My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Content:
President Trump's coronavirus report card, according to me
Clips of Joe Biden 15 years ago versus current clips
Different countries, different COVID19 strategies, same results?
Congressional proxy voting
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topics to build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure.
---
Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scott-adams00/support
Bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum Hey everybody, come on in.
It's time.
Yeah, it's time for Coffee with Scott Adams.
Boy, did you come to the right place.
Imagine if you'd been somewhere else and you wanted Coffee with Scott Adams, you wouldn't get it.
No, you get that here.
The good place.
And all you need to enjoy this incredible, incredible morning.
It doesn't take much.
Not much at all. Just a cup or a mug or a glass of tank or chalice or tine, a canteen jug or flask.
A vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And join me now for the dopamine hit of the day.
The thing that makes everything better, including the damn pandemic.
It's called the simultaneous sip and it happens now.
Go. Hmm.
Yep. I can feel my natural interferon kicking in.
I got a hydroxychloroquine in me.
Just naturally.
I didn't even take any pills.
I just produce it from my own biological factory.
Not really. None of that's true.
Let's talk about what is.
Let's talk about things that are true.
Okay. So...
I've decided that rather than annoy you continuously about the fact that I've got content over on the Locals platform, I'll try to tell you packaging it with something useful.
So rather than give you something that sounds like just a commercial, I'll try to tell you something useful and if that tells you something else, that's cool too.
I talk about the importance of friction and how just a little bit of friction It might not change your mind at the moment, but over time, friction will wear you down.
I talked about that with, let's say, watching television.
Just the act of finding your remote control, turning on the television, finding a channel, do I want Netflix?
There's so much friction now to just watching television that I've completely stopped doing it.
I still look for shows But I never really find them and watch them.
Last night, for example, Christine and I tried to watch The Joker.
Now, neither of us have watched a complete movie in, I don't know, ever?
I don't know if the two of us have ever watched a complete movie because we don't have that kind of attention span.
And I thought to myself, all right, Neither of us ever want to watch a movie again.
Like, literally, if I never watched another movie for the rest of my life, I'd be fine with that.
I just don't know how anybody spends two and a half hours doing one thing.
It just doesn't seem like a thing you do anymore.
But we thought, alright, everybody's talking about this Joker movie.
We're going to watch it. So, Christina comes over, and we make some popcorn, and it's one of those days.
Half the popcorn falls on the floor, and we're like, alright.
Man, it's just so hard to watch a movie.
It's like preparation and planning, and you've got to get two people in the same place.
That's the other thing. Nobody likes to watch a movie at the same time.
In the old days, you know, you're sitting around the living room anyway, there's nothing going on, so you're watching whatever's on.
But today, try to get two people who want to watch the same movie at the same time.
It's kind of hard. Nobody's quaint, you know, everybody's got their own thing to do.
So we finally find the time, we get together, we've got our popcorn that, you know, whatever's left that didn't fall on the floor, we sit down and we turn it on, And we get into it, and then I realize, I swear, I swear this happened.
Sounds like I'm making it up.
We get into the movie, and I look at my watch, and I'm thinking, wait a minute, how long is a movie?
And I realized I didn't have time for a movie.
Because I was going to do my evening periscope, and we'd start at around 5.30 or something.
So, I've watched so few movies that I'd somehow lost the idea that you needed to allocate all this time to do nothing but watch a movie.
And I couldn't justify it, so we watched half of it.
And then I went and did my periscope.
Now, we planned to watch the other half, but I would say...
No more than 50% chance that we'll ever find the time, we'll still be interested.
Probably never watch the other half.
So, anyway, so that's the point of friction.
But let me take that to the point I wanted to make, which is, every time I go on Twitter, which is all day long, I get two feelings.
One is I get these dopamine hits when people like or retweet me.
So I'm getting like dopamine hit, dopamine hit, dopamine hit.
But I'm also getting trolled continuously.
And it's like anti-dopamine, anti-dopamine.
Now sometimes I like, I do enjoy the back and forth and the wrestling with the trolls.
So it's not that I don't enjoy the fight, but it's just sort of always there.
Troll, troll, friction, friction.
So Twitter is sort of this Half friction, half dopamine situation.
But the dopamine is so good that I'm completely addicted.
And you know the big story about social media is that it's designed for addiction.
Now, I took that mindset over to Locals, Locals.com, where I have some extra content, the stuff that would be a little more provocative or just doesn't fit with this stuff.
So it's an extension of what you see with some extra stuff.
And there are a number of benefits over there.
The biggest benefit I completely didn't see coming Which is that there are no trolls, because it's a subscription service.
So no troll is going to pay money just to be part of a subscription to give me a hard time.
So when I go over to locals, I'm like, oh, feels good, feels good, dopamine hit, dopamine hit, dopamine hit.
And then I'm waiting for the bad part, and it doesn't happen, because there's not a single troll on there.
So I got like a thousand people who signed up who just have good intentions.
And I thought, I didn't see that coming.
So here's the larger story.
If you're trying to predict the future of any service, especially an online service, you don't want to look for just the utility.
Because the utility will tell you something.
It's like, oh yeah, it has these features.
It'll let you do this.
Oh, it's cheaper, it's faster.
Those will tell you a lot.
But if you really want to know what's going to happen, you've got to look at the dopamine.
And I think Dave Rubin has hit on a dopamine goldmine.
Because I didn't know you could have only dopamine without trolls, until I experienced it.
It just never occurred to me that that was an option.
So, from just the perspective of the creators, it's pretty addictive already.
I'm spending as much time there as I am on Twitter, just because I like the dopamine.
Alright, let's talk about Congress.
Is it ironic that Congress is wearing masks now?
Because it's the one group of people who should be ashamed to show their face to the public.
And they're robbing us.
Two good reasons to wear masks.
I feel as though after the coronavirus has passed, that Congress should just keep wearing masks.
Because if you're going to rob us, and you should be ashamed to show your face, mask it up.
So the president tweeted this.
I think it was this morning.
He says we've done a great job on COVID response.
Making all governors look good.
Some fantastic. And that's okay.
But the lamestream media doesn't want to go with that narrative.
And the do-nothing Dems talking point is to say only bad things about Trump.
I made everybody look good but me.
So I saw that.
It's a Sort of classic Trumpian tweet, right?
Complaining that he's not being given the credit that he deserves, etc.
And I thought to myself, I'm going to fact check that.
I mean, it's an opinion, so you can't really fact check an opinion, but I'll add my opinion.
So I fact checked it as true.
Here's what I said, I'll add to it.
So you can complain about all the chaos, right?
So you see the critic saying, there was chaos, chaos, chaos.
Do you think that that's true?
That there was chaos in terms of who does what and coordinating?
And I would say, of course.
Of course that would be true.
It's a crisis. If you don't have chaos in the beginning of a crisis...
Well then I don't think you know what crisis means.
It's not really a crisis if you're all ready for it.
Part of being a crisis is that you're struggling to get a response.
So is it a criticism that this government or any other had some chaos at the beginning of a crisis?
And I would say that just seems so normal.
How would you hold that against anybody?
If this were the Obama administration, and I'd heard they had chaos as they're trying to figure it out, I don't think I'd hold that against them.
I wouldn't hold it against anybody.
I'd just say, chaos is sort of what you're going to get, right?
So I don't think that criticism holds unless that chaos translated into a lack of performance that we can observe.
So what would be that lack of performance?
So if you're to list all the things that the president is criticized for, well, first is that testing fiasco.
There were some test kits.
Was it the CDC that had invalid test kits and that set us back a while?
But was that the president's job?
Do you think the president on his list of things to do was, eh, just in case, I better make sure that the CDC test kits for coronavirus are accurate?
Of course not. Of course not.
Now, of course the boss has to take responsibility.
I'm not arguing that.
But if we're being, you know, rational about it, it's not like the president had much to do with the quality of the test kits of the CDC. So yes, that's a valid complaint about a real thing.
But that doesn't really get to the President's performance.
What about closing of the travel from China?
A-plus, right?
You'll get tired of hearing the President brag about this, but man, that's valid.
He is completely right that he went against the grain, against the professionals, and called it right.
I don't know if you could find a finer example of pure leadership than when he closed the airports early.
I don't know that he'll ever get as much credit as he deserves for that.
That was literally pure leadership, because even the experts said no.
And he looked at the larger picture, the bigger risk management of it.
He said, yeah, they're going to call me a racist.
Yes, this could turn out bad for me.
Still made the right call.
He made the right call.
And he made it looking at the right risk management.
It wasn't lock. He didn't get it right by lock.
It was just the right call.
And then, of course, he brags about the ventilators.
We all have a question. of whether the ventilators are killing more people than they're saving.
I think that's a good question.
Maybe it depends how you use them, etc.
But, nonetheless, it is true that the federal government was tasked with getting all this PPE and ventilators together.
Has one person died because of the lack of the ventilators?
No. Not one person has died.
So, in the context of an emergency, if you meet the objective, get enough ventilators, I think that's just got to be pass-fail.
Because it's not like anybody says, well, what was the best way to do it?
It's an emergency. You either get the ventilators or you don't.
The government got them.
It's pretty impressive. Very impressive.
The way they worked with private industry, etc.
Now, on the PPE, what can you do?
Was there something that the federal government could have done more of?
Could they have been more prepared?
Well, here's where you get to the supply chain problem, which really I think legitimately you could call Obama's mess that the Trump administration is cleaning up using Kayleigh McEnany's framing of cleaning up the Obama mess, which politically is really good framing.
It is true that the nature of the supply chain Caused us to have inability to get everything we wanted domestically because you have to depend on other countries.
So is that something that the president is going to fix?
Probably. Probably.
You know, I'm going to just delete you.
I'm going to block you for saying that I have a crush on Kayleigh.
That's just so inappropriate.
You know, here's the deal.
I'm going to say good things about males.
I'm going to say good things about females.
The moment I see that, oh, you're a love other, you love AOSA or whatever, there just exist people who look different all over the place.
Some of them do good jobs.
Some of them don't do good jobs.
If I say somebody did a good job, it's not because I want to fuck them.
Okay? It's because they did a good job.
I'm just going to block people for that comment.
I just don't need any of that. Alright.
Do I seem prickly this morning?
Do I seem quick to anger?
I think it's taking a toll on all of us.
Alright, so finishing up on my report card for the President.
His summary of it is that he makes the governors look good.
I feel like that's as true...
I feel like that's as true as a statement as you can make.
Wouldn't you? Even if you're hard on the president, wouldn't you say it's true that the federal government met its objective of giving the states what they need and making the states look good?
I think actually the president...
Has a completely legitimate claim that he's making the governors look good.
So I'm going to say, you know, I told you from the very beginning, I'm not going to be very critical of any of the governors, no matter their party, nor will I be very critical of the federal government and Trump, as long as they're doing quickly correcting things they get wrong.
Because the idea is that nobody knew the right thing to do.
Nobody knew when to do it.
Nobody knew what to do.
It was really a lot of guessing.
So in the context of a lot of guessing, and we're still guessing, right?
The states are doing their own thing because they're sort of guessing.
In the context of guessing, the only way to grade somebody is to see if they guess wrong, do they quickly correct?
And that's the only standard I would put on this.
And I would say that That the people who are sort of testing that standard would be, for example, some of the governors who are banning going to the beach and some of the things that seem more obviously not a problem.
So I think they're sort of pushing that.
But even then, it's sort of minor and it's only a few weeks.
So I'm not going to worry too much about going to the beach for a few weeks if it turns out to be that sort of thing.
So I'm going to fact check the President True, I believe, and I would tell you, I think I would tell you if there was something that he had totally screwed up on this.
Well, I will tell you. I would say that the press conferences...
We're inelegant, and in some ways, he allowed the critics to make more of them than they could.
Probably talked about himself too much, but it's an election season.
How big a deal is that? I don't know.
Seems normal. So, you know, I've criticized him on the communication part, but not on the performance.
On the performance, it's solid, in my opinion.
And I would say the same about the governors, both blue and red.
Andrew Cuomo is getting a lot of heat about returning the nursing home patients, which may have killed thousands.
And that will be a really good edge case.
Because first of all, I don't know that the governor knew he was doing that.
So I have some questions about what he knew.
I also don't know what professionals had advised him.
Yeah, Andrew Cuomo.
Governor Cuomo. So, if it turned out that experts told Cuomo, yeah, yeah, you can send them back.
It'll be fine.
Or if he didn't know what was happening, maybe he signed something and just wasn't aware.
Maybe he should have been. I don't know how much of that's the governor's fault.
I feel like there were underlings who did some things.
Now, of course, like I said before, It doesn't matter if Andrew Cuomo knew about it.
He's still the boss, right?
He still gets the blame.
He still gets the credit, even if he didn't know any of it was happening.
That's just the way the system works.
So I'm going to be soft on grading everybody who screws up because I just don't think there were other options.
On Tucker Carlson's show last night...
As part of a segment, he showed an old clip of Joe Biden next to a new clip of Joe Biden.
Wow! Have you seen that?
Have you seen the clips together?
Look at Joe Biden 15 years ago.
He's totally on his game.
He's just totally in control.
Intellectually, he looks completely there.
And then you go to modern day.
When you see the contrast...
The contrast tells you that he's lost something, and it should make you wonder how quickly it's going, which is the smart question, right?
But it's unambiguous.
If you see the early clips, the contrast just jumps out, whereas just seeing him out of context, you could say to yourself, I don't know, is it that different than it used to be?
Maybe he always used to get words wrong.
Not really. Not really.
When you see his younger self, he's mentally quite quick.
You know, he was a lawyer, right?
So you see him talking in his younger self, and you say, okay, that's 100% there.
He may have had his other issues when he was younger, but it wasn't mental clarity, because that looks like it's there.
Today, not so much.
Now, the interesting thing is I don't know if the Trump campaign would want to take advantage of that contrast because there's a trap there.
The obvious trap is that somebody's going to take old Trump videos where he also talked very differently.
But here's the thing.
Have you ever seen that?
Have you ever seen young Trump videos recently and compare it to current-day Trump?
Very different, aren't they?
Very different.
But here's the thing. The old Trump style was a little more verbal, a little more urbane, maybe a little more sophisticated, shall we say.
But that wouldn't work for politics.
So here's the difference.
The Trump speaking style evolved to a better one for politics.
He simplified, he repeats, he just kept everything simple.
He took the vocabulary down and And I find his speaking style, I wrote a book about it, I find his current style of communicating super effective.
There's a reason that 95% of conservatives approve of him.
You don't really get approval from the other side of the political world these days.
That's not an option.
But if you can get 95% of your own people to like you, you're pretty persuasive.
So you'd have to say that Trump's speaking style also evolved, but it evolved in the opposite way of Biden.
Biden started down strong and he's turned into a raisin brain.
I'd just like to imagine a raisin inside his skull because there's not much there.
But Trump has evolved from more of an urbane, you know, kind of a jet-setter, playboy kind of a vibe, which no way you can't get elected with that.
There's no way he would have been elected if he continued to communicate the way he used to.
But now he's got this effective way he does it, simplifying, etc.
It's very good. But still, they probably don't want to show the contrast because it would show Trump also simplifying his communication.
I've got a question for you.
How long will it be before we start...
Lumping together the various people who are in the at-risk for the coronavirus category.
So here are the people that we know to be at-risk.
So senior citizens, the obese, diabetics, and African Americans in particular.
So those are the The ones who are getting hit the hardest.
Now you can say men in general too, but that would ruin the thing I'm going to say next.
Which is, one of the benefits of lumping the LGBTQ community together is that there were reasons to talk to them as a group.
In terms of equal rights and discrimination and stuff.
So sometimes it's good to say, alright, there are several distinct individual types, you know, a lesbian is not a gay man, is not a trans, but they have something in common, which is the way society treated them.
So lumping them together for political purposes and other conversation was a useful thing to do, even though nobody in the group is the same as anybody else in the group.
Likewise, with the people who are susceptible to the coronavirus, more susceptible, if you put them together in this order, seniors, obese, diabetic, African-American, it spells soda.
S-O-D-A, soda.
So, I'll just put this out there for fun.
Can we call them the soda community?
Now, it's sort of a double entendre, because...
If you've got a weight problem, maybe you're drinking too much soda.
If you're diabetic, maybe too much soda.
But probably not if you're diabetic.
I imagine you stay away from the soda.
But can we call them the soda community?
Somebody says bad optics.
Well, here's the thing. The first go at this I had, I was using, you know, Different words for the same thing, and I wasn't liking my acronym, so I finally got it to soda.
And, well, somebody's putting soda with two A's.
I think you only need one A for African American, right?
If you're abbreviating it.
Just one A. I'm just looking at your comments.
Yeah, oh, actually, you're right.
If I'd added men, the reason I didn't is because it would be Sodom.
S-O-D-A-M. Somebody said in the comments, but that actually was literally my thought when I decided to get rid of the M. So the trouble is, I don't know that we can have a process that doesn't discriminate against These four classes, or four groups of people, because these are groups that can be discriminated against, right?
There's age discrimination, there's fat-shaming discrimination, there's health-related discrimination, of course, African-American discrimination.
So the SOTA group is a group that, even if we were not talking about the coronavirus, They would be a fairly, let's say, a group that knows discrimination.
So, somehow it feels important.
Here's a weird thing that's happening because of the coronavirus.
And let me ask you in the comments, have any of you found a way to make more money?
So, it'll take a while for the comments to catch up, but I'm very interested.
Is there anybody here, or maybe you know somebody, who found a way to make more money Because of the coronavirus.
Because I'm seeing this happening, and I think the crisis sort of divided the world into two parts.
Everything's divided into two parts, right?
There were the entrepreneurs who got excited because everything was shaken up.
And when you shake up everything, entrepreneurs go, oh, there's something here for me.
Somebody shook the box.
There's going to be an opportunity here.
And then a bunch of People went out and they became like PPE experts and brokers, and people spun up factories, people started new jobs.
I'm looking at your comments now.
So, obviously, most people made less money, so I understand that.
But look at the number of yeses.
If you can't see them, if you're listening to this, I'll tell you that something like 25% of them are saying that they're making more money.
So there are people who have found these weird little opportunities.
And this has happened to me accidentally.
Overall, I'll be way down because newspapers are going to go out of business.
That's my main income.
So my main income...
It's going to get blown up this year, so I may be looking for a new job.
But, seriously, I might be looking for a new job.
But several little weird things got better.
I had a small investment in this company called Click& Grow, which is a very small investment.
And what they do is these little tabletop vegetable gardens that has its own little light source and everything.
And it turns out that as soon as people were worried about food, these things just flew off the shelf.
So this little obscure investment in a tabletop vegetable thing just went nuts because it's gardening.
All the gardening stuff went crazy.
Didn't see that coming. The other thing that I hadn't been doing is speaking engagements.
And I couldn't do them partly because I'm a little bit radioactive because I talk about politics.
But also I didn't want to travel.
I was just kind of done with traveling for work, you know, airplane, hotel, etc.
But what happened with this, because of the shutdown, now you're going to see a lot more speaking that's going to be done virtually.
So suddenly, the very thing I didn't want to do, which is plan a big trip and travel and hotel and everything, My entire speaking career may have been accidentally revived by the fact that nobody's going to travel for a while and that it may be normal to have video stuff.
So, didn't see that coming.
And I just need to give you just full disclosure.
Yesterday I talked about the news story that said Sorrento Therapeutics claim that they have a cure for coronavirus.
A cure! And I noted that that was An outrageous claim for anybody to make unless they believed it.
Because that's a big thing to say.
I mean, if you're wrong about cure, you're really wrong.
You're going to pay for that, right?
So I thought to myself, what are the odds that this CEO is going to say that unless he believes it?
Now, it doesn't mean it's true, right?
He could believe it and then the tests show it doesn't work.
But I at least thought the CEO believes it.
So I bought some of the stock that morning.
This is not what you'd call an investment.
An investment is when you do something smart.
Buying any company that says they have a cure for the coronavirus during the middle of the coronavirus while there are lots of companies making lots of claims, picking one of them And putting your actual money into it is not an investment.
It's gambling.
It's just gambling.
So I gambled.
I made $75,000 and sold it a few hours later.
Now, I know you hate me for that.
I kind of hate myself for it.
Because I actually, believe it or not, I don't like making money I didn't work for.
I'm just sort of raised that way.
If I work for it and get it, I love it.
If somebody buys my book and I get some money, I love that.
But I don't feel the same love if I just did some weird financial thing that totally, by luck, some money came spraying in my direction.
Now, to full disclosure...
And you have to have this full disclosure.
This is not the first time I've made a bet of this type.
Meaning using a stock purchase as just a bet.
Just a gamble. This is the first time it's ever worked.
I have on a number of occasions, not related to coronavirus, but in my past, there have been a number of occasions when I said to myself, you know...
I think if I just gamble on this, I've got a good feeling about this, and then I gamble and I just lose my money.
Now, I've not lost massive amounts of money gambling, because I would never gamble a massive amount of money.
I would gamble something I could afford to lose, and in almost every other case, I lost it.
So, the reason I'm telling you that This was the exception.
It's because the last thing I'd want you to hear is that you can get into the stock market and do what I did yesterday.
You can't do that.
You can do a 1 out of 10, and that's what I did.
This just happened to be the 1.
So if I only tell you about the 1, keep in mind the other 9 times that didn't work at all.
That did not work at all.
So don't be like me, but I got lucky yesterday.
I continue to see stories in which hydroxychloroquine is evaluated without zinc.
And we all have been educated to the point that we know that zinc is the magic ingredient and that hydroxychloroquine, allegedly, is more about the delivery of it to your body.
So I feel as if we're getting gaslighted.
I hate to use that. That's the wrong term.
I won't use that. Erase that.
I feel like the press...
It's just possibly, possibly, I hate to talk in conspiratorial tones, but it feels like just because Trump likes this hydroxychloroquine that it's forced the press to not like it, and it's forced them to emphasize the trials that don't even use the zinc, and you and I don't even think that's worth testing, right?
I mean, at this point...
If you saw another test going on for just hydroxychloroquine, you wouldn't care, because you already know it's useless.
I mean, there's been enough that you would assume that a test of just that one drug wouldn't tell you anything.
But if they test it with the zinc, hmm, now I'm interested.
And if they test it with the zinc and they give it to you early, which apparently is not what was happening, they were giving it to people who were already too late, Well, you give it to me early, and you test it with zinc, and you do a controlled test.
Shouldn't I have a result in two weeks?
Right? During an emergency, don't you know if the virus has been cleared in two weeks?
I feel like it would be the shortest trial, and the fact that we don't have a definitive answer on that is certainly worrisome.
Here's a question just to mess with your entire understanding of reality.
A lot of different countries doing a lot of different things.
Are they getting different results?
Can't tell, right?
How many countries are there that are involved with the coronavirus?
Is it over 100?
I don't know what the numbers are.
But lots and lots of countries doing lots of different things.
And they're all sort of getting the same result.
And to the extent that they're different, because there are differences, there are so many confounding variables that you can't tell if leadership is an active variable.
Think about it. If I told you that leadership mattered, how could I possibly prove that?
Because I would look at the world and say, oh, all right, leadership matters.
Let's go find the good leaders and see how much better they did on this coronavirus.
I'll bet there's no correlation.
I'll bet if you had, before the coronavirus, if you'd done, I don't know, if you could even do this, some kind of an objective poll to find out who are the best leaders.
And then the coronavirus happens to say, okay, now we've seen how people are doing.
Let's compare how they did with who we knew were the good leaders and see if the good leaders got better results.
I'll bet you you're not going to find it.
Now, that would be a surprising result, right?
But it feels like whatever the big variables are...
It doesn't feel like it's leadership.
It feels like it's something else.
Now, there are clearly things like closing travel.
There are things that are clearly leadership.
But yet, we're not getting much different results.
What's up with that? Here's the weirdest little story of the day.
Apparently, the Constitution requires that Congress meet in person.
But it's a coronavirus, so how can they do their job if they have to meet in person?
On day one, when I heard that that was a problem, that they have to vote in person, I said, how about we just don't do that?
What if we just act like the Constitution doesn't exist and just do what makes sense?
Because do you think the founders of the Constitution, if you could, you know, dig them up and revive them and bring them into the future and say, okay, Ben Franklin, you know, Jefferson, we've got a situation here.
You wrote in the Constitution, you've got to meet in person, but you didn't know about the Internet.
So that's cool. You know, you guys are smart.
I know that would be a lot to ask.
You didn't know about the Internet. But do you think it'd be okay, just for a few weeks, guys, you wrote this constitution, would it be okay for just a few weeks that we just do proxy voting?
So somebody will call it in, we'll record who it was and the vote, so we'll know who voted for what, and we'll just have somebody physically do the vote who's standing there.
Do you think that would be okay?
Well, I'm pretty sure the founders would have been okay with it.
Somebody's saying no. You're ridiculous.
The founders would have been okay with it.
Now, they might have said, oh, let's do a quick change to it or something.
Maybe they'd have something to add to it.
But there's no way they would have...
seriously people are disagreeing with us why would you disagree with that Thank you.
No too risky. Oh, I get it.
Okay. I understand.
The no too risky part is what I'm going to talk about.
Okay, so I understand your objections now.
The no is because you don't want bad behavior to happen.
The no is so you don't want the person who's the proxy person to be controlling everything.
It's like delegating your vote to one person.
Right? That's the problem.
I think you're all misunderstanding what it is.
I believe... Let's fact check this today.
Somebody says you're a thousand percent wrong.
A hundred thousand percent wrong.
Fact check the assumptions.
If my assumptions are correct, then my interpretation is correct.
If your assumptions are correct...
Then I will agree with you that your interpretation that it's a bad idea is also correct.
Can we agree on that? Can we agree that whoever got the right assumption, and I'll tell you what the assumption is, is probably the one who also got the right answer.
So let's just talk about the assumption.
Let's not talk about the disagreement yet.
The assumption is, here's my assumption, that everyone who votes will have to record who they are and what they're voting for, so that we will have a record of every person's vote.
As long as I have a record of every person's vote, whether or not Nancy Pelosi or whoever the proxy is overruled it or something, well, it would be obvious.
As long as I know who voted, I'm fine.
Now, is your assumption That the record of who voted for what will be lost.
Because that would be a ridiculous assumption.
So which assumption are you going on?
So for the people who say it's a bad idea, are you all assuming that you won't know who voted for what?
Because that would be crazy.
It would be crazy.
To assume that we wouldn't know who voted for what?
No, that's not going to happen.
And by the way, by the way, If it turns out I'm wrong, and really that proxy voting actually meant giving your vote to Nancy Pelosi, if it turns out that that's what they're suggesting, of course I'm not in favor of that.
Of course not.
That would just be a violation of the Constitution.
So of course I wouldn't be in favor of that.
But as long as everybody's recording their vote, and they can communicate with anybody electronically that they want, you have full transparency.
There's nothing we need but transparency.
Everything else is optional.
Give me transparency.
I'm a happy citizen.
Take it away. I'm not.
Somebody says it's subject to manipulation, but nobody can explain how that could possibly happen.
If you can, then I will change my opinion.
In other words, if somebody can give me an argument about why full transparency makes you subject to manipulation, I would entertain that.
I don't see how.
Somebody says vote changing, not a risk, because every vote will be recorded who voted for it.
Now, I believe that this is one of those situations where you have lined up on political sides and you don't have a reason.
And I'm going to read your comments to make my point that you have an opinion without a reason.
I'll just read them. Lobbyists and left-wing organizations would write bills for Pelosi.
Irrelevant to the voting question.
Fear of general voting.
By mail, that's something else.
Crazy things happen.
That's not a reason. They have more to do than vote.
That's not a reason.
What would the slippery slope look like?
That's not a reason. Someone could hold a gun to the voter's head.
That's not real. That's not a reason.
Are you setting precedent for ignoring parts of the Constitution?
That's not a reason.
It's an emergency.
The world needs transparency.
This is more transparency.
Aren't lost records?
Did you hear about the...
Bring them in person to Congress.
That's a bad idea.
We have electronic ways.
Proxy equals give your vote to Nancy.
That is an incorrect assumption.
Oh, no. Proxy does mean give your vote to Nancy.
It does not mean that nobody knows what your vote was.
So maybe that's where you're getting confused.
So proxy is, unfortunately, it's a murky word.
What it means is that you tell Nancy to vote your vote.
But they still know what your vote is.
A regular proxy vote, let's say, board of directors, that proxy, you say, you vote on my behalf.
That's not what's happening.
Nobody's asking Nancy to vote on their behalf with her opinion replacing their own.
They're asking her to cast their vote, specifically my vote.
I'm going to write it down.
I voted for this. You better cast the vote the way I wrote it down, because I'm going to check.
No risk. Debating bills.
So people are saying that they should be there in person to debate bills.
Well, you don't think you can debate in other ways?
I mean, electronic means is fine for that.
Well, it looks like I've maybe beaten you down because the objectors seem to have disappeared.
So Kevin McCarthy, GOP leader, California guy.
Now, I like Kevin McCarthy.
So, generally speaking, I have all positive opinions of him.
But he had the weakest argument on this.
And here are his two points.
He said, Democrats can stay home for the rest of the year But still get paid, so he doesn't like the fact that Democrats would be working from home.
Just a terrible argument.
We're in a country in which the government is literally asking the citizens to work from home if they can.
The government is not saying if you work from home and you're still working, you shouldn't get paid.
Why would Congress not get paid if they work from home like everybody else?
I want to be on the same side as Kevin McCarthy because I think he's a good guy and a good politician.
I want to be on his side.
But this is just so weak.
This is just the weakest point that you shouldn't get paid for working from home when we're all being asked to work from home.
That's just so weak.
Here's the second point.
Democrats can hand their power over to someone else.
Pelosi can So she can vote multiple times.
That's just a mischaracterization of what it is.
She's not voting multiple times.
She's voting your vote because you couldn't be there.
That's completely different.
That's not even in the same ballpark.
She's just standing there with her finger...
And the call comes in, I don't know if it's a phone call, hey, this is Congressman Bob, vote yes.
And then Nancy's finger goes down, yes for Congressman Bob.
That's all that's happening.
And McCarthy's giving a speech railing against it?
Now, if he had said what you had said, well, maybe they can debate better, more efficiently in person, I'd say, well, that's an argument at least.
But it's not much of one because people do business online.
There's a thing called video conferencing.
So... I'm just blown away about how we can find absolutely frickin' anything to complain about if the other team is in favor of it.
Obviously, we should have proxy voting during a crisis.
This is the most cut-and-dried, obviously smart thing to do with anybody who's debating this just maybe doesn't understand what it is.
There's no way you would disagree with it if you also knew what it was.
You'd have to be confused about it to disagree with it.
Alright, that's enough of that. So apparently Trump fired another IG, the Steve Linick guy.
He was an Obama appointee who briefed Congress on Biden-Ukraine ties at one point.
So, my only comment on all these personnel things where somebody gets fired, of course the left will say, well, you fired him because he was finding bad problems And he would have been a whistleblower, not a whistleblower because it was his job to do it.
And of course, the Trump administration will say he was a bad player for whatever reason.
But here's the thing. In this and every other personnel question, the one thing you can know for sure is that you don't know the story.
And this would apply whether it's politics and whether it's somebody Trump is firing or just somebody from your company.
If somebody leaves a company, you're going to get two different stories every time.
Most of the time. So you're going to get the employer's version, which is, yeah, I had to fire Bob.
Bob was not performing.
And then you're going to get the employee's version, who got fired.
It's like, yeah, my boss is a tyrant.
He was sexually harassing me.
I mean, it's going to be a completely different story.
So when I see news coverage about a guy who got fired...
I put it in that bucket with, we don't know anything.
So everything you should conclude about any one person who gets fired from any administration, it's not a Trump thing, but from any administration, person gets fired, you should immediately say to yourself, okay, here's what I know about that situation.
Nothing. Nothing.
I don't know anything about that situation because I haven't heard both sides.
If you haven't seen both sides, you don't know anything.
So, should you be concerned if somebody who was, you know, digging for dirt on, I guess, Pompeo or something, should you be concerned if somebody like that gets fired?
Yeah. Yeah.
I mean, it's worth the question.
You know, if anybody's saying, should we look into it or see if this is, like, a good firing or a bad firing, it's worth looking at.
You know, I would say that transparency requires that we know why it happened.
But you're probably never going to know why.
But it is a good red flag.
Alright, so those were the main things that I decided to talk about today.
So there's a rule, there's somebody saying that the rules for the proxy vote are there.
Let me put it this way.
If you've lived in the real world for a while, you don't need to go look at what the proxy vote tells you.
Because there really isn't much chance that they would have ever even considered a process to Where you don't know who voted for what.
I refuse to go do research on that question.
I refuse to research it.
Because I'm pretty sure that the most basic part of voting, which is who voted for what, is maintained in this proxy system.
I'm pretty sure.
You can fact check me on that.
But I'd put a pretty big bet on that.
Have I watched Bannon's War Room?
I did watch it the other day, and I have to say it was really well done.
Very well done. Body language in person could be a key element to persuasion on the house floor.
Well, but you don't want it to be.
If you could reduce the effect of irrational influence, such as the effect of somebody's body language or their charisma, I don't see what's wrong with that.
I'd rather they make decisions based on the facts and not be influenced by body language.
Do you ever talk about your failed predictions?
I do. I do quite often.
Yeah, I'll give you one right now.
But of course, whenever you fail a prediction, you like to put in the qualifiers there.
So, My initial thoughts about the shutdown was that it wouldn't have any economic effect much.
and that was based on the fact that they shut down and it wouldn't be that long.
When we first heard about it, I thought, "Oh, it could be two weeks." But, you know, they probably told us two weeks, but really it's going to be four weeks.
And then when it turned into four weeks, I thought, okay, that's about what I thought.
But still, four weeks?
We could have absorbed a four-week shutdown pretty well.
We would have just snapped back.
But the longer it goes, the more in question and the weaker the recovery you would expect.
So my initial prediction of, ah, we're going to snap back from this, don't get worried, was wrong based on being completely wrong about how long we would be shut down.
Now I did not have a specific prediction Of how long we would be shut down.
But I also didn't see it coming as long as it is.
I thought it would be extended.
That part's just normal business.
Everything gets extended. But I didn't think we'd be talking about the summer.
So that part, I would say, blindsided me.
Other predictions that I've gotten wrong?
Well, maybe you could help me. How about people in the comments?
Tell me which...
Oh, there's one that I might get wrong, which is I still have my bet on Kamala Harris being the de facto nominee by being the vice presidential nominee and then effectively being the top person.
So I was wrong that she would get the nomination outright.
So the Kamala Harris prediction is wrong...
On the technicality of it, getting it out right.
But in a weird simulation world way, it could still turn out to be right in a different way than I had predicted it originally.
But I did change my prediction to the modified, she'll get in the other way.
But I have to take the incorrect prediction for getting the top spot from the beginning.
Other predictions I got wrong?
Maybe you can tell me You were wrong on Warren's chances.
Was I? Because I didn't think she would win and she didn't.
How was I wrong? I don't know what that was about.
I wrote a book on my wrong predictions.
So when you watch this, you get a little flavor of what it's like to be a celebrity.
So literally behind me on that shelf is a book that has an entire chapter in it Actually, there are two of them, at least one of them.
One of them has a chapter in it that just lists all my wrong predictions.
I literally wrote a published book with a chapter of my wrong predictions.
And what is one of the biggest criticisms I get?
That I never say I'm wrong.
Right? One of the biggest criticisms is I don't admit my wrong predictions.
And I've literally published them.
I talk about them all the time.
And still, it sort of comes with being in the public eye.
It doesn't matter what you do.
If people have it in their mind that you do the other thing, it doesn't matter.
It's not true. It's just what people believe.
My net deaths prediction...
Oh, there's a good one. Now, we still don't know the final outcome, but let's talk about that.
So my net deaths prediction was that we would get it down to 5,000 net.
In other words, so many people's lives would be saved...
by not driving and not doing extreme sports and stuff, that it would almost entirely compensate for the number of people who died from the coronavirus.
What's interesting is that we don't know how to count this stuff.
And that prediction also depended on the length of the shutdown being limited.
So the prediction that we could come out ahead At least in terms of number of people who died, or at least get closer to break even, not come out ahead, was based on the length of time that we were shut down.
So the longer you go, the worse it is, of course.
And we don't know exactly when stuff is going to end at this point.
So I would say that if we had stayed closed for one month, I think that my prediction of net deaths being about 5,000, Would have been pretty darn good.
I think it would have been the best prediction in the country.
At two months, it still could be the closest prediction in the country.
Because the other predictions are hundreds of thousands of deaths.
If it turns out it's 50,000 or 60,000 net, I'm still going to have the closest prediction in the country, even though I'm way off.
So I'm not even sure I would call mine accurate.
I probably wouldn't call it accurate if I said 5,000 and it turned out to be 60,000.
But if the next best guess was a few hundred thousand, at least I missed it by the same amount as other people.
Now the other thing that we found out is that the number of regular flu deaths is just made up.
We've been comparing the coronavirus to regular flu.
Like, ah, that regular flu is anywhere from 20,000 to 80,000 a year.
And it turns out nobody even counts it.
Nobody counts the regular flu deaths.
You know, we have these numbers every year, but it's not based on counting.
It's based on some kind of algorithm where they think, well, probably about this much.
That's it. It's an algorithm.
They don't actually count them.
And when somebody looked into this recently, a doctor, his estimate was that if you did count them, you might get a number more like in a few thousand.
Does that make sense to you?
Do you believe that if you counted the regular death flus, the regular flu deaths, do you think that it would only be a few thousand?
I do. You know why?
Because I don't know anybody who's ever died from the regular flu.
Do you think 50,000 a year could die from one cause, a regular flu, and you wouldn't see it all the time?
You know people who died from overdoses.
You know people who died from AIDS. You know people who died in car crashes.
You know people who died of alcoholism.
You know people who died of every cause that's in that range of that many deaths.
But you don't know anybody who died of the flu.
It was all made up.
This whole time we were comparing these 60,000 coronavirus deaths and climbing.
Now it's over 85 or whatever it is now.
And we kept saying, well, that's not that much more than regular flu deaths.
And there were never regular flu deaths.
The most basic piece of data that we used to drive all of our decisions and thinking about this was completely made up.
And it wasn't made up even in an accurate way.
In other words, it could be a made-up number that was also somewhat accurate, but it wasn't.
It was simply not true or even close.
So, yeah, it's not like they know how many people get the flu, and they certainly don't know how many people died from it.
All right. It's pneumonia, not flu.
Well, you can shade it that way, but the point is we don't count flu deaths, and we don't know how many died from it.
Is that to scare us to get the flu vaccine?
I think it is, yes. I think the reason that we keep the flu deaths high is almost certainly, this is just my assumption based on living in the real world, my assumption is it has everything to do with giving people the incentive to get the shot.
