Episode 912 Scott Adams: Watch me Fact-Check the Fact Checkers While Sipping Coffee With You
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Content:
Mike Cernovich, NYT and accusations about Biden
Betting on Amazon and political outcomes
Mark Cuban's interesting tweet on FOX, CNN MSNBC
Geoff Pilkington: Elevator quantity and coronavirus severity
WHO supports China keeping wet markets open
President Trump's authority over states
A U.S. issued cryptocurrency with an end date?
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Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scott-adams00/support
No. All you need to participate in the simultaneous sip.
Hey, DJ Dr.
Funk Juice. Good to see you.
All you need is a cup or a mug or a glass of tank or chalice or stein, a canteen jug or flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
You know I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything, including the pandemic, better.
It's called the simultaneous sip.
It happens now.
Go. Well, I just woke up, so I'm a little bit groggy, and I gotta say, I'm not exactly on top of the ball right now.
But would I ever miss our time together?
No, I would not.
One of the things I'm doing during the coronavirus is, I guess I was doing this before, is I don't set my alarm clock.
So rather than getting up at a certain time, Sometimes you're tired, sometimes you're not.
I have taken the decision that during the coronavirus, if my body wants to sleep, I'll sleep.
And if it wants to get up, I'll get up.
So sometimes I get up at 2 in the morning, which is not unusual, actually.
Maybe about 30% of the time I'm up around 2 or 3 in the morning.
Because that's when my body wakes up.
Today it woke up at 6.10.
So there's about a four-hour difference in terms of where my body naturally wakes up on any given day.
So I just go with it.
Anyway, if you joined me last night for the simultaneous swaddle, the evening version of this, you saw me cutting my own hair.
Those of you who missed that, well, that was quite an exciting moment.
Yeah, looks pretty good, doesn't it?
I'm not showing you the back because I cut it myself.
I don't know what's going on back there, but it's not good, I'm sure.
Alright, let's talk about some stuff.
The New York Times finally did their story about Joe Biden, but of course they tried to put a positive spin on it.
So here he is accused of this fairly serious, not fairly serious, it's a pretty serious sexual crime in the 90s, and the New York Times It covers it up, basically.
They're trying to soft-pedal it.
That's my opinion.
By saying, well, you know, there weren't any other complaints other than kissing and hugging and touching too much.
And then they got rid of that part because everybody said, wait a minute, those are bad things too.
All that unwanted touching, hugging, and kissing.
So it gets even better.
So the New York Times agreed to an interview with Ben Smith, and they were asked, like, why did it take so long to even cover the story?
And I'm reading the story, and it said that the people on the Internet were pointing out that the New York Times had not covered the story.
They hadn't said anything about it for days after the story broke.
It was just kind of noticeable.
So I'm reading the story about the story, And the story about the story says that people on the Internet, just people, you know, generic people on the Internet, were asking and noticing that the New York Times had not mentioned anything about it for days and days.
And I'm reading the story, I go, okay, this is the part of the story where you say that Mike Cernovich noticed on the Internet.
And Mike Cernovich had been tweeting, and a lot of people had retweeted, Mike Cernovich.
But correct me if I'm wrong, it wasn't people on the internet.
It was Mike Cernovich.
And I think this is just...
Somebody will have to fact check me on this, but am I right that this is just another case where Mike Cernovich makes national news and the national news writes the story without him in it?
It's getting kind of noticeable, isn't it?
Check me on that, right?
But I think I only saw it from Mike, and I remember retweeting it, but I don't remember any other major player who was talking about it other than retweeting Mike.
So did they just rewrite him out of the story again?
Did that happen? I think it did.
So today the stock market is up.
I told you publicly, I wouldn't say this except I'd already told you publicly, That when the stock market hit the bottom, I took all the cash I had and put it into Amazon.com.
Now, I didn't have a lot of cash sitting around.
I was mostly invested, so it's not a big deal in terms of percentage.
But anything I could get my hands on, I just dumped into Amazon stock.
And Amazon stock just hit an all-time high.
And there's only one other time that I was sure about what to do with my money.
It was in 2008 or 2009, whatever the downturn was.
And when the entire market went down, and it looked like maybe the entire economy of the world would just disappear.
I don't know if you remember how scary that was, but in 2009, it looked like maybe the entire economy of Earth would just disappear for a while.
And so, of course, the stock market sank on that fear, and And I said to myself then, Scott, wait a minute.
What if I took all of my money, anything I could scrape together, and bought Wells Fargo bank stock?
And here was the thinking.
Wells Fargo is one of the strongest banks.
And if the strongest bank failed, well, everything's going to fail, right?
It's not like the bank fails by itself.
If the banks fail, everything's done.
That is the end of the economy.
So I said to myself, I can't guess if Nike will do well or this company or that.
I can't guess that. But I can certainly guess that if any of them do well, the banks are going to come raging back.
So I didn't make that bet because I said to myself, you know, I don't think I can bet 100% of what I have, everything I've earned in my life.
I can't bet at all on this one bet.
But if I did, I would have tripled my net worth.
Because it was logical.
There wasn't any downside.
There wasn't any way to be wrong about betting for the big banks.
Because if you were wrong about them, all the other companies would be out of business at the same time.
And if you were right, it would be the one that would roar back most reliably.
So when this latest unpleasantness happened, I thought about that strategy again.
And it probably would work again because banks are in reasonably good shape.
But I thought, you know, Amazon.com has become almost the equivalent of a big bank, if you think about it.
Now, not in terms of doing banking business, but in terms of the size of it.
In any world in which Amazon.com goes out of business, especially in a world where people are moving toward delivery and not away from it, any world in which Amazon went out of business Everything's gone.
You know what I mean? By the time Amazon can't survive, everything's gone.
So I said to myself, well, I won't put all of my money there, but I'll do what I can.
So that turned out to be a good bet.
Now here's the larger point.
It's very rare, very rare, but every now and then there'll be this little situation that's unique in history where you can't make the wrong bet.
And this was one of them.
And 2009 was the other way.
It wasn't possible. It was possible to lose your money.
So let me be clear about that.
Because if the whole economy had gone down, well, you would have gone down with it.
But it's a bet that the whole economy won't go down.
Because if it does, nothing matters.
It doesn't matter what you bet. And if it doesn't, well, you bet on the right thing.
So it's one of those few cases where you can know for sure, no doubt about it, that you made a financial investment It is 100% the right decision.
Even if things don't work out, it's still the right decision.
It's very rare. Let me tell you some of my other bets.
So, this is just full disclosure.
I realized that when I was going to tell you that, I should tell you what I'm betting in the betting markets.
Because you don't want to hear about it after the fact, right?
You don't want to, after the election, I say, oh, I had a bet on that.
You want to hear it now. So you know that I really put money on these things.
Now this is small money, so there's nothing I'm going to talk about here that's any kind of money that changes my life.
These are just fun amounts.
So I'll give you the amounts, but they're in the thousands, not the millions, just so you've got a sizing for it.
So here are my bets, some good and some bad.
So these are all bets that I made a while ago.
So none of these are fresh.
And when I say none of them are fresh, I don't think there's any of these bets that aren't months old, several months, and some older.
Alright, one bet I had was, just in order, who will be the 2020 Democratic nominee?
As you know, I had a bet on Kamala.
But later, as things started shaping up, I put separate bets on Pete Buttigieg and Joe Biden.
Obviously, the Joe Biden bet is in the money.
The other two are not.
And so I've got a loss on that one.
About half of it. About half a loss.
But, you know, since I picked Biden also, I've got a little bit of a gain.
Just that. All right. 2020 presidential winner?
I bet on Trump, you know, a long time ago.
You know, I don't know.
Many months ago.
A year ago? Nine months ago or something?
I bet on Trump.
His odds now...
I'm well in the money on Trump.
The market expects him to make it.
The 2020 Democratic nominee, I'm not in money on that one because that was Kamala, but I think I might still actually be sort of right with Kamala Harris.
If she's the vice president nominee, it's kind of like she's the president.
Likewise, I had a bet, and again, this is from last year, that the 2020 Democratic nominee would be a woman.
Now, of course, I've lost that bet, or the bet is not in the money.
We don't have a final on that.
But it looks like it'll be Biden, not a woman.
But if he picks Kamala Harris, I would argue that although I will lose my money on the bet because I won't technically be right, I would argue that I'm right on my bet that a woman is the nominee.
Because it will be Kamala Harris as vice president.
Maybe. Or at least be a woman, right?
Because Biden said he's going to pick a woman.
And don't we all agree that the vice president is really the candidate in this special case?
So even though my bets are wrong, I think my bets are right.
You know, in a non-technical sense, I think they're right.
So I also had a bet that the 2020 Democratic nominee would be over 70 years old.
And so that one's in the money.
So the ones that are in the money are the ones that I bet on Trump, and I bet on the nominee being over 20, or I'm sorry, over 70.
And I had a bet on the...
Oh, I have a bet on the 2020 Democratic VP nominee.
So I'd forgotten that I'd bet on Kamala to be the vice presidential choice, Probably bet on that about the time she dropped out of the race, I'm guessing.
And so I'm weighing the money on that.
So I'd make a ton if she gets the VP nomination.
And when I say I'd make a ton, none of these dollar amounts are enough to change how I act in public.
None of this is like, ah, I made...
Well, I'll give you a size of it.
There's nothing that I could win that would be above $5,000.
Because I want to tell you that I'm not gaming the system to take home a big paycheck.
So nothing here will change my life.
But I wanted to be transparent about what stuff I'm betting on.
Mark Cuban had an interesting tweet, which I think I agree with completely.
And I missed this.
So you'll have to tell me if this really happened.
I assume it really happened, because why would he tweet this otherwise?
So Mark Cuban tweets at Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC. He calls them out in his tweet.
And he says, WTF? Question.
The White House press conference tonight...
Finally, in Capitals, finally presents real data in Capital, finally presents real data on the distribution of PPE, and all of you cut away.
Did you see that?
I couldn't watch it all, so I didn't see that.
But Mark Cuban is saying that when the press conference finally was going to give the public real data, the one thing we wanted, what have I been complaining about for months, I think months, Give us some data in context, not just raw numbers that don't mean anything.
And apparently they were getting ready to do that, and all three networks cut away.
And then Cuban says, one of the most important divisive topics facing our first responders, and you think it's not important?
And he bookends his comments with WTFs on both sides.
WTF to start, WTF to end.
And I have to add my own WTF. WTF? What?
Are you kidding me?
Well, this is what Mark Cuban says, and he was watching it, so I assume he switched between channels to see it and couldn't find it.
So, the part that I'm not sure of is how well they were going to cover it.
Because in the past, they've covered the PPE numbers, but not in a useful way.
They would just throw out numbers out of context.
So if they were going to do better than that, I got a real question.
What's up with that? Here's an interesting tidbit.
This from Jeff Pilkington on Twitter made this observation, and I don't know if this came from any other source or this is his own observation, but it goes like this.
Here are some countries that have an unusually large number of elevators.
You ready for this?
So these places are known to have a lot of elevators.
One is Italy.
One is Spain.
One is China. And another place is New York City.
What do any of these places have in common?
Italy, China, Spain, and New York City.
Yeah. Yeah.
Lots of coronavirus. Wouldn't you imagine that an airborne virus, which especially matters if you spend close time next to somebody, and it's worse if there's more than one person who's breathing off the air?
Somebody says, Dr.
Zhu has been talking about elevators.
Yeah, we always thought that elevators were a factor in New York City.
Because when we talked about New York City, you think...
Elevators, right? Lots of big buildings.
So we'd always had a little suspicion that maybe that's why New York City was worse than the rest of the United States.
But did you know that Italy has the highest number of elevators?
Where did that come from, right?
Italy would not have been on my top 20 guesses of most elevators.
So, wow.
We might be a really healthy...
Country in a few months if everybody stops taking the elevator, and it makes perfect sense that the elevators would be the worst place, doesn't it?
If it's good to open your windows in your house, it's good to be outdoors, because the air is going to, you know, clean away anything, any of your droplets that are in the air, you'd have to think that an elevator would be the very worst place you could be.
So we'll see if that bears out.
All right. Let me now fact check.
Oh, Apparently, Australia's Prime Minister is blasting the World Health Organization Tuesday over its stance on wet markets.
So China's decided to keep its wet markets open, despite them being a source for pandemics.
And Australia's Prime Minister called it, quote, unfathomable, that the UN agency supports them opening.
Because I guess the World Health Organization supports China in keeping the wet markets open.
May I borrow a technique from Mark Cuban?
WTF? The World Health Organization supports keeping the wet markets open?
WTF? Again?
Bookending? What?
Now, it's one thing to know that the WHO is corrupt and that they're in China's pocket, but can't they even pretend a little bit?
Can't they pretend a little bit?
Your coffee is getting cold.
You missed the sip.
You came in late. You are allowed to sip now.
But if it'll help you, I'll give you a bonus simultaneous sip for anybody who wants a double.
Here it comes. Go.
Oh, I needed that.
I needed that like blood itself.
So here's what...
Here's how I generally think we should treat, we the United States should treat China and the wet markets.
Rather than complaining about it, see I think the wrong persuasion is to complain about it and say, do you know that the wet markets cause these problems?
And do you know that we don't like these problems?
And do you know that we think you're being irresponsible?
And watch me get all emotional about it.
Your wet markets, close your wet markets because of all my reasons.
Wrong approach. Here is the correct way to handle the wet markets.
It goes like this.
We'll keep travel between...
China and the United States are closed as long as the wet markets are open.
Don't give a reason. Don't tell China it's because of their science.
Don't tell them we're mad at them.
Don't tell them we're disappointed.
Don't tell them we don't believe the World Health Organization.
Don't tell them that we'd like to do studies on it.
Don't tell them that we want to talk about it.
Don't tell them that it's part of a negotiation.
Don't wrap it into the trade talks.
Don't wrap it into anything. Don't talk about it Don't negotiate it.
Just tell them what you're going to do.
It's not a negotiation.
We're not asking them to do something with us.
It would be nice if they did something on their own, close the wet markets.
But if they don't do that thing on their own, it's not personal.
Why make it personal?
Why act emotional?
Why act like there's any vagueness to our actions at all?
Just say, alright, here's the policy.
As long as the wet markets are open, there won't be any travel ever between China and the United States.
You don't even have to ever talk about it again.
I would never even bring it up again.
I wouldn't even talk about it.
When China says, hey, let's get together and talk about it, we should say, why?
Why would we talk about it?
I don't even understand the question.
We should say, this isn't a negotiation.
I don't even understand why you would think so.
No, we're simply saying that that's a risk that's too much for us, and we've decided to manage our risk.
What you do, China, is completely up to you.
Do whatever you want.
Obviously, we'll be encouraging every other country in the world to also stop their travel, And we might have to stop travel with any country that still has travel with China.
I mean, we'll look at that too.
But it's not a negotiation.
Why would you negotiate over it?
It's not a complaint. Why would we complain about it?
We should just do what we do.
Get away from it. That's it.
End of the story. Did you know this is a little consumer tip for you?
Because I'm here to help you in so many ways.
Did you know that in some stores, like Walmart, for example, and it depends on the store, but Walmart has this feature, that if you go to buy something and it's out of stock, not every time, but sometimes if it's something that's in short supply and it's out of stock, that there'll be a little notice on the shelf where you can sign up for an alert.
So you can get a text alert on your phone when Walmart replenishes that specific shelf of the item that you were looking for.
That's pretty good, isn't it?
Right? That's pretty good, I have to say.
That's pretty good. Speaking of shopping, there's some concern that there might be food shortage because some of the meat processing plants in particular, at least one of them, a big one, closed because of too many employees having coronavirus.
And I don't know how worried we are that it'll get into the meat itself, but just the employees themselves being unavailable is a big deal.
And so the news is starting to scare us a little bit about maybe there might be a shortage.
But the news is also careful to say that as long as we don't try to hoard it, probably no problem.
And are we smart enough now, meaning we the grocery stores, that they would stop people from hoarding If it looked like the hoarders were getting worried about hoarding meat, I guess.
Would the big stores do that?
I think they would. And I think it's automatic.
Because if you wanted to hoard...
Let's say I wanted to hoard some meat.
I wanted to go to my Safeway and just buy a bunch of meat and put it in my freezer.
I would have to go stand in a line outside, six feet away from the closest person before me and after me, And in the context of hoarding, you assume other people are hoarding too, I would have a line that would be maybe several miles long because of that six-foot distance and the fact that you can't even get into the store until somebody leaves.
So the process of shopping is so inefficient now by design to keep people away from each other.
It's so inefficient that if you tried to hoard meat, you would just run out of time.
You'd just be standing in line all afternoon and when you got up there, the store would say, "Okay, you're allowed to have two steaks." So you could wait in line all day long for two steaks that you could have bought under any other condition anyway.
So I'm not totally worried about that.
Well, let me say this as clearly as possible.
I have zero concern about food in general.
You'll have plenty of food.
We'll make that work.
That's the one thing I'm not worried about.
Whether specific foods, let's say specific steaks or porks or whatever, are also available, that's questionable.
I would expect that fish will probably be fine because, you know, a fishing boat doesn't have that many people on it and you could probably replace them if you had to with one sick for a while.
So, I'm guessing we'll have some individual shortages, but you're not going to run out of food, is my guess.
When I say guess, I feel very confident about that.
Alright. Here's the funnest story of the day.
Trump claimed during the press conference that...
I want to get his exact words...
He said that the authority of the President of the United States having to do with the subject we're talking about is total.
And the subject we're talking about is the opening of the economy in every state.
So the question is, does the President of the United States have the authority to tell the states, the individual states, to stay closed or to open up?
Does he have that power or is that the state's power?
And so the president claimed that he had absolute power to make those decisions over the authority of the states.
CNN and Daniel Dale did a fact check.
And they fact checked this and they said, fact check.
Trump falsely claims that the president has, quote, total authority over coronavirus restrictions.
Fact check false.
I'm going to fact check Daniel Dale's fact check.
I fact check his fact check.
That's false. It's false.
The President of the United States does have total authority...
This is coming from me. Just so you're clear, this is just coming out of my head.
The President of the United States does have total authority over the coronavirus restrictions.
Let me give you my argument.
Somebody says he qualified it, he didn't need to.
Because I'm going to make my statement...
That he has total authority.
It goes like this. Yes, thank you.
Somebody's saying it's a national emergency.
Now, the conditions in which you can declare martial law...
Martial law is when the military, which means the commander-in-chief, the military takes control over civilian life, every element of it that matters, under an emergency situation.
So, in a natural disaster or in a war...
The President can declare martial law.
And that gives him full authority to tell the states, go back to work or don't go back to work.
Can the President, under this situation, which is sort of a war with a virus, but it's also sort of a natural disaster.
It's somewhere in that middle ground.
Under those conditions, can the President of the United States, should he decide to do it, declare martial law?
Yes, of course he can.
Yes, of course he can.
Why not? Declaring martial law isn't even that controversial.
It's simply a convenience to put the authority where it's needed for a temporary situation that requires it.
So yeah, now short of martial law, does the president have legal authority to do it?
The answer is no. Short of martial law, probably not.
But does the president have practical authority to do it?
In other words, if the President of the United States stood in front of the country and said, look, here's the deal.
I know if you carefully read your Constitution, you will not see that I have this power.
But, as your Commander-in-Chief, I tell you we are at war.
It's not a human enemy.
It is a virus.
But it's a war, nonetheless, requiring all of our dedication.
There will be massive loss of life.
I, as Commander-in-Chief, will be sending troops, if you can call it that, to die.
The troops will be the first people who go back to work.
Troops meaning just individuals.
And I, as the Commander-in-Chief, order you, the troops.
In this case, you're all in the war.
There's nobody who's a spectator in the virus war.
Nobody is a spectator.
There's no such thing as these are the troops that they go off to fight, and these are the people who stay home.
That doesn't exist.
You're all the troops.
Sure, you haven't been drafted, and you haven't joined, but you didn't need to because you're all in it.
That's just the way it works.
As your commander-in-chief, I am ordering you, the troops, to To stay home.
Because this is how we beat the enemy.
I'm going to treat you like you're all in the service for a few weeks.
After this, if we beat it, we can go back to normal rules and everything's transparent.
You know exactly why I'm doing it.
You know how long I plan to do it until we get past this.
And, you know, we live in a country where we would have a violent revolution if a president tried to keep martial law forever.
So, somebody says, you're going to pass?
I don't know what you're talking about.
So, I fact-checked Daniel Dale to be wrong twice.
He's double wrong.
Number one, the president can just declare martial law, and then he does, absolutely has technical, specific, Absolute power over telling people to go to work or not.
There's no doubt about that. Is there?
Is there any lawyer who's going to argue with me that a president can't declare martial law in this situation, and that if he did, it wouldn't cover telling people not to go to work?
I think I'm pretty safe on that, right?
By the way, this is me overruling all the lawyers in the world.
You know, I've been accused of being, what was I accused of?
Having too big an ego or a narcissist or something by some people who are mad at me online.
And I say to myself, how do you not be a narcissist when you've just made public medical opinions contrary to the top medical experts in the United States and the world, the CDC, Fauci, U.S. Surgeon General, World Health Organization, all told you masks wouldn't help.
And I, Did I not just do that right in front of all of you?
I mean, I'm not the only one who was saying it, but I was pretty loud about it, right?
Pretty loud and pretty early.
And now I'm telling you, That in front of the world, as loudly as I possibly can, that my legal opinion is superior to all the lawyers in the United States.
Thank you very much. I'm actually telling you that.
Because I'm not going to hide it, right?
Now, I could be wrong if it turns out tomorrow that one of the respected lawyers...
Let's put it this way.
If tomorrow Alan Dershowitz goes on to an interview show and they say, hey, can the president do this if he declares martial law, can he do this?
And if Alan Dershowitz says, no, actually a lot of people think that's true, but under this situation there's something special case, there's a precedent, when Alan's done, I'm just going to change my opinion to his, should that happen.
I'm going to bet it doesn't happen.
I'm going to bet that if Alan Dershowitz, I just use him as my most credible legal opinion, if Alan Dershowitz goes on TV in the next week and says, yeah, you know, the president can't do that even with martial law, I'll just change my opinion to his.
And here's my point.
I'm accused of having my ego and my narcissism involved, but watch how easily I change my opinion to, I was completely 100% wrong, and I side with a guy who knows more than I do.
If Dershowitz disagrees with me, my transition to his opinion will be instant.
I won't even pause to get the words out.
It'll just be, eh. Okay, I'll take your opinion because you're smarter.
But at the moment, I'm going to say, because I'm not embarrassed about anything, Apparently.
I'm going to say that my legal opinion is better than whatever Daniel Dale and CNN could come up with.
And on top of that, I don't think he needs to declare martial law.
I think that under the context of Commander-in-Chief, and in the context of a legitimate war against an enemy, in this case the virus, I believe that the President could just deputize us all, in effect.
I'm not in the second argument, Not the martial law argument.
The martial law argument just says the law allows them to do it.
The other argument says, in a practical sense, the citizens of the United States like the idea, we very much like the idea, that the commander-in-chief has extra powers during a war.
I don't know if anybody would disagree with that, would they?
Is there anybody, no matter how liberal or anything else, who would say that the commander-in-chief as a job function shouldn't exist?
The whole point of the Commander-in-Chief is that this person is going to be operating to make quick decisions in the fog of war, and it's not a committee thing.
You need your best person, getting advice of course, but you need your best person to just be in control.
You know, if it's an emergency.
You don't want to be debating things.
So I don't think there's anybody in America who says, no, it'd be better if we had a committee, you know, and the committee decides, and Congress takes a vote before we fire a bomb.
There's probably nobody who thinks that.
So on a practical level, if your commander in chief says, I declare this an actual war, it's against the virus, I declare that you're all in it, and this is what you've got to do as a patriot, as a temporary troop, As part of the troops in the war, I'm telling you to stay home.
If your governor tells you to go to work, I'm the commander-in-chief.
Governor does not overrule commander-in-chief.
Ever. If we had been attacked by an external enemy, and your commander-in-chief said, alright, do this or that to defend, and your local governor said, no, do it differently, Who's in charge?
Is the governor in charge because it's their state?
Well, not if we're attacked in the homeland.
If there's a foreign enemy overrunning Iowa, the governor of Iowa is not in charge of the military.
The commander-in-chief is.
Anyway, I think I made my point.
Fact check. Done.
Here's a few questions for you.
Just a mull over.
All right? Somebody says states' rights are suspended.
Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying.
I'm saying that in a war the states' rights would be completely suspended in terms of who's in charge of the military.
For those people who still think that everybody is wrong about the coronavirus and that it's not any worse than the flu and that we should not have closed everything.
So that's still an opinion.
It's a widespread opinion.
But for the people who think that it Let's see, hoax is too much of a strong word.
The people who think that we should not have closed everything, let's just say that, because it wasn't a super big problem any more than a regular flu.
So people who think that, here are some questions for them.
Why did every country, as far as I know, every major country do exactly what we did?
If we were the ones who were wrong...
How do you explain all of those independent countries with all of their independent experts and all of their independent opinions, when they looked into it, why did every one of them do what we did, basically?
Now, even Sweden, if you look at the details of Sweden, even Sweden, the individuals made a lot of changes that the government didn't require.
So even some of the individuals.
Now, Sweden has a high infection rate.
Yeah, so let's talk about Sweden.
I see your comments. Now, different countries handled it differently, and Sweden will be like a good little test case, so you're right.
But Sweden also has much higher infections than other places, and they might have even more infections than that because they're not testing.
All right, so if you want to be...
Pedantic about it, you could probably find some countries that did something a little bit differently.
Sweden being your good example.
But even Japan required masks.
So there wasn't anybody...
Not true, don't block me.
I'd never block you for arguing.
You never have to worry about being blocked for disagreeing if you give a reason.
So somebody gave a reason, they say, hey, Sweden, don't block me.
I would never block you for giving a reason.
Even if I disagree with the reason.
I like that. I like reasons.
You're on my good side. I'm putting you on my good list.
Check. You're on the good list.
You had a reason. We don't know what better hand washing and social distancing would have accomplished on its own.
That's true. I guess we'll find out because we're going to be going into that mode eventually.
So that's my first question.
You could say that Sweden is an exception, and I would say it's an exception that proves the rule.
Because Sweden did not follow the restrictions of other countries, and their outcome was far more infections.
So, doesn't that prove the rule?
They didn't do these stuff and they got more infections?
Now, here's my question for the people who say it is.
I'll reverse the question, watch this.
For the people who say it is.
It is exactly as big a problem as we said.
Why aren't the hospitals in Sweden overrun?
Why are the ICUs in Sweden not the national story?
If Sweden has high infection rate, which they do, apparently, and they're not doing anything special on mitigation, why are their hospitals not crushed?
What's going on here?
Now, I did... I was speculating that there was some kind of maybe genetic thing that might be helping some countries, because I did notice there's some correlation in some of the so-called Germanic countries, you know, Austria, Germany, Denmark, and I think Sweden, the Sweden one.
There's some of the countries that have a genetic background that's similar Seem to have less infection.
I don't know if that's going to prove out or if that's just a fake confirmation bias thing.
That could be part of the story.
Alright, here's another question for you.
If the coronavirus is really just sort of a normal flu, at least in terms of how bad it is, why can't we find any doctors who say that?
Wouldn't you think there'd be some doctors on the other side?
Especially the doctors who handle it.
As far as I know, and you can...
You can fact check this for me.
Somebody's speculating that maybe these other countries are using vitamin D or something, and maybe that makes a difference.
I don't know. Maybe. Is there any doctor who has worked in an ER or ICU area in a hospital handling coronavirus patients?
Can you find any doctor who has worked in that environment who will tell you that this is a normal flu and you shouldn't be especially afraid of it?
I don't think so, right?
As far as I know, as far as I know, 100% of every ER doctor who has handled coronavirus says across the board, oh, this one's bad.
Right? Because wouldn't you find some doctors who say, you know, I've been working this for two months, and I've got to tell you, I don't see anything different.
It just looks like the flu to me.
Yeah, a lot of people are dying, but a lot of people die of the flu.
It looks the same to me.
Have you seen even one doctor say that?
I haven't. So, look for that.
If you see it, let me know. Alright, here's another question just for a thought experiment.
I don't know the answer to this question, so it's not a...
I'm not challenging you on it because I know the answer.
I don't know the answer to this. And it goes like this.
Suppose we had no international borders, or let me put it this way.
Suppose we closed our borders...
To all trade and people.
So that we're just a country as an island.
I'm not suggesting this.
It's just a thought experiment.
And let's say that we had nothing to do with the rest of the world.
Just nothing to do with them.
We don't even talk to them.
We grow everything we need.
We build everything we need.
It's a big enough country. We manufacture everything we need.
We're just completely independent.
And we'll never have to trade with anybody for anything.
Under that condition...
Which I don't think can actually exist.
But under that condition, could you just print money whenever you wanted to and just make everybody rich?
So that's your takeaway.
I don't know if I need to wrestle with it here.
But whenever we talk about, hey, we should just print more money and give it to people, which is literally exactly what we're going to do with this coronavirus relief stuff, is just print more money and hand it out to people.
And I ask the question, well, why can't you do that all the time?
Just to understand how everything fits together, the first question is, why can't you do that all the time?
If it works now, why can't we just always print money and give it to people?
Then everybody would have money, right?
And the answer is that, at least part of the answer, and I guess I'm looking for the full answer, is that if you're trading with other countries, you quickly get into imbalances with your currency.
So you wouldn't be able to buy and sell things across borders if If your own money kept changing value because then you'd have an unbalanced situation or you would devalue your money because you've created so much of it and then it's not worth anything and then you can't buy anything from other people because your dollar used to be worth a dollar but now it's only worth a penny so you can't buy that stuff from other countries because they don't want your penny, they want your dollar. So that's the quick and dirty explanation.
So... If the entire world were just one country with one currency, could the leader print money?
Now, it wouldn't work.
You're getting ahead of me a little bit.
The problem, of course, internally, if there was only one country in the world with one currency, if you printed money any time you wanted to, you'd have inflation.
You'd have inflation, right?
But, in our current situation...
Where inflation is basically impossible because nobody can raise their prices because the demand is so low.
Under this unique situation, could we not just print as much money as we wanted?
Not as much as we wanted, but a lot.
With no repercussions.
Somebody says Venezuela, but Venezuela does not have this situation where they don't have any international trade.
So Venezuela is the opposite because they depend on oil.
So I just put that out there as a question.
Secondly, here's another question.
Could the United States, and this is just a technical question to see if I can understand it.
Let's say the United States, just for kicks, issued a cryptocurrency.
Or just accepted an existing cryptocurrency.
Well, it's probably better if they print one.
So let's take this example. Let's say the United States issues its own cryptocurrency, but it has a special cryptocurrency.
A special quality, which is that the cryptocurrency is temporary, meaning that if they give you $100 worth of crypto, you have to spend it before we all go back to work.
So let's say that the date is given that, I'll just pick a date, August 1st, the cryptocurrency will go to zero value, because that'll be the last day that the government recognizes it as valid money.
The rest of you can still trade it if you want to, but on that date, August 1st, the United States, who hypothetically created this cryptocurrency just to give money to people to temporarily spend, then on August 1st the United States would say, we will no longer, we the United States, accept it in payment.
And we'll also close down the exchange.
Because, you know, you can imagine the government would also set up a website to exchange.
So if you got some crypto, you know, you could change it for some dollars if nobody would accept your crypto.
But somebody says it just inflates later.
But does it? If you put a timer on the crypto so that the only time you could use the cryptocurrency is for a few months, and at the end of the three months it became worthless, At the end of the three months when everybody went back to work and demand is still too low to raise prices, and you still have the same amount of dollars in the system because all the crypto just went away just by magic, would you have inflation?
Now, as I say too often, I have a degree in economics, but I don't know the answer to this question because this is way out of anybody's experience, right?
Sounds like the plot to Mr.
Robot. I'm looking at your comments and I don't think any of you have a good read on this in terms of nobody's...
I don't see anybody who has what I would call an expert opinion on this.
Yeah, it looks like you don't know.
And there's nothing wrong with that.
I don't know if you should know the answer to that question.
Somebody says Libya did it.
Did they? I'm very skeptical that Libya created a cryptocurrency with a time-out feature.
It's the time-out feature that's the special part.
If you're just looking at it as a crypto, that's not the idea.
The magic part of the idea is that it has to become worthless by design on a date certain.
That's the whole value of it.
So people just spend their crypto and you've got to switch it back.
But, so, let's say that I spent my crypto, the store has the crypto, and I've got a loaf of bread, and on August 1st, the crypto that the store has becomes zero, but they could have just traded it, so they've converted it to dollars at the exchange, but then it's the government that owns it at that point.
So, did I just create a complicated way to print U.S. dollars?
I think maybe my idea falls apart there if I think through it.
I don't know. I'll just put it out there.
Maybe somebody has an idea.
And I think those were the main things that I wanted to talk about.
Yes, they were. Yeah, somebody says those accepting crypto would need to be able to change it to dollars.
Yeah, so in this scenario, the government would have to issue the crypto...
But also create the only exchange for turning them into dollars so that the U.S. government could, on that date that it broadcasts in advance, it could say, all right, here's the date we close the exchange.
So maybe the crypto lives forever just because the blockchain goes on forever, but you wouldn't ever be able to trade it for money.
Somebody says, script in World War II expired.
World War II script.
Military script.
Let me Google that.
Some of you know more than I do on this topic.
There's something called military script.
I've heard of it, but I do not know the details.
Let's look at what Wikipedia says.
What is more fun than watching other people look for things on their phone?
Nothing! Alright, what is military script?
There's a form of script, paper money used for temporary use.
So it'd be like the crypto, right?
Used to pay U.S. military and civilian personnel and to conduct other stuff.
Blah, blah, blah. That's weird.
So I guess there's some history of it.
I guess I'd have to look deeper into it.
But it looks like...
Yeah, the rush to exchange drops value.
That's true. But if military script once existed...
I don't know.
Oh, somebody says debit cards that expire in 30 days.
Eric Bolling the plan. Yeah, why not?
Why not? I mean, printing the physical cards gives you a problem because you can lose the card and stuff.
I guess you could lose a password, so maybe it's all the same.
Okay, so maybe that's a bad idea.
I just want to put that out there.
All right, that's all I got for today.
I will see you, not today, but I'll see you later today.
