Episode 900 Scott Adams: Why I Have Decided to Identify as Woman to Lower My #Coronavirus Risk
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Content:
Debunking the pneumonia death chart, kudos Tyler Morgan!
Overruling non-data based requests for ventilators and PPE
Coronavirus net death estimate
Dr. Birx and how deaths are classified
President Trump's response to an unprepared reporter
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It is. Have you noticed that not a single person who regularly watches Coffee with Scott Adams has died from the coronavirus?
It's true. If there's anybody on here who can refute that claim, please let me know.
But for now, I'm going to say that watching Coffee with Scott Adams and the simultaneous sip has some protective qualities that are just as proven as hydroxychloroquine.
Unfortunately, that's true.
But it's a good thing you hear, because You can enjoy the protective value of the simultaneous sip, and all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or chalice or sign, a canteen jug or flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine at the end of the day, the thing that makes everything, including the pandemic, better.
I just realized that you can't spell pandemic without damn.
Probably doesn't mean anything.
But it's time for the simultaneous sip.
Go. The Pandemic.
I guess you can spell it without dam.
But you can't spell it without dem.
Wait a minute. Wait a minute.
You can't spell pandemic without dem.
Hmm. All right.
So, here's the most fun story of the day.
Most of you have seen on social media a chart that seemed to show that the number of pneumonia deaths this year fell off a cliff just when we started reporting the coronavirus deaths.
And the implication...
Is that regular pneumonia was being classified incorrectly as coronavirus deaths, because why would the pneumonia deaths suddenly just disappear when they've never done that any other year this month?
All the other years had a somewhat, you know, similar curve, except this one went boop.
Now, to catch you up, I saw that chart and said to myself, that looks like a fake chart.
And so I challenged the world to debunk it or not debunk it, and pretty soon there was a debunker.
But then, as I reported yesterday, there was a debunker of the debunker.
So I started out thinking, well, it's debunked, and then somebody debunked the debunking, and I thought, well, maybe it's not.
But I'm going to show you how to end an argument.
You've never seen an argument ended as eloquently as the one I'm going to end right now.
And this is with the help of Tyler Morgan, whose profile says he's a freelance data scientist, software developer, business analyst, and mining engineer.
So he's a freelance data scientist.
So that's exactly the right skill set.
To look at this chart and then look at the data and tell us if this chart is accurately reflecting the data, all right?
So it's the right job, the right guy.
But wow! Talk about nailing it.
I have to show it to you and I don't know if you'll be able to see it.
I'm gonna see. Can you see this if I hold it?
Let me see if I can.
I'll change the lighting setting on here and darken it and then I think Take it out, because you have to see it moving.
So here's a chart made by Tyler Morgan, data analyst.
Let's see if you can see it.
If I hold it just right, I think you can all...
darn it! Oh, this is such a good chart.
I have to try one more time to see if I can let you see that because this is just so good.
How about now? Oh, kind of.
All right. So, damn it.
I have to hold it just right.
This is so annoying. Oh, I guess it probably color adjusted.
That's what happened. Yeah, alright.
Well, this would be really impressive if you could see it.
Let me describe it, for those of you who are just listening.
So, Tyler Morgan, who is a freelance data scientist, took all the data from the CDC, and this is the source, the same source, that the allegedly misleading graph used.
And when he graphed it, he graphed it in the same timing as the other years had been graphed.
In other words, he built his graph to show the curve being built up over time as the reporting came in each month for prior years.
And what he found, somebody said, turn blue light off.
Let me try that.
Alexa, turn off studio.
All right, so let's see if I go dark, if you can see that.
Oh, almost!
There it is. You can almost see it moving in the dark there.
All right, so you see the little line below.
It's actually a different line for each year.
You can't tell that there are different colors for the year.
But what you can see is that the line starts out seeming to have this inexplicable dip when it reaches the middle there.
It seems to be dipping down, but that's a fake dip caused by the known lag in data.
So as the data comes in, the curve just goes back to where all the other curves are for the prior years.
So I'm glad whoever said to turn off the blue light, that was exactly the right answer, so thank you for doing that.
But look how perfectly this ends the argument.
Because that line is for not just this year, but it's for every prior year.
And you can see that every year at this time, there's an unexplained dip, which actually is explained by the lag, and all of them will be the same.
So, Alexa, turn on studio.
Sorry, I'm triggering all your devices at home.
But since you don't have a studio, it probably won't hurt anything.
All right. So, I've never seen an argument ended so perfectly, have you?
Have you ever seen an argument on Twitter that actually came to some kind of a conclusion?
Usually, you could argue forever, and if we'd only been arguing without the benefit of an animated graph, because it was the animation that brought it alive.
Now, I'd like to tie this point To the point I've been making since day one about the task force.
You've seen me just complaining endlessly that the task force gives you raw numbers and doesn't put them in context.
So I don't care how many masks you delivered unless I know how many you needed.
It doesn't tell me if you got 10% as what you needed or 110%.
And my point is that they had the wrong people working so that the task force simply didn't have anybody on their On their team who was as talented as Tyler Morgan.
So, you know, guy on internet just totally nails his data visualization.
Like, honestly, this is the best data visualization I've ever seen in my life in terms of getting you to, you know, an answer in a way that just ends the conversation.
It's probably the best one I've ever seen.
So somebody like him should have been working with the task force To give us a picture, give us a graph, give us some kind of visual sense of are we getting close to getting enough supplies or not?
Here's my sense of it.
I think we're going to overshoot the supplies.
And I was happy when Dr.
Brooks was talking about the system, because you know I always obsess about a system.
You know, rather than saying it's our goal to get everybody enough stuff, I always say, well, it's great to have a goal, but what's your system?
If you don't have a system, you're not going to achieve your goal.
So Dr. Brooks, for the first time, gave a little detail of the system.
So apparently, at the federal level, they do have some visibility into the hospitals.
It's becoming apparent that at least part of the problem for them getting numbers about how much people have and how much they need, and I think this is very clear now, is that the hospitals were lying to them.
And it must have been obvious.
In other words, hospitals were saying, ah, yeah, we're going to need a million masks, when they might have thought they needed 100,000, but they didn't want to run out.
So everybody's sort of maximizing their selfish individual hospital benefit.
And that's not a flaw in the people.
The system causes everybody to try to maximize their individual benefit, and you hope things work out in the long run.
But if they start hoarding, that doesn't work.
You know, capitalism works even when everybody's selfish, because the rules of capitalism and the transparency and everything allow that to work.
But it doesn't always work.
All right. So, Cuomo was saying he needed 30,000 ventilators.
So what I think is that now that Birx has described the system in which the federal government has some visibility and they're overruling the requests from the individual areas, which I think is exactly what I wanted to hear.
Because in order to make sure that the places with an immediate need can get ventilators and stuff transferred to them is the government needs to look at their numbers of all the hospitals reporting and then act like an adult and say, you don't need a million of these.
I know you want a million, and I know you'd feel better if you had a million, and I know you can pay for a million, But maybe this isn't statistically where we need a million masks.
So when Birx, the doctor, described that that was their system where the federal government had visibility.
That was the first thing I needed to know that I didn't know.
I didn't know that they had visibility.
And then also they were doubting the requests.
That makes me very comfortable.
I want the federal government to be playing the adult and doubting the need of individual things and putting a larger analytical frame on it so that they can adjust things.
With that system in place, and absent the government saying, uh-oh, we have a big emergency in this one supply, if the government thought they were going to run out of supplies at this point, as of today's vantage point, I'm almost positive You would be hearing something like this.
You know, we're really short on this supply.
But you're not hearing that, right?
You're hearing sort of a general, we need more of everything.
The fact that it's only general and nobody's saying, my God, we ran out of this one thing, we've got to get these tomorrow, suggests that the government might be comfortable that we'll have enough everywhere.
And that comfort might come entirely From their newfound ability to overrule the hospitals and move things where the federal government, the National Guard, etc.
So, I'm going to give the task force a C+. For reporting about how many materials that we need.
I did give them an F yesterday based on the fact that they provided no context for us to know whether the numbers they were reporting were enough or too much.
But I'm revising that today because now with the understanding of that they have a system, The system is completely rational from, you know, me as an observer.
I would say, yeah, that is exactly the system you needed.
I believe it exists.
I don't think Dr. Brooks is, you know, lying or misleading us that such a system exists.
So with the knowledge that that system exists, and the fact that the government isn't calling out some specific supply that's the extra emergency, And the fact that the estimates have gone way down strongly suggests that our government thinks they'll have enough of everything.
Would you agree, by the way?
Would you agree that just sort of reading the hints suggests that the government does think that they'll have enough?
Now, that's probably a new opinion based on the fact that the death count estimates also went down.
And they built a system for adjusting where you need things when.
So I'm going to give them a C +, because I think there might be a valid reason for not giving us the details.
One of them is they don't believe the details coming from the hospitals.
So if they were to report it, they would have to simultaneously say, but we don't think the numbers are real.
We think all the hospitals are lying to us to pad their supplies.
Although I would have been okay with that.
But given that they have a system, I'm okay without the details because I don't think there's a problem.
And I also think it's completely sensible, if not completely ethical.
No, I will say this. Let me say this.
If the government thinks that we're going to make way too many ventilators and masks, they should still keep pushing as hard as they are.
Even if we're not going to use them in the United States.
Because remember, even though we want to be America first, it's a global problem.
And if we don't get a control on the rest of the globe, or they don't get a control on it, it does come back to us, right?
So for selfish reasons, you have to help the world.
It's an enlightened selfishness, but you do have to help the world.
If we make 10 times more ventilators than we need and we can share them with countries that don't have enough, I'd say that is ethically and morally required.
I would say that's required at this point.
Wouldn't you say? You know, if we have enough in the United States but we could make more, I think we're ethically, morally required to make them if we can.
So at this point, I'm pretty good with what the task force is doing with supplies.
Let's see.
I'm already seeing the debate of the people disagreeing whether the death counts are going down because we estimated them wrong from the beginning.
Or because the mitigation works, right?
I told you that this debate will never end, and when it's done, we still never know.
We'll never know. I mean, you might think you know, but you might not.
Speaking of death estimates, Dr.
Chris Murray, Director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.
So there's more than one model of death, but this model is at least notable enough that it was it was on TV news and their model says that the new predicted death count is around 82,000.
So the US death count by this model, which is one of the big ones, is lower to 82,000.
Now, That's 82,000 gross.
So that would be the number of people who are coded as dying from coronavirus in the United States.
But over that period, which will be a few months, there will also be, and we know for sure, that a number of regular deaths will be avoided.
So a whole bunch of regular deaths won't happen.
So you have to net the 82,000, and how many regular deaths won't happen During this period.
I don't know the exact number, but it's in the tens of thousands.
So let's say it's 50,000.
So let's say there are 50,000 avoided, 82,000 coronavirus deaths.
So you take the difference.
So you'd be at 32,000 deaths net.
And this is an official estimate.
So this is somebody who does this.
You know, it's not the imperial...
Imperial model, but it's one of the ones that gets thrown in that conversation.
And if it gets down to 32,000 net, that's just the current estimate.
That's not the estimate, assuming that we get even better at reducing the deaths.
And do you think that we'll get even better?
You know, do you think we'll, do you think that it will get even better?
I might. So whose estimate will be the closest when we're all done?
Remember, my estimate was 5,000 or less net.
Suppose the number comes in at 32,000 net.
Who had the closest estimate?
The experts?
Who said maybe 100 or 200,000?
Maybe a million?
Or the cartoonist?
Who would be...
Somebody says there...
Is somebody re-estimating it down to the 60,000 level?
Oh my god, I feel like I'm gonna kill somebody.
Somebody in the comments says, have you given up on your 5,000 net?
I'm not going to block you because you're just confused.
But let me tell you, it's always 5,000 net.
If you ask me in 100 years, that will still be my prediction.
It could be right.
It could be wrong.
But it's never gonna be gross.
It will always be net.
Always has been.
5,000 net.
Please never ask me again if I've changed it.
Because even if I update it, I will be saying that the 5,000 net was wrong.
So it would be, it would just be a new prediction if I change it.
But this one is, it's, it's hard coded.
That's my prediction. Right or wrong.
Now if I change my prediction, that would be a second prediction That could be judged right or wrong, but the first one would be wrong if I change it.
All right. There's also...
CNN is mocking the conservative people for saying that the death count may be over-counted.
And this is Brian Stelter on CNN. So I have to read this because I think it's always funny the way CNN... Biases, their opinion stuff.
Well, I guess opinions are biased by nature.
So this is Brian Stelter on CNN. He says, some of the biggest names in right-wing media are questioning the official COVID-19 death toll.
All right, so some of the biggest names in right-wing media.
So later he goes on to name who he's talking about these biggest names in right-wing media.
And he lists them. He says, Rush Limbaugh.
And I'm thinking, yeah, yeah, that's about the biggest name in right-wing.
Well, conservative anyway.
I wouldn't call him right-wing. Mark Levin, yeah, yeah, big name, conservative.
Tucker Carlson, of course.
Brigham, yeah. And then he throws in Diamond and Silk.
Now, I love Diamond and Silk, and what they do is tremendous.
I mean, there's a reason that they're successful.
They're very talented and charismatic, and they're great.
But I'm not sure I'd throw them in the same category with Tucker Carlson and Brit Hume.
But, you know, that's just what's funny, is that CNN likes to, you know, just lump everybody together for their purposes.
Anyway, here's his point.
He's saying that all these conservative types, who he calls right wing, but I would just say they're conservative, they're suggesting that the numbers might be inflated in an effort to paint President Trump as doing a worse job.
And I think that the evidence of that is Dr.
Birx said at the press conference that if somebody comes in with two conditions, let's say diabetes and also coronavirus, and they die, that they call that a coronavirus death, not a diabetes death.
If they come in with hypertension and coronavirus, they call it a coronavirus death.
Now, I think that a lot of conservative people are saying, wait a minute, Between the fact that you've already admitted that you can't tell what they died of, and yet you're coding them all as coronavirus deaths just because they have coronavirus in them.
There must be a lot of people dying, coincidentally, who also have an infection.
So they're saying, well, that's an obvious way that you're over-counting.
And then they look at that graph that's been debunked, and they say, well, there it is.
There's the proof. Dr.
Birx has admitted That they're coding them coronavirus without really knowing.
And then you look at the graph and it shows there's a big drop-off in pneumonias.
Boom! You put those two things together and therefore it's obvious that the number of pneumonia deaths have been undercounted and that they've illegitimately counted them as coronavirus deaths and therefore the number is inflated.
Here's what's wrong with that point of view.
Everything. All right.
So whoever is associated with that point of view, that's just dead wrong as far as I can tell.
Number one, remember there are two points of data that they're using.
Number one is that graph that I talked about earlier, which is completely debunked.
So in terms of looking at the data as it's presented on the graph, It's just fake news, bad data.
So half of the argument, I don't know if this is true for all the individuals that I mentioned, but in general, half of the argument is based on a graph which we know is based on lagging data and not accurate.
I won't call it a fake.
Some people object to be calling it fake because that sounds like it was intentionally faked.
But fake also just means untrue.
So the graph is untrue.
I don't think anybody necessarily did that intentionally.
Secondly, what do you make of the fact that Dr.
Brooks admits in public that if somebody comes in with two conditions, either one of them could kill you, but if one of them is coronavirus, they call it a coronavirus death.
Does that inflate the number of coronavirus deaths?
I think not.
But every one of you thinks yes, right?
Probably almost every one of you, at least 90% of you, are saying, well, duh.
If they come in with two things that could kill you, and you don't know which one killed you, and they're not checking, they're not doing an autopsy, obviously, that gets you accidentally over-counting, right?
Just obviously. It couldn't be more obvious, right?
I disagree. I'm going to side with Dr.
Birx. Here's why.
Statistically speaking, what are the odds that your diabetes was going to kill you that day?
If you had diabetes, you probably didn't get it on Tuesday.
You probably had diabetes for 15 years.
If you have diabetes for 15 years, You go in one week for coronavirus and you die.
Is it statistically invalid to say, well, we can't guarantee it was the coronavirus, but what are the odds that you've had this problem for 15 years and this is the week you died?
So I'm going to say it is true that you can't tell.
You cannot be 100% sure that somebody went into the hospital, died because of the coronavirus.
But I do feel confident that from a statistical point of view, it's probably well over 90% accurate.
Well over 90%.
Anybody disagree?
Now, add to that how many people died at home of a heart attack who also had coronavirus, but it didn't make any difference because they died of a heart attack.
And nobody checks for coronavirus.
The EMTs come to your house, they see you had a heart attack, you've never been diagnosed for coronavirus, how do they code it?
Well, I'm sure they code it as a heart attack, because that's what it was.
So you have a tremendous problem in coding these things, but it could work either way.
It could be a little push and pull, not necessarily equal.
But I'm just saying that there might be inaccuracies in both directions.
And in my opinion, Dr.
Birx is on completely sound statistical ground because the odds that you've had cancer for six months, but this is the week you died, could be because of the cancer.
Could be. But if you're also struggling for oxygen, and your lungs are collapsing exactly like a coronavirus patient, and you've got what the ER doctors call that distinguishing your red eyes, apparently your eyes get red around the edges,
and it could be a coincidence that you died of something else, but I think statistically I'm going to say that there is no evidence to support the conservative point of view that there is obviously over-counting.
There could be over-counted, but the evidence that's used to suggest that there is is completely invalid.
Somebody says, Scott, I disagree.
Oh, you're so close to getting blocked.
If you had said, Scott, you're wrong, I would have blocked you.
Because, you know, I always tell you that you can tell me why I'm wrong.
Because even though you don't have that much room in the text, you could suggest the topic of which I'm wrong.
So you might have said, for example, I think you're forgetting this factor.
I mean, you don't have to go into details.
You could say, have you considered this?
Doesn't take many characters.
But if you're just telling me I'm wrong, you get blocked.
Whoever said, Scott, I disagree, you're right on the edge of getting blocked, but I'm gonna let you go with a warning, okay?
Who benefits from extended lockdown?
Crazy talk. That's crazy talk, right?
Everybody who believes that the lockdown is some kind of a clever scheme by some kind of political or other operative, in my opinion, It's crazy talk.
You should just stop doing it.
Now, that's not to say that there aren't people who are thinking, well, if we had to have a crisis, we might as well get something out of it.
I'm sure there are those people.
But in general, I think nobody's doing this for advantage.
I think people are, you know, biased the way they're biased.
CNN will always criticize the president no matter what.
But you sort of discount that in your mind.
Speaking of the press and the president.
There are a couple of funny things.
If you watched the press conference, you saw President Trump go full Simon Cowell.
Now, you could argue that Simon Cowell is really just Trump because they both like to insult their critics.
But the thing about Simon Cowell is that he'd be He would be cruel to people who were just trying to do their job, just trying to sing.
So Simon Cowell had that special kind of cruelness.
There wasn't anybody who did anything to Simon Cowell.
President Trump generally has the kind of cruelness where he's just getting back at people who criticized him first.
So Simon Cowell is worse, in the sense that he'll criticize somebody that didn't do anything to him first.
So, with that in mind, there's a reporter for, I don't know who it was, I didn't recognize him.
So, the reporter starts to ask the question of President Trump, and he starts, he goes, quote, checking on oil again today, and then the president cuts him off at mid-sentence.
He goes, where is it today?
Give me the price. And the reporter says, I'm not sure, to be honest.
And then Trump says, how can he ask a question when you don't know the price?
And the reporter says, I'll look it up.
And Trump cuts him off and he goes, just let me go to somebody else.
It was the coldest thing I've ever seen a president do.
What's the price of oil? You don't know?
Well, I'll go to somebody who knows how to ask a question.
And oh my God, I was watching that and I just thought to myself, Oh my God.
Because I was putting myself in the shoes of this reporter.
And again, I don't know what El Leti was from.
Maybe somebody here can tell me.
But since they have to take turns, even to getting into the press room.
So first of all, it's the hardest thing in the world to get into the room.
In a normal time, In a normal time, it'd be hard to be important enough to be in that room with the president at the press conference.
But because of social distancing, they're only letting them sit, you know, every third chair or whatever it is.
So to get into the room under these conditions is very rare.
And I didn't recognize him, so I don't know if he's ever been in the room before.
It might have been the first time he's ever asked the question to the president on live TV. I don't know that, but I've never seen him before, and I'm thinking it might be.
Imagine what his day was like, the reporter.
Imagine what he found out.
Okay, this is a very rare honor, but you're going to be in the room.
It's going to be national TV, and it's not a regular press conference.
The whole country, in fact, the whole world is watching these.
These are really highly rated.
Only a few of you are chosen, and of all the reporters in the world, you're one of the, I don't know, Eight?
Ten? How many were in the room?
And you get to ask a question on national TV. Make it good.
Make it good. This is your moment to shine.
Checking on the oil gap.
Where is it? Give me the price.
I'm not sure to be honest.
How can he ask a question when you don't know the price?
I'll look it up. Let me just go to someone else.
Oh my God. Oh my God.
Now I've said before, That I could watch this all day long, and it's true.
Because I think the President knew what outlet this person was from, and he probably knew in advance it wasn't going to be a real question, right?
It probably wasn't going to be a real question, it was just going to be another gotcha question.
I'm guessing the President sniffed it out because of who he worked for, the reporter.
So that was pretty funny.
The other press failure is there's reporting that President Trump could gain financially by the hydroxychloroquine drug.
And apparently it's true.
It's true. Apparently the President could gain financially If people use this drug that he's promoting that has not passed all the scientific clinical tests.
Sounds pretty bad, doesn't it?
President of the United States promoting an unproven drug that he has a financial interest in?
Wow! Wow!
The press nailed him!
Got him! They got him this time.
Let's see. How many millions does he stand to make on this?
Well, let's see. It's in a blind trust.
And it's a managed portfolio, so he doesn't directly own the stock.
It's in a managed basket of stocks by some other company that does investing for him.
And how much, what percentage?
Well, if you do the math, it looks like the president, if everything went well, and Sanofi, you know, their stock went up, I think the president could stand to, and this is just an estimate, I mean, I could be off a little bit, but I think the president stands to make hundreds of dollars.
Hundreds. Yeah, hundreds of dollars.
No, not hundreds of millions of dollars.
Based on the amount of stock he owns, indirectly through a fund that owns lots of stocks including this one, according to Mike Cernovich who bothered to do the math and basically tweet shamed the rest of the media for not even bothering to do the math.
Yeah, apparently the gain could be all of maybe a few hundred dollars if everything went right.
Best case scenario, President Trump could make hundreds of dollars off of this.
That was world news.
World news that he could make hundreds of dollars if everything went right.
So your press has not been covering themselves with glory.
Let's talk about Pope Francis.
You know, it's good that we have these religious and moral leaders Because when you have a big crisis and emergency, they can be very helpful.
In normal times, they're helpful, but you really need a moral and spiritual leader like the Pope to really get on board and be useful during this time of emergency.
So here's what he said. Pope Francis has said that the coronavirus pandemic is one of, quote, nature's responses to humans ignoring the current ecological crisis.
Okay, I take back everything I said.
It turns out that our moral and religious leaders are no use whatsoever in an emergency.
Maybe making it worse, possibly.
But nice try, Pope Francis.
Thanks for playing.
That didn't work out. Let's see what else is going on.
I'm going to check that number of deaths to see if it really got lowered.
Now, I tweeted provocatively.
I tweeted provocatively this.
And I have to read you my tweet in the exact wording, because if you don't do the exact wording, it doesn't work.
It said, I would never compare President Trump to Jesus.
But it is worth noting that they are somewhat comparable in terms of curing illnesses.
I mean, I'm talking about the Democratic representative who credits President Trump with saving her life by recommending the hydroxychloroquine.
And then I go on and said, and to be fair, I don't think Jesus could have come back after the Access Hollywood tape.
If you think about it, that was pretty miraculous.
But overall, Jesus is way, way better than Trump.
So I want to be very clear, I'm not comparing Trump to Jesus.
It's just sort of objectively true that Trump is going to have some cures.
Jesus had some cures, but we're not keeping score.
We're not keeping score.
I'm not saying he's better than Jesus.
Come on, don't even think that.
I'm just saying that they both have some cures.
And they're coming back from the Access Hollywood tape.
I don't think anybody expected that comeback, so just pointing it out.
But overall, overall, just so we're on the same page here, overall, Jesus is way, way better than Trump.
We all agree on that, right?
Okay. Glad we're on the same page.
Thank you. So the New York City Health Department, they've been asked whether it was safe to have sex during the coronavirus thing.
And so they issued some guidelines.
So this is the New York City Health Department.
And they said that you should, they recommend that you only get intimate with someone in your household, along with Oh, I can't say this word because your kids are home.
But this is coming from an official government source, the New York City Health Department.
So let's put it this way.
The other thing that they recommend, the last part of the word is Bayesian.
The first part of the word is Baster.
So that's what they recommend.
Either only get intimate with someone who's already in your household, Or you could do the Bayesian thing, first part, master.
And I thought to myself, well, I'm kind of limited to people in my household.
My fiancé is in a different house.
Sort of Snickers and Boo, my dog and my cat.
So I held a little house meeting, and I talked to my dog and my cat, and I said, this isn't me talking.
This is an official government source, and I said, they're recommending that you can only get intimate with somebody who's already in your house.
So I was sort of feeling them out on this, and I got a no from both of them, it turns out.
They were both like, no, forget about it.
And then they both recommended, and this is weird, I didn't see it coming, but the dog recommended Did I do that Bayesian thing?
First word, master.
And when the dog said that to me, I thought, are you kidding?
Are you kidding? Are you telling me that I've just spent the last month completely alone in this big house of mine, and I could have been doing that with all my free time, my Wi-Fi, and my access to the internet?
Are you telling me I could have been doing that the whole time?
I was waiting for some kind of a guideline, and man, was I getting frustrated.
But thank you to the New York City Health Department and to my dog Snickers for giving me the big okay there.
I'm just saying I feel a lot better today.
I'm just feeling a lot better today.
All right. I looked at my odds according to one list.
So my odds of dying from the coronavirus, because I live in California, And apparently California is really nailing it on this coronavirus stuff.
Really nailing it.
So my odds of dying as a Californian are 1 in 100,000.
1 in 100,000.
Now, of course, I'm in the high-risk group, so mine is actually higher, but it's kind of good to know that for the average Californian, it's 1 in 100,000.
Now, if somebody says your odds of dying, or somebody in your family, the odds are 1 in 100,000 if you go back to work, you'd go back to work, wouldn't you?
I think you would, right?
1 in 100,000, you'd say, yeah, that's good enough.
If it's 1 in 100,000, You might say, I'm not going to kill 1 in 100 people by going back to work, because that's going to be somebody I know, right?
You know, if 1 in 100 people died of coronavirus, that would include people you know.
But 1 in 100,000, maybe not.
All right. Now, I've decided that the other thing is that males have a way higher chance of dying from coronavirus than females.
And they don't know exactly what the difference is, something genetic.
But men are dying at a much higher rate than women, and that wasn't a risk I was willing to take.
So from now until the coronavirus crisis has passed, I'm going to identify as female.
It's not that I feel that way on the inside, but I'm just trying to manage my coronavirus risk because I understand the coronavirus is much more aggressive against men.
So just for a few months, I'm going to identify female.
It's only for statistical reasons, only for health reasons, and then depending how I like it.
If I like it, I might keep it, but probably at the end of the summer I might go back.
All right. There is still this weird, fake, ridiculous debate in the news about whether President Trump was ignoring the advice of his aides and not acting more aggressively on the coronavirus more early.
And the evidence they give is this January 29th memo from Navarro, who's getting a lot of credit, by the way.
He's a PhD social scientist.
He knows how to read studies.
So even though he's not a health Care guy, he can read the news, he can read the statistics, he can look at the studies.
So he wrote a memo saying, uh-oh, we've got big trouble with this coronavirus.
We should act aggressively.
Two days later, President Trump closed the airport.
And the news is trying to find some distance between January 29th An aide writing a persuasive memo that we should close the airport.
And two days later, well, the aide just said it was a big problem.
But two days later, the president acting aggressively, exactly as the aide would have wanted.
And the president says he doesn't remember the memo.
But I imagine lots of people were reading the memo, and maybe there was lots of conversation around it.
So I think the memo probably had some impact.
If only on other aides who took the message to him.
But I believe him when he says he doesn't remember seeing the memo.
Now, is there really any distance there?
Are those two days between January 29th and January 31st, is that where you're going to find out that the president wasn't listening to his aides for two days?
One of the biggest decisions in all of the global problems in the world.
One of the biggest questions. And within two days, he took the recommendation from a top aide who is being credited with getting it right.
Two days! Really?
Really? That's where we're going to find that if the President waited two days to take the recommendation that was right, And that's a criticism?
Are you kidding me?
So here's something else I'm going to tell you that I probably shouldn't, but I will.
Because I've been talking more about politics, I've gotten to meet a lot of people and to See behind the curtain on a number of big stories.
So it's quite common that there will be a headline story and the news will report it one way and of course CNN reports it one way and Fox reports it another.
But it's fairly common at this point That I already knew the story before it was in the news, and I know the real story behind it, and it's not the story that anybody's reporting.
It happens fairly often.
And by the way, if you know anybody who works, let's say, in a government, or even for a big company, and you say, hey, tell me the real story about this big decision, something that everybody knows about, you almost always find out that the real story It's just never the one that's reported in the news because there's always some context that's deeply important that just doesn't get reported.
So the news you're getting from the left and the right are typically so out of context and wrong that neither of them are really telling you what's happening, especially if it's reports about something that happened behind closed doors.
Now, if it's a hurricane or something, everybody gets that right.
But if it's a report about what somebody said or did or felt or thought behind closed doors when not many people are watching and there's various anonymous reports and stuff like that, I wouldn't trust either the reporting on the left or the right.
So my experience is that every time, every time, You can get the real story from the real people.
It's not the one that was reported in the news.
Every time. Every time.
It's not the one that was reported by the news, left or right.
So, this is by way of saying that the story about how the president made his decision, there's way more to the story than you know.
And it goes way beyond Peter Navarro.
So I was aware at the time of a disagreement within the staff about how seriously to treat it and how to advise the president and how he should deal with it.
So I can tell you just from the little bit I know from the peripheral that none of it's being reported accurately.
So I wish I could tell you a little bit more of what I know, but it doesn't work that way, because then you don't get to see behind the curtain anymore.
You know, if you report everything you see, you don't get to see behind the curtain anymore.
And I like seeing behind the curtain.
So I'll just tell you that the news is, it's just so misleading that you wouldn't really know what was happening.
But it's more interesting than you think.
That's all I'm going to say. There's a funny story.
In the news, there's some mayor, it doesn't matter where, I don't know, Indiana or Illinois or someplace, the mayor ordered the police to crack down on social gatherings.
So the police went to this bar and they basically told the people in the bar, hey, you can't be in this bar, no social gathering, go home.
And one of the people that they found at the bar was the mayor's wife.
Poor guy. I think it's the only way somebody's saying in the comments.
So this poor mayor orders a crackdown on social gatherings.
The police find his wife at a bar.
And reportedly he told the police to treat her exactly the way they're treating everybody else.
And I don't think anybody got arrested.
Probably just got sent home with a warning.
So that's bad luck.
And I'll tell you, if your wife's at a bar, that's not the way you want to find out about it.
I'm just saying. It's not the way you want to find out about it.
All right.
Those are all the things I think I wanted to talk about today.
Yeah.
Somebody says, I wonder if it was with another man.
Well, I'm sure it was with a group.
But certainly some questions are raised.
So since yesterday you all asked me to look at Dr.
Shiva's opinions, so I did look at his Twitter feed, looked at some of his videos, some of his tweets and stuff, and I can't figure out one opinion that you're interested in.
Because he has a pretty wide portfolio of opinions on different elements of different things about the whole thing.
And I didn't see anything there that I could figure out why you needed my opinion on it.
So maybe if somebody could be more specific, I would give you an opinion.
So if you say, so I can't respond to what do you think of Dr.
Shiva's opinion, because there are lots of them.
And the ones I looked at looked reasonable to me.
I didn't see anything that jumped out.
As being out of bounds.
I think the most controversial thing I saw was he was talking about vitamin A and vitamin D being helpful in these situations.
To which I say, I don't know, he's probably got some science to that.
Vitamin D is obviously scientifically compatible.
Vitamin A, maybe he knows more than I do.
Of course he knows more than I do on that topic.
So I don't really have an opinion on it.
Is there something else specifically that you think on Fauci?
If I understand his opinion on Fauci, it is that Fauci has some connections to some pharmaceutical companies that may have an interest in their pharmaceutical solutions.
Is that what you're talking about?
Because... Why would I have an opinion on that?
It's either true or false, right?
It's either true that Dr.
Fauci has a financial working relationship with a pharmaceutical company that also has, I think maybe the Resvera, whatever that one is.
But that's just a known fact, right?
Why would I have an opinion on it?
Now, somebody who works in the business that he works in, it should be fairly predictable that he would have connections with major pharmaceutical companies.
So wouldn't you expect anybody at his level to give speeches for?
You'd expect that at some point maybe he got funded for a trial.
Maybe they supported him in some way when he was fighting AIDS. So, of course.
And the same reason that you could guarantee that a President Trump probably owns some investment that has something to do with hydrochloroquine.
And probably I do too, by the way.
I mean, I probably have some fund that I don't know about that's got some stock in a company that maybe So I guess I don't have a comment about that.
It's something you should watch.
And if you think that that's the reason that Fauci is saying that hydroxychloroquine is, you know, unproven and maybe we should wait, well, I would say he should say that no matter what.
So you'd have to find something that Fauci has said or recommended That he would not say or recommend, absent a connection to some pharmaceutical company.
So here's a question.
Would Dr. Fauci insist that we should treat the hydroxychloroquine as an unproven thing?
Would he insist, the way he is, if he did not have some connection to a pharmaceutical company that makes a competing drug?
And the answer is, yeah, he would.
Every doctor would.
100% of doctors would say exactly what Fauci said.
Hasn't gone through the required testing.
Some doctors are using it.
The doctor can choose to use it.
There's a reason that they think it might work.
It's well tolerated.
Everything Fauci said, everything, 100% of what Fauci says, any doctor would have said in that situation, no matter what connection they had to the pharmaceuticals.
So, but it is true.
That when people have big financial interests, it can bias them.
It's just that if you're looking for it in whether he should be more pro-hydroxychloroquine, I don't think you could ask any doctor to be that way.
I don't think that's something you would ask any doctor.
Fauci is not promoting vitamins.
Well, he's promoted vitamin D. Can somebody fact check me on that?
Has Dr. Fauci never said that it would be good to take a walk and get some sun, get some vitamin D? I don't know if he said that, but I'll bet he has.
Doctors, I don't know if doctors push vitamins so much, because there's a lot of competing information on vitamins.
All right. Doctors never say light exercise increases immune system.
I've heard them say that.
I guess it depends which doctor you're talking about, but I've heard medical professionals on TV during this crisis.
I've heard them say that light exercise is good for your immune response.
