d be genuinely surprised as of today. Now, of course, anything could change in the next couple weeks, right? But as of today, I'd be amazed if he lost. Because in my world the news has been fake for a full four years, so I don't take any of this seriously. And in my world the polls are obviously fake. Now, not every poll, because the Trafalgar guys were close in 2016, probably they're close again. Rasmussen was close in 2016. And they have a much more narrow margin for the difference, probably enough that the so-called hidden Trump voters will make the difference, I think.

And so my world is complete. Everything that has happened in my perceptions in my bubble made perfect sense the whole way. I saw Trump getting elected because that made sense in my filter of the world. I saw him doing such a good job that you don't even need to talk about foreign policy during a debate. I mean, that's just crazy. Three nominations for Nobel Peace Prize. You can't do much better than that. And before the coronavirus, record unemployment. So those are all the things that I saw. Now, I didn't see coronavirus coming, but I think I could be forgiven for that. Most people didn't. And I don't think he necessarily hit a home run on coronavirus. We'll talk about that in a minute. But everything that I've seen at least makes sense. I can like some things, I can dislike some things, but there's nothing in any of my experience from 2015 probably through election day that will be inconsistent with observation and my filter on the world.

So I don't really have any way to go crazy. In fact, even if Trump didn't win, I'd say, oh, I guess the polls were a little closer than I thought. That's it. My entire worldview could become consistent just by saying, oh, you know, I thought there were more Trump supporters hidden than there were. That's it. And I can instantly be compatible with everything I've observed.

But imagine being a TDS Democrat who honestly believes that Trump was like Satan himself and everybody knows it and there's no way he can get elected again. What if he does? That is a serious mental health problem right there, not to mention civil unrest, which we should expect.

At this point I have a question for you. This is a challenge question on coronavirus. Would you say that this is true, that we still don't know why some countries are relatively more successful than others? Can we say that with certainty yet? Do you feel that that's just a safe statement that experts would generally agree with? Fact check me on this, because I feel like it's safe. It's not one of these hundred percent certainty every person is on the right same side. But as a general statement, tell me if the following is true. Even the experts don't know why some countries are doing better than others on coronavirus. Is that true?

Because even if we say masks work, and the majority of experts do say that, how much do they work? Do they work two percent? Did they work five percent? Because if masks made, let's say, a 50% difference, we'd know that, right? Wouldn't you agree that if the difference between wearing masks and not wearing masks was 50%, hypothetically if it were, we'd all know that? There wouldn't be any conversation about it, because you would just see it. You wouldn't need to do a study at all. You put your masks on, curve goes down every time, every country that does it, as soon as they put their masks on, 50% dip. We'd see that, right?

Now, the scientists do say we are seeing an improvement with masks. So they say if you really dig into the numbers, you do see it. But it feels like it's closer to two percent than fifty percent. Now, I don't know how close to two percent. Maybe it's 25%. I don't know. But it's not 50%. It's somewhere closer to two than 50.

How about the lockdowns? The difference in the lockdowns. Now, the experts are pretty united in saying that the lockdowns make a difference. That's why they do them, and they're doing them all over the world in different places under different circumstances. But generally the experts say lockdowns matter. But do they matter 50 percent or do they matter two percent? Do you know? I don't know. I have no idea. And nor have I seen any kind of study that would suggest the experts know.

Now, common sense tells you it's got to work a little bit, right? The less contact you have with people, how could that not work? So your common sense says it works. But how much? Two? Ten? We don't know. My guess is a lot, but I don't know.

How about leadership differences? How would you measure that? Because suppose you said, okay, we don't have enough leadership. This leader, some specific leader, is not going hard enough on masks. Well, suppose you were to agree that Trump's treatment of masks has been insufficiently supportive of masks. He does support masks, but he's not gung-ho on it. He's not really pushing it. And that gives people permission to be a little ambiguous about it themselves. I would say that's true. Leadership makes some difference.

But suppose the masks or not masks were only two percent of the difference, and you only got that two percent if mostly everybody complied. But what happens if 20% of the public doesn't comply? Well, then you don't get your full two percent. That's reduced by, let's say, 20%. But it's 20% of two percent. Could you tell, given all the other variables that are involved? You could maybe say yes, we should have done more on masks or done them sooner or done them differently. But it's still going to look like — and again, this is I'm asking for a fact check. Don't take this as a statement of fact. I'm no expert on masks. But the feeling I have, based on my survey of the available information as unreliable as it is, is that whatever Trump did mask-wise, it probably was a 20% difference on a two percent variable.

And to get that difference, what he traded off was we had a little more freedom. Perhaps people felt a little more free on masks. Was that worth 20% of two percent? Well, depends. If it's somebody in your family who died, you would think not. But conceptually people might think yes.

So if you added together all the effects of the masks or no masks, lockdowns and how they're done, and the leadership differences, I think if you put them all together it wouldn't really come close to explaining the different countries' behaviors. And I would say at this point genetics has to be seen as one of the big variables that we need to discover.

Now, somebody on Twitter who I'm not aware of their credentials, but somebody who looked like they knew what they were talking about — and I'll ask you to fact check this too — says that Swedes and Germans have a genetic similarity that is known to be good for avoiding disease. Is that real? So can somebody do me a fact check on this? There's some specific genetic thing which is known. We have a name for that little gene, whatever it is. Yeah, it's got a series of letters and numbers or something. And that gene is known to be in Swedes and Germans and gives them better result on things such as viruses. True or false? Give me a fact check on that. Because if it turns out that's true, I feel like we're done here in terms of understanding it.

Now, vitamin D. I think I've been saying for a while I think it's a bigger variable than anybody's admitting. And we know some countries supplement, such as Sweden. So we'll find out about that anyway.

I'm gonna die on this hill because I'm the Dilbert author, and my entire life of cartooning way prior to coronavirus, I've been saying consistently and for 30 years that leaders get credit for things that are just luck, and they get blamed for things which are just bad luck. And the leader usually has a lot less to do with the success than we give them credit for. They tend to be just in the right place at the right time. Now, there are differences, of course. Your Steve Jobs, your Bill Gates, yeah, they made a difference. But you