Episode 1158 Scott Adams: Biden's Mansion, Facebook's Bad Fact-Checking, The Sweden Mystery, Mask Controversy
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com
Content:
Our public versus private thoughts on COVID19
USA Today "fine people" HOAX article...ignores the transcript
Biden's DuPont mansion renovation
Legal bribery, how it's done
Will COVID19 eventually...just go away?
Scott Atlas mask tweet BANNED by Twitter
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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
There's still time to get a good seat for the best part of the day.
Yeah, how many of you are experiencing a peak moment right now?
Because you just said to yourself, what's the best thing I could be doing right now?
And you thought, I could be watching Coffee with Scott Adams.
And it's not just watching, it's participating.
And in order to participate in exactly the right way, which is the only way you want to do it, all you need is a cup or mug or a glass of tank or chalice or 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 hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
It's called The Simultaneous Sip and it happens now.
Go. Yep, just as good as I thought it would be.
I know yours was good too.
Alright, starting with the most important news first.
I saw a tweet about a product that I have to have.
It's a pot for a plant, for an indoor plant.
But it's got an animated face on the outside of the pot.
And the face tells you how happy the plant is.
So if the plant has just the right amount of water, the animated face is smiling.
And if the plant needs a little water, it's droopy or dying.
And if it's too hot, it does something else.
And you have to see the animation of it.
Because when you first hear this, you think, well, that's a That can't be much more interesting than that little singing fish that you put over the fireplace.
But I'm here to tell you that faces have an impact on humans.
And when you put faces on inanimate objects, or let's say non-sentient objects, They do become important to people.
So I did this experiment years ago.
I did something called the Dilber Ultimate Cubicle.
I worked with a design company called IDO, and it was just a publicity stunt, but we built and designed an ultimate cubicle.
So if you had to work in a cubicle, What would be the best design?
So we put in some cool little features, and some of them were just funny.
One of the features was that the guest seat was sort of like an airplane, one of those seats that the flight attendants use, where you just fold it down from the wall.
But as soon as you folded down the guest seat, it would start a timer.
And at the end of the timer, your phone would ring into your cubicle so that you could take the call and say, ah, sorry, I've got to take this as a way to get rid of your visitor.
But one of the other things we invented Which I still think about because I liked it so much.
It was an artificial plant, a little flower that was in a little artificial container, and it could sense when you came in the office.
So when you would walk into your cubicle, the flower would be wilted and it would go to attention, like it was happy that you were there.
And when you left, it would sense that there was no motion in the cubicle, and it would wilt again.
So every time you came back to your cubicle, it would be like coming home to your dog who's always happy to see you, except it's a plant, and it would just go whoop, and it would be happy to see you.
And, yeah, I know what joke you're making.
Go ahead, make your private jokes at home.
Okay, good. I think you're done with it.
But the general notion of animating your environment so that things respond to you like people is really strong.
I have to tell you, many of you know, I have an Amazon digital device in my office, but I also have one in all of the major rooms of the house.
And all day long, I talk to it.
I walk into a room and I ask it about the temperature.
I ask it what time it is.
You know, I ask it where my packages are.
I ask it to define words.
I ask it to do math for me.
You know, so all day long I'll be thinking about the news.
I got about 8,000 retweets on this tweet, so I thought it would be worth sharing it with you.
Here's what I said. If you took away Trump's excellent instincts, You took away his clear policies, his entertainer skills, his persuasion powers.
You took away his mind, you took away his energy.
You'd have Joe Biden.
Just leaving that out there.
Here's one of the things I think is a big problem with coronavirus policy.
One of the problems is people don't have the same risk profile, so you can't have one policy that works for everybody.
But The other problem is I'm pretty sure that we're all lying when we talk about the coronavirus publicly.
And here's what I mean.
If you say, Scott, you've got to go make a speech about the coronavirus, I would say, all right, I'd better say what is good and proper to say in public.
So I would modify my public comments so they were appropriate for public consumption, which might be different from what I'd say privately.
But I suspect that we're all doing that, and it's hurting us.
And it goes like this.
Publicly, if you say, what should we do about the coronavirus, Scott?
I would say something closer to this.
I'd say, you know, we've got to protect everybody.
We've got to do everything to flatten that curve.
Safety, safety. Wear your masks.
Socially distance. I would say all the right things.
Because I certainly know what I'm supposed to say.
It's pretty obvious what the socially correct thing is.
No doubt about it, right?
Now, I might try to nudge people toward opening the economy, but I would be kind of soft about it, right?
I'd be like, well, we need to get back to work, but we got to be safe.
But we need to get back to work.
But what would I say publicly?
What would I say privately?
Maybe I wouldn't even say it to another person because it's so ugly.
But let's go even more private.
What are the things you're thinking that you're not saying out loud to anybody?
To anybody? Does it sound like this?
You know, I'd kind of be willing to kill a few hundred thousand strangers to get back to work and get back to regular life.
How many of you are having that thought?
It goes something like this.
Yeah, it could even be somebody I know.
It could be somebody I care about.
But I'd still do it.
You know? If nobody knew I was the one who made the decision, let's say there was a lottery, and the authority to decide what we do with coronavirus is randomly distributed to a citizen.
But it's private.
Only the person who gets to decide knows their decider.
Nobody else will ever know which citizen made the coronavirus policy.
And what would that citizen do?
There's a very high likelihood that they would not do the same thing they would do if everybody knew their name and that it was their decision.
I feel like we humans are far more I don't want to say evil, because living is not evil.
You know, just having a life is not evil.
But we certainly would be willing to kill a lot more people than we will say out loud.
Now, of course, there's no generalization that holds for all people.
That's what makes it a generalization.
So I'm certainly not going to say that every one of you watching this has that feeling.
But there's a lot of you...
And here's another way to look at it, which I'll bet you are looking at it this way privately, but I'll bet you've never said this out loud, and it goes like this.
If you kill a young person, you have maybe deprived them of, I don't know, 60 or 80 years of life.
If you kill a 90-year-old, you might be depriving them of one or two years of life, on average.
So if you were to look at the coronavirus deaths from coronavirus, given that they skew heavily toward old people, and you were to count up the number of, let's say, life years deprived from the total public, you would find that, relatively speaking, there weren't that many years taken away from the public because they didn't have many.
It was the older people dying.
Now, if you go to war and you send your 20-year-olds off to war and a lot of them die, that's a gigantic difference in years that could have been lived that were not.
So when we've got this lockdown situation, which we know is going to have a big impact on younger people, if one young person dies, Because the lockdown caused them to be sad or overdose or commit suicide or something.
If one young person dies, let's say a 10-year-old, you may have deprived 90 years of life just from that one person.
Whereas, how many 80-year-olds would have to die to equal the number of years that one 10-year-old lost If you start doing the math by number of years, I'm seeing in the comments, a number of you have had some form of this thought, but you can't say it out loud, can you?
I mean, I can do it because I have no shame, but you can't say it out loud.
And I wonder if our policy would be different if we could be honest about that.
Although I'm not sure we should be, because there's part of me that says, Our instinct to be good in public is probably one you don't want to lose.
You know, your instinct to be nicer in public than you are privately, maybe we should keep that, right?
Because it has some other benefits.
All right. Raul Davis on Twitter.
He's a CEO branding expert.
CEO and branding expert, or CEO of a branding expert or something.
But he tweets this.
Is it a tactical advantage for Republicans to have so many Democrats vote early?
Because if you know what the Democrats who are voting early are doing...
Does that give you still enough time to rush in with your funding and your rallies and whatever if there's some place that looks like it's going to be close?
And you think, oh, we can tip that one because we know enough about the early votes to know it's close, but we're losing?
So you go in and just tip it over the edge?
It's a really good question.
I don't know the answer because it's I think you'd have to know more than I know to know the answer to that.
But I think it might be an advantage to go second.
There's so many cases where going second is an advantage, strategically.
One of the things that's not being talked about, and really should, is that I would estimate, this is just sort of, you know, top of my head estimate, based on no knowledge whatsoever, but I think that this election, no matter which way it goes, no matter who wins, something along the lines of 20% of the public will be triggered into a fairly severe mental health crisis.
And that's not a joke.
Dead serious.
Completely, completely serious.
As soon as that election is over and we know who won or who is likely to win, It's going to be the biggest mental health crisis we've ever had.
And I don't think that's an over-claim, do you?
I don't think that's hyperbole.
Because if you see what happened in the last four years, that's a big mental health crisis.
So I was just reading one of your comments there about QAnon.
Okay.
We won't talk about that today.
So anyway, moving on.
We've got a big mental health crisis coming, and I feel as though we need to prepare for it somehow.
Now, I've said before, and I'm going to follow up on this point, that I don't think it's just the shy Trump supporters you have to worry about.
In terms of the polls being somewhat inaccurate.
I think you have to worry about the pranksters.
Because I have a really good sense of Trump supporters, I think.
Because I feel like, you know, I've lived among them enough, and I am one of them, and I just feel like I have a sense of how Trump supporters on average think.
Now, I could be wrong.
I could be very wrong.
But it's my sense that they all have this common thought.
We call it the zeitgeist, if you will.
And the common thought is, wouldn't it be funny if we lied to the pollsters and they had no idea that Trump was going to win again, and the margin that he looked like he was behind on election day was even bigger than the margin in which Trump He overcame and beat Hillary Clinton.
Now, part of you might say, I don't want to tell this stranger because nothing is really secure in our digital world.
But I think some people just think it's sort of fun to lie to the pollsters.
And if you don't believe that's a thing, allow me to read my comments to ask you about that.
So... So I said, it isn't only the shy Trump supporters, blah, blah, blah.
So I made the same point in the tweet.
But let me read you some of the comments.
Now keep in mind, this is just a tweet I just sent out a few minutes ago.
So I don't know how many people have seen it, but just some of the comments about people who lied to pollsters.
Um... I haven't had the opportunity, but I think I would.
This is true.
Talked to some Friday that told me they've been doing it.
I've done this. These are different people on my comments.
I've done this in the last two polls.
Let's see. I did my patriotic duty.
A gent in our social circles did it.
In fact, I started doing it with this.
I'm doing it.
I was called and surveyed for about 20 minutes.
I made up about half of my opinions.
I do that if they ever ask me.
Count me in the second group.
In other words, they do it too.
My uncle lied to pollsters.
That's exactly what I would do.
They deserve it. That'd be me.
This is true.
I always lie to this because I can.
If a poll ever contacted me, I'd definitely lie.
They called me. I hung up.
I agree 100%.
I'm a Trump supporter who has lied twice to pollsters.
Why? Because I had time.
Because I had time.
That's exactly what I'm talking about.
This is the dad joke that they don't see coming.
Because the dad joke here is that it's so easy to prank this if everybody is just sort of thinking in the same way.
Wouldn't it be funny? And I think there are enough people who have at least had the idea in their head of, wouldn't it be kind of funny?
It'd be kind of funny if I maybe skewed the polls a little bit.
So we'll see if that happens.
So I don't know if you know this, but a lot of conservatives are preparing for a civil war.
Are you aware of that?
I don't know if there are any Democrats who are preparing, but I'm hearing whispers and Suggestions and information that suggests that some conservatives, maybe lots of them, I don't know, are literally preparing for a civil war.
Now, that's not to say they expect it.
I think it's just people who like to prepare.
Republicans are very prepare-y.
Probably there are more preppers who are Republican, do you think?
I don't know. I don't know if that's true.
I just feel like I have a sense that more Republicans would be preppers.
And there's at least one group who's organizing generals by geography.
So in other words, they're already organizing who the local warlords will be on the conservative side.
I've been approached, but you don't have to approach me to be a warlord because I already am.
So if you live where I live, in Northern California, And the system goes down, and the government fails, And this is literal.
There's no joke part of this.
You should rally around me.
Only because I'm telling you I'm available.
If there's nobody else you know who's available to be a warlord, and I'm going to avoid violence.
I mean, I'm not a warlord who likes violence.
But if you just want to be organized, and you want to figure out how to survive a civil war or the breakdown of society, I will be happy to be an organizer in my Northern California area.
So if you don't have somebody better, I'd be happy to hand over that power to somebody else, because the odds of being assassinated if you're the warlord are really high.
Really high. I prefer not to be assassinated in a civil war.
But... If you need one, I'm a pretty good choice.
Because I don't have a lust for power of that type.
It's the last thing I'd want would be to have some kind of government job.
And so I'd probably be a reliable warlord just to keep things stable until we recover from the breakdown of society.
So that's a real offer, by the way.
100% serious.
If you need somebody to be in charge temporarily, because I definitely don't want to do it permanently, I will just automatically assume that role if anybody wants it.
All right. USA Today did the most fascinating article, and if you've been following what I call the very fine people hoax, This is a really good chapter, and I tweeted about this so you can follow it that way.
So USA Today, I think it was yesterday, had an article in which they were fact-checking the people who said the fine people hoax is a hoax.
So that would be me.
So they're fact-checking people like me.
Now, how do you think that went?
Because the transcript is very clear.
So the Find People hoax is a hoax.
You can just read the transcript and it's obvious.
So when USA Today, a major news organization, goes to fact check it, it's going to be pretty easy, right?
Here's the transcript.
Boom. We're done.
Is that what they did? No.
They fact checked the Find People hoax without linking to the transcript, I think.
Now, part of what they did is they wrote a big convoluted article in which they mixed in stuff about the Proud Boys so that you couldn't really tell what they were talking about.
It's intentionally confusing.
Huh. Why would they make it intentionally confusing when it's as simple as just showing the transcript?
That would be as simple as anything could be.
And yet, it's really confusing.
You read it and you're You're not sure if they've debunked it or they haven't debunked it.
But here's my favorite sentence from this hot, steaming pile of shit called an article.
It says, a few days after the rally, Trump was asked by reporters about the protest, to which he responded that there were very, quote, very fine people on both sides.
And this is in USA Today, yesterday.
This is actually in a major publication, this next sentence.
And it says, however, some people say they believe Trump also condemned white supremacists and neo-Nazis as part of his very fine people statement.
What? Some people believe it?
It's the transcript.
I don't believe it.
It's the transcript.
It's not really a case of a QAnon kind of belief.
I wouldn't call it religious belief.
It's not exactly like believing that aliens have landed and have abducted people.
Those, I would say, would be in the category of beliefs.
This is a news organization that knows where the transcript is.
They can just show it to you.
And they lead off by saying that some people believe.
Now, what is the implication of saying some people believe it?
The only thing you should take away from some people believe it is that it's not true.
And if you say some people believe it, before you get to the details of whether it's true or false, are you not trying to tell your reader That it's not true.
Because otherwise you would have said something closer to this.
Some people have pointed out that that's exactly what the transcript says.
How hard would that be?
See how easily I wrote that sentence?
Some people have pointed out that the transcript shows he clearly disavowed this group.
So you have to, if you want to be just amazed at what's happening, And how corrupt the media is.
And how cognitive dissonance is just screwing up heads.
Because there's a little bit of corruption in the article, I think.
Or maybe it's all just cognitive dissonance.
Or maybe it's just bias.
And they're trying to hide the fact that the hoax is a hoax.
And they're trying to be accurate while making sure that you didn't understand the point.
It's really... It's jaw-dropping when you see how they handled it.
Anyway, go take a look at that.
Interestingly, Twitter does not make the same mistake that Facebook makes when they fact-checked this hoax.
Over on Facebook, there is still a warning where somebody put the accurate quote from the actual transcript, and Facebook put a fake news warning On the actual, exact, accurate quote.
In other words, you could just look at the quote.
It's exactly the same words.
And they put a fake news warning on it.
Now, here's the interesting part.
Twitter doesn't.
And I tested it by tweeting Facebook's fake news.
And... You know, said the actual find people thing is hoax.
Twitter won't put a notice on that.
So what does it mean if Twitter thinks it's a hoax and Facebook is banning it as not true?
What happens when your social media platforms don't have the same opinion on the facts?
I guess they can just tell their audiences one's not a fact and the other one is silent on it, allowing you to believe that maybe it is.
It's a weird, weird situation we've got here.
Are you following the story about the Joe Biden DuPont mansion?
So apparently back in, I think, the 70s, the Bidens bought a mansion that had been owned by the DuPonts.
And he paid $185,000 for it, which back in the 70s was big money.
Big money. At the time, he was earning $42,000 a year as a government employee.
If you're making $42,000 a year, and the story I read didn't say whether Jill Biden was working then, I don't know if she was being a mom or she was still working, but maybe her teacher salary was on top of that?
I'm not sure. But the mansion is this big, sprawling mansion that was described as a money pit that was in disrepair.
So the reason he got it for such a low price, so you should not be so impressed that he paid millions of dollars for this mansion, he got it for a really low price.
But it was described as a money pit, which he spent 20 years putting money into.
Have any of you ever put money into a home?
Has anybody ever done a renovation of an older home?
How'd that go? Do you have any idea how much it costs to renovate a mansion?
Now, renovating a normal house is pretty darn expensive, but maybe you could do some of the work yourself if it's a regular house.
Do you think Joe Biden did any of the work himself in his sprawling mansion?
I doubt it. I feel like you would have to hire professionals to do that kind of work.
The debunk on this, the fact check on this, is that if you look at the price he paid, it's so low, and it was such a fixer-upper, that it's not really a case of he couldn't afford it, and there's evidence that he was struggling with money at the time, which is more evidence it was a reach for him, but it wasn't that expensive.
So it's all okay.
There's no evidence of anything that's gone wrong here, right?
Well, I believe that that fact check depends heavily on people not being good at math and not being good at finance.
If I look at a house that cost $185,000 and probably needed three times that amount for upgrades, although that would be spread over a number of years, there isn't any way in the world That Joe Biden could afford that frickin' house.
So the way it was reported is, here's the numbers.
It's obvious this wasn't so outlandish.
But I look at the numbers because I have a deep background in looking at numbers.
I've told you this before on Periscope.
If you have lots of experience analyzing data and numbers, you get kind of a sixth sense.
And you can just look at something like this and go, ah, nope.
And I would like to put that to those of you who are watching, who have finance experience.
Let's say you have experience in economics, finance.
Maybe you've even had some experience fixing up homes.
And I want you to check my intuition.
My intuition is just looking at these numbers.
There's no way that this is the whole story.
Not even close.
We're not even in the zip code of this being debunked.
Not even close.
That's my intuition.
So I'm looking at the comments, and I'm seeing the people who have that kind of experience, apparently.
Yeah. I'm seeing people basically say the same thing.
Now, you can't trust that because there are a lot of anti-Biden people here who want to believe there's a crime.
And I wouldn't say I want to believe that.
I don't want to believe that.
And genuinely, I don't want any bad things to happen to the Bidens or anybody else.
But I don't see how these numbers work.
It doesn't even look close.
If you look at the comments, you'll see pretty much mass agreement with my point.
I haven't seen anybody yet who said, oh yeah, those numbers work.
Yeah. Yeah, they're not even close to working.
Now, if you say to yourself, and I saw this defense...
But Scott, Scott, Scott.
Scott, Scott, Scott.
Joe Biden has been revealing his entire financial stuff, his tax returns.
He's been doing that for decades.
If there were any kind of financial impropriety, it would be right there.
It would be there in the numbers.
And by the way, in the recent years, he did make a bunch of money, but legally, by giving speeches and writing books and stuff, which is true.
Well, you know, here's how people bribe rich people.
If you didn't know this, this might make your head spin a little bit.
Bribery doesn't happen by somebody writing a check to a senator.
That's not a thing.
And if it is a thing, they usually get caught.
That's why you don't do it.
Here's what it would look like to bribe somebody without getting caught.
Hey, one of your kids is starting a company.
Boy, did that company get well-funded.
Totally legal, right?
You could fund, you could agree to give a loan or to be an investor in a child's company, child of a senator.
There's nothing illegal about that.
You might even make an investment where you would not have ordinarily made an investment.
It might not be in the realm where you usually invest.
You could do something that Joe Biden is invested in.
Perhaps Joe Biden has invested in some small business, and you know it.
Perhaps you could become the biggest customer for that small business.
Again, it's completely legal to buy things on the free market, so you're just a big customer.
It just happens that the person who is an investor in that company might be a senator.
So there are probably a million ways that you can launder bribes to famous people.
So you're not going to find it on tax returns, right?
You're just not going to find it there.
So I don't have any information that says Joe Biden ever took a bribe, but I'm telling you how to find it and what it would look like.
That's all I'm saying. I've got a question about health care.
I have this This nagging feeling that the only reason we can't solve healthcare, and let's call it healthcare insurance, so the pedantic people don't come after me and say, Scott, Scott, Scott, there's a difference between insurance and healthcare.
I know. I use them interchangeably because everybody knows what you're talking about.
But we are talking about insurance, and I wonder if the only reason this hasn't been solved is because the wrong people are working on it.
And when I say the wrong people working on it, I feel as though it's a simplification problem, meaning that it's so complicated, the whole field, that if anybody tried to come up with a plan, it would also be really complicated.
And if they tried to sell their plan to the public, the public wouldn't be able to understand it, and they legitimately couldn't know if it would be a good idea or not.
So I feel as if the problem with health care Is that the complexity is sky-high, and nobody yet who is good at handling complexity has made that their main job.
You know, there are lots of people who are good at handling complexity, but they're not working on that problem.
They're working on other stuff, I guess.
And let me give you a sense of how simple it would be to solve conceptually.
It's not really simple.
But conceptually, it's simple.
Do you understand that distinction?
In the real world, it would be terribly difficult, but it shouldn't be, and this is why.
In rough numbers, I haven't updated this recently, but I'm guessing somewhere around 10% of the public does not have health insurance.
I need a fact check on that, but it's somewhere in that range, about 10%.
We'll use that for our talking point.
So if 10% don't have health insurance, the other 90% do, could you just raise the cost of health insurance to the 90% who do by 10% at the same time you're doing enough health care cost reduction stuff that it could lower the price by 10%?
In other words, you lower the cost of health care by making it more competitive, getting rid of Rules and obstacles and free market obstacles just make it a more efficient system.
You could probably squeeze 10% out of it, don't you think?
Maybe some of it would come at the cost of highly profitable healthcare providers.
Some of it might be hospitals who are doing this service and not getting reimbursed.
There's some benefit there if they start getting reimbursed.
So you might be able to find a situation where you say, here's the deal.
In three years, we're going to try to lower the cost of healthcare 10% and move that burden onto the people who have it.
They will subsidize the people who don't have it.
Maybe you make the subsidized healthcare not so good that people don't want better healthcare.
So maybe they'll still want to work to get better healthcare, but they'll have healthcare insurance.
Somebody's saying 9% as my fact-check number of people who don't have insurance.
So let me summarize this.
If the entire healthcare insurance problem is 9%, Are you telling me we can't fix that?
Because I think our healthcare insurance goes up, what, 5% a year?
I need a fact check on that too.
That number just came out of my butt.
But I think your regular healthcare insurance probably goes up 5% a year, right?
I'm just guessing. So adding an immediate 10% at the same time you're saying the other part of this plan...
We're going to go nuts on trying to lower the cost so we can get closer to breakeven there on those two things.
So that's my observation.
I feel as though you could simplify this to the point where it should be solvable.
I just don't think the right people are working on it.
You take a Hillary Clinton, who's an attorney, and you say, go try to fix health care, you're not going to get a simple explanation or a simple solution.
You're going to get the complicated one.
And if all you have working on it is lawyers, it's just going to be complicated.
So get rid of the lobbyists and lawyers and maybe it's solvable.
Alright. I guess Twitter has still locked the New York Post Twitter account because they still have that...
A link to the Biden story, the Hunter Biden story.
So we're watching that.
I'm seeing pundits say that Trump needs a closing argument, something like what he's planning to do in the future to excite his base.
Does that track with you?
Do you feel as if that's missing?
I know it's missing in terms of pundit talk, If I were a pundit on TV, maybe I'd say the same thing.
By the way, I will be a pundit on TV tomorrow.
Tomorrow, Monday. So I'm rebooked for MSNBC. At this point, it would be sometime in the 6 to 7 p.m.
hour, Eastern Time.
So adjust for your time zone.
But Eastern Time, sometime in the 6 to 7 p.m.
Monday, I'll be on MSNBC, if all goes well.
But I don't think that Trump needs a closing argument.
I don't think he needs to tell us what new things he's going to do next year beyond what he's already said.
Because everything that he's doing is what I'd call a system.
So in other words, he's got a philosophy about not starting wars overseas.
Does he need to tell us I'm not going to start any wars in the next four years.
He doesn't need to tell us that's an objective or a goal because he has a system of just getting out of any foreign entanglements.
So I feel like I know what his plan is.
Don't do any of those foreign wars.
I don't need him to tell me what he's going to do with China and negotiating.
Because he's in the middle of doing it, and it probably will take a lot more time to get it done.
I don't need him to tell me what he's doing about cutting regulations, because that's a system.
Again, it's not something you do and then you're done.
It's a regular system where, I don't know if they're still using it, but he'll cut X number of Regulations for every new one that's proposed.
He's got a system. I don't need him to tell me what he's going to do with Supreme Court nominations because he has a system.
Here's my list from the Federalist Society.
I'm going to pick from the list.
I get it. I get it.
I don't really need much more detail than that.
I don't need to know what he wants to do with taxes exactly.
Because he wants them less.
If he can get away with it, I don't know if he can get away with it, but I don't really need him to tell me more about that.
I know he'll try if he can to lower taxes.
So I feel as though that's an empty comment, that he needs some kind of a new thing he's doing.
The difference between, this is my big picture view, is that Republicans are better with systems.
I'm going to create a system And we're just going to keep running this system.
Whereas the Democrats are more about, we want everybody to be equal.
But we don't have a system for getting there that would work.
Because socialism is a pretty bad system.
If you go full socialism, that is.
All right. The biggest mystery in the world to me right now is still Sweden and why we don't understand Sweden.
Now you are probably under the impression that Sweden is doing great, right?
That they didn't close down, they didn't go mask crazy, and although they had a lot of initial deaths, you believe they reached herd immunity.
They did not. Not even close.
And that the current situation is that they have very low infection rate.
Those are both false.
Sweden is about average.
They're not low on infections, and they're not a hot spot.
They're sort of in the middle.
In order to reach the middle, they had far higher deaths, but they also had a freer society.
Here's what we don't understand.
Why is it not a hotspot?
Is it just vitamin D? Because they supplement in Sweden all year round.
They take cod oil or something.
And so it could be that.
Is it social distancing?
I've been told the Swedes are just natural social distancers.
Maybe. Is it luck?
Is it travel patterns?
What is it? And why don't we know it?
If we don't understand Sweden, Do we know anything?
I feel that's the problem.
If we don't know what's going on in Sweden, we probably don't understand this virus enough to know that any of our policies are good policies or bad policies.
It's like we don't understand it.
The other thing we don't understand, and this has been blowing my mind for months, when I saw some epidemiologist expert on TV saying that we don't know why any virus goes away, Did you know that?
We don't know why any virus goes away.
Why is it that the seasonal flu that we get this year will not just come back next year?
Do you know why?
Because the experts don't know why.
And it's not herd immunity.
It's not. We know for sure that that's not the reason it stops.
But we don't know why it stops.
And that's what the experts say.
If we don't know why a virus burns out...
Is Trump necessarily crazy for saying it'll just go away?
Because that seems to me completely compatible with the best expert opinion on viruses, that they do just burn out, and we don't know why.
Now, you could argue that this one's different.
Maybe it was engineered.
We still can't know for sure.
But the Trump statement that it will just go away, I think, is completely compatible with science.
The part that he got terribly, terribly wrong is that he was optimistic about it in terms of the timing.
I don't think he has a reason to be optimistic about the timing of it, but I would say his statement that it will go away and we won't know why is probably dead on.
Would you bet against it?
If you had to take a bet right now, would you bet against Trump who said that the coronavirus will someday just go away?
Don't bet against that.
Now, it might be a year from now.
It could be two years from now.
But I would not take the bet that the only reason it goes away is because we reached some herd immunity with either vaccinations or just people getting infected.
I would bet on Trump being right.
It's just that his timing was so wrong that I think that's the big problem.
All right. Dr.
Scott Atlas, whose name needs to be changed, because every time President Trump is on TV and he says, I go, what?
And then he goes, I go, oh, not me.
And then he says it again, and I go, okay, still not me.
Still not me. I keep expecting the television to talk about me, and it doesn't often enough.
But I guess Twitter banned one of his tweets in which he said, I think this is the one where he tweeted, masks work?
No. And then he lists LA, Miami, Hawaii, Alabama, and Israel.
I believe he's saying that they use a lot of masks in those places, but their infections are still high?
I don't know. Is that what he's saying?
I don't even know the point of it.
And then he says, WHO, World Health Organization, colon, widespread use not supported, meaning masks.
So he did this tweet that people interpreted as anti-mask, and it got banned by Twitter.
But then he later, he clarified by saying that what he said was compatible with current policy, which is current policy is, of course, you should use a mask if you're going to be close to people.
But if you're not going to be close to people, don't go crazy with masks.
I think he's walking a pretty murky line there.
I'm not sure that Dr.
Scott Ellis is helping with clarity, but there is something he's helping, which is he's a really good bad cop.
Right? Because you need a bad cop.
And it works really well in a Trump scenario.
It was good that North Korea knew that there were some bad cops saying we should go hard at North Korea, because then Trump could be the good cop.
And I think this is another one of those cases.
As long as there's a doctor who's an advisor who's going out there and he's I'll say he's at least pushing against the dogma of masks.
He's not saying don't wear a mask.
He's very clear about that.
In the right situations, wear a mask.
But he's pushing the boundary of that.
And that allows Trump to not necessarily be the one who's always pushing that boundary.
But he does want the economy to open up.
So I feel like maybe Dr.
Atlas, by taking all the heat...
It might be good. It might be good for Trump in terms of persuasion.
I don't know if it's good for our health.
I don't know if it's good for anything else.
I'm not the expert. But persuasion-wise, it might work.
By the way, if you believe that Sweden has achieved herd immunity and you believe that the herd immunity is much lower, like 10 or 20%, the head expert in Sweden doesn't think they're at herd immunity.
So Sweden itself doesn't believe that's what happened.
So you should probably not believe that either.
My best guess, if I had to look at all of these different outcomes in different countries, with all these different policies and different situations, if I'm trying to find something that could explain it, the best explanations would be cultural differences and vitamin D. I feel like we're down to that.
It feels like vitamin D and cultural differences about distance.
It might be just that.
That's what I'm thinking. If I had to put a bet on it, I would bet on those two things.
Somebody says smoking, too.
Smoking has a Seems to have, some say it's worse, and some say it's protective.
Don't they? So I think that's an unknown.
And I've heard also that marijuana smoke could be a protectant, but I wouldn't recommend it.
I know I haven't gotten the coronavirus yet, so let me say this.
If marijuana is a protectant, Or they say it protects your lungs.
At some level, I feel like it's obvious that it would.
Because if you put smoke into your lungs, I feel like it at least would cover some of the surface.
Maybe there's less for the virus to stick to if there's a A covering of soot on your lungs.
So I can imagine it could work either way.
I can imagine it could make you worse or make you better.
I'm no doctor, so don't take any medical advice from me.
Alright. Somebody says, man, this guy is really ignorant.
Usually when people call me ignorant is because they know less than I do.