My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a Content: My disagreement yesterday with 2 qualified, medical doctors Sweden's coronavirus strategy...didn't work? Winning against all odds South Korea's reporting on Kim Jong-Un --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scott-adams00/support
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| Hey everybody! | |
| Come on in! | |
| It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams. | |
| Yeah, it's probably the best part of the day. | |
| Well, I can't tell you how hard I've been laughing this morning. | |
| If my eyes look like they're... | |
| If they're red, it's not from crying, it's from laughing. | |
| Rarely do you get such a clean win as I had this morning. | |
| You know, sometimes you wake up and you think, what's today going to be like? | |
| Because yesterday, I was getting hammered yesterday. | |
| And then last night, I was just getting hammered on social media. | |
| Now let me tell you why if you miss the show. | |
| But I'll do that after the simultaneous... | |
| Yeah, it's after the simultaneous sip. | |
| And all you need is a cupper, a mugner, a glass, a tanker, a chalice, a steiner, a canteen, a jugger, a flask, a vessel of any kind. | |
| Fill it with your favorite liquid. | |
| I like coffee. Join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine. | |
| At the end of the day, the thing that makes everything better, including the coronavirus. | |
| It's called the simultaneous sip. | |
| It happens now. | |
| Go. Ah... | |
| Oh, where was I? Oh, yes. | |
| I was talking about how much fun I was having this morning. | |
| So, yesterday and last night, just to catch you up, before I get to the good part, I swear to God, I couldn't be any happier this morning. | |
| If you wonder what it's like to see me looking so happy that I can't stand it, This is what it looks like. | |
| I know it won't last, but man, am I going to enjoy it this morning. | |
| So I'm having sort of a shadow of the feeling that I felt, a weaker version. | |
| When Trump won the election, and I went from the dumbest guy in the whole world, that I spent a year and a half being the dumbest guy in the whole world, until he won the election... | |
| And then I was the smartest guy in the world. | |
| You know, at least for an hour. | |
| It felt like that. | |
| So yesterday, I had criticized this viral video that was going around the internet. | |
| Most of you have seen it by now. | |
| There was a Dr. Erickson and some other doctor, mostly Erickson, I think, was talking. | |
| And he was an ER doctor. | |
| And he had his own statistics and arguments about the coronavirus. | |
| And And he said, basically his argument was, hey, look at my numbers. | |
| According to my numbers, coronavirus is sort of overblown. | |
| Let's get back to work. | |
| Now people sent it to me, and I ignored it, and they sent it to me, and more people sent it to me, and I still ignored it. | |
| Because there are lots of stuff on the internet to look at. | |
| In the beginning, I didn't think it was important. | |
| It was just one of many things that people sent to me. | |
| But then people started DMing it. | |
| It's like, oh, my God. | |
| You know, they're sending it to me directly. | |
| I'm getting it through. | |
| I got it through LinkedIn. I got it. | |
| Everybody's sending me this video. | |
| So, all right, I'm going to look at it. | |
| So, I listen to the doctor. | |
| I get about five minutes into it, and my head is on fire because everything he says sounds to me not being a doctor, not being an expert, not being an epidemiologist. | |
| But it sounded to my I made the mistake of publicly disagreeing with two experienced doctors Who were on the front line of this crisis? | |
| How do you think that went for me yesterday? | |
| How do you think it went when I disagreed with two doctors who had a viral video who were saying exactly what people wanted to hear? | |
| See, that was the problem. | |
| The trap, if you will, the trap, somebody says your ego is huge. | |
| Whoever said that, please don't leave yet. | |
| Whoever just made that comment, your ego is huge. | |
| You have to stay. You have to hear the end of the story. | |
| You'll be so disappointed if you don't. | |
| So all day long, I was hammered for being the idiot cartoonist who would dare to disagree with doctors, professional, real, qualified doctors. | |
| And all day long, people said to me, and all night, they said, Oh, Scott, tell us about your doctor degree. | |
| Oh, where did you get your virology experience, Scott? | |
| Because, you know, you're a cartoonist. | |
| These are professional medical doctors. | |
| Went to medical school. | |
| You're not an idiot like you. | |
| Now, to make things worse, because I like to do that to myself sometimes, when I'm in hot water, Sometimes I like to add some hot water to the hot water. | |
| I don't know why. It's like a character defect. | |
| Honestly, it is. I'm not proud of this at all. | |
| When I get in a lot of trouble, my first instinct often is, I'm in a lot of trouble. | |
| I'm really exposed here. | |
| How could I make this a lot worse? | |
| I swear to God I think like that. | |
| And part of it is because I want to see if I can get out of the trap. | |
| I want to see if the trap is so bad that it looks like I can't get out. | |
| And then just to see if I can. | |
| You know, it's sort of like going to one of those escape rooms. | |
| You know, you go to an escape room where you have to figure out how to escape. | |
| Well, you do it just because it's hard. | |
| That's the whole point. That's why you climb a mountain. | |
| Because it's hard. So after being beat up roundly for making medical opinions, I doubled down and I said, you know... | |
| The last time we had this conversation, we meaning the internet, my critics, and me, it was over the question of face masks. | |
| Does anybody remember that? | |
| I bring it up too often because it's too much fun. | |
| When it was the cartoonist against the entire medical community The Surgeon General, World Health Organization, Fauci, saying that masks were not effective. | |
| And I, like an idiot, said, no, allow me to overrule the medical opinion of every professional on the planet with my cartooning degree. | |
| I don't have a degree, but you know what I mean. | |
| My cartooning experience. | |
| But who was right? | |
| Well, I was. I was right, and every medical professional in the world Who probably wasn't wrong. | |
| I think they were lying or they were trying to protect the supply. | |
| So based on the fact that I was right once, just realize how dumb this is, okay? | |
| This is the beauty of how fun this is. | |
| If you don't realize how stupid I was, you're not going to fully appreciate how it turned out. | |
| So like an idiot, I overrule the highest doctors in the world publicly, You know, very vigorously. | |
| But I got lucky. | |
| I got lucky on that one, right? | |
| Because it turns out that I'm pretty good at spotting bullshit. | |
| So you don't need a medical degree to spot obvious bullshit. | |
| That's actually a separate skill. | |
| So when people were saying, Scott, Scott, Scott, you don't have a medical degree, they were actually, they were reading the wrong book. | |
| Because the book they should be reading It's not the medical book. | |
| It's the spotting bullshit book. | |
| Because if you're a bullshit spotter, and you saw the doctor say that face masks don't work, well, the bullshit detector was on, you know, 10. | |
| Mama, mama, mama, mama, mama, bullshit detector. | |
| So then these two doctors come along. | |
| I watched this video for five freaking minutes. | |
| I told people I bailed down after five minutes because it was lacking so much credibility that I couldn't stand it anymore. | |
| And then what did people say? | |
| Man, how can you have a confident public, you idiot, in public you're saying this, how can you have a confident public opinion about medical professionals, you're not a doctor, and worse, you freaking idiot, you didn't even watch the video? | |
| Are you kidding me? | |
| You only watched five minutes of this long video, and that was enough to conclude that you're the expert, Scott, and these medical experts are not Good try, Scott. | |
| So I woke up this morning. | |
| You also heard that the video got taken down by YouTube. | |
| And a lot of people said, censorship! | |
| Censorship. And I said, well, you should at least consider the possibility that YouTube also thinks it's not good medical advice. | |
| And people said, doesn't matter. | |
| There's still censorship. | |
| We should be able to see it even if it's not true. | |
| Which is a fair argument, by the way. | |
| I'm not arguing that point. | |
| As long as you could also see the counter-argument, said people. | |
| And I thought to myself, that's a reasonable argument, but it would also be reasonable to say that you can't scream fire in a crowded theater. | |
| Would you agree? We sort of accepted... | |
| That free speech does exist, but you still can't yell fire in a crowded theater because it would just be a health problem. | |
| People would kill each other trying to get out. | |
| Similarly, analogies are always dangerous, right? | |
| But you could make an argument that giving objectively bad medical advice during an emergency in which it's very much life and death That if people got the wrong medical advice, that might be like yelling fire in a crowded theater. | |
| You could make the argument, right? | |
| So I'm not going to come down on either side of that. | |
| I'm just going to say the argument exists, and that it happened last night. | |
| So I wake up this morning to a statement from the ACEPAAEM. And it goes like this. | |
| The American College of Emergency Physicians... | |
| And the American Academy of Emergency Medicine, they sound pretty medical, don't they? | |
| They sound very medical. | |
| Jointly and emphatically condemn the recent opinions released by Dr. | |
| Daniel Erickson and Dr. | |
| Arden Masihi, the two doctors on that viral video. | |
| These reckless, what? | |
| They used the word reckless. | |
| Who else used the word reckless? | |
| Oh yeah, it was me. | |
| These reckless and untested musings do not speak for medical societies and are inconsistent with current science and epidemiological regarding COVID-19. | |
| Fill in medical word back in that sentence. | |
| As owners of local urgent care clinics, that would be the doctors who are on the video, What? | |
| I can't even believe they said this. | |
| You've seen condemnations before from professional organizations, right? | |
| We've seen that lots of times. | |
| Some organization will say, oh, this person does not speak for us. | |
| We condemn them. I've never seen one condemn this hard. | |
| This is sort of the hardest condemning I've ever seen. | |
| It says, COVID-19 misinformation is widespread and dangerous. | |
| Members of the ACP and AAAM are first-hand witnesses to the human toll, blah, blah, blah, and we strongly advise against using any statements of Drs. | |
| Erickson and Masi as a basis for policy and decision making. | |
| May I simply sit here and bask in my victory? | |
| Have you ever seen anybody win this hard? | |
| Now, I hope you're enjoying this as much as I do. | |
| Now, for those of you who are sort of new to the show, if you will, one of my most frequent themes, I write about it in my books, is managing your ego. | |
| What you're watching is me not managing my ego at all. | |
| Right now I'm doing whatever is the opposite of managing my ego. | |
| I'm just letting it run. | |
| I just let it outside. | |
| My ego is on social isolation. | |
| I just decided to open all the doors and it's just out now. | |
| But my lesson is this. | |
| You can let your ego out to play on these special cases because really... | |
| How often do you get to be the biggest jerk in the world for a day and a half and then win this hard? | |
| I mean, really. This is a very special situation. | |
| So I'm going to enjoy it a little bit. | |
| And then I'm going to try as best I can to remind myself of how often I'm wrong about other stuff. | |
| So today I'll be struggling to try to rein it in and get back to maybe some kind of a normal mental state. | |
| But come on, you have to agree. | |
| That me calling out these two doctors as being medically unfit in public continuously for a day and a half while the entire frickin' world disagreed with me was kind of gutsy. | |
| Are you going to give me that? | |
| It was kind of gutsy, maybe stupid. | |
| If I'm being honest, I can't really tell the difference between gutsy or stupid. | |
| The only thing I know for sure is that it worked out my way. | |
| So, as long as it worked out my way, I'm happy. | |
| All right. Oh my God, I just won't be able to stop laughing about that all day long. | |
| I swear, I thought I was going to wake up today to another day of yesterday where everybody in the world would be telling me I'm an idiot because I'm trying to overrule these professionals. | |
| This could not be more delicious. | |
| Sorry, I'll change the topic eventually. | |
| Here's another one. I don't know if you can actually stroke out or have some kind of medical condition that's caused by winning too much. | |
| Remember the President warned me, he warned all of us really, that we might get tired of winning, but he didn't say that it might be medically dangerous. | |
| This next topic is going to start going into the realm of medically dangerous. | |
| You know the other thing I've been saying in public that I think everyone disagreed with me on? | |
| Probably you. I'll bet every one of you disagreed with me on the following point, which is that Sweden doesn't tell you anything. | |
| How many of you thought, well, look at Sweden. | |
| Sweden's not doing the lockdown. | |
| It's not so bad. | |
| Everything's fine, right? So we should be more like Sweden. | |
| Who is the one person in the world who said, no, don't look at Sweden. | |
| You think you can tell something, but it's a trick because there's just too much that's different there. | |
| Well, so today CNN has a story that basically the summary is that the Sweden experiment didn't work. | |
| That's it. So that's the news today. | |
| So everybody who was on the side of, look at Sweden, let's do what they do. | |
| Read CNN today. | |
| There's an article on there that goes into detail, compares them to the other like countries in the region, not the United States, but Norway and Finland, etc. | |
| And it shows that they have a far higher death rate. | |
| And their death rate is so high that there are professionals, doctors and stuff within Sweden who are begging the country to do what the other countries are doing because they're in so much trouble. | |
| Now, they haven't overloaded any hospitals, and it's still only like 22 out of 1,000 or something like that, whatever the number is, 100,000? | |
| So it's not like they're crushed, but according to the news, the news says Sweden didn't work and is heading in the wrong direction. | |
| Now, you can still say the verdict is out, and I'll agree with you. | |
| You can still say the verdict is out, but you can no longer say Sweden works. | |
| That's off the table, if you're being honest about it. | |
| What you can say is, ooh, Sweden's sort of in dangerous territory. | |
| It might still be better than the alternative, but But it's not looking good in Sweden, and it's looking a little dangerous over there. | |
| You could say that. That would be fair. | |
| But you can no longer say, look at Sweden. | |
| It's working in Sweden. | |
| That's off the table. If you say that, you're no longer consistent with the data. | |
| But you certainly could say it might be better than the alternatives. | |
| So if you said to me, yeah, you know, all the choices are bad. | |
| If we keep the economy closed, it's terrible. | |
| If lots of people die, it's terrible. | |
| Sweden is not ideal, but they haven't gone out of business either. | |
| So you can keep your argument that we should take the Sweden model, but you cannot say it's going well. | |
| So that's off the table. | |
| There's a story I was going to tell you that I've decided against. | |
| Rob Ryder, You know, I'll know Rob Reiner, big critic, Hollywood guy, critic of the president. | |
| So he writes, he tweets this, and I only point it out because I would love to know, if somebody says Scott is being paid, by whom? | |
| Who is paying Scott? | |
| You must be new. | |
| So whoever thinks that somebody could buy me, you're very new. | |
| But you're also gone. | |
| Goodbye. For the people who are new, you get immediately blocked for stating in public what my private thoughts are. | |
| So, if you're speculating about my private motivations or what I'm really thinking, I block you for being a bad mind reader. | |
| Because one of the things I learned Back when I was younger and more naive about human nature, somebody would misinterpret what I said, and then I would make the mistake of saying, no, no, no. You think you're disagreeing with me, but you're actually misinterpreting what I said. | |
| So you don't realize it, but you're actually disagreeing with your own misinterpretation. | |
| So let me correct this for you. | |
| Let me tell you what I really did say. | |
| And then we can have a conversation about my actual opinion. | |
| And I used to think, well, that will work. | |
| Why wouldn't that work? If somebody's mistaken, I correct them, and then we talk about the actual correct opinion. | |
| That has never worked in my entire life. | |
| And finally, I just said, why does this never work? | |
| What's going on here? | |
| Why is it that when somebody misunderstands what you're saying and you correct them, it doesn't make any difference? | |
| They still argue some other thing. | |
| They'll just replace their old misunderstanding with a new one and then argue the new wrong thing. | |
| And then they can move to the new wrong thing and the new wrong thing. | |
| But the one thing that never happens in all of the public and private debating that I've had over my entire life, the one thing that's never happened is that people say, oh, that's what you meant? | |
| Okay. Let's have a conversation based on what you actually meant. | |
| Not once. My whole life. | |
| And there's a reason for it. | |
| Now you say to yourself, well that can't be true. | |
| It can't be true that not once that's happened. | |
| Maybe, you know, maybe I have some false memory and once it did happen. | |
| But generally speaking, the reason that people misunderstand what you're saying and then argue the misunderstanding is not because they didn't understand it. | |
| That's the part that I missed for decades. | |
| For decades, I thought, why are they acting so irrational? | |
| And the reason is, it's cognitive dissonance. | |
| So cognitive dissonance is what happens when somebody hears an argument that ruins their worldview. | |
| So let's say somebody believed, I don't know, that... | |
| I'm trying to think of something that we could all relate to. | |
| It doesn't matter. Let's say somebody believed that the moon was made of cheese, and they believed that their whole life, and then you do a SpaceX, or you do a rocky ship, goes up there, takes a sample back, shows it to the person, says, see, it's not cheese. | |
| It's just this dirt and dust and rocks and stuff. | |
| Now, if people were rational, what would the person who thought the moon was made of cheese do? | |
| Well, they say, oh, wow, I've been wrong about this cheese thing for a long time. | |
| But there it is. There's the proof. | |
| And you actually showed the video. | |
| I know that you shot the rocket. | |
| I watched the launch. That's what you'd expect, right? | |
| But that doesn't happen. | |
| It never happens. The person will say, well, you faked the moonshot. | |
| They'll say, yeah, but that's not actually dirt from the moon. | |
| That's fake dirt that you substitute. | |
| So you can't get somebody who's in cognitive dissonance To find your point. | |
| Because missing the point is the only thing that mattered to them. | |
| They have to miss the point in order to maintain their worldview. | |
| So people will just go all over the place to avoid losing their worldview. | |
| Anyway. I don't even know why I was talking about that. | |
| It just sort of popped up. | |
| I want to tell you the story that ruined me. | |
| I think I'll tell you this story after all. | |
| So, a reasonable question that one might ask is, how did I get so cocky? | |
| And people have been asking me that a lot lately. | |
| It has a lot to do with me being right a lot. | |
| So, of course, I'm cockier when I'm more right. | |
| And when I'm more wrong about things, I tend to tone it down as one should. | |
| But there was a There's something that happened to me in 8th grade that is part of my story. | |
| Remember I told you that it's good to have a story that is a story of you? | |
| So that there's sort of a personal story that is your brand. | |
| It's sort of internal. | |
| You don't have to share it with anybody. | |
| But it's basically the story that describes you. | |
| And my story, as I've told you, is that I always win. | |
| Now, it's not true, obviously. | |
| It's not true that I always win. | |
| I'm sure I lose probably as much as everybody else, if you actually did a scientific study of it. | |
| But my story is that I can come from behind, and my story is that I can win against great odds. | |
| Now, I have lots of anecdotal stories that that's happened. | |
| Probably a dozen different situations in which I beat the odds in ways that just seem weird. | |
| It just doesn't even seem possible. | |
| I mean, the fact that I'm even here talking to you is because I beat the odds in so many ways. | |
| It's hard to believe. But I think it all started in eighth grade, and here's the story. | |
| My eighth grade teacher was teaching the class... | |
| How to properly answer questions on an upcoming standardized state test. | |
| I think it was the regents. | |
| And he said, we'll go over some example questions, and that'll teach you basically the style of how to answer the questions. | |
| And there were multiple choice. | |
| The instructor says, the teacher says, alright, here's a question, and the answer obviously is B. So you would put B in this little box. | |
| And I raised my hand and I said, no, I think the answer is actually A. And my biology teacher was like, you could tell he was a little put out. | |
| He was like, no, the answer is B. And then he starts to go on to the next thing, and it was like, I hear what you're saying, but I'm pretty sure the answer is A. Now, keep in mind what's going on here. | |
| I was in eighth grade, and he was a biology teacher, and it was a biology question on a standardized test. | |
| One assumes that he also had the answer sheet. | |
| So he's a biology teacher with the answer sheet, And I'm disagreeing with him in the class and telling him he got the wrong answer on a multiple-choice test, of which this question was designed to be the easy and obvious one because it's used as an example to teach the class how to answer the question. | |
| And so he said, no, no, trust me, I'm the biology teacher, you're the student, it's B. And this will tell you more about me than anything you would ever need to know about me is in this next part of the story. | |
| And then I said, yeah, I don't think so. | |
| Nope. I'm not buying it. | |
| I'm not buying that you're right because you're the biology teacher and I'm the student. | |
| Because I'm looking at this question and I'm telling you, it's A. A few days go by. | |
| And by the way, I asked him if he had the answer sheet. | |
| And he said, no, I don't have the answer sheet. | |
| But let me remind you, I'm a biology teacher with a biology education. | |
| This is the course I teach. | |
| You would be a student who has not learned this yet. | |
| I say it's B. That's the end of the story. | |
| A few days later, the teacher comes to me in class, and he goes, I was kind of curious, and so I hunted down the actual answer to that question, and the answer was A, you were right. Now, I think that ruined me for the rest of my life, because do you know how fun it was to be an eighth grader? | |
| Have a public discussion with your teacher about the right answer to a biology question and have him have to admit, and he said it in front of the rest of the class, and he had to admit that our public disagreement went my way. | |
| And by the way, the only reason that I knew I had the right answer is because there was something about the way the question was worded and that I, as a good multiple-choice question-answerer, I just sort of deduced it because of the structure of the question. | |
| I didn't even know the content. | |
| I didn't even know the subject matter. | |
| I just thought the question was worded differently. | |
| So anyway, I think that ruined me because it sort of reinforced that thing that I could disagree with authority like an idiot and still come out okay. | |
| And you just watched me do it again. | |
| Disagreeing with authority is really stupid. | |
| If you ever find yourself in my situation where you want to disagree with the greatest experts in the world, don't do it. | |
| Don't do it. It's not going to go your way very often. | |
| You're not going to get lucky. | |
| I mean, I feel like there might be some luck involved here because even I can't believe that I beat the odds so often. | |
| But I do have a history of it. | |
| Those of you who know my story with my voice problem, for three and a half years I couldn't speak intelligently, intelligibly, because I had this weird voice problem where my vocal cords would constrict. | |
| And three and a half years of asking doctors how to solve it didn't work. | |
| I ended up solving it myself by finding a doctor somewhere in the world who had a solution, but I couldn't find him through my doctors. | |
| I found him through my own work. | |
| And now I'm cured. | |
| So there are tens of thousands of people all over this country right now. | |
| As we speak, there are tens of thousands of people who literally can't speak When they try to talk, nothing comes out. | |
| And of those tens of thousands of people, the reason that they can't get a solution is because their doctor told them there wasn't one. | |
| There is one. I know it. | |
| I had the surgery. | |
| I'm talking to you right now. | |
| Could you hear me right now if there were not a surgery that cured that very problem? | |
| No. So all over the doctors, let's say each of these people has at least one doctor. | |
| There are probably 40,000 people, which means there are probably 40,000 doctors who got the wrong answer on this question. | |
| 40,000 of them who their patient came in and the doctor said, I don't know what that is. | |
| Never seen this before. | |
| Or... They said, I do know what this is. | |
| It's called spasmodic dysphonia, and there's nothing you can do about it except Botox treatments that don't work that well. | |
| So, how often are doctors wrong? | |
| In my experience, quite a bit. | |
| Could I sing? | |
| Which is actually a good question. | |
| No. But I couldn't sing before, so I don't know how different that would be. | |
| My vocal range definitely is constricted after the surgery, meaning that I can't do an artificial high pitch if I wanted to. | |
| I can't go up very high. | |
| But I can go down pretty low, as low as I could before. | |
| But it took a little off the top range. | |
| Somebody says, we're in the same position, got a condition the doctors can't solve. | |
| Try Google. I found a patient with the same condition on Google, which caused me to be able to track down the doctor. | |
| Why did Trump get mad at Kemp? | |
| Did he get mad? More so than he normally does? | |
| I don't know. Oh, here's a little insight on South Korea. | |
| So let's talk about Kim Jong-un. | |
| So the president yesterday let it slip, basically, that he knows what the situation is in North Korea. | |
| Well, he said that directly. | |
| That wasn't a slip. He said he knows the situation. | |
| Now, that doesn't mean he's right. | |
| But he said it with confidence that he's the President of the United States. | |
| I think he knows the situation, but he can't be 100% sure. | |
| And he said that he hopes that Kim gets better. | |
| Now, would you say he hopes that Kim gets better if he thought Kim were dead? | |
| No. He would simply not say that sentence at all. | |
| He would just say something like, well, I hope North Korea does well. | |
| Or, I hope things work out. | |
| Or, you know, I'm thinking good things for the family. | |
| He would say something generic. | |
| He wouldn't say something about him getting better unless he knew he was still alive. | |
| Now, why is it that South Korea is insisting, unique among the intelligence services and governments, it seems that South Korea is the most contrarian. | |
| They seem to say, we see no evidence that there's anything wrong. | |
| How does that make sense? | |
| Isn't South Korea the most likely to know what's going on? | |
| Right? There's no doubt about it. | |
| South Korea, well maybe China, but South Korea is probably the most in the know about what's happening there. | |
| And they say, we don't see anything. | |
| Nothing to see here. Why could that be? | |
| Why would they say there's nothing to see and all the other ones say there is? | |
| It should be obvious to you. | |
| It should be obvious why South Korea's answers are contrarian. | |
| And here's the answer. | |
| South Korea has to live with North Korea. | |
| We get to say anything we want, because we're safely on the other side of the world. | |
| Kim Jong-un isn't going to come after me. | |
| And the president is also being very, very diplomatic. | |
| He doesn't get credit... | |
| He doesn't get enough credit, I don't think, for being as good a diplomat as he is when he wants to be. | |
| It's when he doesn't want to be that people get concerned. | |
| But when he wants to be a good diplomat, he's maybe the best I've ever seen. | |
| And I would say that North Korea is the best example of that because I think President Trump did things diplomatically there that just probably weren't even possible for someone else. | |
| I think he just has a skill... | |
| That allows him to do some situations better than other people, and that was one. | |
| You could argue that there are other things he's not as good at, but this one he's better at. | |
| So here's why South Korea would play it differently. | |
| What would happen if South Korea broke the news that North Korea had a change of leadership? | |
| How would North Korea react to that after the fact? | |
| Not good. North Korea North Korea is not going to be happy if South Korea breaks news about North Korea. | |
| You see that, right? If South Korea says, yeah, we know what's going on up there and it looks like he's dead or he's in a coma, oh my God, North Korea is going to say, what the hell are you guys doing? | |
| We're keeping this quiet because we want to keep this quiet. | |
| You South Koreans are the people we want to someday unify with. | |
| Why are you doing this? | |
| Why are you telling our secrets? | |
| You know we don't want you to do that. | |
| You know we don't want you to do that. | |
| We're keeping a secret. | |
| That's not an accident. | |
| We're intentionally keeping a secret, South Korea. | |
| You're the guys we're supposed to be able to work with. | |
| You're the guys we're trying to make peace with. | |
| Why are you doing this? | |
| It would be the... | |
| Most impolite and disrespectful thing that South Korea could ever do. | |
| So ask yourself now, if you're the head of South Korea, and breaking this news, even if you do know the news, would be so inappropriate, diplomatically, politically, even personally. | |
| Even personally. Because he's going to have to deal with the family or whatever's left, or maybe Kim himself. | |
| So they're going to be dealing with the family, or some member of the family, probably. | |
| You want to be as good as you can be to set the stage, because they're going to have a rough transition, probably, in North Korea. | |
| If the news is right, they're going to have a rough transition. | |
| It's risky. South Korea doesn't want to be part of that. | |
| The last thing that South Korea wants... | |
| The last thing South Korea wants is to be brought into some kind of a fight that they don't need to be part of. | |
| So they're wisely just staying out of it. | |
| Now, there are two situations in which South Korea would say, we don't see anything happening. | |
| One is if there's nothing happening. | |
| And two, if there's something happening. | |
| You should expect exactly the same response from South Korea... | |
| Just so they can stay out of the drama. | |
| That would be the right play. | |
| TMZ verified sources. | |
| Somebody says, okay, Scott, is Kim alive or dead? | |
| Well, if the president can be taken as someone who knows the answer to that, not 100% sure, and if he knows the answer, then the answer is he was still alive as of yesterday. | |
| Because that's what the President indicated quite clearly. | |
| But we don't know if the President knows either. | |
| So I would say the odds of... | |
| And there seems to be more reporting about an April surgery. | |
| We've heard two stories. | |
| One of the stories is that he might have been injured when one of the missiles was tested. | |
| And then another one is he maybe had heart surgery that went wrong. | |
| And I'm thinking the missile test story, where maybe he was injured in a missile accident, sounds to me like the least likely situation of all. | |
| Because if a missile blew up on the launch pad, we would know that. | |
| We'd probably have satellite pictures. | |
| By now, we'd have a picture of Kim Jong-un's entourage, and there'd be a satellite picture of the ground, and you'd see where the explosion was. | |
| I don't know. I think there's very little chance that there was an explosion. | |
| Schrodinger's Kim Jong-un, he is both dead and alive at the same time, until proven otherwise. | |
| Isn't coronavirus an obvious probability? | |
| Not in terms of communication. | |
| So it is speculated that maybe Kim is just hiding out from the coronavirus. | |
| But that wouldn't explain why he doesn't show up on video. | |
| It doesn't explain why he wouldn't be issuing statements in his own name. | |
| It wouldn't explain why. | |
| It just wouldn't explain it. | |
| Because if you were lying low because of the coronavirus, I think you'd just say so. | |
| Because every other leader is doing it. | |
| So I think coronavirus is maybe a contributing factor in some way to the story, but I don't think it's the story. | |
| What about the New York Times reporter Davey? | |
| Well, I haven't heard anything since my curse-laden opinion of that situation. | |
| What's the difference because the Kims are just figureheads? | |
| I think they're figureheads who do have their fingers on the nuclear buttons. | |
| Are you a figurehead if you're the one who controls the nukes? | |
| I don't think China controls North Korea's nukes. | |
| I mean, I wouldn't say it's impossible, but it seems pretty unlikely. | |
| Kim can't admit that he's susceptible because the public views him as a god. | |
| Well, if he wants to keep his god-like aura, all he has to do is appear on video. | |
| Say, hey, here I am. | |
| How you doing? He doesn't have to admit that he's hiding because of it. | |
| So the fact he's not on video tells me that he's in bad shape. | |
| Somebody says, Kim likes to be in the news, so maybe he creates the stories for himself. | |
| I doubt it. Do you think his military is trapping him, keeping him from making a deal with Trump? | |
| You know? Let me say. | |
| Let me say that of all the hypotheses, that one would be the second strongest, I think. | |
| I think the first strongest is that he's legitimately sick. | |
| But if I had to pick a second choice... | |
| Second choice would be that he's under house arrest. | |
| Yeah, that would be second choice. | |
| But I think that's really low on the scale. | |
| But it's still second choice. | |
| He can't be seen because that will ruin the weight loss reveal. | |
| So maybe it's a weight loss reveal. | |
| Thought at one point he was kidnapped? | |
| Yeah, I don't think so. He fell off a white horse. | |
| I'd hate to be the surgeon who botched that surgery if that's what happened. | |
| Now, let me ask you this. | |
| If you're the surgeon and you've got Kim Jong-un on your operating table, you know that one little slip of the scalpel could end his regime, but it might kill you too. | |
| It might even kill your family. | |
| But you've got the shot. | |
| Do you think it's possible that there could be a top surgeon who would be willing to risk his life, maybe his family's life, to kill Kim Jong-un on the operating table? | |
| And I would say probably not, because I think that by the time you get chosen to be Kim Jong-un's personal surgeon, they've done a lot of checking, and they've got your family on, you know, your family is already surrounded, you know, so your family will be killed if you make a mistake. | |
| So, it's hard to imagine that the surgeon would do it intentionally, but it's not impossible. | |
| Not impossible. I mean, maybe he could say, well, I'll make it look like a mistake. | |
| You know, nobody's going to blame me if it's... | |
| You know, people die. | |
| All right. Somebody says North Koreans are brainwashed to not try. | |
| Well, the thing with brainwashing is it doesn't affect everybody the same way. | |
| The one thing you could be sure of... | |
| Even if you accept that North Korea is the most brainwashed population on Earth, it's still not 100%. | |
| Brainwashing doesn't work that way because the brains are too different. | |
| You can't do one kind of brainwashing and get every person because their own individual brains and situations will make some people immune. | |
| All right. | |
| North Korea surgeon never dealt with fat people before. | |
| Now that is an interesting, that is a really interesting hypothesis. | |
| Think about that. | |
| There are literally probably no other fat people in North Korea. | |
| So the North Korean surgeons, who have probably not practiced anywhere else, might literally have never worked on an overweight patient. | |
| That's actually a really good observation. | |
| I don't know how much extra hard that is. | |
| Maybe once you get through the upper layer, maybe it's all the same on the inside. | |
| So I don't know if that makes a difference. | |
| All right. | |
| Hands shaking so badly. | |
| Finally. | |
| Yeah, I can imagine that his hands would be shaking badly if you were operating on a god. | |
| On the other hand, if you thought you were operating on a god, would you be worried that he would die? | |
| What kind of god dies from an operation? | |
| Another surgeon said he was nervous about working on an obese patient. | |
| So maybe that is a thing. | |
| Got to be another fat person in North Korea? | |
| There might not be. Well, there might be in the elite. | |
| But how many times have we seen pictures of Kim Jong-un with other elite? | |
| Lots of times. Have you seen one other elite... | |
| That has a weight problem in North Korea? | |
| I think we would have seen at least one, but we didn't. | |
| We didn't see anybody who was even average weight. | |
| They're all underweight, 100% of them. | |
| Different complications after surgery, right? | |
| That is true. Oh yeah, he's a smoker too. | |
| Obviously, it was not exercising. | |
| Yeah. | |
| All right. | |
| So that's all I got for today. | |
| And I will talk to you tonight. |