My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a Content: Anti-Trump media starving for something to criticize Huffington Post slimy headline Opening up date estimates Kim Jong Un not seen in a week --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scott-adams00/support
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| Hey everybody, come on in. | |
| It's been 11 hours since the last time I was with you, and I think that's too long. | |
| Yeah, it's time. | |
| There's not much happening today, so I'm going to take some questions. | |
| It's been Groundhog Day every day. | |
| You wake up and you say, do we still have a coronavirus? | |
| Yep, looks like it's going to be another one of those days. | |
| But this one will start out a little bit better than many because you're going to be taking the simultaneous sip with me and all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or a chalice or a stein, a canteen jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind. | |
| Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. | |
| And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine the other day, the thing that makes everything better. | |
| It's called the simultaneous sip, but it happens now. | |
| Mmm. Beatlicious. | |
| So let's talk about the things that are happening. | |
| So there's a little test of Facebook users. | |
| So Facebook users were offered $102 if they would just give up Facebook for a little while, and then they tested to see how they did. | |
| It turns out that giving up Facebook It was really good for your health. | |
| So the people were reported improved subjective well-being. | |
| So apparently we now have at least a little bit of scientific data that says Facebook's bad for your health. | |
| Somebody says CPAP, not respirators, work. | |
| If you have a link for that, send it to me. | |
| Because I think I know what you're talking about, but I don't know if it's true, so we need to fact check. | |
| Somebody's saying that the CPAP machines might be better than the ventilators, which I don't rule out as possible because the ventilators were considered maybe not the be-all, end-all, and they might have been the wrong pressure and all that stuff. | |
| Yeah, why $102? | |
| I don't know. It's a good question. | |
| So you've heard about the patients who had coronavirus and then they recovered, but then some number of them, maybe 2%, show that they have the infection still. | |
| And so the researchers say, what? | |
| You're supposed to have antibodies. | |
| You're not supposed to be able to get reinfected. | |
| But here's the good news. | |
| Turns out you shouldn't be as worried about that as maybe you were, because there's at least one scientist, doctor, researcher types, who thinks there should not be a source of worry. | |
| And here's his argument. Because there are several possible explanations of why these people are testing positive, and of these several possible explanations, most of them are harmless. | |
| For example, there could be remnants of the virus that are still in people and the test is sensitive so it picks it up. | |
| But a remnant of the virus would not be, you know, something to worry about. | |
| It doesn't mean you have the virus, it just means you have some of the garbage from the virus a little left over. | |
| So that's one possibility. | |
| The other possibilities were, let's see, Just an error with the test. | |
| So it could be that the test is too sensitive, meaning it's too good, so it's picking up more than the virus. | |
| It's picking up the debris from the virus. | |
| But the other is that the test is just not perfect. | |
| So maybe if the test has some false positives, you might be thinking you're retesting people that are positive again, but not. | |
| Although it seems like that would be the easiest one to test, right? | |
| Who would get on here and make a long comment about it being boring just to get blocked? | |
| What's the point of that? All right. | |
| And there may be other issues with the test. | |
| So, here's my current updated opinion. | |
| I had been thinking that this herd immunity wasn't really guaranteed. | |
| It's still not guaranteed, so there's still questions to be answered. | |
| But... At least one researcher, scientist who's close to this thinks we shouldn't even worry about it, that we'll have immunity. | |
| So even if 2% of the people, or even if some people didn't have immunity, there's probably enough people who do to get herd immunity eventually, but other people warn, hey, it's not so easy. | |
| This isn't like a regular virus. | |
| You can get it and recover. | |
| But it might take years for your organs to recover. | |
| So apparently, this is pretty bad stuff. | |
| You could get better, but it might take you years to actually be better. | |
| That's pretty ugly. | |
| So we'll keep an eye on that. | |
| Now, the anti-Trump media... | |
| Broadly speaking, they don't have much material to work with lately, because it's not a normal time. | |
| And the president keeps taking the advice of experts, which is ruining all the fun. | |
| Every time the president takes the advice of experts, and the experts back him up, It just takes all the fun out of the anti-Trump people because they're like, you keep not following, okay, you're taking the experts' advice, but the next time you're not following the experts, okay, this time you're also taking the experts' advice, but we're going to get you. | |
| We're going to get you one of these days. | |
| And so far the president has definitely stayed on the right side of at least science, so he's agreeing with the experts, at least to that degree. | |
| So we're watching the anti-Trump press Desperately trying to find things to criticize the president for because that's their business model. | |
| If they don't criticize the press, their audience will go somewhere else. | |
| So they have to criticize the president. | |
| So here's what they've come up with today. | |
| They've decided to bunch up unrelated things and try to make a story out of it. | |
| So they've bunched together Dr. | |
| Drew, Dr. Oz, and Dr. | |
| Phil. Now, I'd love to know what Dr. | |
| Drew thinks about that, or any of them, I guess. | |
| What they think about being lumped together. | |
| But the unfairness of that, to lump three completely different people with three completely different situations together, that's not fair. | |
| That is so not fair. | |
| So this was on... | |
| Where was this? | |
| This was on CNN. This was the headline. | |
| Fox News keeps inviting TV doctors on air who say crazy things. | |
| Crazy things? | |
| Which were the crazy things? | |
| I'm not sure what crazy means. | |
| So Dr. Drew... I apologize for underplaying the seriousness of the virus, but keep in mind he was underplaying it when the greatest experts in the world were telling us not to be that worried. | |
| Dr. Drew correctly upgraded his opinion, apologized for getting it wrong in the beginning, but he wasn't that far from the experts. | |
| It's not like it's crazy. | |
| It only looks crazy if you're looking at it in the rearview mirror and you take out the context. | |
| The context at the time was a lot of people were on the same page who were experts. | |
| Then there's the Dr. | |
| Oz one. Is this crazy? | |
| Dr. Oz suggested that children would be a safe class of people to go back to school. | |
| And of course, that's the key to getting people, you know, the adults to go back to work because you need the kids to be taken care of, essentially. | |
| But he worded it wrong. | |
| So he just worded it wrong. | |
| And so the people were looking for trouble. | |
| They heard it the way they wanted to hear it. | |
| And it sounded like he was being cold about the possibility of children dying. | |
| Now, you don't have to have a very high IQ to know that Dr. | |
| Oz did not go on television and say something cold about children dying. | |
| Okay, that just didn't even happen. | |
| But of course, they twist his words until it sounds like maybe he said something like that if you squint really hard and reduce your IQ by 50%. | |
| So first of all, Dr. | |
| Oz was just talking about Tough choices. | |
| Somebody's got to go first, right? | |
| You can't send the parents to work and leave the kids at home if they're young kids. | |
| So he's just making an adult observation that you'd want to do it in a certain order, and this might be a good order, and that's it. | |
| There's nothing crazy about that at all, but they turned it into that. | |
| Then Dr. Phil was really just guilty of the most universal bad comparison in the world of regular flu to Or other problems that are not viral to this one. | |
| But that was just bad analysis, but it's the same bad analysis that's practically universal. | |
| So which parts of these were crazy? | |
| These were three people who had three opinions, but none of it's crazy. | |
| It's not even close to crazy. | |
| So that's all they got for that. | |
| Apparently Japan is having a new surge in COVID-19 cases. | |
| And I only point that out because people had used them as an example of people who got it under control easily and therefore maybe it wasn't such a big problem because, hey, look, Japan took care of it so easily. | |
| Well, it turns out Japan did not take care of it so easily because it's surging again. | |
| We hope they get that under control. | |
| But we're definitely learning stuff by watching other countries and what they're doing. | |
| Huffington Post, again, not having enough fodder to work with, so they need to criticize Trump and anybody on his side. | |
| So here's what they came up with. | |
| Listen to how bad this headline is. | |
| So here's the headline for the Huffington Post. | |
| Right-wing economist has been accused of racism before. | |
| If you see this headline, that a right-wing economist has been accused of racism before, what do you think of that guy? | |
| Well, you think he's definitely a racist, right? | |
| You don't even have to read the story. | |
| You're like, well, if he's been accused of racism before... | |
| Even if this one isn't true, maybe the other one is, and maybe if the other one wasn't true, probably this one is. | |
| What are the odds that one person would get accused of racism twice, unless there's something there, a little smoke, there's fire, sort of thing? | |
| That's how the Huffington Post plays their slander. | |
| They give you a headline where it leads you to believe there's got to be something here. | |
| I mean, there's some meat here. | |
| So let's dig into this, right? | |
| And who was it? | |
| Was it Steve Morton? | |
| The economist who is a Trump supporter. | |
| And this is what he's in trouble for. | |
| So remember the headline. | |
| He's been accused of racism before. | |
| So that headline suggests that this story is an accusation of racism, right? | |
| Because the headline is, he's been accused of racism before. | |
| How else can you interpret that? | |
| Then this story is about his potentially being racist, right? | |
| So let's dig in. What was he doing that was so racist this time that would remind you of that last time? | |
| Here's what he did. He was talking about the social distance protesters. | |
| Who are protesting having to stay home in those states where they don't think it's a bigger problem. | |
| And here's what he said. | |
| I call these people modern-day Rosa Parks. | |
| They are protesting against injustice and loss of liberties. | |
| Oh, Stephen Moore. | |
| I'm sorry. I had his name wrong. | |
| Stephen Moore. And I don't know how to interpret that sentence. | |
| I call these people modern-day Rosa Parks, except... | |
| As a very big compliment to Rosa Parks. | |
| Is there any other way to interpret this other than a gigantic compliment and respect and admiration for Rosa Parks? | |
| Now, you could certainly argue that it's silly to compare these protesters to Rosa Parks, but If I told you, let's say I said, you know, so-and-so is the Michael Jordan of, I don't know, being a senator. | |
| If I said somebody was the Michael Jordan of being a senator, would you say, oh my god, that's a little racist? | |
| No. You would say the whole reason you're using Michael Jordan is because, you know, arguably he's the greatest of all time. | |
| It is literally a sign of Admiration and respect for the person used as the example, the Michael Jordan of being a dry cleaner or whatever. | |
| Likewise, if you're going to use somebody as your symbol of the ultimate respected, credible person, that's really the opposite of racism. | |
| That's as far as you can get from being racist. | |
| Holding up somebody who is one of the greatest icons of the African-American experience, somebody universally respected for being the unknown person who changed the world. | |
| How in the world is this racist? | |
| It can't be further from racist. | |
| It literally can't be further. | |
| It's just mind-boggling. | |
| But how many people read the Huffington Post and read that and go, yep, yep. | |
| It looks like he's insulting Rosa Parks by comparing her to people who showed up with AR-15s in this state. | |
| Oh my God. What is wrong with people? | |
| I was looking for... | |
| Changing the topic here. | |
| I was looking for some deadlines on the state's I'd said before, early on, when the whole topic of closing stuff down came up, I'd said that the President needs to give us a date, because even if that date gets later revised, we're all more comfortable with a date. | |
| Now, he gave that April 15 date, then he had to revise it, and I think maybe that felt like an embarrassment or a mistake. | |
| I don't think it was. I think it was exactly the right thing to do even though it got revised because remember from the start I said you should have a date even if you know you're going to revise it because the public needs to focus on something even if it's changed. | |
| I'm uncomfortable having the states all make their decisions because the longer we go I mean, obviously they have to be involved in the decision, but I'd like them to come up with an opening time much sooner, even if it changes. | |
| Because having a date in your head makes it way easier to manage your isolation. | |
| You know, imagine being in isolation and not knowing when it's going to end, versus being in isolation and knowing that in nine days it's over. | |
| Those are not the same. | |
| One of them can make you crazy. | |
| And the other is like, ah, I'll just find some way to keep busy for nine days and I'll be good. | |
| It's a completely different mindset. | |
| And we're experiencing, as much as we're experiencing a health crisis and an economic crisis, it's a psychological crisis, too. | |
| You know, informs the rest of it as well. | |
| So I think to get the psychology right, we need some kind of dates that we can argue about, plan for, feel bad about, you know, just interact with. | |
| We just need a little bit of solidness. | |
| And Dr. Chris Murray He was one of the modelers, one of the big models. | |
| He was on, I think it was CNN, and he was talking about, generally, what he thought for reopening dates. | |
| So he thought that maybe a state like Hawaii, that has the least COVID problems so far, he was thinking that maybe the first part of May, like May 1st or so, they might start opening up. | |
| But that the worst hit places, the hotspots, might be middle of June, And he sees a lot of other stuff in the middle, you know, mid to late May. | |
| Now, that's the first time I saw anybody give an estimate who knew what they were talking about. | |
| And even though you could say, well, those models are incorrect, I don't really care that the models are incorrect. | |
| I care that I had an estimated time. | |
| And so I can look at those times and say, okay, we're not... | |
| I'm in California, so we're not as good as Hawaii, but we're not as bad as New York. | |
| So that would put us in that middle zone, you know, mid-May, maybe. | |
| But we're California, so maybe we'll be a little more aggressive and staying close. | |
| But it looks to me like that at least bounds it. | |
| I'm feeling like mid to late May would be a California time. | |
| Uh... So that makes me feel better, and I wish that the task force would do something similar, which is to say in public, each of your states will be different, but it's going to be somewhere between May 1st and, we think, June 15th. | |
| If you're a hotspot, it's the latter. | |
| If you're not, it's the former, and everybody else is going to be somewhere in that middle ground. | |
| That would make a big difference to the psychology. | |
| Here's an interesting factoid. | |
| Kim Jong-un has not been seen in a week. | |
| And apparently there have been at least a few events that he typically would always be to because he has some kind of traditional value in North Korea, something about his relatives, etc. | |
| And so he's conspicuously missing. | |
| It's obvious that there's some kind of choice or inability to be in public. | |
| So the speculation is anything from he was trying to put some distance between himself and the events because the events were about his family and he wants to be his own person. | |
| Well, I doubt that. I don't think that explanation. | |
| The other one was they're just trying to keep him safe because they don't want him around other people because he might get COVID. I think that's possible. | |
| Here's the other possibility. | |
| Kim Jong-un is exactly the kind of person who dies from coronavirus. | |
| Am I right? Now, I want to say this as delicately as possible, but Kim Jong-un does not look like the symbol of good health. | |
| He's got some issues. I don't know what they are. | |
| It might be diabetes, but he's certainly got some weight issues and lots of rumors about other issues. | |
| So at the very least, I think he smokes, although that may be good. | |
| We don't know. Smoking could be good or bad. | |
| We'll have to wait and see. But if Kim Jong-un got coronavirus, I feel like he wouldn't make it. | |
| At least the odds wouldn't be that good. | |
| Well, I guess even... | |
| Let's see, at his age, even if he's not super healthy, I think actually he would mostly survive, right? | |
| So in theory, he would survive even if he got it. |