the right priority.
It's nowhere near as good as Asia.
Now, if you were with me this morning, or was it last night?
I believe I told you directly you should just stop thinking testing is going to help you because it's a mess.
My sense of it was that the more we were unclear about the testing situation and the more competing stories we would hear like, yeah, they have plenty of tests.
No, we don't. They have everything they need.
Well, that's the other kind of test.
We've got plenty of testing Let's see, test facilities, but what about the kits?
We got lots of kits.
They don't have any cotton.
You know, I'm making some of those up.
But the point is, you kept hearing these confusing stories about all these different kinds of kits with different places and people didn't know what to do, but then you would hear from an actual human, as I have, from somebody who got tested three weeks ago and doesn't have a result.
Did you hear that? Someone who was tested three weeks ago and doesn't have a result at all.
At all. Now, how much of that is going on around the country?
In my opinion, somebody says you're wrong.
You must be new here.
If I had more time, I would block you for that.
I block people for saying you're wrong.
That's an automatic block if you put no reasons in.
I'm on the page of saying that testing is BS and we just aren't doing it in a way that will get us there.
I'm not saying that we couldn't ever get there.
I mean, eventually we could, I'm sure, but we're nowhere near it and we're just so far from it you could almost discount it when you're trying to figure out what's going to happen.
But I do think we'll have good therapeutics.
I wouldn't rule out that we have a vaccination faster than we've ever had one.
I've said this on another periscope, but it's blowing my mind, and I've got to share it with you.
This is just blowing my mind.
I'll just repeat it again.
The top virologist guy in France, Dr.
Didier Raoult or something, It says that all of these viruses peak and then they peter out, and here's the mind-blowing part from the top virologists in France.
We don't know why it peters out.
We don't know why any virus stops being a virus.
Did you know that?
Did you know that the top experts in the world don't know why it goes away?
No. If it were herd immunity, The top virologist in France probably would have mentioned it.
Just guess. If it were because of vaccinations plus herd immunity, the top virologist in France would have said, yeah, it's probably some combination of those things.
If it were those things plus the virus mutates, let's say, the top virologist in France would know that.
He would know that it mutates.
He would know what the vaccinations are doing.
He would know what herd immunity does.
So when he says, nobody knows why these viruses stop, isn't that mind-blowing?
I mean, doesn't that just blow your freaking mind?
First of all, that we're finding this out now.
Because I'm not sure that Fauci's ever said that directly.
I would love for somebody to ask him that question and say, do we really know why any virus peters out?
Like, why doesn't it just go to, you know, if you assume the planet always has a winter somewhere and everybody's traveling everywhere from everywhere to everywhere, if you only had 60% herd immunity so that 40% had never been exposed, There's a winter somewhere.
People are traveling.
How in the world does a virus ever go away?
Now, somebody says viruses get weaker.
But again, the top virologist in France said he doesn't know why they peter out.
Now, it could be that they get weaker.
We don't know why. Maybe he meant that.
It's a big mystery. All right.
The Sweden story just keeps getting more interesting.
And it's not interesting because we can tell anything useful by looking at Sweden.
Let me say this as clearly as I can.
We can't tell anything useful by looking at Sweden.
So what do we do?
It's basically become our national sport to make bad comparisons to Sweden that don't mean anything because there are way, way, way, way too many variables to know anything.
But that doesn't seem to be stopping anybody from making these comparisons, both good and bad.
The President apparently is taking the position that things are not going well in Sweden, which is interesting, because that allows the President to say that the United States is doing better than Sweden, because we used a different approach.
Now, I'm not so sure that I'm going to agree with the President on this.
But, here's what was impressive.
When the President was talking about it, he did talk about the differences in Sweden, and there was one thing in particular he noted about their lifestyle.
I forget what it was, but it was pretty insightful, and I didn't realize that he had looked into it that deeply.
So apparently he was very curious.
About Sweden because so many people were holding it up as a model, but he's decided that things are not going well there.
But I ask you this. What does it mean to say that things are not going well in Sweden?
Because if their hospitals are not crushed, aren't they doing better?
And suppose it never gets to the point where the Swedish hospitals are ever overloaded.
Wouldn't we then say that they did better even though...
Even though they had more deaths per capita than we did.
Wouldn't we say that was a victory?
Because they would have kept their economy going somewhat.
Oh, here's the thing that the President said, and I'd only seen one other place that somebody said this besides me, and I copied it from that person, which is that although in Sweden they did not have a very rigorous lockdown, so many people were afraid of getting it in Sweden that they were sort of voluntarily not doing as much in public.
So the president rightly pointed out you're not looking at a bottle where they're free to do anything versus one where they're not.
That's not what you're seeing. You're seeing two bottles where they're not doing all the things they could do.
One's just a little bit more strict than the other.
So it's not quite the good apple to apple that you want.
All right. I've decided that what I'm going to do on the locals I told you I'm moving some of my content there.
I'll still do the periscopes.
You'll still see them in the same places that you always did.
But in addition, I'll have some extra stuff on the Locals platform.
And I put a lesson on writing humor there.
So I'm going to put some very small micro-lessons on that platform because it's a subscription service and people will want to get a little extra.
So I'll try to do at least one lesson a week so that over the course of a year you would learn 52 skills, micro-skills.
Things like writing humor, how to start a conversation, Yeah, how to sleep, that sort of thing.
Alright, so that will be there.
One is Locals.
Locals is a new platform.
Go to Locals.com in which creators, Dave Rubin started it and creators are moving there to not be guided by the algorithm.
So if I put my content on Say, Twitter and YouTube, Twitter and YouTube get to decide what you see.
So I can only grow as much as those entities want me to.
But if I put it on a subscription service, nobody sees it except the ones who want to have a subscription, and it's all there.
You don't have to go looking for it.
So all of my content will be in one place.
So, that's that.
Somebody says Dave Rubin's on Fox right now.
So he's got a book. I'm going to be talking to him tomorrow.
I think we'll do that live.
Yeah, we'll probably do that live.
Talking about his new book called Don't Burn This Book.
All right. I'm going to take some...
So I thought I answered this question.
Somebody says, so no more periscopes.
Incorrect. The Paris Ghost will be exactly as before.
When the coronavirus is done, I probably won't do an evening one, at least as often, but I will do the morning ones just as always.
They'll still be on YouTube. They'll still be on iTunes.
You'll just have one extra place you can watch them, and then you can watch them at double speed.
There'll be other advantages, but you can send me messages and stuff.
All right, so I'm going to take some questions.
Questions. Who's got a question?
I think Amy has a question.
Amy Banta, do you have a question for me?
Amy, do you have a question? If your periscoping is part of some grand master plan of pacing and then leading conservatives to some of your left of Bernie worldviews, such as universal healthcare and...
Well, certainly not in terms of a grand plan which I put together to conquer the world.
But in general, as I've said before, people who know persuasion Don't turn it off.
It simply becomes the way you talk because everybody wants to persuade.
So if you know how to do it well, why would you do it less well than you know how to do it?
So I'm always persuading, which means that in any situation I will be pacing.
Because that's pretty basic.
And I'm always looking for a reason that I could lead because that's why people want to get paced in the first place.
They want to get a little extra. They don't want to just know what they already know.
But I would say it's very unlikely that I would move conservatives.
Far more likely they would find out that there's something in the middle.
Which is, for example, there's no conservative who's opposed to everybody having health care.
They just don't like the way it's proposed that it happens.
I would propose that everybody has health care too, but that we could almost certainly get there through capitalist ways without taxing somebody to pay for somebody else's health care.
There are some people you're going to have to pay for, but it feels to me That we could just be more clever and get there.
So I wouldn't say that would be moving conservatives to left of Bernie or vice versa.
Rather it would be acknowledging that there's a solution that both could be happy.
Take another example. I would not be trying to, for example, lead conservatives to think That climate change is what AOC and Bernie think it is, because I don't think that.
But I would try to point out that both the left and the right on climate change have a solution that's the same solution, which is nuclear power.
The left is a little behind in understanding it.
If they were up to speed about Generation 4 and how safe that is and can be, they would have a different opinion.
The right is a little more up to date because they care about nuclear so they tend to pay attention to that stuff.
That's not a case of moving anybody anywhere except recognizing that there's an obvious solution that works for everybody.
I think that there might be a number of cases like that.
I'm more about the solution.
I would call myself a pragmatist.
When I say I'm left to Bernie, it's just so I don't get put in a box.
Part of the reason I say that is that nobody knows what it means.
So that's part of the value of it.
People go, I don't even know what that means.
I guess I'll have to ask you.
So as you did, basically, and others have.
Like, I don't get that. Who are you?
That's the preferred situation so that I can be pragmatic.
Maybe somebody on the left has a great idea.
Maybe somebody on the right has a great idea.
It wasn't long ago that It was that AOC had some very good idea that was neither left nor right, and I tweeted it right away.
So I'm not really about the left or the right.
I'm about pragmatism.
Thanks for the question. Yeah, well, you've definitely been persuading me.
Were you on the left or the right?
Oh, definitely on the right.
I was an ever-Trumper until you started Trumpsplaining for me.
Well, I'm glad I could be of service.
All right. Thank you, Amy.
All right. That was a good call.
Let's have more good questions like that.
I'm going to go with Mike Winnbigley, who was smart enough to put the title of my book in his name.
Mike Winnbigley, you got a question for me?
Yeah. Further to her question, we can't afford healthcare.
We can't afford universal healthcare.
We can't afford free college.
But we seem to be able to print money whenever we need it.
So I don't understand. If we can print money, why we can't afford these other things?
I'm not for it or against it.
I'm just saying we can't be able to afford whatever we want.
You're asking a tremendous question.
And to the best of my understanding, nobody knows the answer.
And this is fascinating.
Because I've been asking a version of this question.
Let me try to frame it a little bit for you.
So I've got a degree in economics and an MBA, but I can't answer this question.
And I don't know if anybody can.
And here's why it's so weird.
In a normal situation, if you print money, that means you've got more money in the system, but there's the same amount of goods in the short run.
So that would cause inflation.
Yes. But we're in the most special of special cases in which we have all this production facility but we don't have enough demand because even if we're pumping tons of money in, there are so many consumers who got whacked, they're not going to be buying any extra.
So we're going to be entering a situation where, except for some minor things that people are trying to hoard and there might be price gouging, you're not going to see anything like inflation Almost no matter how much they print.
Because anybody who tried to raise the price just wouldn't work.
Nobody would pay more. What if we go one step further and we say, was there inflation after 2008 when they printed $2 trillion and they just printed $4 trillion?
They can print however much money they want.
It's not causing it to Well, in 2008, I think we borrowed, didn't we?
There's a big difference between borrowing, where you absolutely have to pay it back.
Sooner or later, you've got to pay it back unless you default, and that's worse.
By the way, Trump answered the question about not paying China's debt.
Really well.
Because he's worked with banks and he understands it's not about the moment.
It's about your credit worthiness.
So you don't want to win the moment and lose your credit worthiness.
That would be the worst play in the world.
So he understands that. So here's the thing.
If we borrowed money, that would be interest payments and that would be real pain and borrowing definitely has a limit.
Everything has a limit.
But when you're just printing it in this one strange situation where inflation is basically impossible and that's the only risk, I've asked the question, what's the limit?
Because I think I think if you look at the stock market, the smartest people in finance just watched us print $4 trillion or whatever it was, and they just said, looks good to us.
Right. And what is it that Trump wishes that he had gotten done in this last round?
He wishes that they'd thrown another trillion on it for infrastructure.
So, is there any sense that we can, that there's a limit to how much of this money we can print?
Now, in theory there is, but do we know where that is?
And is there any Nobel Prize or Nobel Prize winner who can answer that?
I don't think anyone can answer it.
It's one part of territory.
We're the smartest people in finance, and all these sweater-best Republicans keep talking about, we've got too much debt, you can't do all these things, and then we just do it, and nothing ever happens.
Just like climate change, the Republicans' predictions about financial ruin never come true.
Never come true.
Well, so part of it is that we overstate the problem in the first place.
Secondly, we humans are amazingly good at figuring stuff out.
So even if we get into trouble, we can figure out how to weasel out of trouble if we have enough time and enough people are working on it.
But I tell you, I spend a lot of time every day thinking about exactly your question, which is, what's the limit that you can just print under this special situation?
No idea. The commenters don't like me.
They're like, put a lid on a key, man.
All right. Okay, take care.
Got chased off by the commenters.
All right. How about...
How about Gabriel? I feel like I've talked to you before.
Gabriel? Gabriel? Gabriel?
Hey Gabriel, do you have a question?
Deep diving on a super current event, but you can indulge my question or not.
You just have to be interesting.
That is the only burden. I was wondering how you and say your group of friends would approach helping one of your best friends who might have been diagnosed with cancer.
Fatal? Terminal?
We don't know precisely, but there was some very terrible news today which does not carry a good prognosis.
Well, I don't think there's any magic bullet, other than adding your love and comfort and visiting and asking what you can do and helping out.
There's no special formula.
There's no right way to do it, but certainly showing your concern and offering help.
That's all you can do.
Unfortunately, it's an easy question to answer because there's no good answer to that.
But are you worried how the person with cancer is going to feel about it, or are you worried in terms of your own internal sense of whether you're doing the right stuff?
I think both.
I think we'd all like to think we can create an environment of positivity around the situation to help the person, but part of me wonders if even that effort's futile.
Well, I don't think there's any case where some positivity isn't better.
So the person with cancer is going to give you all the negativity you need.
The last thing they need is more on top of that.
So you probably do have an obligation to at least keep your contribution light because it's the last thing they need.
So yeah, I would say stay positive and that probably is the best thing you can do.
All right. Thanks for the question.
Appreciate it. All right.
Let's see if Brian has a question.
Brian, do you have a question?
Hello, Brian. Hi.
You're kind of light.
Can you speak up? Okay, yeah.
Sorry about that. Is that better?
That's better. Okay.
The question I had for you was, I don't want to sound too biased against Biden, but I really can't comprehend how people keep endorsing him when so clearly something's not right there.
Well, you know, I have the same curiosity, but I would give you this thought experiment.
When Trump was running the first time, The Democrats were saying, my God, can you Republicans not see what we see?
He's obviously crazy.
He's obviously mentally challenged.
So, I think that a lot of the Democrats honestly saw that.
In other words, that was their honest, intelligent, adult opinion that Trump was dysfunctional mentally.
Now, in fact, they still say that.
But, do you see it?
Because, you know, we all have our own criticisms, right?
He's not above criticism, but I don't see the crazy part.
Like, I just don't see it. I've heard you say this before, and, you know, I try to, I felt like before Biden got the nomination and before he keeps, even while he keeps gathering all of these endorsements, I felt really confident that I was beyond the two movies and one screen, and I could see, okay, this is just the world they live in.
This is the world I live in.
I understand that they think he's crazy.
I don't see it. I just, for Biden, I don't see how you don't see it, and maybe that's part of the process of it.
Well, okay, so here's the second part.
There may be some people who don't see it, but I'm totally with you.
It's easier to imagine how people would see two versions of Trump.
But it's impossible for me to imagine how anybody would see a second version of Biden if they're paying attention.
And all the people who are endorsing him are paying attention.
So here's my best guess.
Number one, there's definitely something going on.
You know what I'm talking about, right?
There's something. There's a conversation happening behind the curtain.
There's maneuvering.
There's a power struggle.
Clearly there are conversations...
Yeah, clearly there's a conversation about what to do about this, and indeed, I've talked to at least one top Democrat who would know the answer to this, who says, we don't know what we're going to do.
I mean, in those exact words, we don't know what we're going to do, meaning they know that they don't have a candidate, but they don't know what they're going to do about it.
Now, this was a while ago. Maybe they know now.
My best guess Is that they're playing for the vice presidency, and they got themselves in this situation before they realized how bad it was.
Because I think it snuck up on them.
Oh, by the way, I'd like to ask in the comments, from the very early on, when Biden was being discussed as a candidate, was I the first person in the country to say that he was mentally incompetent?
Because, you know, I think this...
This might be a selective memory on my part because I like to remember when I get something right and immediately forget if I get something wrong, like everybody.
I'm seeing some people say no.
I was saying it before it became part of the national conversation.
I think it's worsened quite a bit.
I would say that I was seeing the first flickers of it Well before it got to where it is now, and I had also predicted at the time that there was going to be a rate of decline that was going to be really awkward for the Democrats if he got the nomination, and that's exactly where we are.
So I think it's like a frog boiling in a pot of water type situation, or just snuck up on him and now figure out how to do it.
Yeah, because in my opinion, I did not think it was obvious to everyone on day one.
So maybe it wasn't. Yeah.
So, and wouldn't you say he's gotten worse in the last six months?
It seems significantly worse.
Right. It seems significantly worse.
So, and I don't know if anybody else had predicted, like I did, that however bad it is now, I don't know if he's going to make it to the nomination.
I mean, I said that directly, and a long time ago.
And, you know, nobody's ever made a more accurate prediction.
That a candidate might not make it to the nomination.
I mean, I said it about Hillary, and she literally passed out, and God knows what else she did, and got dragged into a limousine.
And it's the only time I've ever said somebody doesn't look healthy who's running for president.
I've only said it once, and there's video of her passing out and being dragged into a car.
So this is the second time I'm saying it.
Clearly... On point.
I mean, everybody agrees with it now.
But to your point, I believe the people who have endorsed him do see it.
I think they just know they got trapped and they don't have an out.
There's no good way to do it.
And here's the weird part.
What if he wins?
Because I'm not going to rule that out.
You know, if I... If I'm updating the slaughter meter, it looks like there's no chance in the world that Joe Biden could win, but I worry that I'm making the following analytical error.
I'm thinking of Joe Biden as a candidate, like as a person, one-on-one against candidate Trump, and if you think of it that way, there's no chance.
I mean, there's not even a little chance that he could be candidate Trump, but I don't know if that's how Democrats see it.
I think they see Trump and no Trump.
Yes, no. It's like a yes-no vote, and they'll figure out the rest later.
I don't know that they care.
I don't know if Joe Biden would still be in the race if there weren't a pandemic.
The lack of exposure has really assisted him getting this far.
Yeah, absolutely.
I would agree with that.
And did you see the president's approval is just jacking all over the place?
It's like way down, then it's way up.
I don't know what's going on with that.
But what we can tell is that the coronavirus, we don't know which impact it'll have on the race because the public's saying, okay, good week, bad week.
That means they don't know how it's going to turn out.
But if I had to guess today how it's going to look on Election Day, I think it's going to look like the United States did a solid job, you know, minus, let's say, testing wasn't good.
There are going to be things that we have to complain about.
But I think in terms of turning the economy back on at the right amount of death, etc., and getting back up and having that, you know, V-shaped recovery that the President talks about optimistically, We might be looking really good by November.
Or at least, this is all it would take for Trump to win.
All it would take is that things have been moving in the right direction over the summer and through November.
If it's moving in the right direction, people will put up with it being slower than they wish.
But it needs to be moving in the right direction.
I think it will be. Exactly.
As I often say. Alright, thanks for the question.
Thank you, Scott. All right.
I think we got time for another one, don't we?
Let's find somebody who would just be the best question asker of all time.
Well, we're going to have to pick Oregon History because I cleverly put my book in his profile.
Hi, do you have a question for me?
Service. I would suggest that you're doing the greatest community service of anyone at the moment, to me in particular, because I'm on Twitter all day Reading about lies and all this nonsense, and then you come on and we hear you, and you talk some sense into us, especially the way you labeled the disinfectant hoax.
I found that really, really helpful.
Just disinfectant hoax, you said.
That's so concise and so good.
And the energy creature concept the other night, the four-dimensional energy creature concept, just awesome.
Thank you for that, too.
Thanks. Do you have a question?
Yeah. Well, I know what your answer is going to be.
You're going to say, don't argue with those people.
But during this time of being off, we have more time to argue with people on the internet.
And I've come into arguments against some anti-Semites.
And I'm wondering, maybe, do you have a kill shot against general anti-Semitism or anything in particular?
Well, I don't know that anybody has a kill shot, because somebody would have used that by now, I think, if there was one.
If I had one, I would certainly unleash it on the world.
But my experience is that anti-Semites are coming at it from a point of an inferiority complex.
Now, I can't say there's one explanation of everybody, and I'm not reading minds or anything.
It's just an observation. If you ask why, if somebody says, yes, they're anti-Semitic, if you had a quiet moment with them and you said, why?
What's your answer?
Eventually, they're going to come around to the fact that they feel threatened.
They think that it's a group of people who just perform better and just do better.
If you feel that resources in the world are limited, then you get a bad feeling about anybody who's good at acquiring resources in your opinion.
The anti-Semites are of the opinion that it's a group of people who are extra good at success and acquiring things.
That means there will be less for other people, according to that point of view.
So, I don't have a kill shot, but if you were to quietly have a conversation, as opposed to in public, with somebody, the question that I would ask is, what are you afraid of?
And I would try to figure out what it is because obviously there's some kind of fear at the bottom of it because there's something special with anti-Semitism that doesn't seem to be the same with anti-other people.
Anti-other people have all different reasons.
There's something special about anti-Semitism.
But I just ask them what they're afraid of and see if you can get them to deal with the fact that That they're trying to externalize their own fears and insecurities.
And they can do that.
It's a free country, but it's not a good look.
Alright, that's the best I can do.
Sorry. Well, I might have been arguing with Iranian Revolutionary Guard bots anyways, so they're not going to be persuaded.
In which case, good luck.
Alright, thanks for the question.
Thank you, Scott. Alright, we can do one more.
There's still a few people here.
Some people who haven't bailed out yet.
Oh, let's see.
Mike Burt. For adding a Burt into your name.
Oops, Mike Burt is gone.
Let's try somebody else.
Let's try Stephanie.
Stephanie? Hello, Stephanie.
Do you have a question? I can.
Good. So, you know how Germany is suing China for this coronavirus?
Yes. And I'm very doubtful if anything will come of that, meaning I don't think China's going to pay up because they're going to be paying the whole world.
But isn't it true that China holds most of our debt?
Well, if you're saying, why don't we just not pay them back?
The President answered that question at the press conference and I loved his answer.
Yes, I heard that too.
So basically, if you go back on a debt, You don't get a second chance.
That's kind of the end of your currency, the end of your credit.
If we were to default on something that big, it's just too big, too disruptive.
It would hurt us as much as them.
Yeah, no, it wouldn't work.
It would be an empiric victory, as they say.
You could win, but you'd be so wounded by the win that you wish you hadn't won.
Yes? You took it a step further and said, well, we're not really going to default, but we're not paying interest on it.
And just paid them back the money they borrowed, but not...
Well, who's them?
Yeah, who's them? It's individual...
Yeah, I'm thinking Chinese nationals, or...
I mean, I'm not even sure I didn't look into that.
Like, who owns it? Yeah, if it's just, you know, well-off Chinese citizens, that feels a little rough, because it's...
Yeah, I understand what you're saying, but we probably, as the President said, we have other levers, other tools, so I think I'd rather use trade and maybe having good allies and maybe have military agreements with people they don't like it.
There's just lots of ways we can put pressure on this.
Yeah, I was also happy when he said maybe we won't have any students here in our STEM programs because that's That's gotten a little out of control, I think.
I don't want to conflate what's happening with China with what would happen with any other country, because we definitely do need as much high-end scientific, technical talent as we can get.
If we can get it from India, we can get it from England, we can get it from wherever, but China is kind of a special case.
Because even though the scholars and the people coming over are, you know, incredible.
Yeah. I know.
I guess what I'm saying is if I have two STEM kids in college and it's like they're the only white kids.
I mean, it's not so terrible to say, but where are the Americans?
Where are the natives? It's a lot of foreigners.
And they're not here taking our Some of it is because they pay full price, and of course the colleges want people who pay full price, but some of it is just math, because if the United States has X number of universities, But it has to service not just our population, but the smartest people from the biggest countries that are way bigger than the United States.
There would have to be way more foreign people who would be willing to pay full price than there ever will be enough in the United States.
So it's kind of built into the system.
I would rather just not let countries that are rivals be part of that at all and get as much as we can from countries that we don't think are a risk because I don't think there's any limit to how many technical and scientific people you can bring into a country because they tend to add more than they they use so you could probably add unlimited high-end technical people and it just improves the economy forever all right and I have to thank you for your cartoon I think right when I was out of college is when you started that and we would sit around with you know my recent grad co-workers and we would just laugh hysterically and each of your characters we knew which boss that was was great.
Well good I'm glad you enjoyed it.
Very enjoyable. All right thanks for the question.
Thank you. All right this brings me to the conclusion of tonight's broadcast.
I hope all of you are feeling better.
I think the I think the direction of the country is finally moving where we want it to go.
It was a rough psychological, financial, and physical haul as we were going up the mountain, but it feels like we just crested the mountain and that I would imagine that every day from here on, it's far more likely to be good news than bad.
I would expect by maybe a two to one ratio that from now to Election Day, If we're talking about the coronavirus and we're talking about the economy, we probably have two pieces of good news for every piece of bad news from now until we get to the other end of this.
So we're in a much better place and psychologically, oh my goodness, it's better because we're moving in the right direction.
We have tools now.
We didn't have tools. We have more understanding.
It was kind of an information problem.
We have a lot more information.
But we're getting there. And I absolutely buy into President Trump's optimism.
I absolutely buy into it.
Meaning that I don't even think he's exaggerating.
I think that once the economy, you know, gets a foothold, I don't know when that'll start.
He's saying fourth quarter.
That's a good guess, I think.
But, man, when it comes back, it's going to come back hard.
All right. That's your happy thought for tonight.
And I will talk to you in the morning.
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