Episode 1086 Scott Adams: Executive Orders, Coronavirus Comparisons, Arguing With Artists

Date: 2020-08-09 | Duration: 58:22

Topics

Find my “extra” content on Locals: https://ScottAdams.Locals.com

Rough Transcript

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Transcript

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• Automatically unfollowed from Richard Grenell, Matt Gaetz?

• Executive orders when Congress fails

• Ari Fleischer’s 3 things for a decent life

• We should teach “life strategy” in school

• A 50% effective COVID19 vaccine

• Required variables for country comparisons

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.
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[0:14]

hey everybody come on in come on in it's time for coffee with scott adams the best time of the day every day no exception so far i think we've got about uh 7 000 of them in a row approximately everyone better than the last it's quite a streak and we're keeping it alive and today all you need to be part of this great growing thing called the simultaneous some of the greatest people in the world all over the world about ready to lift their mug in unison can't we all come together of course we can we're going to do it right now we're going to model it pretty soon when everybody's doing a toast together that's when you know we'll all we'll all be together and all you need is a copper mug or glass attacker chelsea and a canteen jugger flask or vessel of any kind fill it with your favorite liquid i like coffee and join me now for the unparalleled pleasure the dopamine hit of the day the thing

[1:15]

the dopamine hit of the day the thing that makes everything better not to mention your coffee itself or your beverage it's called the simultaneous step and it happens now go
so let me give you a little hypothesis i like saying hypothesis i might say it a few more times because it's a fun word and so my hypothesis goes like this the first part i did not make up okay so the first part if it sounds smart that's because somebody smart said it first it's not because it came out of my mouth and it goes like this the origin of dancing did you ever wonder about that why is it that humans dance it and we coordinate dances so we do group dances like line dancing and you know things where where the whole group is dancing as one where did that come from and why don't

[2:17]

where did that come from and why don't other animals dance together i think there is there are examples of you could get a parakeet to move to the beat but that's it you can't get a bunch of parakeets to move together like they're dancing but humans yes and the explanation i've heard i wish i could attribute it because i don't know what scientists came up with it and it goes like this the humans were relatively let's say relatively weak compared to some types of animals let's say a lion or a big predator now if you were a human and you didn't have physical abilities to fight a lion what could you do as a group to seem like you were big and scary compared to a lion well if you're by yourself you might try to look large you know put your hands up and stand up and try to make yourself look bigger than you are but suppose you were with the rest of your village or hunting party what would you do as a group to look

[3:19]

what would you do as a group to look like you were one big animal that's right you would move together if you could in unison move all as one so that everybody that the lion sees is moving in the same way they're all moving left they're all moving right they're all moving lifting their arms at the same time what would you think if you're a lion you would say to yourself i'm not fighting one tiny creature i don't know what that is but it looks like it's one big thing so dancing and this was the hypothesis which is not my own somebody smart came up with this first uh the hypothesis is that people dance to look like they're together to look as though they're one unit and therefore more impressive than whoever they're up against you see this also in war in war you see people see the group dressed together they have a commonality so it looks like oh they're all they're all just one big thing it's an

[4:19]

thing it's an army but you also notice that music has often been part of the war process usually drums imagine hearing war drums from the other the other army pretty scary right you hear the war drum and you see people moving in some kind of
of unison it's all like one big thing and so i give you this further hypothesis there may be one um one evolutionary key to bring everybody together now you're not going to end racism because music is good but the very act of sharing music with other people would in theory make you feel more bonded to them in other words if all you did be you black be you white be you hispanic or whatever else you want to be you i would imagine that if you came

[5:19]

you i would imagine that if you came together just to dance and to enjoy the same music at the same time and to move in the same ways at the same time i'll bet i'll bet that you could you could study and find that people's uh whatever racial animus that they had would be less i'll bet that you could cause people to work better together think better of each other consider the other simply an extension of yourself through the act of coordinated movement and dancing which brings me to the simultaneous sip people ask me is that nothing but an opener no it's more than an opener it is it is designed to do several things one is to tell you how close i am to being done with the introduction as i've told you but the other is that doing ace the same thing at the same time which you do with the simultaneous sip or many of you does in fact bind you not just to me but to the rest of the audience and you

[6:19]

but to the rest of the audience and you become you you have a feeling of being part of something by the physical coordinated act
act it's similar to when you go to a sporting event and you do the you all stand up and well maybe some of you kneel and to do the national anthem and so when you see the kneelers kneeling when others are standing this really hits you in the evolutionary gun doesn't it it feels and you can tell the impact was so big it's a really basic rejection of the other because if you're standing together or kneeling together or moving together or singing together you're together but as soon as you're saying if you move this way i'm going to move this way that's that says basic an insult i'll say insult but i'll use that in in the big sense of an insult to your biology as well as the flag it's just an insult to your basic basic

[7:20]

it's just an insult to your basic basic humanity i guess and so you can see why that gets people going which makes it a very good protest i've often said all right uh moving on
i did this uh was it yesterday i tweeted around to uh to ask you to see if you had been automatically unfollowed from ambassador grinnell so i had noticed this i don't know a year ago that i had been unfollowed from him and i didn't think it was something i had done so i re-followed him and then i asked other people a year ago hey this happened to anybody else it was a lot of people so i asked again as a follow-up how many people had been unfollowed now i don't know if it's just a continuation from a year ago and some people noticed a year ago some people didn't notice till now or if there's some ongoing issue but it was a lot of people a lot of

[8:20]

but it was a lot of people a lot of people said they were following him and now they're not and that was just one tweet from one person you know even even with all of the people who follow me i wouldn't expect that many people to say that they had been automatically unfollowed it doesn't it doesn't pass the sniff test for some kind of an accident so then i thought to myself well if there's some kind of a pattern we should see if it's at least not limited to one kind of account because you know there could be something about one account that is not common so i asked people to check if they had followed uh congressman mack gates the theory here is that one of the things that makes ambassador grinnell interesting is that his twitter feed is more effective than most in other words he's really good at tweeting good at making a good at making a point and therefore good is supporting the administration likewise matt gates is in that higher level of

[9:20]

level of communicators and i thought well if there's something happening with grinnell's account you'd also see it in gates's account if there's something going on now again that's not any kind of confirmation or anything it's just what you'd expect and so i did the same tweet with matt gases account and what do you think massive number of people in the comments said what the heck i was following him but now i'm not so i don't know what this means and as i've said before i might be the only person in the world who is willing to say that this is not some intentional twitter thing we don't know it's it's a mystery i can tell you that twitter doesn't know or at least at least doesn't offer an explanation and they have looked into it i've looked into it twice that i know of and couldn't find any reason for it now

[10:22]

and couldn't find any reason for it now um now you can of course because you're all skeptical and cynical you're going to say they know exactly what they're doing but i would put out there this possibility that there's no reason to assume that it's coming from an internal intentional twitter decision there's no evidence of that because it could as easily come from the outside meaning that somebody on the outside has an insider who does something for them that's really more like coming from the outside right they just might have one insider who has access to something or it could be a direct hack it could be that literally nobody who works for twitter had anything to do with it but they also don't know what it's about as possible could be just a hack could be some kind of apps having control of it maybe not necessarily just tick tock but there are lots of apps that you give permission to to control your social media and maybe they're doing it and those apps in turn controlled by

[11:24]

and those apps in turn controlled by some malign influence so it's a gigantic question but what's interesting about this one is it's so discreet you know unlike the algorithm where maybe it'll be a little hard to know if something's happening or not happening it would be the easiest thing in the world i would imagine to have some kind of a bot or program that would just monitor the larger pro trump accounts and then just to be careful you would also monitor the largest say pro-biden accounts to see if they're having the same problem because if it's across accounts it just doesn't matter who you are or what you're saying you know any big blue check loses people and they don't know why well that would tell you as one kind of problem more likely something about the system but if it only happened for one kind of people you would not be too surprised to learn that in today's world uh that would tell you something else so i would think that somebody should be writing a bot

[12:25]

writing a bot that could just check on who's following the big accounts might require buy-in from the account so you can get that data i don't know how that would work but there's got to be some way to objectively just graph this thing and find out if it's really happening i don't think you'd have to be a twitter insider in order to track it objectively from the outside but that's just that's an assumption all right did you see the video this is my favorite highlight reel from uh from last night's big game and by the big game i mean anything that is happening in portland or around there anything anti-antifa is doing my favorite clip was antifa uh made a wrong turn into mega territory [Laughter] now if you haven't seen this video and you like your videos of antifa not having a good day you're going to have to watch this one trust me you're going to want to watch

[13:26]

trust me you're going to want to watch this one i don't condone violence unless it's against antifa in which case i condone it totally let me say that again if if you're dealing with domestic terrorists who are wearing masks and threatening your your property and your way of life have fun
fun right don't go to jail but you're not going to see me condemn you um so i'll i'll just tease it and say that there were that there were some locals in a suburban neighborhood who were not pleased with the the arrival of antifa and i'm just going to say it didn't go well let's just leave it at that you have to watch it to get to get the full entertainment effect on it but nothing would make me happier than watching every single morning when i wake up uh watching anti-fog getting beaten up by the police and or uh local

[14:28]

and or uh local local conservatives
i must be a bad person i don't know maybe i'm just a bad person because i'm not even going to pretend i don't enjoy that i totally enjoy it i can't lie all right let's talk about russian interference how long will it be before you ever see an example of some russian interference it'll probably be long after the result of the election but you know there's going to be claims of russian interference will they be as lame as the 2016 attempt that look like a child's high school project to make bad memes and not show them to anybody that's what the russian troll farm did they made bad memes that hardly anybody saw
saw relative to the population hardly anybody saw them and they couldn't have possibly made a difference if you see them if you haven't seen them you say to yourself well they're probably

[15:29]

yourself well they're probably kgb made and they're they're high it's the highest skill level you can imagine they probably you've got psychologists and you know maybe maybe every kind of science they did they tested them man these memes must be no no that's not what happened it was basically some russian with a crayon and a computer and it they just produced crap and it's definitely not scientific crap so until you see an example of this alleged russian interference the smart money says it's happening but not in a way we care about because it's going to be so trivial that's just stupid
how about the story about trump had his little press conference yesterday and paula reed of cbs kept trying to talk over him and and insist on her question even when she'd had her moment and then the president after several

[16:30]

and then the president after several tries to shut her up he just ends the press conference imagine being all the other people who went there to do nothing but ask a question their whole day was about the moment they were about to get to ask a question on camera and then paul and reed just ruined it for everybody by being being a jerk now i get that you have to be aggressive asking the president but if we watch this as theater which is really the only way to watch it uh how did the theater go were you entertained yeah yeah i was entertained i was totally entertained when the president walked out i thought i laughed i thought nice move i'm totally entertained by that now the anti-trumpers will of course and have of course tried to make it look like oh he's having a tantrum he's a big baby he can't handle the prashar

[17:30]

he can't handle the prashar you know all the things that you'd expect him to say but i gotta say i think at a gut level that his walk out worked first of all it's compatible with everything he's ever told you about anything ever which is walk out if things aren't going your way you don't need to be there you know that would be true in a negotiation it would be true in a press conference so you see the president of the united states is standing up there on camera live on camera in front of the whole world and for a moment he thought oh i don't need to be here because if nobody's listening to me what's the point so he turns and walks away it was it was one of the most baller things you'll see because it was perfectly appropriate um yeah you could argue he could have handled it differently but in terms of theater it was perfect because it was to be a played as strong

[18:31]

because it was to be a played as strong so unfortunately humans are so simple that we do interpret things as either strong or weak when it's our leaders because we want strong even if we say we don't want strong we want strong because it's our leader that's who's protecting us you don't want a weak one you want a strong one even if you're not willing to admit it that was a strong play so i thought that was all uh all in his favor well played and and to be honest nothing that could have come out of the questions would have been good because all all of the things taken on the context all of the uh the president said this uh all of that comes from the questions so as soon as the cbs reporter gave trump a reason to not take questions boom free money this reporter put a big pile of free money on the table because the question and answer period can go wrong but it can never go right you know what

[19:32]

but it can never go right you know what i mean the the president never answers questions and then at the end of it oh i raised my ratings my job approval went up because of the way i answered those questions that's not even a thing it can only be bad so this reporter just gave him this big bag of free money which was a get out of questions pass and you can see him standing there thinking did she just put a big bag of money in front of me with nobody's name on it i feel like i could just take this big bag of money have no risk that questions go bad still look like i'm in charge and see you later good decision
i would go so far as to say that that's why you hired him that's why you hired him because of that kind of stuff have we learned this week that congress is the wrong place for budget authority during a crisis

[20:35]

for budget authority during a crisis i think we've learned that right now of course we do want uh budge we do want congress to have budget authority in normal times duh you know that's representative government you know we we wish it were more more functional we wish that they could compromise better yada yada but congress is the right place for that authority so you put up with the with the pain of it
it but maybe not during a crisis because if if timing is more important than getting it right as long as we have full visibility of what our leadership is doing i'd rather have a benevolent dictator just for a while yeah yeah yeah don't get excited no nobody wants a permanent dictator nobody wants martial law because maybe that could turn into a permanent dictator right right i get it i get it you know nobody wants a risk that a temporary dictator becomes a permanent one but

[21:37]

one but let's say dictator light you know the the mildest version of an authoritarian government would be to do some executive orders that the public is begging you to do all right that's sort of the opposite of being a dictator your public is begging you to get this done in this case the emergency relief begging you please government please do your effing job
job can you please now under that specific situation do you want your leader to say all right i'm just going to ignore congress because it's the right place for the decision but they don't have the timing thing down if they can't do it on time it doesn't matter if that's their authority they just don't get to do it right if you don't if you don't do it you lose the right to do it so we're in this strange situation which jonathan turley who he's my go-to on these constitutional things with dershowitz

[22:39]

constitutional things with dershowitz would be the other voices i listen to the most and he he says this which is just the perfect way to put it he says that uh it's absurdly unconstitutional the executive orders but it could be let's just say it could be absurdly constitutional but if nobody challenges it it's practically constitutional so in a practical sense it doesn't matter if it's unconstitutional have you ever been in this situation before maybe i mean historically maybe there's some minor situations that fell into this category but just think of that point so long as the the population of the united states says ah that's unconstitutional but i'm not going to complain and if the democrats say that's really unconstitutional but we're not going to take it to the supreme court

[23:40]

supreme court it actually doesn't matter it doesn't matter if it's constitutional it's kind of mind-blowing isn't it because we're so used to it's got to be constitutional that's like the minimum requirement for anything right you can't be unconstitutional we can have lots of conversations about whether it's a good or bad idea but that's a line you can't cross constitutional and then we just did it looks like we just crossed it running hey constitutional line let's run right off of this keep going and i think it's going to work because you know even if you don't like the details of it people are going to like getting their check and they weren't going to get a check before even if it's not as much blah blah now my take on the executive orders is that they're too complicated to really be good uh meaning that you know it's delaying things and moving things around and

[24:40]

things around and eventually they'll you know you'll have to pay the paper and pay back a loan or move something back into a budget that was robbed to do this so it doesn't really feel like except for the part where you get a check i don't know i don't have an opinion on whether these are the right things to do or whether they're lasting but it does give the impression of a leader in charge again so what people are going to take away from this is is there anything in those executive orders that's good for me and the answer is going to be yes for most people most people are going to find at least one thing on that list they're going to say oh that's just good for me well i'm not going to complain yeah it's a little unconstitutional but i don't want to get evicted it does seem a little unconstitutional but i like to eat so we're seeing almost an entire new form of government here remember i told you before that our form

[25:42]

remember i told you before that our form of government had evolved without anybody voting on it yeah and we turned into effectively the the public through social media especially has way more control of things than maybe has ever been in the past because it would be difficult for a leader to do something that the entire public spontaneously disagreed with violently and i think you've seen the president float ideas and back off and float ideas and back off and it's mostly because of the public it's not because of the democrats it's because the public so this might be the cleanest example because the public basically said in our minds you know i'm i'm gonna mind read for all of you all right in your mind wasn't there some part of your mind that said if congress can't get this done on time somebody's got to do it right some part of your mind said if congress isn't the right place to do it

[26:44]

isn't the right place to do it somebody else has got to do it because you don't have an option of not doing it because then you have you know mass starvation etc so i think the public changed its form of government in their minds while you were doing other things you know while you were paying attention the form of government literally and fundamentally just changed and the constitution became wait for it optional the constitution just became optional is that good is it bad don't know i'm not attempt i'm not tempted to think it's necessarily bad because in a situation like this it's clearly better i'd have to see other situations to know if there's some kind of slippery slope as some of you like to say

[27:53]

that uh i guess ari fleischer tweeted this and there was a study recently i'm not sure i buy this i'll go further i don't buy this so i'm going to give you a study result and as it was summarized by ari fleischer in his tweet i don't think it's true but i'm going to tell you anyway it goes like this that if you do just three things you have a two percent chance of being poor in other words if you were already poor as long as you did these three things you'd have a 98 chance of going from poor to at least middle class and the three things are finish high school get a full-time job and don't get married and have kids until you're 21. if you only do those three things you have a 98 chance of having a decent life pretty interesting isn't it now i put this in the context of what i believe is most missing from

[28:55]

is most missing from school curriculums strategy for success can you imagine telling a telling young black youth uh i like to use black use as my proxy for anybody poor so it could be any person of color any white person any person who's just in a poor situation and doesn't think they can do better because they feel sort of locked into their situation how many of them at age 10 were told that all they had to do is these three things and they would be successful do you know what i was told when i was that age i was pretty much told that this would make me successful not directly but i would feel that when i was just a kid i would have said that these three things finish high school i would have changed that to go to college

[29:55]

that to go to college uh get a full-time job i would have changed that to you know get a good job and wait to get married until after 21 i'm pretty sure that was part of my upbringing because my my mother started having kids at 18 and i think she it seems to me that that was baked into my childhood you got to wait a little while and you know get things up and running i don't remember if that was something she directly told me or it was just obvious but somehow i knew it and i would be really curious how many people who could say who could say as an adult oh yeah this is exactly the life strategy that i learned when i was a kid how many people could say that i don't know and so i think that would be worth testing you know you should just pick out a classroom or something and say we're going to teach you life strategy i would give them my book have failed almost everything and still win big because that's

[30:55]

because that's written for let's say 14 years old and up and it's simple life strategies about how to have a system for something not a goal that sort of thing so i think it would be transformative how much more would you study if you knew that it was the difference between success and failure i mean i feel like it would make a big difference all right here's uh oh let's talk about jerry falwell jr in his photo so there are some stories that i stay away from until they age a little bit and sometimes they're just icky or it's just about one person's personal problems i just stay away from it so i'd been staying away from this jerry falwell embarrassing photograph with a woman's story because i thought it was oh god it's just another another religious person who maybe did something bad but then i looked into the story it's complete bs

[31:56]

looked into the story it's complete bs the whole story is complete bs he basically did nothing wrong and it's obvious you know what once he tells you his version of the story you look at it you go
go oh oh that was nothing that was actually just a joke and the joke was this his his uh his or his wife's assistant who traveled with them in other words he and his wife and the assistant were all in the same place the wife might have taken the picture he posed with the assistant because what was funny was the assistant was pregnant and she couldn't uh she couldn't button the top of her pants so she was leaving it open jerry falwell jr in an act of self-deprecation was noting that he was he had you know gained a little weight and so he was pretending like because he had gained weight he couldn't button the top of his pants so they took a picture together he had his shirt off but i think he was on vacation so not a big deal and you know his top of his pants were

[32:57]

and you know his top of his pants were unbuttoned hers were unbuttoned if you don't notice that she's pregnant it looks like something's up it was nothing but a gag picture to make fun of the fact that he thought he had gained some pounds that's it it was it was so opposite any kind of a sexual anything it was it was literally as far as you can go from a sexual thing and and he had to take a leave of absence about this now of course the judgment part is i guess it got on social media so you know uh the worst part about this is that he didn't understand that other people would see it differently that's it that's it that's the whole thing that this guy had to like change his career situation his his reputation everything over a freaking joke
don't make me defend jerry falwell jr i mean i have nothing against him but it's not my job to defend him but i have to

[33:57]

have to because i don't want to live in a world where somebody does a joke photo that nobody is offended by it wasn't at anybody's expense right it wasn't anybody's expense except himself he was making fun of himself if you can't make fun of your fricking self and you lose your job for making fun of yourself seriously that's crazy
all right here's a little math you're not going to like so according to fox news some kind of survey they said that one third of people the population would not take the coronavirus vaccine now that's not too surprising right one-third would not take it but you say to yourself well that that might be okay because suppose two-thirds take it if two-thirds took it and then you add the any herd immunity that happened whatever small amount that is
is you'd say oh there we are two-thirds take it add a little natural immunity

[34:58]

take it add a little natural immunity boom you're at 70 percent uh immunity virus is gone that should get it done right so no problem if one-third don't want to take it it's a free country if two-thirds take it boom problem done except except according to dr fauci a vaccine might only be 50 percent effective
ouch because then you've got two-thirds willing to take it but only half of them back to one-third are actually gonna take it and have it effective so you would have only one third of the country vaccinated in an effective way because the other half it didn't work and then you add a little bit of herd immunity so you've got like 33 plus 10 percent maybe 10 natural herd

[35:59]

10 percent maybe 10 natural herd immunity what happens if you can only get to the 40 percentage range with a vaccine plus natural herd immunity i you know now it's possible that the vaccine would be better than 50 percent it could be 75 could be better and we hope it's better but there's a pretty high chance that the vaccine won't get you there so just keep that in mind when when you're looking at what is the right strategy to be doing today you have to put your odds on the vaccine getting us to hurt immunity
along those lines yesterday i found myself in the debate with somebody online who did not have a profile a profile detail so often people will tell you in their profile what kind of occupation they have either directly or indirectly and this one was sort of silent on the

[36:59]

and this one was sort of silent on the occupation and insisted that the that trump was doing a bad job compared to other countries managing the coronavirus now i said i got into it and said well you know too many variables it's too early in the game you can't really tell and he pushed back and said oh yeah you could tell compare them to these countries and i said no you can't really compare them that's apples and oranges and then i explained a few examples why and they said well what about this country and i said um that's just another apple compared to another orange same thing i just said just changed the country and then he came back and said what about canada and i started to think what is wrong with this guy why can't he understand that there are too many variables he could disagree with it but how come he can't why why can't he even understand what i'm saying and then i finally after several

[38:01]

and then i finally after several iterations i said what kind of art do you do
you see where i'm going right and they waited a while and said i do various things and then i said what kind of artistic things do you do and it turns out he does various artistic things he's an artist artist of in various fields but an artist now how many times have i made this same mistake of trying to debate an artist so it's a waste of time because artists could be brilliant in their field but if that's their entire domain of experience they don't know how to analyze things but worse they don't know they don't know how so it's sort of like talking to a five-year-old about physics you can't tell the five-year-old that they don't understand physics well i suppose maybe you could in that case but there's no place you could go you can't win the argument

[39:02]

win the argument because that would require them to follow the argument and they can't and it's so consistent that the people who only have experience in that domain can't follow an argument and because it was flagged so clearly in the conversation that i could just say what kind of art do you do
do and i can get it almost every time because i've done this a number of times guessing people's occupation by how poorly they argue you know if this had been an economist a doctor you know an engineer i would have picked that up right away because even their disagreements would be in a category i'd say okay that's you know i disagree but it's a good point and i'll tell you why you know you got an assumption wrong all right but for your for your benefit i compiled a tweet that i just tweeted before i got on about all the variables you would have to look at in order to compare any two countries so here

[40:03]

any two countries so here if you think you can compare two countries i would like you to show me how you factored in the following things for any two countries and the coronavirus population density percentage of black population because they have a higher mortality so for example if you compare the united states to canada are you going to factor in the fact that canada has 3.5 percent black population the united states has over 13 percent black population and the black population unfortunately has a far higher death rates than like four times so who calculated that when you're comparing canada to the united states in terms of the death rate anyway and have you have you factored that in how about the average age italy is very old
old africa is very young big difference how about the island status or near island status if i hear one more idiot compare the united states or any other

[41:05]

compare the united states or any other regular country that's not an island to an island i'm gonna lose my freaking mind because it really helps to be an island new zealand doing great thailand doing great um how about south korea kind of an island because it's only connected by north korea and the dmz and you're not getting much through there so south korea kind of an island how about mongolia mongolia is doing well no water around mongolia no mongolia is kind of an island it just happens to be a land island yeah there's physical separation i may be wrong about that but the point the larger point is don't compare non-islands to islands you could compare the islands all to themselves that would make maybe you'd be closer there but don't compare an island to the united states with porous borders

[42:07]

how about the cultural norms of conformity do you think the united states norm of how much we're willing to rebel versus how much will we're willing to conform do you think that matches up to other countries is your impression of germany that they're a bunch of rebels is your impression of south korea that's all
all rebels no it probably isn't i hate to make sweeping generalizations about entire countries and cultures but i think there are differences in the united states if you said don't hit yourself in the head with a hammer 50 million people would go to the toolbox pick up a hammer hit themselves in the head and say you can't tell me what to do with a hammer you do not tell me what to do with a hammer i decide what to do with a hammer if you don't want me to hit me hit myself in the head good luck with that watch this bam bam bam bam bam bam bam and it looks like i'm making fun of americans

[43:08]

americans nope nope if that's what you heard you heard it wrong am i saying americans are stupid because they'll just hit themselves in the head with a hammer no that's what makes this freaking country great our greatness as a country and i'm definitely on board with the united states being a great country our greatness has everything to do with rebellion we were born of rebellion we have we've fought a civil war we've you know we got you know suffrage we rebel we are a country of rebels and that's also what keeps us together the fact that the fact that we're all rebels it is sort of a sort of a thing right now not rebels in terms of the you know the
the confederate flag but uh rebels in terms of we just don't like to be told what to

[44:09]

of we just don't like to be told what to do
do and if if there's something we're not supposed to do we're gonna do it three times and we're gonna experiment and we're gonna die we will die for freedom like it's taking a walk all right and as long as the united states has that kind of character we will always be a dominant cult culture meaning that the country will do well because that kind of risk of taking and thinking outside the box is why we're the most innovative country in the world it's all connected so you don't want to take that away from us you want to see that as our strength it just doesn't work too well in a pandemic if we're being honest it's not the best match for a pandemic but you gotta factor that stuff in there how about vitamin d exposure we better look at that across countries we know that that's a factor how about uh strong states rights versus the federal government uh what is the situation in i don't know

[45:11]

uh what is the situation in i don't know uh new zealand are are there governors really strong compared to the federal government i don't know but you better compare that stuff how about whether they used hydroxychloroquine early and often well that's a little hard because the other factor is how good is their data the first thing i heard about germany in the in the very first days of the pandemic what i heard through just my own channels is that germany was widely prescribing hydroxychloroquine from the start because bayer a big german company makes it
it so they have you know one of their major companies makes hydroxychloroquine the doctors were handing it out like candy that's what i heard later i heard conflicting information about their their use of it so can you trust the data do you know what countries used hydroxychloroquine which doctors prescribed it how early they prescribed it you don't so you don't know about

[46:13]

you don't so you don't know about hydroxychloroquine because in general and this is another category how credible is the data from that country don't know what about when they got their first infection and how big it was if your first infection came to you from two different coasts and by the time you were on to it it would already spread well you're in bad shape but suppose you're sitting down there in new zealand and you see what's happening to the other countries do you have an advantage you do if it hasn't hit you yet and you know exactly what's coming you have a little bit of advantage to prepare how about if you're an international hub for travel that's got to matter how about how your seniors are cared for do you do it the same way do you have senior homes or do you care for them do you keep graham at home is that your culture that matters how about this one there's a new one i'm going to throw into the mix the number of sex partners you have

[47:13]

the number of sex partners you have on average do you know how much sex they have in brazil brazil's not doing too well right do you know how much sex they have in brazil a lot more than japan all right look it up brazil is near the top of the number of partners and amount of sex you can have they have a lot of sex in brazil japan not so much now if you get this from close personal contact it's not exactly a sexually transmitted disease but it kind of is because if you have close physical contact well so can you compare countries with high sex rates to low i don't think so how about the fake news effect we don't know exactly what what that influenced but it certainly influenced the rate of hydroxychloroquine use in this country it definitely influenced the um the debate on masks so if you don't have

[48:15]

the debate on masks so if you don't have much fake news in your country isn't that a big advantage does new zealand have as much fake news as we do i doubt it i doubt it so that's got to help how about your privacy limits in china no limit on privacy you they they can i mean no limit on lack of privacy the government can take all your privacy they want how about the united states opposite opposite we'll die to survive we'll die to keep our privacy in china they might die too but the government would kill them so that wouldn't be a problem for china's government
then how about the lying about contact tracing if you have never lived in the real world as an adult who worked for a big organization you would probably think this and be completely wrong hey there are some countries who are doing a

[49:16]

there are some countries who are doing a good job of contact tracing and some like the united states who are not
not if you think that's true some countries are doing good on contact tracing and others are not
not you've never lived in the real world here is what is far more likely to be true nobody's good at contact tracing unless you're a super small country and you just had a few infections then in that case it might be a thing but if you take out the the smallest of the cases where it might actually work anybody else who got a hold on this virus is going to claim that it's because of what they did that's what leaders do if the leader had said i'm going to dunk my head in a bowl of water and swirl my hair around and see if that makes the coronavirus go away and other things that country did actually did make the virus go away what will the leader claim will

[50:17]

go away what will the leader claim will the leader claim huh i did this thing i put my head in a bowl of water shook my head after i took it out
out and i guess that didn't make any difference to the coronavirus no leaders don't do that they tell you they tell the news and then the news tells you it's a good thing i stuck my head in a bucket of water or look at the trouble we'd have leaders try to connect what they did to any good outcome if you don't know that that that's a universal truth then you might be mistaken and think some countries did contact tracing really well it's not a thing it's not a thing no largish country is doing contact tracing well they're not now the exception might be a no privacy country like china they could just look at your phone and they can just say hey you were within a mile of somebody who had the coronavirus so we're gonna we're gonna board you up

[51:18]

so we're gonna we're gonna board you up in your house for three weeks all right you can't do that in the united states so comparing china to the united states is just stupid because there's so many differences how about this how about which type of coronavirus you got early now we heard a little about this in the beginning remember and i haven't heard much about it lately so it could be that this doesn't matter but didn't we hear that there might be a different form of the virus on the west coast of the united states than we got in new york city one might have a different characteristic in terms of spread and lethality i don't know if that's still true so i feel like my knowledge is stale on that but it could be a factor and then how about comorbidities does your country i mean this is related to age but does your country have a lot of other health problems etc so if you don't know all of those things comparing two countries is crazy let's talk about this uh lebanon blast uh get back to that

[52:19]

lebanon blast uh get back to that um i've developed a number of go-to people for different topics and my go-to person for the middle east especially when israel is any part of the conversation is jake novak jake if you're watching hey jake so you should follow jake novak as one of your clearest voices not only of a lot of business stuff but of of of israel and um as jake has noted um and i don't know where he's getting his information but he generally has good information so i would trust it he said almost all the people of lebanon are rightfully blaming hezbollah for the blast and their iran-compliant government not israel or the united states and jake says i wonder how many people realize how historic and encouraging this is and i didn't know this did you didn't you just assume that the

[53:20]

didn't you just assume that the residents of beirut would say that's got to be some israeli thing or some american thing death to america but you're not seeing that are you you're not seeing that at all this is a big deal as jake says this is a big big deal like this is one of the biggest deals of all the deals this might be the biggest one and you know it's the dog that didn't bark so it's harder to see the dog that didn't bark so and jake is good at that so yeah the fact that they're not protesting israel in the united states after something big blew up in their country blaming iran that's gigantic gigantic anyway uh yes it was a story that uh simon cowell was testing his new e-bike and fell off in his driveway and broke his back i know i know i've been promoting these

[54:20]

i know i know i've been promoting these e-bikes as the future of transportation and they really are you got to get one of these things if you have any chance you know financially that you could pull it off and you like bicycles uh they are dangerous bicycles are crazy dangerous it was the reason i almost didn't get one and i got to tell you that if if i had only had regular bicycles probably i would have said uh at my age especially maybe a little too dangerous but when you have the e-bike feature it's just so much fun that you're willing to take a lot of danger so don't break your back on your e-bike
so there's a report that twitter is mulling over the conversation of buying tick tock what do you think of that my take on that is that that's probably a just a polite meeting my guess is that tick that that twitter

[55:21]

my guess is that tick that that twitter is not serious about buying tick tock but if you're a big social media platform you probably feel like you have to be at least a participant in the conversation you would have to at least you know hear the details before you said no so my guess is that twitter is just being a good uh good citizens basically and saying well you know we're in the united states we're an american company there are only a few companies in the world who could take over tick tock so we should at least take a meeting i'm guessing it's not that serious because i don't think it fits well because twitter skews more adult tick tock obviously skews way to the young side it doesn't feel like it fits snapchat probably doesn't need to buy them because they're going to knock them off and just reproduce that function i think instagram's going to do the same thing i mean why wouldn't they so you should have you know the facebook

[56:21]

so you should have you know the facebook instagram people and the snapchat people just basically knocking on knocking it off and they have enough of a platform that they have enough of a network effect that they could get it going but how about microsoft i would think that microsoft would be the most natural buyer because that would get them into some kind of social media platform in a bigger way do they have any does microsoft have am i am i blanking on something that microsoft is doing in terms of social networks i feel like they're doing something that i'm just blanking on well if they don't have a big social media platform maybe this is a way to get it but i don't know what you're buying when you buy tick tock exactly are you buying just the customers you know just the customer list is that it oh linkedin yeah i'm sorry yes uh that's what i was blanking on is that microsoft now owns linkedin but that's a different kind of social network

[57:24]

uh i wouldn't call skype a social network yeah thank you for filling me in i knew there was something there i just couldn't produce it was linkedin but
but irrelevant to the conversation because it's not the right kind of social network all right um that is everything i want to talk about today i hope you enjoyed this episode of coffee with scott adams and i hope that you learned something and i hope that when somebody tells you to compare two countries for the coronavirus you find my tweet maybe save it and just present it so people can understand especially the artists that they can understand oh somebody said x bike xbox live too yeah that's right microsoft has xbox live well you can call that a social network i can see that all right that's not for now i'll talk to you tomorrow