Episode 1067 Scott Adams: Portland, The Nation's Ashtray, Teacher Unions Ruining the Planet, Excess Deaths, Trump Reframing
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
Joe Biden says nurses were blowing into his nostrils
...Meanwhile, President Trump aces a cognitive test
Teacher unions have destroyed education
The protesters are having FUN
Ted Wheeler attends last nights protest
COVID19 excess death tally lacks key info
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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
Well, I'll tell you. It started out to be a regular morning with just regular stuff.
But then I heard a technique for really getting up and getting going.
And it was sort of a self-help technique, and I wasn't expecting it really.
It came from Joe Biden.
And he talked about how when he was in the hospital with his brain aneurysm, that the nurses, they quote, they breathe air into his nostrils.
They got him up and going.
And so I thought, well, if getting a nurse to breathe air into your nostril gets you up and going and cures you from a brain aneurysm, or at least helps, I got to get some of that.
So I hired a nurse Who will occasionally just blow some air into my nostrils, and you'd be surprised how that just fires you up.
You feel great. It's like, oh, thank you for that breathing, that air into my nostril.
Well, let's have the simultaneous sip, and it goes like this.
All you need is a cupper mug or a glass of tank or chalice or stein, a canteen drink 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 and the unparalleled pleasure.
You could say those in either order.
And it's called the simultaneous sip and it makes everything better, including the pandemic, unemployment, racism, yeah, all that stuff.
It's getting better now.
Go.
Yes, Yes, so Joe Biden continues to entertain with his unusual statements about nurses blowing, breathing air into his nostrils.
I saw a tweet on that, and the funniest part was reading the comments from actual registered nurses It turns out that if you ask registered nurses, hey, do you ever...
Occasionally, depending on the patient, do you ever breathe air into their nostrils to try to heal them a little bit quicker?
Turns out they've never seen that before.
Surprise! Never seen that before.
Alright, let's talk about some of the things.
Did you all see the clip of President Trump in an interview talking about his cognitive test?
You have to see that clip.
Here's what's interesting.
He describes the test a little bit, and one of the examples was they would give you a list of items, and you had to repeat them back, but then you would later be asked to repeat them back again after asking a bunch of questions in between.
And as the president was describing this process, he would use his example.
It sounded like it came from the test itself, and the list was person, woman, man, camera, TV. Now, I have the opposite of whatever is the ability to remember stuff like this.
I cannot remember verbatim anything, not phone numbers, not lists.
I mean, if I really work at it, I can.
So, you know, I got good grades in school because if I study, I can do it.
But in a casual sense, I don't really try to remember stuff like that, and I don't.
So watching the president just tell the story, and in the process of telling the story, he repeated that same sequence maybe five different times, I think.
And each time he said it, as a viewer, just somebody watching it, it just made the rest of my world go away.
You have to watch how mesmerizing it is to watch Trump do this sequence of five things approximately five times in different times.
And each time he does it, you think to yourself, oh, God, he's not going to get it right this time.
Because he was doing it in a live interview.
video.
Do you know how much guts it takes to do a cognitive test impromptu to yourself live in front of the nation?
The fact that he repeated those five things in order five different times, I'm not sure I could have done it.
I don't think I could have even done the interview, much less the cognitive part.
Now, what's funny is, of course, he's setting up Biden for...
Obviously, it would be good for Trump if the media started asking for Biden to take the same test.
Now, that would be the kill shot, right?
Because one assumes that Biden would not do well on that test, so he either has to deny that he needs it, which would look weird, or he takes it, and that looks bad.
So it's all good for Trump to bring up this topic.
But I would add this caution.
And it may be time for a pivot on this.
Because there are a lot of old voters.
And I think the old voters just don't like it when somebody is honest about the fact that at a certain age you lose your cognitive abilities.
And I would at least suggest...
That, you know, maybe time for this or maybe later, but I would give him, Biden, the Bob Dole treatment that Bill Clinton gave to Bob Dole when he was running against him.
Bob Dole was this much-beloved senior politician who had been through World War II. He was a war hero, very popular politician, and Clinton is running against him.
And what Clinton did was instead of going at him and criticizing him in the most normal way you'd expect, you know, real direct criticism, he basically said, you know, we should respect Bob Dole for his war hero stuff, but we're planning for the future and Bob Dole is planning for the past.
So basically, instead of treating him like an equal, which is full force punching, because that's how you treat an equal, right?
If somebody was your peer, you wouldn't hold back because you're equal.
You've got to give them everything you can to try to win by a little bit.
So you'd put your full force of your attack into it.
But if somebody is maybe weakened, if your opponent is not quite up to your level, then it just sort of looks bad if you're beating on them.
And I think that was what Clinton got right by treating Dole as a lovable symbol of the past.
Because that framing is pretty devastating.
And I think that there's at least that opportunity here, which is for Trump, maybe not yet, there's a timing issue, but maybe yet, I don't know, to just start treating Biden as a respected but retired politician.
Someone who tried hard to help the country.
But I think that Trump no longer needs to say directly that Joe Biden can't put two sentences together.
He doesn't know where he is.
He doesn't understand the topics.
Saying it directly feels like a little bit, at least to senior citizens, as maybe you're taking that too far.
And he could get the same impact By saying, look, I don't want to be unkind, especially because there are a lot of seniors, but I think we all see the same thing.
And I think you need to take that into consideration.
Because if you treated it gently, I think everybody would still see it.
It's the seeing it that's important.
It's not what Trump says about it, about Joe Biden's cognitive decline.
It's just that everybody sees it and everybody knows everybody else sees it.
So I think it's powerful to say, you know, everybody sees it.
It's not even a left or right thing.
Everybody sees it.
So that's one way to go.
All right.
According to Rasmussen, Trump has about 30 percent black support, meaning that likely voters, 30 percent of black voters would vote for Trump if they voted today over Biden.
Do you believe that?
Because that's like triple what you'd expect.
Now here's the interesting part.
The rest of the Rasmussen poll looks about how you'd expect.
You know, the Democrats, of course, voting for Democrats and women preferring the Democrat over Trump and men preferring Trump.
So a lot of things you'd expect are just the way you'd expect them, except this one number, which apparently has been consistent, at least in the Rasmussen poll.
It's been quite consistent.
It's never gone way down, or it hasn't fluctuated wildly.
It's been sort of like right at that level, maybe climbing a little bit.
And if that holds, it's looking pretty landsliding, but we'll see.
And I'm trying to figure out why that would be.
Why do you think it would be that 30% of black likely voters in this country would support Trump when the fake news is calling him a racist every day?
Why would that be?
I'll give you a hypothesis.
And the hypothesis looks like this.
30% is probably roughly, just guessing, Probably roughly the number of people who like things the way they are.
Don't you think? I would guess that in any population, 30% of any group would say, you know, I kind of like things the way they are.
Let's not change it too much.
But on top of that, Trump does not infantilize the black population.
And I would think that 30% of any population would appreciate...
Not being infantilized.
Not being treated like victims.
Not being treated like, you know, there's just something wrong there.
But rather treating it, treating everybody like, you know, you're adults if you're an adult, you're a kid if you're a kid.
But that's the only distinction.
And I've got a feeling that that's more popular than people realize, but I don't have any data to back that up.
So Marianne Williamson, you know her from The Democratic primaries.
She tweeted that Trump wanted to surge federal law enforcement into Chicago to help out with the crime.
She tweeted that if we allow this now, any attempts to stop this dictatorial rise will be forever stymied.
And I thought, dictatorial rise?
Is that what's happening?
Do you feel a dictatorial rise happening?
Because I don't feel any of that.
I feel like whatever would be the opposite of a dictatorial rise is what we're seeing.
Trump is literally letting the states take the lead on a lot of this stuff.
I don't think you could get more anti-dictatorial rise than giving the governors and the mayors as much leeway as the Constitution allows, and Trump is giving them that leeway.
Now, if he decides to search some federal law enforcement and Chicago does not appreciate it, he's still just obeying the law because the federal forces would only be enforcing federal laws, which he's supposed to do.
So anyway, she deleted that tweet.
And I don't know if she deleted it because I mocked it, which I did, but So, I don't know.
Maybe a lot of people mocked it.
But it didn't look like a dictatorial rise to me.
How do you think Trump would do if he were to reframe the protests this way?
And there's a couple parts to this.
One is that the complaint about the The Department of Homeland Security forces being involved in the cities is that they're squelching freedom of speech.
Now, I don't think they're doing anything like that because the protesters have gone well beyond freedom of speech and some of them are doing vandalism and crime and certainly nobody in the government even cares about the speech, do they? I have not even heard anybody complain about the speech.
We're pretty much all free speech people in this country, you know, if it comes down to it, especially the law enforcement people.
That gets drilled into you pretty well, I think, if you're in law enforcement.
But how does Trump solve the problem that it looks like he's clamping down on freedom of speech, it looks dictatorial, but at the same time he really does have an obligation to do what he can to clamp down on crime?
It's part of his job. So how does he get those two things right?
And I would suggest the following.
It could be time to ask for the protesters to organize a little better and maybe encourage the media to take up their voices.
So in other words, the president could say, you know, We do want to clamp down on crime, but I hear what everybody's saying about freedom of speech.
So here's what I would suggest.
I'd suggest that your media sources, your CNNs, your MSNBCs, your Fox News, that they have on, representatives of the protesters, so that their freedom of speech is not just preserved, but amplified.
Amplified. So is there any reason that the president...
Could not be in favor of your regular established media entities amplifying the protesters to make sure that they had their freedom of speech at the same time that the citizens were protected from crime.
Now, what would CNN and MSNBC and all of them say about that?
Because your first instinct, I think, is, hold on, hold on.
You don't want CNN and MSNBC Promoting all this Marxist stuff and the systemic racism stuff that requires destroying the whole system to fix it.
Isn't that just going to make it worse?
But let me ask you this.
If CNN and MSNBC wanted to have those voices amplified, they'd already be doing it.
I think that the established people...
People who have jobs and all that, people who work for CNN, they don't want the protesters to win because the protesters want to change everything.
Let me ask you this.
If you're Don Lemon and you've got one of the best, most prestigious jobs in the country, I would say, a media personality on a major news network in primetime, it's like a seriously great job.
If you were Don Lemon, and I won't read his mind, so I'll just say, if you were Don Lemon, would you want the system to be radically overhauled?
I don't think so.
Because he's sitting on top of the system.
He's the big winner. If you were any of the well-paid staff of CNN or the management or the ownership, would you want the entire system of the United States to be remade?
I don't think so.
I don't think you would.
And I don't think it's a coincidence that the major news organizations, even on the left, are not fully embracing what the protesters are protesting for.
So, I don't think it's a risk, because I think that even the CNN staff, even the MSNBC staff, would push back.
I think they would push back.
Now, they're not going to push back if somebody comes on and says there's institutional racism, systemic racism.
They would probably agree with that.
But if they go further and say, and therefore we have to dismantle the whole system, I think even the CNN staff would say, well, give me some details on that because I'm not quite on board with dismantling the whole system because it's working for me.
And maybe there's a different model.
Instead of encouraging the press to do it, maybe the president could say, hey, let's put together A national, you know, listening committee or something will give us some attention.
But the general idea is that the president could promote free speech at the same time he's clamping down on crime.
But he'd have to separate what is crime and what is free speech.
And I think you'd have to put the burden on the media.
And ask, why is it?
Let me ask you this.
Why do protesters feel they have to protest?
The reason you do that is because your voice is not being heard.
Why not? Why are the voices on the left not being heard?
Because they have most of the media.
If you're on the same side as most of the media and your voice is not being heard, that sounds like a problem on the left.
They need to work that out. All right.
More fun stuff happening.
So the president is giving his press conferences now about the coronavirus.
He's getting high marks for being realistic about it.
It'll probably get worse before it gets better.
And high marks for being pro-mask.
So it looks like he's solved a couple of his problems just by being compatible with the general mood of the country there.
Or at least the general mood of his critics.
But now he's being criticized for not having the experts as part of the event.
Now when asked why he did not have the experts, the president said that the experts are briefing him and that the way he's doing it is a concise way of doing it.
But of course that doesn't quite answer the press's Question, which is why can't we do follow-up questions, etc., with the experts?
And here's what I would do.
I would say, look, we're trying to inform the country.
We don't want this big unwieldy thing that nobody's going to watch.
We don't want to impose upon the news, you know, the live news networks that they have to carry this for an hour.
You know, we have an obligation to make our message compact and And something that the news organizations will carry.
So shorter is better.
And I think half an hour of the president is kind of exactly the right amount.
You know, because it isn't really a case of more is better.
But the critics do have a point, which is what if they want to follow up with the experts?
And they've got a question that maybe they'd rather hear from Birx or Fauci.
And I think the president should make them available.
But maybe not at that event.
Now, I assume they are available.
I don't know the details. How hard is it for somebody to get a question to one of them?
But perhaps they could even say, why don't you follow up with the experts in writing?
If you give us a written question for the experts, we'll get you back a written response.
Is that fair? Is it fair to say, alright, as president, I'm just going to keep it simple, keep my message clean, do the leader thing that the country needs?
But if you want to follow up on technical details, it's much better if you do it in writing so that there's no miscommunication.
So give us a written question.
We'll give it to Birx and Fauci, or whatever experts you want, and we'll get you a written answer.
Yeah, why not keep it in writing?
Because we all know that the press conferences are about the showboating of the press.
So he could say, I could get you all the information you want in a better form than you're asking for it.
Because doing it verbally, you get into all this misinterpretation problem.
But doing it in writing still could be misinterpreted, but much lower risk.
So I think he could say, look, Experts can get misinterpreted, so why don't you give them the questions in writing.
I'll give you the big picture, and then you can follow up on any details.
They're fully available. Send us your questions.
We'll send you some answers.
Who complains about that?
Am I right or am I wrong that the biggest problem in the country is all one problem?
It just looks like lots of different problems, but it's all one problem, which is the teachers' unions have destroyed education.
And imagine, if you will, that there were no teachers' unions and that there could be charter schools, there could be competitive schools.
Basically, education became a competitive business.
Right now, it can't be because teachers' unions don't want that because it's not good for the teachers' incomes.
In the short run. And so it seems to me that everything from crime to racism to poverty, basically all your biggest problems in the world are being caused by citizens who have not been well trained.
They don't even know their biggest problems from their smallest.
Take, for example, all the people who are protesting.
Do they seem well educated to you?
Not really. And by well-educated, I don't mean that they did or did not go through some years of school and college.
I'm not talking about formal education.
Because a lot of the anti-Fa people actually do have good formal educations.
A lot of the Black Lives Matter leaders have good formal educations.
But were they well-served?
Because I would think that one of the basics of education is to know your priorities and to know that you're working on what's important and that you have a strategy that makes sense.
These would be very important as opposed to just reading and writing, which have their own value, but don't get you to a life strategy.
So it seems to me that if you could fix The teacher union problem.
You could have good education.
And then you would produce citizens who, when they saw these questions about Black Lives Matter and systemic racism, they would be better equipped.
Because what they're doing now is complaining about their lowest priority.
The lowest priority, and this is me looking from the outside, But do you disagree with what I'm going to say?
You know, I realize I'm not the one who should be saying this, but I don't know that anybody would disagree with it, which is that the highest priority is education.
If you had a whole generation of well-educated black kids, what does the future look like?
It looks a lot better.
It looks a lot better.
Because you can have less poverty.
That gives you less crime.
That gives you better health outcomes.
Gives you more of a voice in society.
You want to fix some institutional racism.
Well, now you're in good shape to do that.
Because, you know, everything else is working.
You've got the right base education and knowledge.
So, if you don't fix teachers' unions, you don't fix education.
If you don't fix education...
Everything else is unimportant because it all flows from that.
And these protests being mostly about the police, I would say it's the smallest priority.
And I wonder, too, if Trump said that directly, would he be burned alive or would people say, oh, yeah, that's kind of true.
Imagine if you will, and I think maybe the atmosphere is just too toxic to say this, but imagine if you will, that the president said, look, I hear what all the protesters are saying, and nobody wants anybody killed by police that don't need to be killed by police.
But it's also your lowest priority, because the fewest people are affected by that in terms of killed, even as bad as it is.
It's your smallest problem.
Your biggest problem is education and maybe crime.
So if you don't fix crime, you probably can't get education right.
And if you don't get education right, nothing else works.
So what would happen if the president just said, I hear you, and that's a real problem, and we should work on it, but do you agree it's your smallest problem?
Yeah, some people will say, you'd be burned alive.
You'd be burned alive. I don't know.
I think there are a lot of people in the middle, the few people who might be able to go left or right, depending on the argument.
I think the people in the middle would say, yeah, as long as you acknowledge that the police thing is a problem, I have to agree with you that if you were to rank all your problems...
In the black community, it would kind of be the lowest.
It would be dead bottom if you ranked it based on anything.
Based on number of deaths, based on long-term impact, as bad as it is.
Now, of course, somebody will watch this and say, cartoonist says there's no problem with police.
Of course, I'm not saying that.
I'm just ranking them.
All right. Have you noticed that Well, and this problem of not knowing what the priorities are, it affects everything.
Take climate, for example.
The people who have been educated for the past 20 years by the teachers' unions and the teachers that they support believe that climate change is the biggest risk to the world.
Climate change.
Now, Maybe some of you even agree with that, because what could be a bigger problem than the planet itself becoming unlivable?
Well, here's what an educated public would have said.
They would have said something closer to what Michael Schellenberger says in his book, Apocalypse Never, which is that poverty is the problem.
If you fix poverty or put a dent in it, Then you're also going to be fixing the climate and the environment.
Because poor countries don't make better environments.
Rich countries do.
The United States has gotten to the point where we can substitute in greener energy and we can build a nuclear power plant.
But you're not going to build that in a third world country where there's no money, you don't have the support structure, etc.
To imagine that the biggest problem is the environment and not the economics and poverty is just not understanding the problem.
And that's an education problem.
And again, you see the same problem as focusing on the wrong thing fairly consistently.
How do you decide what's the right thing?
Well, the right thing, you'd have to know a little bit about economics, a little bit about comparing things, a little bit about life strategies, you know, the things that are not typically taught in school, but should be.
All right. And I do think that teachers are brainwashing kids To give them a victim mentality and a win-lose sort of mindset instead of an abundance and talent stacking strategy kind of a mindset.
So probably teachers are destroying the country is my bottom line.
Alright. As we're watching all these protests, I don't think you should lose sight of the fact that I doubt the protests would be as aggressive as they are if they were not fun.
Do the protesters look like they're enjoying themselves?
They do, right?
If you see the protesters, they're totally enjoying themselves.
And I don't know if that's...
You don't really protest 50 nights in a row unless it's sort of a lifestyle thing.
So the protesters, because they're protesting the lowest priority, and apparently that doesn't seem to matter, it's become sort of like a...
When I see the protests, they look like Civil War reenactments, where the people are more like actors.
It's like people decided to participate in the protest, but they don't just show up as themselves.
They actually take on a role.
So the black block people who dress all in black, they literally adopted a role, just like a Civil War reenactment would be.
Okay, you guys are the infantry, you're the cannon guys, so wear slightly different outfits.
You're the general. And then you see, now we've got the mobs.
So the mobs are dressing as mobs, I guess, and putting on yellow shirts and And bicycle helmets.
And now the moms are a new set of actors in this massive role-playing thing.
But imagine if everybody had jobs.
Imagine if they had entertainment alternatives.
If you had a job and you had an entertainment alternative, would you be out on the street?
I don't know. Maybe, because it looks like it's fun.
But if you have some other alternatives that are also useful or fun, It's going to take some of the energy out of that.
And what about the fact that the protesters are probably not having sex?
One of the things that we probably won't talk about in this country is that one of the effects of the shutdowns and the quarantines and all that is I think people are having less sex in this country than any time in our history.
What's that do to you?
It's not good. It's not good at all.
So, that's a problem.
Speaking of Portland, who I've designated the ashtray of the nation, Ted Wheeler, their mayor, went down to listen to the protesters and interact with them.
He ended up getting tear gassed accidentally, we think.
And here's what this made me wonder.
So, Ted Wheeler goes and he wants to listen to the protesters.
So far, so good.
I like it when our politicians actively show that they want to listen to protests.
First Amendment protests.
So that part's good. But here's the part that is conspicuously missing.
Conspicuously missing. Where is the poll of what the non-protesting citizens of Portland want?
Do you know? What about the other people?
Because I think I know what the protesters want.
They're pretty vocal about it.
But do you know what the non-protesters want?
Where's my poll of the citizens of Portland who are not part of the protests, physically in the streets, and do they support continued protests?
Or do they support the federal government taking care of it?
Why don't you know that?
Ask yourself that question.
It is such an accessible thing, meaning that there are polling groups, etc.
And you wouldn't necessarily need a polling group.
You could have, you know, CNN does these little, not town halls, but they'll have a group of 12 people who are just sample citizens.
And they'll just talk to them and say, all right, you sample citizens and There are 12 of you.
How do you feel about the protests?
Are you for them or against them?
But why are we not seeing anything like that?
Why is it that you and I don't have any idea?
No idea. I don't even have a good guess of what the citizens of Portland, who are not protesting, want.
I don't know what they want.
And their silence makes me wonder if they care.
And why do I care if the citizens don't care?
Why should I want my federal tax money to go to sending people who are just making people mad and they don't want them?
What's the point? So think about how badly you've been failed by your media that you don't know what the citizens of Portland actually want.
And I gotta tell you, I want to feel sorry for Portland.
I just can't.
I don't have any empathy for Portland at all.
And the reason is, not because I'm a monster who has no empathy, but you don't really want to show empathy for someone who's not asking for it and doesn't need it and doesn't want it and it's not part of their mindset.
If they think they're getting what they want, why am I the one to tell them they're not getting what they want?
Sort of up to them.
So, I don't know.
I just can't get too invested in Portland unless they're invested in themselves.
All right. That's enough about Portland.
Do you think the president will have an electoral advantage or disadvantage in getting tough with So it looks like he's going to surge some troops into Chicago, which is unpopular with the mayor of Chicago.
But what about the citizens of Chicago who are not criminals?
What do they want?
Do you know? No.
No, you do not know.
You don't know what the citizens of Chicago want, the ones who are not protesters.
You don't know. Isn't that the single most important question?
Because if the citizens of Chicago Are okay with their crime rate, meaning that they prefer that over the alternative of stronger law enforcement.
If they prefer it, again, I just won't travel there.
I just don't have to go there.
I just don't know that it's a problem.
But I do think that the President, his instincts are probably right, that as long as he doesn't get too dictatorial looking, and as long as he makes it clear that this is only for the benefit of the citizens and to reduce crime, etc., I think it's a plus.
But the Democrats are going to try as hard as they can To turn those Department of Homeland Security law enforcement people who really are just trying to do a good job and help the country, turning them into some kind of Gestapo, which is pretty bad.
All right. One of the problems that Antifa has is the same problem that ISIS had.
And prior to ISIS being completely destroyed on the battlefield and losing all of their territory...
But obviously not their ideology and recruiting.
But before that happened, I had said publicly a number of times that ISIS, the worst thing they can do is hold territory.
Because as soon as ISIS holds territory, there's something to bomb.
You go, oh, okay, that's where ISIS is now.
That's their police force.
Boom, gone. So if you're a group that does not have as much power as the group you're protesting, you don't want to hold territory.
And that's what they're trying to do with the Chaz and the Chop and the various times that they've barricaded streets and they try to hold territory.
It just sort of doesn't work.
Because that's the point where the larger authority...
Can say, oh, you're all here.
You're all standing in this block, and you've done some crimes, so we can round you up now.
So Antifa has sort of a natural limit to how far they can go, because as soon as they try to hold territory, they lose.
And I don't know that they can win an election.
So it might be naturally gating.
All right. So a new report that the excess deaths in the period that the coronavirus started raging in the United States was about 180,000 to 190,000.
So that's how many people have died above expectations for a normal year.
Now, given that it's hard to know who died of coronavirus, this is a useful number.
But what it doesn't sort out is how many fewer automobile accidents there were while we were locked down.
How many fewer accidents of all kind.
But it also doesn't count how many people died because of the lockdown.
How many people committed suicide or had drug overdoses or were victims of crime because of the lockdown.
So we don't know what the net of that is.
But if it looks like The coronavirus lockdown plus the coronavirus killed, it looks like we're definitely going to be over 200,000.
Now, 200,000 is kind of a magic number because I've told you, I've asked people who said, Scott, Scott, Scott, it's just a regular flu.
It's a little bad, but it's a regular flu.
And I've asked, How many people would have to die from this regular flu before you would say, okay, I changed my mind.
This was a big deal. I didn't realize it was going to be this big.
And the number I've heard is around 200,000.
And it looks like we're going to blow past it.
So do the people who said, it's just the flu, do they revise their opinion when it blows past 200,000?
Or do they say this because they're not good at analyzing?
Do they say, Scott, Scott, Scott, you're counting wrong.
45,000 of them, maybe more, died because of the lockdown.
It was the lockdown that killed 45,000 people.
That's what they would argue.
I would argue that was 45,000 people who died trying to save a million.
So I think that the 45,000 who died because of the lockdown, if you were to ask medical professionals, they'd say, yeah, that's terrible.
Nobody wanted those people to die, but it's fewer than would have died otherwise.
And then nobody will be able to prove it.
So you always get to this point where there'll be this question that you just can't prove.
Like, what would have happened if you'd done the other thing?
You never know, because you didn't do the other thing.
So I guess we'll never have an answer.
But I would say that the question of whether the coronavirus is a regular flu basically is answered.
It is not. All right.
But I know that there will be disagreement with that.
Have you heard the biggest Trump criticisms and how generic they are?
He's creating chaos.
There's no strategy.
He's a racist. Have you noticed that, and I say this before, but once you start seeing it, it becomes funnier, that they don't blame him for things you can measure.
They only blame the president for things that are impossible to measure because that's the only way they can be credible.
If they said, you ruined X, Y, or Z, we could just look at the numbers and say, I don't know, X, Y, and Z look pretty good.
It doesn't look like you ruined them at all.
So they have to go with these vague, there's chaos in the administration, and he's not passing the fact-checking And none of it ties back to a real thing that matters to your life.
And I remind you again that there are some generic things said about every leader.
That there's chaos and nobody's making a decision and there's no strategy.
That's just sort of generic stuff you say about every leader.
Tesla is moving its production for its Cybertruck to Texas.
I think California is pretty much done because, you know, California was one of the potential places to put that, and it's just not even an option.
The fact that Tesla would say, you know, California, thanks for having us.
We'll keep our production facilities that are there for a while, but the state doesn't really work for us anymore.
It's a big deal.
Probably a bigger deal in the future.
Have you noticed that the issue of sports teams and kneeling for the national anthem went from being this big national story to no relevance whatsoever?
Yes, people are still going to complain about it, but is there anything in your entire life that's a smaller problem than an entertainment industry That has some of the entertainers kneeling because they want to use this to protest the flag.
Not the flag, but protest police brutality.
Is there a smaller problem in your life than that?
It's literally your smallest problem.
Not even a problem.
It just makes it more interesting, actually.
So, to me, the kneelers add some interest to a field of entertainment that could always use a little more interest.
I don't see that as a problem at all.
All right. You heard about the Chinese consulate and Houston was closed because I guess it was a den of spies.
A den of spies.
Wouldn't you love to know what's really happening between the United States and China?
Do you think that the public has any clue what China is doing to us every day And what we're doing in response, we're doing to them first.
Who knows? There's a whole war raging with China, but because we don't have the kind of casualties that you can easily count, like, oh, this guy got a bullet, and now he's dead, and we'll count him as one dead.
But if fentanyl comes in from China, goes through Mexico, gets mixed with some other drugs, and somebody has an overdose death, We just say, well, that's the addict's problem.
So there's this gigantic deadly war that's theft and cybercrime and China sending a probe to Mars and that's pretty scary because whoever controls space is going to control Earth.
So I would just note that you're in the middle of a hot war That is a modern form of a hot war.
It's all this cyber information, economic, getting ready for this, lying about this, spying, gathering data, artificial intelligence, and all that.
So you're in the middle of World War III, and it's not even in the news, because it's all distributed in a million ways.
The Three Gorges Dam is about to break.
Yeah, do we have an update on that?
I know that they started releasing water, so they're intentionally flooding some of that zone.
I would think that China would be able to get out of the way because they have enough warning.
Horses on the roof.
I don't know what that means. Scott, what state will you be moving to?
Well, you know, not everybody has the option of moving.
Because if you have family connections, etc., businesses, it's pretty hard to move.
So, I might be a holdout.
Because I don't live in San Francisco.
If I lived in San Francisco, I would already be gone.
But I left San Francisco because I hated living there, you know, 30 years ago.
It's not better now.
Yeah, there go our antibiotics.
Yeah, if China gets flooded, it could get ugly for the supply chain.
All right. Cat on the roof.
Yeah. All right, I'm just looking at your comments, and I think that's all I have to say for today.
