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Aug. 9, 2020 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
58:20
Episode 1086 Scott Adams: Executive Orders, Coronavirus Comparisons, Arguing With Artists, Antifa Meets MAGA, Congress the Enemy

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Bum bum bum bum bum bum bum Hey everybody, come on in, come on in It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams, the best time of the day, every day.
No exception so far.
I think we've got about 7,000 of them in a row, approximately.
Every one better than the last.
It's quite a streak, and we're keeping it alive.
And today, all you need to be part of this great growing thing called the Simultaneous Sip, some of the greatest people in the world, all over the world, about ready to lift their mug in unison, Can't we all come together?
Of course we can. We're gonna do it right now.
We're gonna model it.
Pretty soon when everybody's doing a toast together.
That's when you'll know we'll all be together.
And all you need is a cup or 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.
Not to mention your coffee itself or your beverage.
It's called the Simultaneous Sip and it happens now.
Go. So let me give you a little hypothesis.
I like saying hypothesis.
I might say it a few more times because it's a fun word.
And so my hypothesis goes like this.
The first part I did not make up, okay?
So the first part, if it sounds smart, that's because somebody smart said it first.
It's not because it came out of my mouth.
And it goes like this.
The origin of dancing.
Did you ever wonder about that?
Why is it that humans dance and we coordinate dances, so we do group dances like line dancing and things where the whole group is dancing as one.
Where did that come from?
Why don't other animals dance together?
I think there are examples of you can get a parakeet to move to the beat, but that's it.
You can't get a bunch of parakeets To move together like they're dancing.
But humans, yes. And the explanation I've heard, I wish I could attribute it because I don't know what scientists came up with it, and it goes like this.
The humans were relatively, let's say, relatively weak compared to some types of animals.
Let's say a lion or a big predator.
Now, if you were a human and you didn't have physical abilities to fight a lion, what could you do as a group To seem like you were big and scary compared to a lion.
Well, if you're by yourself, you might try to look large.
You know, put your hands up and stand up and try to make yourself look bigger than you are.
But, suppose you were with the rest of your village or hunting party.
What would you do as a group to look like you were one big animal?
That's right. You would move together.
If you could, in unison, move all as one, so that everybody that the lion sees is moving in the same way, they're all moving left, they're all moving right, they're all lifting their arms at the same time, what would you think if you're a lion?
You would say to yourself, I'm not fighting one tiny creature.
I don't know what that is, but it looks like it's one big thing.
So, dancing, And this was the hypothesis, which is not my own.
Somebody smart came up with this first.
The hypothesis is that people dance to look like they're together.
To look as though they're one unit, and therefore more impressive than whoever they're up against.
You see this also in war.
In war, you see the group dressed together.
They have a commonality.
So it looks like, oh, they're all just one big thing.
It's an army.
But you also notice that music has often been part of the war process.
Usually drums.
Bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum.
Imagine hearing war drums from the other army.
Pretty scary, right?
You hear the war drum and you see people moving in some kind of unison.
It's all like one big thing.
And so I give you this Further hypothesis.
There may be one evolutionary key to bring everybody together.
Now, you're not going to end racism because music is good, but the very act of sharing music with other people would, in theory, make you feel more bonded to them.
In other words, if all you did Be you black, be you white, be you Hispanic, or whatever else you want to be.
I would imagine that if you came together just to dance, to enjoy the same music at the same time and to move in the same ways at the same time, I'll bet, I'll bet that you could study and find that people's whatever racial animus that they had would be less.
I'll bet that you could cause people to work better together Think better of each other.
Consider the other simply an extension of yourself through the act of coordinated movement and dancing.
Which brings me to the simultaneous sip.
People ask me, is that nothing but an opener?
No, it's more than an opener.
It is designed to do several things.
One is to tell you how close I am to being done with the introduction, as I've told you.
But the other is that doing the same thing at the same time, which you do with a simultaneous sit, or many of you, does in fact bind you, not just to me, but to the rest of the audience.
And you become, you have a feeling of being part of something by the physical coordinated act.
It's similar to when you go to a sporting event and you do the, you all stand up and, well, maybe some of you kneel, to do the national anthem.
And so, When you see the kneelers kneeling when others are standing, this really hits you in the evolutionary gut, doesn't it?
It feels, and you can tell the impact was so big, it's a really basic rejection of the other.
Because if you're standing together, or kneeling together, or moving together, or singing together, you're together.
But as soon as you're saying, if you move this way, I'm going to move this way, That's as basic an insult.
I'll say insult, but I'll use that in the big sense of an insult to your biology as well as the flag.
It's just an insult to your basic, basic humanity, I guess.
And so you can see why that gets people going, which makes it a very good protest, I've often said.
All right, moving on.
I did this, was it yesterday?
I tweeted around to ask you to see if you had been automatically unfollowed from Ambassador Grinnell.
So I had noticed this, I don't know, a year ago, that I had been unfollowed from him, and I didn't think it was something I had done, so I re-followed him, and then I asked other people a year ago, hey, this happened to anybody else, and it was a lot of people.
So I asked again as a follow-up.
How many people had been unfollowed?
Now I don't know if it's just a continuation from a year ago and some people noticed a year ago, some people didn't notice till now, or if there's some ongoing issue.
But it was a lot of people.
A lot of people said they were following him and now they're not.
And that was just one tweet from one person.
Even with all of the people who follow me, I wouldn't expect that many people to say that they had been automatically unfollowed.
It doesn't pass the sniff test for some kind of an accident.
So then I thought to myself, well, if there's some kind of a pattern, we should see if it's at least not limited to one kind of account.
Because there could be something about one account that is not common.
So I asked people to check if they had followed Congressman Matt Gaetz.
The theory here is that one of the things that makes Ambassador Grinnell interesting is that his Twitter feed is more effective than most.
In other words, he's really good at tweeting, good at making a point, and therefore good at supporting the administration.
Likewise, Matt Gaetz is in that higher level of communicators, and I thought, well, If there's something happening with Grinnell's account, you'd also see it in Gates' account if there's something going on.
Now again, that's not any kind of confirmation or anything.
It's just what you'd expect.
And so I did the same tweet with Matt Gates' account, and what do you think?
Massive number of people in the comments said, what the heck?
I was following him, but now I'm not.
So... I don't know what this means.
And as I've said before, I might be the only person in the world who is willing to say that this is not some intentional Twitter thing.
We don't know. It's a mystery.
I can tell you that Twitter doesn't know, or at least doesn't offer an explanation, and I have looked into it.
I've looked into it twice that I know of and couldn't find any reason for it.
Now, of course, because you're all skeptical and cynical, you can say, they know exactly what they're doing.
But I would put out there this possibility, that there's no reason to assume that it's coming from an internal, intentional Twitter decision.
There's no evidence of that.
Because it could as easily come from the outside.
Meaning that somebody on the outside has an insider who does something for them, That's really more like coming from the outside, right?
They just might have one insider who has access to something.
Or it could be a direct hack.
It could be that literally nobody who works for Twitter had anything to do with it, but they also don't know what it's about.
That's possible. It could be just a hack.
Could be some kind of apps having control of it, maybe not necessarily just TikTok, but there are lots of apps that you give permission to control your social media, and maybe they're doing it.
And those apps, in turn, are controlled by some malign influence.
So it's a gigantic question, but what's interesting about this one is it's so discreet.
You know, unlike the algorithm where maybe it would be a little hard to know if something's happening or not happening, it would be the easiest thing in the world, I would imagine, to have some kind of a bot or program that would just monitor the larger pro-Trump accounts, and then, just to be careful, you would also monitor the largest, say, pro-Biden accounts to see if they're having the same problem.
Because if it's across accounts, it just doesn't matter who you are or what you're saying, Any big blue check loses people and they don't know why.
Well, that would tell you it's one kind of problem.
More likely something about the system.
But if it only happened for one kind of people, you would not be too surprised to learn that in today's world.
That would tell you something else.
So I would think that somebody should be writing a bot that could just check on who's following the big accounts.
Might require buy-in from the account so you can get that data.
I don't know how that would work.
But there's got to be some way to objectively just graph this thing and find out if it's really happening.
I don't think you'd have to be a Twitter insider in order to track it objectively from the outside.
But that's just an assumption.
Alright, did you see the video?
This is my favorite highlight reel from last night's big game.
And by the big game, I mean anything that is happening in Portland or around there, anything Antifa is doing.
My favorite clip was Antifa made a wrong turn into MAGA territory.
Now, if you haven't seen this video and you like your videos of Antifa not having a good day, you're going to have to watch this one.
Trust me, you're going to want to watch this one.
I don't condone violence unless it's against Antifa, in which case I condone it totally.
Let me say that again.
If you're dealing with domestic terrorists who are wearing masks and threatening your property and your way of life, have fun, right?
Don't go to jail, but you're not going to see me condemn you.
So I'll just tease it and say...
That there were some locals in a suburban neighborhood who were not pleased with the arrival of Antifa, and I'm just going to say it didn't go well.
Let's just leave it at that.
You have to watch it to get the full entertainment effect on it.
But nothing would make me happier than watching every single morning when I wake up Watching the Antifa getting beaten up by the police and or local conservatives.
I must be a bad person.
I don't know. Maybe I'm just a bad person.
Because I'm not even going to pretend I don't enjoy that.
I totally enjoy it.
I can't lie. Alright, let's talk about Russian interference.
How long will it be before you ever see an example of some Russian interference?
It'll probably be long after the result of the election.
But you know there's going to be claims of Russian interference.
Will they be as lame as the 2016 attempt that looked like a child's high school project to make bad memes and not show them to anybody?
That's what the Russian troll farm did.
They made bad memes That hardly anybody saw, relative to the population.
Hardly anybody saw them. And they couldn't have possibly made a difference, if you see them.
If you haven't seen them, you say to yourself, well, they're probably KGB made, and it's the highest skill level you can imagine.
They probably, you've got psychologists, and maybe every kind of science they did, they tested them.
Man, these memes must be...
No. No, that's not what happened.
It was basically some Russian with a crayon and a computer, and they just produced crap.
And it's definitely not scientific crap.
So, until you see an example of this alleged Russian interference, the smart money says, it's happening, but not in a way we care about.
Because it's going to be so trivial, it's just stupid.
How about the story about Trump had his little press conference yesterday, and Paula Reid of CBS kept trying to talk over him and insist on her question, even when she'd had her moment.
And then the president, after several tries to shut her up, he just ends the press conference.
Imagine being all the other people who went there to do nothing but ask a question.
Their whole day was about the moment they were about to get to ask a question on camera, and then Paul and Reed just ruined it for everybody by being a jerk.
Now, I get that you have to be aggressive, asking the president, but if we watch this as theater, which is really the only way to watch it, how did the theater go?
Were you entertained?
Yeah! Yeah, I was entertained.
I was totally entertained.
When the president walked out, I thought, ha ha ha, and I laughed.
I thought, nice move.
I'm totally entertained by that.
Now, the anti-Trumpers will, of course, and have, of course, tried to make it look like, oh, he's having a tantrum, he's a big baby, he can't handle the pressure, you know, all the things that you'd expect him to say.
But I gotta say, I think at a gut level, That his walkout worked.
First of all, it's compatible with everything he's ever told you about anything ever, which is walk out.
If things aren't going your way, you don't need to be there.
You know, that would be true in a negotiation.
It would be true in a press conference.
So you see the President of the United States is standing up there on camera, live on camera in front of the whole world, and for a moment he thought, oh, I don't need to be here because if nobody's listening to me, what's the point?
So he turns and walks away.
It was one of the most baller things you'll see because it was perfectly appropriate.
You know, you could argue he could have handled it differently, but in terms of theater it was perfect.
Because to me it played as strong.
So, unfortunately, humans are so simple that we do interpret things as either strong or weak when it's our leaders.
Because we want strong.
Even if we say we don't want strong, we want strong.
Because it's our leader.
That's who's protecting us.
You don't want a weak one.
You want a strong one, even if you're not willing to admit it.
That was a strong play.
So I thought that was all in his favor.
Well played. And to be honest, nothing that could have come out of the questions would have been good.
Because all of the things taken out of context, all of the, ah, the president said this, ah, all of that comes from the questions.
So as soon as this CBS reporter gave Trump a reason to not take questions, boom, free money.
This reporter put a big pile of free money on the table because the question and answer period can go wrong, but it can never go right.
You know what I mean? The president never answers questions, and then at the end of it, oh, I raised my ratings.
My job approval went up because of the way I answered those questions.
That's not even a thing.
It can only be bad.
So this reporter just gave him this big bag of free money, which was a get-out-of-questions-pass, And you can see him standing there thinking, did she just put a big bag of money in front of me with nobody's name on it?
I feel like I could just take this big bag of money, have no risk that questions go bad, still look like I'm in charge, and see you later.
Good decision. I would go so far as to say that that's why you hired him.
That's why you hired him.
Because of that kind of stuff.
Have we learned this week that Congress is the wrong place for budget authority during a crisis?
I think we've learned that, right?
Now, of course, we do want Congress to have budget authority in normal times.
Duh. You know, that's representative government.
You know, we wish it were more More functional, we wish that they could compromise better, yada yada.
But Congress is the right place for that authority, so you put up with the pain of it.
But maybe not during a crisis.
Because if timing is more important than getting it right, as long as we have full visibility of what our leadership is doing, I'd rather have a benevolent dictator, just for a while.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, don't get excited.
No, nobody wants a permanent dictator.
Nobody wants martial law, because maybe that could turn into a permanent dictator, right?
I get it, I get it.
Nobody wants a risk that a temporary dictator becomes a permanent one.
But, let's say dictator-lite, the mildest version of an authoritarian government, would be to do some executive orders that the public is begging you to do.
That's sort of the opposite of being a dictator.
Your public is begging you to get this done.
In this case, the emergency relief.
Begging you, please, government, please do your effing job.
Can you please? Now, under that specific situation, do you want your leader to say, alright, I'm just going to ignore Congress because it's the right place for the decision, but they don't have the timing thing down.
If they can't do it on time, it doesn't matter if that's their authority, they just don't get to do it.
If you don't do it, you lose the right to do it.
So we're in this strange situation, which Jonathan Turley, who he's my go-to on these constitutional things with Dershowitz, would be the other voices I listen to the most.
And he says this, which is just the perfect way to put it.
He says that...
It's absurdly unconstitutional, the executive orders, but it could be.
Let's just say it could be absurdly constitutional.
But if nobody challenges it, it's practically constitutional.
So in a practical sense, it doesn't matter if it's unconstitutional.
Have you ever been in this situation before?
Maybe. I mean, historically, maybe there's some minor situations that fell into this category.
But just think of that point.
So long as the population of the United States says, that's unconstitutional, but I'm not going to complain.
And if the Democrats say, that's really unconstitutional, but we're not going to take it to the Supreme Court, it actually doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter if it's constitutional.
It's kind of mind-blowing, isn't it?
Because we're so used to it's got to be constitutional.
That's like the minimum requirement for anything, right?
You can't be unconstitutional.
We can have lots of conversations about whether it's a good or bad idea, but that's a line.
You can't cross constitutional.
And then we just did.
It looks like we just crossed it running.
Hey, constitutional line.
Let's run right off of this.
Keep going. And I think it's going to work, because even if you don't like the details of it, people are going to like getting their check, and they weren't going to get a check before, even if it's not as much, blah, blah,
blah. Now, my take on the executive orders is that they're too complicated to really be good, meaning that It's delaying things and moving things around and eventually you'll have to pay the piper and pay back a loan or move something back into a budget that was robbed to do this.
So it doesn't really feel like, except for the part where you get a check, I don't know.
I don't have an opinion on whether these are the right things to do or whether they're lasting.
But it does give the impression of a leader in charge, again.
So what people are going to take away from this is, is there anything in those executive orders that's good for me?
And the answer is going to be yes for most people.
Most people are going to find at least one thing on that list.
They're going to say, oh, that's just good for me.
Well, I'm not going to complain.
Yeah, it's a little unconstitutional, but I don't want to get evicted.
It does seem a little unconstitutional, but...
I like to eat. So we're seeing almost an entire new form of government here.
Remember I told you before that our form of government had evolved without anybody voting on it.
And we turned into effectively the public through social media especially, has way more control of things than maybe has ever been in the past.
Because it would be difficult for a leader to do something that the entire public spontaneously disagreed with violently.
And I think you've seen the president float ideas and back off and float ideas and back off, and it's mostly because of the public.
It's not because of the Democrats, it's because of the public.
So, this might be the cleanest example Because the public basically said, in our minds, you know, I'm going to mind read for all of you, right?
In your mind, wasn't there some part of your mind that said, if Congress can't get this done on time, somebody's got to do it, right?
Some part of your mind said, if Congress isn't the right place to do it, Somebody else has got to do it.
Because you don't have an option of not doing it.
Because then you have mass starvation, etc.
So, I think the public changed its form of government in their minds while you were doing other things.
While you were paying attention, the form of government literally and fundamentally just changed.
And the Constitution came, wait for it, Optional.
The Constitution just became optional.
Is that good?
Is it bad?
Don't know. I'm not tempted to think it's necessarily bad because in a situation like this, it's clearly better.
I'd have to see other situations to know if there's some kind of slippery slope, as some of you like to say.
Here's a fun factoid.
I guess Ari Fleischer tweeted this, and there was a study recently.
I'm not sure I'd buy this.
Well, I'll go further. I don't buy this.
So I'm going to give you a study result as it was summarized by Ari Fleischer.
In his tweet, I don't think it's true, but I'm going to tell you anyway.
It goes like this.
That if you do just three things, you have a 2% chance of being poor.
In other words, if you were already poor, as long as you did these three things, you'd have a 98% chance of going from poor to at least middle class.
And the three things are finish high school, get a full-time job, And don't get married and have kids until you're 21.
If you only do those three things, you have a 98% chance of having a decent life.
Pretty interesting, isn't it?
Now I put this in the context of what I believe is most missing from school curriculums.
Strategy for success.
Can you imagine telling young black youths, I like to use black use as my proxy for anybody poor.
So it could be any person of color, any white person, any person who's just in a poor situation and doesn't think they can do better because they feel sort of locked into their situation.
How many of them at age 10 were told that all they had to do is these three things and they would be successful?
Do you know what I was told when I was that age?
I was pretty much told that this would make me successful.
Not directly, but I would feel that when I was just a kid, I would have said that these three things, finish high school, I would have changed that to go to college, get a full-time job, I would have changed that to get a good job, and Wait to get married until after 21.
I'm pretty sure that was part of my upbringing.
Because my mother started having kids at 18.
And I think she...
It seems to me that that was baked into my childhood.
You've got to wait a little while and get things up and running.
I don't remember if that was something she directly told me or it was just obvious.
But somehow I knew it.
And I would be really curious how many people who could say Who could say as an adult, oh yeah, this is exactly the life strategy that I learned when I was a kid.
How many people could say that?
I don't know. And so I think that would be worth testing.
You should just pick out a classroom or something and say, we're going to teach you life strategy.
I would give them my book, How to Failed Almost Everything and Still Win Big, because that's written for, let's say, 14 years old and up.
And it's simple life strategies about how to have a system for something, not a goal, that sort of thing.
So, I think it would be transformative.
How much more would you study if you knew that it was the difference between success and failure?
I mean, I feel like it would make a big difference.
Alright. Here's a...
Let's talk about Jerry Falwell Jr.
in his photo. So there are some stories that I stay away from until they age a little bit and sometimes they're just icky or it's just about one person's personal problems.
I just stay away from it.
So I've been staying away from this Jerry Falwell embarrassing photograph with a woman story because I thought it was, oh God, it's just another religious person who maybe Did something bad.
But then I looked into the story.
It's complete BS. The whole story is complete BS. He basically did nothing wrong.
And it's obvious.
Once he tells you his version of the story, you look at it, you go, oh, that was nothing.
That was actually just a joke.
And the joke was this.
His or his wife's assistant, who traveled with them, in other words, he and his wife and the assistant were all in the same place, the wife might have taken the picture, he posed with the assistant because what was funny was the assistant was pregnant and she couldn't button he posed with the assistant because what was funny was the assistant was pregnant and she couldn't button the top of
Jerry Falwell Jr., in an act of self-deprecation, was noting that he had gained a little weight and so he was pretending like because he had gained weight he couldn't button the top of his pants.
So they took a picture together.
He had his shirt off, but I think he was on vacation, so not a big deal.
And the top of his pants were unbuttoned, hers were unbuttoned.
If you don't notice that she's pregnant, it looks like something's up.
It was nothing but a gag picture to make fun of the fact that he thought he had gained some pounds.
That's it. It was so opposite any kind of a sexual anything.
It was literally as far as you can go from a sexual thing.
And he had to take a leave of absence about this.
Now, of course, the judgment part is I guess it got on social media.
So, you know, the worst part about this is that he didn't understand that other people would see it differently.
That's it. That's it.
That's the whole thing. This guy had to, like, change his career situation, his reputation, everything, over a frickin' joke?
Ugh. Don't make me defend Jerry Falwell Jr.
I mean, I have nothing against him, but it's not my job to defend him, but I have to.
Because I don't want to live in a world where somebody does a joke photo that nobody is offended by.
It wasn't at anybody's expense.
It wasn't at anybody's expense, except himself.
He was making fun of himself.
If you can't make fun of your frickin' self, and you lose your job for making fun of yourself, seriously, that's crazy.
Alright, here's a little math you're not going to like.
So according to Fox News, some kind of survey, they said that one-third of people in the population would not take the coronavirus vaccine.
Now, that's not too surprising, right?
One-third would not take it.
But you say to yourself, well, that might be okay, because suppose two-thirds take it.
If two-thirds took it, and then you add any herd immunity that happened, whatever small amount that is, you'd say, oh, there we are.
Two-thirds take it, add a little natural immunity, boom, you're at 70% immunity, Virus is gone.
That should get it done, right?
So, no problem.
If one-third don't want to take it, it's a free country.
If two-thirds take it, boom, problem done.
Except... Except, according to Dr.
Fauci, a vaccine might only be 50% effective.
Ouch. Because then...
You've got two-thirds willing to take it, but only half of them, back to one-third, are actually going to take it and have it effective.
So you would have only one-third of the country vaccinated in an effective way, because the other half of it didn't work.
And then you add a little bit of herd immunity, so you've got like 33% plus 10%, maybe 10% natural herd immunity.
What happens if you can only get to the 40% range with a vaccine plus natural herd immunity?
It's possible that the vaccine would be better than 50%.
It could be 75%.
It could be better. And we hope it's better.
But there's a pretty high chance that the vaccine won't get you there.
So just keep that in mind.
When you're looking at what is the right strategy to be doing today, you have to put your odds on the vaccine getting us to herd immunity.
Along those lines, yesterday I found myself in a debate with somebody online who did not have a profile detail.
So often people will tell you in their profile what kind of occupation they have, either directly or indirectly.
And this one was sort of silent on the occupation and insisted that Trump was doing a bad job compared to other countries managing the coronavirus.
Now, I said, I got into it and said, well, you know, too many variables.
It's too early in the game.
You can't really tell. And he pushed back and said, oh, yeah, you can tell.
Compare them to these countries.
And I said, no, you can't really compare them.
That's apples and oranges. And then I explained a few examples why.
And then he said, well, what about this country?
And I said, that's just another apple compared to another orange.
Same thing I just said, just changed the country.
And then he came back and said, what about Canada?
And I started to think, what is wrong with this guy?
Why can't he understand that there are too many variables?
He could disagree with it.
But why can't he even understand what I'm saying?
And then I finally, after several iterations, I said, what kind of art do you do?
You see where I'm going, right?
And then he waited a while and said, I do various things.
And then I said...
What kind of artistic things do you do?
And it turns out he does various artistic things.
He's an artist. Artist in various fields, but an artist.
Now, how many times have I made the same mistake of trying to debate an artist?
It's a waste of time.
Because artists could be brilliant in their field, but if that's their entire domain of experience, they don't know how to analyze things.
But worse, they don't know, they don't know how.
So it's sort of like talking to a five-year-old about physics.
You can't tell the five-year-old that they don't understand physics.
Well, I suppose maybe you could in that case.
But there's no place you could go.
You can't win the argument because that would require them to follow the argument, and they can't.
And it's so consistent that the people who only have experience in that domain can't follow an argument.
Because it was flagged so clearly in the conversation that I could just say, what kind of art do you do?
And I can get it almost every time.
Because I've done this a number of times.
Guessing people's occupation by how poorly they argue.
If this had been an economist, a doctor, an engineer, I would have picked that up right away.
Because even their disagreements would be in a category I'd say, okay, I disagree, but it's a good point.
And I'll tell you why you got an assumption wrong.
But for your For your benefit, I compiled a tweet that I just tweeted before I got on about all the variables you would have to look at in order to compare any two countries.
So here, if you think you can compare two countries, I would like you to show me how you factored in the following things for any two countries and the coronavirus.
Population density, percentage of black population, Because they have a higher mortality.
So, for example, if you compare the United States to Canada, are you going to factor in the fact that Canada has 3.5% black population, the United States has over 13% black population, and the black population, unfortunately, has a far higher death rate, something like four times.
So, who calculated that?
When you're comparing Canada to the United States, in terms of the death rate anyway, Have you factored that in?
How about the average age?
Italy is very old.
Africa is very young.
Big difference. How about the island status or near island status?
If I hear one more idiot compare the United States or any other regular country that's not an island to an island, I'm going to lose my frickin' mind.
Because it really helps to be an island.
New Zealand? Doing great.
Thailand? Doing great.
How about South Korea?
Kind of an island, because it's only connected by North Korea and the DMZ, and you're not getting much through there.
So, South Korea?
Kind of an island. How about Mongolia?
Mongolia is doing well.
No water around Mongolia.
No, Mongolia is kind of an island.
It just happens to be a land island.
There's physical separation.
I may be wrong about that, but the larger point is don't compare non-islands to islands.
You could compare the islands all to themselves.
Maybe you'd be closer there.
But don't compare an island to the United States with porous borders.
How about the cultural norms of conformity?
Do you think the United States norm of How much we're willing to rebel versus how much we're willing to conform.
Do you think that matches up to other countries?
Is your impression of Germany that there are a bunch of rebels?
Is your impression of South Korea that's all rebels?
No, it probably isn't.
I hate to make sweeping generalizations about entire countries and cultures, but I think there are differences.
In the United States, if you said, don't hit yourself in the head with a hammer, 50 million people would go to the toolbox, pick up a hammer, hit themselves in the head, and say, you can't tell me what to do with a hammer.
You do not tell me what to do with a hammer.
I decide what to do with a hammer.
If you don't want me to hit myself in the head, good luck with that.
Watch this. Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam.
And it looks like I'm making fun of Americans.
Nope. Nope.
If that's what you heard, you heard it wrong.
Am I saying Americans are stupid because they'll just hit themselves in the head with a hammer?
No. That's what makes this frickin' country great.
Our greatness as a country, and I'm definitely on board with the United States being a great country, our greatness has everything to do with rebellion.
We were born of rebellion.
We have We've fought a civil war.
We've got suffrage.
We rebel.
We are a country of rebels.
And that's also what keeps us together.
The fact that we're all rebels, it is sort of a thing, right?
Now, not rebels in terms of the Confederate flag, but rebels in terms of We just don't like to be told what to do.
And if there's something we're not supposed to do, we're going to do it three times.
We're going to experiment and we're going to die.
We will die for freedom like it's taking a walk.
And as long as the United States has that kind of character, we will always be a dominant culture, meaning that the country will do well because that kind of risk-taking and thinking outside the box is why we're the most innovative country in the world.
It's all connected.
So you don't want to take that away from us.
You want to see that as our strength.
It just doesn't work too well in a pandemic.
If we're being honest, it's not the best match for a pandemic.
But you've got to factor that stuff in there.
How about vitamin D exposure?
You better look at that across countries.
We know that that's a factor.
How about strong states' rights versus the federal government?
What is the situation in, I don't know, New Zealand?
Are there governors really strong compared to the federal government?
I don't know, but you better compare that stuff.
How about whether they used hydroxychloroquine early and often?
Well, that's a little hard, because the other factor is how good is their data.
The first thing I heard about Germany in the very first days of the pandemic, what I heard through just my own channels, is that Germany was widely prescribing hydroxychloroquine from the start, because Bayer, a big German company, makes it.
So they have, you know, one of their major companies makes hydroxychloroquine.
The doctors were handing it out like candy.
That's what I heard.
Later, I heard conflicting information about their use of it.
So, can you trust the data?
Do you know what countries used hydroxychloroquine?
Which doctors prescribed it?
How early they prescribed it?
You don't. So you don't know about hydroxychloroquine because, in general, and this is another category, How credible is the data from that country?
Don't know. What about when they got their first infection and how big it was?
If your first infection came to you from two different coasts and by the time you were onto it, it had already spread, well, you're in bad shape.
But suppose you're sitting down there in New Zealand and you see what's happening to the other countries.
Do you have an advantage?
You do. If it hasn't hit you yet, And you know exactly what's coming.
You have a little bit of advantage to prepare.
How about if you're an international hub for travel?
That's got to matter. How about how your seniors are cared for?
Do you do it the same way?
Do you have senior homes or do you care for them?
Do you keep Graham at home?
Is that your culture? That matters.
How about this one? There's a new one I'm going to throw into the mix.
The number of sex partners you have on average.
Do you know how much sex they have in Brazil?
Brazil's not doing too well, right?
Do you know how much sex they have in Brazil?
A lot more than Japan.
Alright? Look it up.
Brazil is near the top of the number of partners and amount of sex you can have.
They have a lot of sex in Brazil.
Japan? Not so much.
Now, if you get this from close personal contact, It's not exactly a sexually transmitted disease, but it kind of is.
Because if you have close physical contact, well...
So can you compare countries with high sex rates to low?
I don't think so.
How about the fake news effect?
We don't know exactly what that influenced, but it certainly influenced the rate of hydroxychloroquine use in this country.
It definitely influenced the...
The debate on masks.
So if you don't have much fake news in your country, isn't that a big advantage?
Does New Zealand have as much fake news as we do?
I doubt it.
I doubt it.
So that's got to help.
How about your privacy limits?
In China, no limit on privacy.
I mean, no limit on lack of privacy.
The government can take all your privacy they want.
How about the United States?
Opposite. We'll die to survive.
We'll die to keep our privacy.
In China, they might die too, but the government would kill them, so that wouldn't be a problem for China's government.
Then how about the lying about contact tracing?
If you have never lived in the real world as an adult who worked for a big organization...
You would probably think this and be completely wrong.
Hey, there are some countries who are doing a good job of contact tracing and some, like the United States, who are not.
If you think that's true, some countries are doing good on contact tracing and others are not.
You've never lived in the real world.
Here is what is far more likely to be true.
Nobody's good at contact tracing.
Unless you're a super small country and you just had a few infections, then in that case it might be a thing.
But if you take out the smallest of the cases where it might actually work, anybody else who got a hold on this virus is going to claim that it's because of what they did.
That's what leaders do.
If the leader had said, I'm going to dunk my head, in a bowl of water, swirl my hair around, and see if that makes the coronavirus go away, and other things that country did actually did make the virus go away, what will the leader claim?
Will the leader claim, huh, I did this thing, I put my head in a bowl of water, shook my head after I took it out, and I guess that didn't make any difference to the coronavirus?
No. Leaders don't do that.
They tell you They tell the news, and then the news tells you, it's a good thing I stuck my head in a bucket of water, or look at the trouble we'd have.
Leaders try to connect what they did to any good outcome.
If you don't know that, that that's a universal truth, then you might be mistaken and think some countries did contact tracing really well.
It's not a thing.
It's not a thing.
No large-ish country Is doing contact tracing well?
They're not. Now, the exception might be a no-privacy country like China.
They could just look at your phone and they could just say, hey, you were within a mile of somebody who had the coronavirus, so we're going to board you up in your house for three weeks.
You can't do that in the United States.
So comparing China to the United States is just stupid because there's so many differences.
How about this? How about which type of coronavirus you got early?
Now we heard a little about this in the beginning, remember, and I haven't heard much about it lately, so it could be that this doesn't matter.
But didn't we hear that there might be a different form of the virus on the west coast of the United States than we got in New York City?
One might have a different characteristic in terms of spread and lethality.
I don't know if that's still true, so I feel like my knowledge is stale on that.
But it could be a factor.
And then how about comorbidities?
Does your country, I mean this is related to age, but does your country have a lot of other health problems?
Etc. So if you don't know all of those things, comparing two countries is crazy.
Let's talk about this Lebanon blast.
Get back to that.
I've developed a number of go-to people for different topics, and my go-to person for The Middle East, especially when Israel is any part of the conversation, is Jake Novak.
Jake, if you're watching, hey Jake.
So you should follow Jake Novak as one of your clearest voices, not only of a lot of business stuff, but of Israel.
And as Jake has noted, and I don't know where he's getting his information, but he generally has good information, so I would trust it.
He said, almost all the people of Lebanon are rightfully blaming Hezbollah for the blast and their Iran-compliant government, not Israel or the United States.
And Jake says, I wonder how many people realize how historic and encouraging this is.
And I didn't know this, did you?
Didn't you just assume...
That the residents of Beirut would say, it's got to be some Israeli thing or some American thing, death to America.
But you're not seeing that, are you?
You're not seeing that at all.
This is a big deal, as Jake says.
This is a big, big deal.
Like, this is one of the biggest deals of all the deals.
This might be the biggest one.
And, you know, it's the dog that didn't bark.
So it's harder to see the dog that didn't bark, and Jake is good at that.
So, yeah, the fact that they're not protesting Israel and the United States after something big blew up in their country, blaming Iran, that's gigantic.
Gigantic. Anyway.
Yes, there's a story that Simon Cowell was testing his new e-bike and fell off in his driveway and broke his back.
I know, I know, I've been promoting these e-bikes as the future of transportation, and they really are.
You've got to get one of these things.
If you have any chance, you know, financially that you could pull it off and you like bicycles.
They are dangerous though.
Bicycles are crazy dangerous.
It was the reason I almost didn't get one.
And I got to tell you that if I had only had regular bicycles, probably I would have said, at my age especially, maybe a little too dangerous.
But when you add the e-bike feature, it's just so much fun that you're willing to take a lot of danger.
So don't break your back on your e-bike.
So there's a report that Twitter is mulling over the conversation of buying TikTok.
What do you think of that?
My take on that is that that's probably just a polite meeting.
My guess is that Twitter is not serious about buying TikTok, but if you're a big social media platform, you probably feel like you have to be at least a participant in the conversation.
You would have to at least hear the details before you said no.
So my guess is that Twitter is just being a good citizen, basically, and saying, well, we're in the United States, we're an American company, there are only few companies in the world who could take over TikTok, so we should at least take a meeting.
I'm guessing it's not that serious, because I don't think it fits well.
Because Twitter skews more adult.
TikTok obviously skews way to the young side.
It doesn't feel like it fits.
Snapchat probably doesn't need to buy them because they're going to knock them off and just reproduce that function.
I think Instagram's going to do the same thing.
I mean, why wouldn't they? So you should have the Facebook, Instagram people And the Snapchat people just basically knocking it off.
And they have enough of a platform that they have enough of a network effect that they can get it going.
But how about Microsoft?
I would think that Microsoft would be the most natural buyer because that would get them into some kind of social media platform in a bigger way.
Do they have any? Does Microsoft have a...
Am I blanking on something that Microsoft is doing in terms of social networks?
I feel like they're doing something that I'm just blanking on.
Well, if they don't have a big social media platform, maybe this is a way to get it.
But I don't know what you're buying when you buy TikTok, exactly.
Are you buying just the customers?
You know, just the customer list?
Is that it? Oh, LinkedIn.
Yeah, I'm sorry. Yes, that's what I was blanking on, is that Microsoft now owns LinkedIn.
But that's a different kind of social network.
I wouldn't call Skype a social network.
Thank you for filling me in.
I knew there was something there.
I just couldn't produce it.
It was LinkedIn. But irrelevant to the conversation because it's not the right kind of social network.
All right. That is everything I wanted to talk about today.
I hope you enjoyed this episode of Coffee with Scott Adams.
And I hope that you learn something.
And I hope that when somebody tells you to compare two countries with the coronavirus, you find my tweet.
Maybe save it and just present it so people can understand, especially the artists, that they can understand.
Oh, somebody said Xbox Live, too.
Yeah, that's right. Microsoft has Xbox Live.
You can call that a social network.
I can see that. Alright, that's enough for now.
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