My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a Content: MSNBC Brian Williams and NYT Mara Gay math error Matt Gaetz GDP of American Samoa Bill Clinton's anxiety management technique Lisa Marie Boothe's perfect framing of Biden v Trump Elizabeth Warren's dishonesty Coronavirus --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scott-adams00/support
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| Hey everybody, it's time. | |
| It's time. It's time for coffee with Scott Adams. | |
| Come on in. You came to the right place. | |
| Good job. So far, your day is going just the way you wanted to. | |
| Dr. Drew, good to see you. | |
| It's a terrific morning, and it's only going to get better. | |
| Yes, it is. Because you're about to enjoy something. | |
| Well, you've heard of it. It's going all around the world now. | |
| It's not the coronavirus, it's the simultaneous sip. | |
| And all you need to enjoy it is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or a chalice or a stein, a canteen jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind. | |
| Fill it with your favorite liquid. Have you heard, I like coffee? | |
| And join me now for the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better, the simultaneous sip. | |
| Go. Mmm, better every time. | |
| Do you feel your immunity improving? | |
| We'll be talking about the coronavirus, but first, some politics, some fun stuff. | |
| Here's the least important news you'll ever hear. | |
| The jobs numbers are really good. | |
| It's such a tragedy that we're getting job numbers that are just crazy. | |
| Crazy good. Like, you know, trashing expectations that are so good. | |
| But they're for last month. | |
| So we're going to see a little dip in the economy. | |
| There's no question about that. | |
| Might not be as big as people think. | |
| I don't think it's going to be toward the worst case or anywhere near it. | |
| I think it'll be a blip. | |
| I think in a year we'll be back at 100%. | |
| But those job numbers are terrible. | |
| A good reminder of this concept. | |
| That you need to be strong to get ready for surprises. | |
| You know, the black swan event, the thing you didn't see coming. | |
| And this is really relevant to the question of climate change, isn't it? | |
| Because if you use all of your ammunition on one emergency, How much do you have left for the next emergency? | |
| And how many emergencies are there that have global economic disaster potential? | |
| Well, I've been saying for years that if we were to spend whatever we consider our excess financial ability, if we move it to climate change, that could be a great thing for saving the world from climate change, if that risk turns out to be what the scientists say. | |
| But what about the other stuff? | |
| People always say, you should definitely, you know, even if you don't believe climate change is going to kill us because there's a risk and it's so big and it would destroy the entire planet, you should put all of your resources there to drive that risk to zero. | |
| And I've been saying since the beginning, hello, that doesn't make sense. | |
| That only makes sense in a world with one risk. | |
| In a world with multiple risks that could all take you out, You need to be ready for all of them. | |
| And sometimes the best thing you can do is to keep your economy and your people as healthy as possible so that when they take the punch, they can get up. | |
| And that's where President Trump has brought us. | |
| And I give credit to Obama. | |
| I'm not the guy who says Trump did everything right, Obama did everything wrong. | |
| I think it took two presidents in two different times with two different personalities. | |
| And they were both well-fitted for their time, I think. | |
| I'm alone in that opinion. | |
| But we got to this point where the United States is very strong. | |
| And we got here at a point when we needed to be strong. | |
| So that might be one of President Trump's greatest accomplishments, is to toughen us up and make the border a big question and make the economy a big question. | |
| And we're probably in stronger shape than we could have been without toughening up. | |
| So that's good. But I wouldn't make anything from the jobs numbers, except it's better than if it were bad. | |
| So the news from Afghanistan and Syria, without getting into the details, are everybody smart is pretty sure that if we leave, or at least not paying attention to either of those places, Afghanistan is more about leaving. | |
| Syria is more about should we be more involved in Idlib or not. | |
| And the president's made the adult decision. | |
| He's made the parent decision. | |
| That when we leave, those poor people in those regions are going to get slaughtered. | |
| But if we stayed, it kind of doesn't make sense because we would just be postponing the inevitable because they were going to get slaughtered anyway. | |
| It happens slower. | |
| It will happen when we leave eventually. | |
| So there wasn't any path to success. | |
| And it's a real tough decision, but it's the right one. | |
| To get out when there's no path to success. | |
| And the president's taking that choice. | |
| I applaud it. | |
| But you have to have sympathy, empathy for the people who we are leaving behind. | |
| They will be slaughtered. But to keep it in context, there are lots of places in the world that we could put the same amount of effort to save the same amount of lives. | |
| It's not the one place. | |
| It's just not the one place that needs help where people are dying unnecessarily. | |
| We could help all of them if we had enough money, but we don't. | |
| So we've got to call our shots. | |
| I look at everything from the coronavirus to the wars to the economy as part of a big system. | |
| And you want this system to be as strong as possible. | |
| And it's an ugly truth that the system is probably strongest when the biggest player is the strongest. | |
| Now, I can't prove that. | |
| So I'll put it out there, and you can wrestle with it. | |
| But let me say it again. I think the world is strongest when its most important player is strongest. | |
| Now, that assumes that the most important player is a benevolent kind of force, and I think the United States is. | |
| I'm not talking about Hitler or Putin being the strongest in the world. | |
| But if the United States, I would say the most productive Well-intentioned player, the stronger we are, the better the whole world is, because we're the ones who are going to be able to dole out help, and we're sort of an anchor that could give the rest of the world some optimism that things can improve. | |
| If you let the United States have the same amount of problems that the other countries had, we would be brought down to their problems, and you would have the We have sort of, just by analogy, not in actuality, but by analogy... | |
| The way the United States operates, which is staying selfish, to a point. | |
| We give some international aid, but it's really trivial. | |
| The United States remains selfish, but I would argue that's what makes the entire system work best. | |
| In the same way that, in capitalism, looking out for your own profits kind of makes everybody better off, even if it doesn't sound like you should, even if it doesn't sound kind. | |
| So I think the United States is likely... | |
| To be one of the most, well, probably the most productive player just by being healthy. | |
| Alright. You're all laughing, I know, this morning about the amazing math errors that we're watching in the media. | |
| It started with a tweet. | |
| From one Rivas Mikitas, or possibly Mikita Rivas. | |
| It's one of those names, I don't know which is the first name. | |
| I think it's Mikita Rivas. | |
| So she tweeted, and I'll paraphrase, but she tweeted that Bloomberg spent $500 million on his campaign, and all he got was some delegates out of American Samoa, which most of you didn't know even existed until this week. | |
| So, congratulations. | |
| There's something called in America Samoa, and now you all know it exists. | |
| I'm not sure I knew it existed last week. | |
| So I'm certainly not calling you uninformed. | |
| You know, when we're talking about it, I think to myself, oh yeah, I've heard of that. | |
| I've heard of America Samoa. | |
| Now tell me where it is. | |
| And I don't feel guilty one bit that I've not spent much time understanding Where America's Samoa is. | |
| Anyway, back to the tweet. So this presumably left-leaning person, I assume, tweets that Bloomberg spent $500 million just to get a couple of delegates at America's Samoa, | |
| and then goes on to say, That instead of spending that 500 million, given that there are only 327 million people in the United States, that Bloomberg could have given a million dollars to each citizen of the United States, and wouldn't that make everybody's life better? | |
| What? So you're probably doing the math in your head, and you just said to yourself, Scott, isn't that math off by a million? | |
| Yes, it is. It is off by a million. | |
| So, but that's not bad enough. | |
| You know, somebody making a dumb math mistake or a typo or using a word wrong or something, a spelling error in a tweet, I'm the first one to tell you it doesn't mean anything. | |
| Right? I've made a lot of tweet mistakes, some of them pretty bad. | |
| So I'm not the one who's going to jump on somebody for having a brain flaw on a tweet. | |
| But it didn't end there. | |
| It got better. | |
| Yeah, it got better. MSNBC Brian Williams does a segment in which he's talking to Mara Gray, who's on the New York Times editorial board. | |
| And they bring up this tweet, and they show the graphic. | |
| Now, showing the graphic indicates that this was planned, went through producers and editors, probably a number of people saw it. | |
| And they put it on the air, and then they discussed it. | |
| And between Brian Williams and Mara Gray of the New York Times editorial board, they also laughed, but not at the tweet. | |
| They weren't laughing because the math was wrong by a million. | |
| No. No. They were laughing because they thought it was accurate. | |
| And they thought it was a good point. | |
| That Bloomberg should have spent a million dollars in just giving it to every citizen in the United States and we'd all be rich. | |
| Pretty good idea, right? | |
| And nobody stopped the game. | |
| There were no refs to say, whoop, tweet, tweet, Brian Williams, Mara Gray, foul, You can't put that on the air. | |
| Because people are going to believe that that's actually real math. | |
| It's going to be kind of embarrassing. | |
| But no whistle was sounded. | |
| And so that went on. | |
| And they are getting absolutely pilloried today. | |
| I do not envy Brian Williams and Mara Gray's week. | |
| Maybe their month. I don't know if you can ever recover from this. | |
| Now, again... Let's be fair. | |
| Do you think that Mara Gray and Brian Williams can do math well enough to know that this is wrong? | |
| And the answer is yes. Yes, of course. | |
| Neither of them are so dumb that they don't know this math is wrong. | |
| But why did they act like they didn't know? | |
| Why did they put it on the air? | |
| And the answer is, it's an optical illusion. | |
| And I'm using that in a figurative sense. | |
| It's not actually optical. | |
| So there's something about this little tweet that is weirdly, cleverly misleading. | |
| Because if you just read it fast, hey, he gave $500 million to the campaign, 327 million people, that's a million dollars apiece. | |
| We could have all had a million dollars. | |
| If you just say it fast, You actually think it does make sense, but I think the reason you make sense is because it made sense to other people. | |
| See where I'm going with this? | |
| This has been studied quite a bit. | |
| If you put a bunch of people in the room, and let's say nine of them are working for the researcher, so they're in on the joke, and one of them is not and doesn't know that he's the only one in the room who's not in on it. | |
| If nine people give an opinion that's ridiculous, You can test this. | |
| It's very well tested. | |
| The tenth person will be positive those nine people are wrong and still agree with them. | |
| Very easily just say, okay, it must be me. | |
| If nine people are all on this crazy opinion, I'll go there too. | |
| So peer pressure... | |
| Overcomes math and common sense and your own judgment all the time. | |
| It's easily proven. So if you're laughing at Brian Williams and Mara Gray for being bad at math, that's probably not exactly what's happening. | |
| You should feel sorry for them because they got in a little cognitive trap. | |
| And I'm going to say this, you're not going to like it. | |
| Could happen to a lot of people. | |
| I'm not going to say it could have happened to everybody, because I don't think it would have happened to me. | |
| And I'd like to think that most of you, it would not have happened to. | |
| But if you took a hundred people in the media, and you put them in Brian Williams' chair for that exact situation, how many out of a hundred would have caught that? | |
| Half? Maybe half? | |
| Because, you know, illusions don't fool everybody all the time. | |
| But I'm going to show him some empathy for this being a cognitive illusion, not a math problem, which would look just stupid. | |
| Now, I do say all the time that one of the problems with the media is that they're not trained in economics and science and engineering and other things that would be useful for them to give the public a good idea of what's going on. | |
| But I don't know if that's the case here. | |
| I do think that if they had been economists, they would be more alert to the problem. | |
| So probably the fact that there were no economists or engineers or scientists who looked at this graphic before it went on air probably does mean something. | |
| I would like to guess that if you had 100 engineers, And you tried to pull this cognitive trick on them? | |
| Almost 100% of them would not fall for it. | |
| So, they're not innocent for having fallen for a trick because there are other people with wider exposure to things I think would have caught it right away. | |
| I'm pretty sure I would have. | |
| So, does that mean liberals are dumb and can't do math? | |
| Well, as it turns out, we have a very interesting case with a Matt Gaetz I'll tweet about the same time. | |
| Matt Gaetz, of course, associated with the right. | |
| And what he said was, and again, I'll paraphrase, he said that Bloomberg spent $500 million to get those two delegates in America's Samoa, and the entire GDP of America's Samoa is only $700 million. | |
| So he spent $500 million just to get two delegates, and Matt Gaetz says you could have bought You could have bought the entire America Samoa for $700 million. | |
| Do you see anything wrong with that? | |
| Because we're laughing about Brian Williams and Mario Gray, right? | |
| Oh, how dumb they are with that math error, which was really a cognitive trick. | |
| But when Matt Gaetz says he should have bought America Samoa for 700 million because that's their entire GDP, does that make sense? | |
| Now I'm not talking about the question of whether or not it's for sale, because obviously he's speaking in the Twitter way of hyperbole and just having fun. | |
| It's not as serious in any way. | |
| But let me explain something about the GDP. That's not what makes the price tag of your state or your country or your region or your whatever the hell America's Samoa is. | |
| That's not what does that. | |
| I'm going to help you, Mark or Richard. | |
| Richard says this is boring, so we're going to make him go away. | |
| Goodbye. Here's the thing. | |
| The price or the value that you would pay for a country or a state, should it be for sale, be it Greenland or America Samoa or anywhere else, is not the GDP. Because the GDP is just how much they do per year in economic activity. | |
| It has nothing to do with what you would pay for the country. | |
| Now, does Matt Gaetz know what I just said? | |
| Does he know that the GDP is not telling you the price tag of a region? | |
| Yeah, he knows that. | |
| Of course he knows that. | |
| But when I saw the tweet, I said to myself, oh, here it comes. | |
| All the nitpickers are going to say, Matt Gaetz, what don't you understand about economics? | |
| The GDP doesn't tell you the price of the country. | |
| I mean, it's related. It can tell you a sizing relative to others, so it's useful for that. | |
| But it's not the price tag of the country. | |
| So I looked in the comments to see how many people would say, Matt, you got this all wrong! | |
| And there weren't any. So apparently... | |
| Apparently nobody noticed when Matt Gaetz said that Bloomberg could have bought America's Samoa for the value of their GDP, which makes no sense at all, and nobody nitpicked him. | |
| And I thought, did they not nitpick him because they know he's not being serious and he knows that you don't pay the GDP as a price tag? | |
| Or do they not know? | |
| It's an open question. | |
| Alright, let's talk about something else. | |
| Bill Clinton Found a way to make things worse for Monica Lewinsky. | |
| So decades after poor Monica Lewinsky goes through this ordeal, something that lives with her forever, and you think, well, maybe she's finally getting used to it. | |
| You can get used to anything after a while. | |
| And then there's this Netflix documentary, which is not kind to Monica Lewinsky, But accidentally. | |
| So Bill Clinton was talking about essentially what was his motivation or why did he have this extramarital affair with Monica Lewinsky. | |
| And he said it was, quote, that there was a lot of stress on the job. | |
| Being the president was giving him a lot of anxiety. | |
| And he thought that having this affair with Monica Lewinsky would be a way of managing my anxieties. | |
| Now, First choice, just don't talk about it anymore. | |
| That's first choice. | |
| If you want to be kind to Monica Lewinsky, don't do the documentary, and if you do, don't talk about it, and if you talk about it, don't say anything new. | |
| Don't surprise us. | |
| Bill Clinton comes up with saying that Monica Lewinsky was nothing but a way of managing his anxieties. | |
| That is one of the most insulting things I have ever heard in my entire life. | |
| Am I wrong? Imagine you're Monica Lewinsky and you're reading that Bill Clinton only had a relationship with you to manage his anxiety. | |
| Ouch. That's like the biggest dickhead move I've ever seen in my life. | |
| Seriously, that's horrible. | |
| So, you know, I apologize on behalf of the United States for electing Bill Clinton, who would say that decades after, you know, the wound is healing. | |
| I mean, that's messed up, isn't it? | |
| That's messed up. | |
| To me, that looks like taking a wound that had closed and just opening it up for no reason at all, except, I don't know, what, to feel good about yourself, Bill Clinton? | |
| Don't be proud of that. | |
| All right. | |
| I tweeted one of the worst tweets of my life, in which I called something a fatal kill shot. | |
| Well, you might imagine that people on Twitter said, a fatal kill shot's a little redundant, Scott. | |
| A little redundant, and you're right. | |
| But it was on this. | |
| So, President Trump tweeted a quote, I guess it came from Lisa Marie Booth, probably on Fox, probably on Ed Henry's show, based on who he tagged. | |
| And the quote that the president thought was worthy of retweeting to his 73 million followers was, quote, Joe Biden represents the past. | |
| President Trump represents the future. | |
| That's really strong. | |
| Because even if you like everything that Biden is offering... | |
| It is unambiguously more like, and he's selling it this way, more like going back to the Obama world. | |
| Now, even if you think that was a good idea, and a lot of people do, if I just explained it to you that way, if I said, do you want to stay in this Trump-like administration world that has this set of problems, according to you, or would you like to be in more of an Obama-like world We're not like that. | |
| Now, if you put the question that way, people say, well, at least a lot of people, Democrats, would say, I like that Obama world. | |
| Yeah. Yeah, let's do that again. | |
| That worked out pretty well. Doing something again, that doesn't sound bad, does it? | |
| Doesn't sound bad. Doing something again that was good. | |
| But the moment the president, in this case, The moment you tell them that's the past... | |
| They'll walk away from it. | |
| I mean, mentally walk away from it. | |
| They'll still say it. But mentally, you don't want to go backwards. | |
| We are really, really well... | |
| Not well designed. We're designed, by evolution or whatever you want, to... | |
| Now, I know I have the coronavirus. | |
| I don't think. We're very designed to not want to walk backwards. | |
| To not want to go backwards, to not want to revisit the past. | |
| We're pretty much future-oriented creatures. | |
| I think we evolved to care more about the future than the past. | |
| That's how you survive. | |
| And then I saw Representative McCarthy talking about how Biden would take us backwards. | |
| It's the same thought. So if you see the administration pick up on this, the idea that Biden is taking us backwards, Biden is bringing us back to the past, you don't even have to talk about what that means. | |
| You don't even have to address the details of what the past looks like versus what the future looks like. | |
| Just that frame alone is the end of the story. | |
| It's a devastating frame. | |
| If you ever have a chance to do that to a nemesis, Watch how well it works. | |
| You could use this in the corporate world. | |
| If you say somebody comes in and they're in the meeting and they say, hey, let's do this because it worked before. | |
| If you're the one who says, you know, let's just not go back to the past, you'd need more of a reason than that. | |
| You know, if it worked well in the past, that's a pretty good argument for doing it again. | |
| But that's if it's a specific plan. | |
| When you're talking about Biden, you're talking about a concept of the past that has some Obama-like quality to it. | |
| If you're talking about only concepts, nobody wants to go backwards. | |
| Here's another dog that won't be barking. | |
| What was one of the biggest complaints about the president for the last four years? | |
| Let me tell you. In the top five, Maybe in the top three, is that he's mentally incapable. | |
| Mentally incapable. | |
| Meaning that he's losing it, he's got dementia, etc. | |
| Have you heard that recently? | |
| Is anybody talking about President Trump not having good mental acuity? | |
| Well, sometimes you see a little pushback when people are making fun of Joe Biden, but it's only in the pushback way. | |
| Because one of the most important things you'll ever learn about the world is that everything is contrast. | |
| You should just have that mantra. | |
| Just repeat it in your head for the rest of your life. | |
| Everything is contrast. | |
| Because the moment that Biden became the... | |
| People are presuming he's going to be the nominee. | |
| I don't think it's done yet, but people are presuming it. | |
| He's so obviously mentally more frail. | |
| That that causes a new contrast with President Trump, and it will eliminate the Democrats' one of their top five attacks, which is that President Trump can't put a sentence together. | |
| But if you're comparing him to Biden, that argument's gone. | |
| It's all gone. I tweeted yesterday that you can't realize how good President Trump is at tweeting and communicating and memes until you see somebody else try it. | |
| So Mike Bloomberg tweeted the Star Wars meme in which he was fighting Trump with a lightsaber. | |
| And it took about 10 minutes for the Trump team to create a brand new response to that from the movie Spaceballs, which itself made fun of the Star Wars franchise, showing a large person holding the head of a small person And they put the head of the small person, Mike Bloomberg's head on it, and Trump's head on the big person. | |
| He's just holding the small one by the head while the little one's flailing around with lightsaber and can't reach him. | |
| And I thought, oh my God, it's just a slaughter. | |
| The Trump team is just so good at this that I don't even see... | |
| Do you remember there was one point when Trump was running... | |
| There was a lot of criticism about the quality of his campaign and whatever. | |
| You don't see that now, do you? | |
| Is anybody making fun of the quality of the Trump re-election campaign? | |
| How about no? | |
| There's a dog that's not barking. | |
| Do you hear that dog barking? | |
| Oh, the Trump campaign, it can't raise money. | |
| Okay, I can raise money. | |
| You can raise a lot of money. Oh my God, look how much money it's raising. | |
| But the Trump campaign is not good at communicating. | |
| Okay, look at that meme. | |
| Oh my God, that's a good meme. | |
| Look at that ad. | |
| Oh my God, that's such a good ad. | |
| Alright. Ukraine fired its top prosecutor. | |
| What the hell? The simulation is just entertaining us like crazy. | |
| Because... I don't know how important it is. | |
| Probably not too important. But Ukraine firing its top prosecutor while Biden is in the news and Trump is in the news. | |
| It's just the simulation and code reuse. | |
| Have you tried talking to anybody who doesn't follow the news about the coronavirus? | |
| Has anybody had that experience? | |
| Because I've tried to help some people who are not watching the news. | |
| To be prepared. Just to be careful. | |
| Be prepared. Let me see if you've had this conversation. | |
| Because it's easy for us to think that other people are watching the news. | |
| They're not. Most people are not watching the news. | |
| And if they're not watching the news, their fear has not been amped up to the level that yours and mine are. | |
| If you're watching me right now, you probably watch the news. | |
| And And it's a mind-boggling experience. | |
| Let me give you an example of that conversation. | |
| Hey, Bob, did you know the coronavirus is coming and scientists say it's going to be really bad? | |
| It's not like the regular flu. | |
| A lot of people could die. | |
| It could disrupt our economy. | |
| Maybe you should, you know, just to be careful, get in a little extra food, just to be careful. | |
| Do you know what Bob will say? | |
| If he's not watching the news, Bob will say, I'm not worried about it. | |
| Then you say, okay, Bob, I hear you when you say you're not worried about it. | |
| But what I'm telling you is, every expert in the world is pretty sure they should be worried about it. | |
| So I hear you that you're not. | |
| I'm telling you, you should be. | |
| And you should get some food and probably won't need it, just to be careful. | |
| And Bob will say, it's just the flu. | |
| I go, Bob, Bob, okay, did you hear the part where all the experts in the world say, it's not just the flu. | |
| This is like a special danger. | |
| So you should get ready, Bob. | |
| And Bob will say, eh. | |
| You can't worry people who are not watching the news, have you noticed that? | |
| Now, some people in the comments say, I'm not worried about it, and we'll talk about that. | |
| So apparently, you know, most of you know I live in the Bay Area outside of San Francisco. | |
| There are a couple of cases reported now, and there's another cruise ship that may or may not be infected off the coast that wants to get into San Francisco. | |
| So it's here. | |
| So if you're waiting for your town to get the first coronavirus confirmation, I'll tell you what it's like. | |
| It's here for me. I'm just going to jump around some topics. | |
| There's something about this coronavirus that feels like it's a Green New Deal virus. | |
| Because the Green New Deal was all about reducing our use of fossil fuels, and this virus did it really quickly. | |
| So you saw that the pollution cleared up in China, etc. | |
| Now, people are going back to work, so we do expect the level of pollution to go back up. | |
| But I think we may be at a permanent turning point in terms of traffic. | |
| Would you agree with that? | |
| Are we not at a permanent turning point in terms of traffic? | |
| I think we are. | |
| We may also be at a turning point in how much AC we use and how often we keep the windows closed and stuff like that. | |
| So there could be a lot of different changes. | |
| But one of the unintended changes Outcomes of the virus might be that we're permanently more telecommuting. | |
| And that could be one of the biggest changes in the world in terms of carbon use. | |
| There's some indication that the summer reduces the risk of the virus transmitting. | |
| People aren't quite sure why. | |
| They've got a number of ideas. | |
| One of them is humidity. So I just bought a humidifier for my house. | |
| Now, what are the odds that if it's true, I think the experts agree that humidity will decrease the transmission, but does it therefore follow that adding a humidifier to your house would make any difference at all? | |
| And, I don't know, maybe it only makes a difference if everyone does it. | |
| If you only do it in one place, it might make such a small difference it's not worth it. | |
| Maybe it's hard to do for more than one room at a time. | |
| People are coming in and out. | |
| Maybe it doesn't make any difference because people are always in and out anyway. | |
| But I got one. Now, I was interested to find that there was no shortage, at least on Amazon. | |
| So I ordered it on Amazon, says it'll be here tomorrow. | |
| Didn't cost that much. | |
| I'm going to put one in. It's just one of the things I can do. | |
| And a lot of the things that I plan to do about the coronavirus, I am completely aware... | |
| Completely aware that there's very small chance that any of the things I do are the thing that makes a difference. | |
| But I'm going to take over a sense of control because that's good for my mental state and for the benefit of myself as well as the benefit of you. | |
| I would like to keep my mental state as calm and functional as possible. | |
| So I'm going to do stuff That I consciously know probably doesn't make a lot of difference, but it makes a difference, and it's something, and I'm going to do it. | |
| So it's going to make me feel good. | |
| That will make me more productive and capable to help all of you. | |
| So think about that as a mental strategy. | |
| Find something you can do, and then go do it, so you feel like you have a little sense of control. | |
| Here's my opinion, subject to change. | |
| Here's what I think you should not care about. | |
| Number one is the vaccine. | |
| I don't think you should count on it. | |
| I don't think there's necessarily even a high chance we'll ever have one. | |
| But I don't think that that means it's the end of the world. | |
| So I don't think the vaccine's coming. | |
| The other thing I think you should ignore as being possibly good is containment. | |
| I don't think there's any chance it will be contained. | |
| And I don't think that there's a... | |
| Well, I'll just say that. | |
| There's no chance it's going to be contained. | |
| And I don't think the vaccine will save us. | |
| Here's what I believe is the real strategy that the government can't tell you. | |
| I almost hate to say this, but I think if you're watching this Periscope, you're probably among the smarter, level-headed people, I like to think. | |
| And I will start with this assumption. | |
| I agree that our government should lie to us whenever that's for the greater good. | |
| Now, you could argue that your government should never lie to you, but I'm not going to have that conversation today. | |
| I think there are special cases Where it's just better for the government to lie to you. | |
| And this might be one of them. | |
| It's probably one of them. | |
| I think that the government knows that the vaccine isn't going to stop it. | |
| I think the government knows that closing borders, as mildly as we've done it, isn't going to stop it. | |
| Because we've stopped travel from the high-impact places, but it's in 80 countries now. | |
| It's in 80 countries, including ours. | |
| And we're not stopping travel, apparently, from Italy. | |
| So, I just saw a tweet from somebody who was on the medical team, went over to Italy, came back to the United States, and nobody even asked her where she was. | |
| She was literally in the middle of the coronavirus epidemic, for medical treatment reasons, and nobody asked her when she came back. | |
| Now, how many of those are there? | |
| I don't know how many there are, but there are enough That the virus is coming. | |
| So here's what I believe is the unstated real strategy. | |
| This is based on picking up what all the experts are saying individually and trying to collate it. | |
| It seems to me that the strategy is a controlled spread. | |
| Because there is no hope of stopping it. | |
| There are only two options. | |
| Spreads quickly because we don't do anything. | |
| Or we fight like hell to slow it down so it doesn't overwhelm our systems. | |
| So the goal is to get infected. | |
| Because until you get infected, until enough people are infected, and apparently 80% don't even have anything like a symptom, or they're mild. | |
| So you need 80% to get it once, to have some immunity, which apparently is not complete immunity, And it doesn't last forever. | |
| But it gives you some immunity so that if somebody does get it, they're less likely to have anybody they could give it to. | |
| Apparently that's the only thing that stops the virus. | |
| It's the only thing. | |
| Because even the good weather and going outdoors will slow it down, but then it's going to come raging back in the winter. | |
| And I've not heard any expert who disagrees that it needs to run its course. | |
| Have you? So if you don't hear that, the real strategy is to not panic you, because there's nothing you can do about it, aside from washing your hands and the small stuff you can do about it. | |
| But there's not much you can do about the fact that much of the country is going to get it like every other virus. | |
| Now, if that sounded like a doomsday thing, it's the opposite. | |
| It's the opposite of doomsday. | |
| It's actually the only plan that makes sense, in my opinion. | |
| And that's an opinion based on just watching the experts. | |
| I'm certainly no expert. But somebody says they're trying to not get it. | |
| You should all try that. | |
| You should all try to not get it. | |
| Even if, individually, it might be better if you got it and got it over with. | |
| Because it's the difference between what's good for you versus what's good for the society. | |
| What's good for you would be to get a mild case and get it over with. | |
| Don't do that. What's good for society is that you fight and fight and fight to put it off. | |
| Because you want to spread it out. | |
| If you don't spread it out, you're going to overwhelm our facilities and the hospitals, and then everything just falls apart. | |
| But I don't think that's going to happen, because we're going to spread it out. | |
| And the United States is doing a good job. | |
| Now here's my opinion of why this is the real strategy, but it's not one you can tell the public. | |
| If you told the public that, I think it would cause the wrong behavior. | |
| People would say, ah, let's just get it then, or let's not care about it. | |
| And those are the wrong moves. | |
| But the fact that the airports are not all closed is everything you need to know. | |
| Closing it from China and a few of the other hotspots makes sense because that could have caused us to suddenly surge. | |
| But I feel like we're letting it in intentionally. | |
| In other words, the actions we're taking are clearly meant to allow some risk into the country, but a small one. | |
| Now, the small risk is not a risk of something happening or not happening. | |
| It's a guarantee. | |
| It's a guarantee that if you let world travel happen, and the only things that you stop are the hotspot travel, you're still going to get a guarantee. | |
| There's no question about it. | |
| So here's somebody in the comments that says, let's just get it. | |
| And did you hear me? | |
| If we all got it right away, it would be the end of civilization. | |
| Probably not, but it would be pretty bad. | |
| You need to fight like heck to not get it. | |
| Spread it out. Don't overwhelm the resources. | |
| So, let's see, what else we got here? | |
| So, CNN had a headline that said that Dr. | |
| Gupta, their medical TV doctor, who was a real doctor, their headline said that he debunked Trump's hunch that the coronavirus would be lower than a 1% death rate after we've found out all the people who have no symptoms. | |
| So the president was saying that he thinks the death rate is lower because we're going to find a whole bunch of people we didn't know had it That weren't in the denominator. | |
| Now, he was widely mocked for that, saying, my God, the scientists say it's, I don't know, 3% or whatever they were saying at the time, and Trump says it's less, and he's not a scientist, and he's so anti-science, and what kind of an idiot, and then a few hours later, scientists started lowering their estimates. | |
| In other words, President Trump was completely correct. | |
| It wasn't just a hunch. | |
| He was listening to the experts, and he was watching the estimate go down and down and down every day. | |
| If you're watching an estimate go down every day, and there's an obvious reason why it's going down, which is more testing, it's not a hunch per se that it's going to keep going down. | |
| It's just a pretty good guess. | |
| And the president made his pretty good guess. | |
| I think it was a totally responsible thing to say as president, because there's an estimate of where things are going, and it would look like it might go in the right direction. | |
| That's exactly what you want your president to say. | |
| If the president thinks things are going to go in the right direction, the experts do, there's a reason for it, of course you should say it out loud. | |
| Now, did Dr. | |
| Gupta debunk, because that's the word used in the headlines, Trump's hunch? | |
| And the answer is, no, he didn't. | |
| If you read the article, he didn't debunk it at all. | |
| He didn't really talk about it in those terms. | |
| So the headline says that Gupta is debunking Trump, but the article doesn't do that. | |
| Typical BS. There's an interesting story out of Africa. | |
| Reportedly there are only three cases out of Africa, which makes no sense. | |
| It should be ravaging the continent by now because they don't have the same quarantine and medical facilities and testing and all that stuff we have. | |
| Only three cases? Is it because it's hot and humid? | |
| Is it because? | |
| We've confirmed that there are genetic differences in terms of who can get it. | |
| But one expert said there's nothing about the coronavirus that we've identified that has a genetic preference. | |
| But just because we haven't identified it doesn't mean it's not the case. | |
| It could be that Africa gets through this pretty well. | |
| I mean, fingers crossed. | |
| We'll see. It's going to be pretty bad if it doesn't. | |
| Let's see what else we got here. | |
| The other possibility is that when we start testing, we're going to find out that so many people already have the coronavirus, That we're in way better shape than we thought. | |
| It could be, for example, that... | |
| No, I guess we would know that by now. | |
| If there's enough testing. | |
| Maybe we don't. It could be that... | |
| I'm just going to throw this out there. | |
| Maybe so many people in Africa already have it, but have it mildly, that it doesn't catch on in any deadly way there. | |
| Possible. But I would think they would have tested that by now. | |
| Um... Kellyanne Conway says, oh, here's another thing on masks. | |
| Those N95 masks, you know, a lot of experts have been contacting me privately to give their opinions on the masks. | |
| I didn't realize that the N95 masks you can buy in a hardware store. | |
| I thought these were some kind of high-end medical special masks, the ones everybody wants, but apparently you could just buy them at the hardware store because people use them for construction to keep the dust down. | |
| Now, there's some thought that they don't have enough of a filter for a virus because virus is smaller than the filter, even of the high-end masks. | |
| But here's just a new thing I'm going to add to it. | |
| I heard directly from somebody whose job it was To work in the ER, or work in surgery rooms, and make sure that people have the right protective gear. | |
| And apparently, did you know this, that surgeons will typically wear the non-N95 masks. | |
| In fact, the only time they use the high-end mask, even when they're doing surgery, The only time they use the good mask is if there's something special. | |
| Yeah, like the dust. | |
| Let's say they're grinding a bone and there's some bone dust or there's some fumes or something coming out. | |
| But for an ordinary operation, they just use the same cheap old face masks everybody else does. | |
| So that should tell you something. | |
| I don't know what. | |
| Kellyanne Conway had a funny tweet. | |
| So Elizabeth Warren is claiming that... | |
| Misogyny and sexism were part of the reason that she had to leave the race and was not victorious. | |
| And Kellyanne Conway tweets this. | |
| If true that Elizabeth Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, and Amy Klobuchar lost, quote, because they are women, then the Democrats aren't just hapless, they're sexist. | |
| These women lost among Democrat voters in Democrat primaries and caucuses. | |
| And I thought, oh yeah, every time Warren says that sexism is what kept her from being president, you have to ask yourself, who is sexism? | |
| Because I don't think the Republicans were part of that process. | |
| So apparently Democrats don't think that any of those women were the ones that were qualified. | |
| Now, here's something that Elizabeth... | |
| I'm going to say something that nobody says, all right? | |
| I don't know why. When you hear me say this, you're going to say, oh yeah, I'm thinking that. | |
| Why doesn't anybody say that? | |
| It's something I guess you can't say on TV or in public, but I'm going to say it anyway. | |
| For every voter who would say, I'm not going to vote for a candidate because this person is a woman, there are two that will vote for her because she is. | |
| I'm not wrong. | |
| And those two aren't necessarily both women. | |
| You don't think there were plenty of men who said, yeah, it's time for a woman. | |
| Time for a woman. I'm going to take that under consideration. | |
| That's a variable. | |
| I'm going to put that in there. | |
| I think we should have a woman president. | |
| Yes. How about when President Obama ran for office? | |
| Did he fail to win two terms because the public would not vote for him because he's black? | |
| Oh, there must have been somebody. | |
| There must have been somewhere. | |
| There were Republicans who didn't vote for Obama because he's black. | |
| That's fair to assume. | |
| We've got a racist enough country that that's true. | |
| But there were two people who voted for him for being black, for everyone who voted against him. | |
| And I would put myself in that category. | |
| I didn't vote, but I'm in the category of people who said... | |
| Sounds like an advantage. | |
| As long as he doesn't say it's an advantage, and I make that point a lot. | |
| As long as Obama wasn't selling his blackness as an asset, that allowed me as a citizen to say, yeah, that gives us a little extra. | |
| If it makes people more comfortable that we're an inclusive country, he's got the skills, people voted for him, it's a benefit. | |
| It's an absolute plus. | |
| Why wouldn't I vote for the candidate who has a little extra? | |
| A little extra plus. | |
| So when I hear Warren say that there's misogyny, oh my God, I almost lost it. | |
| I caught myself. | |
| I almost just launched into a profanity-laden monologue because this does bother me more than I'm letting on. | |
| Because it's so dishonest. | |
| It's dishonest. Elizabeth Warren, the only reason you got that far is because you were a woman. | |
| Sorry. The only reason you got that far is because you were a woman. | |
| And the reason that you didn't go farther is because you weren't good enough. | |
| That's it. That's the whole thing. | |
| I've been telling you I tempered early on prednisone for my sinus things, getting ready for some upcoming surgery. | |
| And one of the side effects is anger. | |
| Somebody's saying, do it, don't hold back. | |
| The only reason I'm holding back is not because it was a genuine emotion and not because I'm being kind to anybody listening or whatever. | |
| The reason I'm holding back is I don't think it's real. | |
| Because I'm on prednisone and one of the side effects is it can make you flash to anger. | |
| And I felt myself starting to flash to anger for a reason that I didn't know was real. | |
| So this is one of the most valuable lessons you'll ever have in your life. | |
| Your attitude is caused by environment and chemistry and what you ate and how tired you are and all that stuff. | |
| If you believe the reason you're mad at a thing is because of the thing, you have not understood the most basic concept of life. | |
| Your anger or your attitude is sort of self-generated, given that it's influenced by the chemistry that you choose to put in your body and whatever's there. | |
| But once you learn that your anger is entirely about you, And that the events are just the events. | |
| There are certainly things that are worth getting mad at, but it's good to know the difference. | |
| You know, when are you really mad? | |
| Because it's a bad thing. | |
| And when are you mad? Because you didn't get enough sleep. | |
| All right. That's all I got for now. |