Episode 982 Scott Adams: The Good News Bubbling up Everywhere, How to Tell a Writer From an A

Date: 2020-05-18 | Duration: 55:04

Topics

My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a Content: Big trends pushing an entrepreneurial wave Joel Pollack reports on Obama’s 69 page Pandemic Playbook Nate Silver calls out WaPo anti-Trump headline Dr. Rick Bright, whistleblower or disgruntled ousted employee? Mike Pompeo’s staffer and the fired IG AOC reframing her Green New Deal

If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topics to build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure.

> [!note] Rough Transcript
> 
> This is an auto-generated transcript and may contain errors.

## Transcript

[0:12]

hey everybody come on in yeah you found it it's time congratulations good work so far so far your monday is looking good you found coffee with scott adams did you hear the news well not news in 2012 there was a study that musicians brains actually sync up during a duet if you look at their brains you find that they actually get in sync and interestingly even before the music starts their brains sync up so there's actually a physical known let's say matching within the physical structure of brains prior to singing and i believe this connection is very important for humanity we will now connect sonically in a very similar way because you know it's coming next don't you
you already your brain is syncing up those of you who have joined me before

[1:13]

of you who have joined me before feel it yeah your brain is syncing up with mine right now because you know what comes next here it comes all you need is a cover a mug or a glass of tanker challengers nine a canteen jugger 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 pandemic it's called the simultaneous sip it comes with synchronicity it comes with simultaneous vibrations in our brain go
did you feel that i can feel that yeah i can feel that all right well it's a funny day today's a funny day
day i'm gonna be optimistic today okay with you it's all gonna be good news today i'm sure there's bad news well i'm sure there's bad news all over the world but today

[2:15]

all over the world but today today we're gonna wrap ourselves in a a little monday blanket of good thoughts number one good thought comes from naval ravicant who tweeted yesterday and i quote i love america greatest country on earth only place that will completely accept you even if you weren't born there the reason i mention that is that this would be a really good time to remind ourselves that there's something about america that's just not like other places we are not a collection of people so much as a collection of shared ideas and it is indeed true if you share those ideas you play by the rules you follow the laws you you follow the constitution you think that's a pretty good deal america completely accepts you and we should remember that because when 2021 comes

[3:18]

2021 comes and we start to rebuild to make america great again which has never been so much
we should remember who we are and who we are is a group of people who are here by choice
not every one of you you know was born where you wanted to be born necessarily but
but people who came to america all came here by choice except for the well i guess everybody ultimately came here by choice if you go way back and
and there is something about that self-selection process so
so you know even though america is not about the people so much as it is about the ideas and the shared values it is nonetheless true that those shared values became a filter and if filtered and has for hundreds of years who it is who comes to this country

[4:20]

who it is who comes to this country and we now have the most optimistic capable
rule violating because we're americans too we like to violate our rules sometimes because we are rebellious by nature but but remember who we are just remember who we are now if you're if you're listening this from another country feel free to substitute what's great about your country into this conversation because it's time to stop hunkering down it's time to get off of defense against this coronavirus it's happening everywhere states are going back on offense they're they're going right at it and i would like to make a suggestion for the country this this would work for the world as well but for the united st

[5:27]

uh coronavirus deaths as one number and break it into two maybe the second number is people over 70 or maybe it's just nursing home deaths but we should stop tracking the nursing home deaths with the total deaths the reason is it's time to get back to work the time to be scared is over the time to be smart starts now scared is good scared makes you do what you got to do scared makes you put on your mask scared makes you stay home scared had his purpose you know there was a reason for scared but now it's a reason to rebuild time to rebuild do you want to rebuild scared nope don't want to it's time to it's time to change the way we report and talk about the deaths so that we put them back into a smarter frame let's take it out of the scary frame scary was good

[6:28]

scary was good let's no criticism there let's just scare everybody that was exactly what we needed to do now we need to rebuild i've told you many times an economy is a set of psychological states that people act out if you get your psychology right your economy is right step one to get our psychology right is let's stop counting the number of nursing home deaths because those are not the deaths that matter to reopening the economy if we're smart because we now know that that's where the weakness is we can wall off that group of citizens send the young people back to work but please please united states show us just the stats for the people who are going back to work that's the death rate i care about for the economic purposes of course i care about all the deaths let's not let's not be that person

[7:28]

let's not let's not be that person but let's let's put an optimistic economically compatible tweak on the numbers and let's just grow up a little bit and say all right we have two problems not one two problems one problem is the comorbid comorbidity people the people have higher risk and the other problem is opening the economy and we should just track them separately just track them separately it will be great for the psychological being of the country
uh i would like to uh give you some more uh
uh cause for optimism uh
uh i predicted on twitter this morning that 2021 will be more than a recovery year 2021 will also be a recovery year but i think it's going to be bigger than that like really bigger than that and you can almost feel it can't you today i saw the news that kim kardashian

[8:30]

today i saw the news that kim kardashian launched a line of face masks so while some of us were hiding kim kardashian launched a new business now i think she may be giving a lot of it away i don't know if she's even doing it for money she may be doing it just for patriotic reasons which would be terrific but
but there are a lot of entrepreneurs who are spring-loaded right now and saying you know let me get out of the house let me do something because i got an idea and here are the bigger trends that are going to push this entrepreneurial wave which i think will be the biggest wave of entrepreneurial energy the world has ever seen starting in 2021 i think that everything you've ever assumed about entrepreneurial anything is just going to be thrown out the door in 2021 and you're going to see a a surge of energy uh in the into the economy that will be historically unprecedented

[9:32]

historically unprecedented and some of the things driving that are i just saw a study that said that 40 of the americans don't want to buy chinese products and 78 said they'd be willing to pay more for products made in this country compared to made in china do you know how much stuff china makes and 78 of us just said screw that i'll pay more to keep my neighbor employed because how much did it cost you to have your neighbor out of work that wasn't free you know we used to be able to say well i got my job so you know my neighbor lost his manufacturing job to china but you know that's my neighbor that's not me but what did the coronavirus teach you it taught you that you and your neighbor are economically connected when your neighbor ran out of food who paid for the food well maybe we just printed money who

[10:33]

well maybe we just printed money who knows but ultimately we assume that the people who are doing all right have to be the ones who were paying for the ones who you know needed some help who else is going to pay so the idea that we can just ignore the fact that you're shipping your neighbor's job to china like that's not going to affect you somehow i think we just got over that didn't we didn't we just learned that that that's not how it works if your neighbor doesn't have a job nobody's going to mow that lawn that's going to come back on you so there's a psychological thing happening there's an enormous thing happening with the supply chain i mean that part is almost beyond calculation if you if you only took that one thing you said all right 2021 will be like prior years before the coronavirus the only thing you're going to change is i don't know bring back the entire supply chain from china and that's all you would have to know to buy stock in this country

[11:34]

buy stock in this country right um
um what else is happening so
so those are not the only good things the other thing that's happening i think will be more subtle and i've talked about this how the coronavirus made everybody in the united states rethink everything it made us rethink how we work travel go to school how we live with each other everything and when you rethink everything and it's everybody rethinking it it's the it's the people not just the entrepreneurs you've really you've really shaken the box and you've you've created a whole bunch of opportunities that in a sense already existed but they were invisible to us so as soon as you the coronavirus kicked up all these flaws in our system that we could see them and everybody could see them and we could all say oh whoa those flaws were not necessarily so visible until we saw this

[12:37]

until we saw this so there's gonna be a lot of fixing of flaws and that activity alone would be enormous but i've also uh if you saw my periscope last night you know that i think we're gonna just redo civilization because we're waking up to the fact that we're living in somebody else's uh
uh somebody else's world just briefly from what i said in a longer form last night the home that most of us live in if we if you have a house or even an apartment situation you're living in something that was designed for people who died 100 years ago even if your home is new it probably is a legacy design from the 30s when people lived a certain way
way you know before the internet etc so what you're going to see is i think people because of the coronavirus sort of
of resetting the way we're looking at our world we saw all the problems that happened when we had just a little bit of a wrinkle in it i think people are going to say wait a minute

[13:37]

minute let's just look at this from scratch what does transportation look like what does education look like what is what should it look like and so there's going to be a lot happening on that all right
um i know i had at least one other good example of that oh cheap energy we may be entering a phase where energy you know either oil will stay low we've got generation four nuclear that's you know the us government's doing a lot with their test sites and stuff they're trying to iterate up quickly we may be entering a phase where energy is just super cheap and what's that do i mean how about a phase where interest rates are zero or negative we're coming into a world where every assumption has been wiped away we have an educated population willing to work supply chain we're bringing back cheap energy zero interest rates and a a president

[14:39]

zero interest rates and a a president that just showed us sometimes if you cut a whole bunch of regulations you come out better you will will it help us to know that we cut a bunch of regulations and it helped us during the coronavirus i feel like that's a lesson that gets into your head and then it's easier to cut regulations going forward because you saw that it worked before and
and i think a lot of people also realized that having a job and a boss is not a secure situation you know there were a whole bunch of people who said well i'm going to wake up in the morning go to work i'll have the boss i'll have a job i'll have a paycheck and they just found out that's not that's not a secure way to live at least all the people who lost their job in the coronavirus so if you put all this stuff together you can almost feel it can't you feel it in the zeitgeist now let's talk about zeitgeist

[15:39]

so i tweeted i tweeted that uh yeah i could feel it in the zeitgeist the 2021 would be a huge wave of entrepreneurial energy and some of you are saying scott why are you using that german word what does a zeitgeist mean well here's what it means it means that the feeling that everybody has collectively that we haven't necessarily talked about you know you and i haven't had a conversation about it but there's just something in the air we're feeling at the same time our thoughts are sort of collectively moving in a similar direction but we don't know exactly why it's not because we coordinated it's just the there's just something in the air that's what the zeitgeist is so there's no american word for that now i promised you uh i promised you in the title to this that i would help you determine the difference it's a subtle difference sometimes they look similar but i'm going to help you identify the subtle difference between a professional writer

[16:39]

professional writer and an because they can look pretty similar well let's see let's be honest and here's the difference this is one way to tell it's not the only way to tell it's a bigger topic but here's one way to tell if your if your writer uses a word like zeitgeist you have to ask why they're using it now when i used it in a tweet a tweet is a small bit of you know text and my intention was that people would have one of two reactions one they would know what the word meant and they would feel smart because they know other people don't know what it means if you want people to feel smart use a word that you know they know what it means but they also know other people don't don't know what it means they'll make them feel smarter but what about the people who don't know what it means so i'm a professional writer and i put out a word in a tweet that i knew

[17:40]

that i knew 75 percent 80 percent maybe 90 percent of the readers wouldn't know what the word is is that good writing or is that just being an
well i would propose this that if the reason your professional writer used an unfamiliar word is to make you stop and think about it and maybe even look it up then that's good writing that's what i did so i used the word that i knew a lot of people wouldn't understand because i wanted him to stop and say what the hell is that zeitgeist why is he using that word now here's the beauty of it the way i used it you didn't know you didn't need to know what it meant because the context told you i'm just saying it's going to be good in 2021 a lot of energy but you probably stopped on the word if you didn't know what it meant that's what i wanted you to do if i could make you stop and pause and think a little extra about

[18:40]

and pause and think a little extra about my point then my point becomes part of your memory in a way it would not have if i'd used ordinary words so if you're a professional writer and you know that what you're trying to do is make your reader stop and think that's the right way to use an unusual word had i used that same word in a longer paragraph without explaining it probably a mistake because the reader wants to get through the paragraph they don't want to stop nobody wants to have to stop and look up words in a long form so in that context you don't want to use weird words which brings me to the funniest story of the day that was all all of that was just a setup for the funniest story of the day this is brought to us courtesy of joel joel pollock at breitbart who did the hard work of actually reporting on something and
and and when it's really the funniest thing of the day
day so you heard that the obama

[19:41]

so you heard that the obama administration left behind this 69 page pandemic planning document so good job obama right you got that got that big old planning document
so apparently nobody except joel pollock thought it would be a good idea to actually look at it and say is this is this planning pandemic as good as we thought it was well here's where it gets interesting and
and i was laughing for i think i laughed for 15 minutes straight after i'd read jules article about this planning document and then i went back and read the title of joel's article which is
the obama biden pandemic playbook is less than advertised now
now that title won't make you laugh until you read the article but when you when you appreciate the

[20:42]

you appreciate the the understatement of less than advertised
tell you nothing's ever been less than advertised than this this freaking thing all right so so i won't be able to fully describe how useless this document is but i'll just give you a flavor of it from from jules from joel's article
and let me put it in context remember the story about the russian troll farm that was influencing our elections with their their super kgb russian troll memes that no doubt were moving moving results and you're thinking my god the russians they're weaponizing their weaponizing memes you know what have they done they've probably got a secret laboratory and they're you know they're they're testing it on people to see which of the memes are the good ones you know they've really probably studied this and weaponized it my god what kind of memes are they sending us and then you look at their memes

[21:45]

and then you look at their memes and it literally looks like it was a sixth grade class project children take out your crayons and we're going to make memes today make one that says hillary clinton is mean make one that says she lies all right thank you children and when you actually look at the memes you just have to laugh because you realize the entire story about the russia troll farm was all fake maybe not fake ins in the sense that they actually did these things i'm not saying they didn't do the things i'm saying that when you look at it it's really a stretch to say that russia was interfering in the election i mean it's the biggest stretch you've ever stretched uh it's sort of like you know pissing in the ocean and looking to see if the if the water level rose so this document the obama biden pandemic playbook is

[22:46]

playbook is as joel pollock says less than advertised let me tell you how much less
as joel says of the 69 pages because you say to yourself wow that's pretty hefty 69 pages of pandemic playbook wow but of the 69 pages only 27 are actually playbook the first 13 pages are a table of contents executive summary and various title pages the last 29 pages are appendices and within the 27 pages of the playbook only 17 deal with an international uh says on the next page all right with an actual pandemic i guess

[23:51]

um anyway so there's a uh a quote in there in which the first part of the uh the very first oh here it is sorry uh
uh so here's an actual quote from the guy this is the very one of the first sections i swear to god i'm not making this up this is actually written down by a public organization it says this this rubric capitalized capitalize r for rubric this rubric is not intended to serve as a comprehensive concept of operations or what it's not intended to serve as a as a comprehensive concept of operations or to replace pre-existing us government response structures what so the pandemic playbook is not a con comprehensive guide of what to do i thought that was the whole point but rather it's a guide to other guides

[24:53]

but rather it's a guide to other guides it's a rubric now
now raise your hand if you know what a rubric is somebody in the comments exactly as i said that the comment appeared on screen what is a rubric now let me explain and bring it all together the difference between a professional writer and an is that if your professional writer used a word like zeitgeist in a tweet the point of it was to make you slow down and think what does that word mean if however you're writing a 69-page pandemic playbook meant to be read quickly and efficiently by people during an emergency one word you should not use if you're a professional writer is a rubric because nobody knows what the it means i have to just look it up i'm a professional writer i don't know what a rubric is have you ever used that word in your whole life

[25:55]

in your whole life seriously raise your hand if you've ever used the word rubric in a freaking sentence not me not me
so whoever wrote this was not what i would call a professional writer because no professional writer is going to say this rubric is not intended to serve and then go on to say it's just a guide to other guides now here's the fun part this thing is so poorly written that you would never use it it's completely unusable but here's what it tried to do so it tried to be a pointer to point to all the government entities that would have a role during a pandemic here's the fun part each of those individual entities already knew what they were supposed to do
so do you think we needed a pandemic playbook for all of these entities to do what they're supposed to do when each of the entities already knew

[26:56]

when each of the entities already knew what they were supposed to do i would submit to you that the entire 69-page pandemic playbook should have been on one page and that one page should have said in the event of an emergency of this type here's the list of agencies that get involved each of them know what to do here are their phone numbers and who's in charge just so you can coordinate with each other one page the 69 page pandemic playbook should have been one page and then when you had that one page done here's what you should do with it ball it up into a little ball and then throw it in the garbage because you don't need the one page either because as soon as the as soon as the came down every one of those agencies i'm guessing leapt into action and told their bosses what they need to do
do and then those bosses went to their

[27:56]

and then those bosses went to their bosses and told them what to do because every agency already knew what to do if you're telling me that the pandemic playbook was the key to it all and if we'd had this there would have been no chaos you have never lived in the real world because whoever wrote the pandemic playbook and started with the sentence this rubric is not your a player in the government this was clearly the lowest level probably a political hire somebody who had an ivy league degree or something like it and and somebody said look we don't have any real work for you can you make us a pandemic playbook and the person said well what's that because i don't know just make sure there's a document so we can say that we've got a plan you know just in case
so you have to read for humor purposes i swear to god this is just for laughs you have to go look at it so look at joel's article i tweeted it you can find it in my twitter feed or go to breitbart

[28:58]

my twitter feed or go to breitbart and and and go to actually the document itself and look at the text it is so hilariously useless and watching biden claim that this is the magic document is pretty funny all right
we got some fun stuff out of south korea there was a study of asymptomatic transmission now there's still that question how much asymptomatic transmission is there but i feel like this south korean study gives us a pretty pretty good answer so there was some a gym where they had a different a bunch of different classes and what they found is that in the high intensity classes where people were maybe packed in and breathing hard that there was a high rate of asymptomatic transmission so i feel like we can put to rest the question whether it exists i i feel like we can say there is a

[30:00]

i i feel like we can say there is a symptomatic transmission based on this alone because i would chose south korea for this stuff and it's but here's the interesting thing there was no transmission in the less active classes like yoga and pilates and there was no transmission in classes with fewer than five people that doesn't mean there would never be but i think this lays it out pretty clearly that if you were to say go to your cubicle and sit there and work and you're not you know hugging or touching other people it's going to be more like taking a yoga or pilates class and a symptomatic transmission didn't happen but if you're you know in one room sweating and playing basketball or something and you're above a certain age probably pretty dangerous so i think that really to me this put it in a really stark contrast because it looks like they did a good job of the contact tracing and they've got a

[31:00]

of the contact tracing and they've got a good handle on this being asymptomatic but also the specific situations you've got to watch out for that's pretty big deal
the washington post has this opinion piece trump is gambling the health of the nation for his re-election so that's how the washington post describes a leader simply doing the job of a leader correct me if i'm wrong but isn't every leader of every country trying to put people back to work but safely is president trump doing anything different than every governor of every party and every leader of every country and all of their governors everywhere in the world every single one of them is doing the same thing they're trying to figure out this this balance of when to go back to work and how but in the washington post opinion trump is gambling the health of the

[32:02]

nation for his re-election okay so first of all that's another mind-reading situation because it assumes some knowledge of his inner state and your your magical knowledge of his inner mind is that his inner mind doesn't care about dead people he doesn't care but if you live or die he only cares about his re-election i would say that's not quite in evidence another person who says that's not in evidence well he doesn't say that but i've told you you should read nate silver he he's totally the best when it comes to calling out the bs for other people's let's say statistical ignorance and what nate says about the opinion piece that trump is gambling the health of the nation for his re-election nate silver says i continue to doubt the implication of a certain influential parcel of the conventional wisdom that tens or hundreds of thousands of additional americans dying would be good

[33:04]

additional americans dying would be good for trump's re-election prospects so
so you know nate who i don't believe would ever identify as republican or conservative i'm just guessing i don't know if he said anything in those terms but
but but one does not think he is republican and even even he's calling on the washington post saying uh basically i'm paraphrasing here but basically can you explain to me how you get reelected by killing hundreds of thousands of your own citizens what exactly is the strategy you're suggesting he's pursuing where by killing lots of citizens he gets more support can you explain how that works because it looks to me like it's just adults making adult decisions and it's not all pretty so you so even nate is calling out the washington post on that so this is why i'm appreciating nate silver he is i would say consistently he just goes with what the evidence is

[34:05]

he just goes with what the evidence is pointing to and
and is rare so it's worth calling out moderna a tech company says they've got a chronovirus vaccine that activated antibodies in all 45 participants but they're one they're one of 110 vaccine makers who knows if any of that will work um
um let's say
so it looks like the current death count estimate for the united states is 147 000
000 by early august so are we going to get to 200 000 dead do you think if we just straight line our it doesn't look like we're trying to flatten the curve i'm sorry it doesn't look like we're trying to drive the curve to zero it looks like it looks like not looks like it is that we're going back to work with a flat curve we'll be good enough

[35:05]

flat curve we'll be good enough i think we'd go back to work even with a slightly rising curve as long as we didn't think it would overwhelm hospitals
but if if early august is 147 000 dead uh we could hit 200 000 by the end of the year could we not and have you heard the people who say it's just the flu be very active lately because correct me if i'm wrong but around the time that the number of uh estimated deaths seemed like it would certainly be over a hundred thousand because we're already around ninety thousand once it started once it was clear that it would exceed a hundred thousand deaths did you notice that the just the flu people started getting quiet is that my imagination because i think people may be moved from hey it's just like the flu
flu to okay this isn't the flu

[36:05]

to okay this isn't the flu but we still have to open up it doesn't really might not change your opinion about reopening but it might change your opinion about whether this was a serious thing
um let's say what else we got going on well there so there was that uh whistleblower the disgruntled uh
uh mr bright b-r-i-g-h-t he's bright
and here's some of the things that he said so i guess he was on six he was on cbs
cbs was it 60 minutes i'm not sure but
but let's see if you if you think he's a disgruntled employee is he just acting politically or uh is he just a whistleblower and he's just right here are some things which we learned he said that a january 23rd meeting he was the only person in the room who said quote we're going to need vaccines and diagnostics and drugs it's going to

[37:06]

and diagnostics and drugs it's going to take a while we need to get started so
so so he was the only person in the room what room was he in who else was in that room was it the guy who wrote the pandemic playbook probably not was the president in the room on january 23rd when he said we need these vaccines and diagnostics how about anybody else in the room who also thought that was he the only guy was he the hero so here's the thing look for the hero story if your whistleblower has a hero story i try to tell them they wouldn't listen to me does that sound like a whistleblower or a disgruntled employee i had the idea nobody would listen to me in the meeting as the creator of dilbert i appoint myself judge and jury of this question and i vote sounds more like a disgruntled employee

[38:07]

sounds more like a disgruntled employee but we're not done that's not a firm judgment yet
and then bright told nora o'donnell on 60 minutes that his resistance to trump's push for hydroxychloroquine was what you know got him fired and then he put it this way quote the whistleblower did i believe my last ditch effort to protect americans from that drug to protect us from hydroxychloroquine was the final straw that they used and beliefs was essential to push me out he was trying to protect the american people from a drug that is widely used in other countries successfully he's a hero he's trying to protect us from the drug that's widely used in other countries successfully now when i say successfully i mean they're not reporting any problems and they continue to use it so they must think it's working

[39:07]

so they must think it's working because who would still be using it if it had made no difference fact check me on this are are other countries using it more since this guy said it was dangerous are or are other countries using it less because of all the problems and the people dying from it i'm going to guess what i'm going to guess more wouldn't you so it seems to me that this guy was just bad at risk management it is it is a fact that if enough people take this drug somebody's going to have a bad reaction to die that's just the fact it's a fact of drugs in general and
and i'm going to say that he's got a little bit of a hero thing going on here i i
i i i tried to save the americans from that drug it was my last ditch effort i told them they needed protective equipment i told them

[40:08]

i told them no one would listen they wouldn't listen to me all right um and then here's the kicker and i will base my final judgment on this sentence and by the way for those of you who have followed me long enough you know this is something i've said before a lot so this won't be the first time i've made this kind of interpretation i've made this judgment a lot i'll just be consistent he says quote we don't yet have a national strategy stop stop what do i say about strategy what do i say about that employee who says we don't have a strategy we don't have a strategy that employee is always the disgruntled employee that's not a whistleblower a whistleblower is not complaining about your strategy that's that's your disgruntled employee

[41:09]

that's that's your disgruntled employee i write i've written about that i've done this exact joke of the employee who says i don't have a strategy because strategy is not even a real thing there's no such thing as strategy the strategy is you do whatever makes sense at the time that you're making a decision that's exactly what we did and guess what that's pretty much what the pandemic playbook said you should do too the pandemic playbook does not say here's your strategy because it wouldn't make sense because every situation is going to be the new situation you're going to figure out the situation you're going to figure out what tools you have you're going to figure out where it's hitting who's hitting harder and then you're going to figure out what to do is that a strategy no it's just you doing what you need to do because you're in a crisis the dumbest guy in the room is the guy complaining you don't have a strategy that's the person who's operating at the lowest level of understanding his world

[42:10]

lowest level of understanding his world so
so if if he's got a hero complex and he's complaining that the company doesn't have a strategy and he doesn't understand risk management because it wasn't just the risk that the drug was dangerous it was also the upside potential that it made a big difference he's acting like that part doesn't even exist so i would say this is a guy who damn well needed to be fired uh of course the simulation gives him the last name of bright b-r-i-b-r-i-g-h-t and then he demonstrates that he's not how perfect is that really it's like it's like one gift after another um
um so there's a story about the inspector general over at the state department who got fired by trump uh and the story is he got fired because
he was mike pompeo had been asking one of his assistants to do some personal errands like walking his dog making dinner

[43:12]

like walking his dog making dinner reservations and grabbing dry cleaning a source familiar said now
now do you think that mike pompeo especially you know during these these times which would you rather would you rather know that mike pompeo used a political appointee you know basically somebody who got his job because he's connected probably some young person presumably uh
uh who probably didn't have much to do and mike pompeo had a lot to do so what what is your better world that mike pompeo sent some political appointee young person to do some personal errands or do you think mike pompeo should drop what he's doing and go pick up his own dry cleaning which one of those would you prefer as a citizen mike pompeo doing his own errands or mike pompeo you know presumably you could have as an assistant or something do it but one assumes that if mike

[44:13]

do it but one assumes that if mike pompeo had an assistant to do those errands you would have used that person right you have to assume that he didn't have anybody to do it or he wouldn't have asked this person to do it now given the value of mike pompeo's time and energy am i as a citizen concerned that he sent a low-level staffer to walk his dog make dinner reservations or grab some dry cleaning no
no thank you mike pompeo for managing your time correctly because i don't think you're working a freaking eight to five job
job mike pompeo is not looking at the clock and saying five o'clock gonna go home all right if mom if mike pompeo is not looking at the clock and saying i'm going home at five o'clock and he's staying and he's working late and he's working late for you he's working late for me he's working late for the country yes we can send a staffer to pick up his dry cleaning

[45:14]

dry cleaning and
and if somebody wants to get him in trouble and waste my time by trying to trying to get mike pompeo in trouble because he wants to work 18 hours today instead of nine hours fire that ig that is the most fired guy i can ever think of i would fire him twice if i could fire him really we're in a gut we're in a pandemic and even without the pandemic we got some stuff to do all right mike pompeo's got some work to do
do he's got some work to do
inspector general you're so fired um that's i'm gonna say this is uh trump's best fire this is his best one yeah there's nobody that he's fired that's as clean as this one

[46:15]

that's as clean as this one uh and i i'm even glad that we know why i'm glad that we know it was because of this trivial about doing some private errands you know you if mike pompeo you tell me mike pompeo stops work at 5pm and then i'll tell you mike pompeo needs to get fired right but you can't tell me that tell me these dinner reservations weren't work these dinner reservations might have been work all right and do we want them to go go to work with a suit that isn't clean i mean this is just it's just all right let mike pompeo do the work that he wants to do for the american people let them work all right
apparently uh according to a marquette law school poll joe biden still has a commanding lead in the polls over president trump the hell is going on [Laughter] are our conservatives playing the best

[47:17]

are our conservatives playing the best prank of all time on pollsters is that what's happening because i'm starting to think that's what's happening can is there any part of your brain that can wrap itself around the fact that biden is leading in the polls because there's there's nothing i can see in the environment that would suggest that's even slightly possible now i get how much they hate trump and i get that maybe biden's just a stand-in preference but
but i don't think the stock market has factored into biden president presidency do you do do you think the stock market is expecting uh joe biden to be the next president i don't think so i don't think so because the market's going one way polls are going the other way so i have i hope this is true like there would be nothing funnier than this if it turned out later that we could do a poll of people had been polled if that's possible so find the people who had been polled during the year and

[48:17]

who had been polled during the year and just say all right we want to check back with you were you pranking us were you really going to vote for biden you know or something like that and just find out it was a gigantic conservative prank you know that 10 of conservatives were just saying yeah i kind of like biden i think i like biden because you know you've met conservatives have you not
have you ever met a conservative do conservatives like practical jokes yeah they do they do they like their practical jokes uh so i'm going to say that 10 of conservatives just might be in on a practical joke that's the only way i could explain it um
i love this article making fun of uh jonah goldberg i think it was in fox fox news site and what's funny about it is that they called them jonah hill the editor of the dispatch jonah hill is the

[49:18]

editor of the dispatch jonah hill is the actor so jonah goldberg turned into joni hill for an article all right uh
so there's aoc is apparently uh let's say reframing her green new deal as
as as rather than being a multi-trillion dollar cost uh now she's saying to somebody who was pointing that out she tweeted hey there uh totally get it if you've never bothered to read the legislation meaning the green new deal you're commenting so authoritatively on aoc said the green new deal is a non-binding resolution of values it does not have a price tag or cbo score and costs us zero if passed
what what did you always did you always understand that the green new deal didn't have a price tag it was just some values because you know it's weird i could totally sign on to the values

[50:21]

i could totally sign on to the values couldn't you i mean i'd have to look at them to make sure that's true but i think the values if you're saying it's values wouldn't it be something like uh
uh you know we'd like to have cleaner energy that would be a value i could i could sign on to that wouldn't it be we you know we'd like to uh keep the water level from rising if we can understand what's causing it and if there's anything we could do about it yeah yeah i'd sign on to that it if it really is a bunch of values
okay i don't know somebody says uh somebody says they don't share the values well i bet you do what what exactly would be a value that the green new deal would be promoting that you don't favor if you don't favor the green new deal it's because you think it's not practical or you think it's not affordable or you think it's not as good as the

[51:22]

think it's not as good as the alternatives but you don't disagree with the
the concepts the values do you are you against you know clean air and a sustainable planet and are you against you know disadvantaged people doing well i don't know is there anything you're against not values wise
and apparently so remember i told you the zeitgeist is is looking good for 2021. so apparently there was a university of michigan consumer sentiment reading that came in better than expected the index rose in may up to 74 from 72 in april so
so so the consumer index people's expectations are actually rising that's important because remember

[52:22]

that's important because remember direction matters more than level when the economy is the question so the direction of things tells you more than where things are at and the direction is positive can you believe that consumer sentiment the primary thing that will make our recovery happen is trending positive in the middle of the coronavirus just think about that and
and um
um and well above the dow jones estimate so where professionals thought it would be was like way lower and it says the index of current economic conditions soared to 83 from 74. in other words our economy is not only not dead i think it went to the gym um i think our economy is starting to flex it's like it's like it rested too long you know you're starting to see you know

[53:24]

you know you're starting to see you know you're starting to see i rested a little too long ah you ever uh you're trying to let's say get your numbers up for running distance you know you're doing a few miles every day and then you know there's a day that you can't run but the day after that you're really strong because you had that little rest i feel like the economy is that olympic athlete who's who had to take a few days off for business but man that day when you get back after a few days off when you've been training for a month that's the day you get some serious serious work in
so uh
uh that is coffee with scott adams and tonight i hope you'll join me again you know when and you know where i've stopped telling people when and where to find me on periscope because hey you've got google and i like to keep it a little bit special

[54:25]

special and so i hope i did and we'll go look at the stock market oh well let me look at it before i sign off here let's see what everybody's talking about holy cow
wow well that's uh that's the stock market holy what the hell is going on my god
oh i've what [Laughter] this is crazy all right go take a look at the stock market uh have a good day we're back