Episode 956 Scott Adams: Come Sip the News

Date: 2020-05-05 | Duration: 1:08:38

Topics

My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a Content: The revised death model Reaching a new level of contempt for CNN coverage Sean Hannity wants armed protesters to reconsider Chinese drones being used by US law enforcement? Civil disobedience is coming and growing

If you would like my channel to have a wider audience and higher production quality, please donate via my startup (Whenhub.com) at this link: https://interface.my/ScottAdamsSays

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## Transcript

[0:12]

hey everybody go on in here it's time for a special cinco de mayo episode of coffee with scott adams featuring the simultaneous sip which i would say in spanish if i could but i can't so let's just call it the simultaneous it's not going to take much hey you walnut creek in the house good to see you good morning everybody um there will be no cursing this morning i mean unless things completely go off the rails no cursing i did my cursing last night that will be my evening evening cursing it's better to curse in the evening i think it just fits better this morning i overslept so i'd love to tell you i'm really prepared but i'm not what do you do when you're not prepared there's one thing you can always do it doesn't take much all it takes is a cuppa mug or glass attacker tells you to sign a canteen sugar flask

[1:13]

to sign a canteen sugar flask vessel of any kind fill it with your favorite liquid i like coffee and join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine hit of the day the thing that makes everything better including the damn pandamik and
and [Laughter] it's called the simultaneous sip and it happens now go
infection rates falling i can feel it hello new york
all right uh it turns out that i've developed two different fan bases i think uh one that likes it when i swear the one that one that prefers that i'm not so it's like i've split into two characters somebody like some some like the other all right let's see what's going on here so the new uh coronavirus death

[2:16]

so the new uh coronavirus death model that's right i sent a death model has been revised upwards of course because we're reopening some of the country so what do you call it when things go exactly the way everybody assumed they would go you call that news that's news my friends if things go exactly the way everybody said they should go we'll go can't really go any other way
that's called news and so it's been jacked up to 134 thousand uh a new model previous uh
so i guess 134 000 looks like it's not just the minimum i'm looking at cnn's text i think that it's maybe the where they actually think it will be it's a little unclear if that's the new minimum or that's the just the prediction either way it's a

[3:19]

just the prediction either way it's a little absurd but anyway and um apparently the uh is predicted to kill 3000 people a day by june first nearly double the current number now let's just game this out three thousand people a day for june july and august three thousand people a day for ninety days how does that equal a hundred and thirty four thousand feels like it could be twice that now that depends of course of course the model probably takes into account the summer months and something magic about summer that makes us get less of the virus but what is that exactly so i don't know if 134 is really the low end the middle the

[4:22]

is really the low end the middle the middle or the high end anymore so but it's about where i thought it would be so i would say it's pretty close to where i just assumed it would be there right that's the whole point you go back to work people die so what does cnn do about this decision well of course they're trying to cram it down the president's throat so that he will be responsible personally for every death that happens because we reopen the economy and as i watch this form you know you can see it you know just sort of coming together you know that what's going to happen for sure is that governors will open some states but cnn doesn't really mock governors because it's not good it's not a good model for television i guess they prefer to mock the head of the federal government it's better tv so trump is going to get blamed for everything no matter what the governors do

[5:23]

do you know that right and watching this take shape is so disgusting to me i think i've reached a new level of just contempt for for cnn's coverage i'll just say for their coverage rather than make it personal and here's the thing you know and i'll say this a million more times nobody knows how to make the right decision here i don't even know if there is a right decision there are just two ways that people are going to die is there a right decision when there's just two ways people are going to die and you got to pick which one to put pressure on the the uh the leaders let's say the governors and all the decision makers you know throw fouchi and berks in there too they're they're leaders and decision makers in this context to put that pressure on them that these deaths are sort of going to be on their hands is so so low and so contemptible

[6:25]

is so so low and so contemptible now i wouldn't say that they've they've actually done that you just see it you see it taking form because what else are they going to talk about they're going to talk about who the leaders killed right with their decisions well he made this decision and now aunt sally's gone and here's here's a people on this page and here's all the names in their faces and they all died because of the decisions made by you know these republicans or whatever [Music] and i'll say it again there's nothing more important than that we as a country understand that there's no right decision so if you're if you're hamstringing your leaders to make any decision because you're ready to just eviscerate them no matter what you're not really helping you're not helping you know i think i think everybody has to get a pardon in advance for whatever happens i'm talking about the governors the experts

[7:26]

the governors the experts the politicians i mean we just have to find some way to be okay with decisions that can't be good they can't be good by their nature it's just too bad decisions they're going to have to pick one
one so somebody's going to die and our leaders have the very unenviable task of doing it i'm glad i don't i'm glad you don't are you are you glad it's not your decision i mean you could make a decision i could make a decision if i had to you know if it were my job i'd do it but i'm glad i don't because whoever it makes is going to be accused of murder just for just doing their job just trying to help the country trying to get the country to a better place no matter what anybody does no matter what their intentions are no matter how smart they are even if they make all the right choices they're going to be accused of murder murder not just regular murder but like mass murder so that's the situation we put our leaders in

[8:26]

leaders in and then we ask them to make good decisions for us make us some good decisions and by the way we are going to accuse you of murder well i take that back we're going to accuse you of mass murderer no matter what you do i just don't want to live in a country like that
um sean hannity is surprised in a way he's actually uh requesting that the armed protesters in michigan reconsider the military garb and sean hannity's argument i think is completely solid somewhat unexpected which is the fun part of the story but um but solid argument and his argument goes like this that if you put a show of force on against police officers that's a very dangerous situation because the police

[9:27]

because the police they kind of have to maintain their own control right that's part of the job it's not just standing around in a uniform the the police have to exert authority right they've got to exert that they are the ultimate force of control that's what keeps everybody safe the last thing you want is people saying well police yes police no i don't have to do what they say i've got a gun they've got a gun my gun's bigger i don't know maybe i don't have to do what they say so you could easily see it sliding in the wrong direction and so i think sean hannity is is making a very it's a hard call because even dan bongino came on his show right after and said ah i don't know second amendment freedom of speech
everything they're doing is legal do you tell people to stop doing completely legal things in this country and so you could see both arguments can you
you i don't think dan bungie was wrong you know we got laws

[10:28]

know we got laws what gives anybody the right to throw the laws away like when did that happen right so that's a good argument dan bongino's argument completely solid follow the constitution they're they're following the constitution as long as they follow the constitution why shouldn't wait right but hannity's argument is also solid why would you want to put the police at risk and i think hannity has got a good you know long history of supporting law enforcement and so he's being consistent on that and and confesses that it's a very hard call to do anything that would be even slightly anti-second amendment you know he's got a concealed carry himself as he reminds us so here's my opinion on it and i don't think anybody's opinion should sway you because it's this is so subjective right you know i'm not going to tell you my opinion is right or or not right but under these very very

[11:28]

or not right but under these very very specific conditions meaning that the next time something comes up don't ask me to be consistent with this because this is just a one-off so so anything i say about this should not ever be generalized in the future to any other situation it'll just be different the people with the guns are there to support the constitution that's my understanding they're not there to overthrow the government they're they're in fact there to support the government they're literally there to support the the document if you will the constitution that binds us all together it's the thing that pays the police you know ultimately the the form of our government defined by the constitution allows a structure in which the police can get paid so are the protesters dangerous or are they protecting the system it's really tough

[12:29]

protecting the system it's really tough isn't it and um who said this the other day uh oh is somebody smart on television said that when you've got a gray area somebody was saying that their father gave them this advice maybe one of you saw it it was somebody wise was saying this that when you when you have a gray area and you know one direction is maybe safety and the other direction is maybe freedom but it's a tough call that you should always buy us toward freedom and that in the long run you end up better that way if you bias toward freedom so here's my take
i've never seen a situation where the armed militia types have ever fired have you because they show up on a lot of stuff if you look at all the times that the same same types of people the ones who you know are into that lifestyle the militia the guns etc they're very anti-shooting sort of super

[13:32]

they're very anti-shooting sort of super anti-shooting i would say because they're not there to shoot they didn't come there for that they didn't come to shoot anybody what's the last thing any of them with a gun actually wants to happen the last thing the last thing any of them want to happen is to shoot anybody they don't want to get shot they don't want to shoot anybody it's the last thing they want so it's hard to get into the minds of strangers which i just did and so that you know i probably shouldn't have if i were to say okay let's treat them as mindless we don't know what they're thinking yeah i'd say you don't want guns and police officers in the same place so if you ignore their internal mental state and maybe that's the smartest play maybe maybe energy has nailed this completely it's just just look at the variables lots of guns police put them in the same place nothing good can happen right that's that's a pretty adult opinion and i i would respect him for that opinion but i gotta say i'm leaning the other

[14:33]

but i gotta say i'm leaning the other direction i'm i'm leaning i'm leaning bongino in this one i'm leaning if they're there to protest for their freedom i don't know if the whole point of it is freedom
how do you take their freedom away when they're protesting for freedom legally legally protesting for freedom in legal ways and you take some more of their freedom away while they're protesting for freedom how's that gonna go what's what's more dangerous what's more dude well i mean nobody's tried to take their guns away that would be of course crazy but i guess i would lean toward letting them do their thing and here's another story the uh you probably saw this um apparently there's a chinese drone maker the of the smaller drones the kind that law enforcement would use and this gigantic chinese company just dropped their price or donated some of them

[15:33]

of them and they're they're putting their drones in lots of different local police forces and part of what the drones are doing is flying around and looking for social distancing violators do you feel comfortable with that
do you feel comfortable that there's basically a chinese-made computer because you know each of the drones has a little intelligence in it there's a little computer in those drones from china that's flying around and collecting information on our citizens what kind of information is it collecting what does it know just by flying around and being part of the police force could it listen in on the police force i don't know you know could could the drones be modified to collect information we don't know they're collecting i don't know could uh could anybody ever take advantage of any of the administrative or data that gets sent up to headquarters does that even happen

[16:34]

to headquarters does that even happen does anything get sent to headquarters i don't know but it doesn't matter does it matter you've got a chinese-made computer that they're giving away to local law enforcement [Music] no no you can't let that company into the united states apparently homeland security has already banned them from homeland security but the local police force is like hey free drone of course i want a free drone do i want a free drone yeah give me a free drone that's what the local police say
say so they're accepting all these chinese spy drones they're not made exactly for spying but you know what i mean
and let me ask you this do you think the united states has any companies that make some drones i think so i think the united states has companies that make drones yes lots of them why the hell

[17:38]

yes lots of them why the hell are we buying chinese drones we should we need to do that and get rid of that immediately in fact let's just get rid of everything we buy from china if there's any substitute in the united states i don't care if it costs more um of course that's easy for me to say i know i know all right uh so that's going on there's a massachusetts golf course owner who's going to defy the state's lockdown and reopen for business and this is a way more interesting story than it sounds like as a headline because the family that's reopening i guess it's family-owned golf courses the family that's doing this in in defiance of the state just lost a family member to coronavirus just lost a grandmother in a tragic situation so the whoever the representative of the family was saying believe me we get it like you're we're not
not we're not in any you know we're not confused

[18:39]

confused about how deadly this is grandma just died from it and we still want to open up the golf course you know partly because it's something you could social distance a little bit easier than most but also because there's no choice there's just no choice you know people need to eat got to get going so i would say i support this massachusetts golf course if it opened in my state i would go golf the police would come probably probably and maybe i'd have to go home but if they reopened the next day i'd try to go golf again then the police would come they'd send me home and maybe some other businesses would try to reopen and maybe there would be too many businesses for the police maybe don't know am i am i uh suggesting civil disobedience i'm not suggesting it i'm saying it's coming i don't need to suggest it that civil disobedience is guaranteed this is

[19:41]

civil disobedience is guaranteed this is america have you heard have you heard of americans you've probably heard of us right and most of you are american we like to protest so i mean we'll we'd protest a yam sandwich so do you think anybody's gonna have some civil disobedience about closing down the economy for another month oh yeah oh yeah it's coming um
so i i put some questions or put a tweet on
on twitter and told people to ask me questions and i would answer them and by the way are you seeing that every day we get a conflicting data about hydroxychloroquine i feel as though every day somebody says hey it's great this trial well it's not conclusive but looks good and then 10 minutes later yeah you know here's all the reasons why it probably

[20:41]

here's all the reasons why it probably doesn't work and i feel like we can't get any good information what was the last thing we learned about that was actually true have we learned anything that's true about the coronavirus has just fact-checked me on this is there even one thing about the coronavirus and one scientific or other data fact that actually turned out to be true from the the viral amount of it to what it was the spreading to humans do masks work do are ventilators good or bad think about name one thing we got right i can't i can't think of one thing we got right we didn't have enough of stuff and then we had too much of stuff name one thing we got right nothing not a single thing now i'm not too harsh about getting things wrong in a in the context of a pandemic because your first actions are you know just guessing really

[21:44]

all right i'm looking for my own tweet in which i ask people to ask me questions if you would like to ask me a question that's where you should have put it there are 200 questions and so will trump debate biden in person um i'm feeling like the odds are no if i had to bet on it right now i'd say 70 percent no would be my bet and there would be two reasons for that number one i think that the democrats will do everything they can to not have a debate they'll use the coronavirus excuse etc um trump will probably say he wants to do it biden might also say he wants to do it but gosh if only i could no i don't think it will happen and i think that the democrats know that that's a losing proposition so they'll use the coronavirus to avoid it i think why are healthy people being quarantined because they could become carriers why

[22:47]

because they could become carriers why are we still asking that question [Laughter] how do we get how do we get to may and there's somebody and i know this this user uh because we interact a lot on twitter but this is somebody who's like really following and i'm not making fun of you i'm just i'm just honestly curious how could you get all the way to may and not know at least the argument for why healthy people are being you know locked down the argument is that they won't be healthy they'll go out and get it and bring it back and kill grandma now you could argue that that's not a good enough reason you could say that the costs are greater than you know the benefits that would be an argument but to ask why are healthy people being quarantined don't we all know that now i mean i'm not saying it's the right answer but we should know the reason um
all right and so we're seeing people uh criticizing trump on the 60 000

[23:49]

uh criticizing trump on the 60 000 expected deaths and you saw it on world world omitter um well yeah the numbers are all over the place and everybody speaks imprecisely about them and you saw me do it just a moment ago so i was looking i was reading cnn looking at it and i realized that the cnn report doesn't tell me if that's the low estimate the likely estimate or the high or what i mean what good is that when you've got a vast range and they give me one number uh i don't know is that the low the middle it's all useless information um what do i think about the 16 19 project so that's the new york times project where they were going to write long series about institutional racism and how it all came from slavery etc
etc and i guess they got the pulitzer prize for that which uh pulitzer prize is like six people sitting in the living room who saw 0.000 or 1 of the

[24:52]

or 1 of the creative stuff that got created that year and they said oh we like this one the most useless stupid completely non-prestigious award the pulitzer prize is just ridiculous it'd be like you just making up a prize uh
uh i'd like to give the carl and jane prize for literature uh it's just me you know just me jane and me we just had their living room and we decided we'd like this book better than this one so we're going to give it the carl and jane prestigious award that is exactly as valuable as the pulitzer prize no difference it's just some people in their living room probably got together on so on zoom and said uh do you read these seven books that were submitted yeah which one do you like ah they're all pretty good how about this one yeah all right let's pull the surprise useless all right um and then i guess historians complained that the

[25:53]

that the some of the articles that came out of that 1619 project were inaccurate i would go on i would go further and say that they were written for naked political purposes and that we shouldn't take any of it too seriously
andreas asks how have you stayed motivated before dilbert became a success uh excellent question and the answer is for my entire life as a young person i expected to be successful and successful on some kind of a a level where the the rest of the world noticed you know not just sort of successful privately but successful in some way that the public knew about it and i've never not felt it i i think i was born with that feeling i mean i felt it from my earliest memories i always thought

[26:54]

memories i always thought i'm going to be famous someday just always and i've told this story before that adults would tell me that too when i was a kid they would say someday you're going to be really rich and famous and i never knew why they were saying that i mean i knew i thought it myself but i also didn't know if everybody thought that i kind of wonder how many of you let me ask in the comments while i'm finishing my story here how many of you when you were a kid thought that you would be famous someday i'm just wondering because i always thought i would now obviously that causes you to make certain choices in your life that make it more likely it's going to happen so there's a there's a causal element there but how many of you thought you would be famous when you were kids i'm just curious because when i was a kid i didn't know if it was just the way everybody felt i thought maybe everybody you know was optimistic and dreamed about good things but i didn't dream about it

[27:56]

good things but i didn't dream about it i expected it it just was a different feeling i can tell the difference when i'm just dreaming about stuff oh i'm looking at people's answers this is fascinating i didn't know where this was going there were a lot of yeses i see some no's oh my goodness that's very common i i didn't know i had no idea which way that question was going to go apparently it's universal i mean not universal because i see some no's but if i were just based on the answers which is very non-representative of the sample it's just the people wanted to answer um wow there's a i don't know what percentage but we can conclude from the comments that a lot of people thought that they would be famous someday interesting so i guess i should take it to be nothing you know because it felt like it was almost a premonition but if everybody had the same premonition that it didn't work out for most people i'd have to say it's just just how kids feel i guess so to finish this answer how do i stay

[28:58]

so to finish this answer how do i stay motivated i've never not been motivated so i don't know what it's like to feel unmotivated i don't even know what that feels like because i've always felt like um almost like there was a a problem with myself that i needed to fix
fix you know when we talk about success and motivation and things uh we tend to because we're america and you know we're a certain type of people we tend to put the most positive spin on success and we say motivation ambition we tend to put a positive frame on those things because we like to encourage people to do those things make sense but when you're actually that person and you're the person who has that ambition and has that motivation it doesn't always feel like it's a positive it feels like a flaw that you're trying to fix now i don't know how many other people would back me up on that feeling that

[29:58]

would back me up on that feeling that may be highly individual i don't know but what i feel like is a continuous weight on me that i should have done more and i can't shake it i wake up thinking i should have done more and i go to bed thinking i should have done more that day and i can't wait wait to wake up i hate sleep i just i just dislike the whole idea of sleeping because it takes me away from my day and my day is when i can do stuff and i can get stuff done i can accomplish things right i can i can make a difference when i'm sleeping sleeping's like suspended animation sleeping is like practice for being dead sleeping has no place in my world except unfortunately it's necessary for good health so you should do everything you can to sleep you know sleep a healthy amount don't want to convince anybody to sleep less but
but i'm just telling you how i feel so to answer andre's question i've never felt unmotivated so i suspect some of that is just baked into your

[31:00]

that is just baked into your your nature i i don't know it's always been there it's never going away and it feels like an itch that can't be scratched but i spend my whole life scratching anyway is that good i don't know because i don't know if i have the capability to be let's say retired you know i'm at that age where everybody thinks seriously about it and um you know there many times i've thought you know wouldn't it be great to be retired what if i could wake up and just do anything i wanted what if i didn't have to work what if i could sleep as long as i want do anything i want when i wake up not worry about money and just live out my days you know like a perfect free human that nobody ever gets to be like nobody ever gets to be free just wake up do what you want not run out of money who gets to do that i have no interest

[32:01]

who gets to do that i have no interest in that i have no interest because that's available to me now i can stop working you know i know you hate me for it because especially now when people are having a tough time it's just the truth i could stop working i could just wake up and just eat and play around and just have a good time for the rest of my life i could i have no interest in it it sounds like hell to me because it doesn't scratch my itch it doesn't make me feel like i've done anything useful and that only useful for myself because i already got what i need i'm almost entirely externally focused at this point in my career because if it's not good for you not interested if it doesn't help if it doesn't help someone else no interest at all not even a little bit so my ambition to sort of further to andre's question my ambition has changed over the years from a pure personal ambition to you know i've

[33:03]

pure personal ambition to you know i've got to get somewhere personally to oh now what do i do because once i got it what do i do what am i going to do with that and so almost immediately upon getting what i thought i wanted my ambition changed to external and i thought to myself well you know could i run for public office and i thought what would be a bigger waste of my talents than to put me in a meeting okay you know if you've watched me long enough you say to yourself okay what what is it that you're good at what is it that you could contribute to the world and now uh now you've got to go raise money and attend meetings let's just be the biggest waste of time ever for my specific set of talents so i try to find ways such as this in which i could do something that would be potentially useful which is why i've started to put the micro lessons on the locals.com platform

[34:05]

on the locals.com platform so right now there's a lesson on how to be funny i think my next lesson will either be personal finance very very short lesson on that for those who just don't know anything about it uh or maybe design i'm gonna probably do one of those today maybe all right so i'm always motivated it's just the nature of it changed um shota says what are some techniques to wake up and start the day off great uh and the answer is if you don't drink coffee i don't know what the answer to that question is um one of the things that i teach in fact just yesterday somebody somebody said that this lesson changed their life so what i'm going to tell you now this will be the short version of it but somebody just told me yesterday changed their life to hear this idea that we're moist robots i wrote about this in my head failed almost everything and still win big book you see on the shelf back there and

[35:07]

book you see on the shelf back there and the idea of a moist robot is that it just responds to inputs so if you put an input into a computer you you'll get an output and that if you treat yourself like that instead of some kind of mental creature if you treat yourself as a mind you don't know what to do with it because you don't quite know how to manage a mind it's more of a concept but if you manage your physical body and you manage it right you can produce the right kind of thoughts and actions and stuff that your mind likes so i teach people to reprogram their mind by programming their physical environment and their physical body and also associating rewards with things they want their physical body to do so one of the things that i want to do is wake up and be productive who doesn't right if it were free and easy and didn't take any work wouldn't you all want to wake up and be productive you might want to wake up at different times

[36:07]

different times but everybody wants to be productive so i use the moist robot technique to train myself like a dog and the way i do that is i say hey if you do this trick you get a treat and the treat is this protein bar this specific one because it's one that i like i'm not saying you'll like it i'm just saying i like it and delicious cup of coffee which when combined in the same bite a bite of the chocolate peanut butter protein bar with the sips of coffee is really really good and the coffee wakes me up it gives me a buzz and my body registers the buzz right it's a little shot of energy and your your body recognizes that as a treat and then you do the taste treat and the in you know maybe you're a little hungry when you woke up anyway and then those two tastes go together and it's like a taste explosion of awesomeness now it doesn't

[37:08]

explosion of awesomeness now it doesn't matter that you don't like these things because if you were doing it you would pick your own treat your treat might be i don't watch a tv show your treat might be take a walk in the morning maybe it's whatever you like but the the trick is for whoever said how do you wake up in the morning is you should pair your wake up routine and you should turn it into a routine so it's not different every day with a treat a really really good one and let me tell you if you heard this and said yourself uh a protein bar and a cup of coffee that's not much of a treat that's just food and beverage you could have food and beverage all day why is that a treat well the the thing you might miss is how much i like it so if you don't like it find something you do is i really really like the first two hours of my day by far they're they're extraordinary the first two hours of every day for my life are extraordinary pretty much every time

[38:11]

are extraordinary pretty much every time there's almost nothing else that's as good the rest of the day unless you know unless christina's involved
how popular will pop-up drive-in movies be this summer well i saw that somebody somebody's got some pop-up movie theaters that already happened so i predicted that that would happen and i know it's happened at least one place maybe more and there have been the drive-in
church services as well and i guess dr the people just parking in a parking lot and listening to the the pastor on on their car radio turned out to be too dangerous which is ridiculous if i had to guess you'll see more of that in the summer but not much more um [Laughter] practical bob says this uh is kb i assume he's referring to my fiance christina uh as hot looking in person as

[39:14]

christina uh as hot looking in person as pictures no no she is not um christine is not as hot looking in person she is way hotter way hotter in person there is no photograph that could ever capture her total beauty so now i'm sad to say that she does not look as good as her pictures she looks way better than her pictures way better um that's true by the way and the 15-minute kova tests uh
can it be done multiple done at a time or is it one at a time well that's a good question you know do you have to wait 15 minutes before you do the next test and the answer is um i doubt it i doubt i would assume that they can batch them up and just test test test and then everybody's just waiting for results or at the very least you've got more than one test test station so yeah there might be ways to make that faster

[40:18]

the new york times calling for the dnc to investigate tara reid's complaint
how can they suggest such a thing with a straight face it does make you wonder yeah there's so much happening in the news that you just look at it you say do they really mean that or are they just saying that because they know it sounds good you really can't tell anymore can you you really can't tell if people mean what they say in any uh in any real way do i follow brilliant geopolitical writer peter zayn i don't i don't know if i follow him i've read his stuff but i'm not too familiar um i answered about the armed protesters the sweet caroline says do you think most people will do what's proper and if they want to work they should be able to and the answer is yes most people will do most things properly

[41:19]

do most things properly but twenty percent will not if twenty percent don't do what they should do is that good enough will the other eighty percent be okay if the twenty percent don't do what they're supposed to do and the answer is they won't be when the 20 don't do their social distancing etc it will be a problem and it will extend to other people but there also isn't another way so i don't like to complain about things that can't change as a general rule i probably do but it's a good rule not to complain about things that can't change and one thing that can't change is that you're not going to get 100 of adults to act like adults there's no there's no practical way that that could ever happen so it shouldn't be part of our planning to assume that it would so assuming that uh a hundred percent of people or anything close to it would obey social distancing would be i think

[42:28]

yeah 20 percent failure rate could be catastrophic but we don't know so again i'll throw this in the category of
of is there any expert who can answer this question no no there's no expert who can answer that question it's just one of our many unknowns
let's see the the research professor in pittsburgh that was on the verge of making a significant findings on how this he was just found murdered in his home what uh is this new here's a coronavirus researcher dead huh looks like a murder suicide well i don't know questions i got questions who knows uh what do your notes look like for these periscopes that's a funny question uh the answer is i just print them out before i start and if it looks like there's a lot of

[43:29]

and if it looks like there's a lot of text on the page i didn't type that i just cut and paste from news headlines and then i i talk about the headline so usually i have uh two pages of notes that are just cut and paste from the what's happening some tweets and stuff um
does the communist party of china provide levels of remuneration to social media giants that should concern us well you know it's funny the in every situation that we know of in life whoever has the most money in that situation ends up controlling it now that's worked out
out pretty well for the united states for a long time because the united states always had the most money so we could have you know the most influence over institutions because we funded them the most influence over other countries because we supported them militarily so it's just a fact that whoever has the

[44:30]

so it's just a fact that whoever has the most money be they the billionaire in the room or the
the rich country they influence things more there's no way to stop that because it's a power they have it they can use it it's legal it's going to happen the problem is that china is just simply by its size alone will come to have more money than the united states so if the united states and china both did let's say similarly well with their economy just because of the number of people in china there would be is it four times as big three times as big somebody do the math for me three times as big three to four times as big so china should have something like three to four times more money should they even pull even with us in economics you know per capita so to speak so in theory china will dominate the world it's just math there's no way it can not happen the only way china could not dominate the world in the future is if their economy doesn't grow

[45:32]

future is if their economy doesn't grow as well as ours does and so in order for the united states to continue its probably oversized dominance of a lot of things that we don't even know about you know you have to assume that the united states does what china is doing which is to use their power and influence everything else to you know buy us everything that we can buy us in our direction in order to keep that up china has to do less well in the long run one way they could do less well is we could send them back their stupid spy drones and we could not buy stuff in china in the future so that would help so yes we should be very worried about their monetary influence on social media as well as every other part of our existence um what will happen to office politics in the age of uh mostly staying home i guess um that's a good question because

[46:35]

that's a good question because i do wonder what is the value of all the in-person interaction in the office you know the thinking has always been that all of this casual interaction in the office leads to positive but unplanned benefits you know you cross-pollinate with ideas and you you find somebody to work with and you get your answers quickly and all that but nobody's ever tested that i'm not aware of any scientific evidence that would suggest that being in the same office gives you a better result we feel it intuitively like it's true because you you can influence somebody personally in a way that you can't influence them as well or a video so does that make a difference we don't know we only know it will be different so it could be that the politics will decrease the time wasters will decrease but there might be other problems you know the the work at homers will start just not answering their phone that would be my guess i think where

[47:36]

that would be my guess i think where it's all going is that when it's new and everybody's working at home and you're not used to it yet you answer your phone when it rings and you answer your zooms and your skypes but something tells me that as we do more and more work at home everybody will learn that the smart people don't answer the phone [Laughter] and then what happens i don't know
will biden be the candidate in november i'd say 50 50. but whether or not he's actually the candidate on the ticket in november i do think people will be looking at the vice president um speaking of which oh my god did you see what the president did last night i think it was last night on an interview he said that so trump said that he thinks biden should pick elizabeth warren because she deserves it

[48:41]

and i tweeted nothing makes me happier than watching trump give biden bad advice it is so diabolical it is so funny you know he does it you know he does it with like a twinkle in his brain like he's not letting on that this is a joke but is so diabolical the way he gets in in the heads of competitors i would hate to golf with him have you ever have you ever thought to yourself what would it be like to just golf with trump and let's say you were pretty good you were a good golfer can you imagine how much you would get in your head before you even hit the first golf ball i can't imagine he ever loses a golf even if he plays people who are better because he probably so messes with their psychology that by the time they try to swing they're hitting the ball backwards anyway here's the beauty part of suggesting that suggesting that biden owes it to what

[49:42]

she deserves it because when you use language like that that's like emotional language so he's trying of course to get the democrats spun up to fight with each other which is so funny that like lastly i saw that tweet i'm like oh you just have to keep doing this because it's i think it's the second time now he's given bad advice to biden but made it act like he was he was serious yeah i got your back on this whole tara reid thing i think you should go out there and defend yourself and when you hear when you hear the president's bad advice to biden and you know he's only doing it because biden is mentally degraded let's face it he's mentally degraded these things wouldn't work with somebody who is more capable but biden is not that person so the president can just totally mess with the psychology of their situation do it with a straight face and the news doesn't even know how to report this because i can't tell i don't know is he kidding was that a joke is he trying to mess

[50:45]

was that a joke is he trying to mess with him or does he really think that elizabeth warren would be what's going on here and of course he's messing with him it should be pretty obvious i don't have to read his mind to know that i would call that an obvious one
but here's the beauty of it first of all elizabeth warren would be the worst choice because she's stronger than biden that's that's rule number one of picking your vice president you want the public to say okay of these two people you know it's obvious which one is the presidential candidate and it's obvious which one is the vice president because they're like a weaker version of the president right if you see donald trump and mike pence you know who is the president right you know because i i always say good things about pence i don't agree with him on a lot of stuff you know i'm not on the real religious stuff etc you know we don't see eye to eye

[51:46]

we don't see eye to eye but pence is a good egg i think just he's just a good solid citizen and he's perfect vice president because he just doesn't make too many mistakes he didn't wear that mask that one time but that's no biggie
and but if you if you take elizabeth warren and put her side by side with biden everybody's going to say uh yeah you see what's wrong here right elizabeth warren's like twice as capable i was biting it's not even close you know mentally if you were to let's say you were to uh um give them both an sat test or an lsat or an iq test elizabeth warren versus biden that's not going to be close right say what you will about your elizabeth warrens and i have but she's super smart can't say the same for biden right so if you put her as a vice president

[52:47]

you put her as a vice president presidential choice it just ruins everything which is why it's hilarious that he would he would say that she's earned it you can't even say no she's earned it you know so then if he doesn't pick her the president has put in their heads that he picks somebody who didn't earn it
so let me further my uh further my long-held prediction by saying this if you picture elizabeth warren and biden you know just in your mind your mind's eye picture them side by side as i said warren looks stronger now picture kamala harris side by side with biden ah now you see it don't you now you see it kabula harris is close to sort of similar to biden she didn't give far enough in the primaries to be sort of elizabeth warren level

[53:47]

level she's one level down she's just about equivalent with biden but she's strong enough because she went through the process of running for president she's strong enough that if she were to become president people would say uh that's legitimate she was in the primaries she she made a dent in the primaries she's a legitimate presidential candidate people took her seriously she had a lot of supporters she didn't make it that far in the primaries but she's a serious candidate yes we accept her as our new president if that's the way it's going to go uh so kabul just she checks off every box
box right and somebody says scott is still trying to persuade his prediction into reality well let me ask you this do you think the democrats are listening to me do you think there's anything that i'll say that could persuade the democrats my

[54:47]

that could persuade the democrats my my assumption is that they're going to end up there on their own because that's just water traveling downhill in other words the the path of least resistance i didn't create i'm not the person who created the path i'm simply describing it i'm just standing there saying look there's two paths one of them this elizabeth warren is a brick wall you can see it i'm not making the brick wall there i'm just saying you can see it too i didn't put that brick wall there now look at kamala harris it's a different path yeah there's nothing in that path there's nothing stopping her from being president if she if biden you know stays in pictures vp wins the election i think that's unlikely but that would be the path stacy abrams i think just can't be taken seriously

[55:49]

think about the bad feelings you have for kamala harris think about so you mostly trump supporters on this periscope think to yourself your think about your emotional feeling about kamala harris and now ask yourself how different is that from the emotional feeling that democrats felt when trump started becoming you know a serious candidate think about how they felt about him it was like this visceral it was almost like you disliked him before he had a reason there's something about his personality his braggadocio his you know his playing loose with the facts it was like ah
now maybe you and i didn't feel that but you certainly observed that the democrats were having this just contempt feeling this like you know almost a bodily hatred for trump now ask yourself did that stop him from becoming president no because that thing that made people hate trump is just the other side of the

[56:52]

trump is just the other side of the thing that made people fall in love with him
him and there there are people who support trump who are you know almost cult-like they just love him and this is true of obama and other people as well it's not just trump but he he um trump causes your emotions to catch on fire and you either love him or you hate him but there's not a lot in between which is actually pretty predictive of somebody who could become president the one you don't want is where everybody says well i don't love him i don't really hate him he's just in this middle ground somewhere that's where biden is that's why that's why biden is so weak because he doesn't make you love him he doesn't make you hate him he just exists that's usually not a good sign of future leadership kamala harris the moment i mention her name some of you just go enraged now that's too strong but you have an emotional reaction to

[57:52]

but you have an emotional reaction to her
her people are saying ah she slept her way to the top she put people in jail she she lied about some racist stuff she accused somebody of she'll she'll do anything she's a skier think about what you feel about her don't you feel a stronger emotion negative about kamala than some other people ask yourself do you have do you have the same feeling about kamala like just just examine your internal feeling as you did about say let's cory booker you might have said oh i don't think cory booker should be president but do you have the same visceral feel for cory booker i'll bet you don't i'll bet you say you know cory booker looks like a good guy he's just not the guy i'd want for president how about andrew yang does anybody hate andrew yang probably not probably basically nobody but do you get like super excited well

[58:53]

but do you get like super excited well you get excited in a certain way with yang you know he's interesting and stuff but he doesn't really he doesn't cause you to love him like some people do you know you don't hate him you don't love him he's interesting but he's interesting in the middle
so here's my uh here's my overall statement of that the fact that you have such a negative feeling about kamala harris tells you there's something about her that's reaching you emotionally if it's true that there's another side to that she might actually be able to move democrats emotionally as well so look for the person who's got who can make you feel something she definitely makes you feel something i don't know if there's a positive side of that yet i haven't really seen it but she definitely feels she makes you feel the negative if you're on the other team so follow the power of emotion to find the same with aoc you can hate

[59:53]

the same with aoc you can hate everything about aoc but just examine the depth of your feeling that's the thing that is predictive it's the depth of it not your intellectual opinions um what is your favorite movie at least at the moment i dislike movies as an art form because in 2020 they just take too long they're too self-indulgent it's more about the director and they put ridiculous hackneyed crap in every movie now if i see one more damn by the way i have a rule let me tell you my rule for watching drama i will turn on a movie okay got good ratings lots of action i can watch that sometimes as soon as the star or any part of the movie is tied to a chair i turn it off that's my rule i've been following this for years do you know how many movies i've turned off because at some point somebody is tied to a chair yeah 75 percent 75 percent of all

[1:00:56]

yeah 75 percent 75 percent of all action movies i turn off when they get to the tied to the chair part because first of all i don't want to see it everything that happens with that tied to the chair part is going to be unpleasant i don't want to think about it i don't want to imagine it even as a you know fiction i don't want it in my head i just need to fast forward past that part but i'm not gonna the fact that you put that in there and you thought that i wanted to watch that it's just hackneyed it's boring it's it's redundant and if that's the best you can do for your movie i'm out like if that's if that's your symbol of creativity why don't i do what everybody else does tie somebody to a chair i'm out um all right i'm a little bit over time here so i don't want to go too far uh let's see if there's one more question how much testing is needed to accomplish something useful in opening the country my answer is and i'm i'm pretty confident to this

[1:01:57]

confident to this let's put my confidence at 75 80 percent so you know good solid 20 20 20 25 i might be wrong about this but my current thinking about testing is we can't get there at all that there's no way to test enough that we will consider in the end when we look back at it oh thank goodness we had enough testing and the right kind of testing and we tested the right people in the right way that we really got a handle in this thing my prediction is there's nothing that looks even remotely like that's going to happen not even a little bit we're nowhere near being able to test in the right way fast enough etc now i have optimism in humanity in the sense that maybe something will get invented but somebody would have to invent something that could be scaled up quickly that doesn't yet exist is that going to happen in three months or one month when we need it i don't think so

[1:02:57]

think so seems pretty unlikely to me could happen you know i'd like to keep that solid 20 maybe it'll happen uh and i do think generally speaking that humanity will rise to the challenge and as we're looking at this crushing amount of death that we're looking at for going back to work i would if i had to bet we're going to be
be super super clever in the next 30 days and then we will just devise things you know mechanisms systems technologies inventions i mean it's going to look crazy in the next 30 days of how much human innovation just pops out of this some of it might be important and make a difference i don't think it'll be the testing if you had to guess testing is just one of many variables that could make a difference so what are the odds it's that one single one i'm going to bet against it so i'm going to say that testing will not be your answer and i say the same thing about vaccines i don't think the vaccine hope

[1:03:57]

vaccines i don't think the vaccine hope is real frankly i don't think it's real i think that's just a you know make you feel good um it might work but if we can come up with a coronavirus vaccine for the first time in human history well wouldn't that be surprising if you know what i mean um all right
does it make sense for bill gates to speak in favor of the chinese government's handling of the plague and the answer is i'm going to back bill gates every time he says something that is true even if you don't like it so is it true that the chinese government acted aggressively and decisively in a way that only they could and probably made a big difference in the in the plague i would say yes i would agree with um i would agree with bill gates that as far as we can tell we might find out something later but as

[1:04:59]

we might find out something later but as far as we could tell it looks like china effectively handled it
it even if you don't like the way they did it you know even if you don't like the fact that they you know lock people in their houses till they starved or whatever the hell happened if you don't like the fact that you know there's lots there's lots of stuff not to like but what i like about bill gates is he'll give you the difficult answer if it's also true it's a difficult answer because do do i want to say in public yeah you know i got my criticisms but if you looked at the big picture the chinese government took care of business maybe not in the way their citizens wanted them to a lot of probably a lot of victims out of that but you gotta say they it looks like they got past it maybe so i i favor bill gates saying things that are honest um i that's one of his primary benefits to the country i think is that

[1:05:59]

benefits to the country i think is that he does tell you what what actually is true um so
uh he's also the largest donor to the world health organization and has conflicts of interest well here's the thing tell me if you will what you think bill gates's intention is if if i thought that bill gates was trying to make money or or influence politics i would have a very different opinion of him but you know that's not true right you know bill gates is not in this for the money don't you i mean really don't you know that but he's not into this for the money because it kind of wouldn't make sense for him to be in it for the money i mean not this you think he decided to be the richest guy in the world and go spend a lot of time working on african toilet design which he does because he's trying to make some money on toilets no no bill gates is the real deal

[1:07:01]

no bill gates is the real deal and and maybe the reason i can see it uh in my opinion more clearly is because i'm i'm the the smallest version of him meaning that i've i've experienced making my own money and then running out of things to do i just talked about it earlier right i took care of myself now what do i do it is quite natural that you are because you're a human living in a human society that the next thing you say is oh well if i took care of myself and my family let's see what i can do for the world so i
i guarantee it there are very few things i would say with a hundred percent certainty this will be one of them i guarantee it 100 the bill gates is the real deal meaning that he's only doing it to help the world period nothing else no no you could say oh it's you know it's good for him too because people will feel good about his

[1:08:02]

because people will feel good about his legacy or whatever okay sure i mean that's part of it too but it's not the reason it's not the reason i don't i don't do anything for a legacy because i expect to be dead i don't think bill i don't think bill gates is a believer uh i don't think he believes in the afterlife i'm not positive about that i don't know if he's talked about it um but i i don't think he's i don't think he's playing for his legacy i think he's playing for right now i think he's the real deal that's it i'll talk to you tonight you know where you know when