Episode 980 Scott Adams: I Create a Bubble Reality of Positivity For You to Live in Until a Least Monday
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Content:
A devastatingly insightful criticism helped make Dilbert successful
General Flynn may NOT have been unmasked?
"Masking" is a fairy tale
LDH and coronavirus
A bubble reality of positivity
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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.
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It's called Coffee with Scott Adams and the Simultaneous Sip.
And if you have not discovered already how much better your day is when you do this, well, you're in for a good surprise, aren't you?
And in order to enjoy today, this will be one of the best.
One of the best. All you need to enjoy it is...
Do you know? Do you already know?
I think you do. It's a cup or mug or a glass of tank or chalice or stein, a canteen jugger, a flask of vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better, including the damn pandemic.
It's called The Simultaneous Step and it happens now.
Go! Well, as I promised you on Twitter and in the title of this Periscope, today I will create a bubble reality around you.
This will not be reality itself.
We don't have access to that.
But I will create a bubble around you that will make you feel better all day.
Will it last? We don't know.
It might last Monday. It might last longer.
But your little bubble reality will be based on the following concept.
Are you ready? I'm going to create a bubble reality entirely out of the process Of imagining that the news is true.
That's it. Instead of imagining that the news is fake, I'm just going to tell you the actual news.
And at least for today, we're just going to pretend it's true.
And when I say the news, I mean any news about studies.
Could be news that comes through the internet.
Could be just a rumor.
But we're going to treat it Like it's real.
Just for today. And I want to create a little bubble reality in which things are going to be really good.
You ready? First, I'm going to teach you a new skill.
Now this is a continuation of a skill that you've been taught before.
So we're going to start out with something useful.
And you're going to say to yourself, Wow, that was kind of useful.
I've already gotten something good out of today.
It goes like this. I've taught you the six dimensions of humor, and if you need to brush up, just Google my name and six dimensions of humor, and you'll see the six dimensions.
And the idea is that you have to use any two of the six to make a joke.
So while I've taught you that, and it doesn't matter which two, and it's better if you use more than two, but two is enough.
So the dimensions are, and I can never remember it off the top of my head, but it's like Cute, recognizable, clever, bizarre, naughty.
There's a sixth one.
But the idea is you want to use as many as you can.
And I did a tweet in which it will teach you exactly what that looks like.
So here's the tweet, and then I'll tell you the technique behind it.
Because it's already got 4,500 retweets, which in my world would be a lot.
So the tweet was this. I like it when Congress wears masks.
Most of them should be ashamed to show their faces, and if you plan to rob the public, it helps to dress for the part.
Now, the first thing you need to know about this joke is that I almost didn't write it.
Because I thought of it, and then I wrote it down, and I looked at it, and I said, you know, this is not really edgy.
It's just sort of...
It's sort of just right down that fat middle where I'm just saying what people want to hear.
And I thought to myself, I'm a professional.
I feel like, as a professional, I can do better than this joke.
And then you know what happened?
And then I thought back to a moment in 1990 when I was giving a presentation to a bunch of newspaper editors, and I was talking about the new Dilbert comic that was relatively new at the time.
No, it wasn't 1990.
Yeah, it was. About 1990.
And I was telling them how great Dilbert was so that they would add it to the newspapers.
So basically it was like a marketing event for me, but I was a speaker at an editor's event.
I was just making sure that they knew who I was.
And at the end of my presentation, a man I didn't recognize stood up in the question period, and instead of a question, he had a comment.
And his comment was that my cartoon, the samples that I'd shown him up front, he said, what you have there is a cartoonist's cartoon.
And he went on to explain, he said, it's a cartoon that would only appeal to other cartoonists.
Can you imagine that? I'm standing in front of all of my customers and a guy gets up and tells me that I have a cartoon that would not appeal to anybody in the audience.
The only people would appeal to is another cartoonist.
Said that in public while I stood in front of a room full of my customers.
Now, I of course did not appreciate this when it happened.
And afterwards I went to my editor and I said, Was it my editor or somebody who was in the room?
And I said, can you tell me who that guy is?
Who is that guy?
Because I don't like that guy.
That guy did not make my day good.
And she said, that's Bill Keene.
Bill Keene.
You ever hear that name? He was the creator of the Family Circus, one of the most successful comics of all time.
So he was a legend in the industry.
Now, whether or not you care for his comic or not is irrelevant to the point.
And then I realized that I had not just been insulted in front of an entire room full of my customers, but that I had been insulted by one of the most famous cartoonists in the history of the planet Earth in front of All of my customers.
Now, when I learned who he was, I said to myself, this is not a good guy.
He's not a good guy.
However, as criticism goes, I learned what he meant.
So I came to understand what he meant when I said I had a cartoonist cartoon.
What he meant was, and here's the fun part, I count this as the best advice, probably in the top three, of the best advice I've ever gotten.
Indeed, that day, Bill Keen made my career.
He actually turned me into a successful cartoonist.
That day. Because that advice stuck with me and it never left.
And I'm going to tell you how it plays into this tweet in a moment.
And the advice was this.
If I write cartoons that appeal to me as a cartoonist, I've lost the fact that I'm not like other people.
Whatever it is that made me the cartoonist probably also made my sense of humor develop in a slightly different way than most of the public.
So if I'm creating a product for the public, as opposed to creating something to amuse myself, I should not be creating it with all the elements that are designed to amuse myself.
And as a professional cartoonist, he could see it right away.
He could see in my cartoons that I'd written them For myself.
And I had. It was the most insightful thing I've ever heard.
I've never had anybody say anything that devastatingly insightful about the nature of what I was doing.
And when I realized fully what that meant, that I'm developing a product for other people, and that my ego was in the way.
It's an ego problem.
My ego made me draw comics for myself because I said to myself, essentially, well, if I like them, anybody's going to like them.
Once I got that, and I also realized that the customers, the readers, were asking for Dilbert to be more in the office, and at the time he wasn't.
He wasn't spending much time in the office.
It wasn't really an office place comic too much.
So I said to myself, you know, I don't really love it when he's in the office, because that's actually my day job.
I still had a day job.
And the last thing I wanted was to have a comic that was sort of my mental escape to be the same as my day job, because that's what I was escaping from.
But it's not what the customers wanted.
What the customers wanted was my shared pain of being in a cubicle, because I still was, and that's what they wanted.
They wanted to say, hey, I'm in a cubicle, you're in a cubicle.
Let's talk about that.
And so when I managed to take Bill Keen's advice, eventually, and managed to start writing for the audience, I realized that I wasn't writing stuff that would necessarily...
Be exactly what I'd want.
And this tweet that I sent out that, as I said, went viral.
I almost didn't write it because I said to myself, you know, it's not the tweet that I would like.
Do you know how hard it is as an artist to create art?
And I'm going to say that a tweet or anything you write if you're an artist is art in a sense.
Do you know how hard it is to create art That you don't like.
Do you know how hard that is?
It's very rare.
And I just did that.
So this is a tweet. This tweet I personally dislike.
But because of experience and because of the, I will say, the gift that Bill Keen gave me, I was able to do it.
So I was able to say, all right, here's my ego.
But I'm not writing the tweet for myself.
I'm writing it for other people.
So I'm going to write a tweet that I know other people will enjoy.
I wrote it. Bam.
4.5 thousand retweets.
Let me give you the end of the story about Bill Keen.
So, I was...
And of course I was one of the young cartoonists at the time who made fun of the family circus for being...
I always say circle. Is it family circus?
Circus, right? I would make fun of it because it wasn't cool.
And I thought, hey, I can make these edgy cartoons.
Why can't Bill Keen?
Why can't he make a cartoon that's edgy and cool the way I would like it?
And then you look at his sales.
One of the top cartoonists in the whole frickin' world.
Number of clients all over the world.
He drew cartoons for other people.
And when I got to know him a little bit, because he was, he ran, there was a big cartoon society and he was big in that.
And he was the host of all the cartoon events that were like the Oscars.
And so I got to know him a little bit and realized that he wasn't anything like the person who stood up.
In other words, he wasn't a dick.
He was actually a really nice guy.
Like a really nice guy.
And And I guess it was tough love, basically.
It was the most useful advice I've ever gotten.
But it turns out that his own personality and his own sense of humor wasn't anywhere close to the product he created.
He had learned to create a product for his customers that I'm pretty sure he didn't like himself.
Once you got to know him, you'd see how different his sensibilities were than his actual product.
And then I'd say, oh, I get it now.
You learned to make a product for other people.
Now I see how this works.
So, and then at the end of the story, Dilbert became financially successful and got a lot of attention in the Mid-Dinese, and there was this one event called the Rubens, and the Rubens were like the Oscars for cartoonists,
and I'd never won anything as a cartoonist, and I think I'd been nominated and lost once before, and So one day I get nominated for the two top awards.
So within my category, the top awards would be the best comic strip.
So that would be the top of the comic strips.
But then there's an award above all the other cartoonist awards.
So then you also could get an award for the best of all cartoons of any kind.
So those are the two best awards.
So I got nominated for both in the same year, the two top awards.
And I wasn't going to go.
Because by that time I was like, eh, you know, I got nominated last time, I rented a tuxedo, I took my ass across the country, spent two days at this event, and then I didn't win.
It was just sort of depressing.
So I decided I wasn't going to attend, because I just didn't care that much at that point.
And Bill Keen calls me home.
So now we're going to complete the story here.
So it's years later.
I'm now a famous cartoonist.
One of the most famous cartoonists in the country.
This is years after Bill Keen insulted me but gave me the best advice I've ever gotten.
And he calls me at home.
And he says, now by this time you also have to know that we'd done a cartoon trade where we'd also communicated And he drew my comic for a day, and I drew his comic for a day.
It was part of a big national thing.
So we already knew each other, and I'd come to like him as a person.
Because I got to understand him a little better, and then I was like, oh, okay, I get it now.
And he calls me at home and he says, you know, you've been nominated for the two top awards in cartooning.
You know, the greatest honors you could ever have in cartooning.
And we understand you're not going to attend.
And I told him why. I go, yeah, you know, it was just disappointing last time.
Yeah, I'm busy.
I just don't want to do it.
And then Bill Keen said this.
It was one of the coolest things anybody's ever done.
He said, you know, there was this guy.
I forget who it was.
And he got nominated.
And he also didn't go.
And then when he didn't go, he ended up winning.
And he always felt bad because he went and he didn't win.
And of course, I knew that.
I mean, I knew if I went and I won, which I wasn't expecting, I knew I'd feel bad, but I figured, eh, I don't care that much.
And then Bill Keene says this.
He goes, you've been nominated for the two top awards.
If you don't come, and if you won, you might be.
Twice as unhappy as he was.
And I said, what?
And he said, you might be twice as unhappy.
And I said, got it.
Okay, got it.
In other words, Bill Key had already knew that I'd won.
And he knew that I'd won both awards.
And he was making damn sure that I didn't miss it.
So that was sort of the wrap-up of that.
So Bill Keen, he came through.
So that's that.
Here's a question for you.
Here's a suggestion for you.
Do you ever wonder about your digital assistants listening to you all day?
So your digital assistants are listening to all your conversations, allegedly, or are they actually listening?
Is your phone listening to you?
Is my Amazon digital assistant listening to me right now?
Well, you worry about that, don't you?
So here's my recommendation to you.
Here's what I do.
Randomly during the day, I confess the crimes that I didn't do.
Because if I could get enough body of work into the digital assistant, then someday when it finds, it accuses me of a crime I did do, and they check the records and they say, look, right here, we were recording you the whole time, and we found this record, and it says you did kill that guy.
And I'm going to say, really?
Oh, really? You believe that because I said it in the room, and it got picked up on my digital assistant?
Well, if you'll go back and check the records, I believe you'll also find my confession for killing JFK. I believe you'll also find my statement that I have DNA from Bigfoot.
You will also find that I went fishing and caught the Loch Ness Monster.
So, let's put them in context, shall we?
So, that's my advice to you.
All day long, you should just admit to crimes.
Occasionally you should scream as though you're doing a domestic abuse situation.
You should stage every possible crime that you might later be accused of so you've got a big body of fakes.
And then somebody says, well it's right there in your own voice.
Oh yeah? Let me show you something else that's in my voice.
Context, bitch. Alright.
There is some breaking news.
The Epoch Times apparently has an article on this.
It turns out that, speaking of surveillance, it turns out that maybe Flynn was not unmasked.
What? Yeah, it turns out that maybe Flynn was not unmasked.
According to the transcripts, there's some indication that The Flynn transcripts directly from the NSA. You know, the NSA that's sucking up everybody's conversation everywhere, allegedly?
Well, it turns out if you get it that way, there's no unmasking to do because nothing is masked.
That's right. You can just, apparently if you're in the government and you've got You say you've got a reason.
Apparently, somebody has access to raw, unmasked footage of every American in every conversation, presumably, and they just had to ask for it.
Do you believe that?
Do you believe that this whole time that we've been lied to?
I'm going to say lied.
That we've been lied to about the idea that our government would be so guarded with our privacy that the government itself had put up rules so that even the government couldn't look at who the people were unless they had a special legal process to do it.
Turns out, none of that was true.
Sure, how hard would it be If you wanted to know who the masked person was, apparently you could just go to the NSA and just say, well, I don't want to go through the masking process.
Just give me the transcript.
Somebody says that is in Snowden's book.
Well, we certainly know.
We knew from Snowden that everything was being collected.
Here's the part I didn't know.
I didn't know how easy it was for the government to get access to it, meaning that I didn't know what situations would present themselves.
I thought it was more of a terrorist kind of a situation.
I assumed it was more of a people we thought were pretty guilty situation.
You don't really think of it in terms of a sort of a political situation, do you?
So, if you haven't lost all trust in your government yet, That should do it.
So I think we should treat as a fairy tale the idea of masking.
Should we as citizens, we're now informed citizens, right?
As informed citizens, should we even act like masking is a real thing?
Because it's not.
I mean, apparently it's not.
We've been completely lied to this whole time.
So let's watch that story develop.
Alright, so I promised you I would create a bubble reality in which you can live in it happily.
The bubble reality will last at least today, and I'm going to build this bubble reality using nothing but the news, including stuff that comes across the internet, and I'm just going to treat it all like it's true.
Okay? Just going to treat it all like it's true and watch this bubble reality form around you.
It might not be permanent, but you'll like it today.
Number one, have you noticed that for every business that is actually open, and of course that isn't that many, doesn't it seem like a lot of the businesses that are open have more demand than they can handle?
Think about it. If you were to open a restaurant today in my town, You would have way more demand than you can handle because there aren't that many open.
That is really good news.
Pretty much everything that's open has plenty of demand.
So as long as demand is driving reopenings, that's good news.
And as I've said, half of the country, or something like it, didn't actually lose money.
Something like half of the country made money somehow because they still got paid But they didn't have much in the way of expenses for three months.
So weirdly, half of the country is ready to spend.
And I feel like when businesses reopen, they're going to be surprised.
Were you surprised that the cruise ships are already overbooked for next year?
The cruise ships!
If you were to guess one thing that should not be overbooked for next year, top of my list would be cruise ships.
But even they are booked.
People have money. Not everybody.
It's like half. Half the country.
But the half that has the money, they're looking to spend that money.
That's good news. So that's the first part of your bubble I'm going to form.
The first part is that the recovery is looking pretty good.
It's looking pretty good.
You know, the potential recovery.
The other thing is, weren't you panicked about all this money we're printing?
Hey, we can't just print trillions of dollars.
But the more I hear from experts who sort of understand that world of printing money and monetary policy and debt, it turns out that maybe we can.
It turns out that in this very unique situation, which is unlike any other situation, it might be the only situation where you can actually print trillions of dollars.
So we did.
Have you noticed what's missing?
Here's a dog that's not barking.
Where's the dog barking on television where there's an economics expert, an economist, who's saying, yeah, I know it's an emergency and we printed all this money, but we're definitely doomed because of that.
Where's that guy?
Where's that woman?
Right? Isn't that conspicuously missing?
It's conspicuously missing because every situation has a person on the other side.
Name one other situation in the news that doesn't have an expert on the other side saying that it's all doom, you can't do this, it's a big mistake.
Have you seen one economist, an actual qualified person, go on the news and say, look, I've got to raise my hand.
All this printing of money, boom, six months from now we're doomed or whatever it looks like.
Somebody says, Peter Schiff.
Well, I'm going to reserve my comment about that.
Well, no, I'm going to give a comment about that.
What you have to watch out for is somebody who's famous for making a right call in the past.
If somebody's made the correct call in the past...
They have an incentive to try to get another big one right.
So I'm always a little distrustful of the person who got that big call in the past right and became famous for it.
You know, it's sort of the person I trust the least.
Now, watch out for the people also who don't know the difference between printing money and debt.
So everybody says Peter Schiff, yeah.
Peter Schiff is Mr. Doom.
So I haven't seen him on television.
Has he been on CNBC? So anyway, since we're building a bubble reality, we're going to ignore Peter Schiff.
And I'm going to say that it does seem to me that the majority of economists are not panicked about it.
Otherwise you'd see them on the TV. So the first thing is we probably can print money.
It'll have some cost later, but at the moment it looks like we can handle it.
We'll have plenty of demand.
We've got plenty of people ready to spend.
Here's the other good news.
There has been a burst of entrepreneurial energy that you're really going to see coming to fruition.
You can already see all the seeds, but people have rethought everything.
From the bottom up, people have rethought how do we commute, learn, do online education, everything.
And There's going to be a burst of entrepreneurial energy maybe like we've never seen.
Maybe since the internet was new, but even that was slower than what we're going to see.
This might forever be referred to as some great entrepreneurial wave.
I think historically we'll look back and say something happened in 2020 That wasn't just the virus.
There was something about the whole way we think about risk, the whole way we build businesses, the whole way we operate as a civilization.
And that is going to drive an amazing amount of economic activity.
Now let's talk about the health parts.
So far I've made my argument that the economy is actually going to be not just good, But if I had to put a bet on it, it'll be good in a way we've never even seen it that good.
I believe that the Golden Age is about to be unlocked.
And that this is the third act to the Golden Age.
It's the thing that made you say, my God, I don't know if we can get there.
Everything just fell apart.
But it didn't.
Because we can actually rebuild this pretty quickly.
And all the parts are there.
So let me talk about the health part, and here's the fun part.
Oh, and also I'll throw onto the economic part, that we'll certainly be pulling our supply chains back from China.
The pulling of the supply chains back and the reinvigoration of manufacturing in this country is guaranteed to be a long-term economic benefit.
I mean, it's really, it's almost certain that that's going to be a good thing.
So you got that going too.
Alright, here are some things I've seen today.
So I saw a thread that I tweeted, you can take a look at it, it's in my Twitter feed, in which there was a recent study that said hydroxychloroquine didn't make any difference.
And this individual, I don't know much about him, but he dug into the study and found out that you had to really try hard To make it look like it didn't work.
And the trick that they used, I don't know why, but the trick they used to make the hydroxychloroquine look like it didn't work was they lumped together two types of different outcomes.
People who got put on ventilators and then people who actually died.
So people who went on ventilators and didn't die were added together with people who did die.
What? Why would you add together people who didn't die with people who did die and try to come up with a result?
Now, remember, if somebody else looked at this critic, they might say, no, the critic is wrong.
The study was right the way they did it.
But that's not what we're doing today.
Today what we're doing is I'm forming a bubble reality in which this is true.
So what's true, just for the bubble reality, not the real reality, we can't see that one, but the bubble reality for today is that the studies saying hydroxychloroquine don't work are bogus.
And here's a perfect example, because the study itself clearly shows it did.
All you have to do is take the ventilated part out, leave the people who died, and suddenly you compare it and 89% of the people without hydroxychloroquine died, but only 60% who had it died.
60% versus almost 90%.
And that's in the study that says hydroxychloroquine doesn't work.
And it's only because they did this weird thing of adding together people who lived with people who didn't live.
What? What?
Why would you do that?
Well, apparently people who know what they're doing have an argument for why that might have sort of made sense, but other people are going to say it doesn't.
So let us accept in our bubble reality that hydroxychloroquine does work And this study actually was the worst situation, which is they waited until people were already in bad shape.
So this was only for people who were in bad shape.
And the whole point of hydroxychloroquine is that you add it to the zinc, you give it to people early, and they don't get bad in the first place.
So the first part of the bubble, I'm going to say that hydroxychloroquine reduces deaths by 30%.
Is that true?
Doesn't matter. Because this is a bubble reality.
Does it seem like it could be true?
I'd say absolutely yes.
If you told me that the truth is that hydroxychloroquine, if administered early on, reduced ultimate deaths by 30%, I would say to you, that feels true.
It's not proven true by science, and that's what you have to wait for.
But we're in a bubble reality today.
We're just going to feel good for today, so it's true for today.
Alright, so that's 30% benefit, right off the top there.
Then, another study out of Northwestern University.
Researchers looked at data from 10 countries, and they found this correlation.
Turns out that wherever there's low vitamin D, they have bad outcomes.
So, have you ever heard that before?
That's right. Turns out that there's another study showing a very strong correlation.
And in fact, the correlation is so strong, something like 50% more likely to have trouble if you've got low vitamin D. 50%.
Now, again, you have to watch out for the correlation versus causation.
So just because people had low vitamin D, it doesn't mean that's what caused them to have problems.
Could be a correlation.
But given that we know vitamin D is so implicated in your entire immune response and good health in general, I'm going to accept it as true.
So now we have two things we're accepting as true, for today anyway.
One is if you boost your vitamin D, and I expect all of you have done that by now.
All of you should have looked at your vitamin D, said, what's my situation?
Is my skin light or dark?
Am I in the sun? Where do I live?
Can I supplement? You should have all done that by now.
So you've all taken your vitamin D by now, or you'll do it by the end of today, and you've lowered your risk by 50%.
Does the science say that?
No. No. The science does not say that, but it's suggesting it.
It's sort of... Hinting, maybe it might be in that direction.
So now we've got a 30% reduction from the hydroxychloroquine.
We've got a 50% reduction in risk from just vitamin D. Two cheap, widely available things.
How's your bubble so far?
You've got an economy that almost certainly will recover ridiculously well.
I mean, I think 2021 is going to be for the history books, honestly.
I'm very much with Trump on that.
Alright, here's another one.
Turns out that there's a blood test you could do, and if you find that people have a certain kind of blood situation, I guess it's their LDH, with 90% accuracy...
You can study people's LDH and their HSCRP. It's another marker in your blood.
And with 90% effectiveness, they can tell if you're going to have a bad outcome.
90% effectiveness, they can test your blood ahead of time, before you even have the coronavirus.
And they can tell if you're in the 10% who's going to have a bad problem.
Now, how hard is it to test your LDH? Probably most of you already have that test, right?
So somebody says LDH is indicative of comorbidity.
Well, I don't know about that.
Certainly could be true.
But suppose it's true.
Remember, today is Bubble Reality Day.
We accept all studies as true just for today.
Let's say it's true that we have a simple blood test, which, in fact, I think most people have already taken.
I think I could get on I think I can log on to my healthcare account and see my LDH, right?
And I know it's in a good range, so I'm not worried about it.
So now you have your LDH, which even if changing your LDH Doesn't change your risk.
It tells you if you have risk.
Oh, look at my Twitter feeds.
So if you're looking for any studies or anything, the ones I'm mentioning I tweeted today.
So it would be toward the top of the Twitter feed.
So you've got that.
So you've got vitamin D cuts the risk in half.
You've got hydroxychloroquine maybe cuts the risk by 30%.
You've got these new blood tests.
We're going to imagine that they work even if they don't.
We're going to say that that won't tell you what to do.
I'm not suggesting that if you improve your LDH, you'll have a better outcome.
That's not demonstrated by anything.
But it could tell you if you have a risk.
So it could tell you who to hide and who can go back to work.
Imagine if you could know with 90% effectiveness who can go back to work.
Big difference, right?
How about this?
There's another study that came out, and again, all studies are true just for today.
They said universal mask wearing would reduce the transmission by 80%.
Which would make sense for why some Asian countries did so well, right?
Turns out that the...
Let me make...
I'm going to make a generality...
That is unfair and racist.
I'm going to do it anyway. You're okay with that?
Everybody okay? I'm going to say something that sounds racist.
Just see if you can deal with it, okay?
Asian countries, my guess, and I'm looking for a fact check here.
So if you want to just say, Scott, Scott, Scott, what kind of an idiot are you?
That's just a racist stereotype.
That's not true at all.
So fact check me on this.
Culturally speaking, would it be as comfortable for somebody in, let's say, Japan or Singapore or Hong Kong, would it be as comfortable for them to go in public without a mask as it would for an American?
Because I'm thinking not, right?
I'm thinking if you went outside today in South Korea or you went to some public place without a mask, I don't know how long you're going to last.
Because I would think that the social pressure would be so extraordinary that their compliance with masks is very high.
Now that's the racist part, right?
Because why would I say that about this?
So my statement should be taken as cultural, not racist.
I'm hoping you're all adult enough to know the difference.
But the American character By historical norm, the normal American, when they hear that the law or the rule is you have to do something, what does every American instinctively want to do the day they're told they can't do something?
The moment you hear that you're not supposed to do it, if you're an American, you say, I'm going to do some of that.
I'm going to do that. What do you mean I can't do that?
Have you heard of freedom?
Have you heard of the Constitution?
What do you mean I have to wear a mask?
How about I'm not going to wear a mask because you told me I have to?
How about that? How about I'm not only going to not wear a mask, I'm going to go on TV without my mask.
I'm going to tell other people not to wear a mask.
Will I die? Yeah, I might.
Yeah, it might kill me.
It might actually be dangerous for other people too.
But freedom. But freedom.
So, am I right to say that the American character just automatically rejects authority, and so you wouldn't expect a good, you know, as good an uptake of masks?
All right, let's put it together.
So, Americans certainly can wear masks if we decide we want to.
Are you in? Americans will reject being told by the government To do anything.
Just automatically.
We reject it.
But we certainly will do things we think are good ideas, right?
If our government just told us something that's a good idea, and we looked at it and said, well, that's just a good idea.
We'll do it, even if it's hard.
Here's another thing that's part of the American character, I'd like to say.
I mean, nothing's universal, right?
But it's part of the American character.
If you say, Americans, you're going to have to do something that's really hard.
But you have to do it, because it's the only way to get by.
It's really hard. What do Americans do?
They say, can we do it right away?
It's really hard. People are going to die.
Can we get started now?
We never run from this stuff.
Americans go at danger.
You tell an American that there's a problem, we run at it.
If you tell us something's hard, we say, can we start now?
If it's hard, we should start right away.
Get it over with. So, put it all together.
Masks, 80% effective.
Let's say the American public buys into the truth of it.
Now it's not the government telling them to wear a mask.
That's different. Government tells me to wear a mask?
Maybe yes, maybe no.
But if the data tells me to wear a mask, and it's hard, I'm going to wear a mask.
I don't care, it's hard.
I'm an American. If it's hard, I'm going to do it anyway.
I'm going to do it sooner, because it's hard.
Alright, so you got your hydrochloroquine, takes 30% off, allegedly.
You got your vitamin D, 50% off.
You got your blood test, it'll tell you 90% likelihood.
You got your mask, it'll be 80% effective.
You've got your social distancing.
You've got your reopenings happening.
You've got your New York. New York is looking at Memorial Day.
Memorial Day is 12 days away, 13 days away.
Can you make it two more weeks?
Can the public make it two more weeks without everything breaking?
We can. We absolutely can.
I'm very much a big fan of what I would call the productive friction in society.
The most productive friction you've ever seen is the conversation between going back to work sooner and And not going back to work sooner.
When I see people fighting hard on both sides of that, really digging in to make their argument for both sides, that makes me happy.
If you're saying to yourself, oh, I wanted one side to win, I don't think that's your most enlightened view.
Your best situation is that those two sides are fighting you down in public, and you're slowly moving in the direction that makes sense.
You want a productive friction there.
You want people on both sides of that argument.
And you want really capable people arguing both sides.
That's what we need.
You don't need a winner.
You need a fight.
Because when this is done, you want to know that this was totally...
You know, rinsed out, turned around, turned inside out.
You want to know that we fought over it?
You want to know that the best people were involved?
You want to know that we disagreed?
You want to know that we turned over every rock?
You want to know that we really fought over this?
Then, if we fought over it, it's more credible.
Even if we got it wrong, We'll always argue that we should have done it a different way.
That's also part of our national character.
We'll always argue that it was wrong.
But the fighting is what makes it credible.
And I would argue that the fighting, if you will, has been really a credit to the population.
I would say that the way...
Let me give you some context.
Early on when this situation was breaking, a very smart person in my world was telling me this could go to the point where the military is just running the country, a complete breakdown of society.
Could have happened.
It was entirely possible that the direction this would go was a complete breakdown of civilization.
That was not out of the question.
But, how did, let's just talk about Americans, because I just have more knowledge of that group.
Let's talk about Americans.
How did Americans respond when put in a situation that if they'd acted wrong, civilization would have been destroyed?
They had protests.
How many people fired their weapons at protests so far?
The protests about opening up?
Zero. Zero.
Zero people.
How many stories of something like violence have you heard from a protest itself?
Not from individuals being arrested in ways that you wish you'd never seen, but at the protests.
How about zero?
Zero. How many people have gone hungry because other people were not willing to do whatever they needed to make sure that the hungry got fed?
Zero. Zero.
Have you heard of anybody who starved?
Because the people who were not starving did the right thing.
They said, whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on.
We've got a whole bunch of people who might starve.
Drop everything. We've got to feed people.
And we succeeded. If you look at each challenge that this is presented, can you get enough ventilators?
Can you get enough PPE? Can we get money to people?
Can we feed them? Can we keep them alive?
Can we keep the hospitals from crashing?
Guess what? We succeeded on every one of those things.
Every one of those things we succeeded at.
Handily. We succeeded with room to spare on everything.
Now, of course, testing just takes a while to get up and running.
I'm not going to be the guy who says that we failed at testing.
It is unambiguously true there should have been more.
There should have been in terms of we wish there had been more.
I'm not going to say should have been.
Because some things just take a while.
And I would guess that the things we're doing for testing are Are incredible.
And I would say that when this is done, we're close enough to the endgame now where I'm going to make you a prediction that I will live and die by and I feel completely confident in this.
We're close enough to the end line with enough stuff opening up and something that looks like a plan.
We're close enough That the odds of civilization just going to hell now in these last few weeks?
Zero. Zero.
Our risk of total collapse, in my opinion, had just reached zero.
And the reason is we're too close to the end line.
Nobody gives up the race when they're a few steps from the finish line.
Because we have plenty left in reserve.
We're not even close to beating them.
We're basically climbing on top of this virus like nobody's ever climbed on top of anything.
We're getting on top of this thing, and it's working.
So here's the thing.
I declare that the economy has a 100% chance of recovering in a spectacular way.
2021 will be the time that we see that that comes true.
I declare that the combination of all these little things we're doing to beat the virus are right at the point where we're just going to climb on top of this freaking thing.
And I think that once we're on top of it, it's going to look good.
All right. So that is my bubble reality.
Economy. Made it.
This is a big deal, by the way.
If this doesn't make you feel good, you're not in the bubble yet.
But get in the bubble with me. It is my opinion that the catastrophic risk to the economy is actually over.
It's actually over.
Certainly a risk to how quickly we come back.
Tons of risk for individuals who need to do what we can to make sure everybody who got the worst of this gets a hand up.
But do we know that we are those people?
Have we learned that we will take care of each other?
Yes, we have.
We have learned that if people need this ongoing help, We have learned unambiguously that the rest of the country, the rest of the world, apparently, will do what it needs to do.
So your risk of starvation is zero.
Your risk that the economy will be catastrophically damaged, I put it, zero.
The risk that we won't open up in some kind of a staggered, faltering fashion over the next three months Zero.
We are going to open up. And I would say, unambiguously, and this is the part that will add that science has not caught up to me, so I'm going to get ahead of science here, right?
Those of you who want to stay outside the bubble, you're welcome to it.
And outside the bubble, you'd say, ah, I need those reliable clinical tests where I really know what therapeutics work.
Okay. But there are enough things happening from, who knows, maybe the Sorrento cure is real?
You know, probably not.
But there are enough things going on that I think we're going to have it.
Now, I'd like to say again, because I just can't get this out of my head.
The president has promised, you know, this warp speed project to get to a vaccine.
And while I have great...
Great doubt about whether a vaccine is possible.
The fact that all of the experts seem to be so optimistic about it, for today's purposes, I'm going to say you couldn't have that many experts tell you that we're going to have a vaccine with so many people working on so many different flavors of it.
It's very unlikely we're not going to have something like a vaccine.
So I'm going to, for the purpose of Your feel-good bubbles say, there will be a vaccine.
And that this warp speed thing does look like exactly the right thing.
Every now and then, your government does something where you say to yourself, hey, you should...
Okay, that's exactly what you should have done.
And this warp speed project is exactly what we should be doing.
I like it a lot.
But the best part I like...
Here's the part that Trump understands better than any president has ever understood it.
He knows the show.
He understands that our psychology is what drives the economy, and that the show, in other words, the spectacle he puts on, is part of what drives our psychology, which is what drives our economy.
So if you want a good 2021, how do you want the public to feel?
Well, you want to feel positive.
You want to feel optimistic.
You want to feel patriotic.
You want to feel like you're building, like you're coming back from something.
You want to feel victorious.
So what does the president come up with?
That the day we have enough of this vaccine, let's say we get the vaccine, we're going to say it does happen, because this is Optimism Day.
He's going to use the U.S. military...
To deliver it using every plane, train, not train, but every plane, boat, and truck.
Now, what will that do to your psychology?
How will you feel watching the U.S. military deploying to every town and city in the United States with life-saving vaccines They're designed for the most vulnerable first, taking care of the seniors first, and vulnerable populations.
How will you feel when that's the news?
Because the news, it's going to be very visual, which is what the president does best.
I mean, he knows visual. He's just so good at that.
How are you going to feel about that?
Somebody says, I feel the country is broke.
I'll bet you wouldn't, because the countries, even the news, will frame this as a positive development.
I've got a feeling that you are going to feel so good about this that that good feeling will actually boost the economy, that it will be that effective.
Rarely could you ever imagine there could be, let's say, an event or a spectacle or something that could have that much effect on the national mood.
But that, you know, whoever came up with the idea of the military delivering this, it's just brilliant.
It really is. I'd like to think it was Trump, because it's right in his wheelhouse.
Alright, so that...
That is what I wanted to tell you today.
Alright, how many of you feel happier...
Because at least now, you've got a little optimism.
Do I think that Zoom records all conversations like the NSA? Well, I don't know if it records all of them, but it wouldn't be hard for it to look for keywords and record the ones that had the right keywords.
So I don't know. And I think that Zoom...
It's trying hard to get their product to not go through any Chinese servers.
So by now, maybe they've accomplished that.
I don't know. So it could be that Zoom is turning things around.
We'll see. I hope so.
Zoom is one of the just coolest American companies, if I'm being honest.
If you had to look at just the product, if you say to yourself, all right, Zoom as a product, it's really, really good.
I gotta say, because I use it quite a bit.
And if you've used any other thing, you know, like Skype for example, Skype's pretty good.
Skype's good. Zoom's better.
Oh good, I'm looking at your comments and it looks like many of you are enjoying the bubble reality.
Good. Good, good.
Well, it looks like that worked.
All right. Then I think what I'm going to do is leave it on the positive note.
Somebody's asking me if I can tell you a dirty joke.
I can, but I'm not going to do it today.
And I'm going to leave it there.
Take that good feeling into the rest of your day.
Be aware that you've created a subjective reality.
But you can enjoy it for today, because what were you going to do about the coronavirus today anyway?