Episode 982 Scott Adams: The Good News Bubbling up Everywhere, How to Tell a Writer From an Asshole
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Content:
Big trends pushing an entrepreneurial wave
Joel Pollack reports on Obama's 69 page Pandemic Playbook
Nate Silver calls out WaPo anti-Trump headline
Dr. Rick Bright, whistleblower or disgruntled ousted employee?
Mike Pompeo's staffer and the fired IG
AOC reframing her Green New Deal
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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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Well, not news. In 2012, there was a study that musicians' brains actually sync up during a duet.
If you look at their brains, you find that they actually get in sync.
And interestingly, even before the music starts, their brains sync up.
So there's actually a physical known, let's say, matching within the physical structure of brains prior to singing.
And I believe this connection is very important for humanity.
We will now connect sonically in a very similar way.
Because you know it's coming next, don't you?
Already your brain is syncing up.
Those of you who have joined me before, feel it?
Yeah, your brain is syncing up with mine right now.
Because you know it comes next.
Here it comes. All you need is...
A cup or a mug or a glass of tank or chalice or stein, a canteen jug or a flask or a 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 sip.
It comes with synchronicity.
It comes with simultaneous vibrations in our brain.
Go! Do you feel that?
I can feel that.
Yeah, I can feel that.
Alright. Well, it's a funny day.
Today's a funny day. I'm going to be optimistic today.
Okay with you? It's all going to be good news today.
I'm sure there's bad news.
Well, I'm sure there's bad news all over the world.
But today, today we're going to wrap ourselves in a little Monday blanket of good thoughts.
Number one good thought comes from Naval Ravikant, who tweeted yesterday, and I quote, I love America, greatest country on earth, only place that will completely accept you even if you weren't born there.
The reason I mention that is that this would be a really good time to remind ourselves that there's something about America that's just not like other places.
We are not a collection of people so much as a collection of shared ideas.
And it is indeed true.
If you share those ideas, you play by the rules, you follow the laws, you follow the Constitution, you think that's a pretty good deal, America completely accepts you.
And we should remember that because when 2021 comes and we start to rebuild to make America great again, which has never been so much, We should remember who we are.
And who we are is a group of people who are here by choice.
Not every one of you was born where you wanted to be born, necessarily.
But people who came to America all came here by choice.
Except for the, well, I guess everybody ultimately came here by choice, if you go way back.
And there is something about that self-selection process.
So even though America is not about the people so much as it is about the ideas and the shared values, it is nonetheless true that those shared values became a filter.
And if filtered, and has for hundreds of years, who it is who comes to this country?
And we now have the most Optimistic, capable, rule-playing, rule-violating, because we're Americans too.
We like to violate our rules sometimes, because we are rebellious by nature.
But remember who we are.
Just remember who we are.
Now, if you're listening to this from another country, feel free to substitute what's great about your country into this conversation, because it's time to stop hunkering down.
It's time to get off of defense against this coronavirus.
It's happening everywhere.
States are going back on offense.
They're going right at it.
And I would like to make a suggestion for the country.
This would work for the world as well, but for the United States especially, I would like to make this following productive suggestion, and I would like all of you to agree with us.
We should stop tracking coronavirus deaths as one number and break it into two.
Maybe the second number is people over 70, or maybe it's just nursing home deaths.
But we should stop tracking the nursing home deaths with the total deaths.
The reason is, it's time to get back to work.
The time to be scared is over.
The time to be smart starts now.
Scared is good. Scared makes you do what you gotta do.
Scared makes you put on your mask.
Scared makes you stay home.
Scared had its purpose.
You know, there was a reason for scared.
But now it's the reason to rebuild.
Time to rebuild.
Do you want to rebuild scared?
Nope. Don't want to.
It's time to change the way we report and talk about the deaths so that we put them back into a smarter frame.
Let's take it out of the scary frame.
Scary was good. No criticism there.
Let's just scare everybody.
That was exactly what we needed to do.
Now we need to rebuild.
I've told you many times, an economy is a set of psychological states that people act out.
If you get your psychology right, your economy is right.
Step one to get our psychology right is let's stop counting the number of nursing home deaths, because those are not the deaths that matter to reopening the economy.
If we're smart. Because we now know that that's where the weakness is.
We can wall off that group of citizens, send the young people back to work.
But please, please, United States, show us just the stats for the people who are going back to work.
That's the death rate I care about for the economic purposes.
Of course I care about all the deaths.
Let's not be that person.
But let's put an optimistic...
Economically compatible tweak on the numbers, and let's just grow up a little bit and say, all right, we have two problems, not one.
Two problems. One problem is the comorbidity people, the people who have higher risk, and the other problem is opening the economy, and we should just track them separately.
Just track them separately.
It'll be great for the psychological being of the country.
I would like to give you some more cause for optimism.
I predicted on Twitter this morning that 2021 will be more than a recovery year.
2021 will also be a recovery year, but I think it's going to be bigger than that.
Like, really bigger than that.
And you can almost feel it, can't you?
Today, I saw in the news that Kim Kardashian launched a line of face masks.
So, while some of us were hiding, Kim Kardashian launched a new business.
Now, I think she may be giving a lot of it away.
I don't know if she's even doing it for money.
She may be doing it just for patriotic reasons, which would be terrific.
But, there are a lot of entrepreneurs who are spring-loaded right now and saying, Let me get out of the house.
Let me do something, because I got an idea.
And here are the bigger trends that are going to push this entrepreneurial wave, which I think will be the biggest wave of entrepreneurial energy the world has ever seen, starting in 2021.
I think that everything you've ever assumed about entrepreneurial anything is just going to be thrown out the door in 2021.
You're going to see a surge of energy into the economy that will be historically unprecedented.
And some of the things driving that are, I just saw a study that said that 40% of the Americans don't want to buy Chinese products, and 78% said they'd be willing to pay more for products made in this country compared to made in China.
Do you know how much stuff China makes?
And 78% of us just said, screw that.
I'll pay more.
To keep my neighbor employed?
Because how much did it cost you to have your neighbor out of work?
That wasn't free.
You know, we used to be able to say, well, I got my job.
So, you know, my neighbor lost his manufacturing job to China, but, you know, that's my neighbor, that's not me.
But what did the coronavirus teach you?
It taught you that you and your neighbor are economically connected.
When your neighbor ran out of food, who paid for the food?
Well, maybe we just printed money.
Who knows? But ultimately, we assume that the people who are doing all right have to be the ones who are paying for the ones who needed some help.
Who else is going to pay?
So the idea that we can just ignore the fact that you're shipping your neighbor's job to China, like that's not going to affect you somehow, I think we just got over that, didn't we?
Didn't we just learn that that's not how it works?
If your neighbor doesn't have a job, nobody's going to mow that lawn.
That's going to come back on you.
So there's a psychological thing happening.
There's an enormous thing happening with the supply chain.
I mean, that part is almost beyond calculation.
If you only took that one thing and said, all right, 2021 will be like prior years before the coronavirus, the only thing you're going to change is, I don't know, Bring back the entire supply chain from China?
That's all you would have to know to buy stock in this country, right?
What else is happening?
And those are not the only good things.
The other thing that's happening, I think, will be more subtle.
And I've talked about this, how the coronavirus made everybody in the United States rethink everything.
It made us rethink how we work, travel, go to school, how we live with each other, everything.
And when you rethink everything, and it's everybody rethinking it, it's the people, not just the entrepreneurs, You've really shaken the box, and you've created a whole bunch of opportunities that in a sense already existed, but they were invisible to us.
So as soon as the coronavirus kicked up all these flaws in our system, then we could see them, and everybody could see them, and we could all say, oh, whoa, those flaws were not necessarily so visible until we saw this.
So there's going to be a lot of fixing of flaws, and that activity alone would be enormous.
But I've also, if you saw my periscope last night, you know that I think we're going to just reduce civilization, because we're waking up to the fact that we're living in somebody else's world.
Just briefly from what I said in a longer form last night, the home that most of us live in, if you have a house or even an apartment situation, you're living in something that was designed for people who died 100 years ago.
Even if your home is new, It probably is a legacy design from the 30s when people lived a certain way, you know, before the internet, etc.
So what you're going to see is I think people, because of the coronavirus sort of resetting the way we're looking at our world, we saw all the problems that happened when we had just a little bit of a wrinkle in it.
I think people are going to say, wait a minute, let's just look at this from scratch.
What does transportation look like?
What does education look like?
What should it look like?
And so there's going to be a lot happening on that.
Alright. I know I had at least one other good example of that.
Oh, cheap energy. We may be entering a phase where energy...
You know, either oil will stay low, we've got generation 4 nuclear that's, you know, the US government's doing a lot with their test sites and stuff.
They're trying to iterate up quickly.
We may be entering a phase where energy is just super cheap.
And what's that do? I mean, how about a phase where interest rates are zero or negative?
We're coming into a world Where every assumption's been wiped away, we have an educated population willing to work, supply chain we're bringing back, cheap energy, zero interest rates, and a president that just showed us sometimes if you cut a whole bunch of regulations you come out better.
Will it help us to know that we cut a bunch of regulations and it helped us during the coronavirus?
I feel like that's a lesson That gets into your head and then it's easier to cut regulations going forward because you saw that it worked before.
And I think a lot of people also realized that having a job and a boss is not a secure situation.
You know, there were a whole bunch of people who said, well, I'm going to wake up in the morning, go to work, I'll have a boss, I'll have a job, I'll have a paycheck.
And they just found out that's not a secure way to live.
At least all the people who lost their job in the coronavirus.
So if you put all this stuff together, you can almost feel it, can't you?
Feel it in the zeitgeist.
Now let's talk about zeitgeist.
So I tweeted that I could feel it in the zeitgeist that 2021 would be a huge wave of entrepreneurial energy.
And some of you are saying, Scott, why are you using that German word?
What does a zeitgeist mean?
Well, here's what it means.
It means that the feeling that everybody has collectively that we haven't necessarily talked about You and I haven't had a conversation about it, but there's just something in the air we're feeling at the same time.
Our thoughts are sort of collectively moving in a similar direction, but we don't know exactly why.
It's not because we coordinated.
There's just something in the air.
That's what the zeitgeist is.
So there's no American word for that.
Now, I promised you in the title to this that I would help you determine the difference.
It's a subtle difference.
Sometimes they look similar.
But I'm going to help you identify the subtle difference between a professional writer and an asshole.
Because they can look pretty similar.
Let's be honest.
And here's the difference.
This is just one way to tell.
It's not the only way to tell.
It's a bigger topic. But here's one way to tell.
If your writer uses a word like zeitgeist, You have to ask why they're using it.
Now when I used it in a tweet, a tweet is a small bit of text, and my intention was that people would have one of two reactions.
One, they would know what the word meant, and they would feel smart, because they know other people don't know what it means.
If you want people to feel smart, use a word that you know they know what it means, but they also know other people don't know what it means.
That will make them feel smart.
But what about the people who don't know what it means?
So I'm a professional writer, and I put out a word in a tweet that I knew...
75%, 80%, maybe 90% of the readers wouldn't know what the word is.
Is that good writing, or is that just being an asshole?
Well, I would propose this.
If the reason your professional writer used an unfamiliar word is to make you stop and think about it, and maybe even look it up, Then that's good writing.
That's what I did. So I used the word that I knew a lot of people wouldn't understand because I wanted them to stop and say, what the hell is that?
Zeitgeist. Why is he using that word?
Now here's the beauty of it.
The way I used it, you didn't need to know what it meant because the context told you, I'm just saying it's going to be good in 2021, a lot of energy.
But you probably stopped on the word if you didn't know what it meant.
That's what I wanted you to do.
If I could make you stop and pause and think a little extra about my point, then my point becomes part of your memory in a way it would not have if I had used ordinary words.
So if you're a professional writer and you know that what you're trying to do is make your reader stop and think, that's the right way to use an unusual word.
Had I used that same word in a longer paragraph without explaining it, probably a mistake.
Because the reader wants to get through the paragraph.
They don't want to stop.
Nobody wants to have to stop and look up words in a long form.
So in that context, you don't want to use weird words.
Which brings me to the funniest story of the day.
All of that was just a setup for the funniest story of the day.
This is brought to us courtesy of Joel Pollack at Breitbart, who did the hard work of actually reporting on something.
And it's really the funniest thing of the day.
So you heard that the Obama administration left behind this 69-page pandemic planning document.
So good job, Obama, right?
You got that big old planning document.
So, apparently nobody except Joel Pollack thought it would be a good idea to actually look at it.
To actually look at it and say, is this planning pandemic as good as we thought it was?
Well, here's where it gets interesting.
And I was laughing for, I think I laughed for 15 minutes straight after I'd read Joel's article about this planning document that And then I went back and read the title of Joel's article, which is, The Obama-Biden Pandemic Playbook is Less Than Advertised.
Now, that title won't make you laugh until you read the article, but when you appreciate the understatement of less than advertised...
I'll tell you, nothing's ever been less than advertised than this frickin' thing.
So I won't be able to fully describe how useless this document is, but I'll just give you a flavor of it from Joel's article.
And let me put it in context.
Remember the story about the Russian troll farm that was influencing our elections with their super KGB Russian troll memes that no doubt were moving results?
And you're thinking, my God, the Russians, they're weaponizing Russia.
They're weaponizing memes.
What have they done? They've probably got a secret laboratory, and they're testing it on people to see which of their memes are the good ones.
They've really probably studied this and weaponized it.
My God, what kind of memes are they sending us?
And then you look at their memes, and it literally looks like it was a sixth grade class project.
Children, take out your crayons, and we're going to make memes today.
Make one that says Hillary Clinton is mean.
Make one that says she lies.
All right. Thank you, children.
And when you actually look at the memes, you just have to laugh because you realize the entire story about the Russia troll farm was all fake.
Maybe not fake in the sense that they actually did these things.
I'm not saying they didn't do the things.
I'm saying that when you look at it, it's really a stretch To say that Russia was interfering in the election.
I mean, it's the biggest stretch you've ever stretched.
It was sort of like pissing in the ocean and looking to see if the water level rose.
So this document, the Obama-Biden pandemic playbook, is, as Joel Pollack says, less than advertised.
Let me tell you how much less.
As Joel says, of the 69 pages, because you say to yourself, wow, that's pretty hefty.
69 pages of pandemic playbook.
Wow! But of the 69 pages, only 27 are actually playbook.
The first 13 pages are a table of contents, executive summary, and various title pages.
The last 29 pages are appendices, and within the 27 pages of the playbook, only 17 deal with an international pandemic, I guess.
Why are my notes out of order?
He asks. Anyway, so there's a quote in there in which the first part of the very first...
Oh, here it is. Sorry.
So here's an actual quote from the guide.
This is one of the first sections.
I swear to God I'm not making this up.
This is actually written down by a public organization.
It says this. This rubric, capitalized, Capitalize R for rubric.
This rubric is not intended to serve as a comprehensive concept of operations or to replace pre-existing U.S. government response structures.
What? So the pandemic playbook is not a comprehensive guide of what to do?
I thought that was the whole point.
But rather, it's a guide to other guides.
It's a rubric.
Now, raise your hand if you know what a rubric is.
Somebody in the comments, exactly as I said that, the comment appeared on screen.
What is a rubric?
Now, let me explain and bring it all together.
The difference between a professional writer and an asshole is that if your professional writer used a word like zeitgeist, In a tweet, the point of it was to make you slow down and think, what does that word mean?
If, however, you're writing a 69-page pandemic playbook meant to be read quickly and efficiently by people during an emergency, one word you should not use if you're a professional writer is rubric, because nobody knows what the fuck it means.
I have to just look it up.
I'm a professional writer.
I don't know what a rubric is.
Have you ever used that word in your whole life?
Seriously. Raise your hand if you've ever used the word rubric in a freaking sentence.
Not me. Not me.
So whoever wrote this was not what I would call a professional writer.
Because no professional writer is going to say this rubric is not intended to serve and then go on to say it's just a guide to other guides.
Now here's the fun part.
This thing is so poorly written that you would never use it.
It's completely unusable.
But here's what it tried to do.
So it tried to be a pointer to point to all the government entities that would have a role during a pandemic.
Here's the fun part.
Each of those individual entities already knew what they were supposed to do.
So, do you think we needed a pandemic playbook For all of these entities to do what they're supposed to do when each of the entities already knew what they were supposed to do.
I would submit to you that the entire 69-page pandemic playbook should have been on one page.
And that one page should have said, in the event of an emergency of this type, here's the list of agencies that get involved.
Each of them know what to do.
Here are their phone numbers and who's in charge, just so you can coordinate with each other.
One page. The 69-page pandemic playbook should have been one page.
And then when you had that one page done, here's what you should do with it.
Ball it up into a little ball.
And then throw it in the garbage because you don't need the one page either.
Because as soon as the shit came down, every one of those agencies, I'm guessing, Leapt into action and told their bosses what they need to do.
And then those bosses went to their bosses and told them what to do.
Because every agency already knew what to do.
If you're telling me that the pandemic playbook was the key to it all, and if we'd had this, there would have been no chaos, you have never lived in the real world.
Because whoever wrote the pandemic playbook and started with the sentence, this rubric, It's not your A player in the government.
This was clearly the lowest level, probably a political hire, somebody who had an Ivy League degree or something like it, and somebody said, look, we don't have any real work for you.
Can you make us a pandemic playbook?
And the person said, well, what's that?
He goes, I don't know. Just make sure there's a document so we can say that we've got a plan, you know, just in case.
So, you have to read for humor purposes, and I swear to God, this is just for laughs.
You have to go look at it.
So look at Joel's article. I tweeted it.
You can find it in my Twitter feed or go to Breitbart.
And go to actually the document itself and look at the text.
It is so hilariously useless.
And watching Biden claim that this is the magic document is pretty funny.
All right. Let's see what else we got going on here.
We got some fun stuff out of South Korea.
There was a study of asymptomatic transmission.
Now, there's still that question, how much asymptomatic transmission is there?
But I feel like this South Korean study gives us a pretty good answer.
So there was some gym where they had a bunch of different classes.
And what they found is that in the high-intensity classes, where people were maybe packed in and breathing hard, that there was a high rate of asymptomatic transmission.
So I feel like we can put to rest the question of whether it exists.
I feel like we can say there is asymptomatic transmission.
Based on this alone, because I would trust South Korea for this stuff.
But here's the interesting thing.
There was no transmission in the less active classes like yoga and Pilates.
And there was no transmission in classes with fewer than five people.
Now that doesn't mean there would never be.
But I think this lays it out pretty clearly that if you were to say, go to your cubicle and sit there and work, And you're not hugging or touching other people.
It's going to be more like taking a yoga or a Pilates class.
And asymptomatic transmission didn't happen.
But if you're in one room, sweating and playing basketball or something, and you're above a certain age, it's probably pretty dangerous.
So I think that really, to me, this put it in a really stark contrast.
Because it looks like they did a good job of the contact tracing and they've got a good handle on this being asymptomatic but also the specific situations you gotta watch out for.
That's a pretty big deal. The Washington Post has this opinion piece.
Trump is gambling the health of the nation for his re-election.
So that's how the Washington Post describes a leader simply doing the job of a leader.
Correct me if I'm wrong.
But isn't every leader of every country trying to put people back to work but safely?
Is President Trump doing anything different than every governor of every party and every leader of every country and all of their governors everywhere in the world?
Every single one of them is doing the same thing.
They're trying to figure out this balance of when to go back to work and how.
But in the Washington Post's opinion, Trump is gambling the health of the nation for his re-election.
Okay, so first of all, that's another mind-reading situation, because it assumes some knowledge of his inner state, and your magical knowledge of his inner mind is that his inner mind doesn't care about dead people.
He doesn't care if you live or die.
He only cares about his re-election.
I would say that's not quite in evidence.
Another person who says that's not in evidence?
Well, he doesn't say that.
But I've told you that you should read Nate Silver.
He's totally the best.
When it comes to calling out the BS for other people's, let's say, statistical ignorance.
And what Nate says about the opinion piece, that Trump is gambling the health of the nation for his re-election, Nate Silver says, I continue to doubt the implication of a certain influential parcel of the conventional wisdom that tens or hundreds of thousands of additional Americans dying would be good for Trump's re-election prospects.
So, you know, Nate, who I don't believe would ever identify as Republican or conservative, I'm just guessing, I don't know if he said anything in those terms, but one does not think he is Republican.
And even he's calling bullshit on the Washington Post, saying, basically, I'm paraphrasing here, but Basically, can you explain to me how you get re-elected by killing hundreds of thousands of your own citizens?
What exactly is the strategy you're suggesting he's pursuing, whereby killing lots of citizens he gets more support?
Can you explain how that works?
Because it looks to me like it's just adults making adult decisions, and it's not all pretty.
So even Nate is calling out the Washington Post.
So this is why I'm appreciating Nate Silver.
He is, I would say consistently, he just goes with what the evidence is pointing to, and is rare, so it's worth calling out.
Moderna, a tech company, says they've got a coronavirus vaccine that activated antibodies in all 45 participants.
But they're one of 110 vaccine makers.
Who knows if any of that will work.
Let's see. So it looks like the current death count estimate for the United States is 147,000 by early August.
So, are we going to get to 200,000 dead?
Do you think? If we just straight line our, it doesn't look like we're trying to flatten the curve.
I'm sorry, it doesn't look like we're trying to drive the curve to zero.
It looks like, it looks like, not looks like, it is, that we're going back to work with a flat curve will be good enough.
I think we'd go back to work even with a slightly rising curve as long as we didn't think it would overwhelm the hospitals.
But if early August is 147,000 dead, we could hit 200,000 by the end of the year, could we not?
And have you heard the people who say it's just the flu be very active lately?
Because, correct me if I'm wrong, but around the time that the number of estimated deaths seemed like it would certainly be over 100,000, because we're already around 90,000, once it was clear that it would exceed 100,000 deaths, did you notice that the Just the Flu people started getting quiet?
Is that my imagination?
Because I think people maybe moved from, hey, it's just like the flu, to, okay, this isn't the flu, but we still have to open up.
It might not change your opinion about reopening, but it might change your opinion about whether this was a serious thing.
Let's see... What else we got going on?
Well, so there was that whistleblower, the disgruntled Mr.
Bright. B-R-I-G-H-T. He's bright.
And here's some of the things that he said.
So I guess he was on CBS. Was it 60 Minutes?
I'm not sure. But let's see if you think he's a disgruntled employee.
Is he just acting politically?
Or is he just a whistleblower and he's just right?
Here are some things which we learned.
He said that at January 23rd meeting, he was the only person in the room who said, quote, we're going to need vaccines and diagnostics and drugs.
It's going to take a while.
We need to get started.
So he was the only person in the room.
What room was he in?
Who else was in that room?
Was it the guy who wrote the pandemic playbook?
Probably not. Was the president in the room on January 23rd when he said we need these vaccines and diagnostics?
How about anybody else in the room who also thought that?
Was he the only guy?
Was he the hero? So here's the thing.
Look for the hero story.
If your whistleblower has a hero story, I try to tell them they wouldn't listen to me.
Does that sound like a whistleblower or a disgruntled employee?
I had the idea nobody would listen to me in the meeting.
As the creator of Dilbert, I appoint myself judge and jury of this question, and I vote, sounds more like a disgruntled employee, but we're not done.
That's not a firm judgment yet.
And then Bright told Norah O'Donnell on 60 Minutes that his resistance to Trump's push for hydroxychloroquine was what got him fired.
And then he put it this way, quote, the whistleblower did, I believe my last-ditch effort to protect Americans from that drug, to protect us from hydroxychloroquine, was the final straw that they used and believed was essential to push me out.
He was trying to protect the American people from a drug that is widely used in other countries successfully.
He's a hero. He's trying to protect us from the drug that's widely used in other countries successfully.
Now when I say successfully, I mean they're not reporting any problems and they continue to use it.
So they must think it's working.
Because who would still be using it If it had made no difference.
Fact check me on this.
Are other countries using it more since this guy said it was dangerous?
Or are other countries using it less because of all the problems and the people dying from it?
I'm going to guess more.
Wouldn't you? So it seems to me that this guy was just bad at risk management.
It is a fact that if enough people take this drug, somebody's going to have a bad reaction and die.
That's just a fact. It's a fact of drugs in general.
And I'm going to say that he's got a little bit of a hero thing going on here.
I tried to save the Americans from that drug.
It was my last-ditch effort.
I told them they needed protective equipment.
I told them no one would listen.
They wouldn't listen to me.
All right. And then here's the kicker.
And I will base my final judgment on this sentence.
And by the way...
For those of you who have followed me long enough, you know, this is something I've said before a lot.
So this won't be the first time I've made this kind of interpretation.
I've made this judgment a lot.
I'll just be consistent.
He says, quote, We don't yet have a national strategy.
Stop. Stop.
What do I say about strategy?
What do I say about that employee who says, We don't have a strategy.
We don't have a strategy.
That employee is always the disgruntled employee.
That's not a whistleblower.
A whistleblower is not complaining about your strategy.
That's your disgruntled employee.
I've written about that.
I've done this exact joke of the employee who says, We don't have a strategy.
Because strategy is not even a real thing.
There's no such thing as strategy.
The strategy is you do whatever makes sense at the time that you're making a decision.
That's exactly what we did.
And guess what? That's pretty much what the pandemic playbook said you should do, too.
The pandemic playbook does not say, here's your strategy, because it wouldn't make sense.
Because every situation is going to be the new situation.
You're going to figure out the situation.
You're going to figure out what tools you have.
You're going to figure out where it's hitting, who's hitting harder.
And then you're going to figure out what to do.
Is that a strategy?
No. It's just you doing what you need to do because you're in a crisis.
The dumbest guy in the room is the guy complaining you don't have a strategy.
That's the person who's operating at the lowest level of understanding his world.
So, If he's got a hero complex and he's complaining that the company doesn't have a strategy and he doesn't understand risk management, because it wasn't just the risk that the drug was dangerous, it was also the upside potential that it made a big difference.
He's acting like that part doesn't even exist.
So I would say this is a guy who damn well needed to be fired.
Of course, the simulation gives him the last name of Bright, B-R-I-G-H-T. And that he demonstrates that he's not?
How perfect is that, really?
It's like one gift after another.
So, there's a story about the Inspector General over at the State Department who got fired by Trump.
And the story is that he got fired because Mike Pompeo had been asking one of his assistants to do some personal errands.
Like walking his dog, making dinner reservations, and grabbing dry cleaning, a source familiar said.
Now, do you think that Mike Pompeo, especially during these times, which would you rather?
Would you rather know that Mike Pompeo used a political appointee, basically somebody who got his job because he's connected, probably some young person, presumably, and Who probably didn't have much to do, and Mike Pompeo had a lot to do.
So what is your better world?
That Mike Pompeo sends some political appointee, young person, to do some personal errands?
Or do you think Mike Pompeo should drop what he's doing and go pick up his own dry cleaning?
Which one of those would you prefer as a citizen?
Mike Pompeo doing his own errands, Or Mike Pompeo, presumably he could have an assistant or something doing it, but one assumes that if Mike Pompeo had an assistant to do those errands, he would have used that person, right?
You have to assume that he didn't have anybody to do it, or he wouldn't have asked this person to do it.
Now, given the value of Mike Pompeo's time and energy, am I as a citizen concerned that he sent a low-level staffer to walk his dog Make dinner reservations or grab some dry cleaning.
No! Thank you, Mike Pompeo, for managing your time correctly, because I don't think you're working a freaking 8 to 5 job.
Mike Pompeo is not looking at the clock and saying, 5 o'clock, gonna go home.
If Mike Pompeo is not looking at the clock and saying I'm going home at 5 o'clock and he's staying and he's working late and he's working late for you and he's working late for me and he's working late for the country, yes, we can send a fucking staffer to pick up his dry cleaning.
And if somebody wants to get him in trouble and waste my fucking time by trying to get Mike Pompeo in trouble Because he wants to work 18 hours today instead of 9 fucking hours.
Fire that IG. That is the most fired fucking guy I can ever think of.
I would fire him twice if I could fire him.
Really? We're in a pandemic.
And even without the pandemic, we've got some stuff to do.
Mike Pompeo's got some work to do.
He's got some work to do.
Inspector General, you're so fucking fired.
I'm going to say this is Trump's best fire.
This is his best one.
There's nobody that he's fired that's as clean as this one.
And I'm even glad that we know why.
I'm glad that we know it was because of this trivial bullshit about doing some private errands You know, you tell me Mike Pompeo stops work at 5 p.m., and then I'll tell you Mike Pompeo needs to get fired.
But you can't tell me that.
Tell me these dinner reservations weren't work.
These dinner reservations might have been work.
And do we want him to go to work with a suit that isn't clean?
I mean, this is just bullshit.
Let Mike Pompeo do the work that he wants to do for the American people.
Let him work. All right.
Apparently, according to a Marquette Law School poll, Joe Biden still has a commanding lead in the polls over President Trump.
What the hell is going on?
Are conservatives playing the best prank of all time on pollsters?
Is that what's happening?
Because I'm starting to think that's what's happening.
Is there any part of your brain that can wrap itself around the fact that Biden is leading in the polls?
Because there's nothing I can see in the environment that would suggest that's even slightly possible.
Now, I get how much they hate Trump, and I get that maybe Biden's just a stand-in preference.
But I don't think the stock market has factored in a Biden presidency, do you?
Do you think the stock market is expecting Joe Biden to be the next president?
I don't think so.
I don't think so.
Because the market's going one way, polls are going the other way.
So, I hope this is true.
Like, there would be nothing funnier than this if it turned out later that we could do a poll of people who had been polled, if that's possible.
So, find the people who had been polled during the year and just say, alright, we want to check back with you.
Were you pranking us?
Were you really going to vote for Biden?
You know, or something like that.
And just find out it was a gigantic conservative prank.
You know, the 10% of conservatives were just saying...
Yeah, I kind of like Biden.
I think I like Biden.
Because you know, you've met conservatives, have you not?
Have you ever met a conservative?
Do conservatives like practical jokes?
Yeah, they do. They do.
They like their practical jokes.
So I'm going to say that 10% of conservatives just might be in on a practical joke.
That's the only way I can explain it.
I love this article making fun of Jonah Goldberg.
I think it was in a Fox News site.
What's funny about it is that they called him Jonah Hill, the editor of the Dispatch.
Jonah Hill is the actor. So Jonah Goldberg turned into Jonah Hill for an article.
So, AOC is apparently, let's say, reframing her Green New Deal as rather than being a multi-trillion dollar cost.
Now she's saying, to somebody who was pointing that out, she tweeted, hey there, totally get it if you've never bothered to read the legislation, meaning the Green New Deal.
You're commenting so authoritatively on, AOC said, The Green New Deal is a non-binding resolution of values.
It does not have a price tag or CBO score and costs us zero if passed.
What? What?
Did you always understand that the Green New Deal didn't have a price tag, it was just some values?
Because you know what's weird?
I could totally sign on to the values.
Couldn't you? I mean, I'd have to look at them to make sure that's true, but I think the values, if you're saying it's values, wouldn't it be something like, you know, we'd like to have cleaner energy?
That would be a value.
I could sign on to that.
Wouldn't it be, you know, we'd like to keep the water level from rising if we can understand what's causing it and if there's anything we could do about it?
Yeah. Yeah, I'd sign on to that.
If it really is a bunch of values, okay.
Somebody says they don't share the values.
Well, I'll bet you do.
What exactly would be a value that the Green New Deal would be promoting?
That you don't favor. If you don't favor the Green New Deal, it's because you think it's not practical, or you think it's not affordable, or you think it's not as good as the alternatives.
But you don't disagree with the concepts, the values.
Are you against Clean air and a sustainable planet.
Are you against disadvantaged people doing well?
I don't know. Is there anything you're against?
Not values-wise.
All right. And apparently...
So remember I told you the zeitgeist is looking good for 2021?
So apparently there was a University of Michigan consumer sentiment reading that came in better than expected.
The index rose in May up to 74 from 72 in April.
So the consumer index, people's expectations, are actually rising.
That's important because, remember, direction matters more than level.
When the economy is the question.
So the direction of things tells you more than where things are at.
And the direction is positive.
Can you believe that? Consumer sentiment, the primary thing that will make our recovery happen, is trending positive in the middle of the coronavirus.
Just think about that.
And well above the Dow Jones estimate.
So where professionals thought it would be was like way lower.
And it says the index of current economic conditions soared to 83 from 74.
In other words, our economy is not only not dead, I think it went to the gym.
I think our economy is starting to flex.
It's like it rested too long.
You're starting to see...
I rested a little too long.
You ever...
You're trying to, let's say, get your numbers up for running distance, and you're doing a few miles every day, and then there's a day that you can't run, but the day after that you're really strong because you have that little rest.
I feel like the economy...
Is that Olympic athlete who had to take a few days off for business?
But man, that day when you get back after a few days off when you've been training for a month, that's the day you get some serious work in.
So, that is Coffee with Scott Adams.
And tonight...
I hope you'll join me again.
You know when and you know where.
I've stopped telling people when and where to find me on Periscope because, hey, you've got Google.
And I like to keep it a little bit special.
And so I hope I did.
And we'll go look at the stock market.
Oh, well, let me look at it before I sign off here.