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Dec. 21, 2020 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
53:43
Episode 1226 Scott Adams: I Compare President Trump and Biden on Coronavirus Leadership. Who Wins?

My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a Find my "extra" content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com Content: - WaPo cartoon portrays Republicans as rats - Whiteboard1: Foreign Hackers - Congress gives us $600 - Ida Bae Wells opinions on school choice - Asymptomatic spreading...is trivial - Whiteboard2: Pandemic Leadership/Importance - Rapid testing is misunderstood ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topics to build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scott-adams00/support

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Hey, everybody. Come on in.
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You know, we're often separated by Country type and ethnicity.
We're separated by gender and age and all kinds of things.
But one thing that brings us all together is the simultaneous sip.
And it's pretty awesome. Speaking of awesome, although there's a tragedy involved, United Airlines had a situation where a COVID passenger died in flight.
And as the COVID passenger stopped breathing, there were actually multiple people who volunteered to help do CPR. Just hold this in your head for a moment.
We're in the middle of a pandemic, and somebody has symptoms that certainly look like they could have been coronavirus, you know, because it's a breathing problem.
And indeed, it was confirmed it was real coronavirus.
And yet, and yet, there were multiple people who volunteered without hesitation to perform CPR. Now, in this case, the CPR did not include mouth-to-mouth because they have oxygen masks.
So it's more about the compression.
But one of those people was Tony Aldapa, who was a young man who was, I guess he was an emergency EMT type, happened to be on the flight and he jumped in, used his expertise with no hesitation, performed CPR on the guy for a long time by his own report, by Tony's own report.
He was covered in the man's sweat and urine by the time he was done.
And indeed, Tony also, it looks like, got coronavirus.
So he did actually get the exact risk that he knew was the risk when he didn't hesitate.
And he says now he would do it again.
Now, of course, he's a younger man, so his risk of dying, Tony's risk, is lower than the patient.
So statistically, the odds were in his side.
But how do you like living in a world...
In which you can be in the middle of a pandemic, and you go down on an airplane, and there are like several people come to your rescue.
Several. It's pretty inspiring.
Another story, Trump is actually mulling, reportedly.
He's asking people about reprising The Apprentice.
Now, I'm not a big TV watcher, so I don't have an opinion about whether that'd be good TV, but it would be the top-rated show.
So if Trump wants to have the top-rated TV show, he can do it.
But it's sort of a weird career situation for Trump, because he could also have the top-rated anything.
Basically, you know, whatever business he starts is probably going to do pretty well if he chooses right.
So he's got a lot of options.
Steve Malloy tweeted a cartoon from the Washington Post that was depicting Trump supporters as rats.
Yeah, does that sound familiar?
So it's a cartoon depicting Trump supporters as actual rats, you know, physical rats.
And it might sound familiar to people of a certain age, because as Steve pointed out in a side-by-side photo, it's nearly identical to Nazi propaganda.
Now, very few people have mocked People more than I have for using any kind of Holocaust analogy or Nazi analogy.
And the reason I mock people who do that is that the whole reason that, you know, the Holocaust is so big in our minds is because it was a one-off.
Well, one-off is, unfortunately, that's too optimistic.
It's something that doesn't happen a lot, let's just say.
Unfortunately, it wasn't unique that there was a massacre.
But usually, I say to myself, calling an American politician Hitler, that's not right.
That's just hyperbole.
It's stupid. You're just not a good part of the conversation.
But this is the first time I've ever seen an exact match.
The type of communication that the Washington Post was using with this cartoon of the Trump supporters as rats is exactly the same as Nazi propaganda showing the Jewish population as rats before World War II. It's exactly the same.
There's no difference. That is so shocking that I don't even know how the Washington Post stays in business after that.
I mean, the whole company should have been shut down after that.
Like, this is so bad, you actually should have shut down the company.
But, you know, there's no law against it, so there's no way you could actually shut down a company over a comic.
But this is, in terms of how bad it is, it's a close the company kind of bad.
This isn't, oh, sorry, this isn't run a correction or run an apology kind of thing.
This has closed the whole company.
You don't deserve to be in business because you are a menace to society.
If you're a news organization, well, I've said enough on that.
Today, I don't know if you can take the excitement, but it's a double whiteboard day.
But it's not just a two-sided whiteboard day, but the two sides are two different topics.
How about that? How about that?
It's not even the same topic.
Topic number one.
The integrity of our computing systems in the United States.
Oops. Don't want that side.
Don't look. Don't look.
That's the wrong side. No, don't look.
I hope you enjoy my super high-tech presentation, which if you're listening to this on audio, is really annoying.
So, alright, topic one.
The integrity of our computing systems in the United States.
We found that With the SolarWinds hack that is probably Russia, our experts say.
Trump says it might be China.
It might be. But the Pompeo and the intelligence agencies are saying it's probably Russia.
How much should you trust our intelligence systems who say it's probably Russia?
What level of credibility would you put on all of our intelligence agencies being quite certain?
Quite certain. Yeah, zero.
Zero. Zero is what the credibility I'd put on it.
I'd put zero on that.
Now that doesn't mean they're wrong, but in terms of whether you could believe them or should believe them based on recent history, I'd say zero.
They gave us Russia collusion, so if they give you that, they can give you anything.
But here's our situation.
We know that foreign hackers have gotten into pretty much a lot of our critical systems.
But one element of this particular hack is that you can't really tell if you got hacked or not.
That's built into the nature of the hack, is that you wouldn't really know you were hacked.
So I don't use the word hacked for this graphic.
I use the word compromised.
So compromised, just the way I'm going to be using it for this, means that you don't know if you're secure or not.
So that's different from knowing you're hacked.
Rather, you just don't know.
You might have some bad software in there.
You might not.
But I want to give you the good news.
I don't want to dwell on the bad.
So we know that whether we have confirmed a hack or we simply know that it might have been, because it's compromised, pretty much all of our major systems with one exception.
Have been compromised. And again, it doesn't mean hacked.
It just means we don't know if it's hacked, so therefore it's compromised in that sense.
But the only one that isn't is our election systems, which is not one system, but rather it's a constellation of different systems.
But I'll just represent it with one circle here.
So all of our other systems in the United States we know are compromised, which doesn't mean hacked, it just means it might have been.
Except for the election systems.
So we have a good, solid election system.
And I think you'd have to chalk it up to luck.
Because all of these systems that are compromised have just as good security as this one system there wasn't.
In fact, some people would argue that it's kind of ironic, because the one system that seems to be kind of weak on security, if you were just sort of looking at it from the outside, I don't think the companies would say that.
I think the companies would say they have good security.
But looking at it from the outside, I say to myself...
Doesn't look so good to me, but I'm not really a professional in that area.
So I'm going to say the companies that manage these systems are correct and that their computer security is the best.
Because just look at this.
Every one of these other systems is either confirmed to be hacked or might have been.
Might have been. You don't really know.
But not the election systems.
And the reason I know this is because this is what the news says.
And if you look on social media, even if you were going to, let's say you're crazy, just hypothetically, let's say you were actually mentally insane, and you started thinking, I think the election may have been hacked and our software is not secure.
So if you were insane like that, and obviously that would be clinically insane if somebody said something like that, you would be actually chastised on social media.
Because even to say that this one is also compromised...
I mean, how can you even think that?
That's a little woo-woo, you know?
Well, it's true that all the other systems are compromised, whether they've been hacked or not.
They're compromised. But this one?
Wow. First rate.
So that's the good news.
I like to focus on the good news.
You watch the news and they'll be like, oh, people died, you know, negative stuff, pandemic.
But you come here for the optimism.
And I'm here to tell you, it looks dire with all these hacks and these compromised systems, but thank God our election system is not part of that mess.
Thank God.
And I'm going to take it further.
The people who manage the election systems are not just better than the rest, because they're the ones who don't have compromised systems.
They're not just better, but I think They're patriots, really.
And I've got a little tear in my eye because you don't really see this kind of patriotism often, especially from people who might be citizens of other countries.
So you don't see as much American patriotism from citizens of other countries, but for our election systems, they're completely American patriotic.
And Would you join me?
I think we should give a little applause for our election systems.
Everybody else failed us this year.
They all failed us.
But not...
Our election systems.
So, looking on the bright side.
Speaking of the bright side, Congress has finally, it looks like they're going to have some kind of a coronavirus stimulus deal.
And isn't that good news?
Here's some more good news.
The coronavirus stimulus bill that our Congress, which gets a lot of, Congress gets a lot of criticism, wouldn't you say?
Is that too strong a statement, that Congress gets a lot of criticism?
It's true. People are criticizing Congress all the time, and unfairly, I think.
Because just look at the stimulus deal.
Here's a deal that they all pretty much agreed on months ago, and it only took them, what, six months or so to do a bill that they all pretty much agreed on from the start?
Or at least they knew how it would end from the start, the smart people say.
So that's pretty good, isn't it?
Like, how long is a bill supposed to take?
I feel like in the context of an emergency where people are starving to death, six months is pretty fast.
I mean, let's not criticize them for every little thing.
It's just a pandemic.
It's only people's entire lives being destroyed.
It's just starvation.
But six months is pretty fast.
And I'm not talking about something that's easy.
I mean, this is practically a warp speed, moonshot kind of a thing.
And I think Congress...
Today's just all only compliments today.
Congress, for doing the work of one day in six months, I salute you.
You're patriots. Thank you.
Thank you, Congress, for letting all those people suffer for six months for no reason at all, but...
Six months, still pretty good.
Pretty good.
In news of, what would we call this, wokeness.
In wokeness news, Ida Bay-Wells, you may know her because she was, I think she was the principal behind the 1619 Project, in which we are all trying to learn more about the founding of our country, especially the The slavery part of the founding of the country.
And so Ida Bay Wells was tweeting, and she said this.
It was part of a tweet thread, so it sounds a little bit out of context.
But she was saying she can't get over how people talk disdainfully about 10 and 11-year-old children.
Well, I didn't know that people speak disdainfully about 10- and 11-year-old children.
Does that happen a lot at your house?
I don't...
I mean, some people talk about their own kids sometimes, but do people...
Do you hear a lot of complaining in public on social media?
It's like, I tell you, this country's got some problems, but no problems quite as big as our 10- and 11-year-olds.
Am I right? So apparently in Ida Bay Wells' world, there's a good deal of complaining about 10- and 11-year-olds.
I must live in a bubble because I don't hear it, but I'll take it on faith that a lot of people are talking about those damn 10- and 11-year-olds disdainfully.
Anyway, she's talking how it's bad that people would imagine that they lack talent and gifts because they're being under...
So her point is that kids, especially in minority places, you don't want their whole life determined by their bad school.
So by the age of 11, bad school may have sort of set their fate.
Of course, somebody went into the comments and quickly noted school choice should help fix that.
So we have a problem, which is kids, especially minority kids, getting under, let's say, a low-quality education.
But there's a fix, which is school choice, because competition eventually tends to improve just about everything.
And here's what Ida Bay-Wells said to the comment that school choice would help fix that.
She said... School Choice literally came about to stymie integration, but nice try.
So, her argument against School Choice in 2020 is that the reason School Choice first was introduced was a scheme to stymie integration.
Now, is that true, or is it false?
Why do I care?
What's the difference if it's true?
What's the difference if it's false?
It's the past.
It's the past.
What if you found that the country called the United States was founded around, unfortunately, in many states, slavery?
Would you say that the United States maybe is a bad system?
Because it was founded on a pretty bad principle.
You know, women couldn't vote.
Slaves weren't considered people.
So is the entire United States bad because of the way it was founded?
Or, or, just going to put this out there, do you allow that pretty much everything in the past was shitty and it may have evolved into something that we like today?
Because don't conservatives say this about...
Well, there's a lot of talk about how things were founded.
Everything from Democrats were really the KKK, and Planned Parenthood was really about exterminating the black population.
There are a lot of things that were founded for a purpose that over time became some other purpose.
So If your strategy for improving your situation is based on what something was founded as, you've got a really bad strategy.
And I've been saying forever that the biggest problem in the black community is their strategy.
Meaning that if you look, for example, let's take the LGBTQ arc of freedom, if you want to say.
If you look at how LGBTQ folks have handled their own, let's say, their own...
Struggle to get equal rights in this country.
Would you say that their strategy was good or bad?
I would say it was really good.
I would say if you were to look at the strategy that especially the gay community has used for, what, 20 or 30 years to improve their situation, excellent.
A+. I would say just on a strategy level, really, really, really, really, really good.
In every way. I mean, I can't even find anything that's wrong with their strategy.
But in the case of the black population trying to improve their situation, their strategy is so obviously bad.
And do you know why I can't help?
I don't know either.
Why can't I help?
I want to help.
I would like to say, I think you're getting your strategy from a journalist.
You know, a journalist is telling you that school choice is a bad idea, essentially, because of the reason it was founded, which doesn't have much correlation at all with why people do it today.
Today they do it because they're trying to improve education.
That's sort of the point of it.
So if you're getting your strategy from a journalist, have you gotten it from the right place?
Now, I don't like to be the one who says, stay in your lane.
I believe a journalist could have the best strategy in the world.
But not in this case.
Who would you rather listen to?
Kanye, who says don't get lost in the past, and then went and used his own strategy to build a multi-billion dollar empire?
Do you want to listen to the person who built a multi-billion dollar empire about what a good strategy looks like?
Or do you want to look at somebody who's a journalist?
There's a big difference. Now you could say, well, but wait a minute.
Kanye's basically an artist.
Don't you mock artists? Yeah, I do mock artists.
I don't mock an artist who built multi-billion dollar industries.
There's obviously something else going on with Kanye.
He's got other talents.
It's pretty obvious. So I think the black population...
It really has a strategy problem that's just...
It's worse than the pandemic.
Like, literally. It's literally worse than the pandemic.
And it's just strategy.
It really is.
It's come down to just shitty strategy.
Because everything else that they want, it's available.
I mean, it's not available immediately.
You'd have to employ a strategy and keep on it.
And, you know, it's going to take years to show improvement, etc.
But it's available. It's not like it's not available.
You just use a better strategy.
All right. The question of asymptomatic spread.
I was talking about it yesterday.
There were some studies that at least suggested that almost none of the spread comes from asymptomatic people.
And therefore, the smart people say, well, wait a minute.
If very little of the spread can be tied to asymptomatic spreading...
Why are asymptomatic people wearing masks?
Right? Why do they have to lock down?
Because if you have to have symptoms to spread it, at least in any meaningful way to spread it, wouldn't it be easy to just say, well, you've got symptoms, so you do your thing because you've got symptoms.
Stay away from people, whatever you have to do.
I don't have symptoms.
So I'll just live like a normal person and take my less than 1% chance that I'll run into somebody who can be an asymptomatic spreader.
That sounds logical, right?
Is what I just said completely rational to you?
I think my audience, maybe not the whole country, but my audience is probably compatible with that.
Yeah, if we know asymptomatic spreading is trivial, why don't the people who have no symptoms just live life?
And the people who do have symptoms go to a little more extreme and they're quarantining.
And we're done here, right?
Wouldn't we be done?
I mean, literally, if you only made that change, aren't we done?
Is that what you think?
I don't think so. And let me tell you why.
You may have had the following experience, which I did.
And it goes like this.
Someone in your family gets symptoms.
But you also have something you need to do.
Gotta travel.
You know, you got things you need to do.
But somebody in the family has symptoms.
Let's say they haven't been confirmed yet.
So the test isn't coming back because it takes a week to get the test.
By the way, where I live, my healthcare provider will take longer than one week so far to give you your test result.
Longer than a week. So if you've got a symptom, and you don't have your test result back, but you know that the symptom could be one of, you know, a variety of different things, and you've got stuff to do, let me ask you this.
Do you quarantine with extreme rigorousness?
You'd like to think you would, right?
If you're not in this situation, you say to yourself, of course I would.
If somebody in my family had symptoms, yeah, I'm going to lock that person up in a closet, or whatever.
I'm going to stay away.
I'm going to move out to a hotel for a week.
That's what you say.
Let me tell you what you do.
It's a little thing called cognitive dissonance.
That's right. If you find yourself in this situation, you will invent rationalizations why it doesn't apply to you.
You think you won't, but you will.
You will. And you will do that reliably and predictably.
Every psychologist who understands the field would be able to predict this with complete certainty.
That once you're in the situation, you're going to say, yeah, but we'll just have little Johnny sit in the back seat and tell him to breathe sideways.
Yeah, we'll just tell Johnny to wear a mask and we'll bundle the other kids into the little car and stay there for three hours while we're driving in this little confined space with somebody who probably has COVID, but, you know, we don't have the test results back and I'm feeling maybe it was probably a cold and, you know, I don't believe in, you know, Right?
People will justify any risk away to do what they want to do.
It's the most basic part of our operating system is we don't care about reasons.
Now, let me take that back.
We don't care about facts.
And we also don't care about what we said we would do.
We don't care about any of that.
We kind of want to do what we want to do.
And if there's something stopping us from doing it, we will imagine it doesn't matter because of reasons that we make up that only sound good to us.
But anybody looking on would say, that doesn't sound like a good reason.
Until they're in it. And then that very person who criticized you, they get in the same situation, they do the same freaking thing.
Cognitive dissonance is very, very predictable.
And those people would say, you know...
It's not that big a deal if my family takes a little bit of risk.
How much difference could that make to the whole?
I mean, I'm just one family.
So that's what would happen.
So the point is, if you were to make a rule that said you only need a mask if you have symptoms, what would happen?
People with symptoms would find a reason not to wear a mask.
And they would say to themselves, yeah, I do have symptoms.
I'm coughing. I got a dry cough.
I can't smell anything, but I feel like it's the flu.
I'm sorry, I feel like it's allergies.
How many people who had coronavirus symptoms would tell themselves it was just allergies so they didn't have to wear the mask to the mall?
Most of them. Probably more than half would not wear a mask with symptoms, and they'd still go to the mall if we got to the point where only people with symptoms were supposed to wear masks.
So there's no way that managing the asymptomatic versus symptomatic thing can work in the real world.
If people could actually comply, then it'd be a great idea.
But people would not comply.
They would not even come close. I'd like to point out that most of the fake news that...
Well, I don't know. I think it's competitive.
But the news on the right is just filled with fake news on coronavirus stuff and election stuff.
News on the left is filled with fake news, usually Trump-related fake news.
But probably we're...
We're reaching peak fake news because we're having, at least potentially, we're having a change of leadership.
Remember I told you that whoever is not in power, meaning if Biden's in power, Fox News is sort of out of power, if you know what I mean.
Whoever is not in power creates the most fake news.
But during the transition...
You might have this weird situation where both the left and the right are cranking out fake news full-time until there's unambiguously one leader.
And then the fake news will start to be biased just toward the opposition side.
But at the moment, because you've got this, I'm not entirely sure who's the president, at least according to a lot of the country.
You have double fake news.
So you're getting bombarded on both sides.
I would advise you that whatever credibility you put on your own news sources, drop it to zero.
Trust me. Whatever you thought was the credibility of your own new sources, the ones you thought had been pretty good for the last several years, just for the moment, for about a month, drop it to zero.
There's no credibility on the left or the right at the moment.
I would see that we might creep back to a little more credibility, but right now none.
Would you like to compare the leadership of Joe Biden, hypothetically, and President Trump, reality?
If you'd like to be good at comparing things, you came to the right place.
A lot of what we think is political disagreement is just people who don't know how to compare things well arguing with people who do, and the people who don't know how to compare things right don't know that they don't know how to do it.
Here's an example. Let's say you were to compare...
Who would be better in the pandemic leadership?
And I just took some of the main things that are involved in leadership.
Notice that I left out from the list the idea of rapid testing, which is different from testing really fast.
So the first thing you need to know is that when I use the phrase rapid testing for coronavirus, that has nothing in common with testing really fast.
Testing really fast would be great, But we don't have any products that can do that and be the highest level of accuracy.
The rapid testing is a little less sensitive test, but they're so cheap that you can test a lot, and the testing a lot compensates for the fact that they're a little less accurate.
If they're cheap, everybody has them, and then the pandemic's over.
Trump has never pushed it, but neither has Biden.
So I would say on one of the biggest issues of coronavirus leadership, both Biden and Trump failed 100% on just that issue.
Now, I say failed because neither of them have even said we considered it and here's the reason that we don't want to go harder at it.
Had they done that, I would say, well, I don't know if they've failed or not, but they've at least got a point of view.
Neither Biden nor Trump have expressed a public point of view on the concept of rapid testing, which has nothing in common with testing really fast.
Testing really fast is sort of stuff we're trying to do.
Rapid testing is a whole different thing.
Neither of them. They both ignored it.
Who would have closed travel early and how important it is?
This is the column that is teaching you how to think if you didn't already do this.
Issues are not of equal importance.
Closing the travel early probably made a big difference.
We can tell from the way both Biden and Trump talked about it during the time when it mattered.
Biden was not in favor of closing as early as Trump.
I would say the importance of closing the border was, I'm just going to put a number on it.
Think of this in terms of a way of thinking.
If you wanted to put different percentages here, you might get a different outcome.
But in terms of the way to approach it, that's what you want to learn here.
Just the approach. So I'm going to say 20% importance.
Seems about right. And I would say I would give that to Trump.
Trump did something right.
More right than Biden.
And we're being fair here, right?
This is the live stream where I'm not being just overtly political.
Did Trump close travel sufficiently early enough...
And aggressively enough, especially in Europe, especially closing all the travel as opposed to making exceptions, I'd say no.
No. I think Trump did not close early enough or tight enough.
But we do know for sure that Biden would have been even worse.
Because what he said he would do is obvious now in retrospect.
It's obvious Biden would have been worse on this one.
And it's 20% of the whole thing.
In my view of things.
How about being a role model for wearing masks?
I would say Biden is much more consistent and his messaging is much more compatible with the experts, so therefore Biden's better.
Would you say Biden is better on masks?
Because he's closer to the experts, he's more consistent, and he models it consistently in public.
Better than Trump, right?
Well, here's the thing.
You have to imagine that if Biden had been president, the conservatives would listen to him.
That's sort of crazy, right?
It's not like Biden would have the better messaging and therefore he would get the better outcome.
I would agree completely that Biden's messaging on masks was far superior than Trump's messaging on masks.
But here's the thing.
It didn't matter.
It didn't matter at all. Because if Biden had been president, do you think conservatives are going to listen to Biden and say, oh, you know, I had my own information from, I don't know, Fox News and my own research, but now that you tell me that my arch enemy, Biden, says I should wear a mask and reduce my freedom, well, why didn't you tell me, Democrats?
I was just waiting for a Democrat to tell me to reduce my freedom, and now I'm all on board.
Does anybody think that would have happened?
So what the fake news has sold you on is this ridiculous idea that because Biden's messaging on masks was better, which it was, 100% better, not even close, Biden's messaging on masks killed Trump's messaging on masks.
But here's what Trump gets right.
He knows what matters.
He does a terrible job, Trump does, on things that don't matter very much.
Biden did a terrific job on something that didn't matter.
Now the reason I gave it a 5% importance is not, and this is important, not because I think masks don't work, but because as a function of leadership it wasn't going to make that much difference.
So I'm only giving it a low percent, not in terms of effectiveness of stopping anything, But only in terms of could a leader make any difference?
Would Biden's messaging really move the needle?
No. There's very little chance it would have made things better.
It might have made things worse.
If you're a conservative and you're a Trump supporter and you see Trump say, you know, I think the experts probably are right.
Yeah, maybe you should wear a mask, use your judgment.
It's sort of not strong enough.
But at least he's Trump.
At least he's the guy that many of you voted for.
If you assume that the Democrats are masking up better than the conservatives, who is better to convince a conservative to wear a mask?
Would a conservative be more convinced to wear a mask because a leftist told him to, or because one of their own told them to, but he didn't tell them as strongly and as effectively?
Which one would get you a better mask result?
I don't think that's clear, but it's not a big lever.
Vaccination speed, even Trump's critics give him an A+. Biden said, follow the science.
If you followed the science, would Project Warp Speed have worked?
Nope. If you followed the science, you would have taken the recommendation of the scientists and Don't push us.
It's going to take five years.
Trump did not take the recommendation of the scientists in this one sense, in which he said, no, I'm going to push you, you're going to do it in six months.
And they frickin' did it.
They actually did it.
I would say that the vaccination will be at least 70% of the solution, at least.
I mean, you could put this higher, but I wanted to leave a few percentages for the other stuff.
I mean, maybe it's even higher than 70%.
How about lockdown persuasion?
Just the ability of the president to get the states to do what he wanted to do, and specifically to lock down.
Would Biden be better at getting states to be a little more rigorous about locking down?
Well, he might have better messaging, just like he might have better messaging on masks.
But would it make a difference?
Do you think Florida would lock down, if it were still up to Florida, Republican governor, right?
Do you think a Republican state like Texas or Florida would say, oh, you know, now that Biden's president, This Democrat.
We Republicans who disagree with him completely, yeah, we'll do more lockdowns.
Because now a Democrat is telling us to lock down our Republican state.
So yeah, we're more likely to lock down.
No! No!
No, that's not going to happen.
So, again, you could say that the lockdown is the biggest, most important thing we do, but what you can't argue, if you're being rational, is that one leader would have gotten you much of a difference compared to the other.
I don't believe Biden would have gotten much of a difference in terms of lockdown, given that the states really are the prime movers of what's happening there.
Then on school closures, I would say that at this point we just say Trump is right.
On one of the biggest issues that has more to do with protecting the mental health of our kids, Trump was just right.
Right? People disagree to them, but here we are.
And now people say, yeah, we probably should open the schools.
He was right. Now, when I look at this...
If you were to say to yourself incorrectly, the two most important things might be mask wearing and And lockdowns, and I say incorrectly, not based on science of whether these things stop things, but I'm just saying that if you believe these are the two big things, you tell yourself, but Biden's better on the two big things, so that's pretty good, right?
But what you're not doing is understanding that the two big things don't have really any sensitivity to leadership.
Leadership, probably not the biggest variable, except for this.
And maybe for the school closure things.
And I would say, this is my honest opinion with no hyperbole.
If you were to compare Trump's leadership to Biden's, it's not even close.
It's not even close.
Trump killed it on this.
He killed it. I think historians will judge that Once they properly understand that Biden couldn't have done much about masks or about lockdowns either, which I think everybody would agree with if they thought about it.
Once you realize that, this was one of the best examples of leadership in all of history.
And actually, I think the historians will someday regard it as one of the best, especially the Operation Warp Speed.
I think people will see it as one of the best acts of leadership of all time in the end.
And trust me, if you're new to this, I know already the criticisms I'll get is that, you know, I'm just in the bag for Trump and whatever, blah, blah, blah.
I'm just going to support Trump.
But you've all heard me criticizing, including on the rapid testing, which is a giant mistake.
It just happens to be a mistake that Biden is making at the same time.
Here's my Christmas provocation related to this, and I'll remind you I said this.
If Trump had been president of South Korea instead of being president of the United States, would his result in South Korea be just as good against the coronavirus as South Korea got, which is considered a success?
I say, yes.
If Trump had been president of South Korea, he would have done just as well as the South Korean president did.
Why? Well, apparently there's a private company in South Korea who, as soon as the virus was identified, started working hard on test kits.
And so South Korea, for a number of reasons, they had sort of an island situation because the DMZ doesn't let anybody through, so effectively they were kind of an island.
So that's a big advantage.
And then they had the coincidental advantage of having a company that independently stepped up and gave them enough testing for their little island country.
So that was different.
If Trump had been president of South Korea, still that independent private company would have still did what it did.
It noticed the virus, it made the test kits, and so South Korea had a way to test their way to tamping it down that just wasn't available in the United States.
So you take the president of South Korea and you move him to the United States.
He wants to be the same leader and he's like, hey, let's test really fast.
And then he finds out he can't.
Because in the United States there was not a company that independently created a bunch of really good tests really fast.
It didn't happen here. And it wasn't because South Korea was so well managed.
It was because there was an independent company that got ahead of the curve.
That's it. And the fact that they're an island nation.
Then on top of that, you add the culture.
If you assume that masks work, would you get better compliance in South Korea, no matter who is the president?
Would you get better mask compliance and social distancing in South Korea?
Yes. Yeah, there's a cultural difference.
If you move the president of South Korea over to the United States and that president said, hey everybody, wear masks and do social distancing, would he get more compliance than Trump did?
I don't think so.
Would Biden get more compliance than either Trump would or the president of South Korea if he had been the president of the United States?
I don't think so. There's no evidence he would have gotten more compliance.
They would have basically been doing the same thing and gotten the same result.
So my argument is this.
The country makes the leader as much as the leader makes the country.
And we put too much belief in the leader's work as the main mechanism of change.
And they are obviously very important.
But really, the office makes the president.
The country makes the president.
The reason we have a President Trump is because there's something about America.
Right? You don't get President Trump unless there's something about America.
And you don't get maybe a President Trump elected in South Korea because whatever it is about South Korea, it's different.
So thinking that the leader is changing the country is a little bit of wrong think.
It's actually that the nature of the country, so long as they have a democratic process, is giving you the leader that the country wanted.
So keep that in mind.
All right. Here's the reason that the fake news can't criticize Trump for what I consider his biggest mistake in the pandemic, which is not pursuing the rapid testing idea, which is completely different from testing really fast.
I'll recover that.
Because if the fake news criticized Trump for not doing it, what would happen?
What would happen if the fake news criticized Trump for not doing the rapid testing technique?
If they criticized him for it, it would educate people what it was.
And then it would happen.
So if the fake news criticized Trump for not doing rapid testing, there would already be rapid testing.
So they would actually solve the pandemic by criticizing Trump.
Somebody says they did.
I know there had been an article or two about it, but basically it's not really a story on CNN or MSNBC. It's not a headline story that they pound all the time.
It's just something they mentioned and then they dropped it and left.
All right. That.
So watch this in the comments, how many people don't understand what rapid testing is.
So you see in the comments, oh, there's this place in the United States that is doing rapid testing.
Oh, there was a rapid test recently approved.
None of them are rapid testing.
So if you believe that we're close to it or working toward it or the things that have been recently approved are in this category of called rapid testing...
You don't know what rapid testing is.
What you're talking about is tests that are kind of fast.
That's not rapid testing.
Because you have to add the cheap and super rapid part of it, or else it's a whole different concept.
Somebody's saying, how accurate are rapid tests?
That is a misunderstanding of what a rapid test is.
So to ask the question, if you're asking the question how accurate the rapid tests are, Then you don't understand the concept of a rapid test.
The concept is that a lower accurate test will get you a better result if you do enough of them.
Because if the first test doesn't work, the second one does, etc.
Somebody says, low accuracy testing is not as useful as you think it is.
How do you know? Where was it tested?
I think that the logic of it is so strong that while I accept the possibility that it might not be the kill shot, I think, the fact that it's not being at least tested somewhere, maybe tested in a state or something, the fact that it's not being tested is complete failure.
Even if, once you tested it, it wasn't as good as you thought, but the fact that you're not testing it, and it so obviously looks like it's a good idea, even if you're wrong, giant mistake.
Now, I say the same thing about hydroxychloroquine.
If it turns out that hydroxychloroquine has no impact on the coronavirus, it would still be unambiguously a mistake that we didn't try it before we could have certainty, because the risk-reward was right, even if the drug was no good.
All right, that's all we get.
So, alright, that's all for now, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.
Alright, looking at you, YouTube.
Periscope is off. Somebody says it wasn't a mistake.
Paul says it was intentional.
Maybe. I mean, I don't know what intentional means in this case, but maybe.
Somebody says, thank God the liquor stores stayed open.
Well, you know what? If you watch conservative news, part of the fake news on conservative news was this keeping open the liquor stores.
When you heard that liquor stores were going to stay open but other businesses were not, didn't you say to yourself, ah, how does that make sense?
Liquor's optional. And the answer is alcoholics.
If you have a pandemic and alcoholics don't have access to legally buy alcohol, they're still going to get it.
They would do it illegally or they would have major medical problems for having to suddenly stop drinking, which is not the best way to stop drinking in many cases.
So, the question on liquor stores.
If you saw a story that the liquor stores were staying open and they did not mention the next fact, That addiction specialists or experts actually recommended it.
So addiction experts recommended for health reasons to keep liquor stores open.
Because the people who are addicted to liquor, if they stop cold turkey, it's a problem.
They need to stop professionally and with a system.
They need to be in treatment.
In order to make the stopping be a good idea.
So, are the experts right?
Are the addiction experts right?
Who said, you know, maybe if it's short term, just leave the liquor stores open.
Are they right? I don't know.
I don't know. But they had a reason.
And that reason is generally not reported on conservative news.
So, if the experts have a reason, and your news didn't show you the reason, whether or not you agreed with it is different.
But they didn't even show you the reason.
That's fake news. Alright, that's all for now.
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