All Episodes
Previous Next
April 28, 2020 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
51:32
Episode 940 Scott Adams: Sleepy Joe, General Flynn, How to do Civil Disobedience, Flat Curves
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Well, it's time, yes it is, for the evening edition of Coffee with Ellen Scott Adams.
Because, well, you could have your coffee, but I won't be having it.
And it's another sunny, beautiful day here.
Exactly the kind of day that your coronavirus doesn't like at all.
We don't need the outdoors.
We got each other.
Let me recommend to you, if you'd like a good laugh, you know the meme maker, Sol, S-O-L? Solmemes1?
Well, she's got a meme of...
I'll try to play it for you.
Well, let me see if I can do it.
I'll just play it. Looks like you might be able to see it.
And together, we're just getting started.
And then watching Joe's tongue.
I could watch this forever.
To move beyond politics and serve every American, no matter where they live or what they believe.
Only one candidate in this election has all three.
My husband, our next...
I could watch that all day.
It's funny. It's literally just one joke.
And you could watch that one joke for like five minutes at a time and then just loop it and watch it again.
Oh, that's the funniest thing I've seen today.
So the Biden Protection Program continues.
I can't think of anything more perfect for Joe Biden than they don't let him campaign.
Was the coronavirus designed to get Joe Biden elected?
Because, I mean, think about it.
The worst thing that could have happened to Joe Biden is that there was no coronavirus and he would be out there trying to talk in public.
But there is a coronavirus.
So he's actually going up in the polls because nobody sees him doing anything.
Apparently he's got a strategy.
His strategy is to hide in the basement and not let anybody see him talk until he's president.
Could work. I'm not saying it's not going to work.
So I'm just sort of catching up on this General Flynn stuff.
And all of these legal stories, they tend to have too much detail.
So I try to figure out what's going on.
It sounds like somebody was bad to somebody.
And you can't really, I don't know, I just lose interest on all the legal stuff.
But it doesn't take you much detail to find out In the General Flynn story, it looks like the FBI literally just framed him for political reasons.
I've been holding out the benefit of a doubt as long as possible, which I like to do in any legal situation.
It doesn't matter who's accused.
I like to at least try to hold out the benefit of a doubt until the process has worked its magic.
There's some exceptions.
I mean... Kavanaugh was obviously not guilty, but generally I try to hold my fire.
But I guess it's time to talk about it, because it seems we have enough information now that's been released that apparently the FBI is thoroughly corrupt.
I know I'm going to regret saying this, but...
I'll say it anyway. You know, we've been saying for like three years, I think, we've been saying the same mantra.
You know, well, there are a few rotten apples at the top of the FBI, but the rank and file, you know, the people doing the work, you know, they're good patriots and everything.
And now I think we just have to question that.
Sorry. Which doesn't mean that, you know, obviously doesn't mean all people at FBI are bad.
Most of them, I assume, are good.
But the people at the top, at least far enough down that we're involved in this Papadopoulos stuff and the General Flynn stuff, all this stuff, were just completely crooked.
Completely crooked. Apparently.
I mean, that's what the news is telling us.
They're completely crooked. And it's not my fault.
That that reflects badly on the entire organization.
So, I'm going to have to stop saying, well, there are only some bad eggs at the top, because I don't know.
Do you know? I don't know that the bad eggs are only at the top.
Why would that be? Why would bad eggs, coincidentally, be all at the top?
I'd like to believe.
I'd like to believe that that's the only place it's rotten.
But... I guess I have to suspend my disbelief at this point and say, I don't know.
Maybe if you have that much power, maybe you're all corrupt.
I don't know. What would it take?
Of course, I'm highly biased because I'm watching the Waco documentary, and that is really damning to the FBI. I've only watched the first part of it, and it doesn't look like the problems are new.
Whatever the problems are with the FBI, it doesn't look new.
So, this is a gigantic story that's just sort of hidden by the coronavirus, but it's amazing.
If you take that plus the Russiagate, I'm still not buying into deep state as a term.
I've said from the beginning, I can easily believe lots of individuals did individual things.
I can easily believe that some of them talked to each other, but not some great organized conspiracy.
But still, deep state.
I would have to say at this point, it is demonstrated to be true and corrupting the country and Trump came in and just ruined all their stuff.
He just broke all their toys.
So I would be super, super disappointed if there are not lengthy jail terms for most of the top of the FBI at this point.
And what the heck is Christopher Wray doing?
Do you have any confidence in Christopher Wray that we're finding this stuff out now?
I hate to be the guy who says it should have been done sooner, because that applies to just everything.
But we've got some questions for Christopher Wray.
I was asked on Twitter to give some recommendations on how one would do civil disobedience in the current situation.
Let's say you decided to ignore the guidelines, or wanted to ignore them, How would you do civil disobedience?
And I would suggest the following.
There's only one thing you can do, which is if somebody opens a store, go to it.
That's it.
But I don't think people are going to be opening many stores.
And when they do, it'll be a national story.
The authorities will probably close them down pretty quickly.
But if people open, just go there.
You don't even have to buy much.
Buy an eraser.
Buy a greeting card.
Just go. Now, I'm not recommending that you do that.
The question was, how would you do civil disobedience?
I'm telling you how to do it if you want to do it.
I'm not telling you to do it.
Now, in California, we just heard that, in my county and others, that we're going to be locked down until the end of May.
So I'm going to be in this house for five more weeks.
Alright. Do you think I'm going to adhere to the guidelines for five more weeks?
No. No, I'm not.
I'm not. I'm just not.
I will make my own decisions.
I will trust other people will make their own decisions as well.
But I will make my decisions based on What I determine is good for society and for me and my loved ones.
But I would say we can't really trust the authorities at this point.
Pretty much everybody in power has disappointed us.
So I'd say you don't want to ignore what they say, but you don't want to necessarily believe it either.
And I think we've just got to make our own decisions at this point.
Speaking of baloney, so this morning on my periscope, I spent a great deal of time debunking this video, this kind of a viral video, of two doctors, but mostly one doctor talking.
And the essence of it was, if you saw this morning's periscope, that the one doctor especially is saying that according to the data that he can see, That it doesn't make sense that we're closed down and it was overblown and we should basically go back to work.
And our civil liberties are being curtailed for not a good reason.
Now, I spent a good amount of time completely debunking that.
It was the least credible thing.
It looked like the guy, the doctor, didn't know how to compare things, using the wrong numbers, extrapolating the wrong way, ignoring gigantic facts that really matter like they don't matter.
So, it was the least credible thing I've ever seen, and that was just featured on Tucker's show.
So, the way the world works, and you live in the world too, so you know what happens next, right?
You can sort of connect the dots.
First of all, you'll all be calling for me to debate with Tucker, which probably won't happen.
Secondly, Tucker's show has far more wattage, so probably at least half of all conservatives now believe that debunked doctor thing.
Debunked, in my opinion.
So I'm the one who's saying it's debunked by my own work and some other people who joined in in the comments section.
But it's very disappointing to me because it looks like Hannity all over again.
Now, who knows how this is going to turn out?
And I would say, if you're trying to figure out who to believe, if you're trying to figure out who to believe in all this, specifically the big question of how bad was it, should we have shut down, should we go back to work, you know, the big questions, I would say the people you should not believe is anybody who expresses certainty.
So anybody who tells you confidently, it's time to go back to work.
Because the numbers show that it's time to go back to work.
If somebody says that confidently, you should never listen to them again.
Because they've lost all credibility.
Likewise, if they say the opposite.
We need to be locked down for whatever.
It doesn't even matter how long they say.
End of June, next week, three months.
As long as they're sure about it, You should ignore them forever.
The only people...
Oh, somebody says that Dr.
Drew went over their math errors.
Oh, good. So I wasn't the only one who saw it, and I noticed that other people saw it as well.
And they're really big errors.
I mean, they're embarrassingly big if it's the same ones I'm thinking of.
So... I'm sure I had a point there.
Alright, so the situation is that because of this non-credible doctor video, the conservatives of the world, the Fox News watchers, have all been deeply misled, in my opinion.
Alright? Now, the in my opinion part should be the most important part of what you just heard.
And I will emphasize that by saying, do you remember the early data that we got And how it was all wrong?
You remember that, right?
So stick with me. We all agree that all the early data we got about the coronavirus, pretty much all of it, was wrong.
But as time went by, we would get new information.
How was the new information?
All wrong, right?
But there was more information after that.
Each week there would be new information.
How was the information after that?
All wrong. Now, coincidentally, we finally get this video of this doctor who says the things you want to hear.
Because you want to hear a doctor say, I've got the secret scoop.
It's all a big phony hoax.
You can go back to work.
That's what you want to hear.
I mean, you want that as much as you've wanted anything in your life.
You really want that to be true.
So how did you hear it?
You heard it is true. That's how your brain is organized.
You wanted that to be true so badly that it became true even though on the surface it looked just ridiculous.
I mean, just crazy, non-credible.
Now, so these new doctors have some new information.
Is this the time that the information is accurate?
Just ask yourself this.
It's never been accurate yet.
No matter where it came from or who said it, it wasn't accurate.
But this is the time?
Guy on video that we've never heard of, he got it all right?
Totally possible.
You could not rule out that eventually somebody gets the right answer, and for the right reason, not just guessing.
It could be him. But what are the odds?
Just ask yourself, what are the odds that this guy got it right, and the people who still have it wrong are the experts who are seeing the whole field?
So the guy who's just, from his one little perspective, in an emergency room that apparently didn't have much action, I mean, part of the reason he was talking about it is that he wasn't very busy.
From his little perspective, he got the right answer, but all the experts didn't?
Totally possible, because we watched that happen.
We watched all the experts say that masks don't work, And people who are not experts like me said, I'm sorry, but all the experts are lying to you.
I don't know why exactly.
Maybe to conserve supply.
I mean, that's what I was saying at the time.
And then, of course, it turns out they're all just lying to you.
Did you believe the stories that said hydroxychloroquine was a magic pill?
A lot of you did. I wanted to believe it.
Then news came out that it's killing people.
Did you believe that? Well, I wanted not to.
But I thought, well, maybe I better hold on.
You can't believe the fact.
You can't believe the debunk of the fact.
You can't believe the debunk of the debunk.
We're living in a world where all of our information is flawed, deeply flawed.
Flawed to the point it doesn't even point you in the right direction.
That's the most flawed you can get.
When I talk about Trump, You know, departing from the fact-checking.
I always say that at least he's sort of, you know, directionally, he's pushing you in the right direction.
But with the coronavirus stuff, none of the information is credible and it points in opposite directions.
What do you do with that?
Well, the only thing you can do is tiptoe.
The only thing you can do is try something.
One of the things that Tucker said to us that there's a Wall Street Journal article I did not hear, I did not read, And again, I didn't see it, but it claims, according to Tucker, that a study was done of states that closed down quickly and tightly versus ones that didn't.
I think it was just states, not countries.
But the claim was there was no correlation in outcome.
Now, I don't know what to say about that.
Because that's so obviously wrong, isn't it?
Again, let me be as big a jerk as I was a few weeks ago when I said in public they're all lying to you about the masks.
Of course they help a little bit, obviously.
So I went on a limb, disagreed with all the medical professionals, I was right.
Now, Tucker is saying that somebody must be a professional at statistics.
Somebody who knows how to do this sort of thing looked at it.
And the expert, who's far more expert than I am, I wouldn't even be able to check their math.
That expert has said that when you keep away from each other in a pandemic, where the very nature of it is that being close to each other is what makes it spread, but if you don't spend as much time close to each other, it doesn't make any difference.
What? What?
Are you kidding me?
And Tucker repeated that because the experts, and there was some Wall Street Journal article, maybe somebody can tweet it at me, but it doesn't matter.
Do you need to read that article to know it's not true?
Do you need to be an expert on statistics or virology to know that two people standing together, one of them has the virus and one does not, is that better or worse than Then two of them on the opposite ends of the planet.
Which one of those is more likely to make the virus spread?
I don't know. I'm stumped.
Come on! Now, I don't know what the Wall Street Journal claimed to see.
Maybe it was a more narrow claim that got misinterpreted either by Tucker or by me.
But let's not pretend that the shutting down and the social isolation doesn't work.
That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard in my life.
It's as dumb as saying that masks don't make a difference, because obviously they do.
Obviously. Obviously, shutting down and having tighter controls made some difference.
To imagine that there's a statistical evaluation of that is the most ridiculous claim I've heard this week.
And it's been a week of ridiculousness.
I mean, there's been a lot of ridiculous stuff.
But really, really, staying away from each other doesn't make a difference in transmission of frickin' viruses.
That's what we've come down to?
That that's on television and we're all like, uh-huh, uh-huh.
I'll bet that statistical analysis is pretty darn good.
No! All of our statistics are lies.
All of the data is lies.
I mean, until we get something that's reliable, they all look like lies.
And when they're this obviously stupid, I mean, this is just obviously stupid.
Of course staying away from people makes a difference in transmission rates.
Of course! It's making me crazy!
Alright. Here's another one that's making me crazy.
Everybody has taken an assumption that what we're trying to do is flatten the curve But other people say this, not me, and they say that the point of flattening it is that eventually you'll get on top of it, and then the curve will, you know, maybe slowly, but it will approach zero, and then we're out of trouble.
Would somebody ask somebody who's an expert how we get from the flat part to the down part?
Because you know there's no plan for that, right?
Because By the time we have a vaccine, it's at least a year.
Now, I'm not saying there won't be some new development or we'll find some way to do something better, because, in fact, I do predict that our creativity and our innovation and our just ability to invent is off the chart, and we'll see probably in the next few weeks just amazing things.
So I think that something could come up, maybe one of the therapeutics works or something.
And then that would give us the ability to plan.
That would give us the ability to plan.
But would you agree with this statement that nobody who knows what they're talking about in terms of the curves and epidemiology, that nobody has told you what could possibly make that curve go down?
Now you're going to say to me, well, yeah, the curve will go down because they always do.
All of the other curves have gone down.
No. The other curves went down because we had vaccinations and herd immunity.
Have you heard anybody say that herd immunity is definitely something that can happen with the coronavirus?
No. No, you've heard maybe.
And if we're flattening the curve, how long does it take us to get to, say, 70% herd immunity if there is herd immunity?
When's that gonna happen?
If it takes a year, we're gonna lose hundreds of thousands of people.
So, here, let me see if I can summarize my point.
We've got a curve that's got a flat part and then a presumed drop-off.
Tell me what's different that makes the drop-off happen.
What's going to happen in the future that makes that?
It's not just herd immunity because we're not going to have much because we had a flat curve.
It's going to take you a long time to get there.
I don't think there's a plan.
The plan is that you invent something, right?
The plan is that you get a vaccine sooner than you thought.
Well, even if the warm weather makes it pause, even the experts are saying there's going to be another hump after that because it's not going to go away.
There will always be a summer end.
So there's a big story about UFOs, but it's not a real story.
It's a fake story.
Fake news. So there's fake news about UFOs.
It's fake news in the sense that it's the same video and the same films that had been leaked a long time ago.
And the U.S. government simply released what they had.
So you can see it in its totality so that you can see that nothing was edited out.
But it's the same story.
It's not new. And I would like to say once again in public that it is one of the least believable stories you'll ever see in your life.
Probably one of the least believable stories.
Now most of you believe there was some kind of Like weird spacecraft, right?
And multiple pilots saw it.
Because multiple pilots saw it, that's pretty credible.
And they also captured it on some instruments, right?
But the only instruments we see are that one video view.
And the video view looks exactly like there was something in the camera, like there was literally a bug in the camera or a piece of dust or something.
I mean, it looks so not like a spaceship to me.
It looks literally just like a bug or just a piece of dirt on the camera.
Now, you say to me, Scott, Scott, Scott, That might explain why one of the pilots thought he was seeing something.
Because, you know, only one of them would see the bug on their own camera.
But what about the other pilot?
How do you explain that?
Well, do you think there's no other way to explain it?
Would you say it must be true because two pilots or more, I forget how many, said it's true?
Is that how it works?
If three pilots said it's true, it's probably true.
Not in my universe. In my universe, it just means three people got together and started a hoax.
Do you know all of the crop circles?
When I was a kid, that was a big thing.
They thought that the aliens were coming down and making flattening corn or wheat to make it look like there was a circle and then designs.
Of course it came out.
It was just farmers having a good time.
The thing was all a prank.
Well, There were lots of witnesses to crop circles.
There are lots of witnesses to alien abductions.
Do you think that the number of witnesses Even if they saw exactly the same event, do you think that lends credibility?
Because even the fact that they were pilots, do you think it lends credibility?
We've had eyewitness accounts for everything from the Loch Ness Monster to Bigfoot to aliens to ghosts, and many of them have multiple eyewitness accounts.
So it's the most ordinary thing in the world For multiple people to think they saw something that wasn't there.
It's very ordinary. So, what is more likely?
There's an advanced A race of aliens who have been here, and they've got this physics-defying ship that can do things that aren't even possible under physical laws, and yet we did capture them on camera, but even though they're here, we can't find better evidence, and we can't really get a clean photo.
It's always a smudge, and it seemed to flip upside down, more like a piece of dirt on a camera than on a spaceship, So it could be there's a vast alien civilization visiting us and for all these special coincidences we can only see them on grainy video and that's it.
We can't get better evidence of that.
That's possible. Possible.
You cannot rule that out.
That is completely possible.
Let's compare it to, I don't know, another hypothesis.
Let's pick one other explanation, no matter how wild it is.
Just so we have a comparison.
Because you want to have a comparison to know you've really thought about it right.
So I'm just going to throw this out here.
People are stupid and they lie.
And we're deluded about things all the time.
I mean, I'm just going to throw that out there.
People lie about stuff.
People believe they saw things they didn't.
People believe they saw things because their friend said he saw it.
How easy would it be to imagine that one pilot was just looking at something and saw something natural and didn't know what it was, and the other pilot was saying, did you see that?
Did you see that? It defied physics.
And the guy in the other plane's like, I think I did see that.
As a matter of fact, I think I did.
You can convince somebody they saw something I'll bet if you did a survey...
And you said, did you hear the President of the United States say in his own words that maybe we should consider injecting household bleach and Lysol into your veins?
Did he say that on TV? Do you know how many Democrats would see it?
I saw it with my own eyes.
I heard it. Yeah, of course he did.
Now, it didn't happen. Most of you know that, right?
It didn't happen. But how many people could you get to be an eyewitness who say, not only did it happen, I was there.
Dude, I saw it. I mean, I heard it.
I saw it. There's no question about it.
I saw it live. I was in the audience.
And yet it didn't happen.
So... You're watching every day in the news.
People have spontaneous false memories for which there are literally millions of other witnesses.
Millions. Millions of people believe the president suggested shooting up with Clorox and Lysol.
Millions. Never happened.
There's no part of the real world in which that happened.
So how unusual would it be for some pilots...
To be spewing some BS and have some dirt on their camera or some other malfunction, one of them is a lot more likely than the other.
That's all I'm saying. If you had to put a bet on it, one of them is a lot more likely than the other.
Looks like Diamond and Silk got booted from Fox, rumor has it, for spreading some coronavirus conspiracy theories, to which I say...
Boy, that's a fine line, isn't it?
Isn't that kind of a fine line?
What's the line between a coronavirus conspiracy theory and what's actually happening and how people are actually talking about it?
Don't we have legitimate people saying it's no problem at the same time other legitimate people are saying it's a big problem?
I mean, we're reporting the facts completely opposite.
Are you telling me that Diamond and Silk, they're the only ones who got something wrong about the coronavirus?
I don't think so.
Now, I don't think it's a good idea to speculate on too many conspiracy theories, but I'm just going to say that There's no distance between a conspiracy theory and all the bad information we've been getting from every legitimate source.
And I don't think there's anybody who hasn't speculated.
We've all speculated about the medical possibilities.
We've speculated about who's lying.
We've speculated whether it's a bioweapon or accidental.
What's the difference between what diamond and silk we're doing?
Can't they speculate?
Well, is there a rule that says they can't speculate, but everybody else can?
I don't know that Fox needs to hire them back.
They may have... Their act kind of...
It could be it was convenient.
I'm guessing that Fox management probably said, you know, they're great, but their act is sort of repetitious.
If you see them a lot, you might say to yourself, yeah, I've seen that before.
So... President Trump, who is terrible at keeping a secret, apparently let slip that Kim is alive, that Kim Jong Un.
Now, he did that indirectly.
So he's had several things that indicate that he knows that Kim is still alive, but obviously not in good shape.
So without confirming it, the president has confirmed that, at least based on the information he has, which one assumes is better than what we have, he said he wouldn't talk about it, but that he wishes Kim well, and he's really sure that Kim did not send a message on his own over the weekend.
Which means the president knows that Kim isn't conscious.
He's not making any decisions.
But the president did wish him well, which is not really what you'd say right after you said you know what the situation is.
If it turns out later that he's already left this planet, why would Trump say, yeah, I know the situation and I wish him well if he had already passed on?
That didn't happen. So the president, who's terrible at keeping a secret, basically just told us that Kim's in bad shape.
Did you watch the press conference today?
It was really interesting because I thought Trump's blowing off of the illegitimate reporters was right on today.
I thought he was right on today because he stopped treating them seriously and he also stopped treating them he stopped going just hard at them.
Because when he goes hard at them, he makes stars out of them and it elevates the whole thing.
But today he got a couple of, you know, those ridiculous questions.
I don't even remember what they were.
They were the, you know, trying to get you, got you questions.
And he just blew them off and went to the next question.
And I thought, oh, that is so boss.
Because I didn't like it when he gets too defensive, even though I like the show.
I have to admit, I do like it when he goes after the reporters because I like the show.
But I didn't think it was helping him.
It's one thing for me to enjoy the show, but I would also like him to do well, right?
And I don't think it was helping him.
So today I thought he had just...
Did anybody see this today?
Tell me if that's an accurate description.
I thought he threaded the needle this time.
You never know what you're going to get with Trump, so that's part of the fun.
But I thought he threaded the needle.
It was just the right amount of dismissing them Without being a jerk.
And if you lower your own jerkiness, if you will, your own response, it helps to put some contrast on the reporter.
It's like, well, I'm being normal right now.
I'm thinking about the country right now.
What are you doing? Like, what is that question?
Somebody doesn't know I do a periscope at night.
Um, So I enjoyed that.
So good work there.
Here's an interesting story.
So I asked this question in a tweet, but I already knew the answer.
So sometimes it's more fun to put things in a question form.
And this is what I tweeted.
I said, historians, please verify.
But didn't China once have a huge foreign debt problem?
A lot of that was owed to the United States.
That is solved by changing its name and saying the debt belonged to the last government.
Did you know that's a real thing?
It's a real thing.
A pre-communist party, pre-government, before the government that exists now, earlier China had borrowed something like a trillion dollars from the United States and other places.
And we're still owed it.
So there are people in the United States who have these ancient, I think they're bearer bonds, you know, like a piece of paper that says, I will pay you X money, you know, my name is China.
So we have like a trillion dollars of debt that China says they don't owe us anymore because they changed their name.
That's a real thing.
They changed their name.
So they said, oh, are you thinking of old China?
No. No, we're not old China.
We didn't make that deal.
Look at our government. Do you see anybody in this government who made that deal?
No. That wasn't us.
And so they didn't pay.
So there's a trillion dollars of Chinese debt.
I think maybe just the United States part is that big.
And they just didn't pay.
And they don't have to.
Because they say, no, that wasn't us.
That was those other guys.
So I'm not suggesting that we do that.
But I'm not suggesting we don't.
I'm just saying we should look at it.
Just give it a look.
I don't know what the pros and the cons of that are.
Rachel Maddow's lawyer said in open court...
He was trying to defend her from charges of defaming somebody.
And he said that her statement is quintessential statements of rhetorical hyperbole, incapable of being proven true or false.
In other words, her lawyer said that she can't have defamed somebody because you have to understand that nothing she says is reliable.
So, how would you like to be a Stanford graduate, an Oxford graduate, and was she like a Fulbright Scholar or something like that?
So, Rachel Maddow is seriously smart.
Like, you know, say what you will.
I know you don't like the politics, blah, blah, blah, but seriously smart.
I mean, you don't want to compete with her on the SATs, is what I'm saying.
So the super smart person has to have her lawyer, also smart, one assumes, arguing on her behalf that she doesn't know what the word literal means.
That's actually a big part of their case.
Because the insult in question, the defaming part, used the word literally, which is key to the claim.
Because what she said is, X person is literally being paid by Russia.
Which was not true. Whoever it was was not being paid by Russia.
Not literally and not figuratively.
Now the lawyers pointed out that she has used the word literally correctly To mean something actually happening, not figuratively.
She's used it correctly a whole bunch of times in ways that it's obvious that she knows the difference.
As in, this literally happened two minutes ago.
It actually did happen two minutes ago, so literally it did.
So she knows the word.
She has two prestigious degrees.
She has an IQ that's probably through the roof.
And she has to win her case by arguing that she's not actually smart.
That's her best play.
Her best play is that she's kind of dumb and she lies a lot.
Or she just makes stuff up, I guess.
Some version of that.
Well, good luck with that, I say.
Making 10 million a year?
Yeah. Whatever she's doing, she's doing it well, apparently.
If she's getting paid that much.
Alright. It's a show, not the truth.
That is correct. You know, I say this a lot, but...
Fox News deserves a lot of credit for how well they label their opinion shows versus their new shows.
And I know there are some people who can't tell the difference.
But I think the obligation of the program is just to label it, you know, to make sure people know the difference.
If they choose not to know the difference, if they choose to treat the opinion people as fact people, that's sort of on them.
But you have to admit that on CNN it's a little less obvious.
Who is the news?
Who's the opinion? And the fact that they all hate Trump is pretty obvious.
All right. Smart does not equal intelligence, somebody says.
Yeah, I suppose you could argue that.
China holds U.S. bonds converted from trade imbalances.
These are bonds sold on the open market.
Yeah, so I don't know if we have any options for doing anything to China to get reparations or anything from this coronavirus stuff.
They're just going to say that, you know, I assume they'll just say, eh, it wasn't us.
And that's the end of it.
Yeah, we're hearing some stories about meat packing problems and shortages.
But I don't think that translates into a food shortage.
Because if you had to be a vegetarian for a few months, you wouldn't die.
If you have to be a vegetarian for two months, you'll be okay.
But I have a feeling that they'll get those meatpacking places up and running in 30 days or something just because we have to.
Could I do a 15-minute show for YouTube?
Why would I do that?
Nicotine products in France are banned.
Yeah, wasn't there some thought that nicotine might protect you?
And as soon as I saw that, I was like, oh no, no, people are going to start smoking and getting nicotine patches.
But it's even worse than that.
So, you know, when there was a run on the hydroxychloroquine, I said to myself, I'm glad I don't need any hydroxychloroquine.
I'm glad I don't have one of those lupus or arthritis conditions or malaria or something where I need that pill because it would be hard to get now.
And then today there's a news story that one pill that I do take might work.
Famotidine? I think it's a heartburn drug.
So it's an acid reflux drug which I actually take.
Apparently people who have been taking that Are not having as much problems, but don't go run and buy a bunch of stuff.
Pepsodacy, yeah. Pepsodacy is made of that material that I just said.
There are a number of products that have that Interestingly, on day one of the, when people were hoarding, all of the FIMO tie-dye got bought out in the first few days.
So it was one of the things that people hoarded on day one.
But so far I've managed to, and I couldn't even get it from my healthcare provider.
But I know the supply is a little better.
So, somebody says it's famotidine.
Famotidine. Looks like you know what you're talking about, so I'll say that that's true.
Oh yeah, then Singulair, another asthma medication, has some indications it works.
Let me ask you this.
So we heard from the president and others that there are a whole bunch of trials going on for therapeutics.
I think several dozen.
I don't know the exact number, but somewhere in the range of 30 different trials for different therapeutics.
And then a whole bunch of trials for vaccines.
I don't know how many, but it feels like dozens.
Now let me ask you this.
Do you think that out of that, let's say it's 30, of the 30 therapeutics that are being studied, how many of those do you think are like really good chances?
Here's why I ask.
At the beginning of the crisis, everybody, including scientists, realized that suddenly their incomes were in jeopardy.
It didn't matter what you were doing or who you were.
You suddenly said, oh, my income is in jeopardy.
I mean, even my income basically will disappear.
So after the end of this, I have to go get a job or something because I won't be a cartoonist anymore.
There won't be any newspapers after this.
So you have all these scientists who know that even they need to figure out How to make ends meet.
And they might not be able to do it with their regular job.
So then they hear that the government is desperate to get some trials going of therapeutics.
So you're a scientist.
You're not sure you have any other kind of work.
It's the only work you can get.
The government just said we have all this emergency billions of dollars.
You just have to apply for it and we'll fund you because we're desperate.
What do the scientists do when the only place they can get money is from the government and only if they're testing coronavirus solutions?
Well, let me tell you how that goes.
A person who maybe saw something about hydroxychloroquine says, you know, I think there's a good reason this might work.
I'll test this. Somebody looks at remdesivir and says, we have good indications that this has got a chance, so we'll test this.
What do the others do?
Well, I'll tell you what they do.
They go into their closet, and they take out a tube of toothpaste, and they say, let's use some of this in a petri dish, because if it kills the coronavirus even a little bit, I'm going to say we're going to study toothpaste, and we can get some study money, and we'll just study toothpaste.
So I think, out of the 30 or so therapeutics that are being studied, the way you should look at it is, there might be two or three that have some real promise.
And probably 27 or 28 that are the equivalent of toothpaste.
Which as a scientist said, you know, I only got one way to get paid.
I guess I'm testing something for the coronavirus.
Is there anything laying around?
I'll use whatever's in my medicine cabinet.
Oh, how about some Femotidine?
Yeah. What else we got in there?
Singulair. Uh-huh.
Yeah, let's test that.
So... I just have a suspicion that the vast majority of the trials, both for therapeutics and for vaccines, are not even close to being real.
Not even close.
Everybody who's worked in a big organization is nodding their head right now, right?
For those of you who don't have experience in large organizations in which people are putting together funding requests, it's what I used to do for a living.
I would put together funding requests for big hardware upgrades and stuff.
And so I've seen the budget process.
All you need is a big pot of money and somebody who's not checking too carefully, and people are going to ask for that money.
That's the way it works. Somebody says I'm cynical.
The difference between cynical and correct tends to be how much experience you have.
So, if you don't have much experience, I look cynical.
If you have experience, I just look correct.
Oh, somebody in the comments says yes, they're nodding in agreement because they write grants.
So somebody who writes grants is saying, oh yeah, we'll throw the toothpaste at it to get some money.
It's a person who writes grants.
Don't take my guess.
Take it from the person who does it for a living or did it for a living.
My chewing tobacco addiction has come full circle to help me.
I tell you, we can't believe anything anymore.
Oh, somebody says their company gets that money and they're fully employed.
Well, there you go. Yeah, all these companies that are close to a vaccine...
Let me ask you this. Why were there not 30 therapeutics and 30 vaccines being tested for every regular flu?
Well, I guess they...
I'll retract the question about the vaccines because that's a special process.
But why don't we have 30 trials every year for the seasonal flu that kills hundreds of thousands around the world?
Like, why is it just this year that suddenly there are 30 things to test?
We didn't have 30 things that were worth testing last year?
So that's what makes me suspect that most of them are not real.
Alright, Oxford is supposedly close to one.
Yeah, I don't know what that means in the vaccine world.
I think being close to having a vaccine, I'm not sure if it means anything in that world.
It just means they're close to testing.
It doesn't mean they're close to having one.
Thoughts on hospitals getting paid $39,000 for every person who dies on a ventilator?
Well, that would seem suboptimal.
Money corrupts, but I doubt doctors in the emergency room are making that calculation.
Now, I can't rule it out because we live in a terrible world, so maybe those doctors have been talked to by the hospital administration or something, but I don't know about that.
I think the most exciting thing happening is the nose capula or whatever it's called.
So they found a way that instead of using a ventilator, they do a nose thing where it just pushes warm, moist air up your nose.
And apparently people rarely die and rarely need ventilators if they do that.
But the ventilator is sort of a one-way trip.
I think 97% don't make it out in some places.
But in other places, half of the people are getting off a ventilator, and in other places, none of them are, or almost none.
Why is it that in some places, people are getting off the ventilator, at least half of them, and in other places, hardly ever?
What? Oh, it's a cannula, not a capula.
Capula is something else.
Cannula is the word for the thing that goes up your nose.
Thank you for that. Cannula.
C-A-N-N-U-L-A. Thanks to all the people who were telling me that.
Alright, that's enough for to now.
To now. It's enough for tonight, and it's enough for now.
It's enough for to now.
That could be a word.
To now. To now.
Just because it isn't.
▲
Export Selection