Episode 1159 Scott Adams: I Teach You How to Evaluate Trump’s Coronavirus Performance, Masks, Biden Laptops, Herd Immunity
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Content:
Tips for accepting bribes
Herd immunity and the seasons
The mask debate
Fear of being hunted down, post-election
President Trump's COVID19 strategy
Risk management strategy
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Some days you wake up and you say to yourself, I don't know, I'm not feeling lucky today.
And other days you wake up thinking, I think something good is going to happen today.
Well, today is your lucky day.
You know why? Because you're here.
You just started off the day with the best possible way.
You could not have beaten the way you started today.
Absolutely nailed it.
So good for you. And all you need to maximize your experience, some of you probably know, But it doesn't take much.
All you need is a cup or mug or a glass, a tank or chalice or 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 of the dopamine here of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
Except the coronavirus.
It's called the Simultaneous Sip.
It happens now. Go. I was wrong.
I was wrong.
It made the coronavirus better, too.
Just when you think there's something coffee can't do, it can do it.
So, a lot of you heard the news that there's yet another laptop that's been discovered belonging to allegedly an associate of Hunter Biden.
This one's in the Ukraine.
So I believe the count is now four laptops.
Three of them were left at a repair shop, and one of them was left in Ukraine.
And when I saw that story, I started thinking, I wonder where else there are laptops?
Because I didn't even know that was a thing.
I haven't really ever, I don't think I've ever forgotten a laptop anywhere.
But I thought, what if I have one?
So I started looking through my house to see if I have any Hunter Biden laptops.
And I do!
I found one.
So there's at least five Hunter Biden laptops.
I've got one in my house.
It was in the garage.
It was behind some rags.
I don't know why it was there.
I'm not sure why it was there, but I'll be checking it later for emails.
You should check your house, too, because there are Hunter Biden-related laptops freaking everywhere.
Check behind the couch.
If you've got cushions, look under the cushions.
You probably have a couple of Biden laptops.
I mean, why wouldn't you?
So I see the news today that Biden was double-masking at church.
So he had two masks on.
He had a white mask below a darker colored mask.
And I'm thinking, that's a good start.
That is a good start.
But two masks?
Could you really be safe with just two masks?
Because I'm thinking...
I value my life.
I'm thinking three to five masks would be safe enough to go to church.
Now, considering he was also in church, so there was that extra risk of some religion getting in through the mouth area.
Satan, for example.
Maybe when Biden went to church with his double masking, He was thinking one mask for the coronavirus, one mask to keep Satan out of his mouth hole, because that could be a problem, couldn't it?
So I'm thinking I might triple, maybe quadruple mask, just cover all bases.
I've got a tip for you on how to accept bribes when you become a senator.
Now, nothing about what I'm about to say is to suggest that Joe Biden has taken bribes from anybody.
I have no data, no information that would suggest that.
So let's start with no information to suggest he did anything illegal.
Swampy, perhaps.
But illegal? I don't know of anything.
But hypothetically...
Let's just say that you were just elected to Congress.
Let's say you're a senator. Let's say you thought that you would like to accept some bribes, but you don't want to get caught.
What would be the way to do that?
Would you just say, hey, why don't you give me a check?
I'll put that check in my bank.
That'll be safe enough.
No, you would not do that because that would create a paper trail, a digital trail, and you would not want anybody bribing you in any way that could be discovered later in any easy way.
So one thing you might do, and there are lots of ways to do this, but I'm just going to throw out one suggestion.
One thing you could do is buy a fixer-up mansion.
Something that you could just sort of barely afford, but you definitely couldn't afford to fix it up.
You might be able to afford to buy it, but you don't have enough money to fix up a mansion.
So suppose you had some contractors coming in there, and they're working on your mansion.
They're fixing it up. Is there any paper trail About who paid them in cash?
Let's say they were paid in cash.
Have you ever heard of a subcontractor who was willing to accept cash as opposed to checks?
Yes, you have.
It's called every subcontractor.
I'm sure there's some subcontractor in the world somewhere who will take a check.
But if you offer them cash, if you make it an option, Most subcontractors would say, a cash, check, it's all the same.
Sure, I'll take the cash.
I don't mind that.
And they may or may not declare those earnings on their taxes because if it's cash, it's hard to track.
So imagine, if you will, some rich person who wants to bribe you is not bribing you directly, but maybe they're giving you the cash that you give to your contractors.
And how would that be discoverable?
How in the world would anybody know anything was wrong?
The contractors would be getting cash, but they would be getting it from the homeowner.
The homeowner would just give them cash.
If that cash came from someplace illicit, subcontractor doesn't care, all they know is they got paid.
And it's not the homeowner's fault if the subcontractor doesn't pay their taxes.
It's not your responsibility to make your subcontractor pay the taxes.
Somebody says a 1099, well, there's no 1099 if you pay cash, and if your subcontractor just wants to stay under the radar.
Now, that would not be legal, and I'm not suggesting that anybody in this story actually did that.
I'm just saying that if you wanted the perfect setup to accept bribes without it ever being Here's an opinion about...
I'm going to make you smarter today.
So I'm going to give you a...
Somebody says, a 10K IRS form.
No, there is no tax form.
There's no tax form...
That is going to show whether a subcontractor got paid cash.
That's not a thing. I'm looking at your comments.
You think that they could find that out, but they could not.
They could not. At least not without a lot of work.
So... Here's a little piece of knowledge to make you smarter than all the people you know when they talk about coronavirus.
You know about herd immunity.
You know that the experts say that you probably need something like 60-70% of people to be infected before you can have a good herd immunity.
But I heard a modification to that that's really important, which is it depends on the season.
So, for example, there's evidence from Adam Kucharski on Twitter.
You can see me retweeting him in my Twitter feed.
And he's a mathematician and epidemiologist.
And he's written a book, The Rules of Contagion.
So it's somebody who knows how to do math, knows epidemics, and he informs us this.
That if you looked at the regular influenza, the ordinary seasonal flu, he did some serology data study, and he found that 40-50% of younger people get infected each year.
So they might not have symptoms, they might not know they were infected, but up to half of younger people get infected with influenza each year.
One assumes that's from school.
And 15-20% of older groups Now, the influenza seems to come and then go each year.
It doesn't completely disappear as I understand it, but it becomes a non-issue in subsequent years.
And I looked at that and I said, ah, that does make sense.
Because if only 10 to 20% of older people, and most citizens are older than kids, if only 15 to 20% of them is enough, For your herd immunity, that doesn't make sense.
Because shouldn't it be closer to, you know, 60% or something like that?
And as Adam informed me, and I hadn't really made this connection before, it depends on the season.
If it's the winter, and you're indoors and you're really spreading it around a lot, then your herd immunity has to be pretty high.
Because your risk of infection is also so high.
So you need a little extra herd immunity if people are going to be indoors.
But if it's the summer, and they're outdoors, and they're not in this super-spreader kind of situation, then a lower herd immunity, and it could be a lot lower, would be enough to burn it out.
So you've got two factors that both have to be considered.
How much does the herd immunity need to be And then what season is it?
Because the herd immunity can be a different amount depending on the season.
Got that? That's kind of an important concept to hold in your mind.
It'll help you explain what happens as the winter approaches.
And then... Coming into the conversation was Andres Backhouse.
I always mention him because he's got a background in economics, so he's better at comparing things than most of us.
So he's better at picking apart these claims and telling you what to believe.
Here are a couple of quick facts that Andres points out.
One thing is that you can't look at charts that show mask mandates coming into effect and then show that the virus still was raging.
And so people say, look, here's my chart.
And you can see that the virus was going up, and here's the day that the masks went into effect, and the virus kept going up, so therefore masks don't work.
That's what people say on the Internet.
And you'll see even smart people saying that.
But here's the thing. There's no control group.
So how much would the infections have gone up without masks?
Because masks tend to go into a situation where you've got a known problem.
So the first part is...
Was there such a problem that was out of control, that's why you put masks on in the first place.
So the correlation might be backwards.
People are saying, wait, the masks didn't work because the infections went up, whereas maybe what's happening is infections are going up, So that's why people are wearing masks.
So you might have the correlation and causation backwards.
So we don't have anything to compare it to, and we don't know if we've got the causation right.
So you could easily over-interpret The fact that somebody introduced masks in a location and the coronavirus continued to increase.
That alone, by itself, doesn't tell you anything.
And we even saw, I think, Rand Paul making that kind of a claim that where masks were introduced, You didn't see much of a difference.
But, countering that, we have Dr.
Fauci. Now, don't you think that Dr.
Fauci, probably more than anybody in the planet Earth, or at least in the top 1%, is somebody who's looked into it?
You and I probably have not looked at every mask study, and you and I may not be qualified to look at a mask study and know if it tells you something useful or it doesn't.
But Dr. Fauci has, and people he's talked to has, and other experts have.
And as of yesterday, Fauci says the meta-analysis showed that masks really do work in preventing infection.
And so Fauci says if you look at all of the information, masks work.
Now, does that mean that masks have been tested in one of those reliable kind of tests, the kind where you do the randomized controlled study?
Well, in order for it to be controlled, you would have to have some group that you said, hey, There's going to be a whole bunch of coronavirus in your environment, but we don't want this group to wear masks.
You can't do that study.
Because you can't say to people, you shouldn't wear masks during a coronavirus, because the expectation is that they probably work.
So given that there's such a strong feeling among experts, who could be wrong?
They could be wrong, right?
It's possible. But they have a strong feeling that the masks work, And under that condition, you can't do a controlled test because you can't ask anybody in a coronavirus environment to not wear them.
It just can't be done.
So the meta-analyses have to do with other viruses or other bacteria or other kinds of infections.
So you might say to yourself, wait a minute, those other things are not like this thing.
This coronavirus is not the same size as other things.
It's not a case of protecting the person with the mask.
It's more about protecting the other people.
It has a higher R value, meaning it's more infectious.
Does that make a difference?
Probably. But there you have it.
Dr. Fauci, who has looked at the data, says, and somewhat unambiguously he says this, he's not really hedging it too much.
At all, really. He's not hedging it at all, I'd say.
He's saying, mass work.
Is he right? We'll see.
We'll see. All right.
We'll get back to this coronavirus stuff.
I've got some more fun stuff to talk about.
I was watching a movie last night, and every now and then I say to myself, you know, I'm going to try watching a movie again.
Because some of you might know I bailed out on watching movies because they're so bad.
First of all, they take too long, and they're all hackneyed, and it's the same movie, just rewritten over and over.
There's always a car chase.
There's somebody killing a lot of bad guys.
There's somebody tied to a chair.
Yeah, they're just all boring and predictable.
So I watched this movie with Jessica Chastain.
I forget the title of it, and you certainly don't need to watch it.
And she was some kind of a super spy who, you know, everybody was trying to kill her.
And so it was one of these action movies in which the hero, in this case played by Jessica Chastain, kills lots and lots of bad guys from the beginning to the end.
It's just death count, death count, death count.
And I'm watching it, and I'm thinking to myself, okay, I get that there are far more female heroes in action movies, and maybe the market wants that.
I don't know. I'm no expert.
But But I thought to myself, in what other situation do you get a person from one demographic group, in this case a woman, who can slay unlimited numbers of people from another demographic group, in this case men, and that's okay.
You can make a movie about that.
What other situation could you do that?
Has there ever been a movie in which a male hero Violently dispatches dozens and dozens, if not hundreds, of female characters.
No. You're not going to see that movie.
How about a movie where there's a white star, an action star, who is only killing people of a different ethnicity?
Well, you used to see those movies when I was a kid, right?
It was either like a war movie from World War II where the only people dying were the Japanese characters in the movies, etc.
But you don't see those in 2020.
You don't really see...
A person from one group exclusively killing people from another group.
Because that's no longer politically correct.
It would just send some kind of a message.
Even the Rambo movies are now quite aged.
I don't think you'd see a Rambo movie where only one kind of person gets killed by another kind of person.
And so I ask you this.
What is the impact on our youth Of watching a female character killing unlimited male characters, but never the reverse.
You never see it the other way.
You can certainly see male characters killing unlimited other male characters.
You'd accept that.
I feel like it's devaluing men, and sufficiently so, that we probably ought to ban those movies.
I think if we've gone so far, and we've gone pretty far with this political correctness, you either have to make everything okay and say, alright, anybody can kill anybody, it's just a movie, don't take it too seriously.
Or you have to say, I don't think the one thing we can not only allow, but feature?
In fact, find me an action movie that does not include a female lead character killing hundreds of males.
That's the basic movie right now, right?
Birds of Prey, female characters killing male characters.
That's it. That's the movie.
And I think you're going to see a lot more of that.
I find that unacceptable.
And so I will boycott any movie that has a female character who is killing exclusively or almost exclusively male characters as entertainment.
Because I'm not sure that's entertainment.
All right. Somebody is countering with the handmaiden's tale.
I feel like The Handmaiden's Tale is from the perspective of the victim.
If the movies I was talking about were very sympathetic to all the hundreds of henchmen who got killed, it's like, let's do this.
Let's do a movie from the perspective of all of the bad guys who got killed.
That's what The Handmaiden's Tale is.
That's from the perspective of the victim.
See? That's more of the same.
It's not the counter example.
That's more of the same.
All right, let's talk about the polls.
And let's talk about who's going to win.
Do you want some optimism about Trump winning the election?
I got some. You ready for some optimism?
I told you this was going to be the best part of the day.
It's going to be incredible.
All right, so first of all, the major polls and the polling average would show that Trump is not only behind, but behind by fairly large numbers.
But we know from 2016 that the polls in general, not every poll, we love our Rasmussens and Zogbys and a few others, Trafalgar, but the polls in general appear to be, I feel like I can say this as just a fact, they appear to be illegitimate.
Can I say that as just a fact that is so well established that I don't need to defend it with any reasons anymore?
Have we reached that point where everybody's like, yeah, those are fake.
I think we have. And I think we would also expect that the fake polls would close in the final week so that they don't lose all of their credibility.
Oh, something happened the final week and the polls closed.
How about that? But I would think that Joe Biden's success with fundraising recently, because he's raising massive amounts of money, has a lot to do with the polls.
Because people like to give money to winning causes.
They don't like to give money to something that looks like it's going to lose.
So as Biden's poll numbers look better, he's raking in big numbers.
Not a big surprise.
But besides the polls, are we seeing anything that would suggest that maybe Trump has a better chance than the polls are indicating?
And yes, we are.
And it turns out that just about everything that isn't those illegitimate polls...
Looks bro-chump.
Almost everything. Let me give you an example.
So first of all, there's a pollster, Patrick Basham.
No relation.
Who has indicated that there are something like 4-5% shy Trump supporters.
So according to this one researcher slash pollster, they are absolutely there, and it's not just because some rural people are hard to poll, but that there is an absolute, no doubt about it, shy Trump supporter, and it's going to come out on election day similar to 2016.
Now apparently there's also the internal polls don't show what the external polls show.
And the reason that Obama, I think Obama's going to Pennsylvania to help out Biden, you don't send Obama to Pennsylvania if the polls that say Pennsylvania is going to go to Biden are accurate.
That is an indication by the Biden people that they don't believe the polls either.
So they're sending Obama there to nail down a state that in theory, and on paper, Biden's already got in the bag.
So that should tell you something.
Also, the Trafalgar group, I think this is recent enough, has Trump ahead in the battleground states.
So it doesn't really matter what the national polls say.
The battleground states are enough.
And so in at least five battleground states, Trump is ahead, according to the Trafalgar Group, who has done better in the past than other pollsters.
So you look at the ones who were the closest in 2016 and say, how are they?
And once again, the ones that had the best results in 2016 are looking really good for Trump.
Surprise! And we're also seeing polls that Trump is earning a higher percentage of black and Hispanic voters than he did in 2016.
How would you like to be the Biden campaign and realize that Trump is doing way better with black and Hispanic voters?
Pretty scary.
Now apparently Biden is doing better with seniors.
But I don't know if I believe that, because that may be also coming from the same illegitimate polls.
But I suppose I could believe it, but I don't know if I do.
It's possible just because Biden, you know, Biden's a Democrat and Biden is promising things and scaring people with a bunch of lies about what Trump's going to do.
So maybe, maybe.
But I would think getting back the black, or gaining in the black and Hispanic voters is going to make a big deal.
And also, if you just look at the enthusiasm...
I think the enthusiasm gap is just so obvious.
If you look at any Biden rally, it's three cars and two reporters standing in circles.
And you look at any Trump event, and it's gigantic.
Apparently the polls show that Trump-likely voters are twice as enthusiastic as other voters.
So twice as... Two times more enthusiastic than Trump voters.
That's not even close.
Twice as enthusiastic?
And it's pretty obvious. I mean, it matches your observation.
Also, I think Trump was shown in one poll, maybe it's already changed, but 56% were better off, they thought.
56%?
If that was the only thing you knew, that would pretty much determine what's going to happen.
And apparently Trump's approval rating is high enough, even with coronavirus and everything else, his approval rating is high enough that it actually predicts re-election.
So we don't know, but we shall see.
We'll talk about Trump and coronavirus in a minute, but here's something I'm feeling...
But I can't measure it.
So tell me if you're feeling this too.
The thing we're worried about is that the election results will not look credible to one side or the other, maybe both.
And that could cause some kind of civil unrest leading to a breakdown of civilization or something.
I'm feeling the opposite and I'm feeling it strongly.
Now, anecdotally, we're seeing lots of individual threats against, you know, we're going to hunt you down, you Trump supporters.
We're seeing individual acts of violence on the street.
And a lot of Trump supporters are thinking, if Trump loses, or even if he wins, and it's a contested election, are we going to be hunted down?
Because it's feeling like that?
And I'm going to tell you, it's starting to feel the opposite.
And here's why.
The very act of having an election and the act of voting and the act of getting, let's say, getting dirty in analyzing the election and really looking at the data and trying to understand what the candidates are proposing, looking at their policies, watching the debates, all of this stuff that is really super concentrated in the last month has an effect on us.
And it has an effect of reintroducing us to democracy.
Let's call it the republic, to be technical.
But the principles of democratic government, they've gone from something we know exists but are not front of mind.
It's now gone completely to front of mind.
And in the world of persuasion, if you can get somebody to do a small thing, it's easier to get them to do a slightly bigger thing.
It's how cults work.
They get you to do small stuff, and then they gradually get you to do more stuff.
But getting people to actually physically vote, physically fill out a ballot, physically deliver it, physically drive to the voting area, is very self-persuasive.
Meaning that we are brainwashing ourselves back into the love of democracy, the love of the republic.
And nobody's in charge of this, right?
There's nobody whose message is, love your democracy.
There's nobody who's, I mean, I guess the politicians say that sometimes, but you wouldn't identify with anybody.
We are instead re-hypnotizing ourselves to love the country and love the system, even while we're complaining, right?
Because you can complain like crazy and still love the thing you're complaining about, such as, you know, your own family.
You can complain about your family, but still love them.
And I feel like there's a thing happening, right?
And you're going to feel it more and more right up to election day.
And that thing is, people buying into the system.
If we do have a record turnout for the election, that also means we had a record number of people who bought into the system.
And that is a very stabilizing thing.
Very stabilizing.
And the more people you see simply participating in a peaceful way, and those number of people are going to be, how many?
Over 100 million?
Can somebody in the comments tell me how many people actually are likely to vote?
100 million? Now, add up all the people who have protested in 2020.
All of them. Every person who went on the street, not just violent people, not talking about looters, just every single person who went on the street, every person who's threatened a Trump supporter, every person who did violence, if you add them all up, how many are there?
20,000? What would be the total number of people who seem to be revolution-minded?
You know, actually marched 20,000?
Maybe 100,000?
But we're talking about 100 million Americans just reminded themselves that they were Americans.
And we're going to keep reminding ourselves.
And we're going to remind ourselves all the way to Election Day.
And when this election is over, no matter which way it goes, and we fight about it, because we will, will it go to the Supreme Court?
I'd say more likely yes than no.
More likely yes than no.
But when it's all done, we will be immersed in the system.
We will have participated.
We will have done our part.
We will have looked at the Supreme Court and watch it do its part.
It will give us an answer that we will respect because it won't be stupid.
Some of the smartest people in the whole frickin' country are on the Supreme Court.
They're not going to be stupid.
You're going to be proud of it.
You're going to be glad of it.
You're going to be happy that you live in a system that can do this.
It can do this.
We can do this.
Meaning the system can do this.
And we can do it as well.
So my feeling at the moment is that no matter which way it goes, There will be the required paid demonstrators, but I think the people demonstrating will largely be the organized people who have an agenda.
The Marxists, anybody who's getting paid by an outside authority, some organization that's trying to get power.
But what I don't see happening is the bulk of the country, or enough of them, Rejecting our system or rejecting the results?
We'll complain about it forever, no matter which way it goes.
We're going to complain forever.
But we probably...
And I'm going to say 99.9% chance we will still be the United States in a year.
We will still be the strongest country that the world has ever known.
And we're not going to be beaten by the fake news.
Because it's the fake news that winds us up.
It's the AI that drives the fake news and drives the social engagement.
Those things are not working on our side.
But... The AI wants to keep us alive.
The AI doesn't want the country to be destroyed, because that gives you less AI. So the AI wants the country to live.
The public wants the country to live.
The few people who don't, We're going to have to deal with a country that is more armed than it has ever been before.
If you think this country can be overthrown, I will give you what I call the ISIS analogy.
ISIS looked unstoppable until their ambition got bigger.
As soon as they tried to hold property and hold land and territory, they became an easy target.
You knew exactly where they were.
Oh, look, they are. This is their territory.
There's their standing army.
Let's blow them up.
So things that work on a small scale do not necessarily work on a big scale.
So if you take all these protesters, etc., they found this little niche, say it any way you like, translated into your head to your favorite pronunciation.
So they found this weird little time and place that they could have unlimited trouble.
They'd have to find a democratic location.
They'd have to get enough people that the police were sort of outnumbered.
They'd need to have just the right political situation.
They'd need to have funding from the outside.
They'd have to have the right organizers.
They'd have to have the right weather.
And they would have to have a whole bunch of things.
It has to be sort of perfect.
But one thing they really, really need Is that these citizens in the area they're causing trouble are not heavily armed.
And that's not true once you get out of the middle of the city.
As soon as you get into the suburbs, people are armed to their teeth.
And it's only going to take...
I would be amazed if there's not a mass casualty event, let's say, working against the protesters.
Now, the fact that it hasn't happened yet...
It tells you a lot, as someone else was opining on social media.
The fact that conservatives who are armed to the teeth, we all agree on that, conservatives are armed, but they have, I would say that they've held back The level of violence that they are capable of delivering, they have held back almost completely.
The Proud Boys actually like to fight.
That's literally part of the culture.
So they sort of look for trouble.
They like fights. But they don't represent conservatives or anything like that.
They have some overlap, but they certainly don't represent them.
So it would take a lot...
Apparently, to get conservatives mad enough to be violent in some general way.
But if you move into the suburbs, you got it.
If these protests move into the suburbs, it would be like ISIS trying to hold property.
You're going to move all these people into the kill zone, and somebody's going to do something that we don't recommend, but it's predictable, right?
And... Once there's a mass casualty event among the protesters, they may be less inclined to protest again.
But it probably takes getting into the suburbs before that happens.
But I don't see any chance that the unrest can grow to destroy the country.
I think that risk is basically zero.
So there's that.
Let's talk about Trump's performance on the coronavirus.
Oh, by the way, I'm scheduled to be on MSNBC today.
So later today, which would be sometime in the Eastern time zone, it would be between 6 and 7.
I don't know when between then.
So if you're in California, between 3 and 4.
If you're in East Coast, 6 to 7 on MSNBC. So that's happening.
But let's talk about Whether we know Trump is doing a good job or a bad job on coronavirus.
And here are some things to make you smarter.
So if you remember everything I tell you, it's an Arie Melber show on MSNBC. Somebody's asking.
Here are the things you should ask yourself if somebody tells you Trump has botched the coronavirus.
So Trump closed China travel, and I think most people say he did it soon enough, but he didn't close it completely because a lot of Americans who needed to get back home were there.
And there's some thinking that he should have forced them into quarantine or not let them come home, I suppose.
I don't know how that works.
How do you not let Americans come back home?
That's a tough one. And we didn't really have the testing resources, and there were so many of them, apparently lots of them, that you couldn't test them all or quarantine them all.
It just didn't seem practical.
But here's the question I haven't seen asked or answered.
What did the experts recommend about the, I think it's mostly American citizens, who were allowed back in from China?
Did Fauci and Birx Say to President Trump, yes, you should close travel from China, but make sure you close it all.
Don't let the American citizens back in.
Did that happen?
Do you know if that happened or it didn't happen?
Because I don't know.
That feels like it's pretty important, right?
Because if the experts were not terribly concerned about the number of people who were going to get back in, then why should the president have been concerned?
If what we're asking of the president, somebody says, yes, Fauci did.
So if you have a source for that, I'd like to see it.
I'd like to see anything that would suggest Fauci said it should be closed completely versus allowing the Americans back in, which would be a smaller number compared to total travel.
So that's a question that I don't know, but if somebody says that too many people got back in, throw it back at them and say, what did Fauci and Birx say?
Did they say not to let those people in?
Some says they were quarantined.
I don't believe that's true. I don't believe that the people coming in from China were quarantined.
Alright, so the number one question there is, what did Trump do that's different from what the experts told him to do?
If Fauci and Birx had told Trump, no, no, no, you have to stop everybody, if that happened, wouldn't we know that?
Because that would be the number one headline, wouldn't it?
Trump doesn't do what experts say, right?
If he violated what they recommended, we would know that, wouldn't we?
And I don't know that.
Alright, here's the other thing.
If you think that Trump's treatment of masks caused fewer people to use them, and therefore more deaths, here's the question you would have to ask if you were good at comparing things.
Would Obama have been better at getting conservatives to wear masks?
What do you think? Is there any evidence to suggest that a President Obama or a President Clinton, or I'll even extend it, how about a President Mitt Romney?
What tells you that any of them, Obama, Clinton, or Romney, which of them would have done a better job at getting conservatives to wear masks?
And young people to wear masks.
I think that's where the problems are.
I have no reason to think any of them would have been more successful.
It hasn't been tested, and certainly there's no common sense that would suggest that they would be better at it.
And I'm not even sure that Trump's example is really what's driving people.
It might be. I mean, you have to worry about that.
But I can't imagine that a Democrat would get Republicans to wear masks or that the young people would say, oh, it's a Democrat asking.
I wasn't going to wear a mask to my college party, my illegal college party, but now that I know that a Democrat has asked me, I'm going to wear that mask.
Said nobody. Said no college student ever.
So I would say that the idea that Trump has not handled the mask-wearing...
It fits common sense.
In other words, as you're watching him, you're saying, surely the way you're talking about this is suboptimal.
But that's not the end of the analysis.
You still have to compare him to any other president who would have been in that situation, and you'd have to know that that other president would have got Would have achieved greater mask wearing.
Do you know that? Because I don't see that.
It is not obvious to me that some other president would have somehow achieved this magical mask wearing thing.
I think our desire to not wear masks has more to do with Americans than it does with our president.
How about this? If you took a leader from another country that you thought did a good job with the coronavirus, let's say South Korea or New Zealand, and you just plop that leader into the United States with all of our problems, we've got more international travel than a lot of places coming in from different directions.
We might have a less compliant populace who is more freedom-loving than compliant.
We've got states' rights that add a wrinkle.
How would that other leader do in the same situation?
Well, there's no way to know.
And therefore, you don't really have any knowledge of whether Trump did better or worse than some other leader would have done with the same scenario.
How about this? How do you compare countries that have different preferences for freedom over safety?
If the United States, by, let's say, historical and cultural reasons, we value freedom over safety.
More so than some other places, which I believe if you did a poll, I don't know if anybody has done that, but if you did a poll, I think you would find that some countries value health and safety over freedom, or at least their leaders do.
Because if the leaders value it, maybe they can force it to happen.
But if the United States favors more freedom at the expense of safety, How would you compare our death rate to a country that had a different set of priorities?
How is that a fair comparison?
We should only be compared to countries that have the same, let's say, preference for freedom over safety.
And who would that be? I don't know.
Do you? Because we didn't do exactly the same thing as Sweden, so that's not a good comparison.
So people who are good at comparing things know that we don't have anything to compare.
And how about this?
We still don't know why one country does better than another country.
We don't. If you read experts, and I'm talking about actual experts, who are talking about, let's say, Sweden's experience, they don't even agree.
There's no expert consensus on why Sweden is having the experience that they are.
We don't even agree if it's a good experience.
The experts can't even agree if things are going well there or poorly.
I mean, think about that.
We don't even know if they're doing well or poorly.
And we don't know why some countries mysteriously have good effects and others don't.
We have lots of hypotheses from, you know, cultural distance things to I think vitamin D might be a big part of it.
Age, ethnicity, maybe masks, maybe distance, who knows?
We don't know. So if you don't know, and I think that's fair to say, I feel like that's completely fair to say, that we don't know why some country does really well and some country doesn't.
And if you don't know why some country is doing well and another one isn't, why are we attributing that difference to the leaders?
Because there's no evidence that it's the leaders that are the problem or the solution.
All right. Now, so that would be the defense of the president's performance, and it's mostly around the fact that you really can't tell how anybody's doing.
So that's the summary.
You just can't tell. The fact that we have different outcomes only tells you there are different outcomes.
The different outcomes do not tell you The quality of the leadership.
It doesn't tell you that. And when you imagine it does, you're in purely irrational territory.
But, that said, are there some things we could say about the president's performance that you could still clearly say are suboptimal?
And the answer is yes.
Here are the things that I would put at the top of the list.
On day one, I can forgive that we didn't have good testing, because apparently there was a technical problem, we didn't know we had it, we got a late start.
It's not exactly the president's fault.
You know, it was the fault of the experts who were doing the test kits, etc.
But now it's been, what, seven months in or something?
Seven months later, I heard somebody else ask this on a news show, so I'll just borrow this thought.
Why is it that seven months in, the most capable country in the world, I'd like to think we are, maybe not, Why is it that I can't just walk down to CVS and get myself a coronavirus test as often as I want?
Ideally, I'd like to have the results, you know, same day, 15 minutes.
But are you telling me that if we put, you know, balls to the wall, you know, War Powers Act, pull out all the stops, stop at nothing, to make sure every citizen could get tested every frickin' day?
Every citizen, every day.
How would we look in terms of the coronavirus if we could do that?
Well, a lot better, right?
It would be a lot better. Has the president done that?
No. No.
And although he has done a lot, and there's a lot happening with testing, a lot of different companies are working on it, it does feel to me, just sort of as an observer, that by now...
If our president was doing everything that hindsight tells us he should have done, we would be a lot further along in all of us being able to get tested as much as we wanted.
I feel like that's a safe statement.
So if somebody said that's a problem, I don't know if I could argue that.
I have argued in the past that contact tracing It only works when you have just a few infections, and it doesn't work if you're already massively infected, as we were by the time we had enough tests to even think about that.
So I think I would not blame the president for doing less contact tracing, because we didn't have the ability to do it until it was sort of too late.
But we should be able to test sort of everybody by now.
And if we can't do it by now, can you tell us when we can do that?
Is that sort of a late November you're going to be able to go into any Walgreens and get a test?
Yes or no? I'd love to know if that's on track.
Somebody says disagree in the comments.
You've got more room for text than the word disagree.
So while testing is more available, it's certainly not available enough.
Why don't you have an oxygen meter in your house?
How many of you have your own oxygen meter?
You know, it's an inexpensive device.
You just clip it to your finger and it tells you your oxygen level.
Why don't you have one of those?
Because those are really one of the first indicators you've got a problem, even before a test, probably.
Now, a lot of you have them, but why isn't a national effort to put one in every house?
Wouldn't you feel better if the president had said, look, we're going to fund one of these companies that makes those oxygen meters, and we're going to just mail one to every house with a ballot.
We'll probably mail them to the wrong addresses, too.
We'll just mail one to every house.
There will be no house that doesn't have an oxygen meter.
That would feel like better leadership, right?
That didn't happen. Why are we not being continuously reminded to take more vitamin D? Wouldn't that feel like good leadership if every time you saw the president he said, make sure you're supplementing with vitamin D? Because, you know, he does mention wash your hands and wear a mask if you're in close social distancing range.
But wouldn't you like to see a little more on vitamin D? You're probably doing it on your own, but wouldn't you like to see more of that?
And why have we not done a test of two different cities, one where masks are required, one where they're not, if they have enough in common that maybe you could tell there's a difference?
I would feel like we had better leadership if we had more tests going on.
You know, a test this versus this.
A-B testing. I don't see that.
I'm not sure that would be easily organized.
By the federal government, but they could at least call it out.
If there are two cities that went two different ways, I'd like to see the president say, okay, we've got a good test case.
We've got Cleveland going this way.
We've got Miami going this way.
And hypothetically, let's say they had enough in common with infection rates or whatever, that now we can see if these procedures make a difference in the curve.
Wouldn't you like to see that?
And then, of course, Trump has claimed that he does a bad job explaining masks and the efficiency of masks.
He made the claim that 85% of people who wear masks caught COVID. So he kind of butchered that explanation.
It wasn't about masks working or not.
So he's definitely said things which probably discourage people from wearing masks.
That feels safe.
But again, would Obama have done better?
How would you know? I don't see conservatives saying, oh, Obama said it.
I guess I'll go wear a mask now.
It doesn't feel like that would happen.
All right. So those are your pros and cons for Trump and coronavirus.
I sent a tweet this morning that said that listening to the experts is the dumbest, smart-sounding idea of all time.
There's some things that sound smart, but they're really the dumbest thing ever.
I'll give you another example.
Be yourself. Have you ever heard that advice?
Be yourself. Just be yourself.
That's the best thing you can do.
Worst advice ever.
There's no advice that's worse than be yourself.
Now, here's better advice.
Try to be a better version of yourself.
Try to be better than yourself.
That's good advice.
Try to continuously improve.
Try to not accept where you are as good enough.
Don't try to be yourself, because you wouldn't wear clothes, you wouldn't bathe, you wouldn't obey the law.
If it was just up to you, just being yourself, you'd be the worst person ever.
Do you ever have a friend who tells you that they're just being honest?
Oh yeah, I know it might sound rude, but I'm just honest.
I'm just being honest. Do you want that?
Wouldn't you rather be around somebody who wouldn't be that honest if the only purpose is to hurt you?
Can't help you. Didn't help you at all.
It was just honest and it hurt.
Maybe you don't want that person to be around you.
Alright, so listening to the experts is seriously the stupidest advice anybody ever gave.
And still, and still, I'm going to give you that advice too.
It's both the stupidest advice ever given, and I'm also going to give it to you right now.
Yeah, you have to listen to the experts.
You have to. You'd be an idiot not to.
But believing them, that's another story.
Because you want to reach the level of maturity where you can say this to yourself.
If the experts don't agree, how do you know which expert is right?
You're not the expert on experts.
You're not an expert on coronavirus.
You're not an expert on climate change.
And if you talk to the experts, you don't know if they're lying to you.
You can't tell.
You're just trusting the experts.
So are you really trusting science?
Are you really listening to science?
Are you really listening to the experts?
Well, you might be listening to them, but should you?
You don't know. You don't know.
How do you know that science is at that early stage where they might be more wrong than right on some topic, or they've progressed to the point where they're more right than wrong?
How can you tell where they are on that progression?
Can you tell that something is really settled versus something that's not yet settled?
You can't tell.
There's no way to tell.
Even an expert can't tell that.
So you certainly can't tell.
So if you don't know which experts are right, And which ones are wrong?
What does it mean to trust the experts?
It's nonsense.
It's complete nonsense.
So instead, you know, on questions like masks and hydroxychloroquine and lockdowns, clearly there are experts on both sides.
So what about going with the majority?
How about that? Should you go with the majority?
Because most experts, if they're all on one side, let's say it's 90-10.
Would you go with the 90 just automatically?
Well, again, you don't know if this is a mature science in which when 90% of the people are on the same side, it tells you a lot.
It tells you that that is a solid opinion.
Or is it the beginning?
Where 90% of the people are wrong, but we won't know for a while.
How do you tell? You can't.
So what I do is risk management instead.
So instead of saying, those experts are certainly right, I say to myself, if I follow this expert, what's the upside and what's the downside?
So with masks, for example, I don't believe the experts, because that would be stupid, and I don't believe them because there are more that say it's that they work than don't, although I'm biased by that.
I admit I'm biased by that, but it's not automatically true because most experts say it.
It's not true because there are studies.
Metadata, meta-analysis, as Dr.
Fauci says, that doesn't make it true because there are probably plenty of things that there's meta-analysis and it's wrong.
And we know that 50% of the studies that are submitted to journals and published, peer-reviewed and published, something like half of them turn out to be not reproducible.
So science isn't one thing that's right, and all the smart people believe it because it's one thing and it's right.
Science is this big mess of stuff that is more wrong than right, because there's more stuff that you're working through the early parts than there are things that you've settled.
And you don't know what's wrong, and you don't know what's right.
So I go with risk management, and I state to myself, for example, I don't know anybody who died from wearing a mask.
Do you? I don't know anybody.
I don't know anybody who got some incurable disease from wearing a mask.
Do I believe it's possible?
Yeah. Yeah, totally.
Do I believe that some people might be worse off wearing masks and that the downside for those certain medical conditions, etc., is worse than the risk of getting coronavirus?
Yeah, those people certainly exist.
I would say so.
But until I see people dropping from mask-related illness, I'm going to go with the meta-analysis and the Fauci that says, we think it works.
It might work.
Could be wrong. But we don't see people dying from wearing masks.
But the meta-analysis strongly suggests people will die from not wearing masks.
So it's a risk management question.
That is how smart people act.
Trusting experts is the dumbest frickin' thing you could ever do in your life, even though they're usually right.
They're usually right.
I would bet that if you looked at all expert opinions over time, you'd find they're more right than wrong, depending on the category.
All right. And that's about all I wanted to talk about.
How about that? Well, I would grant you that wearing a mask for a long time is way riskier than wearing it for a short time.
So that's true.
And there again, I would go to, if we see a massive health issue from wearing masks, and we would see it first in the people who have to wear masks for longer periods, I would say we should take that seriously.
But until we do, there's been enough people wearing masks.
I mean, look at Asia.
In Asia, it's fairly common for people to wear masks all day long.
Do we have data from Asia that says, oh, all those mask wearers were worse off?
Don't think so. Now, there's another thing happening.
I don't have confirmation of this, but it looks like the regular influenza rates are low this year.
I need a fact check on that because I didn't see a source I trusted.
But I'm very curious what regular influenza will look like this year.
If masks work, you would expect it would be lower than ever.
If there's some kind of cross-immunity thing, maybe it'll be less than ever because of that.
But here's something that I would at least put out there as a possibility.
I've told you before that the regular influenza death rate is fake and that you've never met anybody who died from regular flu.
Have you? Now, there's always going to be somebody who says yes, but we all know somebody who died of coronavirus.
Maybe not directly, but you know somebody who knows somebody who died of coronavirus.
You see them in the news, etc.
That seems real. There are real people dying of coronavirus, and a lot of them.
You don't know a lot of people who died of influenza.
I know exactly zero in 63 years of life.
Apparently 20,000 to 50,000 people around me have been dropping dead from this influenza, and somehow I never noticed.
It escaped my view.
I certainly know people who died in traffic accidents.
And that's about the same number per year, right?
Ask yourself this.
Do you know anybody who died of an overdose or anybody who died of a traffic-related accident?
Yes, you do.
How many of those are there per year?
About the same as alleged.
Influenza deaths. It's in that range, you know, the low tens of thousands per year.
Same range. Why is it you know somebody who died of AIDS? Probably.
You know somebody who died in a car accident.
I know somebody who died in a parachute accident.
But I don't know anybody who died of influenza.
So I'm going to say that, and this is one of the tips I have in my book, Loser Think, that if you're trying to figure out what's true and what's false, here are some tips.
If the news on the left and the news on the right says a fact is a fact and they say it the same, it's probably true.
If either the news on the left or the news on the right are the only ones that say it's a fact, but the other news says it's not a fact, it's probably not a fact.
All right? Whoever says it's not true has the advantage.
It's usually not true if somebody says it's not true.
All right. That's a weird comment.
And the other way you can tell if something's true, or at least it's a flag, is if the official data completely conflicts with your observation.
All right? For example, most of my life I was taught that if you ate within, I don't know, half an hour or whatever of swimming, you would get a cramp and you would die because you ate food too close to swimming.
And yet, I lived my entire life without hearing of a single person who died because they got a cramp, because they ate food too close to swimming.
Do you know how many times everybody I know ate food Too soon to swimming?
Basically everybody.
So the whole world is full of people who are violating that, eating food and swimming, and I'd never heard of anybody who got a cramp and died from swimming.
And then decades pass, and sure enough, the science comes out and it says, um, there was never any science to suggest you would get a cramp from eating before swimming.
Sure enough, the observation was that none of it was happening, and The data, what I thought was the science, probably was never real science, but I thought it was science, said that people were dropping like flies, or at least they could.
So the influenza thing is the same.
It's the same, that it doesn't match observation.
And I still have a big question on the Spanish flu I'm seeing in the comments.
Somebody mentioned that.
How did the Spanish flu ever go away?
If everything that we've been told by the experts is true, and remember, we're supposed to trust the experts.
But the experts have told us that unless you have herd immunity, a virus isn't going to go away.
Spanish flu didn't reach herd immunity, did it?
But it went away? So is that because there was some other immunity that was cross-immunity?
Was it because there's a genetic thing where all the people who could get it got it?
There's a big, big unknown about the Spanish flu.
And I see people even disagreeing about whether masks worked during the Spanish flu.
I feel like we would know that, wouldn't we?
But I guess we don't. All right.
That's all I got for now.
I think that's plenty, don't you?
I hope you enjoyed today's episode of Coffee with Scott Adams.
And I will see you...
Well, if you're watching me on MSNBC, you'll see me later today.
Otherwise, I'll see you tomorrow.
All right, YouTubers. Periscope is off.
I'm just watching you right now, looking at your...
Somebody says that they wore gauze.
For the Spanish flu.
Yeah, that wouldn't work as well, would it?
Influenza is generally not listed on death certificates.
That is correct. Influenza is actually not counted.
It's estimated based on excess mortality.
But I got a feeling there's some other reason that people are dying.
Why are you doing this Periscope YouTube difference?
I don't know the question, but let me give you a general answer.
In order to do a live stream on both Periscope and YouTube, I had to use two different iPads that are just nailed up to the two different services.
And I just put them in front of me together so that I'm on both.
But every other technology, such as this device you see behind me, that's $13,000 worth of equipment, high-end equipment, to be able to live stream to different destinations, doesn't work.
Now, technically it works, but you would need to be a full-time engineer to debug it every time it goes down.
Unfortunately, if you have a Windows platform, and I don't know why anybody would use Windows, frankly.
Do you use Windows for anything?
Because every time you turn it on, it just starts begging you for updates and downloads, and you just can never use it.
When I open up my Macintosh, I just start working.
If I open up a Windows machine, I can spend the next hour just debugging all the things that degraded since the last time I opened my computer.
You know, all the software is on a date, and it's just a mess.
So anyway, so all those, the systems that try to stream to multiple outlets, they use Windows machines, which are not dependable devices.
