Episode 1143 Scott Adams: I Tell You How the Trump Diagnosis Changes Everything
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Content:
What caused so many COVID19 White House infections?
The most 2020 things that could happen
Is HCQ in the President's cocktail of medications?
Where are the "numerous" White supremacist terror examples?
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Come on in. It's another great morning featuring coffee with Scott Adams.
It's the best part of the day. Does it get better than this?
I don't think so.
Well, today I'm doing a little experiment in which I am live streaming simultaneously from two devices.
I've got one device live streaming to YouTube and one live streaming to Periscope per normal.
Just an experiment.
I don't know if I'll do it again.
But before we get to the news, what do we need?
That's right. It's time for the Simultaneous Sip and all you need is a cup or mug or a glass of tank or a chalice or a stein, a canteen jug or a flask.
A vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
It's called the Simultaneous Sip and you're about to enjoy it now.
Go. I feel my livestream audience is 10% better just because of that sip right there.
That's called science.
Well, let's see what's going on.
Certainly it seems that the vice presidential debate might take on a little bit of extra importance.
But you know what's interesting about the vice presidential debate?
Is that pretty much nobody in the world wants either of those two people to be president.
So we're in this weird 2020 situation where we're saying, you know, it might not be Biden so much.
Maybe Kamala Harris is the important one in this race.
And meanwhile, President Trump is in the hospital.
So people are saying, well, you know, we don't want this to happen, but we got to be serious about a vice presidential option.
How did we get to the point where we spent the most powerful and capable country of all time, the United States, spent two years scouring the country to find the two best candidates for the two parties.
And when we were done, we ended up with two candidates That probably couldn't win a mayor's race at this point.
Well, that's not true.
They could both be in Congress, for sure.
But I exaggerate.
The point being, I'm not sure anybody wants, really, to see a President Kamala Harris or a President Pence, but maybe that's what we're talking about now.
So we'll see how that goes.
I just read that the Nobel Peace Prize, there's of course a betting market, so people are trying to bet who will win, and two of the entities that are near the top of the betting list for the Nobel Peace Prize are the World Health Organization.
No, I'm not even joking.
This is really happening in the actual reality world, if there is reality.
The World Health Organization is being considered for the Nobel Prize, at least according to the betting markets.
The other one's even better.
Black Lives Matter is being considered, at least in the betting markets, for the Nobel Prize as well.
In that case, I think Black Lives Matter is the movement, not the specific organization.
Now, how much prestige Would you assign to the Nobel Peace Prize if two of the top entities under consideration are two of the most discredited entities of all time?
It kind of makes the whole thing worthless, doesn't it?
I certainly don't see Black Lives Matter as pursuing peace, even if you were completely on their side.
What does no justice, no peace mean to the Nobel Peace Prize?
Because to me it sounds like we're kind of a little bit, sort of, not kidding, pro-violence if we don't get our way.
That feels like if you were going to draw down on paper and you said to yourself, hypothetically, What would be the least like a peaceful organization that you could imagine?
What would be the absolute opposite of a peace promoting situation?
Well, I would say it would be someone whose famous chant is, no justice, no peace.
It's really the opposite.
The World Health Organization, of course, is owned by China and gave us bad advice on the coronavirus.
Which killed a lot of people.
To the extent that the coronavirus is like an enemy.
You know, it's like a war and the coronavirus is our enemy.
Which side was the World Health Organization on?
It's a little unclear.
I mean, obviously they did helpful things too.
But I would say that situation is a little bit ambiguous.
I've got a clarification from, I think, from yesterday's Periscope.
I was talking about the possibility that some people might be genetically inclined to be super spreaders.
I won't name names, but I've been informed by someone who knows a lot more than I do, mostly including reading the actual study that I tweeted around, that the super spreader more accurately refers to a situation than a person.
So whether or not there are people who are more likely to spread it than other people by something about them, that would be still unknown.
But we do know that situations where people are in close contact seem to be the super-spreader situations.
That said, does it make any sense to you that a 400-pound mouth breather would be the same amount of risk as a 100-pound A person who doesn't breathe as much.
Wouldn't it matter how much volume of air you're moving around you?
Makes no difference.
I mean, maybe it makes no difference because it could be that regardless of the volume of air, it's the same amount of virus because you only have so much in you.
Maybe. Who knows?
But I would not rule out the possibility that there's some difference in who could spread it Even if the only difference is how big you are and what your lung capacity is.
Seems just common sense.
There must be something there.
Alright. I asked on Twitter, we'll talk about the president in a minute, but I asked on Twitter, how many people are watching less drama movies or drama TV or reading dramatic books?
And 62% of people said they either stopped watching fictional drama or they cut way back.
Two-thirds of people, almost two-thirds of people, cut back on their entertainment and drama.
I wonder if that's a permanent change.
Because it might be.
Now, I don't know if it's only because of the stress.
There's just too much stress in real life so people don't need any extra.
I would think that's the big reason.
And the reason I ask the question is I've completely eliminated drama from my life in terms of entertainment.
So I won't watch a drama movie.
Definitely won't read a drama book.
Won't watch a drama TV show.
Just don't need even fictional anything.
I don't need any of it. And every once in a while I'll sample something.
Because I'll say to myself, well, this is sort of a light drama.
You know, it's not really that violent or anything.
Five minutes in, I'll say, why am I watching entertainment, which is literally designed to make me feel tense so that they can make me feel better at the end or feel something or cry at the end?
Why would I want my emotions to be manipulated for entertainment?
They're way attenuated already.
The last thing I need is a little more piling on to my emotional stability when there's plenty of reasons to be alarmed.
Some other reasons that people have given for watching less TV drama is that it's too politically heavy-handed.
Have you had that experience?
Have you had the experience yet where you think, oh, this might be a good movie, and you turn it on and it's so anti-male that you just say, uh, I don't really want to watch something that's anti-male.
And then you turn the channel and say, oh, I'll try something else.
And you turn it on and it's anti-male.
And then you think, well, maybe that's a coincidence.
And then the insurance commercial comes on and it's anti-male.
It feels as though all entertainment has turned into anti-male entertainment.
I don't know if I've told anybody this story before.
Maybe I've told this on Periscope.
If I haven't, this will be, I think, the first time I might be telling it in public.
Maybe I said it on a podcast somewhere?
And it goes like this.
Some of you know I was trying to write a Dilbert movie a few years ago.
I had converted a room into a movie writing room in my house.
I had notes all over the walls.
I had the scenes drawn out.
And I had pretty much the entire plot work down in my head, and I just needed to, you know, finish the dialogue and pull it all together.
And I abandoned the entire project after, I would say, a year of work, and I abandoned it cold.
Why did I do that?
The reason was I had written it to be anti-male.
And I didn't really realize it because it wasn't any kind of a conscious decision I'd made.
I had just sort of written it with the influence of the world in my head.
And the plot, everything was sort of designed so it would end up with, you don't need to know the details, but It was more of a celebration of women and men not being so competent.
Now, of course, it was in a humorous context, and it was supposed to be an interesting reveal at the end and everything.
And when I was done, I was actually disgusted with myself.
And I was also completely conscious that I'd fallen into these...
Social justice model of how a movie needed to look.
And when I realized that my creative choices were so compressed that there was only one way it could be, I couldn't just write a movie.
I couldn't just write it like real life.
I couldn't write it interesting.
I couldn't do anything with it unless it conformed to this narrow band of what Is socially appropriate?
And when I realized that I had fallen into this super uncreative ditch where I couldn't get out, because if I changed it, it would no longer look appropriate.
And so I abandoned the whole thing.
Probably millions of dollars in terms of potential upside.
Because I could probably get a movie made if I push hard enough.
I have enough connections, etc.
But I just couldn't be part of that.
So that's part of why people are watching less, I think.
Somebody else suggested that social media is just more inviting.
So compared to the quick hit you get on your phone, a movie is boring.
How many of you have had this experience?
You turn on a movie, or let's say sports or something, that used to completely entertain you.
You watch for about a minute, and the next thing you know, you're playing on your phone at the same time.
And you're sort of watching the movie, but the phone is more interesting.
And then the next thing you know, 15 minutes has gone by, and you didn't watch the movie because it wasn't as interesting as your phone.
So that's part of it.
Then somebody suggested that, at least when it comes to sports, that it's hard to watch the BLM Kneeling sports.
So there's some people who are turned off by that.
I've got a feeling that the entire entertainment landscape is really in for a shock.
More so than it's already had.
Along those same lines, I tweeted a video of one of the kids who was killed in the Parkland shootings from a few years ago.
And his name is Joaquin Oliver.
And although the teenager was killed during that tragedy, they brought him back to life as a deepfake.
In other words, they used computer-generated technology.
They called it AI, but I'm not sure exactly if artificial intelligence is really the right term for what they did.
Maybe. I'm not saying it's not true, but I don't know exactly what the AI part would be.
But here's the thing. They created a full-sized, full-body movement fake of the deceased teenager talking to the camera and doing sort of an anti-gun presentation.
And you could, if you were looking for it, you could tell it wasn't real.
Barely. Just barely could you tell that this thing wasn't real.
And here's the question I ask.
Given the weird coincidence that the deepfake technology became mature exactly now, at the very time that you can't really easily make a movie because of COVID, so real actors can't do their work at exactly the same time The digital version of actors became practical.
That is a weird coincidence, isn't it?
It's almost like, why is it a coincidence that the protesters get to wear masks because of COVID, which really makes the protests more effective because they wear masks?
That's a big coincidence.
There's a lot of big coincidences happening with this COVID stuff.
So it could be the end of real actors in Hollywood, or the beginning of what will obviously be the end of them.
Because why would you hire real actors if you can create digital ones that once created, it would be expensive to create them the first time, but once you've created a fully realized digital fake, you can make a lot of movies using the characters that you've already created.
And if it's a sequel, Let's say the sequel has, you know, the main characters are just the same ones.
It could get really, really economical.
How long will it be before there's a digital Tom Cruise that, you know, doesn't look like Tom Cruise, but is the, let's say, the charisma equivalent?
You know, you look at the digital and you say, oh, that's a pretty good, pretty interesting person there.
Not long. I think we're about there.
All right. Let's see what else is going on.
Of course, the president went to Walter Reed.
You all know about that. And there's just so much to say about that.
So let me just start at the beginning.
Rasmussen Reports did a funny tweet this morning, and they said, It has now been over 24 hours since POTUS was asked publicly if he denounces white supremacists.
A constitutional crisis surely looms.
It's funny because it's based on something that feels true.
The entire news industry had completely formed around that we're just going to keep asking this one question in different ways.
And that was going to be the news cycle until the election.
How many ways could we ask the president, does he really seriously denounce white supremacists again?
Well, he just did it like five minutes ago.
Well, but does he denounce it now?
Because that was five minutes ago.
And by the way, we don't remember it.
What do you mean you don't remember it?
Here's a video. Look, I'll play the video for you here.
Watch this. I denounce All white supremacists.
There you see? Good. Five minutes ago.
It's on video. There you go.
Does he denounce it now?
What is wrong with you?
It's right here from five minutes ago.
On video. You can verify.
This is real. Yeah.
But he said white supremacists, but he didn't mention neo-Nazis, which is kind of striking.
Well, but it's all the same thing.
I don't know. Is it?
I think we're going to need a little clarification.
Because, you know, white supremacists, yeah, they overlap.
They overlap with the neo-Nazis.
But we need a little clarification on neo-Nazis.
Well, here's a video of him denouncing neo-Nazis, calling them neo-Nazis.
That's a little older.
That's months old.
Does he still? I mean, how do we know he still denounces them?
So that was the cycle that we were about to be in, which was just horrible.
In terms of boring news, it's almost as bad as somebody famous dying, and you just have to listen to that for five days.
Yeah, we respect the people who died, but it ruins the news cycle for a while, if we're being honest.
So, why doesn't the White House get some of those coronavirus sniffing dogs?
I talked to you about those before.
So apparently, it is actually possible, and it has been demonstrated to work.
You can teach some kinds of dogs to detect coronavirus even before they have symptoms.
How cool would that be? Because I can't imagine there would be a faster, more reliable way to have a continuous checking in the White House than to literally have a White House dog who just walks around and sniffs everybody all day long.
Even if they've had a recent test, give them a sniff.
Can't hurt. So I get that there are not many dogs who have been trained yet, but if you had even one dog That you were pretty sure it could sniff coronavirus?
That one dog needs to be in that one place, right?
If ever there was a place for a corona-sniffing dog, yeah, you'd like to put him in the senior citizen homes and the elder care homes.
That's great. But let's put one of those dogs in the White House.
I feel like we've demonstrated the need for that.
And plus, it's a great visual.
How much would the press...
Just love to death a White House dog that was actually protecting the White House, literally.
An actual dog protecting the White House.
It would be video candy.
So let's get a sniffing dog.
So let's talk about how any of this is going to affect the election.
Now I would say first of all that Events are changing and morphing quite quickly.
So whatever we think is likely to be the outcome of this as of today, check back in 10 minutes, because there might be so much that's changed that any hot take is just obliterated in 10 minutes.
One of the ways that happened is more people getting coronavirus diagnoses.
So it was one thing when the president had it.
When the president was the only one we were talking about, obviously lots of people have it, but when he was the one we were focusing on at the White House, what did you feel about that?
Well, you probably thought, okay, it's a story about, you know, the left is going to say he's a dumbass, he deserved it by not wearing masks, didn't take it seriously, it's karma, you know, got what he asked for.
And of course, The Republicans would say some version of, well, he asked the public to go back to work, he went back to work, he took normal precautions, maybe even better than normal precautions, and it didn't work out.
But it was the same risk he asked the public to take, so of course you want him to take the same risk that he's asking you to take.
It just feels more like leadership.
So it was going to be spun that way, but Probably the bigger theme is that there would be empathy for the president.
It's hard to dump on somebody when they're down.
So even Joe Biden quite cleverly announced that they were going to pull all their negative campaign ads.
Now, that was a really smart thing to do.
The way the public is going to see it is, wow, that's what good people do.
They don't dump on people when they're down.
But it was of course a brilliant political move.
Because by Biden pulling the political ads, what does that make you feel about President Trump?
Does it make you feel more empathy?
I don't know. Maybe.
But what it makes you feel is that he's weak.
If Biden had kept the pressure on campaigning at full strength with full negative campaign ads, he might get a little blowback for being too aggressive, possibly.
But it would also make Trump look strong.
Because you don't make your full court attack against somebody who's weak.
So Biden got this perfect opportunity, I think he was well advised, unless it was his decision, he was well advised that they could save money on TV ads, That's good.
Save a bunch of money. A week of ads, probably a lot of money.
At the same time, by saving the money on the ads, he can look like the nice person in the race.
That's a bonus. Saves money.
Looks like the nice person.
But it's the third thing that's the killer.
The third thing.
Who is it that you go easy on?
If you ease up, it's because the other person is weak.
In some way. So he's managed to frame the president as very weakened.
At the same time, he's making himself look like a nice guy.
At the same time, he's saving money.
That's about as good a play as you can get out of a campaign.
So whoever is advising the Biden campaign, at least on this stuff, very competent.
In fact, I would say, overall, the Biden advisors have been pretty good.
I'm going to sneeze. This is going to be ugly.
Trying to hold it.
Hold it. See if I can get past the sneeze.
Okay, I think I did.
All right. Now, the fact that so many people have now been diagnosed with the coronavirus, I think, completely changes the narrative.
When it was mostly the president, you could say a big part of the story is we feel sorry for him, there's empathy, don't dump on him, and we hope he does well, etc.
But as soon as you realize that a lot of people in his inner circle got infected, and I think it's up to nine people, Kellyanne Conway, three senators, a priest, Ronald McDaniel, once you get that many, It really changes the story, doesn't it?
In my mind, it changed the story from, you know, we have some empathy because the president's sick, to, wait a minute, are you telling me that because they did not take proper care, and because they did not wear face masks as they would like the public to do, and because they had a public gathering in tight spaces, everything we're not supposed to do?
And that it worked out exactly the way the experts would say it would.
If you do these things, you're going to have this outcome.
We experts tell you.
Are there any experts who disagree?
Well, not too many. You can always find the skeptics, etc., about masks and social stuff.
But most experts...
Left and right, most experts, would have said that all of those things the White House did are exactly the things you don't do.
They did them in public.
They got a pretty big infection rate.
It could be the end.
That could be the end for Trump.
The fact that this is so starkly Incompetent.
Yeah, I don't know if you could use any other word.
You know, I like to put the best spin on it, but if it had just been the president, I would have said bad luck.
Just bad luck, and maybe even good role modeling.
But the fact that the entire events seem to be that poorly protected, now I'd say the narrative has shifted to incompetence, unfortunately.
You know, now...
You don't have to like that, but I don't know how you can escape it.
Now, does that mean that, in my opinion, that the not wearing masks and the social distancing is definitely the cause of all those infections?
I don't know. I don't know.
You have to think that anybody who would not wear a mask and would, you know, hug people in public...
During a public event, during a coronavirus, they're probably doing similar things at home, don't you think?
Don't you think it's a group of people who, by their nature, are either going to be lax with masks all the time, at least if they can get away with it, or are they only lax with masks at the White House?
So the first thing you have to ask is, is there something about this group of people Who are unusually unwilling to take the precautions that most experts should say.
So I think the President has a big, big problem with that.
Now, how could that change between now and Election Day?
Well, we could find out that there's more news that's still going to happen between now and Election Day than we've seen so far all year.
If 2020 stays in character, There's good stuff that hasn't even happened yet.
And it might be the big stuff.
Who knows what it could be.
But it could be big.
And we'll wait for that.
So everything that we think is true on any given day between now and Election Day, just assume that it could be wiped off just the way the coronavirus diagnosis of the president wiped everything else off the map.
One of the problems that the public and the press are having with this situation is it didn't fit into any model that we had before.
For almost anything that comes up in the news, we can always say, well, that was like the 1826 gambit, the 1968 convention, and very similar to the 1979 thing that happened.
And then we say, okay, is it more like which one of those things?
And then our brains can wrap around a new thing.
Say, okay, it's a new thing, but it's like these other things.
The president getting the coronavirus this close to election, this is not like any other thing.
There's no model that you can go to and say, all right, all right, if it worked out this way before, and this is sort of similar, this is how this will go.
We got nothing. There's no history that informs us.
There's no common sense that tells us where it goes.
There's no road map.
Just don't know in terms of how it affects the election, etc.
So that is unusually disconcerting in an otherwise disconcerting way.
But here's one possibility.
Let's say that things go the way of the best script.
I've talked about this before.
There's some reason, and I don't know why, that you often get this situation where real life goes the same way that a movie script would have gone.
In other words, the most interesting thing that could happen actually happens.
Now, you're seeing this with President Trump getting coronavirus.
If you were writing the script, and this was just a movie, would you give President Trump coronavirus?
Yes. Yes, you would.
Because that's what would make the story extra interesting.
As sad as it is, and tragic, extra interesting.
But what would make it extra interesting from this point on?
Now, I'm going to give you some Some ideas of what that could involve, but this is very important.
Before I talk about this, I want you to understand I'm not wishing for any of this to happen.
Very important. I don't want anything that I'm going to describe to happen.
It just falls into the category of the most interesting thing that could happen.
Don't want it to happen.
I'll say that in the middle, and I'm going to say it at the end.
Don't want any of this to happen.
Seriously, do not want any of this to happen.
Alright? Now that you're primed, you're all adults, you can handle this thought, right?
Don't freak out. And I wouldn't talk about this outside of this periscope too much, if I were you.
Do me a favor. Don't spread these ideas onto social media.
Let's sort of keep them here for a while, because if you take them out of context, it'll get ugly.
Number one, the best, and when I say best, I mean most interesting, not the one I want to happen, the most 2020-like thing that could happen would be Biden gets coronavirus and doesn't survive.
Obviously, I don't want that to happen.
Obviously. But if this were a movie, that's the way it would go.
Because the moment Biden got coronavirus, it would make you say, wait a minute, wait a minute.
The entire story has been that the people who didn't wear masks and didn't hide in their basement, many of them got coronavirus.
So that anecdotal bunch of stuff...
Was my entire impression of what the risk is.
You're telling me that Biden, Mr.
Mask, hide in my basement, do everything right.
You're telling me he got it?
Now again, it wouldn't mean anything in terms of your understanding of how risky it is, etc.
It shouldn't mean anything because it would just be one data point and anecdotal.
But it would. It would change how you think about it.
Alright, so that's one possibility.
Here's another possibility.
Again, don't want this to happen.
Really, really don't want this to happen.
And it goes like this.
President Trump takes a turn for the worse.
I don't think that's going to happen.
Very unlikely. But, you know, in terms of scripts, he takes a turn for the worst.
And it gets so bad that you could argue that he was momentarily dead and brought back.
What would happen under the unusual situation that President Trump became so ill that he was technically dead and brought back?
Jesus.
It would be an actual literal, not literal, but a resurrection story.
You know, unlikely.
Very unlikely that things would get to that point.
I don't even think that's a thing with coronavirus patients.
I don't know if there's any case where that's ever happened.
That they were technically dead and brought back to life.
It's probably never happened. But, again, if it were a story, that's sort of where the plot might go.
Don't want that to happen.
Don't want that to happen. Don't even want to put it into the universe.
We don't want that to happen.
There's one more that is so awful, I almost don't want to mention it, except in the context of telling you how this script idea works.
There is one outcome.
Don't want it to happen.
Don't want it to happen.
But in a 2020 world, it could happen.
And it goes like this.
President Trump gives the coronavirus to Kellyanne Conway, who gives it to George Conway, who, if I may be unkind, has a physical look of someone who would have a tough time surviving coronavirus.
Right? It's an ugly thought.
I'm not even going to complete it.
You can complete it yourself.
But that's one of the possibilities.
George Conway has a tough time with it, and it came from the president.
Right? Again, you don't want that to happen.
You don't want your enemies to get coronavirus.
Certainly not political enemies.
That's just dumb.
But it's 2020.
Along those same lines, there are two people that I'm, in addition to George Conway, that I am quite concerned about.
So I would say these three people just raise a little flag of concern for me.
I'm not going to be political about this.
I would be concerned equally about all of them.
Bill Barr, Chris Christie, and George Conway.
They are three people who have been close to exposed people, and they've got a little extra weight on them.
I would be a little extra concerned about those three.
And if anything happens to any of the three, it's just going to be extra tragic.
All right. Here's a question I have for you.
Shouldn't we know by now if masks work?
Now, I get that all of the experts, not all of the experts, that the consensus of experts is that masks not only work, but they're vital to getting to the other side of the coronavirus.
But here's what I wonder.
Don't we know by now, lots and lots of people who got coronavirus, don't we know whether or not they wore masks or were around other people who wore masks?
Shouldn't we know by now, by talking to all the people who have got coronavirus, were they in a mask-intensive environment or a mask-permissive environment?
Wouldn't that be just about the easiest thing to track at this point?
Because you just talked to the patient and say, did you have coronavirus?
Yes. Would you self-report that you have consistently been in a very mask-intensive environment where both you and the people around you were being pretty dedicated about wearing masks?
Yes or no? Scale of 1 to 10, how masked up were you and socially distanced?
Shouldn't we know by now exactly How effective masks are.
And the fact that we're even talking about it is just making me think there's some kind of mass incompetence that's going on in the system in general, not just the politics.
I don't know. Maybe that information is out there.
Somebody says there's not a consensus.
No, you're wrong. You're wrong.
There is absolutely a consensus.
It is not universal.
A consensus means that the majority of people agree.
Consensus doesn't mean that there are not notable critics who make a lot of noise.
I will acknowledge there are notable critics, and I will acknowledge that I'm not convinced that I've seen hard data that says that masks are working in this coronavirus.
I think they are.
I would say that the smart money says yes.
I would think that common sense says yes.
I would think our experience from the pandemic in 1918 tells us they work.
I would think the fact that every single country is using masks if they have a coronavirus problem.
All of them. All the experts in all the countries seem to agree that masks work.
So I'm going to say if you were going to place a bet, you know, Scott, you've got to put your money on masks.
I would place a very large bet on that they do work.
Now, they may have their trade-offs, I wouldn't argue that, but I would certainly put a very large bet on they do work.
Speaking of things like that, the president, it is reported, is, let's see, he's on Regeneron, vitamin D, zinc, Now remdesivir, and I saw speculation from a doctor that he was almost certainly on convalescent serum.
Now, what is the impact of doing all those things at once?
I don't know.
I don't know if anybody's done all those things at once.
Putting the president on remdesivir, which my understanding is not 100% safe, But rather, you would want to save that for somebody who's looking like they have some real problems.
What does the fact that the president is getting remdesivir at this stage tell you about the seriousness of his infection?
I think it's telling us one of two things.
Either the president is being treated as a special case, meaning they're treating him more aggressively than they would somebody who has the same amount of symptoms.
Which would make sense.
That wouldn't be the dumbest thing in the world.
But remdesivir, my understanding is it doesn't have any impact if you're at the lightly infected stage.
Correct me if I'm wrong.
I need a fact check. But isn't remdesivir understood to be something you would only give to somebody who's in pretty bad shape Because at that point, the little bit of risk that comes with it is worth it.
Right? I think the melatonin was just for sleeping.
Somebody's saying in the comments.
So, here's the weird thing about this cocktail that the president's getting.
There are a few weird things.
Number one, it seems like he's taking every drug that's ever been mentioned in a sentence with coronavirus Accept hydroxychloroquine.
What are the odds that the White House doctors, knowing that hydroxychloroquine has a very safe profile, and knowing that the President would probably have a bias toward giving it a try if it were not dangerous, and maybe it would work.
What are the odds that they would not prescribe hydroxychloroquine?
It's a little weird, isn't it?
Because even if you thought the doctor said, no, we're not convinced it works, the studies are a little ambiguous, you know, why bother?
Maybe. But even if it was in the gray area, for perfectly political reasons, don't you think they'd say, you know, we don't think it makes any difference, but it probably won't hurt you.
Do you want to take some hydroxychloroquine?
Because I feel like the president could have a Enough influence on that that he could just say, look, if you don't think it's going to hurt me, I'd like to take some just for political reasons, just to be consistent.
So the first thing I'd ask is, maybe he is taking it, or maybe he was on it prior to even being diagnosed.
So I think there's more to learn about that.
But, interestingly, he is taking zinc.
And as you remember, the Zelensky protocol, as it was called, required zinc as well as azithromycin.
And by the way, I haven't heard he's taking azithromycin, so they're silent on that so far.
But maybe the reason that we think hydroxychloroquine works is that it was used with zinc enough times that maybe it was the zinc that worked.
Maybe. Who knows?
But apparently the doctors are convinced enough that zinc won't hurt you and might help that they're giving it to him.
That's interesting. A little behind-the-scenes information for you.
So you all know of Dr.
Zielinski and the Zielinski protocol, which was hydroxychloroquine, zinc, and azithromycin, given early at first symptoms.
I will tell you that the doctor has DM'd me a few times, two or three times, and I haven't responded.
And he's DM'd me looking for me to boost his message about the hydroxychloroquine.
I have declined to do that because I'm not convinced that it's real.
And I don't think cartoonists should be boosting signals of things for doctors.
I feel as though it would somehow give it more credibility than the story by itself would have.
Now, my last estimate prior to this week, and I've lowered it over time, is that I started with something like a 50% chance.
I don't know if it was higher.
It might have been. Early on, a 50% chance that hydroxychloroquine might be real and might work.
And that was based on the fact that there were lots of reports that it was working.
So that's good.
But they weren't quite the, you know, the random bias controlled types.
And it seemed to me that if it worked the way people said, that it would be obvious by now.
And that it would be in widespread use all over the world.
There would be more use, not less.
We'd hear more about it, not less, if it worked.
Now, every month that goes by, and you don't hear a story like that, oh, we just discovered it totally works.
It's being widespread used in Albania, and now we're all going to use it.
Every month you don't hear that story lowered my odds that it's working.
So last week it was a 30% chance, meaning there was a 70% chance.
This is just Scott's own personal...
70% chance the hydroxychloroquine didn't make a difference.
30% chance it did, still based on so many anecdotal, or not anecdotal, but observational studies, etc.
Today, if it's true that the president is not taking it, if that's true, we'll wait for that confirmation, probably is, I would take it down to closer to 5 or 10%.
Maybe I'll go generous.
15%, 1.5%.
So I think the odds of hydroxychloroquine being a game-changer, 15%, 1.5%.
That's my current estimate, subject to adjustment, should it ever be needed.
Now, the president's also taking vitamin D. I would like to note...
That it is entirely possible that the very first person you ever heard say, take vitamin D for the coronavirus, might have been me.
Because when it first came out, I was telling you, get in the sun, get your vitamin D up.
Because at the very least, it's good for your immune system.
And now there seems to be more and more evidence that that's true.
So if you'd listen to me, what good shape you'd be in.
So... It turns out that the most dangerous job in the world is Trump campaign manager.
Do you remember when Corey Lewandowski was the campaign manager and he got falsely accused of aggressively grabbing some woman?
Grabbing her arm, not sexually grabbing her.
And that turned out to be fake news, but it was pretty tough to be a campaign manager.
He was replaced by Paul Manafort, Who ended up going to jail for unrelated, you know, crimes unrelated to the campaign.
Then there was Brad Parscale, who recently got involuntarily committed to a hospital after losing his job.
Who knows what's going on there?
And now Bill Stepien gets a diagnosis of coronavirus.
So if you ever had to pick a job that was going to be dangerous...
Yeah, if you were going to pick something dangerous, it would be that job.
All right. So here's a question that I've been asking for a long time.
We keep hearing in the news, and we're hearing it from both the left and the right sometimes.
So FBI Director Wray has said this.
You kind of feel like he's on the right a little bit.
Or somewhat. And the left says that.
And they say that the biggest problem with domestic terrorism is white supremacy.
Now, I keep hearing it, but I'm trying to connect in my mind why is it that literally every night, literally every night, I hear about Antifa and left-leaning people burning things and getting hurt and attacking people and killing people.
So I'm hearing every night stories about the left and domestic terrorism, but I'm not hearing stories about the right, and yet the FBI and other important entities are saying the big problem is white supremacy.
Now, I'm not doubting it's true.
So as of today, I would say I'm not doubting it's true, because there are a lot of people saying it's true.
But why is it that I'm not hearing about it?
And I would like to give you a story to prime you before I tell you the rest of my story about my search for all of the white supremacy statistics.
Years ago, when I was working for Pacific Bell, the local phone company where I lived, I had a project to build a laboratory within the headquarters where we would test our technology, our new digital technology for the phone network, And we would use the laboratory for customers who wanted to make a buying decision, but they needed to test our equipment with their equipment to make sure it worked.
And I was told by my boss that we just keep getting all these requests from customers.
And if lots of customers are requesting a laboratory to test the equipment, it follows that if we had a laboratory to test equipment, we'd sell a lot more equipment.
Because if you could show the customer it works, look, I just hooked it up.
Here's your phone.
Here's our network. There, it's working.
Now you can feel safe buying it.
So I was given the task to first build a business case to get the funding and then go ahead and be the project manager to build the laboratory.
So I started out to build my business case by collecting data About all of the customers who would ask for this laboratory.
Because it was all based on customer demand, right?
It wasn't something we just sat around and came up with.
It was just purely responding to this avalanche of customer demand.
So I would go to, you know, a manager who was in a relevant place.
I'd say, you know, do we need this laboratory for customers?
And the manager would say, yeah.
Yeah, we totally need it.
All the customers are asking for it.
It's high demand.
And I would say, can you give me the name of a customer who asked for it so I could actually talk to the customer and really dig down and find out about this demand?
And the first manager would say, well, I don't know the name of a specific customer, but there are tons of them.
So maybe talk to this other manager and he could give you a name of somebody to talk to.
Talk to the next manager.
He goes, yeah, it's like the customer demand.
They keep asking for it.
I go, can you give them the name of one customer?
He's like, well, you know, I can only think of one, but why don't you talk to them and maybe we'll kick up some other ones you can talk to.
So, what I determined after a long analysis was this.
There was ever only, since the beginning of recorded time, one customer who asked for it once.
That was it. One customer had asked for it once.
But because when that customer asked for it, they asked probably more than one person, and then those people started talking to each other, and then people heard about it, it became an entire story about a mass request for laboratory resources that literally didn't exist.
Didn't exist. It was confirmed, and I went back to everybody and said, Anybody accept this one customer?
Everybody said the same customer.
That's it. And then I asked, well, what happened with that one customer?
I assumed that they did not buy the product because they didn't have a lab.
And then the managers told me, oh, no, they bought the product.
So I said, all right, let me get this straight.
The story that there were lots of customers really boiled down to just one And the reason we needed a laboratory is that they wouldn't be able to buy without the laboratory, and the one customer actually bought anyway.
Thus, proving beyond a shadow of a doubt, we don't need a laboratory.
Now, once I presented that to my management, do you think they said, oh, I'm glad you caught that.
We could have wasted $10 million, which was the budget.
We could have wasted $10 million building a laboratory that nobody needed.
Do you think that happened?
Nah. No, it didn't.
My boss said, build it anyway.
Make a case for it.
Build it anyway. In other words, the reason had nothing to do with the decision.
The data had nothing to do with the decision.
The logic. None of it.
Even revenue. None of it had anything to do with the decision.
I just had a boss who wanted to be the boss of a laboratory because it would be good for his career, I guess.
So that was the story.
Now, take that story, and that's what I've learned because of my experience, how this can get blown up, and then I'm looking at this white supremacy thing, and I'm saying to myself, it's kind of weird that it's the biggest problem, and yet I'm only hearing of these other problems, but I don't hear a lot of examples of this, so I go to do a little bit of research.
And when I say a little bit of research, I mean just, you know, One millimeter deep.
I'm not going to spend a lifetime doing it.
So I just Google some stuff about data on white supremacy, and I find this.
It says, the threat posed by racially or ethnically motivated terrorism, particularly white supremacist terrorism, remained a serious challenge for the global community.
So what follows this should be some examples, right?
And here they come. Continuing a trend that began in 2015.
All right, so it's a trend.
So if it's a trend, there'll be some data to show the trend.
There were numerous deadly attacks.
Well, okay, there are numerous of them.
So now what will follow will be the list of them.
So I'll just see how numerous they are.
And it lists three.
I go, okay, well, it says they're numerous, but there are three.
And there were, let's see, Included the Christchurch, New Zealand, Halley, Germany, and El Paso, Texas.
So the first thing I said to myself is, oh, okay, they're talking about worldwide, and two out of the three didn't happen in the United States.
So really, there's one.
It was the El Paso, Texas, where the guy went into a Walmart, I guess, And his complaint, he had a manifesto about immigration, and I think he shot a bunch of, presumably, mostly targeted people who he thought were immigrants, I'm guessing.
And so I thought, okay, well that one, alright, so we have one example.
But it's real, alright?
There's no question that this guy was a massive white supremacist, and I thought this will be obvious when you read his manifesto.
Because if you read the manifesto, it's going to be pretty clear he's a white supremacist.
So I read some of his manifesto.
He was anti-immigration because he thought immigration would turn the country into Democrats and the democratic system would destroy the country.
Do you know the part where he said, I don't like immigration because the people coming across the border are brown?
That wasn't in there.
Or at least I didn't see it.
I read excerpts from it.
I would think that they would have pulled that out if that was an excerpt.
But it turns out his real concern was Democrats.
Literally. It was about Democrats.
Now, you could certainly make the argument that he's also a racist, but he didn't write that.
He didn't write, white people are awesome, I don't want any brown people.
He wrote that he didn't want Democrats because they would ruin the system and we'd all die under a Democrat system, basically.
I'm exaggerating. So, of the three that were listed, of the so-called numerous deadly attacks, two of them were in other countries, which doesn't make them less important, but it makes it less important to the United States.
And then the one that was listed is sort of a little bit of a gray area, if you know what I mean.
Now, because this will be taken into context, may I say, at this point, I completely disavow and rebuke all white supremacists, KKK, racists, white nationalists. So, I disavow all those groups.
I'm just saying that I was sold the story about massive white supremacy problem, and the three examples given are two from other countries And one that doesn't look like it to me.
I get that it's a gray area, but these are your good examples?
So, here's the question I have.
Is it like the laboratory story, where there never really was a problem, and because of the telephone effect, and somebody talks to somebody, and somebody's talking about a gray area, and some things in other countries, and maybe there's more activity online?
Could it be that Massive online activity is foreshadowing something that is a really big problem, but the actual violence has not been big in terms of numbers.
Is that possible?
I mean, that would still be a major problem.
If somebody described it to me that way and said, Scott, you're not seeing the big issue here, it's not so much how much has already happened, It's that we can see it brewing very clearly.
The number of people associating with these groups is growing.
The rhetoric is getting worse.
If that's the story, I'll say, oh, okay, that's fair.
I don't want to be seeing some big white supremacy movement that's picking up steam in the United States.
I'd be quite concerned about that, as well you should be.
But I don't know that that's the story.
Is it? The news business is so thoroughly broken that you can't even tell if the biggest problem even exists.
Think about that.
Think about the fact that you can't be sure, even a little bit, if the thing that your government and the FBI is telling you is the biggest domestic terrorism concern, you don't even know if it exists.
Much less being your biggest concern.
You can't even tell. Now, common sense tells me there must be plenty of examples.
There must be. But why doesn't the news have a list for me that's handy that I can see?
Now, by the way, if somebody has a more complete list of white supremacist events in this country, I want to see the list in this country, could you DM that to me or tweet it at me?
Because I don't want to be the guy who says it doesn't exist.
I want to be the guy who says, why isn't the news telling me where it is?
