Episode 1558 Scott Adams: Don't Miss My Kamala Harris Impression and Provocative Other Opinions
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Content:
COVID seasonality
My impression of Kamala Harris
A Christopher Steele thought experiment
Where's Carl Bernstein now?
55% Oppose mandatory COVID vaccinations
Kyle Rittenhouse trial
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Good morning everybody and welcome to, yeah, you know, you know what I'm going to say.
And it's true every time.
It's the best thing that's ever happened to you, right now.
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The dopamine here of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
Watch what it does to your antibodies, which is watch this.
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Most of my antibodies just came online.
Some of them did not.
We're going to need to do a second augmented sip here.
Go. Checking.
All good. We're online.
I don't know what it was.
Some kind of a vaccination mandate sick out or something, but my antibodies were not going online all at the same time.
But it's all good now. We're all good.
Well, COVID is killing 1,200 people per day still in the United States, allegedly, if we're counting them correctly.
And the ERs are packed.
That's the news. Apparently we hit some kind of a plateau.
Things were dropping like crazy and then we hit a plateau.
That plateau is probably, say some experts, to do with not seasonality exactly, but indoor living.
Now here's a new clue.
For this pandemic, and I don't know that I exactly had processed this before.
It's something I've heard of, but I hadn't quite put it together.
It goes like this.
Your normal flu has seasonality, right?
When the summer comes, the flu pretty much gets knocked out, if it's the seasonal flu.
But the coronavirus and the Delta...
Have seemed to have a different pattern, which is that they respond to indoor living regardless of the season.
So apparently it's not enough to simply be outdoors in the summer and indoors in the winter.
If it's Florida, in the summer people go indoors and they get COVID, and in other places in the winter they go indoors and get COVID. But why doesn't that work with the regular flu?
Why does the regular flu...
Which presumably is also worse indoors, right?
Does anybody doubt that? Nobody doubts that the regular flu is also worse indoors.
But why does a regular flu still succumb to seasonality when this one doesn't?
Is it just more aggressive?
Is that all it is? It's just a matter of degree.
Right. So some are saying it's the aerosol versus contact on surfaces, I guess, would be the other way.
Somebody says not weaponized.
I like your thinking.
Yeah. The gain of function might be what does that.
But let's do a little critical thinking.
Is there anything we can learn from the fact...
That the regular flu succumbs to seasonality and this one doesn't.
Aside from the fact it's more aggressive.
Maybe that's the whole story.
It's just more aggressive. But here's a question.
I'm just going to put that out here.
This is a thought experiment and not something that anybody will ever do.
Suppose we had a rule that said that if more than...
I'll just pick a number. If more than three people are going to be in a room for more than ten minutes, and again, I'm just making this up for conversation purposes, you have to open a window.
Even if it's winter, you have to open a window.
Otherwise, you just can't be three people in a small room together.
Could you get rid of the coronavirus in two weeks?
Because I've got a feeling if we could study...
How many times people got an infection in a room that had a window open?
What do you think? I feel as if opening a window takes your odds of getting the coronavirus from pretty good to maybe hardly ever.
Don't you think? I don't know if there's any way to study that, but if you could study is indoors with the window open We're going to protect you completely, just like being outdoors.
Being outdoors seems to protect you almost completely.
And remember my other hypothesis that fans might be enough to keep you safe indoors?
What if you said you can't have a gathering of more than three people unless the fan is on?
Turn the fan on. And the fan would just be to disperse whatever's in the air so that even if you were infected, it'd be such a small load as opposed to a big plume.
You know, you don't want to stand in a plume of COVID. But if you were in a room where there was just like trace amounts floating around, you'd probably be fine.
I'll bet you. So here's a bet.
It's an easy bet because we'll never do it.
We'll never find out.
I'll make a bet. That if you had a rule, and people followed it, of course they wouldn't, but if you could, that you shouldn't have more than three people in the room for more than ten minutes without a fan on.
Or let's say a ceiling fan or any kind of a fan.
Or a window open. Something like that.
I'll bet it would end the pandemic.
We'll never know. Elon Musk decided to sell $5 billion worth of his stock.
Some say it's because he needed some cash to pay some tax liabilities from some stock options he exercised or something.
I don't know the details, but it seems related to...
Please stop what?
Steve? Are you telling me to please stop the topic?
Because I'm going to pop you off the channel here.
I don't like that kind of comment.
Alright, Elon Musk sold some...
Here's the best part of the story.
Elon Musk doesn't do anything boring.
I don't know how he does it.
But he's somehow genetically designed where he just can't do boring things.
I don't know if he knows how.
And so instead of just selling some stock and paying his taxes like some quiet billionaire might, he does a Twitter poll and then tells people that he'll follow whatever the Twitter poll says.
Now, the funny thing is that there's nothing less scientific than a Twitter poll.
I mean, really, that's just ridiculous.
So here's a guy who's going to make multi-billion dollar decisions based on a Twitter poll.
That is just the best.
That's just the best.
It's impossible for him to be boring.
Somehow he made the most boring thing, I'm going to pay my taxes, into exciting, because it turned into a Twitter poll that wasn't scientific.
So I guess the poll said he should sell some stock.
He was talking about 10% of his holdings.
But he sold $5 billion worth, and it looks like he actually is doing what the Twitter poll said.
And Tesla stock is up today, somebody says.
Anyway, there's not much meat to that story.
It's just that everything he does is interesting.
Here's some fake news.
Fake news on Fox News.
How many of you think that Fox News sometimes has some fake news?
Anybody think that? Because mostly we make fun of CNN and MSNBC. Well, here's some fake news.
Now, of course, I'm using my definition of fake news, okay?
So this is my personal definition of fake news, and it includes this tell.
If somebody gives you the news with a percentage, say this was an X percentage of something, but they don't give you the raw numbers, it's fake news.
And also the reverse.
If they give you raw numbers for a story, But the percentages would tell you more.
It's fake news.
So anytime you see a story that's only the raw numbers or only the percentages, it is intended as manipulation.
So here's how...
The fake news on Fox News by Pilar Arias.
So this is not an opinion piece.
It's a news piece on the Fox News site.
And it talks about one California school board is rejecting the mandates for kids to get vaccinated.
And as part of the context for this story, the data has shown that 24% of COVID cases were kids.
Is that news or fake news?
24% of COVID cases lately have been kids.
News or fake news?
Let's say it's true.
So I'm not saying it's untrue.
But is it news or fake news?
It's fake news. It's fake news because the context is clearly intentionally omitted.
What would be the context?
Zero deaths?
Right? The context would be, and zero deaths.
Now, it's probably not a zero.
It might be one or two, whatever it is.
But the number of deaths is pretty important to the story, isn't it?
Because otherwise you're vaccinating the kids to save other people.
Is it ethical to vaccinate kids to save other people?
I suppose it would depend on how many other people were at risk.
If it was all of them, maybe yes.
If every adult would die unless kids were vaccinated, well, yeah.
I guess maybe in that case you would vaccinate them.
Because kids would need living adults to take care of them too, right?
But this is clearly just fake news because the context is clearly intentionally left out.
All right. How many of you would like to see my Kamala Harris impression?
Anybody? Anybody?
Because she's in the news.
She was at a CRT meeting, and apparently she was talking to some folks, and there was a viral video of her talking.
Now, before I give you my Kamala Harris impression, I would like to show you how an actual, a real person would talk in public.
So here's how a real person would talk.
They might talk with their hands.
For example, they might say, you know, this or that, or, you know, you see people talking like this and like this and like this.
That's how a normal person talks.
If you're Kamala Harris, you pattern your body language after the police officer from Young Frankenstein.
Ever seen the movie? I mean, if you've seen the movie, that's pretty funny.
All right, so... To do your Kamala Harris impression, we'll adjust things.
I've got to stand up for this.
Whoa, hell, hell, hell.
Technical difficulty over here.
What the hell? I say again, nobody's ever made a stand for a monitor that isn't shitty.
Number one, you need an unstylish blazer.
So I can use a man's jacket because, well, trust me, it's going to work.
All right. So you put on the unstylish Kamala Harris jacket.
Now, when she appears in public, she also wears a mask.
So you put the mask on.
And then, because I don't have a wig, so I'm going to cheat a little bit.
By taking off my glasses...
There you go.
If you can't see the top, Kamala Harris.
And now here's Kamala Harris talking.
I'll add some dialogue of my own, because what she says is usually babbling nonsense.
But watch the body language.
So if you have the critical race theory, what you do is you've got a plan...
A plan. And then you execute the plan.
And then you execute the plan.
And then everything is fine.
It doesn't matter what I'm saying.
Just watch my hands.
I'm not nervous.
I feel very comfortable talking in public.
Your Kamala and Harris impressions will take a lot of energy.
Thank you.
It's a lot of practice.
All right.
The US is third in math performance according to an international competition.
Does that sound right to you?
We're going to be third in math competition.
China's first, Russia's second.
How do you think they measure this?
Lost the microphone.
Lost the microphone.
I'll bet that's better.
All right. Here's my problem with comparing math performance across countries.
If you're the best math student in China, do you think you have a choice about being in a math competition?
What do you think? You're the best math student in China.
Does China say to you, hey, do you want to be in a math competition?
Or does China say, you're in a math competition?
Now take the United States.
If you're great at math, and you're 17 or 18...
In the United States, and they say to you, you know, there's an international math competition.
What do you say in the United States?
Well, I might be interested, but I just launched a unicorn startup, and it's going to go public in a week for $10 billion, so I might miss the contest.
Here's the thing. I don't think a competition tells you anything.
Because all you're really finding out is that the people who are in the competition, how they did.
It's not really telling anything about the home country, I don't think.
Except that some might be coercive.
So don't trust that. I would love to see if there's any way to do it.
The top 1% of math students in each country.
And just see how they compare.
Because it doesn't really matter if everybody else is good at math.
Because we don't use it that much.
I mean, sometimes I'll use a little algebra.
Believe it or not. Sometimes.
Every now and then it comes in handy.
But not often. And if I had to have a workaround, I probably could.
So... Anyway, we teach math to too many people who will never use it.
I think it's a waste of time. And so I would say 80% of math education, the higher level education, in my opinion, is completely a waste of time.
But it's certainly useful for the top, say, 10% of students.
And certainly everybody should learn at least algebra.
I think at least algebra.
But maybe that's about it.
Alright, here's some fake news from CNN. Now this is in an opinion piece by Michael D'Antonio.
So the opinion pieces are a different standard, right?
Because it's opinion. But it's on a news site.
And I don't think CNN would allow an opinion On a news site, their news site, unless the facts alleged in the piece were also facts that CNN says are facts.
Would you agree with that? Even though it's an opinion piece, the editors aren't going to put it on CNN's page unless the factual claims are actually accurate, according to them.
So here's a factual claim by Michael D'Antonio on CNN, on their website.
He says...
I'll skip that part.
He talks about a well-documented and objective truth of Trump's election defeat.
So he says there's a well-documented and objective truth of his election defeat.
Is that a fact?
No. That it's well documented and objectively true?
No. It's objectively true that no court has ruled that there was a substantial fraud.
Not looking for something isn't the same as not being there.
The courts don't look for fraud.
They only judge what's brought to them.
In most cases, they didn't have the standing or the jurisdiction to even rule on it.
So basically, no fraud was really looked at in any serious way.
The audits looked at the obvious stuff, but they can't audit everything, including the electronic stuff.
So yeah, that's just fake news.
But CNN readers would not know the difference.
I've told you many times that our opinions are assigned to us, but it's hard to see it, right?
Because you think your opinions come from some internal process.
There are only a few situations in which it's really obvious.
That your opinions were assigned to you.
And I'm going to give you one of those.
Now, I'm not talking about you necessarily, right?
So this doesn't mean you specifically.
But the public has an opinion, a collective opinion, both left and right.
This one won't even be much different, left or right.
This is an assigned opinion.
And when you hear it, you're going to know it right away.
But it was invisible until I mentioned it.
Watch this. If Christopher Steele, of the famous Steele dossier, had been an ex-Russian spy instead of an ex-British spy, would we say that he was part of Russian interference?
If Christopher Steele had been an ex-Russian spy, would we say that Putin was involved?
Yes. Yes, 100%.
And why would we say that?
If Christopher Steele, in this hypothetical, if he was operating independently and he was no longer working for an intelligence agency, maybe he didn't even live in the country, didn't even live in Russia, would you say, well, that doesn't count because he's independent now and...
He's X. He's not part of the intelligence.
He used to be, but now he isn't.
So would you say, oh, okay, that's a distinction that matters.
So we won't say that Putin's behind it because he's not really working for Putin anymore.
But he's an ex-British spy, and yet both the left and the right...
Believes that an ex-British spy has no connection back to his home country and intelligence agencies.
But you wouldn't believe that if he were an ex-Russian spy, would you?
Here's why you would never be able to come up with this opinion on your own.
This is how you know it's an assigned opinion.
Nobody would come up with this opinion on their own.
If you heard he was ex-M6, is it?
Ex-British Intelligence, you would say to yourself quite reasonably, there's no such thing as ex-British Intelligence.
Right? You would never say to yourself, there's such a thing as an ex-spy.
Because there isn't.
There are definitely people who are not on the payroll.
And there are definitely people who are not taking orders from their old bosses.
That's true. But if he's about to do something that has international repercussions at the very highest level, he checked with his old boss.
Let me say that with complete confidence.
I mean, I don't know.
I don't have facts to back it up, right?
But do you think there's any chance he didn't check it with the home office first?
Even though he doesn't work there, he's an ex-spy, doesn't owe them anything.
But you don't think he checked with them first?
Really? Because if he were Russian, you'd be sure he did.
But because he's British, our press just ignores it.
And because it's ignored, you don't come to the conclusion that he was actively involved with Great Britain in trying to interfere with the elections.
This is an opinion that nobody would come to on their own.
And yet, both left and right came to this opinion that Great Britain is not really involved in interfering.
Do you see it? Am I wrong that once I point it out, you can see that this is an assigned opinion?
Nobody came to this opinion on their own.
Now, some of you, and I can see it in the comments, some of you were there all along saying, wait a minute, there's no such thing as an ex-spy, exactly.
You can never be completely exed, right?
Yeah, it is a good example, isn't it?
This one will bother you if you think about it.
Because if you had never once thought, wait a minute, Great Britain definitely interfered with our election.
If you've never had that thought once...
Then you accepted an assigned opinion uncritically.
All right. Let's see what else is going on.
I love the fact that the new revelations about...
Hello?
My potential spam doesn't want to talk to me.
Hello?
Okay. I thought that was going to be fun.
So what's funny is that now that we know that the Steele dossier was...
At least coordinating with the Democratic campaign for Hillary Clinton.
Now that we know that, and clearly this is worse than Watergate by a lot, by like a factor of 100, it's not even close.
Where's Carl Bernstein?
The guy that CNN trots out to say that anything that Trump did was worse than Watergate?
They can't bring him on TV anymore.
The funniest thing about this is that he's got to be completely shut out.
He's probably in hiding.
Literally, you need to...
I'll bet you that no journalist can find him right now.
I'll bet he's literally off the grid somewhere, not answering questions.
Because there's no way he's not going to be asked if this is worse than Watergate.
And what the hell is he going to say?
You're starting to sound like Carl Bernstein.
Maybe. All right.
Jeffrey Toobin, of course, is in the news.
Now, I've defended him getting his job back because I think he just made a dumb mistake and that's not really the reason you should fire people.
It was just a funny mistake.
However, it does not let him off the hook because when you do something that funny...
I'm going to have some fun with it.
So I totally support him in getting his job back.
I'm just going to say, I'll just summarize what he said in his commentary.
This is my summarization, so don't blame him for the wording.
But Toobin thinks that Rittenhouse is a jerk.
So part of his commentary is that Rittenhouse was really, really dumb to bring a gun to where he did.
So Toobin thinks Rittenhouse is a jerk, but also that Rittenhouse's lawyers might get the jerk off.
Anything? Anybody?
Anything? All right, that's all I had on that.
Rasmussen has a poll that says 55% of the public surveyed, I think these are likely voters usually, oppose mandatory vaccinations for kids.
And 35% are in favor.
55% oppose mandatory vaccinations.
What percentage of the country has to oppose anything before you can be sure it won't happen?
What percentage? I feel like it's about 75.
It's not 55.
Definitely not 55.
Somebody saying 70?
Maybe. Depends on the topic, probably.
But I think you need 70, 75 before the public's in control.
Now, remember, I often remind you...
No, I didn't steal that joke from Gottfeld.
But we do have a similar sense of humor, so I wouldn't be surprised if he had a similar joke.
I think 70, 75% is when the public simply takes control.
At 55%, I think we do throw it to the government and say, ah, we can't decide.
You decide. And then we live with it because it's better to have a system that works than to get everything you want every time.
So, that 55% is going to have to get bigger.
So, convince your fellow citizens, don't convince the government, because the government's not going to change its mind at 55%.
China continues to be not safe for business.
Greg Goffield just texted me to say that that wasn't his joke.
He says he's mad he didn't come up with it.
So I guess Greg is watching.
Hi, Greg. Anyway, there's a new COVID policy in Shenyang, China.
I learned about this in an Ian Bremmer tweet.
By the way, you should follow Ian Bremmer.
You would be one of the, I don't know, 20 people on Twitter that say useful, good things that you wish you knew.
So follow Ian Bremmer on Twitter.
But here's the new China policy.
COVID policy. All visitors are quarantined for 28 days in a hotel.
So for 28 days, you don't have any human contact up close.
You get tested seven times during that period.
And if all clear, you have to go self-quarantine at home for another month.
So 28 days in a hotel quarantined, followed by a month quarantining at home, quarantining at home.
That's 56 days of isolation.
56 days just to visit China.
Now, that's pretty serious.
But it's also one more reason not to go to China, in case you needed any.
So anybody who's still doing business in China, unless you have existing business there, which I would understand, you need to think about getting out of China.
Well, Michael Malice, if you don't follow him, you should.
He's another great follow on Twitter, had this great tweet today.
He said, Blue-pilled people use language as a way to avoid thought.
Their cognitive process is entirely different.
They use phrases delivered to them by the corporate press to close off thoughts where a critical mind would otherwise go, akin to sewing up a hole in clothes.
And I do believe that's pretty much there.
Now, I call that word thinking, where you use words that sound right to replace any critical thinking.
But yeah, they do use language as a replacement for critical thought.
That's actually true. It's a good observation.
Alright, so let's talk about Kyle Rittenhouse.
This trial is really interesting, and not for good reasons.
It's interesting in all the wrong ways.
For example, today there's a hashtag trending, Kyle Rittenhouse is guilty.
What? Kyle Rittenhouse is guilty?
The entire trial is about having no evidence.
No evidence of any crime has been even presented.
No evidence that looks like any evidence, really.
So there are people who could watch this and still think he's guilty.
Of what? Bad judgment?
That's not a crime. So, I would like to say this, number one.
This is something that should not have retreated to political sides.
It shouldn't have, but of course everything does.
However, I would like to propose this thought experiment.
If Kyle Rittenhouse had been, let's say, identified as a typical leftist, Who had also used a gun to kill somebody in what looked like self-defense, would the right be just taking sides and saying, oh, it's a leftist, so they're guilty? Or would the people on the right, the pro-gun people, say, no, it doesn't matter who does it.
It's self-defense. Because I think the right would have stuck with principle.
Am I wrong about that?
Now, I do think the left and the right are equally guilty of just going to their side and saying, oh, my side is this side, your side is that side, and just ignoring the facts otherwise.
What team are you on?
But I feel like the right would not have teamed on this one, because they're sort of team gun, aren't they?
I think the right is more team gun than they are team Republican.
Am I right? And the gun information about this, just like the Alec Baldwin story, gun stuff is absolute.
And it should be.
And I've had this conversation with at least one person about the Alec Baldwin thing, and I think it applies here.
Gun mentality runs as an absolute because it has to be.
Right? Self-defense is an absolute defense.
It's not a partial defense.
It's an absolute defense.
Gun responsibility...
It's an absolute. If the gun's in your hand, you're responsible.
I don't care who you delegated it to.
The fact that you delegated that responsibility to your armorer is irrelevant if it's in your hand.
So that's the way the gun people think of absolutes.
That's my impression, anyway.
And again, this is just purely subjective.
But I feel like the right would not have taken teams on this except team gun, To support the absolute nature of some of these things.
All right. I asked a question that was just a thought experiment.
Obviously, this can't and shouldn't happen.
But if somehow Kyle Rittenhouse got a gun on the witness stand and shot the prosecutor in the middle of the trial, would it be self-defense?
Would it be self-defense?
Now, what's your first thought?
Well, no. You can't shoot somebody during a trial.
And certainly, if this prosecutor were a normal prosecutor making a case with no lies and no exaggerations, just making their case, I would say, no, there's nothing going on here except a fair trial.
Of course, it's an adversarial process.
You're not going to like what the other team says.
But that's not... That's not a reason for killing somebody.
That's the system working just the way the system is supposed to work.
But is that what's happening here?
It's not what I'm seeing.
What I'm seeing is somebody murdering an innocent man in front of us.
That's what I see. Because if you don't think that what is happening to Kyle Rittenhouse's brain is not grievous harm, well, then you don't know anything about anything.
Kyle Rittenhouse is suffering, at the moment, grievous physical harm.
Now, the physical part is the physical part of his brain.
But his brain is being permanently reprogrammed into a negativity, into PTSD. He probably already has it.
But what is happening now is the height of criminal behavior.
There's somebody being grievously harmed right in front of us without reason, without cause.
Because if he had evidence that Kyle Rittenhouse was a criminal, then I'd say, well, you've got to do what you've got to do.
But since the evidence clearly shows he's not, the continued torturing and dismantled of this young man's brain right in fucking front of us looks like a crime to me.
And while I don't know how I would rule if I were on the jury, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't care if he stood up and shot the prosecutor.
Again, I'm not in favor of violence.
This is just a thought experiment.
Nobody should shoot anybody.
Don't do any violence.
But in terms of would it be justifiable, I think yes.
It would be very unwise, and I wouldn't want to see any kind of trend like that, but would it be justifiable to shoot this specific prosecutor in this specific situation?
And I say yes. I say yes.
I think that what he's doing, the prosecutor, rises to a level of grievous bodily harm, and that it's witnessable.
We're watching it right now, right in front of us.
Jeanette says, you're losing me here.
Well, remember, it's a thought experiment, so nobody's arguing he should actually do it.
Joe Biden, I guess during the campaign, called Kyle Rittenhouse a white supremacist, which is backed by zero evidence.
There is zero evidence of anything like that.
Can Joe Biden be sued for calling him a white supremacist?
I don't know the answer. Probably not as a sitting president.
But can he be sued after he's out of office?
I would say yes, right?
Yes. To me, that feels like a slam dunk.
How in the world could you lose that case?
Because the evidence that he said it is clear.
The evidence that there was no evidence for it is clear.
Right? And he did it for malicious purposes, which was to win an election by maligning some innocent guy.
But also, I wonder if it's impeachable.
I'd ask him the same question again and see if he'd deny it.
Somebody needs to ask Joe Biden if he disavows his prior comment about Kyle being a white supremacist.
Because if he doesn't disavow it, I think that's impeachable.
Am I wrong? I mean, I don't know if it meets these standards specifically of impeachability, but if the President of the United States targets a citizen who is objectively and obviously innocent of the charges, I feel like some kind of crime is involved, if not a crime, at least impeachability.
So somebody needs to ask him that.
Peter Doocy? Get on that.
Um... All right, I still say that the crime of the century is one that nobody's calling a crime except me, as far as I know, is whatever happened with the rapid test strip approvals in this country.
Now, before I talk about rapid test strip approval, my understanding is there are a lot of people who don't understand why rapid tests, which are somewhat less sensitive than the normal tests, why we would have less sensitive tests at all.
Because you get false readings now and then.
And the answer is that they would catch pretty much all of the super spreaders if they were people who didn't have symptoms.
If you have symptoms, you go get the good test.
Everybody understands that?
If you have COVID symptoms, you don't use the rapid test.
You immediately get the real test.
If you have COVID symptoms and you only use the rapid test, well, then you're using the wrong tool, and that would be bad.
I'm sure people will do it, but that would be the wrong tool, and that would be bad.
But anyway, the fact that only one company got approved quickly, I think it was Abbott, And there were other companies, you know, begging to get approved that could have done these things quickly, and they didn't.
Makes me believe that the only explanation for that is massive corruption, which could have cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans so far.
Now, I don't know who it is or why any of this happened, but I do not believe that incompetence is why we were delayed.
Do you? How many of you think that the correct explanation of why we were delayed so much and other countries weren't was incompetence?
Because remember, the things that we didn't approve were approved by other big countries that are also smart.
Why would that be? Can you think of any reason other than corruption?
Because I can't. I can't think of any reason other than corruption.
So my assumption is that there's some corruption here hiding in plain sight that is just insane.
But let me complicate this story a little bit.
As Adam Dopamine tweeted today, not his real name as far as I know...
That the FDA is going to meet on November 30th to discuss approving therapeutics, you know, the pills.
I think Pfizer has some therapeutic pills.
And right now, I guess, Burroughs Wellcome has something, and Regeneron, now you can get a shot of Regeneron that acts as a therapeutic, or actually a prophylactic, and therapeutic, I think.
So they're going to meet on November 30th.
What's your first reaction to that?
They're going to meet on November 30th to discuss it.
What's your first reaction?
They're going to meet on November 30th to discuss it.
Here's my first reaction.
It's November 11th.
And we're in a pandemic.
Who decided to wait...
All that time to talk about the most important thing that they need to talk about.
Is there something more important than this?
What were they doing that was more important than this?
Thanksgiving? Vacation?
Family leave? This looks like corruption, too.
Because the faster you get therapeutics, the faster the demand for vaccinations will go down.
Because a lot of people are going to go all Joe Rogan on this, right?
They're going to say, I don't need the vaccination because these therapeutics look good.
So I would say that this delay might be scheduling.
It might be incompetence.
But in the context of what seems to be more obvious, probably financially related crimes or corruption, this delay itself looks like corruption to me.
Doesn't it look like corruption to you?
Because I don't really understand why you can't do this tomorrow.
Do you? My understanding is that Pfizer has the data.
If they're waiting for data, then yes, of course.
But the data is already out, right?
And how long does it take to look at the data?
I guess other people dig in and ask a lot of questions and stuff.
But I suppose that process might be happening between now and the 30th, and it's just part of the process.
But somehow, in the context of not trusting them in general, I'm not sure I'm going to automatically give them the benefit of the doubt on this.
Anyway, so that's what's going on.
And... I'll just put this out there.
If Trump were president, do you think the FDA would wait until November 30th?
Or would he be kicking their ass to do it faster, if that's possible?
Now, again, we don't have enough information.
So it could be that a bunch of FDA analysts need to study it and it just takes that long and blah, blah, blah.
But I have a real doubt that it takes that long to study it.
Because the only data they have is going to come from Pfizer, right?
And Pfizer's been all over it.
It shouldn't take that long for somebody who at least understands how to look at the numbers to know if this looks legit or not.
Okay. So I think Trump would have made that better.
And if not, we can imagine that he would have.
And so I've asked this provocative question...
If Trump's election strategy...
Now, we don't know for sure he's running, but I think he is.
If his election strategy is just to stay chill for a while and wait for the public to beg him to come back, it's working.
If Trump's strategy is to just stay chill...
Don't make a new provocation.
He responds to everything in the news provocatively.
But that's okay. Because that's just in the news.
But don't come up with something that's brand new.
Don't come up with something that's brand new.
And be provocative about it.
All he has to do is hang out.
Because the Democrats are doing such a bad job, people are going to beg for him to come back just to fire people.
Just to fire people.
Because at least we know Trump is good at that.
Now, Trump was asked on an interview recently why he didn't fire Fauci, and his answer, some people questioned, because his answer was that Fauci, part of his answer, it wasn't the whole answer, but part of the answer is that Fauci had been around a long, long time.
Is that a good answer to why didn't you fire him?
What do you think of that answer?
He's been around a long, long time.
All right. So...
You know that's not a good answer, but then there's a mystery, right?
You know Trump has no problems firing people in general.
I think you'd all agree with that.
He can fire people.
That's one thing his critics would agree with.
Yeah, he can fire people. He's a firer.
So... Do you think he just couldn't fire Fauci?
I think he gave us a hint...
And here's the hint. Fauci had such a high credibility, partly because he'd been around so long, that firing him would have made Trump look like the guy who doesn't believe in science and believes in hydroxychloroquine and drinking bleach, according to his critics. So I believe that Trump was actually in a corner.
I think that he correctly read the room, which is what he does well, by the way.
Trump will never get the credit he deserves for how well he reads a room.
You know, the room being the country in this case.
He can read a room.
And I'm not sure everybody else can do that.
He just has that skill. He can read the room in a small room, and he can read the room in the country.
And I think he read the room, and he said, if I fire the guy that 60% of the country thinks is the smartest guy in the game, I'm going to lose credibility.
And I don't think it was a bad thing that he had a good cop, bad cop situation going on.
I don't know that I hated that.
Did you? When you see the little divisions maybe between Fauci and Trump, at least in terms of how they messaged and stuff like that, I felt that was a productive tension.
I wanted to see that.
I wanted to see it play out.
So I think that his instinct to not fire Fauci...
It was actually well thought out.
It's hard to know. Maybe it would have worked out better if he had.
We can never know the future.
But I feel like my instinct would have gone the same way.
I feel like he needed to keep him around, even to keep him around as a punching bag, which is what happened, basically.
So even keeping him around as a scapegoat, right?
It was probably a good play.
Probably a good play. And I think that Trump hinted at that by giving the answer non-answer, which is he's been around a long time.
That's sort of an indirect way to say he has a lot of credibility.
So firing him would be obviously some blowback.
So Biden is a failure for not firing him?
I don't know. You know, I have a different opinion about...
Fauci and the experts than most of you do.
And part of it is that being wrong is sort of built into their job.
Right? We ask these experts to give us, you know, a confident opinion about stuff in a situation that's never happened before.
In other words, this specific kind of pandemic has never happened before.
So anything that Fauci said was true or probably true or a prediction, I don't know, if he gets that stuff wrong, I think that's just the situation.
I think that's the situation more than Fauci.
I think he's in a situation where being wrong is just sort of built in.
On YouTube, somebody says, Scott loves the pandemic.
So I saw Scott Gottlieb say that he thought the pandemic would be essentially over in January.
What do you think? Do you think the pandemic will be not over, but it will be taking out a pandemic and into endemic territory?
Just, we've got to live with it.
In January? Does that seem too soon to you?
I feel like that's optimistic, but it depends on the therapeutics.
If in June we can take a pill that reduces our odds of something by 80% or something, yeah, I think we're endemic at that point.
Well, those of you who say COVID is over, keep in mind that the ERs are at capacity, and largely because of COVID. Not totally.
So there's still a medical capacity issue with COVID that's very real.
Look to Germany.
No. No.
I'm not going to look to Germany.
As I often say, leadership will not be the thing that was the most predictive here.
How to deal with a family member who is incredibly afraid and has cognitive dissonance on COVID. Yeah, I don't know.
I suppose just giving them context could help a little bit, but fear is the best persuader.
So if somebody is afraid, it's hard to change their mind.
You can't make people less afraid unless you really, really work on them for a long time.
And they want to be. They'd have to want to be less afraid.
And I don't know if they want to be.
Um... Yeah, hospitals are supposed to be near capacity.
Yeah, you're right. This might be a little bit of fake news because they talked about one hospital was at 80% or 85% capacity, which my understanding is that's exactly where you want to be.
That's my understanding.
Staffing defines capacity.
Well, largely but not totally.
There definitely is some space limitation and equipment limitations.
Yeah. Their business model is they require full hospitals to make money.
So it's a little unclear how much of this was fake news.
Sophistry, you just took both sides.
What did I take both sides of?
No, it's not sophistry when you take both sides.
Showing that there's an argument on both sides is not sophistry.
You know, I think that's another...
I'm going to add that to my tell for NPCs.
Have you noticed there are just some things that people always say?
Like, oh, that's sophistry.
I think that's just an NPC thing.
You know, references to the matrix, references to soil and green, references to sophistry.
I... Yeah...
I think that those are all just somebody who doesn't have critical thinking.
Maybe an NPC. Yeah, 1984, right?
1984 is another one of those.
So if that's where you're at, you're probably not part of the thinking class.
Robert says, which FDA employee worked for Abbott Labs?
No, that's not the right question.
That's almost the right question, Robert.
The real question would be, who at the FDA was specifically in charge of deciding which rapid tests are evaluated?
So I would go a little bit deeper and find out who specifically was in charge.
Oh, is that the simulation?
I don't think the simulation falls into the NPC category yet, because that's still sort of new and unique.
So, did anybody see...
Was it Eric Weinstein, who went to a group of economists in Chicago and told them economics had always been wrong because they were doing the math wrong?
I'm over-summarizing that.
That's not exactly what was happening.
But did anybody see the outcome of that?
How did it go?
Was there any kind of resolution?
Eric or Brett?
Wasn't it Eric?
I think it was Eric, right?
I think it was like Chicago, some economics group there.
All right. Oh, it was closed, so we don't know what happened.
Well, that would be interesting.
I'd love to hear that. Because I definitely would not be surprised if economics...
I'd been using the wrong math forever.
That wouldn't surprise me at all.
All right. But I think I would be very surprised if he convinced the economists.
But there's an antibiotic shortage.
You know, let me give you the Adams Law of slow-moving disasters.
And I'm not sure it entirely applies to the supply chain problem.
I think it does. Now, the supply chain hit us kind of quickly, right?
So I don't think anybody quite saw it coming.
But I would predict that what we thought was an impossible situation That there was so much congestion in the ports that you couldn't even clear out the congestion.
It was so congested that literally nothing could happen.
Like, you couldn't even move a crane to move a...
You know, like, basically nothing could happen.
It's all just filled with storage containers and nothing could move.
Now, that's sort of the exaggerated, hyperbolic version of it.
But if you bet on people, and I always do, if you bet on people...
Somebody's figuring it out.
Meaning that there are some people or persons at the ports who are saying, you know, nobody had this idea before, but what if we do this and this and put this together?
I'll betcha. That what looks like an unsolvable problem is being solved while we talk.
I'll bet you that smart people are finding...
Maybe they're A-B testing.
Maybe they're just poking around.
Maybe they've got an out-of-box solution.
Maybe they've changed the system cleverly.
Something. But I would be surprised if humans, with all of our ingenuity, given the size of the problem and the stakes, I'd be surprised...
If we don't fix this faster than any kind of common sense would tell you it could be fixed.
My common sense says this is going to be a long problem.
My optimism is that there will be enough smart humans trying enough stuff that somebody's going to find out what works and then just do more of it.
I think so. So let's keep an eye on that.
All right, that's all I got for now. And I'm going to go do some other stuff.
There is no...
Is today or tomorrow Veterans Day?
Is it today? Today or tomorrow?
It's today. So I guess tomorrow's a day off for school anyway.
So, to the veterans, thank you for your service.
How many veterans there today?
In the comments, veterans, make yourself known.
All you veterans. There you go.
Wow, a lot of them.
Holy cow, look at all the veterans.
Yowzer. A lot of veterans.
Holy cow. Do I have, like, every veteran in the world watching this?
Or are there just a lot of veterans that I don't know about?
You should see the comments on both platforms.
I can see them both.
You can only see the one you're on.
But both platforms are just streaming with veterans.
Amazing. All right.
And spouses. Spouses of veterans, thank you for your service, too.
If you're a spouse or a family member, thanks for your service.
