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Aug. 13, 2020 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:07:16
Episode 1091 Scott Adams: My Antifa Neighbor Doesn't Like Me, Brain-Dead Biden, Lots of Curse Words Today

My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com Content: Biden basing his campaign on the Fine People HOAX Being called a racist, legitimizes violence against the accused Joe Biden, the lyingest liar Democrat Unfair attacks on Kamala's personal past Kamala: Pragmatic moderate or wild leftist? Cheap, OTC paper tests for COVID19 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 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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Hey everybody, come on in.
This morning we're going to have extra cursing.
So if you've got children, make sure they are well out of the way.
There will be extra cursing.
Well, has anybody watched the news recently?
There isn't any.
There isn't any news.
Every morning I wake up and I think, ah, I'm going to look at the news.
I'll look at CNN, I'll look at Fox, and I'll say, all right, I'll talk about the news.
But today there wasn't any.
It's just purely political.
Neither Fox nor CNN are even pretending to To cover anything like news today.
It's just all just pure politics.
It's fun, but there was no news.
Which makes you wonder, what's up with the news?
Wait. We need something.
We need the simultaneous sift, because today will not be complete without it.
And all you need is a cup or mug or a glass of tank or chels or sign a canteen jug or flask or vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better, including Joe Biden's rotting fucking brain.
Drink. Ah.
This is a good one. Um...
Yes, so there will be extra cursing today.
Oh, it's called for.
It's very called for.
Have you noticed, we'll get to all the good stuff here, but have you noticed that if you encounter somebody on Twitter who just gives you a sarcastic comment without any reasons, just stuff like, oh, Scott, I see you're really looking into it today.
Or, well, I guess that's all we need to know.
And I think to myself, who would put a sarcastic comment that doesn't even kind of work in the situation and then I check the profile?
What kind of profession?
Writers. Artists, writers, musicians.
Less musicians. It's usually visual artists.
And writers.
What is wrong with those people?
They literally can't tell the difference between sarcasm and reasons.
Once you see it, you can't unsee it.
The pattern is so clear.
When somebody who is, say, a lawyer or an engineer or an economist disagrees with me, it takes about two seconds to find out where the disagreement is.
Usually some disagreement about a fact That's hard to research or, you know, a difference of priorities, for example.
But it never seems crazy.
It just feels like people have a little different view of the world, perfectly fair, just different from mine.
But the artists?
The artists are not even...
I don't even know if they know that logic and rationality even exist.
It's like it's not even a thing in their world.
They go through...
These conversations, at least, as if it's nothing that needs to be addressed.
Rationality? Why?
I have sarcasm.
I have all I need.
Look at my sarcasm.
That should cover it, I mean...
So, anyway.
So, when Hillary Clinton was running against Trump, I have to admit that for me it felt personal.
Because I really didn't like Hillary Clinton.
And she was anti-male.
Now, if anybody ever had a good reason to be anti-male, it's Hillary Clinton.
She comes by honestly.
I think Hillary Clinton could be completely forgiven for being anti-male.
If we're being fair, she's got a reason.
It's called Bill.
But... Whatever her reason is, she is anti-male, and I think that's pretty obvious.
And so, anybody who's anti-me for immutable purposes, doesn't matter why, if they're anti-men, anti-white people, anti-black people, if they're anti-anything about something you're not going to change, or including, I guess, religion, even though you could technically change that if you wanted to, You know, I hate everybody who's in that category, basically.
If somebody hates me for any one of those reasons, I just hate their fucking guts.
And likewise, if they're hating some other group I'm not in for the same reason, I'm not too happy with them either.
But it's a little more personal when it's me, of course.
So 2016 honestly felt personal.
But I wasn't feeling that about Biden or Kamala Harris because I don't really have a strong feeling about them until today.
And here's the thing.
When Biden was originally, and when I say originally, I mean not that long ago, in the last few months, he brings up the Charlottesville fine people hoax every now and then.
And he believes, or he acts like he believes, That the president called the neo-Nazis fine people.
All of you know it was a hoax.
You know that the president literally said the opposite.
You know that all the people who said, I saw it with my own ears!
Because they talk like that.
They see things with their ears.
You know that they saw the edited version that reverses the meaning.
If you see the full thing, it completely flips it.
But... I thought when he was saying it originally, I said to myself, you know, he's not all there.
He probably doesn't know it's not real.
He probably thinks it's real.
Because a lot of people were fooled into thinking it was real, so maybe he was fooled too.
But at this point, at this point, he's basing his campaign on the Charlottesville finding people hoax.
He made that very clear again last night with Kamala Harris.
And here's what's different.
Do I understand that President Trump has failed the fact-checking 20,000 times?
Can we just get this off the table?
Yes, I fucking know it.
You don't have to come into my comments and say, well, what are you saying?
If Biden said that and it's not true, what about Trump's 20,000 fact-checking?
Yes, I fucking know it.
I fucking know it.
You don't have to tell me.
And you know what's different about the Trump supporters from the other people?
They know what they're getting.
And they chose it.
Right? So we know that President Trump uses hyperbole, you know, he influences, he sells.
And you don't take him exactly literally if you understand where he's going.
Do I care if he built 100 miles of wall or it's 65?
Don't fucking care in the big picture.
You might like 100 better than 65, but it doesn't really matter.
You know what he's doing. He's trying to show progress.
He's trying to keep people feeling good about the country, moving forward, pushing all the time.
That is very, very different from saying that the president is a flat-out Racist because of the fine people hoax.
Now, if the president had said that, well, yeah, anybody who supported him would have a lot of explaining to do.
Would you not agree?
If the president really called the neo-Nazis fine people, if that had actually happened in the real world, do you think I would fucking support it?
No! I hope most of you wouldn't either.
It wouldn't fucking happen.
So here's the thing. The fine people hoax is not like other fact checking.
It is the tent pole that allows the people who are the anti-Trumpers to dehumanize his supporters to the point of fucking violence.
It is not safe to To live in a country where your fucking candidate for president is demonizing, what, 35% of the country, 40% of the country, as literal racists because of this fine people hoax.
Because again, if that were true, if this president had actually said those words, I wouldn't fucking support him, but he didn't.
He didn't say those words.
He said the exact fucking opposite.
Now, what's different is, If you push that hoax, you are demonizing Trump supporters to the point of violence.
Real fucking violence.
Yesterday, I take my garbage out in front of my house, just taking the garbage out, ordinary night.
Car slows down in front of my house, puts the window down, and calls me a racist by name.
Somebody knew my name and called me a racist from their car.
Now, of course, fucking idiot doesn't know that in my neighborhood we're kind of ready for this stuff, so here's a good picture of the fucking idiot driving past all the security cameras in the world.
It's not the best place to commit a crime, asshole.
Now, I don't know if it's technically a crime to call somebody a racist from their car, but we'll have a conversation later today.
Fucker. Now, the interesting part about it is when I heard the voice before I I looked at the video.
I couldn't tell if it was male or female.
It was somewhere in between.
And then I look at it and it's like, oh fuck, it's Antifa.
It's fucking Antifa.
Now I don't know if it's technically a member, but they all have that little uniform.
And you know how the genders are always a little hard to determine.
It looks very Antifa.
I don't know if it is or not.
So I don't know what gender we're dealing with.
And if you're new to this, I don't care.
I'm not one of those people who cares about the labeling of the gender.
I want everybody to be happy and do whatever they want in their personal sexual preferences.
I have no biases about that at all.
It is sort of an identifying feature of Antifa.
I don't think we can doubt that.
So here's the thing. If my neighbor has the temerity to roll past my house, not trying to hide his or her identity or whatever gender-fluid situation is going on here, that's not a safe place to live.
It's not. Because when you call somebody a racist, you are giving yourself permission to hurt them physically.
And so I asked this.
Why is it that Twitter allows this?
So I just tweeted before I got on, tweeted at Jack Dorsey, that as I understand the Twitter rules and, let's say, philosophical preferences, if you will, in addition to the rules, my understanding is that Twitter doesn't want to ban free speech.
So just saying something that isn't true would not be enough to get you banned or labeled or have your tweet taken down or anything like that.
So simply being not true can't be that big of a problem in the world in which you have free speech because there's just going to be too much of it, right?
You can't really police that.
But there is a different category that Twitter cares about a lot, which is it could get somebody hurt physically, a call to violence, for example.
Or it could change the course of an election because let's say it was a tweet telling you the wrong day for election day.
That could change the actual election.
So I would want social media to flag that.
Because you do want everybody to show up on the right fucking day, right?
I mean, I don't want to win any elections so much that I want people to show up on the wrong day to win it.
That's not the way to get there.
So, here's the thing.
I think Twitter has to recognize that the fine people hoax is not like other facts.
Because it is a call to violence.
It is a pretty direct call to violence.
Because once you've said that the supporters are on the side of the neo-Nazis, in the United States, that's permission.
That's permission for violence.
It's permission for what my neighbor did, who will be hearing about it a little bit later.
It's permission. And Twitter, I think you've got to look at this pretty carefully.
This is not like other fact-checking.
When you say somebody's with the neo-Nazis in the United States in 2020, you just painted a fucking target on their back.
So let me back up to my point about when Hillary was running, it felt personal to me.
With Biden and Kamala Harris, it did not until yesterday.
Now it's fucking personal.
I've got a stake in this.
I'm actually physically at risk if this fucking lie keeps going.
I've spent months trying to kill this fucking thing.
And the fake news, who is now completely illegitimate to the point of accepting violence against part of the citizenship of this fucking country, has a lot to fucking explain.
I'll give Jake Tapper credit.
He's the only person I know, as CNN, who has clarified at least the Find People hoax on camera and said that the president went on to say he wasn't talking about that group.
So Jake's the only person who's even given a little fucking care to whether it's true or false.
And I feel like he could step up a little bit better, too.
Ultimately, I ended up blocking Jake, and so he's out of my life now.
We'd worked together on some charities and stuff.
And I liked him, but here's my rule.
If somebody thinks I'm a racist, I'm not going to be your fucking friend.
I'm not going to do a favor for you.
I'm not going to have you in my life at one little fucking bit.
Now, you can have all the opinions you want, But if you think I'm a racist because I think the president is not, if that's what you think, fuck you.
Just get out of my life and stay out.
I don't want to have anything to do with you.
If you're that fucking dumb that you believe the fine people hoax and that's coloring your worldview, in Jake's case, I don't know what the fuck's going on there.
I think he knows...
Well, I don't think he wants...
I won't assume I know what he's thinking.
So forget that. Alright, so here's the thing.
The gloves are off. And here's a specific thing that I'll be doing a little bit differently.
I had been saying that I felt bad about making fun of Biden's mental state.
Because he's not all there.
And I think that I'd been saying that he needs a more respectable send-off.
He should be retired with some dignity for his years of public service.
People say he's a nice person.
He's nice in person.
I don't doubt it.
But now it's war.
Because Biden is making it dangerous.
So let me put it very clearly.
There's almost nothing that's off the table anymore Because it's a clear and present danger to me physically.
Once it becomes a physical danger, all the rules are off.
I believe there are two ways to fight in terms of getting into a fight with another person.
Method one is run away, which is always my first choice.
If somebody wants to fight me and I think, I might get hurt.
Even if I win the fight, I might get hurt.
I don't want to get hurt. So my first instinct is run away.
And I would recommend this to all of you.
As a self-defense mechanism, run away.
So that's strategy number one, run away.
Strategy number two is to kill the person.
And anything in between is just bullshit.
Anybody who gets in a fight...
Even if they think they're going to win the fight, I don't quite understand it.
I mean, there might be some special cases where you have to because there's something in media happening.
But if you have an option, run away.
But if that person still needs to be killed, well, you know where to find them.
Why would you take a chance of getting hurt yourself?
Find them, hunt them down, and kill them.
Now, fortunately, that has never happened.
I've never had to hunt somebody down and kill them.
Because I've never had such a reason.
I hope I never do.
But my point is, I don't have an in-between speed.
So in the political sense, Biden has to go down.
Not in the physical sense.
But in the political sense, all the regulators are off.
So his rotted fucking brain can't ruin the country the way it looks like it's shaping up.
So Biden is going to have a little extra pressure on him.
More to come on that topic.
Yeah, it's a strategic retreat is what it is.
Here's what I've never understood.
Why would you hurt somebody who knows where you live?
Have you ever thought that that was weird?
I can imagine hurting somebody if they didn't know who you were and they didn't know where you lived.
But if they know who you are and where you live, why would you ever hurt somebody?
It feels like a really bad strategy for life because it's going to come back.
And it's kind of amazing to me that something like the Find People hoax and a lot of the other hoaxes They can remain completely intact because the fake news has such a good bubble that the people on the left, they really won't touch news that's not in their bubble.
You could send them an article from Breitbart.
Try this with any of your friends.
Send an article from Breitbart to one of your Trump-hating friends and say, hey, here's something that contradicts what you thought was true.
It shows its sources.
You can check for yourself and you'd see that it's right.
You can't even get them to read a Breitbart article.
They just won't do it. Won't even read it.
So their bubble is complete.
Now, I have to admit, there are a few sources that I feel the same.
If somebody sends me an article from the Huffington Post to make their point, well, I'm not going to read that.
Come on. Or the Atlantic.
Has anybody ever sent you an article from The Atlantic to make their case that, you know, Trump is orange man bad?
If I see an article from The Atlantic, I just laugh, and I think, you poor, poor bastard.
If you're reading stuff in The Atlantic, and you think that that view of the world is anything close to accurate, you poor, poor fucking bastard.
You know, I ask this question, and this is serious.
Objectively speaking, if you take politics out of it, and you're just scoring, is Biden the most prolific liar the Democrats have ever run for president?
Do you think that that's true?
Do you think that there's never been a bigger, more obvious liar than Biden?
Now, of course, you're going to say, hey, but Bill Clinton lied, and you're going to say, hey, Obama lied.
And all the politicians lie.
Let us stipulate that we don't have presidents who have told no lies according to third parties who rank these things.
But I'm just saying that Biden might be the lyingest of all the liars.
Am I wrong about that?
Because the types of lies that he's told are ridiculous ones, like his own resume.
He's lied about His education.
I mean, he's lied about some pretty big stuff.
And now he lied about the president being soft on terrorists?
What? Being soft on terrorists?
And so he says, or Vox.
If somebody sends me a Vox article, I usually just laugh.
Because you don't really need to read it to know that it's bullshit.
But if somebody sent me, you know, Something a little bit more mainstream, I might read it.
So that's just a question.
In my opinion, I think that we would find, at least in modern times, that Biden is the most lyingest Democrat who's ever run.
Purely objective things.
I think you could just score it, see how many times he's lied and what kind of lies they are.
Which is an interesting strategy.
Because what is the biggest complaint about this president?
You know, before Trump was in office, there were all these complaints about the bad things he would do, right?
He will blow up the country.
He will destroy the economy.
He will...
whatever. And then three years of governing, and none of that stuff happens, right?
He wasn't a Russian puppet.
You know, the Russia collusion didn't happen.
So after three years, you talk to your Democrat friends who hate Trump and you say, what is it about him that you hate now that you've seen that everything you thought would happen didn't happen?
And what is the usual answer?
The usual answer you'll get from an educated Trump hater who's watched him for three years and none of the things that he thought would happen happened.
And what do they say?
Well, he's a liar.
He's a big liar.
Now, fact check me on this.
Have you had this conversation after, say, three years of governing when you don't have to guess what happened?
You just look at it. Don't they say the biggest problem with the president is that he lies?
That's it, right? It's the number one thing.
Because all of the other things just sort of went away.
Now, you and I probably think, okay, you call it lying.
I call it hyperbole.
Yeah, maybe he should say less about the medical stuff.
Well, I get it. But have we not learned how to filter things?
Have we not watched enough of this president to say, okay, there's the claim.
Now let's look at what the experts say, see if it's a hyperbole or not.
Have we not learned to understand how that works?
That he is intentionally and tells us directly.
This is the fun part.
The president told us while he was running, before he was elected, after he was elected, that he uses optimism and he uses hyperbole.
And he tells us.
He actually tells us that he's going to do it.
And then he doesn't.
That feels a lot different than just making up a lie that would tear the social fabric of the country apart.
Those are not the same thing.
Biden's lying is the dangerous kind.
The president's lying, if you want to call it that, is the salesman kind.
Is the salesman destroying the country?
No.
No, probably not.
Probably just selling you a car that you might be happy with if you bought.
Somebody says, "I lived in Delaware for 20 years and he's dirty, Biden is." Well, I don't doubt that.
But he's been so vetted that, I don't know, honey, that's going to stick to him.
I know what you're talking about, though.
The credit card companies and all that stuff.
Here's something funny.
Have you seen the way that the media is treating the photography and the graphic images for Harris and Biden?
Have you noticed that they're putting...
They're putting a big picture of Kamala Harris and then they'll put a little picture of Biden standing behind her.
On what planet, in what year, have you ever seen the Vice President featured and the top of the ticket standing way back in the corner like he's disappearing?
Have you seen that?
It is so obvious that they're de-emphasizing Biden, the head of the ticket, that if this were a comedy I mean, you could play this as a comedy.
Imagine this is a movie, all right?
Literally. Imagine it's a movie, and you're seeing the graphic artists, and the graphic artist comes to the boss.
Let's say they work at one of these big publications.
They say, all right, here's my graphic treatment.
And the editor says, ah, can you make...
You've got the vice president and the president, Biden and Harris, the candidates.
You've got them the same size.
Could you go back and just make the Biden one a little bit smaller and make the Harris one a little bit bigger?
And the graphic artist goes back and now the Biden is half the size of the Harris.
And the editor says, okay, we're moving in the right direction, but the Biden is still a little bit big.
Could you, you know, just a little bit, just take a little off and give me another look?
Graphic artist comes back, and now the Biden is 30% the size of the big Harris image.
And the editor is like, could you just give me one more look?
I just want to have something to compare.
One with just a little bit smaller.
Could you make the Biden 10% the size?
And Could you hide most of the Biden, most of the body part, behind the much larger Kamala Harris picture?
And then the graphic artist looks at the editor and says, sure, sure, I'll do that.
And then as they're walking down the hallway, you see the graphic artist muttering, fucking idiot.
Now, If that were a movie, because you know something somewhat like that actually happened, you know that those pictures you saw with Tiny Biden and gigantic Kamala Harris, it wasn't the graphic artist who came up with that.
No graphic artist brought that image to their boss.
Nobody's that bad at being a graphic artist.
I'll tell you what happened.
They brought him a picture where they were balanced, And the editor said, go back to the drawing board, that Biden, we can still see it.
We can still see a little Biden in that picture.
A little less Biden.
You know that happened.
You don't have to be some mind reader to know it went down just like that.
Because no graphic artist brings tiny Biden, giant Kamala to the boss and says, how about this?
That's not draft number one.
You know it, right?
That's not first draft.
All right.
I feel like Republicans are totally falling into a trap.
I think President Trump has fallen into this trap already, and certainly all the supporters.
And here's the trap. If you're attacking Harris for her presumed sexual whatever past, and the Willie Brown stuff, and ha ha ha, she slapped her way to the top, first of all, you're not a good person.
Alright? It's a subjective thing, but in my opinion, you're not really a good person if you're going to that argument.
Because there's enough of an argument without that, and you wouldn't want it to be about you, right?
I mean, if you reverse that, would you want to be running for office and all they want to talk about is your sexual past?
No. No.
It wouldn't be fair. You wouldn't want it to happen to your daughter.
You wouldn't want it to happen to your mother.
You wouldn't want it to happen to your wife, your spouse.
You wouldn't want it to fucking happen to anybody.
So, if you're doing it, you know, if you're part of that, ha ha ha, it's funny.
Okay, I get it. You know, it's funny for about a minute, but really, it would be really helpful to get off of that quickly because it just is too easy for the...
Too easy for the Democrats, and they're already doing it, to say, well, it looks like it's misogyny all the way around.
All the Republicans are misogynists.
Looks like that president's being misogynist because the way he talks about Harris is not the way he talks about men, which you could argue.
But the president does like to use this word nasty.
Nasty. Now, here's where he's...
Clever, but maybe a little too clever in this case.
The president is superb at using imagery and words and stuff that set your brain on fire, but if you looked at it specifically, there's nothing wrong with it.
The word nasty was not invented as a gender-specific insult.
There's nobody who can't be nasty.
You could be male, female...
There's no gender assumption in nasty.
But the Democrats have decided that there is.
Now it could be that there's no history of Trump using that word against men.
I don't know. Maybe yes, maybe no.
But it feels like it's being used because she's a woman.
But it's a really good word.
Because nasty is one of those words, like dark, that you can read into it whatever you want it to put into it.
You know, dark. Well, what's dark?
Well, his attitude, the way he talks, the policies.
Everything fits into dark, but likewise, there's a lot of stuff that fits into nasty.
So, in terms of persuasion, it's a really good word.
It's a really good word, but the counter to it is a little bit better, which is, hey, you wouldn't use that word with a man, which is a pretty good counter if you're already primed to believe there's some misogyny going on.
So I would advise all of you to just let that go.
First of all, to be good people.
You don't want to stump, you don't want to lower yourself to your enemy's level.
I can see sometimes that might make sense, but I don't think you're not buying anything by doing it.
If you had something to gain by doing it, well, maybe.
There's just nothing to gain on this.
The Democrats are trying to figure out how best to protect Harris and Biden, and I don't think they've decided yet if calling her a pragmatic moderate...
I think that's the way they're going to go.
They're going to try to sell Harris as a pragmatic moderate.
But the right is selling her as a wild...
Leftist with the most progressive ideas, etc.
Which one of those is true?
Is it true that Harris is a pragmatic moderate?
Or is it true that she is a wild lefty?
What do you think? What is your honest opinion?
If you were to take the politics out, forget which team you're on for a moment, And you're just saying, alright, alright, I'll be as objective as possible.
Imagine it from 30,000 feet.
I'm an alien. I just came to Earth.
I don't have any biases or opinions.
I'm just going to look at what she says and does.
Does Harris look like a pragmatic moderate or a wild lefty?
Pragmatic moderate, in my opinion.
And when I mean pragmatic, I mean she'll take whatever position she thinks will get her elected.
So you can't get more pragmatic than that.
In my opinion, she has no commitment whatsoever to the far left.
She has a commitment to ambition.
She has a commitment to winning.
She has a commitment to herself.
She may have some good feelings about the country too.
I don't know. Can't read her mind.
But the attack that she is a wild lefty...
It probably works on the right.
In other words, Republicans are certainly primed to believe that.
And anything that she wants to do that Republicans don't want to do will feel like it's too far left.
So I think that framing works for the Republicans.
But here's the question.
The Democrats are trying to frame her in a way that can get her elected.
If you are part of the Bernie Sanders crowd, Do you want to hear that she's a pragmatic moderate?
Because I've got a feeling that the Bernie people are just going to stay home.
I don't know that they'll vote for Trump, but I don't think they're going to come out and vote for the pragmatic moderate because that's exactly what they didn't want.
That's as close to what they didn't want as anything could be.
Now, will they say, yeah, but it's better than Trump?
They might. But how enthusiastic are you for, yeah, I fought really hard for Bernie and these really leftist policies, but man, I'm going to get up early and I'm going to brave the coronavirus or I'm going to fill out my mail ballot or whatever I'm going to do to get that pragmatic moderate in there.
I don't know. It just doesn't feel inspiring to me.
So I've got a feeling that's going to hurt them.
Here's a wild card that was suggested to me.
I'm not going to give credit to people who send me DMs.
If I use your idea that you DMed to me, just take the happiness that the idea made it onto the Periscope.
Because if I haven't asked you if I can mention your name, I don't want to do it.
And I usually forget to ask that question.
So here's a thought from...
It's not an original thought.
The idea is that the young women who are Democrats are seeing Biden as a creepy old man with a younger woman.
And as soon as I heard that, I thought to myself, oh, snap.
Think about it.
Creepy old man with a younger woman.
Now, I know what you're thinking.
I know what you're thinking. You're saying, Scott, that might be a topic you know just a little bit about.
Okay, I get it.
Yes, I do have a much younger wife.
And I can tell you that my experience, no surprise, is that there's a segment of the population who really, really hates that.
I don't know exactly why.
You know, you'd have to open up their brains and do a brain scan and figure out what's going on there.
But there is something incredibly triggering in a bad way when an older man and a younger woman are, certainly if they're married or they're together, but even though a vice president and a president are not in any kind of a personal relationship of that sort, does it feel like it?
It kind of feels like it.
There's my cat's tail going by.
Oh, perfect. Yeah, just leave it right there.
Oh, that works, yeah.
If you're listening to this on the audio only, my face was temporarily replaced by a giant cattail.
Alright, so I've got a feeling that this whole old man, creepy old man with younger woman thing is kind of a turn-off for a certain number of Democrats.
Uh... And we'll see if that makes a difference.
I think it might. All right.
Have you noticed that President Trump, when he gives his briefings about the coronavirus, have you noticed that he started to put the United States' progress in the context of how we're doing compared to Europe?
Have you heard that? Now, I'm assuming that the numbers he's talking about in terms of Europe's experience versus the United States are in the ballpark, meaning that if you compare Europe as a whole, not country to country, but compare them as a whole, the president is making the point that they're having a renewed problem, there's some kind of second wave situation happening, and that we're actually doing well compared to Europe.
I haven't seen the fact checkers disagree with that.
And I imagine they would, right?
That would be at the top of the things they would disagree with if it were not true.
And I've given up on trying to look at data.
Anytime you try to Google, well, is that true?
Let me Google whether Europe is doing better or worse than the United States.
You can find information, but you can't find anything you trust.
At least if you're me.
So you'll find competing information.
You'll find stuff that's a month old.
You'll find stuff about one country.
You'll find stuff that measures things a different way in the United States.
But it's not really...
I won't say it's impossible, but it's nearly impossible to go research anything yourself.
Because there's just too much noise out there in the data.
So, anyway, I think it's smart of the president to compare himself to these other countries because, as I predicted a while ago, they were doing well compared to the United States for a while.
But what changed?
You knew it was going to change.
All right. Here's a criticism of the administration.
For those of you who say, Scott, Scott, Scott, why do you only say good things about the Trump administration?
A, I don't.
I don't. I have plenty of criticisms.
I do talk more about what they do right, and I do defend them more than I criticize, but that's because the criticism part is so well taken care of.
You don't need another person to point out the same thing that's all the headlines.
You don't need that from me.
So I like to show you the view that's less expressed.
And here's my criticism.
I've talked about this before.
There's the idea that we already have the technology and it would be easy to ramp up for these cheap, over-the-counter paper-script tests for coronavirus.
Now, apparently, these are a good test which will tell you if you currently have the virus versus used to have the virus and only have antibodies.
So that's the first thing you have to understand, that these cheap, could be even one dollar, cheap little tests will tell you if you have it, as opposed to will tell you if you used to have it.
So that's the first advantage.
Second advantage is you get your answer in a few minutes, meaning that you could do it every day.
You could test yourself before you left the house.
You could test yourself in the lobby of your employer.
You could test yourself before you go to the sporting event.
So if it only costs a dollar, and you get your answer really quickly, that's pretty darn good, right?
I mean, you could imagine that that would lower the R... Was the R0, or whatever they call it?
It would lower the transmission rate enough that we'd really get on top of this thing.
It wouldn't make it go away, but we could really get on top of it.
Now, the critics say, but, but, but, Scott.
It doesn't...
This type of test won't pick up the virus when you're asymptomatic for like a day, that first day, to which I say, that's right.
It gets all the other times when you're the most spready, but it will miss, you know, we know this, it doesn't get that first day because you don't have enough, I guess, whatever to detect it.
But it doesn't matter.
If you got 80% of the, if 80% of the time you were right, That would be the best thing ever.
So the first thing you need to know is that these paper strips could be only 80% getting it right.
The 20% is wrong is because it's just too early.
If you could create a test that could do that for $1, widely available and immediate response, it doesn't matter that you only get 80% of it.
It doesn't matter.
That is so good that if you're doing this much testing, you would just stamp out the virus probably in a couple weeks, you know, if it were ubiquitous.
So here's my question.
So this idea I... I can tell you from personal knowledge, has been promoted up through the administration.
So the administration is completely aware of this option.
There's some kind of FDA thing that makes it impractical, so private industry can't just go ahead and do it.
So there are private companies who could just ramp up and do this.
They have the technology, ramping it up isn't that hard, it's paper strips.
Oh, and if you're worried about privacy, this is a test you give yourself, unless you're trying to get into an event, and then of course that would be different.
But it's a test you would give yourself, so nobody has to know what your result is unless you tell them.
So the administration knows about this option, and we have heard Nothing about whether they like it, and nothing about whether they don't, and nothing about what they may or may not do about it.
Now, I'm not going to say that I know this is the great answer and that I've considered everything and I know all the context and I know what's good or bad about this.
I don't. I'm just saying that our administration is failing us at the moment on this question because we don't have an answer.
At the very least, I need somebody like the president, or ideally more like the head of the FDA. I want somebody who's probably the head of the FDA to say, this test exists, or it could exist, you could ramp up, and then tell us why it's not already a thing.
If you're working on it, please tell us.
If it's going to happen in a week, there's going to be some change to make this possible, please tell us.
That would be the biggest fucking thing you could tell us.
If you're not going to do it, and there's a reason, fucking tell us.
I just want to know the reason.
I don't need it to be right.
I don't need it to be the solution if it's not.
I don't want you to lie to me.
I just need to know where we're at.
And so there's this big black hole where this is According to the people who have looked at it, the most obvious, ramp-up-able, practical, completely doable solution that would make this whole fucking pandemic go away if it's real.
But what if it's not real?
I need to fucking know that too!
We need to know if it's not real.
Just tell us where you're at, FDA. Because Without that feedback, again, the FDA might be completely right.
So I'm not ruling out the option that the FDA has looked at it and judged that it's a bad option.
They have their reasons, and it hasn't been communicated.
Failure. That is a failure, because you've got to fucking communicate it.
We're all in this.
Like, if you think the public is not fully engaged in this fucking pandemic, think again.
Right? FDA, you're not like operating in some little satellite out there.
You're fucking connected to the public.
And we need just an answer.
Just fucking tell us.
Is this a thing or is it not a thing?
Just inform us.
All right. Um...
I guess that's just about what I wanted to cover today.
If the paper test is...
Now, somebody's saying reliable for the paper test.
I'd like to get the language correct because I've been corrected on it and I think it's helpful.
When you're talking about the test, don't think of it in terms of accurate or not accurate, or reliable or not reliable.
It's very reliable for the thing it does.
So for the thing it does, it's really good.
The thing it does is pick up a virus after that first day or so.
What it doesn't do is it's not designed that it could pick up that first day, but you don't need it to solve the problem.
You could miss that first day every time.
That's the proposition.
You would miss it every time, but you would get the other stuff really, really well, and that would be all you need.
All right. Yeah, we talked about my neighbor.
You missed that part. So here's something amazing.
So every time I see Alex Berenson tweet about masks being unproven, it's making me crazy.
Because I think to myself, how do we not know, and I tweeted this yesterday, how do we not know now whether masks help?
And I thought to myself, this is just crazy.
This Berenson guy keeps tweeting that To the effect that we don't have any information that masks work.
And I'm thinking, that can't be possible.
I mean, certainly it was possible in the beginning.
But five months in?
We don't know for sure.
And here's what's going on, I think.
The first thing that I think is going on is that people are looking at these various lab studies.
The lab studies are all fucking bullshit.
All of them. 100% of them are bullshit.
So if you saw a study that said that these masks stopped these water particles or whatever, and so therefore masks are good, that study is bullshit.
If you saw the opposite, that there was a study that said that the particles get through, or it makes it even worse, or they're getting out through the edges or something, and in the lab they showed that that's true, that study is complete bullshit.
So whether or not the lab study showed it works or the lab study showed it doesn't work, they're all bullshit.
None of that should be taken as credible because they don't test it in the real world.
Basically, they're just saying some droplets came out or some droplets didn't or we measured this or we measured that.
But what they don't tell you is that in every case, The covering is going to change at least the direction of where stuff is going.
At the very least, it's filtering it to the side or whatever.
At the very least, it's changing the viral load.
I mean, even if all it did was distribute it as opposed to send it directly into the mouth and eyes of the person you're talking to, if that's all it did, it probably would distribute the load.
And none of these things are tested in the lab tests.
The lab tests are all just looking in one window of the Taj Mahal.
That's it. Every one of them looks in one window and they go, alright, I guess I know what the Taj Mahal is.
I'm looking in one window and it looks like the Taj Mahal is a men's room.
It looks like that's a bathroom in there.
If you're only looking through one window, you don't know anything.
That's what all the lab tests are.
The only thing that would convince me is real-world usage, where somehow you could say, this group is exactly like this other group.
That's the hard part, right?
Getting any two comparable groups and say, well, they use masks, and look how well it did.
They didn't use masks, and look how well it did.
Now, the next thing that people do is they'll send me this one country or one state.
They'll say, Look at this one state.
Here's where they put the masks.
Here's where it didn't work.
Do you know what is also useless?
Sending me one state.
Every time you see a graph of one state, or two or three, you know, anything in the small numbers, and it says, here's the masks, this day is when they were mandatory, and look, infections still went up, then you don't understand how to look at data.
Because all you've seen is that things are getting worse.
You don't know what the masks did.
If you didn't have masks, would that curve be even worse?
That's the question.
If you don't know if it would be even worse without the mask, you don't know anything.
You don't know anything.
Here's what I would find convincing.
All of the countries that did masks, somehow putting them in a bucket.
All the states, all the countries, the mask people, put them in one bucket and all together.
So you're not seeing just the weirdities of any one country or the weirdities of any one state.
Compare that to all the places that didn't do masks.
And just show me the two curves.
If you can adjust them by time, I guess you'd have to do that, because everybody's sort of on their own schedule there.
So if you could do that, would that whole entire giant basket of people using masks have a noticeably different curve, collectively, than all the ones that didn't use masks?
Or, yeah, I guess that would be the best way.
Now if you show me that, And they don't look that much different?
Well, I would say that would be pretty convincing.
If you showed me that, and there is a big difference, I'd say, okay, well there it is.
That's not a controlled clinical trial, but for the same reason that hydroxychloroquine, you don't know if it works.
I don't know. I put it at 30% chance that it's a big deal.
But it's still worth taking it because the risk is so low, right?
So if you have a low risk, and yes, yes, I know there are people who can have problems with the masks.
I know the dentist has the foul mouth smell problem.
I know it keeps the bacteria close to your face.
I know the mask can get infected.
I know you might touch your face.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But if it shows overall that the masks are making a difference in the pandemic, I would consider that important.
And I think it's astonishing that we're still having this conversation five months in.
So here's my take on it.
I don't know if masks work.
It seems to me obvious they do.
But being obvious that something works is different than being scientifically true and proven.
We all agree that you can be easily fooled Just by looking at stuff.
That's not science.
Science is not saying, well, it looks like it'd work.
But your reason should tell you that at the very least, it's keeping your exhalations a little bit local.
And if they're floating in the air afterwards, they're probably dispersed and probably a lower viral load.
And if masks don't work, well, I'd be very surprised.
Wouldn't be impossible. I don't rule it out.
I don't rule it out that Sunday we'll find that masks made things worse.
I just think it's a small chance.
If I had to put the odds on it, I would say 95% chance that masks are helping in an important way, 5% chance that we got it all wrong.
That's the odds I'd put on it, just observationally.
So I'm just amazed that we don't even know that.
If there's one thing we've learned from this whole coronavirus thing is that we can't trust any of the studies, you can't trust any of the experts, and everything you think is true is going to be untrue tomorrow.
And take that thinking over to climate change because it's the same conversation.
Now, by the way, for however many years I've argued that we can't do useful models of the future, 80 years in the future, for climate change.
Most people who have not done data analysis for a living, I would think, or have not been close to it anyway, would think maybe I'm wrong.
Maybe you could do an 80 year projection about temperature and how that will affect the world.
Maybe you could. And you would not be an idiot for thinking maybe that was possible.
You would just be somebody who had a different kind of experience in life.
I've done projections Anybody else who's done this kind of work knows it's not a thing.
It's not even close to a thing.
It's not in the neighborhood of being a thing.
It's nowhere near a thing, but it's presented as a thing.
Now once the coronavirus has I think it ruined all of us in terms of trusting data, trusting scientists, trusting the consensus, trusting individuals or organizations, trusting the government, trusting anything.
We've just learned that literally nothing can be trusted in the scientific or political realm.
Nothing. But will we take that understanding in the gelman amnesia way Will we take what we learned in this coronavirus situation about the undependability of projections, will we take that to climate change?
Evidence suggests that most people won't.
That they won't make the leap.
That they won't have the sophistication to say, you know, everything was wrong about the coronavirus.
Just everything. Every person, every organization, every model, Everything.
It was all wrong. Oh, but this climate change stuff, we got that nailed.
Got that nailed.
Lucky we got this stuff right.
But the one time you can really see if it's right or wrong, it's all wrong.
Really? That's just a coincidence, right?
The one time you can clearly know if the experts were right or wrong, they were wrong as much as they were right.
Coincidence? Well, it could be the fog of war.
But I don't think that explains it totally.
You know, I'm not on the anti-Fauci train because there's a mind-reading element to that that I'm not comfortable with.
Anything against Fauci, in my opinion, rests on the assumption that he had bad intentions.
He had some financial connection or bad intentions.
I just don't feel that's an evidence.
And assuming that he's feeling that way or secretly thinking that way is not a standard I would put on anybody else.
I wouldn't put it on him. And the fact that he was wrong about some stuff, I told you from the beginning.
On day one of the, you know, when we knew this coronavirus thing was going to be a big deal, very early on, I made a really big deal of saying, I want to tell you now That our leaders are going to make a lot of mistakes.
And you shouldn't blame them because nobody knows the right thing to do.
Later we'll know what was the right thing to do and then we'll think we're all fucking geniuses because we looked in the past and say, well, why didn't he know?
Why didn't he know?
And of course nobody knew.
There was always going to be somebody who guessed right.
If you take a bunch of marbles and you've got a circle drawn on the ground, you just drop your marbles and Some will land in the circle, some will land outside the circle because they'll roll.
If it turned out later that being inside the circle was better than outside the circle, were the marbles that were inside the circle the smart marbles?
No! Marbles are not smart.
They just ended up where they ended up.
And likewise, leaders around the country took their best guess.
They took their best guess.
Some of them were going to be right, Or right-er.
And some of them were going to be wrong or wrong-er, just like the marbles.
And at the end, because we're humans, we will attribute genius to the marbles that landed inside the circle.
We'll say, hey, look, it's pretty obvious.
The marbles that were inside the circle are the good leaders.
Those are the good leaders because they picked the right place to be.
No, they didn't. It was random.
People were guessing some of them got it right.
They're not the smart ones.
The ones who've corrected are the good leaders.
So if you're looking for a skill, look for the people who got it wrong and then correct it.
And I'm going to surprise you.
Boris Johnson, it looks like, you know, this might change in time, so just current snapshot.
It looks like Boris Johnson got it completely wrong.
Meaning that he was going to go for H.E.R.D. like Sweden, but then they reversed course.
Quite dramatically, they reversed course.
It looks like the reversing of the course was better.
Don't know yet. We could find out that maybe they should have just gone for H.E.R.D. But at the moment, it looks like they made a bad decision at first, and then they corrected it.
So who's the good leader?
Is the good leader who made the right decision first or the one who corrected?
I kind of like the one who corrects, right?
You don't want to be on the team that got it wrong and then had to correct.
Wouldn't you rather be on the team that got it right?
But you have to realize nobody knew what to do.
So the Boris Johnson approach, if indeed history proves that it was very wrong in the beginning, but they did adjust, I would look at the adjustment to look for the leadership.
That's where I would look for the leadership.
So I'm not willing to throw Boris Johnson under the bus or any of the other leaders.
Let's wait to see how this turns out.
And let's be a little bit forgiving about the leaders who got it wrong.
But the correcting? Oh yeah, you want to look at the correcting.
You want to make sure they got that right.
All right. It's amazing that the Russians were first to get the vaccination.
Well, that's not amazing if you imagine that they cut corners.
So I'm being prompted in the comments to mention Canon Hinnant.
I guess the story is the little five-year-old or something who got murdered by the neighbor.
Now, I think the reason that...
Conservatives or pro-Trumpers are pushing that story is because they say, hey, how come this is not a national story?
Because it was a black man, neighbor who assassinated, basically, just walked up to a little kid with a gun and just killed him.
That's the story, allegedly.
And then the complaint is, why is the national media not covering it?
And I would argue, why should they?
I don't agree with the argument.
It's a good political argument.
If you want to push the argument for political reasons, it's a political season.
But, in my opinion, it is not national news.
It is a tragedy that doesn't have a political element to it that I can see.
If somebody gets murdered wearing a MAGA hat, Well then, that's also a tragedy, but it's also a national story because it connects to politics.
But one child tragically murdered by a neighbor, does it matter that the neighbor is a different ethnicity?
I don't know. Why should it?
I mean, we don't know what was going on there, but it looks like a mental health problem, right?
So to me, it just looks like a mental health problem that doesn't connect to any larger issue.
So we can be horrified by it.
We can be informed by it.
But you shouldn't take it as some larger political thing.
That's what I think. Alright.
Somebody says a peace deal is going on.
A peace deal between Israel and the UAE. Interesting.
Interesting. Okay.
I'll check up on that.
It does seem like Israel may be taking advantage of the coronavirus to get some stuff done.
But when I say take advantage, I mean in a good way.
It looks like a lot of Iranian military assets are catching on fire.
A lot of Hezbollah's assets seem to be blowing up.
So I think Israel is mopping up things and doing a good job of it.
All right. Oh, at the moment, the slaughter meter is 100%.
I can't see from this perspective Trump losing, or even coming close to losing.
I just don't see it.
But, it's still a long time until November, so the slaughter meter specifically excludes surprises.
And there will be surprises.
So you can't use it as a prediction, but it's fun.
Yeah, the George Floyd thing was political because of the issue of police, blah, blah, blah.
And somebody says, if you reversed the ethnicities, would it then be a national story?
Not in my opinion. No.
Because in both cases, it would be a mental health story.
It's not a political story.
Alright, that's all I've got for now.
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