Episode 887 Scott Adams: Grab Your Beverage and Get in Here!
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Content:
WARNING! Angry Scott
Are the task force members taking Hydroxychloroquine?
My grade on the task forces communication
China's body parts on demand program
Expelling kids of China's elite from American colleges
Balaji Srinivasan vs. Adam Townsend
Coronavirus impact on climate change
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This is where all the simultaneous sipping happens.
Yeah, it does.
And all you need is...
What? What do you need?
A cup or a mug or a glass of tank or chalice or stein, a canteen jug or a flask or a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine of the day, the thing that makes everything, including the pandemic, better.
It's called the simultaneous sip.
Go. Mmm.
White blood cell count increasing even as we sip.
It's amazing, really.
Well, first, an update on my presidency, my candidacy.
As you know, I announced my run for president, but I'm running as an emergency backup spare.
Just in case.
Joe Biden is the nominee and he's not capable of being president.
But just in case something happens to President Trump.
Let's say he decides to retire before November.
Don't you want an emergency backup?
It will all be your emergency backup.
Do not vote for me if President Trump is still in the...
You know, still in the election and still looking healthy.
Vote for him instead if you're a Trump supporter.
But if anything happens and your only other choice is Joe Biden, I'm your emergency backup.
All right. The unemployment numbers around today, 6.6 million people filed for unemployment.
Now, according to my digital devices, The number of people who work in the United States is about 139 million, or at least recently that was the number.
So 6.6 million are unemployed, or maybe additionally unemployed, but that's out of 139 million who are still working.
It's about 5%.
So today it was about 5% out of work.
I thought it was going to be a lot more, didn't you?
Didn't you think the unemployment would be like 30% or something like that?
I feel like most people can't go to work, but I guess people are getting paid, people are telecommuting, and maybe we'll see that double next month.
I don't know. But if it stayed that, if $6.6 million ended up being the worst of it, I don't think it will.
It seems like it would have to go up in the next couple of weeks.
But if it were... We could get past that pretty easily.
The problem is that it could get worse.
But I don't think you should be too afraid of today's number, because as a percentage, it's manageable, unless it doubles and triples in the coming weeks.
Here's my grade for the task force working on the coronavirus.
I'm going to give it an F. An F grade.
Now, they may be doing good things that we can't see.
I assume they are, right?
I assume that they're doing great work behind the scenes, working hard.
I think it's all the right people working on it and everything.
And I think that they're moving heaven and earth and doing what they can.
I give them a failing grade because now it's been weeks and I can't answer this question.
I watch every one of the press conferences and And I can't answer the question, when will we have enough masks?
Seriously? I can't answer that question yet?
How about this one?
When will we have enough tests, test kits, both for testing people that may or may not have it and for testing the public in general?
When? Is that next week?
Is it in four months?
You don't know. I don't know.
It's the most basic thing you'd have to know in order to judge that your task force was competent.
And we don't know. We don't even have a guess.
I don't know if it's a month or a year.
I don't know if we could ever get there.
How about the results of the hydroxychloroquine?
Do you feel like you're getting good information about how that's going?
No. No, you're not.
It might be the most important thing that's going on, and your task force is intentionally not talking about it.
And when they talked about masks, they gave you the wrong information.
Don't wear them. So that was misinformation.
So of the two most important things, where are we on tests?
Well, three really. Where are we on tests, masks, and knowledge about and supply of hydroxychloroquine?
The three things that I think are the most important, you have no visibility on after weeks.
Now, do you think that it's impossible to know those numbers?
Or even sort of directionally, you know, we think we can have it done in two weeks, but it might take a month?
That would tell you something.
But I hate to be grading harshly, but it's an emergency.
I think in normal times, I might be a little more flexible.
But you have the entire psychology of the country, which...
is the thing upon which your economy depends.
The way we think about the economy is going to be the thing that makes it recover or not.
And the way we're thinking about it is completely crippled by the fact that the three most important pieces of information, in my opinion, which is the availability of supplies generally, but I would say masks is going to be more important, hydroxychloroquine supply, And, you know, and also I'd like to know how many people are being hospitalized through having the hydroxychloroquine early.
There was one doctor that was on Laura Engram's show last night saying that it was a game-changer, the hydroxychloroquine was, and that hydroxychloroquine None of the people he gave it to for five days, in other words, the people who got it early enough in their symptoms, none of them ended up being intubated and on ventilators.
None. So, you know, it wasn't a controlled test, but the doctor was saying that the odds of that happening, given all the other groups and what percentage of them get on ventilators, he said that the odds of Of the hydroxychloric lean not being the thing that made the difference are just vanishingly small at this point.
Could be wrong, but that's what it looks like at this point.
All right, so I give the task force a failing grade for communication because their communication has an impact on our morale and our psychology.
Psychology has an impact on the economy.
And if we break that, you can't put it back together again too easily.
Right now the economy is not broken.
It's just sort of on a time out, which is very different.
It's not broken. It's just paused.
And if we don't get this information pretty soon, I don't know how much longer the country can hold that together.
Because we're literally holding the economy together by will.
I mean, that's not an exaggeration.
The entire economy of the world is being held together by our minds.
That's not an exaggeration.
Because what we think of it is what it becomes and what it will be.
Because if you think it's good, you invest.
If you think it's going to be bad, you fire your staff and you don't invest.
It's a completely different direction.
So task force, please.
Even if you have to lie to us and then, you know, correct it as you get better information.
When are we going to have enough masks?
When are we going to have this hydroxychloroquine that we could take, you know, early on, enough of it?
You know, and when are we going to have enough test kits?
You know, here's what I don't want to say.
I'm trying not to swear because I'm getting really mad.
So I'll try to take it down a little level.
Maybe I'll go a whole day without swearing.
Who knows? It's deeply irresponsible to watch these experts up there and our president simply spouting raw numbers.
I'm just going to swear, okay?
I'm just going to warn you I can't get past this next section without using a curse word.
So send the kids away, turn down the volume, whatever you want.
Here's what I don't want to see today.
So I assume there'll be another coronavirus task force.
I don't fucking want to see them spouting raw numbers again.
Oh, we got 4,000 ventilators, and I sent 20,000 over here, and 6,000 gloves, and I sent 4,000 masks.
Fuck you. Fuck you.
Don't give us raw numbers.
Tell us how many you need.
How close are you to that?
How many are in the pipeline?
That'd be good. Don't give us fucking raw numbers like we're fucking idiots.
All right?
You have been wrong, you, the professionals, both the politicians and the experts, you've been fucking wrong about everything.
You've been wrong about the fucking mask.
You've been wrong about the hydrochloroquine.
You've been wrong about the China numbers.
Probably wrong about the models.
You've been fucking wrong about everything.
And you stand in front of us, and you fucking say these wrong numbers like that is supposed to make us fucking happy.
You're blowing this fucking smoke up our asses in the middle of a goddamn emergency while the economy is melting down, and you're giving us these fucking wrong numbers like we're fucking idiots.
Like we're idiots. Oh, it's 4,000.
Oh, I guess that's good.
Oh, go back to work now.
Got 4,000 dental ears.
Is that a lot?
Is that too much? Give us a fucking piece of information, you goddamn incompetent motherfuckers.
I'm not going to go one more day being okay with this.
It's a fucking emergency.
Give us some fucking useful numbers for once.
How about not fucking lying to us and we know it?
How about that? If you don't know the numbers, just say you're incompetent.
Just tell us. And maybe we can do something about it.
But please, stop fucking lying to us about the numbers.
The raw numbers don't help us at all.
Not even a little bit.
If you can't put them in context, don't fucking even talk.
Just let somebody else talk.
This is for you, Mr.
President. I love you, Mr.
President. But we can't have another day of these fucking raw numbers out of context.
It was way too long.
I was a little bit patient for a while.
But now, I'm fucking mad.
You've got to fix this today.
You've got a few hours.
Make up some fucking numbers if you don't have good numbers.
Just make up some fucking numbers.
Jesus fucking Christ.
Alright. Here's something interesting or not.
I got a message on LinkedIn.
A lot of people are sending me useful information that I can send around to somebody.
And apparently there's a company, I won't name the company, that can make 70 million test kits for the coronavirus in two weeks.
So they're capable of making 70 million tests In two weeks, but they're not doing it because they need a big check.
So right now they don't know how to sell it to individual hospitals and stuff.
They're not set up for that.
They're more set up for selling big bunches.
So I've passed that along to my most helpful contacts in the government.
And maybe this is a real company and maybe they can really do that.
Maybe it makes a difference.
But I was kind of shocked that at this point in the process, there would be a company that makes test kits.
I think they need to be validated and approved or something, too.
But there would be a company that could make this many test kits.
It's in another country. It's not an American kind of company.
And we haven't already climbed down their pants to figure out what they can do and how quickly they can do it.
So I'm a little skeptical.
That as of today, there'd be a company that can make 70 million test kits, and yet hasn't got a productive contact in some government to send them a check?
I'm a little skeptical, but I passed it along anyway.
If you're following along on Zoom today, The application that lets you make a video call with your teammates, you probably know that there's a little bit of a problem there that's becoming more of a problem, I think, as time goes by, that a lot of their engineers live and work in China, and some of the traffic goes through servers in China.
So if you're doing a top-secret Business meeting about your technology, and you're using Zoom, which is the most popular software for doing this.
Probably, I don't know, eight out of ten businesses are using it routinely, especially now.
Your secrets are actually going through a server in China.
When you know that China is stealing our secrets, it's not like you worry that they might.
It's way past...
It's way past worrying that they might steal your secret IP. They are.
It's the most confirmed, documented thing in the world.
So Zoom has a problem.
Now, I'll just tell you that there is a Zoom alternative, which can be packaged up.
Right now it wouldn't work for everybody because you'd have to scale it up.
But if there's anybody out there who would like to invest in a Zoom alternative that does not go through China, contact me.
So I'm looking for somebody who's a billionaire who can write a big check.
I'm not going to be doing fundraising or anything.
But if you're a billionaire...
Or you're in the government and you can write a check for a million and a half to just develop it to the point of feasibility.
It's mostly already written.
So the actual code is mostly done.
And I've actually used it and you can make a call and it looks just like Zoom.
But it would need to be packaged up in a company form and you'd have to have enough servers online to handle the volume, etc.
So it would be a big job to productize it, but if anybody's interested in that, just tweet at me and I'll hook you up.
And I am connected to that.
Just full disclosure, I am connected to that effort.
So just so you heard that.
Let's see. I have a question.
Does China's death tolls, which we know are all bogus, but I wonder if it includes the political prisoners that they carve up for parts?
Now, if you didn't know that, apparently it's well documented to the point of no doubt about it.
So China is using political prisoners...
For parts.
They're actually keeping them alive.
I assume that they have anesthesia.
But in order to transfer organs from someone to someone else, you need the donor to be alive.
China can deliver a heart and lung transplant on demand on the hour that you want it.
Now, you don't have to be much of a transplant expert to know that if you can deliver a specific organ...
On a specific date, it's because she killed somebody.
Mathematically, statistically, there's just no way that somebody would coincidentally be a donor within driving distance and within an hour of when you needed the surgery.
So the experts know for sure And they know that the operations are happening, because Westerners sometimes go over there and get the operation, because they can't get a heart and lung on demand anywhere else, because nobody else is killing people for hearts and lungs.
So I'm wondering, you know, if it's true, the high numbers, I saw some numbers like over 300,000 people might have died from the coronavirus in Australia.
In China. Now imagine if 300,000 died, you know, most of them are probably elderly and would not qualify for any kind of a transplant.
But how many people who were, let's say, Chinese party officials who could be saved with, let's say, a lung transplant, because, you know, lungs go bad with the coronavirus.
How many, how many Communist Party members in China, you know, people who are rich or connected, How many of them are alive because they killed a political prisoner and took that person's heart and lungs and put it into the Chinese official?
Probably more than one.
I don't know. Could be a few.
Just put that out there.
All right. I suggested, I put this idea out there.
I was just seeing what kind of appetite there was for this.
But I want to tell you how clever this is.
So on the surface, it doesn't sound clever, but then I'll tell you what the clever thing is.
So I tweeted, let's start expelling the kids of Chinese elites who are going to college in the United States in alphabetical order.
One for every death from fentanyl or coronavirus.
Now, of course, it wouldn't take long before they were all gone, but there are quite a few children of the rich people, the elites, the connected people in China who, as a status symbol, go to college in the United States.
Because if you're a Chinese official, you'd like to say that your kid went to Harvard or Stanford or some good American college.
And, of course, they take this training back to China, where China, you know, in most cases, and China, of course, tries to destroy the United States with this newly learned knowledge.
And so, the colleges, of course, the universities, they make a lot of money from the foreign students because they can charge them the full price.
You know, the foreign students are not necessarily getting scholarships.
So it's profitable for the colleges.
That's why they do it a lot. But here's the strength of the idea.
If you just said today, you know, just today, all kids of Chinese elites go home today.
Now, that would make a big statement, but it wouldn't be nearly as good as my idea of doing it in alphabetical order.
Now, I don't know if you ever saw Schindler's List, but this is a persuasion technique I learned from a scene in Schindler's List, meaning that, you know, without going into details, a bad guy was executing prisoners somewhat randomly, and the prisoners had to wait and wonder if they were next.
Now, as bad as it is to be executed...
That happens kind of quickly, right?
You get shot in the head, you're kind of dead quickly, as bad as that is.
But not knowing if in the next five minutes you're going to be shot in the head, because you're watching other people get shot in the head right in front of you, has got to be far more psychologically devastating, right?
I mean, stands to reason.
So here's the idea.
Instead of just saying all Chinese children of elites have to leave their colleges and go home, That would be like pulling the band-aid off all at once.
It would be bad. It would get their attention.
They wouldn't like it at all. But it would also be over really quickly.
So it's not nearly as good.
What you want to do is say, it's nothing personal.
We're not even going to decide who goes first.
We'll just do it in alphabetical order.
And then on day one, you say, looks like we've got a week of fentanyl overdoses and this many corona deaths.
Okay, that's 175, so we'll just go down the alphabet until you get 175 kids, and you just send them home.
Just send them home.
You've got to be gone by tomorrow. And then the next day, the elites in China say, what the heck just happened?
Wait a minute, what's our last name?
My last name starts with F? Oh, maybe we should do something about this.
So if it doesn't hurt the elites, it doesn't count because they're the only ones who get a vote.
So I would say let's just send them home in alphabetical order.
You don't have to do it right away.
Just start the process in alphabetical order and make it just mechanical.
No human decision involved.
We'll just get a statistic, go down the alphabetical list, send them an email, say, be gone by Tuesday.
You don't even have to negotiate about it.
You don't even have to ask China for anything in return.
There's no negotiating here.
You're just saying, it's just the way we want to run things.
This is our system. Don't even argue it.
All right. Here's a new rule.
I'm stealing this from Bill Maher.
He always says, new rules, which is a good structure for jokes, by the way.
If you're criticizing the president's timing of decisions for this coronavirus stuff, you have to produce a witness who was in the room and watched the president ignore advice from experts at the time.
Because otherwise, what exactly are you criticizing?
Now, if the president...
We're surrounded by experts who said, you must do X, and the president ignored all the experts and said, eh, I think I'll do Y. Well, that would be a legitimate story.
That's something I'd want to know, right?
But if all we know is it would have been better to do something earlier or different, is that telling you anything?
Because again, everything good should have been done earlier.
There's no exception to that.
So simply saying it should have been done earlier has no meaning at all, except TV idiots will talk about it forever.
But unless you have a witness that actually watched him listen to experts and decide not to follow their advice, you don't really have anything.
Because without that, there's no context.
It wouldn't mean anything. The leaders of other countries didn't seem to do much better.
Now, I know some people are going to say, but, Scott, why were we not ready with all the ventilators and the test kits?
The answer is, nobody was.
Nobody was ready with that.
I mean, South Korea is a smaller place.
Maybe they're a little more efficient.
Maybe they got there quicker.
But nobody was ready.
Of all the nations in the world, nobody was ready.
And how many ventilators did we think we needed?
How many did we think we have?
We still don't know. We don't know how many we had, how many we needed.
Do you think that the President of the United States was ever aware that we had a ventilator shortage?
Was he even ever aware of that?
Do you think the President, and you can say this for every leader of every other country, do you think the President of the United States was aware that That we didn't have the right kind of test kits.
No! I doubt it.
That's kind of down in the details.
Anyway, that's enough about that.
I'm watching the most interesting intellectual, let's say, difference of opinion.
And what's interesting about it is that the two people who are on opposite sides of this...
Are so smart.
Normally you see a smart person arguing with a dumb person.
Of course you always agree with the one you think is the smart one.
But it's unusual to see somebody who are equally smart at the highest level smart and also deeply disagreeing while looking at exactly the same facts.
To me, that's just so fascinating.
So here's what's happening.
You may be familiar with these names from Twitter or otherwise, but Balaji Srinivasan has been tweeting about the dangers of the coronavirus extensively and in detail, with tons of good sources and great thinking about it, etc. And he would be on the side saying, it's as big a problem as the experts say it is, maybe even bigger.
It's going to be big. It's a big, big deal.
And then it's special.
Now, to Balaji's point, you could look at China.
They had more deaths than they say, probably.
You could look at Italy and Iran, and you could say, oh, well, already we're seeing that there are major problems.
And then we also look at what the ER doctors are saying.
And I don't believe you'll see any ER doctors who say, you know...
I'm working ER, and it's basically just the flu.
Have you heard anybody say that?
Have you heard any doctor who's actually working at the front lines who agrees with the notion, you know, this is sort of just like more flu.
It's just sort of more like that.
No, not even close. Every doctor who's working on it says as clearly as possible, this is not the flu.
One of the doctors said that you can even tell the people who have it by that their eyes get red in a very specific way, and they have a very specific cough and bronchial situation.
But anyway, so Balaji has on his side that the deaths have gone from 100 deaths a day to 1,000 in, I don't know, a week or something, as you would expect if it's really bad.
We've got other countries that are already suffering it.
Sooner, things are really bad there.
That sides with him.
And then the ER doctors.
So he's got quite a bit of scientific and anecdotal information that is compatible with his view that this is really a big, big problem.
On the other hand, we have equally smart and well-informed Adam Townsend.
One of the people that I look to To make sure my opinion makes sense.
And Balaji as well.
So there are people who will instantly modify my opinion just because they're smarter and I just change my opinion sometimes when smart people say something else.
But Adam says and I think it would be really easy for me to mischaracterize the nuance of his argument so I apologize in advance to Adam if I'm doing that.
But I'll try my best To capture, right?
And I think the feeling is that maybe closing the economy was an overreaction based on what we're seeing.
So, and some of the sub-arguments there are that we're probably over-counting the number of deaths in New York.
So, does that sound right?
That we're probably over-counting the number of people dying from coronavirus?
Now, the argument here is that, especially for older patients who are the majority of the ones who are having the bad problems, older patients almost always have an underlying health condition.
Almost always. You know, if you're 70 plus, you've got something wrong with you.
You know, a little hypertension, got some COPD, maybe you've got a heart murmur, maybe you've got something.
So, But every time one of those people who has some other condition also has coronavirus, are they being recorded correctly?
So in other words, is it the coronavirus that really killed them?
Or did they have things that were going to kill them anyway?
And so the coronavirus was just coincidentally in their body too.
Now I don't know how you'd get to the bottom of that, but I'm just pointing out that that's an argument.
Likewise, the New York data shows that almost nobody is dying unless they have an underlying condition, which would suggest, well, maybe it's not that bad for regular people.
Except that most of us have some kind of underlying condition.
If you count overweight and asthma and everything else, a lot of us have an underlying condition, including me.
And then also, Adam has correctly pointed out that I believe the models for how many people were already supposed to be dead were not even close.
So in other words, apparently we're way less in deaths, way under, than the models at one time predicted.
Now, let's pull apart these two arguments because they're not exactly opposites.
I would say that Adam is more I think he's pointing out that you can't really rely on these numbers, and therefore you don't quite know what you're dealing with, and you don't necessarily know that it's so bad you should close the entire economy.
Here's what's interesting about this, besides the fact that they're both smart and they're looking at the same information.
We are so close to knowing who's right.
And neither of them are backing down.
We're so close.
Because in two weeks, you're going to know with a fair degree of certainty, right?
Was this as bad as the expert said?
Or did we just panic and it was more of a hysteria situation?
It was the way we were coding the deaths.
One of those two positions is going to be right.
Right? And we're going to know in two weeks.
And the fact that they're both pretty firm in their opposite opinions just fascinates me.
It's two movies on one screen.
All right. What will be the impact on climate change politics after all this is done?
Because I've never seen experts take a beating like this.
Have you? Can you think of any time in your life...
That the experts were so thoroughly discredited.
Not all the experts and not on all the facts.
But the whole don't wear, you don't need a face mask thing, that felt like some kind of a final straw.
Because it was just such a blatant lie.
And maybe they had good intentions, but it was such a blatant lie that I think experts are forever damaged.
At least, you know, for those of us who live through this, I've got a feeling that climate change from school looked different.
Now, I tweeted a page from my book, Loser Think, in which I was talking about.
So before the pandemic happened, I was saying one argument against spending all your money on climate change is it's not the only big threat.
And I listed pandemics and asteroids and cyber attacks and those sort of things as the other risks.
Now, look what this pandemic did to our economies.
Now, just imagine if this had happened, say, two years from now and you had a president, Bernie Sanders, just hypothetically.
If... If socialism had been in the process of revamping our economy, transitioning to it, let's say the AOC's got their way and won, what kind of shape would we be in now if we'd spent that much money on Green New Deal?
Could we still do as much as we are, even though we're basically broke already?
Could we do as much as we're doing against the pandemic?
So I don't know the answer to the question, but...
Everybody who thought they were smart, Nassim Taleb, would say, you have to spend as much as it takes to fix climate change, because it's something that could be a gigantic catastrophe.
And I would say, that only makes sense if you only have one problem.
One problem that could end you, then of course, yeah, you should overspend to drive that down to zero.
Even if you thought it was a 1% chance it would take out the planet, you still want to drive that to zero.
But if you have multiple risks, you just can't take the same strategy because you don't have infinite money to do everything.
So, as somebody on Twitter said, and some of you have said, I think the way out looks like this.
Once we have enough test kits, and we have enough of the hydroxychloroquine, and we're giving it to people early, those two things, plus wearing masks, plus keeping grandma socially isolated for a while, probably those things might be enough to get us back to work.
Because if it's true that the people who are working age, let's say people under 65, if people under 65 Get the hydroxychloroquine early and almost never need a ventilator.
Then all of your health care problems are largely solved because it's really the ventilator stage where all the problems come.
And then the rest of us could test like crazy.
Keep grandma locked up.
Wear your face masks for a few months until you feel like you're over it.
And maybe you can make it to the point where we can get the blood antibodies in us, and some people have a natural immunity, and then you get to the vaccines.
So we do have a way out.
But the way out depends on knowing when we'll have enough test kits, when we'll have enough masks, and when we'll have enough hydroxychloroquine, and the FDA is still happy with it, which I think is a given.
So we're kind of close to at least knowing what we need.
But as I mentioned, our government...
The task force is not telling us how long any of those things will be.
When will we have enough tests?
When will we have enough drugs and masks and stuff?
There's no excuse for it anymore.
There's just no excuse for them not giving us that kind of visibility on this.
Just no excuse. I could not be more angry about that.
Is China using the sickened bodies?
Using them for what? I mean, is China using the blood serum thing?
I believe that they did try it.
I think others are trying it too.
Big Pharma doesn't want a $20 cure.
That might be part of the problem.
Might be. Why hasn't the Trump administration hired you as a consultant?
Well, why would they hire me?
They get it for free. About pneumonia vaccines.
I was wondering about that, you know?
That's a good question.
Does the pneumonia vaccine protect you from coronavirus, since coronavirus, the risk is that it gives you pneumonia?
That's a good question. And why has nobody asked that question in public?
I have to see it on a comment here.
I'd love to see the answer to that.
China sent spreaders, you think?
Yeah. You know, I don't know about the...
I don't believe that China did this intentionally.
But there's a difference of opinion about whether you could tell if a virus was engineered.
So I've heard smart people say, oh, you could certainly tell if it was engineered.
To which I say...
Well, if the only thing you engineered was combining parts from existing viruses, you really think you could tell?
Because wouldn't it look like a virus like every other virus?
They all have the same kind of parts, but they're in different order, basically.
I feel like you could engineer a virus that nobody would know was engineered, as long as you used parts from existing viruses to give you what you wanted.
But I don't think it happened.
I do think it's more likely it came from some kind of a lab, but probably accidental.
All right. Was Venezuela a drug move, a message to China?
I believe so.
Yeah, let's talk about that.
So I talked about it a little last night.
Anything big that's happening in the world at the moment, you almost have to always ask yourself, eh, what's that got to do with China?
Because it feels like that's the backdrop to everything.
So when the president announced he was going to do more naval interdicting, mostly between, you know, South America and Central America.
So it wasn't really the Mexican cartels that were going after...
Well, I don't know. I'm not sure which cartels were involved.
But they were going after the routes between South America and Central America that would go over water, mostly.
And I don't know what that means.
So here's my question.
Are we so good at recognizing a smuggling boat that we can identify them and stop them?
I mean, it's a big ocean. Can we do that?
Can we tell every boat and what they're up to?
I just don't know if you can interdict anything.
So that's my first question is, does it really even make any difference?
If we send our entire Navy there, are we going to even know who to stop and search?
I don't know. But maybe we do, or at least it makes some difference.
But here's what I think.
I think it has more to do with moving our naval assets into the area.
If you know what I mean. Because Maduro is still there, and we've now put a price on his head, which allows us...
I think he's been determined to be some kind of a criminal, which allows us basically to kill him.
So we just put a bounty on his head, essentially told the world that, from our perspective, it's okay to kill him.
And then we just moved all of our military assets into his backyard.
But it's for allegedly a different reason.
Maybe. Maybe the only reason we're moving our military assets there is to take care of this little smuggling problem.
Because apparently Venezuela is using the drug money to replace money they're losing on oil and other stuff.
So it could be they're just starving the Maduro regime and it's exactly what the president says.
We're just going to stop the drug trade so that Maduro doesn't get this illegal drug money.
Could be just that. Or...
It could be an excuse to move our assets into the area without people thinking it's an invasion.
Just in case, we need to do a little invading.
Now, I don't know that we would put boots on the ground.
I don't know. I'm not a military strategist.
But if it all comes down to basically killing one guy, and you just socialized it with the world...
Because when the president put a price on his head, that was sort of saying to the world...
Hey, I'm just giving you a warning.
Is anybody going to have a problem because we're going to kill this guy?
Anybody? Because this would be the time to complain.
I don't know if anybody complained.
I didn't hear any. But you can imagine that China wasn't too happy because China is probably working with Maduro and they don't know if he's replaced by somebody else.
Let's say somebody elected democratically.
Would they work with China?
Because China had been one of their biggest trading partners with Venezuela.
I don't know what that looks like at the moment because Venezuela is falling apart.
But I would think that the President's larger strategic objective is to get China out of Venezuela, to get China out of our hemisphere.
I think maybe that matters more than anything else in the long run.
Wouldn't you think? You don't want China to have that much influence over anything in South America?
So, this could be, you know, this big move to maybe stop some drugs, but more likely block China.
So that's what I think.
That's what I think. It's a cartel.
Okay? Oil.
I don't know if anybody wants oil anymore.
Oil is so cheap, maybe nobody wants it anymore.
One theory is that drugs are how the flu got here.
Or the virus.
Yeah, maybe. Maybe.
But it seems more likely people.
So one of the things we're learning is that the amount of viral load you get matters.
So that when people are singing in the same room, the odds of them all getting it are pretty high.
So don't do any singing.
And wear your face mask.
Azithromycin is an antibiotic.
That is correct. So the azithromycin is useful if you actually have it, if you have the coronavirus.
But if you don't have it, you don't want an antibiotic in you.
Get China out of Africa too.
Well, I have a feeling that Africa is just going to blow up in their faces.
So maybe China can have Africa.
Why did CBS News use footage from an Italian hospital when describing conditions in New York?
Well, I don't think that you can bring cameras in to an American emergency room because of privacy.
So I'm sure it's just some producer said we need a picture of an operating room and they had one.
That's probably all it was.
Oil is up 35%.
News of the day.
Well, let's see what the stock market looks like.
Stock market looks, well, smartly up.
Smartly up, at least in a lot of categories.
More up than down.
Not bad. Alright, so that's good news.
You know, if you have to make a bet on the stock market price, let me give you a rule here.
That will work 75% of the time.
That whatever the market did yesterday, it'll do the other thing the next day.
So today looks like it's going to be a big up day.
If it ends the day up, you know, 3 to 5%, which would be a big day.
The odds of tomorrow also being up?
Much smaller. So there's like a...
I'd say there's a 75% chance in our current environment...
That the next day will be whatever is the opposite of today.
So if it were bad, it's going to be good.
If it's good, it's going to be bad.
But it's not going to happen every time.
It's at least 75% of the time.
And that's what allows you to creep up over time, that your ups outnumber your downs over time.
However, do not make any bets based on cartoonists speculating about magical things.
So don't take any investment advice from me.
How is chloroquine supposed to work?
Well, it keeps your body from going into that trying too hard to kill the virus mode.
It's your body that actually kills you, not the virus.
It's your body trying to fight the virus that makes your lungs stop working.
Do you think Biden is sound of mind?
No, not even close.
I think that...
I don't think there are any Democrats at this point, at least, you know, the professionals.
I don't think that they think that Biden is capable.
Yeah, the virus could come back year after year, but we would have some immunity by then, so it wouldn't be as bad.
No price increase until Saudi's lower production.
All right, I don't know what the situation there is.
It's 35% down, dear.
So is somebody saying that oil is down?
Or is it up? I don't know.
It'll be whatever is the difference tomorrow.
So tomorrow it'll be whatever is different than that.
Is Cuomo going to replace Biden?
He says no. And I don't know how he would run for president.
I think he's pretty busy.
Yes, I'm sticking with my 5,000 net.
Keyword net, so when all of you come back later to tell me I'm wrong, you'll forget the net part.
So let me say in advance, you stupid idiot, you forgot the net part.
So you're not criticizing me, you're criticizing your own hallucination.
I like to tell you what I'm going to say weeks in advance.
So the 5,000 net makes this assumption.
Because we're shut down, there are a whole bunch of lives that are not being lost, traffic accidents, etc.
And you have to net that out.
Because the decision to close the economy is the decision about how to treat the virus.
So it's all part of the same decision.
You can't say, this many people died in the hospital, and then ignore the fact that twice as many people are alive who would have been dead under other conditions.
So at the moment, we're still negative.
My understanding is that the number of people who have been saved by not having a normal economy is still quite a bit bigger than the total number who are dead.
Now, I do expect that to reverse, so it's not going to stay that way.
And the economy itself will cause some problems with poverty too, and that's hard to net that out of there.
Why am I away from Christina?
Somebody says. Well, here's the situation.
So, she has her own house, and she took in a family member.
You know, it's emergency time, so people are doing what they have to do.
And one of her family members works at a hospital.
So, in Christina's house, it's only young people.
And... And one of them has a critical job at a hospital.
So I can't be in a house where there's somebody going to a hospital and coming home.
So I'm in my big old house alone with no human contact.
What about the three candidates catching coronavirus?
Well, it's possible. You know, I said that a question that should be asked...
Of the task force is, are they already taking hydroxychloroquine?
And I'm really surprised that didn't get asked yesterday, because it's such an obvious question, isn't it?
Isn't it like just a super obvious question?
Mr. President, Mr.
Vice President, are you taking hydroxychloroquine for preventive reasons?
Because wouldn't you be surprised if they're not?
I would be a little worried if they're not, right?
Because the task force people just don't have the same flexibility that we do.
I mean, even when they're standing on the stage, they're closer than six feet away from each other.
So I feel like that's just a given.
They should be on it, and they should tell us.
I think that we're owed that.
I think we're owed that information.
Yeah, somebody said, what about obesity?
Yeah. So there's some indication, at least in Italy, that something like, or maybe other countries do, something like 80 to 90% of the people dying are obese, or at least they're overweight quite a bit.
So does that then tell me that I don't have as much of a risk if I'm a normal average weight?
I don't know. It feels like it.
But I also have a little asthma.
Now, Having a little asthma, which is well controlled, does that put me at the same risk as somebody who has COPD? Because they lump them together.
You know, if you have lung disease, it's like a big category.
But if you have COPD and you're 80, you're pretty close to death anyway.
So I can see how the virus would finish you off.
But if you're in good shape, Normal weight, everything's fine, but you've got a little bit of asthma that's well-controlled.
Am I in the death group?
I'm going to act like I am, because I don't want to take the chance, but I kind of doubt that my risk is just like an 80-year-old with COPD. Anyway.
Let's see. Help name the Fortune 500 ETF. Well, they're ETFs and they're spiders.
There's a technical difference, but they act the same.
So the one I use is SPY, S-P-Y. So if you look for that in your online brokerage, S-P-Y, it'll pop up and it's a basket of the top 500 stocks in the United States.
I'm not recommending it.
I only recommend diversification.
That basket of stocks does give you diversification, but I don't recommend it.
Find your own way to make it work, but diversifying is good.
I tell you, Chris Cuomo is just getting more interesting all the time, unfortunately not for happy reasons, but I don't know if you saw he was talking about his fevers and hallucinations.
And I don't know how many of you are doing this, but I spend part of every day going through my memory of how sick I was in January and trying to convince myself that I already had it.
Because my January was the sickest I've been as an adult.
Maybe. I mean, you witnessed some of it.
I thought I had nasal problems and fever and night sweats and everything.
And I thought it was the meds, because I was on meds for some sinus stuff.
And maybe it wasn't.
Because I felt sicker than I've ever felt in my life, but I thought it was just a bad reaction to some meds.
But maybe I had it.
Who knew? All right.
Asthma is part of the COPD-Venn diagram.
I know. But I just don't know that COPD and asthma are going to respond the same to this virus.