Episode 929 Scott Adams: The Green New Deal is Dead. Joe Biden Still Hiding. Carl Stories.
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Content:
Andrew Cuomo's daughter asks him a funny/humanizing question
Leading model death estimate is only up to August?
Iranian gunboats harassing American Navy
Joe Biden Insult Bot @BidenInsultBot
Green New Deal decimated by...Michael Moore backed film
WaPo Philip Rucker promotes massively debunked fake news
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No doubt about it. We got lots of fun stories today.
Sometimes the stories are sad, sometimes they're fun.
Today is more fun than sad.
Let's go with that. You can watch sad stuff on the other channels.
You know, you've got plenty of sad stuff.
We'll come here for the optimism.
Glass is half full.
Speaking of a glass, if you'd like to enjoy the simultaneous sip, all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or chalice or a canteen drink or a flask, a vessel of any kind, and fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine, the other day, the thing that makes everything, including the frickin' pandemic, better.
It's called the simultaneous sip.
Go.
Mmm.
Better every time.
Just like I promised you.
Thank you.
Alright, we've got fun stories.
All kinds of fun stories.
There was a wonderful little human moment from Andrew Cuomo, Governor Cuomo of New York.
And he was telling the story So he's got three daughters.
I think at least two of them are teenagers.
And he was telling the story about how they're at home and they're watching the news.
And he saw the news of another governor of Maryland, Larry Hogan.
Talking about how Larry Hogan had cleverly acquired a bunch of test kits from South Korea.
And Governor Cuomo, who's like the talk of the town, and he's really got the highest profile of any politician who has a good reputation, he's like the star of the show.
So, it's Andrew Cuomo, he's just killing it in the public opinion, taking charge, he's a leader, and his daughter turns to him and says, "Why didn't you do that?" And then as Andrew Cuomo tells the story, and then his other daughter says, "Yeah, that
Why didn't you do that? Now when he tells the story, he's practically crying because he feels guilty, because it just diminished him so much.
Like, you know, you have to know that even though he's going through a tough time with all of it, you have to know That he at least felt he was important.
At the very least, he thought, well, it's a tragedy.
Nothing about this is good.
But at least I'm killing it.
I'm just killing it.
Everybody says so. And then his daughters go, yeah, what do you think of that?
Now, as I often say, there's one criticism...
That just always works.
Which is, if you do something that's right, you should have done it sooner.
And if somebody else does something right, this is sort of the cousin of that, if somebody else does something right, well, why didn't you do that?
Why didn't you think of that last week?
So there's some criticisms that are just universal.
You can apply them to every situation.
Like, no matter how much you did right, Well, why didn't you do it sooner?
So, I love that story.
But it's also, because it was so human, it also highlights why Andrew Cuomo is so popular at the moment.
Because this is one of those occasions in history where you need somebody who's just really, really human.
Because the people need to know that their leaders sort of understand them, they're human too, they feel your pain, etc.
So I think Andrew Cuomo might be like a perfect leader in the perfect situation.
But what's also funny about this is that Many of you have watched the interviews in which his brother Chris Cuomo of CNN was doing with his brother.
And one of the dynamics of those interviews that made them so interesting, in my opinion, they were great television.
You know, people complained, blah, blah, blah.
But it was great television, just on entertainment alone, because it gave you two levels.
We were getting the news, important news, and at the same time we were seeing this brother dynamic, which I found fascinating.
Fascinating because both of the brothers were operating at such a high level.
Normally it wouldn't be this interesting, but when you've got somebody who's like a top anchor on CNN, the governor during an emergency, and the brothers.
It was just sort of cool.
So you could say it was stunt casting, but it was still interesting.
But here's what I found the most interesting about it.
The dynamic that they displayed on screen was sort of a competitive sibling thing.
So they were always competing.
And they would mock each other, and it would be sort of like a sports trash talk, which is what made it fun.
But here's the best part.
So imagine these brothers compete with each other to be the alpha of whatever the situation is.
And Chris Cuomo is in the position of being the inferior brother.
And when I say the inferior brother, I mean just in this situation.
The person who is the governor and the leader and the role model of all governors everywhere is sort of the star of this situation.
But the person who is simply asking him questions is not the star.
If you had asked me, you know, two months ago, who is the more famous Cuomo, I might have said Chris Cuomo, because everybody sees him on CNN, but not everybody pays attention to the governor of New York.
But at the moment, that's reversed.
So you've got this great dynamic of the children.
And I thought to myself, well, is there anything that Chris Cuomo could do that would fix this situation where instead of his brother is the most famous person during the coronavirus situation, what is there that Chris Cuomo could do that would make him more of the story And less of the person asking about the story, which is not so noble.
Oh, I've got an idea.
How about Chris Cuomo becomes the most famous person who has coronavirus?
Could that be more perfect?
The one and only thing that Chris Cuomo could have done to level up with his brother who was just killing it It's to become the most famous person with coronavirus and start filming from his basement and he becomes the story.
So he crossed the line from talking about the story to becoming one of the biggest elements in the whole country.
Biggest in the sense of attention, not in importance.
Everybody who has the coronavirus is equally important.
All right, a leading U.S. model, the one that everybody talks about for the coronavirus deaths, it just inched up from 60,000 to 66.
There's a little clause in the sentence here that I had not noticed before.
I'm going to plug in my iPad, which sometimes causes me to drop off.
So if my iPad goes blank for a while, that's technical difficulty.
All right. So it inched up from 60,000 to 66,000, but here's what I had never known before, that that death toll is by August.
So by the end of August.
And I'm thinking to myself, is that the end of the death?
Because we've been using this 60,000 number as the number of deaths.
Didn't you think that's what that meant?
Isn't the whole point of predicting the number of deaths That you're predicting the number of deaths.
What am I missing when they predict the number of deaths, but it's not the number of deaths?
Because the number of deaths is all the people who are going to die, not the people who are going to die by the end of August.
What's that all about?
And when we compare the proposed or predicted deaths from coronavirus to the annual flu, Do we say we'll compare it to the annual flu up to the end of August?
Is that what we do?
Now, with the annual flu, maybe that does make sense, because the regular flu kind of peters out in the summer, right?
So if you were to measure, measure, the regular flu, maybe measuring it through the end of August gets you 98% of what you need.
But with the coronavirus, we're already talking about the second and third wave and coming back next year.
If the best estimate is 66,000 by the end of August, isn't it a safe bet that the total is going to be over 100,000?
Do a fact check on me, please.
Am I incorrect that if the model says 66,000 by the end of August, it almost certainly means over 100,000 overall?
I mean, what would this second wave be if not And why are we even talking about getting a vaccine 18 months from now, unless we believe that 18 months from now, this thing will still be killing people?
If it's not killing people in 18 months, why are we even talking about a vaccine?
So obviously, it's going to kill people for at least 18 months, and longer, because not everybody's going to be inoculated on day one.
So what would happen to how we understand this?
If it definitely, absolutely is going to be over 100,000 deaths.
Doesn't that start to change how people feel?
I'd asked Adam Townsend on Twitter to give me a number just in his own opinion, because he's on the anti-alarmist side of the debate, I guess you'd say.
And his view is that while it might be bad, it's not so bad that That it matches the amount of pain we're putting on the economy.
I don't want to characterize his opinion, but let's just say that he's on the opinion that it won't be as bad as the bad case.
And I asked him, what would change his mind?
What death number Would convince him that this was actually a big deal.
So he's in the camp, and I really hate characterizing anybody else's opinion, because it's fairly nuanced, and I don't think it's easy to characterize a nuanced opinion.
But it is fair to say he's in the anti-alarmist camp.
Let's just say that.
So I said, what would move you from the anti-alarmist into the, oh, I guess the alarmists were right after all.
How many deaths? And I believe he said 200,000.
And I thought, reasonable.
That's reasonable. I think a reasonable person, you could disagree with this, but subjectively and from a personal opinion, if it was under 200,000 deaths, then maybe you could conclude that you shouldn't have closed the economy.
Except that if it was 200,000 deaths with the economy closed for a long time, it really indicates it would have been a million if you hadn't closed it, right?
Sort of. Maybe half a million.
At which point it makes sense that it looks like closing the economy made sense.
Anyway, keep an eye on that.
But that end of August thing threw me because I don't think that's been accurately reported.
Here's just a change of pace for a moment.
So yesterday in my evening Periscope, I outlined a plan for a digital free college, which would involve making a new major, which would be sort of a life strategy major.
It would be comprised of all the subcategories that make you more effective.
I'll just give you some examples.
So learning, say, persuasion, communication, economics, business management, design, 20 other things.
So the idea was you could create a major that's digital and online.
If you had a search engine like a Yelp for classes, They can find you the class online from all the different platforms that have online teaching.
And then you can just say, oh, this is my major.
Go to the search engine, pick the class that you like based on ratings.
Oh, this is a good class.
They're all the same class, but some of them are just better than others.
So you pick the good one. And it might only cost you a few bucks, and so therefore you have basically free college, and it might only take a year.
So it might be a one-year College degree, and then you get the government to, say, give it some accreditation, and you're good to go.
And I would argue that if you could give me, and I said this last night, so I'll say it in case somebody missed it, I'm going to make a provocative claim.
If you were to let me design that major, I could design a major and then present it to, and I'll just pick...
For social reasons, it's obvious why I'll do this.
If you said, okay, Scott, take your college major, and you can have 100, let's say, low-income black kids from America, and you can run them through this major...
And then we'll compare them to people who got to pick their own major, made their way in life a different way.
Maybe they went to college, maybe they didn't go to any college because they couldn't afford it.
The online one was basically free and so cheap.
So, compare them.
Now, subtract from your comparison anybody who went to a STEM field or became a doctor or a lawyer.
I'm talking about the people who are Preparing for a life that could be an entrepreneur, working in a big company where they train you to be something specific.
I'm talking about all the generalists.
If you were to compare the generalists who go their own way to the generalist I would train with this new proposed college major that would be sort of the standard major for the people who don't go into specialized fields, I would propose that if you come back in 10 years after they've completed their Let's say it's a one-year degree, that they would on average be earning far more than the control group.
So this is my provocative claim, that you could create this major that would give better performance.
Now, here's the new point as of today.
I don't want to just reiterate what I said yesterday.
I've often said that the way you can tell a good idea from a bad idea is if in its bad form, before it's even engineered to be good, if in its bad form it already gets people to do something with their bodies.
And it's the body test.
So for example, let's say you design a comic strip.
You decide to become a...
To become a cartoonist and you show your friends some comics that you've made.
If your friends look at the comics and say, hey, this is great.
You should try to do something with this.
You have nothing. Because they haven't really done anything.
They just talked and, of course, they were expected to say something nice.
But if you give your friends some comics and say, what do you think?
Do you think I can make a career out of this?
And your friend says, oh, these are great.
Can I make a copy of this?
I want to send it to my friend.
That passes the body test.
Because in order to make a copy and send it to your friend, your body has to be involved.
So if you create a product which involves somebody's body spontaneously, you don't have to ask them to do anything, they just volunteer to use their body to do something with this product, you've got a product.
So it's one of the most reliable indicators of something that would be good is if bodies are moving in some way.
And of course the Dilbert comic, that was the tell, is that people were literally physically cutting him out of the newspaper and physically putting him on the refrigerator or the cubicle wall.
So it was the physicality of it that was the predictor.
So after I did my little demonstration about how college could be free, this morning I got on Twitter and I saw that Donovan Loomis, who's been on my periscopes, I had taken my whiteboard that I just sort of scratched the ideas on and turned it into a proper graphic flowchart.
Now, in order to take my whiteboard and turn it into a proper graphic that he then tweeted, he had to involve his body.
He had to be looking at the one thing and typing physically, probably a lot of arranging things to get it just right, playing with the fonts.
So if you can come up with an idea that causes somebody on the other side of the planet, and literally Donovan's in South Korea, so he's literally on the other side of the planet.
If on the other side of the planet somebody's body is moving, like literally physically their body is doing something, that It's a really strong indicator of something that will grab other people's attention as well.
So it's out there now.
And let's see if the idea moves any more bodies.
And I'll let you know how that goes.
Apparently Trump ordered the U.S. Navy to shoot down any Iranian gunboats that harass our fleet.
So I guess the Iranians are trying to, you know, take their gunboats too close to our boats, and now that Trump has just said to just basically kill them.
Just kill them. Now, is that the right decision from our Commander-in-Chief?
If the Iranian gunboats keep doing this, just kill them all.
I think so.
I think so.
And I would be disappointed, well, that's the wrong word, I would expect Iran to keep doing it, right?
Because they sort of have to test that.
So don't you sort of expect that in the next few days you're going to hear that one of our ships obliterated at least one, might be more than one, but don't you think we're going to obliterate at least one Iranian gunboat?
Because we sort of have to, right?
You know, if they keep it up, At this point, I mean, it's an order from the commander-in-chief, so they have to.
All right. The funniest account on Twitter...
At least at the moment, is the Joe Biden insult bot.
If you have not experienced the fake account called the Joe Biden insult bot, you really need to.
The way it works is, if you tweet at it, it's a real person, not a bot, but if you tweet at the account, It will insult you in the form of a Joe Biden insult, which are all just crazy talk.
And it's the funniest freaking thing you've ever seen in your life.
I'm going to read you a few of them.
Now, these might not come across as so funny when I read them.
They'll give you a flavor of them.
And there's something about reading them all in the list that makes you giggle to the point where it hurts.
All right, so this is from the Joe Biden insult.
These are just various tweets.
Here's one. Take it to the bank, you cobblestone-crunching gravy guzzler.
Here's another. That's some real potato skin, you yellow-snow-eating corn snake.
Here's a go amble in some bramble, you dribble-mouthed scuttle-flipper.
Go on, git, you horse-jackin' tri-corner hat-thief.
Easy on the mustard, you gravel-scratchin' clam-fister.
Take the slow boat to Tinseltown, you Piccadillon grass-gobbler.
You jello-handed.
So, I tweeted this yesterday.
You should just follow this account.
It's pretty darn funny.
Now, the thing that makes this funny demonstrates a principle of humor.
I was going to do a humor lesson around this, but I'll give you the quick version.
Which is that one of the things that makes things funny...
Here's like...
One of the most illuminating rules you'll ever hear.
This will be really looking behind the curtain of reality a little bit, and then behind the curtain is behind the curtain.
And it goes like this.
The main thing that makes somebody laugh at a joke is that there's a logic to it that doesn't make sense, but it still makes sense.
So the best jokes are there's sort of kind of a joke logic that And you get what the joke logic is, and you're trying to reconcile it in your brain with real logic, but you can't get there.
So it's near logic, but not quite.
And your brain, the thing that triggers the laugh reflex is that your brain can't fit it into logic.
It recognizes it as logic, but can't make it logical.
So roughly speaking, those are the requirements.
It feels logical emotionally, But it's not.
And your brain knows it, and then you have this conflict, and then it fights it out in your head, and it causes a laugh reflex.
Buzz Killington jokes, right?
So when you read these, what makes them funny, I think, is that the author of these found a format...
That you could very easily fill in new words, and it's the same joke form, and it always works.
And what makes it works is that all the words in the sentence don't work together, but they feel as if they make sense, but they don't.
So let me read you a few with that in mind.
So the rule is that your brain sort of feels like it makes sense, but it doesn't.
Here's one. Easy on the mustard, you gravel scratch and clam fister.
So your brain is trying to figure out what mustard and gravel scratch and clam fister have in common, and the answer is nothing.
But your brain can't accept that because it understands the sentence.
Get it? You understood the sentence, but it also doesn't make any sense at all.
So that's exactly the...
What would you call it?
The formula. You understand it, and it doesn't make sense at the same time.
So that's probably one of the strongest rules of humor.
I saw this story in the New York Post, and I swear I've never loved my country more than this.
You know, I'm quite patriotic, you know, down to the DNA level.
But there are moments when you love your country, like more than just a citizen loves their country.
There are moments when you're not just loving your country, but you're in love with your country.
Do you know what I mean? Like it goes that extra level where you say, I don't just like the United States and appreciate its system of government.
I think I love it.
And that happened when I read this headline.
In the New York Post, de Blasio's social distancing tip line, that's the one where you can call in and say, I saw somebody who's not socially distancing.
So de Blasio's social distancing tip line flooded with penis photos and Hitler memes.
I've never loved my country more.
I swear to God, there's just moments like this where I just fucking love this country.
So, that's the most American protest I've ever heard of.
What could be more American than de Blasio, the mayor of New York, basically asked his citizens to rat on each other, and the New Yorkers flood his tip line with penis photos.
And Hitler memes.
Now, the Hitler memes being, you know, calling de Blasio Hitler.
Oh, God, I love this country.
I really do.
Sorry. That is so funny.
I think you just can't stand it anymore.
All right.
I have...
You know, I tell you, nothing gives me more encouragement about the future of the United States than stuff like this.
As much as I don't think it's a good idea to be protesting the social isolation, I love the fact that we are.
I can't separate the fact...
I can't separate the fact in my head that we should not be gathering in groups without masks to protest social distancing.
We just shouldn't be doing that.
At the other hand, I love the fact that we are.
I can't separate those thoughts.
I can hold them both. Anyway, the canaries in the coal mine for what I would call the left-leaning world And I've said this before.
Michael Moore, Bill Maher, maybe Matt Taibbi.
You can think of a few more.
These are people who would be the first to realize that their own side was full of crap.
If it is. Now, if it's not, of course they won't.
But I would call them the people who are most likely to be able to call out their own side for being wrong.
Now, on the conservative side, I would say maybe Tucker Carlson and Greg Duffield would be similar on the more right-leaning news in the sense that they would be among the first who would call out their own side for being dumb if they saw something that was dumb.
So there are several people that I just watch for a leading indicator.
Because if Tucker goes hard in a direction...
It kind of predicts, doesn't it?
It kind of predicts where things might go.
And likewise, if Bill Maher or Tybee or Michael Moore make a change, it also, I think, signals something.
And so that brings us to the Michael Moore-backed documentary.
So he's the executive producer, not the talent in it, of this Planet of the Human's Documentary.
Now, I mentioned it, but I had not seen it until last night.
I saw it all but the last 10 minutes, and I don't think I missed anything in the last 10 minutes.
But here's the basic thrust of it.
So it's somebody that Michael Moore decided to back, you know, as executive director.
And the essence of it is that the green technologies are all bunk.
And that it's just smoke and mirrors, and it's really not real.
That it can never replace fossil.
It mostly depends on fossil.
You still need fossil.
You still need your electrical lines.
You can't really get off the grid.
Doesn't work when it's rainy.
It's hard to dispose of them.
The solar panels only work for 10 years.
They're big, you know, big solar plants that were built with great fanfare that are being taken down, a different kind of solar.
So basically, the documentary essentially completely eviscerates the economic argument, or even the moral argument, for green energy.
And one of the biggest things that I learned, and I didn't know this, was that we have a huge so-called green energy in biomass.
I didn't know anything about this.
Did you know that there are, I don't know, hundreds or hundreds of biomass electrical generators around the country?
And the reason that they use biomass is that it's sort of right on the border of being, is this renewable?
It's renewable because it's trees, but it uses so many trees that I don't think you could renew them.
So it's sort of an anti-renewable thing that people call renewable, because you can argue that you can grow a new tree, but I don't know if you could argue that you can grow them fast enough.
So that part was missing.
So here's some of my overall comments on this.
Number one, I think this ends any chance of the Green New Deal.
I think it's over.
And I think it's the second biggest story of the year, because it's not coronavirus, but the second biggest story of the year is that when Michael Moore turns in a fairly full-throated way against standard green energies, solar and biomass and windmills, when Michael Moore goes, that's the end of it.
Isn't it? Because AOC can argue all day long that it's a good idea and the whole argument is going to turn into this.
Did you see Michael Moore's documentary?
The one he backed?
That's the whole argument.
The Green New Deal is actually dead.
It's completely dead.
Now you could have argued that maybe it was dead anyway because of the coronavirus.
Because we spent all our money so we couldn't do much about it.
And Maybe we stopped trusting long-term prediction models because of the coronavirus, which would make people more skeptical of climate change models.
So I was thinking that Green New Deal might have been dead anyway, and then the Michael Moore documentary comes along, and by itself it would have killed the Green New Deal.
But if you add it all together, this is the biggest story that's not being covered.
The Green New Deal is just totally dead.
Now, How credible is the documentary?
And now here's the bad news.
The bad news is it's not very credible at all.
So if you're looking at the quality and credibility of the documentary itself, I would say it's very low.
Very low. And I'll give you some specific reasons for that.
But nonetheless, because it exists, And because the general thrust of it, I think, is probably accurate.
The general thrust of it is that the green energies are not as promising as the people promoting them would like you to believe.
And the general thrust is that a lot of the people pushing green technologies are in there for the money.
It makes the case that Al Gore is the bad guy.
Can you believe that?
A Michael Moore film, backed film, Makes the case that Al Gore only did it for the money.
That's all bullshit.
I'm paraphrasing, but that's the sense I got from it.
I watched it, and I thought the movie was telling me that Al Gore was a fraud, he did it for the money, and that the technologies that are being pushed just can't work, and he made lots of money off pushing them.
That's not my allegation.
I think that's what the film is saying.
But here's why the film lacks credibility.
I'll just give you some examples.
Imagine, if you will, somebody makes an entire documentary about green energy and not once mentions nuclear power.
I mean, seriously.
It's a comparison of fossil fuels to these traditional green energies, an entire movie about energy, and they don't mention nuclear power.
Do you know why they don't mention nuclear power?
It's because they know it's the answer, and they can't go that far, I think.
Now, I can't read minds, so when somebody says something like I just said, your first thought should be, well, you're not reading the mind.
You don't know they think that, and of course I don't.
But what would be your other explanation?
For why people who are, let's say, getting red-pilled on their own, people who thought these green technologies were the bomb, and now they're saying, okay, we were fooled, maybe they're not the answer.
How would those people do an entire documentary on energy production and not even mention nuclear?
What's the other reason they would not mention it?
I can't think of one. The only reason I can think of, and again, it's speculation because I can't read their minds, My speculation is that they're either convinced or leaning toward it being the answer.
And they can't say that.
Because if you're Michael Moore, it's a big stretch to say, did you know solar power isn't what you thought it was?
That's a big movement.
Now he's been pacing his side, doing things they agree with for years and years and years, so maybe he can lead them.
Maybe he's exactly the right...
Maybe this is Nixon can go to China sort of thing.
Maybe Michael Moore is the only person who could convince him solar and wind are not the answer.
But could even Michael Moore take them all the way past that to nuclear?
I don't think he could.
And maybe one can speculate that he would be smart enough to know that and may have just said, you know, that's a fight for another day.
So it's so conspicuous by its absence, you know that it had to be a conversation that the filmmaker had, probably with Michael Moore at some point, where they said, you know, the only way I'm going to be able to do this is to just not mention nuclear energy like it doesn't exist, because then at least I can make a clean argument without that getting in the way.
So it could have been just a filmmaker decision.
But it's so obviously missing that it destroys the credibility of the entire operation.
The other thing that it's missing is any kind of an economic comparison that would be credible.
So while it is true to say, hey, these solar powers only last 10 years, they're hard in terms of waste, etc., I'd still like to see the comparison.
Just because the solar has downsides, that's true of every option.
Just simply pointing out that there are downsides to green energy doesn't get me all the way to, and therefore it's not a good deal.
I can't get there.
All I know is that it has some downsides.
So no credibility for the economics of it.
Simply it's saying that it has problems, and we already knew that.
Here's another problem. It used, as some of its examples, it went to some green energy promoted concerts.
And the concerts were billed as being sort of off the grid and using solar power to power the concert.
But when the documentary maker went behind the scenes, he learned that they had backup generators and they needed them because it wasn't sunny all the time.
So the backup generators were to fill in for the times it wasn't sunny.
And so the filmmaker is sort of concluding that maybe a lot of these green energy things are frauds because behind the stage, literally behind the stage, was a backup generator using, in that case, biomass, but it wasn't enough.
I think they had to use fossil fuels or something.
And I would say that is totally illegitimate.
So using those examples as examples of why green energy is maybe a fraud, completely illegitimate.
Because nobody makes the claim that you could do a concert on solar panels.
Nobody makes that claim.
So to debunk a claim that nobody's making and to throw it in the mix, I don't think that's honest.
That really detracts from your credibility.
So I would say that whether or not you can put on a concert with solar panels doesn't really tell you Whether a permanent installation in which solar is part of the answer could ever be economical.
So he doesn't really close the gap to finish the economic argument.
So that's a big problem. Here's one that's really big, in my opinion.
He shows Elon Musk claiming that his Ginga factory would be 100% Green energy is self-sufficient.
And then to debunk that claim from Elon, who said they had accomplished 100% green energy, he shows that the Gigafactory is actually connected by wires to the regular grid.
And so his conclusion is, well, you must not be 100% green energy using your solar or whatever locally if you have to be connected to the grid.
And somebody's saying batteries, etc.
So, here's what's missing.
If you were completely self-sufficient with 100% green energy, you would still be connected to the grid.
One does not preclude the other.
Why would you be connected to the regular grid if you were making 100% of your own energy?
Well, if you'd looked into it even this much, you would know that there are several reasons that potentially that's true.
Number one, if you say that you can produce 100% of your energy, what do you do with the extra?
Did Elon Musk ever make the claim that they were producing exactly 100% of their energy?
As in they don't need any extra from the outside ever, but they also don't make any extra.
Did he make that claim? Do you make the claim that every day, no matter what's happening with the sun, the exact amount of energy they're making is just the amount they need?
No, he never made that claim.
And if you can't make exactly the amount you need every day, what do you do?
Well, if you're making too much every day, you connect to the grid and sell it back to them.
That's how it works. The panels on my house are not off the grid.
The panels on my house go directly into the grid.
I sell them electricity, essentially, by just giving them electricity.
And then they measure how much I give them.
And then I use their electricity off the grid for my household appliances.
But they say, oh, we won't charge you the full price because you gave us some free solar panel energy separately.
That's how it works.
So if the Gigafactory is like anybody else who uses solar panels, they have to be connected to the grid.
That's how it works.
You give your energy to the grid, and that helps balance out the load at the grid, and then the grid gives you a consistent amount back, including at night.
Here's another reason that they could be attached to the grid even if they had their own power.
How do you build the plant in the first place?
This plant is in the middle of nothing.
How did they construct it if they didn't have power?
Well, I would think the very first thing you would do is you say, well, I'm going to build this giant facility in the middle of nowhere.
I'd better get me some electricity.
First thing you do is run electricity.
A connection from the power grid to build your solar plants and your factory, right?
So it could be just left over from when they did construction, and why would you take it away?
Once you've built it, you can just leave it there in case you need it.
It could be built there as just a backup.
What if, even if they're getting 100% of their energy from solar panels, what if they said to themselves, you know, it might break someday.
Someday it might stop working.
So why don't we have them back up to the grid, which we needed to build anyway during the construction phase.
So, my point is, we don't know why Tesla is connected to the grid, but we do know there's a whole bunch of explanations that are far more likely than it's all a fraud.
So, given that nuclear wasn't mentioned and these other comparisons were just really sketchy, I'd have to say it's not credible, but it's still going to be very persuasive in the larger argument.
I saw a very clever, presumably fake, Campaign ad for Joe Biden.
Now the really good fakes, the ones that the trolls are putting together, are the ones that are so close to reality, somebody says, you debunked nothing?
Who says I debunked nothing?
Now are you telling me that a energy documentary, a documentary about energy that doesn't mention nuclear, You're saying that I haven't debunked it?
That alone debunks it.
All the rest is just gravy.
So I don't know what you're watching if you think that wasn't debunked.
That's pretty debunked. Anyway, there's a campaign ad that I think is put together by trolls and it said, it just shows Joe Biden and there's like this glow coming from his chest where his heart would be and the words of the poster say, his brains?
No, his heart.
And people thought it might have been a real campaign ad and that they were giving up on Joe Biden's brain being a selling point.
And they were just going with, he's a nice guy, he's got a good heart.
But that again fits the category of a little bit too on the nose.
This campaign ad looks a little bit too close to what his critics would say.
That his brain doesn't work.
So I rated this as probably a troll thing.
And then people said that if you click on it, it goes to a broken link.
So I still think it was a...
Yeah, it had to be a parody.
But look for the parodies that are so close to what you think would be true...
That that's what makes them clever.
I guess there's a whole bunch of new rumors about Bill Gates and the World Health Organization and the Wuhan lab and the virus having gained a function and stuff.
I would say none of that's likely to be true.
So you can ignore all that.
Bill Gates sure is the subject of a lot of conspiracy theories.
CNN is reporting that Quote, the quiet abandonment of hydroxychloroquine on Fox Network because the studies are not giving it enough support.
So CNN is sort of mocking Fox News for making a big deal about the hydroxychloroquine, but getting really quiet about it as the new studies come out, if you know what I mean.
But this latest study, or at least one of them, I don't think they're testing it necessarily with the zinc product.
There may be one test where they did.
But I don't know if they're giving it to people early on and they're also giving it with them azithromycin and the zinc.
So be careful when you're looking at the hydroxychloroquine tests because they're not apples to apples.
The ones that work...
We have the three drugs, hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin, and zinc.
I should say the ones that are reported anecdotally, not confirmed, but seem to be effective.
The ones that seem not to work at all, and maybe it's even bad for people, tend to be the hydroxychloroquine alone or with azithromycin.
But because the zinc is presumed to be the magic ingredient, the thing that works with the hydroxychloroquine, That if you tested one without the other, you wouldn't actually be testing what you need to test.
It's good to test everything, but presumably you would get a bad result if you didn't include it with the zinc, and that's what we saw.
But there might be at least one where the zinc was there and they still didn't get a good result, so I'm a little unclear about where we are on that.
I'm going to keep my 60-40 odds.
Based on early, undependable reporting, I'm going to say there's probably a 60% chance it's not effective.
And a 40% chance it is.
Just my read of how it feels without solid information at this point.
Apparently Kim Jong-un is not dead, or if he is, North Korea is not aware of it, because they seem to be just doing business as usual.
So there's no sign in North Korea that there's anything like Kim Jong-un died, or even break dead.
That doesn't mean it didn't happen.
We haven't seen him in a while.
But it's actually not that uncommon to have wild rumors that just are crazy and turn out to be false.
As is, you can expect this to happen.
So the Israelis were shipping various aid, medical aid and food and stuff to some of the Palestinian Authority, and they were trying to help out.
And what of course happened?
Immediately the rumor spread that the Israelis were not really trying to help, that they were putting virus on the stuff that they were shipping to the Palestinians because they really wanted to infect the Palestinians.
Now, it just doesn't pay to try to help the world, does it?
Bill Gates wakes up every day and just tries to help the world.
And then he's accused of being basically the devil.
Israel is just trying to help the Palestinian Authority and they get accused of trying to kill them.
I feel like doing good deeds just doesn't pay too much.
Alright, let's talk about the President's temporary ban on immigration.
Apparently 79% of the American adults I'm not sure who's getting banned and who's not.
It's a little unclear at this point.
But certainly we should be looking at tightening that up during the coronavirus.
But here's the clever part.
It baits Joe Biden into giving an opinion.
What exactly will Joe Biden say to the Trump plan of temporarily halting immigration because it might be dangerous and we need the jobs in this country?
It kind of puts Joe Biden in a trap, right?
Because you can make a case for it, but I don't know if Joe Biden can.
You'd have to work pretty hard to make an elegant argument for why you would want to do the opposite of what the President is doing, because Joe Biden has to take the opposite.
He has to take the opposite.
Oh, yeah, maybe he'll just call him racist.
Go back to the oldies.
Let's see. Apparently there's an idea floating around that the Democrats...
Need to counter President Trump's coronavirus briefings because they're too much like a campaign.
And so the thought was that Biden could create a shadow cabinet and then they would take turns, each of them debunking whatever the president says during his briefing.
I've ranked that as possibly the worst idea I've ever heard.
There's so many bad things about that idea that I'm really hoping they do it.
Because, first of all, they're going to disappear compared to the president.
The president brings the show.
The best they can do is have some talking head in front of a camera saying, are you lying about everything like they do after the State of the Union?
But nobody's going to care.
Nobody's going to care. And if they're this shadow cabinet, everybody's going to be talking about the cabinet choices.
So it's just going to give the president new targets.
There's a new study.
Provocative it is.
Provocative, I say. I'm not sure I believe it and other people are questioning it too.
So the new study that disputes the finding of a new study that suggests...
Oh, Fox News disputes this.
So there's a study, but Fox News disputes it and says it's a weak study.
Not real. And the study alleges...
The regular viewers of The Hannity Show were more likely to die from coronavirus than those who preferred Tucker Carlson's Tonight.
And their reasoning was that Tucker was early in warning that it was a real problem, and allegedly Hannity was less early in being as serious as Tucker was, and that it actually killed this situation.
And then some of Hannity's people died because they got bad advice from watching his show.
Now, when Fox News says they dispute the findings, I think you could really dispute those findings.
People are saying in the comments, as I was going to say myself, that you have to be careful there might be a demographic difference.
The Tucker viewers might be younger.
So you can imagine there would be lots of reasons why there would be a difference.
But I also think a lot of people watch both.
I just don't think you can pick out that difference.
But let's say it's true.
What if it were? Even Scott was hooked by hydroxy.
Yeah, this will be the part where everybody redefines what I said so that I can be wrong.
Watch the evolution of this.
Watch people claim with their false memories that I said hydroxychloroquine was the answer.
I never said that.
You won't be able to find it anywhere, but you'll remember that I did.
It just didn't happen.
Every time that I talked about it, I was always clear to say, you know, we're optimistic, we're hopeful, but we don't have studies.
Where am I right now?
Pretty much the same. I'm optimistic.
I'm hopeful. We don't have studies.
But I'm putting a percentage on it now because we have more negative anecdotal.
So I think it's like a 60-40.
40% chance of it working.
If you're an optimist, pretty good.
Pretty good. So if you're already telling me that I'm wrong or that I've changed my mind, you are misinformed.
It is true that I've probably shifted the percentage of my optimism But it's not like it was ever 100 or anywhere near it.
I mean, it was never... I would say I'd probably move from 80 to 60%.
Or, no, 80...
I'd probably move from 60 to 40.
My own assessment.
But that was well within the uncertainty range.
All right. What else we got going on here?
Well, if it's true...
Let's say it was true... Let's say that studies support the fact that people who were warned early about the seriousness of the coronavirus were more likely to survive.
Would that not indicate that I had saved a number of lives?
Wouldn't you say that I was the first one who said, close those flights from China?
And I probably was the first earliest pundit, except for Jack Posobiec, who said close travel from China because it's serious.
Or until we find out how serious it is, but it looks serious.
And if people who watched my Periscope took that seriously, is it possible that I saved lives?
Well, according to the study, which doesn't sound too credible, maybe.
If 100,000 people watched my Periscope and got a bigger scare about it and therefore acted more socially isolatingly, maybe.
Maybe I saved some of your lives.
But I'm not sure these studies will hold up.
All right. Apparently, Russia's got an interesting situation going on there.
Because I guess Russia's not doing the greatest job of informing its people or taking care of the coronavirus.
And Putin's popularity, which is usually sky-high, has fallen to 63%.
So it's normally in the higher 60s or 70s.
And so, given that...
You wonder if Putin's actually vulnerable?
Probably not. But I'll bet you this coronavirus does change some regimes.
I would guess that the coronavirus situation will change who runs some countries eventually.
We don't know which ones though. We're starting to see what I call the Carl stories.
So a few days ago I tweeted this.
I said, in about a week prepare for non-stop stories in the press like this.
Quote, Carl protested the economic shutdown.
He did not wear a mask.
Now Carl is dead, and so is his grandma.
Don't be Carl. Because you know they're coming.
Well, headline today, John McDaniel, age 60, of Marion County, died April 15th at a hospital, blah, blah.
He had made several posts about the coronavirus on Facebook last month before testing positive.
This is from this guy's Facebook post.
Quote, does anybody have the guts to say this COVID-19 is a political ploy?
Asking for a friend.
Prove me wrong. And then he got it, and then he died.
So that's your first Carl story.
You are going to see so many Carl stories in the next week, you're going to be tired of them.
Here's a question I have.
The reason for closing immigration is because we have so many people at work.
And the theory is that Americans could do those jobs of the immigrants.
I've never seen any evidence of that.
I would say that the statement that Americans can take the jobs that the immigrants would not be doing if they're not allowed to come into work, I would say there's no evidence of that.
I've seen evidence against it, but I've never seen evidence as true.
And here's what I mean. If you take the skilled technical workers, the reason that skilled technical workers are hired from overseas is not because they're cheaper.
I mean, they might be.
I don't know if they are or not. But that's not why you do it.
You do it because you can't find enough.
In Silicon Valley, finding somebody with technical skills is getting really hard, or at least it was during the better times.
Now, So this might be the only time when we don't need any more skilled workers for a few months, assuming that some of the skilled workers got laid off.
But in general, the reason that we have skilled workers come in is that they add to the economy.
So if you bring in a skilled worker, a technical worker, I would say they add more to the economy for everybody than they subtract.
But what about the ones who are working on the farms and doing dishwashers and stuff like that?
Well, here's my experience.
Somebody says they are paid less.
But that's not the reason you do it.
The reason you do it is because you can't find enough technical workers.
That's a bonus. If you can find a way to pay them less, that would be a bonus.
In my experience, running a restaurant...
You can't find non-Mexican workers, you can't find American citizens to do a lot of jobs.
They would rather just not have a job.
So if you said to the Mexican immigrants, well, your choice is to have no job, or you can have this back-breaking labor...
The Mexican immigrant will say, yeah, back-breaking labor.
That's exactly why I came here.
I came here to do back-breaking labor.
Of course I'll take that job.
And then they'll take that job.
If you say to an American, and this is my experience, right, so this is just anecdotal, but I would be looking for anybody to give me a counterfactual.
If you say to the typical American, hey, I got this...
You know, this job for you.
It's back-breaking labor, but maybe it could turn into something better.
The average American who is unemployed and is only qualified for that job will say some version of this.
Nah, I think I'll wait and see if I can get something better.
So, if you think you can get Americans to take those jobs, well, good luck.
I think what you'll find is that Americans will prefer unemployment.
To working those jobs.
That's my experience. My experience is that they will prefer unemployment.
Now somebody says, pay them!
Thank you. So somebody who has an understanding of economics says, yeah, the reason Americans don't take those jobs is they don't pay well.
Now the reason they don't pay well, of course, is that if they did, then the cost of your food would be far higher.
Maybe that's the better solution.
But in any case, you're just trading one problem for another.
We should be aware of that.
In the short run, because the wages would not be going up that much, in the short run, I just think farms and other places who require back-breaking labor are not going to be able to find Americans to do it.
Americans don't do back-breaking labor if they have an option of staying on their mother's couch and eating their mother's cooking.
We just don't do it.
That's been my experience.
There's a so-called...
The White House bureau chief for the Washington Post, Philip Rucker, he's claimed, even yesterday, he claimed that Trump showed solidarity with neo-Nazis in Charlottesville.
Literally the opposite of what happened.
This is a bureau chief for the Washington Post and is somehow not aware of the most debunked fake news of Of all time.
It is the most thoroughly, completely debunked, all you have to do is look at the record.
You just have to look at the transcript.
That's it. There's no judgment.
There's no opinion. You just have to look at it.
There it is. Debunked.
And the White House bureau chief for the Washington Post was not aware of that or decided to act like he didn't know.
So Joel Pollack in Breitbart's Pointed that out and corrected the record yet again.
How many times do we have to correct that record?
All right. Well, I think I've talked about all the amazing things I want to talk about.
And we're still trying to figure out if...
So there's a new report that says maybe the first person who had coronavirus was much earlier than we thought, which would indicate maybe there's more widespread...
Infection than we thought.
Maybe it started back in January, which would have given it enough time to be more widespread than we think it is.
I don't believe anything at this point.
Maybe it's true.
But I also can't distinguish between that and...
There's a handful of people who have it, and it just took a while to catch on.
I can't tell the difference.
So I don't know if this story means anything or not.
Anyway... Trump uses the word plague.
Yeah, I like it. Outed his source.
Who outed his source?
Alright, just looking at your comments before I sign off.
Don't forget our welfare state.
Okay, thank you, I won't.
Some think that Philip Rucker is aware about lying.
I don't think so. If I had to bet on it, neither of us know, because we don't know what he's thinking.
If I had to bet...
I would bet that Philip Rucker does not know that he was promoting the biggest debunked hoax in politics.
I'll bet he does not know.
And it's based on this, the silos of information.
How much do you think Philip Rucker has listened to this periscope?
I would say zero times.
How many times has Phil Rucker read Breitbart?
At least before today, because he's probably reading it today because there's an article about him.
But before today, how much time did he spend reading Breitbart?
Zero. Now, if you didn't follow me, you didn't follow Breitbart, Steve Cortez was talking about it until CNN kicked him off the air.
They unhired him for talking about debunking this hoax.
So even if Philip Rucker watched CNN, where there was like a full-time debunker, they removed the full-time debunker quickly, just so he didn't actually give anybody any information.
So if you were a conservative, I'll give you this concrete example.
If you were a conservative and you watched the new Michael Morbecht movie about green energy being largely BS, did you already know that?
And the answer is, if you're a conservative, probably yes.
Because when I watched it, I was surprised at how many biomass plants there were.
That part I didn't know about. But I wasn't surprised at all to hear that the economics of solar and wind, etc., are not promising.
I knew that because I've been exposed to news on the left.
I've been exposed to news on the right.
But suppose you've been only exposed to news on the left.
What would you have ever seen that would have ever told you that this green energy is maybe overrated?
Nothing. Because there are no reports like that on the left.
So I would say that people like Phil Rucker I think actually are just...
Not informed of everything that the people on the right think is common sense because they've seen it so many times.
I mean, how many times have you, because most of you are Trump supporters watching this, how many times have you seen an article that says basically what the Michael Moore documentary said, that the green energy is not such a great deal?
Most of you, right? Probably almost every one of you.
How many people on the left have ever seen that?
Have you ever seen any article that suggested that green energy is not real?
Probably not. So, if you ask me, does Philip Rucker know that he is promoting the most easily debunked non-fact in the world, my answer is, probably not.
He probably has never been exposed to that fact.
Very easily, you could easily imagine that.
So that's my opinion.
All right. That's all I got for now.
And tonight, I'll talk to you tonight.
Oh, I went over time tonight.
I went longer than I want. So I'll let you know when my interview with Dan Crenshaw is live.
I don't have time for that, but as soon as it is, I'll...
I'll tweet it. So I did get...
I was on Dan Crenshaw's podcast.
I think it went well.
We had a good conversation. And I think you might like it.
