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Aug. 1, 2020 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:00:52
Episode 1078 Scott Adams: Defund the Police a Smart Way, Fauci Misdirection, How to do a Convention, HCQ

My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com Content: Native American cold cases and Othram DNA crime lab Drive-in theaters for convention events Vote-by-mail fraud Teacher Unions are a national security concern Dexamethasone cuts death rate in half for COVID19? Ad in Spanish targets Biden for not considering Hispanic VP ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 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

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Well, I was asked the other day, why do I always do this three times? why do I always do this three times?
And it's because I do this first on live stream.
A lot of people will see it in replay, but those of you on live stream We'll feel a sense of, it's almost like on your computer when you're watching a progress, you know, the little progress monitor.
Don't you feel better when you can see progress that your computer program is working?
Well, that's what this is.
I do this at the same routine so that as soon as you get on, you say to yourself, oh, I got in about the paper shuffling time or he's taking a simultaneous sip.
Speaking of which, I've got a special guest in a moment, but first, first, it's a simultaneous sip.
And it's the thing you do before a great day happens.
And today is going to be a great day.
You don't know it yet, and maybe not for everybody, but it's going to be a great day.
And all you need to get this day going is a cup or mug or a glass, a tank or chalice or stein, a canteen jug or flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
Traffic, pandemics, fleas, you name it, everything.
Go. Sublime.
Now, if technology serves me, we'll have a Quick guest here, and it looks like this is going to work, so I'm very excited.
It's always fun when it works.
David Middleban, are you there?
From Othram.
Now, those of you who have been watching my Periscopes, you are familiar.
I think you've heard of Othram, O-T-H-R-A-M. And can you explain what Othram does for those who haven't heard?
Just a quick summary of what the company does.
Yeah, what we do at Othram is we're a forensic laboratory that develops identities for people that are either victims or perpetrators of crimes.
And we can analyze a crime scene sample, look at the DNA, figure out who is involved in the crime, even if they're not in the FBI CODIS system or the traditional forensic database.
So the basic idea is that the regular police have a database of people who have been arrested or convicted.
Generally, you end up in the CODA system if you've been convicted, and it varies from state to state.
Sometimes you're convicted, but you still don't make it into the database, and sometimes there's ways to get the database upon arrest.
So the police have this very small, limited database, and if they get lucky, they get some DNA at a crime scene, and by chance, it's somebody who already committed a crime, already was convicted, and they had their DNA. And they got in the database and they checked it.
But with your company, you have a broader net.
And describe just as quickly why you can get more DNA samples than the police.
Why do you have access to more stuff?
We use a different process.
The police, as you noted, the FBI system indexes you on a few markers and then tracks folks that commit repeat crime.
What we're able to do is we're able to get all the genomic information from a crime scene sample and then use that to do related testing and look even for distant relatives that might be connected to help us figure out where the unknown person might fit on the family tree.
So you can imagine that even the smallest scrap of information can be useful in finding someone that is even remotely connected to you, and any of those relationships can help us essentially triangulate or reverse engineer an identity, or at least a nearest relative.
Alright, now let me tie this into the headlines to make this relevant to all of you.
The big conversation in the news is defunding the police.
And that sounds crazy, right?
Who wants less police when you have just as much crime?
But I think that actually there is a smart way to do it.
And the smart way to do it is to create situations in which getting away with a crime is effectively impossible.
So as you drive toward it's impossible to get away with it, in theory, the number of people who try a crime that they know they'll get caught for, Should go down and therefore the number of police you need should go down.
So this is one of, there are probably a dozen technologies in private companies that police do not have direct access to.
Everything from facial recognition to drone things and now DNA technologies.
But there are a number of technologies that could drive the ability to get away with a crime really close to zero.
I don't think you'd have to get all the way to Big Brother.
I see some comments saying that.
This is relevant because in the news, Ivanka Trump is spearheading an effort to try to solve a bunch of cold cases, specifically for the Native American community and the Alaska Natives, because I guess it's an underserved community and they have all these DNA and cold case samples that they can't solve.
So, how many of these cold cases, in the sense of if they have some DNA from the case, what percentage of all these cases that Ivanka is targeting to get some resolution to, what percentage of those do you think Othram could solve if you were brought into this?
I think that on the upfront side, you would probably solve somewhere close to 75%, and then it'll converge very closely on over 90%.
That's in contrast to what you would see with a typical system right now where sex assault reveals identity through code as 15% of the time.
Identified remain is like 1% of the time.
All right, now put yourself in the head of a criminal.
And you've got two possibilities.
The old way is that there was a 15% chance of getting caught for, let's say, some violent crime that would leave your DNA. But what happens if it goes to 90 or 100%?
Are you exactly as likely to do the crime?
Well, if it's a crime of passion or you're crazy or it's revenge or something, maybe yes.
But I've got to think that if there were a steady stream of reports of cold cases being solved, What does that do to your mental understanding of risk?
David, would you imagine that there will be lots of stories coming out of the kind you're describing where a really cold case that couldn't be solved suddenly is easy to solve?
What's that going to do to the criminal mind?
Is something like that coming?
Yeah, I mean, there's been a steady flow of cases that are being solved.
We've got dozens that are going to be announced in the next month or two.
And I think what that does is, you know, people have argued, do we have stricter punishment?
Do we have, you know, what demotivates people to commit crime?
And I think severity of punishment hasn't been very effective.
But I think knowing that you're going to get caught, you know, I think is a huge deterrent.
And at this point, if you're going to leave, whether on purpose or accident, DNA somewhere, there's almost a certainty that you'll be caught.
If not immediately, very soon, the technology continues to develop, and so I think it's going to make people think twice.
Certainly, it's going to retire the idea of, I think, repeat crime, serial crimes will probably converge on extinction.
Yeah, well, that's interesting.
Serial crimes will converge on extinction.
That's a phrase that you couldn't even imagine before, but that sounds entirely practical to me.
All right. Thanks, you. I just wanted to get a quick hit on that and try to connect some things I've been trying to connect.
But just more generally, I think that defunding the police, if you change that into your mind, into how do you make less crime happen in the first place, then you get to defunding the police indirectly.
Thank you, David. David Middleman from Othram, O-T-H-R-A-M. Thank you.
Thanks for coming. All right. All right.
You're going to see more on that in the coming months in the news, I think, as cold cases get solved.
Raul Davis on Twitter had a great idea.
I'll just put this out there.
Probably, I don't know if it's practical, but you decide.
So Raul Davis, CEO, branding expert.
He's on Twitter and he said, any convention that's smart would make it a national event to rent out drive-in theaters across the country and project their candidate on the big screen.
So think of this idea. You do a bunch of pop-up drive-ins.
You don't have to use existing drive-ins.
There aren't that many. But you could do a pop-up.
Just put up a screen or project against a white wall or something.
And it would be pretty easy to livestream and project something.
That's really common and cheap and easy to do.
So you could have a drive-in theater situation where you've got a virtual convention that happens all over the country at the same time.
And imagine that you're sitting there, you're watching the convention on TV. It's streamed.
There's no live audience.
And you hear the horns honking.
Wherever you are, you'd hear honking for applause or whatever.
And it'd be fun. It'd be really fun, wouldn't it?
Now, I don't know if you can keep it safe enough with bathrooms and whatever you need to do, but I believe there are drive-in theaters that are open, so I know they've figured out the bathroom and whatever else they have to figure out.
So, that would be...
The thing I like about this idea almost has nothing to do with politics, and I don't care who does it, you know, Democrats or Republicans.
It has more to do with the fact...
That Americans just want to participate.
We just want to get in the car.
We just want to go somewhere.
We want to be at an event.
We want to see some other people.
We just need to get out of the house in some safe, productive way.
So that idea does both.
I love that. There's a lot of conversation, and I haven't weighed into it much at all, about mail-in votes.
And the reason that I haven't talked about it, but I don't quite understand it.
Meaning that there's something about the argument about why the...
What are the two categories?
There's the absentee ballots, which we've had forever, and they seem to work fine, but everybody voting by mail is more of a problem, and I think that has to do with the fact that if everybody just gets a ballot whether they want it or not, A lot of people, it'll be mailed to the wrong place.
It'll be mailed to a dead person.
Somebody else will pick up the mail and fill it out for you.
So you can imagine a whole bunch of problems like that.
And I got to say, it's a tough one.
Because I certainly understand why states want to do it, and I completely understand how open to fraud it would be.
But here's the question I have.
Is there any way to test that ahead of time?
And I couldn't think of one.
But you can smell it before you can see it sometimes.
I feel as if there's somebody who would be smart enough to say, well, why don't we just test a thousand sample votes?
But I just don't know that you could design the test so it would be good enough.
But I hope somebody is smart enough.
Because we have enough time.
So if you could do...
Let me describe the bad version of it.
So when you hear this idea and you say to yourself, well, Scott, there's an obvious flaw in your idea, I know that.
I know that. This is the bad version.
I'm just trying to inspire somebody else to say, well, I can fix that problem and maybe I can make this into something.
So the bad version would be this.
Do you do a test of a thousand citizens?
I don't know, are they random? Or do you have to tell them they're in the test?
I'm not sure which makes sense.
And you just see if the process can flow from actually receiving it to filling it out to mailing it.
But I guess you'd have the problem that nobody would be trying to cheat.
So if it's a test, there's nobody trying to thwart the test.
So it may be impossible.
But I would put that out there to people who are smarter than I am about anything to see if there is a way to test that.
I just wonder. Now, I saw there was a news report of a local correspondent.
I think he did a local test of mailing some ballots, and he discovered that there were some problems in the post office.
I think three out of 100 ballots didn't make the whole process, which is way too many.
Imagine an election in which you were pretty sure 3% of the votes got lost.
That wouldn't be much of an election, given how close our elections are.
I would say my opinion on all of this is I'm just as concerned as other people, but I think we have the weirdest situation in the world here in which I don't know that we have an opportunity to have a A credible vote this time.
Because there's so much going on and so many accusations on both sides of irregularities and voter suppression and mail-in votes and every other thing that I don't even know if we have the option of a fair election.
It just might not even be an option.
So what do you do?
If you can't have a fair election for president, what do you do?
So here's what I think we would do.
In a normal year, it doesn't make that much difference who's president, right?
If you looked in the past, that was the thing that pundits said all the time.
Well, it doesn't matter who you elect.
They just raise your taxes anyway.
Well, Democrat, Republican, doesn't matter.
You still end up in a war.
But I don't know that that's true in 2020.
The difference between Biden and Trump, that might be the biggest difference we've ever seen.
You know, the difference between Hillary Clinton and Trump, you could argue was, well, that's a pretty big difference, but it's not gigantic, right?
The country would still look like the United States if Hillary Clinton had been elected.
You might not like elements of it, but still the United States.
If Biden gets elected, he would be the most progressive candidate, and I'm not going to have an opinion on whether that's good or bad.
I'm just saying it's the most different from what Trump offers.
So this time, the result really could change the fate of the country.
In my opinion, Given that it's such a big difference, Trump is probably the safest in terms of risk management, simply because you know what the last four years look like.
And even if you didn't like those last four years, you'd have to admit that if you subtracted the pandemic, it looked pretty good.
It looked pretty good. We didn't start any big wars.
We ended some wars.
We wound down that. The economy was good.
So if you were even a little bit objective, And you said to yourself, you know, I don't know what's going on here.
Biden could be a big problem and we wouldn't even know who got elected, really.
And then the progressive stuff is sufficiently big enough changes.
Yeah, I'm not going to say radical because that's just politicizing the speech.
It's a big enough change that any big change introduces a new set of risks.
So there is a different risk profile.
And I would argue that the Biden risk is far bigger than Because it's an unknown and also a big change.
Trump is closer to a known.
If he gets re-elected, you're going to see some tweets you don't like.
There are going to be some fact-checking that doesn't look good.
There will be world leaders who say some bad things about Trump.
It's guaranteed what that looks like 90%, right?
Always some surprises, but you kind of know what a Trump president's going to look like.
So if you have this much uncertainty about the result, you have basically one way to get a safe outcome that doesn't drive the country apart, and it's a landslide election for Trump.
Now, that might happen anyway, but the republic is going to be a little bit at risk if we go the other way.
It's impossible to know exactly risk, but I would say that What's the saying?
The evil that you know is better than the evil you don't know.
So even if you don't like Trump as president, you kind of know what you're getting.
That's my point. Apparently Trump said on Air Force One that he's planning to ban TikTok in the United States.
How about that? So TikTok, as you know, is the app that is owned by a Chinese company and therefore is The assumption is, and it's been determined that the code actually does this, it's collecting a lot of information on Americans and kids in particular, and so that will be banned.
The decoupling of the United States from China, I think it's a thing now, meaning that you don't have to wonder if it's happening.
This was hard to imagine a year ago, wasn't it?
Imagine a year ago, That we would be sitting here saying that we are actively decoupling our economy from China.
It was hard to imagine.
I was asking for it a year ago, and I was pretty early on the ban TikTok train, so things are going the way that I want them to go.
Have you ever noticed that almost everything in the United States goes the way I want it to go in the long run?
It's the weirdest coincidence, isn't it?
It's something I noticed in my 20s.
So when I was in my 20s, I wasn't talking publicly about politics or big events, but I would have preferences and then I would watch and I'd think, oh, that's interesting.
The very thing I was hoping would happen, it happened.
It happened so often that it's sort of freaky.
I mean, seriously, a year ago, I was lobbying as hard as you possibly could to decouple from China and then banning the TikTok, but even I didn't think it was necessarily going to happen.
It felt like quite a reach.
Here we are. What about opening schools?
I continue to say that education is a national security matter.
Especially if you're doing it wrong.
If you're doing it wrong, the federal government has to fix it because it's national security.
You can let the states experiment and let the states do the thing and let the states take the lead on education in normal times.
As long as they're getting the job done, let the states educate the kids.
Take the lead. But if the states stop educating the kids, it's a national security problem.
Educated kids create a good economy.
A good economy allows you to have a good military and protect yourself in a variety of ways.
Certainly, we're reaching a point where the federal government might need to take control in some fashion.
I would certainly like to see an executive order that limited the power of the teacher unions.
That would be one thing that might be productive.
Because the teachers' unions apparently are the...
I would say they're the base problem for every problem in the United States right now.
And that's a big claim, right?
That the teachers' unions are the base problem for every big problem in the United States.
But it's true. Because if you educated children better...
If there were more options, and it's the teachers' unions that limit the options, so you can't have competition and a free market for teaching.
Therefore, it can't evolve in the way that it naturally would to its best form.
And kids who are in bad school systems are just trapped, don't have an option.
So as long as that situation exists, there's a national security issue there, and that needs to get resolved.
Now, at the same time, I'm completely on board with the notion that teachers did not sign up to be frontline healthcare workers or they didn't volunteer to be on the front line of a war.
Now, can we force them to do it just because it's a national security concern?
Well, maybe, sort of, kind of, but we do have a volunteer military and we have a voluntary medical community.
We should have a voluntary teacher situation if the danger goes, you know, is high like it is.
Well, it's not high. But if there's a danger, it just has to be voluntary, in my opinion.
So how can you best open schools and keep everybody safe?
Let me give you this suggestion.
The kids themselves seem pretty safe.
If it's the teachers who are worried, I would offer this option, that teachers could have an in-class situation Physical body who is either a young person or somebody who has recovered from coronavirus and therefore has presumably some protection and that you could have the regular teacher on video all the time and they do the class plans and the decision-making,
but you have a physical human being in the classroom Just to make sure that anything physical gets taken care of, etc.
So that would be one model.
I don't know if anybody's considered that.
I do also like the pod teaching model, where the kids will get together in little groups and do some stuff at home.
I do like the pod idea.
But as I've often said, and let me put it in this context, I think the pandemic, as horrible and tragic as it is, and the lines for people in my town who are lining up just to get food, you know, food that's delivered by some form of government, it's getting pretty long.
I live in a high-end neighborhood, and there was a pretty long line for food yesterday, for food.
So let's not forget that's still top priority.
That said, there's a saying in business that if you don't cannibalize your own products, your competition will.
So if you don't make your next version of your product so good that all of your customers don't want the last version, that's what your competitor will do.
They'll make the version your customers go to.
And you need to continually destroy what you have in regular business to build the new thing.
So, for a company like Apple, destruction and creation happen at the same time.
They're destroying their old products by creating the new products.
School isn't like that.
School is just sort of ossified and it is what it is and it's hard to change and there's not much competition.
If you could change that so that schools could destroy themselves while they're creating something better, In other words, free market, free competition.
Best one survives, the bad one doesn't.
That situation, how much better could school be?
How much better?
Probably a lot.
What is your guess of how much better?
Of course, this is like a conceptual number, but do you think that the free market would make education 10% better?
Because 10% Would be quite a big impact, you know, on the size of the economy.
It'd be quite, quite big, a 10% improvement.
But is it more than 10%?
Maybe it's 50%.
Maybe it's 400%.
Right? Because imagine if you had a better learning experience, somehow you got rid of the bullies, you never had a bad teacher, and you learned the right things in the right way.
Right? I feel like it's a 4x benefit.
It doesn't feel like a 10% benefit to me.
To me, it feels like a 400% kind of situation.
And again, we're talking about national security.
We're talking about the economy in the future, because the kids drive the economy in the future.
I think this is one of the biggest opportunities this country's ever had.
And this will be maybe a contrarian.
No, I think it's not a contrarian.
A lot of people are coming around to this.
That the pandemic, nobody would have asked for it, but it might fix the pandemic.
I say this all the time, that the schools are even, in my opinion, and therefore the teachers' unions, are the cause of systemic racism in this country.
Now, I'm playing a little loose with the wording here.
When I say the cause, I mean the cause of it being a problem.
So systemic racism, it really is built into the fabric of everything.
There's a ripple from slavery.
That's real. But is it bothering Oprah?
No. Because if you're successful and you have money and your life is working well, systemic racism isn't hurting you much.
So if you can simply improve education, improve the economics of anybody who's a person of color, isn't that going to change their situation and how they feel about systemic racism, even if it's still there?
It'll be kind of like background noise.
All right. I've decided I want to see if I can reclaim some of my humanity by being less of a jerk on Twitter.
If you follow me on Twitter, most of you do, I think, you know that I can be a jerk sometimes.
And I'm not proud of it.
I was reading an article yesterday about how social media sort of takes our humanity into a conceptual place where when I'm zinging somebody on Twitter, the sensation I get is as if it's a video game.
And that is really dangerous.
That's really dangerous.
I mean, think about that.
And let me put this in context.
When I started out on Twitter, I had zero followers.
And I made it sort of my mission not to cheat too much and use the Dilber thing to grow my Twitter account.
I wanted to see if I could grow it by doing things that you do on Twitter.
And I wanted to talk about politics, and I wanted to see if I could grow users, followers, not users, but followers, because I was doing the right things and giving them something they wanted.
So I sort of made a point of it to grow organically.
And so now I've got over half a million followers.
And the thing that I'm cautioning myself about is that The thing I'm cautioning myself about is that when I had 100 followers, if I weighed in on a Twitter thread and insulted somebody or said something about them, no impact, right?
100 followers, no impact.
But I lost sight of the fact that my impact is fairly enormous now because it happened gradually.
You can just lose sight of it.
And I realized a few times that I saw something I didn't like on Twitter from somebody, somebody I don't know, and I would just throw a little slap out there, like a little Twitter slap, and I'd realize it had much bigger impact than I wanted because a lot of followers will pile on,
and then suddenly there's some poor person I've never even met whose only offense is that they said something I didn't like And now they're being dumped on by half a million people, or thousands.
And I'm going to pull back a little bit.
Now, I'm going to go just as hard against the professionals.
So the professionals still get the full treatment.
And I would expect that I would also receive the full dehumanizing treatment because I'm a professional.
I'm doing this in a professional sense.
So I'm not asking anybody to lighten up on me, because the people who go into battle knowing that that's what they're doing, you know what you're getting.
But I'm going to make an effort, and I don't think this is going to be 100% successful.
I don't think so.
But I'm going to try to be a little kinder to civilians.
So a little kinder to civilians.
We'll see if that works out.
And let me tell you that the reason that I'm doing this is as much...
I'll tell you the insight I had about this.
Not just the insight that we're dehumanizing ourselves on social media.
But the insight is that I get continuous flow of messages from people who tell me that I've changed their life in some positive way.
Because a lot of my books are about how to live your life better, how to think better, how to be more persuasive, how to get what you want.
And so a lot of people have read my books and actually got what they want.
I tweeted one this morning of somebody whose life was completely changed just by a brief appearance on my Periscope.
And when I see how much I can change people's lives in the positive with the smallest amount of effort, The smallest amount of effort changes people's lives completely.
I say to myself, what have I done accidentally that actually damaged somebody's life?
Because I just wasn't thinking.
I was just careless. And so I'm going to be less careless about that.
Well, that's my intention.
We'll see if I can do it. This morning, I sent off a very angry tweet that I later deleted.
Man, did it make me angry.
And I'll tell you what made me angry about it and then why it was wrong.
And it was a video clip about Dr.
Fauci. He was responding to a member of Congress who was asking him about the Henry Ford study on the Henry Ford whatever medical facility study about hydroxychloroquine and zinc.
And the congressman said that the study showed that it was effective and therefore the implication is why don't we use it?
Dr. Fauci said that that was not a valid study for a few reasons.
Number one, it was not a randomized placebo trial.
It did not have a control group with the placebo.
It was not studied in the way that you would get a gold standard result.
The first thing he said was it did not meet that standard.
I'm going to tell you in a moment why that's...
I think that's what triggered me.
Because it turns out that the study actually is garbage.
So here's the first thing.
And the reason I deleted the tweet is that as soon as I looked at what he said, he is right.
I did this scathing, insulting tweet to Fauci because of the first thing I read, and then I looked at his claim, and I thought, okay, this is a little more than I thought.
He gave two reasons to not believe the study.
One of them is that it wasn't the gold standard type of study, which I'm going to argue in a minute, he's misleading you.
But the other is that it was combined with another drug that we know works.
So if you combine hydroxychloroquine with a drug that we already know works, and you get a good result, you've literally found out nothing.
Because it was the other drug that made it work.
Now, I didn't know that.
And I feel a little bit...
I feel like it's a little bit my fault, but a little bit the media fault, because this is a really big point.
Apparently, the other drug was some kind of steroid, I guess, that they give you if you're hospitalized.
It's some kind of anti-inflammatory steroid.
I forget what the name of it is.
Here's what triggered me.
Fauci says that you don't know if the hydroxychloroquine worked in that study because it was given in combination with a drug that you do know works.
In the comments, I'm being reminded that the drug that was with the hydroxychloroquine was dexamethasone.
Apparently, that is, as I'm learning, already a common treatment.
So it's a common treatment.
And it works.
So if you know it works, and you get effectively the same result with hydroxychloroquine added to it as you would have gotten without it, and I think that's actually what happened, then there is no evidence that the hydroxychloroquine worked.
So Dr.
Fauci, you win this round.
This round goes to Fauci.
But this raises some questions.
Were you aware that there was a drug that would cut death rates in half?
Because that's what we learned, that this dexamethatone is widely in use and cuts the death rate in half.
How come I didn't know that?
Did you know that?
Because we've heard about remdesivir, we've heard about everything else.
But did you know that That if you get this particular drug, which is widely available, standard kind of a drug, that it cuts your death rate in half?
So some of you are saying you heard of it, some of you not.
The fact that as much as I've studied this stuff, as a layperson, not as a scientist, but as much as I've looked into this, why is today the first time I'm hearing about this?
Which should be a wake-up call.
About how uninformed we are about all of it.
This is such a big missing piece in what I knew about the whole situation that it was sort of mind-blowing and also very humbling.
It also reminds me that I'm a jerk because I went after Fauci in public on Twitter being wrong.
You know, I tried to correct it, but I was wrong.
But I do have some Fauci criticisms, and I think what actually triggered me is that it was obvious he was lying, but it wasn't about this.
So what he said about the dexamethasone, I think he's completely right.
But it also tells you that the Henry Ford study was with hospitalized patients, which again, is not the point, right?
It wouldn't matter if the study he said was debunked was a good study or not, because I wouldn't have believed it anyway, because the whole point of it is to use it early, and the Henry Ford study was hospitalized people, and then to hospitalized people, that other drug we know works.
And have you seen any national reporting on who doesn't use the drug?
Because what I was wondering, who was the control group?
Who was the control group?
If we know that this drug that was in combination of hydroxychloroquine cuts the death rate in half, who was the group that didn't get it?
Right? How do we know that this drug cuts the death rate in half unless there's somebody not getting it?
And if we know it works, why would anybody not get it?
Maybe we have a history of people who didn't get it before, but I would be really suspicious of any data before we were really looking into it.
Did it come from another country?
My guess is that in this country, people were probably getting it from day one.
And was there a point where the death rate went from way high to half as much?
When that drug started being widely used, or was it always widely used?
Anyway, I have lots of questions.
Here's my Fauci criticism.
You do want, as Dr.
Fauci continuously reminds us, if you really want to be certain, at least as certain as you can be, about a drug, you have to do the RPT trial, the one with the placebo and randomized.
Does that apply in every case?
Here's the problem.
If you had a drug that was brand new, let's say a vaccine, something that never existed before, you would need to know three things about it.
You would need to know the cost, because that makes a difference.
You would need to know if it hurts people in the short run and the long run.
And you would need to know if it was beneficial at all to the thing you're trying to treat.
Under those conditions, when you're trying to learn all three things, what's it going to cost?
Which is separate from the trial, but it's part of a decision.
You're trying to find out harm and benefit.
Under those conditions, you absolutely need what Dr.
Fauci says you need.
You need the double blind.
You need the gold standard, or don't put that in anybody's body.
It's just a bad idea if you haven't tested it.
But that's not our situation, is it?
Our situation is that hydroxychloroquine in low dosage, which is the only thing that's recommended for the early symptoms people, that that actually doesn't have a risk because Let me not speak in absolutes.
Rather, it's one of the safest drugs of all time.
It has been around 65 years.
As you all know, it's been tested to death.
So given that the drug exists and has been tested, 50% of what you're trying to learn in one of these gold standard trials is unnecessary.
So you don't need the gold standard to find out half of what you're trying to find out.
You already know. Under those conditions, when the hydroxychloroquine is very cheap, I mean, so cheap it's like candy, and you know it's safe enough, right?
Nothing's 100%, but better than Advil.
If you know it's that safe and that cheap, and you know it might work, because there's lots of indication that it will work, short of proof, this is a no-brainer, Dr.
Fauci. When I saw Dr.
Fauci insist on the gold standard to test, it looked like lying, lying by omission.
What I mean by that is if he wasn't willing to express the view that I just gave and either debunk it or embrace it, I feel like that's lying.
Meaning that if he can't give this to the public the same way that I told it to you, or to tell you why the way I told it to you is clearly wrong, which could be the case, he's lying.
Because every one of you listens to him talking and says, but it's really cheap, we know it's safe, and I hear what you're saying that it might not work because it hasn't passed all these high levels of standards that we'd all like to see.
But there's a whole lot of suggestive evidence.
So the risk management clearly is weighted in one direction.
I mean, overwhelmingly.
So, Dr.
Fauci, unless you can tell me why the risk management, as I described it, is wrong, I don't want to hear you say that you need a gold standard test, because that feels to me like a lie.
It's a lie by omission.
And when I heard him do that, it triggered me, and then I over-tweeted.
So I apologize to Dr.
Fauci for the tweet that I think was over the line in my case.
All right. I think the election is largely over.
And I think Biden is a dead man walking.
And I say that because of a political ad I saw yesterday.
Now, you may say to yourself, Scott, Scott, Scott, political ads don't really move the ball that much.
You know, not that much.
But it's not so much the ad, which was actually very good, but the idea.
So the ad carried an idea that I hadn't seen exactly expressed.
And when I saw it, I said, Oh, I think it's over.
The ad was in Spanish.
It was a campaign ad for the United States in Spanish in which it showed a number of Hispanic famous people like AOC. There were some people on the left, some people on the right, so basically famous, successful Hispanic Americans.
Then it said, Joe Biden Why did you say that you were going to pick a black vice president?
And they say Hispanics are more than 18% of the country.
The black population is 13-ish.
And so the Hispanics are saying, in the ad, what's wrong with us?
Why would you not consider Latino, is it Latinx?
What's the woke way to say it?
You know, I've never figured out, by the way, the difference between Hispanic and Latino, Latina, Latinx.
I always think I'm going to know the difference, so I'm going to say Hispanic.
I hope we're not insulting anybody today.
But, so, forget about the fact that it was in Spanish.
Forget about the fact that it was a campaign ad and People don't get too influenced by them, in my opinion.
But that idea that Joe Biden is flat-out racist is really strong.
Because can you think of any time that Trump has ever made a government decision based on entirely race?
I suppose you could say helping the funding of the Of the traditional, what is it, the historically black colleges.
But I think people are mostly on board with that.
That's pretty popular, I would guess.
But Biden saying that he would definitely pick a black vice president when 18% of the country is Hispanic.
We just had, not just, but not too recently, we had two terms of Obama.
And you're not even going to consider for a vice president somebody who is in 18% of the population?
And here's the thing that blew my head off, right?
And I think you might have the same impression.
If you're a white person in America, you've sort of come to accept, maybe you don't like it, but you've come to accept That it can't be racist against white people.
Now, of course, in your private thoughts, you're thinking, of course it can be racist against white people.
Anything that discriminates against anybody by race is racist by definition.
But we also understand that if you're a white person in America, you're Part of a traditional class that had some advantages.
Not all of you, of course, but many had advantages.
And so you sort of understand the thinking even if you don't like it, right?
You're like, ah, I think racism should be about everybody.
But I get it that if you're at the lower end of the economic pole, it's different, right?
It's just not really the same to say that To use my very own example, I've lost several jobs for being a white male.
Many of you know my stories about that.
But it's not the end of the world for me because I had plenty of opportunities.
Things went fine.
So when people say that anybody is being racist against white people, I have some thoughts about it, but it's not the end of the world.
But I'm also not Hispanic.
Imagine if you were Hispanic and you were not traditionally the dominant ethnic group of the United States in terms of economics, and the vice president just said, or the president, the candidate for president, Joe Biden, you're president of your country.
You're a citizen of the United States, just like everybody else.
And the guy who wants to run for president of your country just told you that you're not good enough to be vice president.
And that's what the ad said.
That's the way they phrased it. Why are we not good enough to be a vice president?
Because we have the numbers.
We have the numbers.
And we are not an historically advantaged population.
Now, you know, obviously it did not come through the, you know, the pathway of slavery, so that's a whole other story.
But, you know, so you can make the argument.
But here's the only thing I'm going to add.
If that point, if that point gets emphasized, I think it will, that's really strong.
And I would be curious to hear from anybody who's a Hispanic American who saw that ad, or just hears the argument.
How do you feel about it?
Because maybe you don't care.
It could be that the people who made the ad hoped other people would care and they just don't.
And here's something else to blow your mind a little bit.
I feel as though the Hispanic Americans have been the quietest about systemic racism.
It feels that way to me, right?
It feels like the lead is being taken by both black and white activists.
That's what I see anyway.
I'm not sure if that's true, but that's what I see.
And somebody said to me yesterday that the reason is that the Hispanic community just cares less.
They're just sort of not invested as much in the whole racism, racism, racism thing.
They're not siding with anybody.
They're just trying to get their work done, have their life, you know, just stay out of the way and not get into a fight that's not their fight.
Don't have as much investment in it for some reason.
So the thing I don't know, and I'd be real curious to learn this in the next week or so, if anybody wants to tweet at me or send me a message, if you are Hispanic, American, how does it make you feel to know that anybody like you can't be vice president under Joe Biden?
How does that make you feel? Because as a white person, I say, Well, you know, if Biden's there and there have been plenty of white presidents, I don't care.
You know, fine with me.
But I wouldn't feel the same if I were Hispanic, I think.
I just don't know. Dr.
Fauci says that the reason that Europe has been able to contain the virus better than the United States is that they closed down 95% of their economies while the U.S. only shut down 50%.
So who's the idiot there?
So Trump closed the economy only 50% and then had more deaths per capita.
But in Europe, those smart Europeans, they went all the way to 95% shutdown and got a better death rate.
So they're the smart ones, right?
Yay, Europe, they won.
I don't think so.
Here's my take on this.
From the beginning, Trump described the pandemic as a war.
In wars, you take casualties in battle with the hope that you'll win the larger war.
Trump's approach, and he said it directly, and he said it a lot of times, is that it's a war.
At the end of the war, who won?
Let's say that both Europe and the United States get to the end of the pandemic, whenever that is.
And our death rate is higher, but our economy is better.
So our death rate is higher, but our economy is better.
Who won the war?
The war is with China.
The pandemic is just sort of part of the war.
But the long-term war is with China.
And whoever has the strongest economy is going to have the strongest defense and the most ability to survive in the future.
So we don't know how Europe and the US will come out of this.
But I would argue that if the US economy goes up like a whole level, something that's really obvious and measurable and sustained, if it goes up a level and Europe, let's say, goes down or doesn't go up, And it causes like a permanent situation of more American economic power relative to Europe.
Who was smarter?
Even if we had a pretty grotesquely higher death rate, let's say we lost, I don't know, 50,000 people that we didn't need to lose if we'd done it the European way.
How long would it take for us to recoup The 50,000 dead people, obviously, they don't pop back to life, but a strong economy can keep other people alive who would have otherwise perished and can keep the country safe from external threats in a way that you can't if you don't have money.
So I feel as if Trump told us it was a war, told us there would be casualties, kept the economy, you know, open-ish, And basically went to war.
And as Commander-in-Chief, he knew he would take casualties in the short term, but the point of it is to win the war, not the individual battles every time.
And I feel as though when this is all said and done, and we're looking back at it in five years, if the US economy Got a permanent, sustained bump relative to Europe.
I'm going to say Trump won, and I'm going to say Europe lost the war.
But we don't know that that will happen.
I'm just setting that up right now.
So, of course, Republicans and Democrats are arguing about the coronavirus Relief bill, which means the checks aren't going out, which means that people will be unable to eat and pay the rent.
And here's what I would suggest.
Given that the total amount of printed money and new debt, if you will, that we've already done, don't we owe something like $28 trillion?
You know, at this point, the national debt.
The difference between The smaller number or even the difference in how they want to spend it, I would recommend that you just give both the Democrats and the Republicans everything they've asked for because it's just not going to make much difference.
So in other words, Democrats and Republicans, they have different ideas of how much to spend on each category of thing.
I would say take the biggest number that either one of them have for every category and pick it.
Just pick the biggest number that the Republicans want for, let's say, tax cuts, and the biggest number that the Democrats want for social services.
Just take the biggest number and just frickin' get it done so you can feed some people.
Because that difference to our total national debt at this point, at this point, is sort of lost in the rounding, unfortunately.
Somebody says $100 trillion.
What was $28 trillion?
Was $28 trillion not this year, right?
That would be too big.
All right, so I don't have any of my numbers right, but the basic idea is the way to solve this difference in Congress is to give both sides everything.
Give both sides everything and just feed the people, because otherwise people die from starvation and stuff.
I'm not going to argue about another 3% on the national debt if people are starving.
So, the debt.
Yeah, I need to check my numbers.
I don't know enough about national debt.
$20 trillion, I'm seeing people throwing some numbers out in the comments.
Somebody says you do.
$28 trillion is the current total debt.
Current total debt.
Alright, so that's not annual.
That's how much we've racked up over time.
Alright, so if you're going to add to your $28 trillion total debt one more trillion than you wanted to, I think if this is the time to do it, just throw it in there.
Throw it in there and see if that helps.
All right. I think I've talked about everything that matters today.
Somebody says people should be able to sue their employers if they get sick.
I don't know. Maybe?
I don't know. I'd have to think about that one because that's got some real trade-offs.
All right. Somebody says, not hearing or seeing hunger reported other than here.
Yeah, so far, it's my understanding that nobody's starved to death.
And I think we have to pat ourselves on the back a little bit for that as America.
Because remember early on, when we first were presented with the pandemic, and I was trying to calm the fears of my audience, and I said...
We're not going to run out of food.
I said that as hard as I possibly could, that we're not going to run out of food, and so far not.
I think that's really a credit to us.
You see everything we do wrong, but you don't see the things we did right.
Let's give a standing ovation to the food supply chain in the United States.
Just a tremendous number of people Taking risks, you know, the meatpackers.
I mean, the food industry in this country basically went to war.
You know, if you think about it, the food workers, especially the meatpackers, the settlers who were exposed, they went to war.
They didn't want to.
I'm sure it wasn't their first choice.
But the alternative was that their fellow citizens starved to death.
So it's a little different than teachers, you know, because you get a little bit more flexibility with education.
But the food workers of America?
Heroes. Absolute heroes.
Because they kept us fed.
So, I saw somebody ask about Dershowitz.
I understand there's an interesting interview with him that I haven't seen yet.
So I'm going to look at that in a bit.
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