All Episodes
Previous Next
May 6, 2020 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
53:10
Episode 957 Scott Adams: Let Me Tell You About the Psychedelic Mushroom I Accidentally Ingested Called CNN
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Well, it's a very special evening edition of No Coffee with Scott Adams because it's the evening. it's a very special evening edition of No Coffee with Who drinks coffee at night?
This guy? Yeah.
Caught you off guard, didn't I? Do you have a beverage?
Do you? A bong or a joint.
It's fine. Whatever. Beer.
It's good. It's evening.
You can. We're not all working tonight.
But I am. I never sleep.
But you should. It's good for you.
Join me now for the bonus simultaneous sip.
It's happening now.
Ah. Delightful.
So, let's see.
You know, one of the things that we do not give enough credit for, and sometimes, every now and then, I think we should pause and show our respect for the healthcare workers.
Specifically, not only are the healthcare frontline workers handling the biggest pandemic in 100 years at great personal risk, but on top of the pandemic, They're also handling an epidemic of people who are ingesting disinfectant.
And, man, are they doing a good job!
Because, I don't know about you, but I haven't even heard one problem with that yet.
Have you? Because I know there's a lot of it going on, because the press told me it was a pretty big problem.
And the fact that you're not hearing much about it, just, well, I'm led to believe, That our healthcare workers are handling not only the coronavirus, wow, but they've reduced this epidemic of disinfectant drinking to you don't even hear about it anymore.
It's like it's not even in the news.
I mean, you can't get better than that.
So, slow clap for the front line.
Healthcare workers who make it seem like the epidemic of drinking disinfectant Wasn't even real.
I mean, seems like it.
But we know it was.
So I made the mistake of turning on CNN tonight.
And it's really hard to do this next part without stopping to pause every few seconds and saying, I'm not making this up.
So if I could maybe just say once in the beginning, That anything I say for a while until I tell you otherwise, I swear to God I didn't make it up.
It's actual real.
So I turn on CNN just for the laughs.
Honest to God, that's why.
Not a joke. Man was I not disappointed.
The experience was like being on mushrooms.
And I've talked about, you know, this one time I'd ever done mushrooms when I was 21, I guess.
And the thing I took away from that experience, the mushrooms, was that you could experience a whole different world, but everything still worked.
You know, everything looked different and new and wonderful and bizarre and, you know, you'd never seen anything before.
You know, you'd look at a chair and it was like you were seeing it for the first time.
You'd be amazed by it.
But at the same time, you knew what it was.
It's a chair. You sit on it.
You knew how to work it. So it was like everything in your world changed, and yet somehow you still knew how to work it.
It was the weirdest experience.
But turning on CNN and seeing an alternate universe is just absolutely mind-blowing.
It was actually, for a while, I felt like, and this, again...
Remember I told you, I'm not making this up.
So what follows is not an exaggeration.
It felt like an almost psychedelic experience.
Because I got to feel a whole different reality and I spent enough time in it that I started to feel like what it must be like to be a full-time inhabitant of that movie.
Let me give you a taste of what I learned in 10 minutes.
Of CNN. This was an Anderson Cooper show.
That the coronavirus is unstoppable, but the president stopped it wrong.
I mean, that's a little hyperbole, but there's some version of that.
That there's nothing we know how to do in any possible way that could stop this thing.
And the president is at fault for not stopping it.
And I'm listening to this and I'm saying...
Do you not know that those don't go together?
That if it can't be stopped, it's also got to be true that you couldn't have stopped it wrong because of the can't be stopped part.
Have you noticed, I think to myself, that every country is doing something completely different and getting largely the same result?
Has anybody brought that up?
That no matter what any country does, We don't know why some things worked and some don't.
There are some that are actually getting a better result, but we can't identify any one thing or a combination of things with any kind of reliability that would tell you why it worked.
It could be that none of the things the government is doing makes any difference.
It could be entirely social.
It could be entirely density.
It could be entirely how many foreign travelers there are.
It could be entirely where you are on the timeline of You know, getting it or already had it.
We don't know anything about this thing.
But the thing we do know is we don't know how to stop it.
Not even a little bit. So, in the other universe of CNN, it's an unstoppable problem that the president is a big old dope because he didn't stop it.
I guess. You know, of course, I'm putting my own words to it, but that's the sense you get from watching it.
He had some woman who was an expert on pandemics, and he asked her sort of what the best-case scenario was.
So here's an expert on pandemics, and here's her best-case scenario.
So remember, the context is that the Trump administration has done bad things.
They haven't handled it right, right?
That's the permanent context.
The Trump administration, totally incompetent.
So, it would be reasonable to say, well, if everything they've done is wrong, what would it look like to do it all right?
And so, they give their pandemic expert a chance to give them the best case scenario.
If you did everything right, give us the rosy picture.
What would it look like to be competent?
And she said this, That we'd develop a coronavirus vaccine by year-end, and it would be the really good kind, the kind that doesn't even need to be refrigerated.
And we would get 20 million people signed up to be like an army that would scour the world, and we'd produce tons and tons of this vaccine that works, and we've got it in record time.
And the 20 million people would go across the world.
They would find every villager in every remote city.
They'd give them a vaccine.
BAM! And then she said, but that's kind of impossible.
Because you know why?
It's impossible. There's no way that's going to happen by the end of the year.
And if it did, by the end of the year, we're going to be pretty close to herd immunity whether we like it or not.
It's not our plan.
But by the end of the year, by the time we've scoured the planet with our 20 million people, what year is that?
Is that even 2021?
2022? So the best alternative to all these mess-ups that this dumb old orange stupid monster of a science-denying orange thing, all those mistakes are not nearly as good as the alternative which was clearly explained, which is magic. Magic.
Because there's no other solution.
That's the best case scenario, is literally something that can't happen.
Do they even know how to compare things?
That's not comparing things.
When you compare things, you're supposed to compare it to something that could happen.
If you compare it to things that can't happen, you're doing it wrong.
For example, if somebody said, hey, Bob, what are your career aspirations?
And Bob said, well, I'm going to go to law school, I get good grades, go study art, try to be a lawyer.
Not bad. What's your other alternative, Bob?
Well, other alternative is I'll sprout wings out of my ass and fly to Mars.
Bob, that's not actually an alternative.
Because what that has working against it is the impossibility of it.
Because you're not going to sprout wings out your ass and fly to Mars.
So really you haven't offered me an alternative.
You've just told me an impossible thing.
So you're doing it wrong.
That was a terrible example, but you know where I'm coming from.
Oh, I'm not done yet.
Then Anderson Cooper spreads the idea that the president...
We disbanded the Crisis Task Force.
Wait for this.
You have to hear this.
Anderson Cooper speculated, because he did say that he can't know what somebody is thinking, and then he went on to tell us what somebody is thinking.
But at least he admitted that it can't be done before he did it.
That's progress. And he said that he's speculating anyway.
That the president disbanded the coronavirus task force because, wait for it, he was embarrassed for getting called out for suggesting that maybe people should ingest disinfectant to cure the coronavirus.
Which, as you know, but apparently the viewers of CNN don't know, never happened.
He puts it out there like it happened.
That didn't happen.
The president was talking about light as a disinfectant.
There is a real product in testing right now that literally injects the disinfectant, the light, into the lungs.
They don't know if it works yet, but it's based on solid science.
There are real serious companies doing it.
It's not shady people.
But on CNN, there's still Days after it's been the most widely debunked story in the face of debunked stories, they're still reporting it like it's fact.
And I ask myself, because I really don't know the answer to this, do their viewers really think that happened?
I mean, imagine living in the world where you think that the leader of your country may have tossed out the idea of drinking bleach.
And just think about that.
Think about it, you wake up in the morning and you're like, ah!
Ah! And you start screaming because you know you woke up into a world in which your leader is an orange monster who's encouraging people to drink poison and die.
That's actually what you think you woke up into, an actual world like that.
And why would you think that?
Because it's on the news!
It's actually on the news!
But of course it didn't happen.
But there's more.
There's also the magical thinking that the president should have done something sooner.
That's going to be the main attack on the president is he didn't take it seriously sooner.
But of course the reason he didn't take it seriously is that the experts were advising him and they had not yet turned up the heat.
So he was doing everything that his critics ask of him.
Which is he was very clearly, quickly, and unambiguously following expert advice.
It just happened to be wrong.
So, you'd think they would mention that.
You'd think that would be part of the story.
That, yeah, maybe he was a little slow on this based on our perfect hindsight.
But are all of the reviewers so dumb that they don't know that we only know it now?
We didn't know it then.
If it was so obvious then, tell Tony Fauci because he didn't know.
Apparently he didn't know.
Now, of course, China is to blame for giving us bad information.
So there are perfectly good reasons for it.
But on CNN, those perfectly good reasons, which are China lied, Fauci was fooled, Fauci gave Trump bad advice based on bad data from China, Trump followed the bad advice.
That's the story.
But over on CNN, he just started late.
That is so different.
That is not even the same universe.
Yeah, he was just, yeah, he was dumb.
He just started late. And the viewers watch that and go, yeah, big old dumb orange monster told us to drink bleach and he didn't take a pandemic seriously?
My God, I'm so afraid of what's going to happen.
I need Joe Biden.
Stat. They also talked about disbanding the task force as if that's crazy.
Now, here's where having some experience in different domains really serves you well.
And I'm going to guess that there may be some experience lacking on the people who were on that episode.
And here's how this works.
When the government disbands the task force, that is not the same as not working on the problem.
You'd think that they would explain that.
Anybody who's had any experience in a big organization knows that it is very common to build a task force It does its work, and then when it gets past the critical period, as we have in a sense, because we now have enough supplies,
we have enough ventilators, we have a blueprint of a plan, everything that can be done by the federal government has sort of been done, which is that they backstop the states to the point where the states really want to do their own thing.
The citizens of those states want the state to make the decision.
They don't want the federal government to make it.
And the president said, well, who's the best?
And here's the beautiful part.
We can't tell the difference between genius and stupidity.
We really can't.
We think we can, but we can't.
It looks identical, because both a genius and a stupid person will do something that doesn't make any sense to you.
So if you don't understand why somebody's doing something...
Just keep in mind there might be two reasons, not one.
One is that they're smarter than you, right?
This might be an example of that.
So the way CNN is reporting it is that the president is just sort of trying to put the responsibility of who dies on the states so that he can get re-elected.
Because people are going to die no matter what.
But if the president says, all right, it's up to the states, then the responsibility is on the states and it's a political move to And so the president is cleverly moving responsibility for killing people off to other people.
Now, is that what's happening?
Yeah. Yeah.
That's one of the variables.
But of course it's CNN. So they can only handle one variable at a time.
So is there anything that a president does that's not political, you know, a few months before the election?
No. Come on. Everything has a political dimension.
Is that the reason that you turn it to the states around now?
I think he said at the end of the month.
No. The reason that you turn it over to the states is genius.
It's genius. Here's why.
And by the way, this won't be the first time I've said this.
So if you remember some of my earlier periscopes, I was making a big deal about the fact that the federal government is the wrong instrument for making the decision.
Because it is a life and death decision.
And you put your president in this position, and he should not make the decision.
And the position is this.
Mr. President, do you want the poor people to die, the sick people, or the old people?
Because whichever way you go is going to move the emphasis.
There's a lot of overlap in those groups, obviously.
But the emphasis of who dies is going to be largely determined by whether you're favoring the economy or the The absolute avoidance and health aspects of the virus.
So, the President did what the Constitution understands he should do, push responsibility down whenever it's practical.
More importantly, if it's a life and death decision, which these are, that also needs to be pushed down to the closest level of authority That's closest to the individual.
Because if you're going to make life and death decisions about me, I would much rather have somebody who lives in my house make the decision.
And if that's not possible, I want one of my closest neighbors to make the decision.
If that's not possible, somebody in my town.
If that's not possible, my county.
If that's not possible, my state.
If that's not possible, all right, last choice is the federal government.
But if it's life and death, and it might kill me, or it might kill my grandmother, and somebody's going to decide, do you go or is it grandma?
I want that decision pushed down to the lowest level, and I've been saying this, right?
You know, I know I always get blamed for defending the president no matter what he does.
But you can fact check this, that I've been saying it for a while.
The presidency is the wrong place.
Let me also tie this to something I've said consistently for a while, too.
On the question of abortion, I've said that the only person who shouldn't be in favor of abortion under any circumstances, no matter what party they're in, is whoever is the president.
And the reason is that the president should be the only person in the country who will never kill an American Period.
Now, maybe the death sentence for federal offenses and the military are sort of separate things.
But you want your president to say, if that's a gray area, I'm out.
If it's a gray area about who lives and dies in the United States of the innocent citizens or the arguably innocent citizens when you're talking about a fetus, different opinions, you don't want the president on that conversation.
That's the only person in the whole country who should say, I'm out.
I'm out. Drive that down to the lowest level because it's life and death.
Now if you can get away with the Supreme Court handling it, that's cool.
But in any case, the president should get out of that decision.
And he should get out of the life and death decisions for the coronavirus.
And by disbanding the task force, the guidelines are in place.
I think the public can very much look at the guidelines from the federal government.
They can look at what their state did in variance to those guidelines.
And then they can look at the other states.
They can make up their own mind.
I mean, I'm not sure we'll ever be able to You know, know for sure who did the good job.
There are just too many variables involved.
But we'll be able to look at it.
And if you ask me, this is really exactly the right time to disband the task force.
I believe we have, we got tons of information.
How much of it was accurate?
Right? The task force gave us probably, you know, more inaccurate information than accurate, if I'm being fair.
Now, that's not necessarily their fault, because there was no accurate information to be had.
So they were passing along the best they could with the best intentions.
But the result was that we were not better informed.
Were you better informed because they told you masks don't work?
I mean, I don't have to go through the list, right?
You're not really better informed.
So I think we've all been educated up to the level that we don't need the task force anymore.
So I would agree, that's the right time to get rid of it.
I'm totally on with that decision.
But here's the funniest part of that Anderson Cooper episode.
He had a guy who was the...
He had been the former CDC emergency preparation person.
Okay, this is really important what his job was.
I think in a prior administration, he had been in charge of emergency preparation at the CDC. And Anderson Cooper had him on to talk about what the CDC is doing right or wrong at the moment.
And do you know what he did not ask him?
You're in charge of the CDC emergency preparation.
Why didn't you prepare?
Because shouldn't we have been all prepared by now?
Because you were the head of emergency preparation?
And maybe there's a good reason.
There might be actually a good reason why we're not prepared.
And Anderson Cooper was interviewing the guy who was in charge of preparing.
Now, one of the questions you might ask would be, hey, guy who used to be in charge of preparing, I'm just curious, why didn't you do some preparing?
Could you answer that question?
That question was not asked, because the narrative of the show is that Trump is, you know, orange man bad, so I guess that didn't come up.
All right. So much happened since this morning.
It's interesting. Here's a question for you.
I was listening to Tucker Carlson's show, and he was talking about going through the whole timeline of all the bad things that China did to conceal how bad the coronavirus was.
And then, worse than that, they not only concealed it, but they...
Well, they concealed it.
And then they bought a bunch of PPE for themselves.
Meaning that they got a bunch of masks and they, you know, started buying stuff so they'd have enough.
And then by the time the rest of the world found out that it's actually a pandemic, we would try to buy ventilators and masks, there wouldn't be any.
Because China would have them all.
Now, let me ask you this.
This is going to be a real mind effort.
Alright? You ready for this?
I know you can handle it.
Only because those of you who have been watching my periscopes long enough, You can handle a challenging thought without retreating to your bias.
I'm trusting you to do this.
All right, you're China. You're President Xi.
Your experts come to you and say, we got a problem.
We let down the coronavirus.
It looks like it might destroy much of the world.
Could be hundreds of millions dead.
We don't even know how bad this thing is.
But I'll tell you what, we're going to run out of medical supplies really fast.
What do we do? Now, you're President Xi.
You have two ways to go.
One is complete transparency.
You say, immediately tell your peers in the scientific community.
Immediately alert the UN and the World Health Organization and tell them that we have created, accidentally, but we've created this massive problem and you all need to get ready.
What would happen? Well, what would happen is China would not have...
Nearly as much access to medical supplies, right?
But if they don't tell the world, then they can hoard the supplies.
Let me ask you this.
Which one did their population want them to do?
If the people in China had been a democracy and they could vote on that question, which of course wasn't possible, but if they could have voted, would they have said, you know, It was an accident, and it's every country for itself.
We have the advantage that we found out first because we created the accident, but it was an accident.
And it's every country for themselves.
And by the way, this could be so bad that if we take care of ourselves well enough, we will be the leading country in the world when this is done, because this might take out the United States.
What would you do if you were President Xi?
Moreover, what would you do if you were any resident of China and your choices were telling the world and your own population dies on the streets for lack of medical attention and the right proper protective gear, your entire country is destroyed, your economy goes to hell, there's cannibalism on the streets, or You make it somebody else's problem.
Because after all, what is the motto of the United States?
The motto of the United States is not, let's treat everybody equally.
Nope. The motto of the United States is make America great again.
America first. What would we do?
If it was the United States, what would President Trump do in the exact same situation, but in the United States?
If somebody came to President Trump and said, we messed up.
This virus got out.
This is totally our fault.
But if you tell the rest of the world, 10 million Americans are going to die.
If we put it off and make it their problem, there might be 100 million people who die in other countries, but we might be able to save 10 million here, and we're not even positive about that.
I mean, we're kind of guessing, but it feels like that.
And they say that to President Trump.
What's he do? Would President Trump stay true to his often-stated philosophy of America first?
Because if he did, he'd do the same thing China did.
Or would he say, this is bigger than all of that?
This is just bigger than all of that.
Now, I don't think that President Trump would have even had the option, because we don't stop freedom of speech.
So if it happened in our country, our scientists would just talk to the other scientists, and that would be it.
So it wouldn't even be a question of the president being involved in a decision.
The information would just flow out like it does from the United States.
So I just put that out there to say, Nobody is harder on China than I am.
As most of you know, they killed my stepson with their fentanyl in 2018.
At least I blame them, at least partially.
Of course, he's to blame primarily.
And I hate them more than anybody hates them.
Trust me. When I look at this and I say, this is a real one-off.
I don't know if any other country would have acted differently.
I don't know. Do you?
Do you know if any other country would have acted differently?
Because I don't know. Now, I don't think that that matters in terms of how we treat them, because they did make their choice.
And part of that choice is that they would have to accept the blowback.
In other words, they made a decision with full knowledge, I assume, right?
They had to have full knowledge that there was a high likelihood this would all come out, and they would have, you know, Possibly devastating long-term effects.
But maybe it was just a better bet.
Maybe it was. If their economy opens up sooner than ours and does better and faster than ours, it was a good bet.
So, I don't know.
Those are the things I'm thinking.
So, did you see the story about the British scientist expert who recommended quarantine for everybody and lockdown for everybody and then found out that his married mistress was coming to his house during the lockdown and then going back to her family?
Like, oh my god.
I don't have anything to add to that story, but if you haven't seen it, just go read the story for entertainment purposes because it's just...
It's just jaw-droppingly awful.
All right, here's the funniest thing that happened, which is that President Trump finally decided to give a nickname to Kellyanne Conway's husband.
Now, before we laugh about this, let me explain something about humor for the few people who don't know.
Now, I've often said that one-third of the public actually doesn't have a sense of humor.
But even the people who do have a sense of humor There are varying degrees.
And there's a nuance that I don't know if everybody appreciates.
And it goes like this.
If an ordinary person had made a deep insult about Kellyanne Conway's husband, what's his name?
George? George Conway. And had made that comment...
about his physicality, you know, any part of what he looks like or whatever.
That wouldn't be funny.
Even if the actual insult was kind of clever, I don't think I would be amused by that.
Because this is random person saying an ugly thing about somebody who, you know, maybe isn't the best looking.
That's not fair. Like, I'm not cool with that at all.
But, when the most powerful person on the planet Calls George Conway, who is, of course, the President's biggest critic, probably.
When the President of the United States, the most powerful person in the world, calls George Conway moonface, well, that's just funny.
I'm sorry. That's just funny.
That's just plain funny.
Now, I get that not everybody thinks that's funny, but the part of it you have to understand Is that it's the president's position that makes it funny.
Because that's the thing that makes it out of sync.
Right? If an ordinary troll says an ordinary insult to even a famous person, you don't even register it.
It just doesn't mean anything.
Because it's completely within the expected universe.
So remember I was teaching you the...
I think I was teaching you about humor...
And how if you can create a situation that makes sense, but it doesn't make sense, then people's laugh reflex will be triggered.
So you want to create situations that have a humor logic to them, but they don't actually make sense.
And then the brain will try to make them make sense, but it can't because it doesn't make sense.
And then you'll laugh. It's sort of like being tickled.
It's like a reflex. Well, if an ordinary person insults another person, There's nothing unordinary about that, and your brain just processes that.
Oh, troll, insults, victim, bam.
No laugh. But, if the most juvenile and yet super clever, which also doesn't make sense, that it could be juvenile and super clever?
Because it's both. So that's the first thing that shouldn't fit together.
It's like, wait a minute.
That's juvenile.
But it's also...
Like ridiculously genius.
But it's also juvenile.
But a juvenile can't be a genius.
And so that's the first thing that hits your humor reflexes.
You can't reconcile that it really is kind of genius.
It's just juvenile at the same time.
And then you can't reconcile why any of those two things would ever come out of a sitting president's thumbs.
And then you just go, I can't even understand this.
And then you just start laughing.
Because it's all things that don't belong in the same place.
Now, the president, you know, I've often said that he's unable to be uninteresting.
I don't know if he even knows how to be uninteresting.
His just normal mode is always interesting.
And part of the way he does that is that he makes things, he puts things together that your brain doesn't want to put together.
Like you can't quite make sense of it, but you sort of know what he's talking about.
And he does it so often that you lose sight of it as a technique that he's continually putting not quite logical things together.
And your brain is trying to keep up and it's trying to cement them together as he's going.
And while you're struggling with the last one, he's already on to the next one.
It's like, oh, but how will Mexico pay for the wall?
I don't even know how that works.
And then he's on to the next topic.
And so if you know it's part of the show, you can really just enjoy it the way many of you do, the way I do.
I mean, and it's just from an entertainment perspective, It's just amazing, right?
But if you think he's evil and he's up to bad news, you just think he's a dumb old guy rambling.
So you missed the show.
Did you notice that the idea of closing the streets in front of restaurants actually is catching on?
So you probably heard me mention it.
You probably heard Greg Duffield mention it on The Five.
I think he mentioned it like three different times on The Five.
Probably other people have had the idea as well.
And the idea is that since you need space, and it's always healthier to be outdoors with this virus situation, that where you have a density of restaurants, if you have several of them on a main street, as long as you have surrounding streets so you can go around, just close the street.
Now in my town, we have that exact situation.
We've got a tiny little downtown.
It's mostly restaurants.
Or, I don't know, a lot of restaurants, not mostly.
A lot of restaurants. And they fairly frequently close the street for, like, street fairs and events and stuff.
So it's sort of built for that.
It's just perfect. So I sent that idea.
I guess there's a restaurant in Tampa doing it.
There's some other people playing with it.
And it's just the obvious solution.
So I sent that idea to, you know, one of the best restaurant guys in my town to see if he can make that happen.
Um... Let's see.
What else we got going on here?
Oh, speaking of Greg, so the president tweets this just like out of the blue.
You know, I told you the other day that the president tweeted me like three times in a row the other day, and you wake up.
To the president tweeting you, it just doesn't even feel like reality anymore.
You feel like you're in some kind of weird other world again.
It's like doing mushrooms again.
And so imagine, you know, you're Greg, and he just, you know, he just, you know, wakes up like it's any other day, you know, goes to work, does his thing, and then somebody says, uh, did you see what the president tweeted?
What? You didn't see?
What? Did you see what the president tweeted about you?
What? I don't know if it went down like that, but maybe it did.
Anyway, this is what the president tweets.
He goes, Greg built his show from scratch and did a great job in doing so.
And I love that last line.
Oh, that last line is just, you know, the dagger.
You can feel the dagger going in just because, you know, that Greg beat all of these people.
And he's, you know, he says good things about Trump now and then.
So, you know, Trump's just putting the dagger in.
And the dagger's like, It's an inch in, and then he gets to this last line, and you can feel like, that hurts quite a bit.
That dagger's about an inch in.
And then the president says, Greg built his show from scratch.
Just stop and think about that.
You know, all these other three guys who didn't get as good ratings as Greg Gotfeld gets on the Gotfeld Show, Greg Gotfeld Show, every one of them just inherited a show that had such a long-time audience that they couldn't have ruined it if they tried.
Think about the difference between just inheriting somebody's chair, which is largely what the other three did, and convincing...
Wait for this.
Convincing... A conservative news network to run a humor, irreverent show at night.
Like, how do you even do that?
Obviously, you know, Red Eye gave him some traction on that.
But... So the guy's on two top-rated shows for their time range, you know, the Five and Greg Gutfeld show.
But I just love the way the president threw these other guys onto the bus and then backed over them and then ran over them and backed over them again.
But when you throw in that last part, it's like, he built it from scratch.
From nothing. He built it from nothing.
That's a whole different level.
Alright. Ben Shapiro tweeted probably the best description of what's going on right now.
So you should take a look at that tweet thread.
I tweeted it. I tweeted it so you can find it toward the top of my Twitter feed.
And he makes the following point which I agree with.
I have one small disagreement which I'll mention and that is that what Ben Shapiro points out is that we don't have a plan and we sort of didn't notice it.
Meaning that our original plan made sense.
We were going to try to spare the hospitals from overcapacity by bending the curve and we were going to do that with social distancing.
Mission accomplished, I'd say.
Wouldn't you? So, that plan seems to have been successful.
But, now we're at the phase where that plan is doing its thing, and, as Ben asks, and then what?
What's the next thing?
Now, obviously, they're going to try to open up businesses slowly and cautiously and all that, but why aren't we just opening them all?
Are we holding out for a therapeutic?
Are we holding out for a vaccine that's never going to happen?
What exactly is the long-range plan?
Because If the plan is that we have to basically just live with it, which means getting it, if there's herd immunity, would that be great?
If there's not herd immunity, well, that's what it is.
But we don't really have an option anymore.
I've said people are already criticizing the president for not starting soon enough and maybe being too fast to end it, so he gets blamed for both sides.
But I'm not so sure anybody knew what was the right thing to do.
So here's the point.
We have to recognize that there is no plan to get rid of it.
There's nobody even suggesting that something could happen for it to go away.
Certainly not before hundreds of thousands of Americans die from it.
But there's some reason we're not saying that.
Why can't we just say that, and Ben was making this point as well, that we should be able to expressly say, this is what we're going to do.
We're just going to live with it because we don't really think there's anything that's going to change within the planning horizon.
And if we don't get back to work, it could be too late.
So... So I think his point of view is good.
Now the one thing he said that I'll slightly quibble with is that he said if you don't have a timeline, an estimated time of when you're going to do what, then you don't have a plan.
I would disagree with that.
Because I think in the context of an ever-changing situation where your data is different every day, that having a plan almost doesn't make sense.
We're really more in a situation where we're responding rapidly.
Which I would call a plan.
So we certainly have a plan of rapidly responding to what we learn as we learn it.
If we developed a therapeutic that works, we would rapidly implement it.
If we learn that genetics make a difference, we would rapidly implement it.
So, I mean, that is the plan, but it doesn't require a timeline because nobody knows when this vaccine might or might not happen, when some therapeutic will work or not.
So I wouldn't worry about the timeline part of it, but it is true that there's something like a lack of a plan.
Now, part of it is people don't want to say that they want to kill old people, unhealthy people, minorities, and poor people.
And who does, right?
Who wants to say in public, you know, if it's up to me, I'll save this group and kill this group.
Well, I'll go first.
How about I go first?
So, here's your choice, Scott.
You've got to have a policy that would favor or not favor any of these groups.
The elderly, the people with comorbidities, and the poor.
Now, there's an overlap, of course, but if you do something that helps people financially, you know, helps the poor, you're probably going to kill a lot of old people.
The people with comorbidities, you know, they probably have bad luck no matter what you do.
And so, Scott, who do you want to kill?
Old people or poor people, many of whom especially are African Americans who have a special risk, apparently, with the coronavirus.
Who are you going to kill?
Old people? Or African Americans?
Go ahead, Scott. Say it.
Say it in public. Who are you going to kill?
Are you willing to say that in public?
That you would kill old people?
Or you would kill African Americans and poor people?
Go ahead. Say it.
Okay. Old people.
That's my choice. I choose old people.
If you can say that too, or even if you can say the opposite.
But if you can say it out loud...
You get to sit at the adult table.
You could be right. You could be wrong.
I would only ask you to have good intentions.
You could be selfish. That's totally allowed.
You could say, you know, this is good for me.
I don't care about other people.
This is the way I want to go.
It's just good for me. If you can do that and say it out loud, you too get to sit at the adult table.
Because you can be selfish as an adult.
You're allowed. Our system allows you to vote for who you think is going to help you.
That's built into the system.
Perfectly fine. But if you can't say it, you've got to stay at the kid's table.
And then you just pretend like there's magical solutions and magical vaccines and you don't have to make trade-offs.
That's the kid's table.
Go sit there. So I said it out loud.
I would save the poor and the African-American community first, to the extent that your policies can have an emphasis.
I'm not even sure if that's possible.
But if it can, that's the way I'd go.
So in other words, I would go back to work a little bit faster than maybe some others.
Not so fast that it's crazy.
And really, I said before, I said this morning...
That if it turns out that you had to wait another three weeks in California, that's what it looks like, another three weeks.
Three weeks probably isn't the difference between living and dying.
It's probably not the difference between your company failing.
Everybody's saying so, but keep in mind they're all economically ignorant.
Let me tell you why things are not as bad as maybe you think in terms of the companies that are going out of business.
You're going to hear all these stories from the financially ignorant portion of the press, which is almost everybody, saying that all these restaurants are going out of business and closing, etc.
What they won't tell you is what is the landlord going to do?
What do they do with a building that used to be rented And now it's still a restaurant, but they own it.
What are they going to do? Well, the smartest thing the landlord could do is make a deal with the owner, the restaurant owner, and say, look, you didn't pay me for three weeks.
You're totally underwater, but so is everybody.
So is everybody.
Can you come back?
And the best thing for me is you come back.
Because that's the best thing for the landlord.
And that will always be left out by the financially illiterate.
That all these companies that are declaring bankruptcy and closing and saying they'll never open up again, that's not exactly true.
Quite a few of those that think they're closed for good are going to come back to a world in which people are way more flexible than they imagined.
They're going to have banks that say, you know, you're bankrupt, I'll still give you a loan.
Imagine that. Imagine a world where you're going to be able to walk into a bank and say, I'm bankrupt last week.
Will you give me a business loan?
And the bank will look at you and say, were you in business three months ago in a successful restaurant?
Yes, I was. And then, you know, restaurants actually are hard to finance.
So maybe a restaurant's the worst example because it's going to be hard for them to get a loan.
But it's always hard for restaurants to get funding.
But for an ordinary business, the bank is going to say, I'm not sure I care that you're bankrupt.
I care that it's a real business and you can pay the bills, but everybody who came in this week is bankrupt.
It's universal now.
So I think that you're going to hear a lot of fake bad news that people will imagine as if somebody went out of business in a world where everybody else didn't.
But in a world where massive numbers of people went out of business, the options are very constrained.
And the most obvious best option for almost everybody is to get really flexible and put those people who are out of business back in business as quickly as possible.
So I think they could be out of business and then back in business faster than you think.
Just because it's the easiest way to go for everybody.
Alright, those are the things I want to talk about.
Somebody says another three weeks is ridiculous.
Well, it might be ridiculous scientifically, but I don't think it would be ridiculous in terms of death.
You know, I don't think anybody will die from poverty in three weeks.
And I don't think it will be a measurable difference.
All right. Texas woman put in jail for cutting hair.
Oh, that's the other thing I wanted to say.
When this is all over, when all the restrictions are off and everybody can move freely, I want us all to share our stories of massive cheating during the lockdown.
I know you got your stories.
I know you do.
I see you. You're smiling.
You're smiling. Because I know that you snuck somewhere.
You saw somebody.
You know you did.
You let some people come over to your house.
You know you did. I see you're smiling.
You, yep, you, yep, busted.
So when this is all over, And you don't feel the red, hot, searing pain of other people's judgment upon you.
I want to hear your funny stories of the things you got away with.
Somebody says, slept with neighbor, which I'm sure is true.
Because I think there are going to be a lot of stories about people who maybe...
Let's just say they did not obey their government if they didn't feel that their government's rules were, let's say, perfectly crafted.
Massively cheated on this social isolation thing just because they thought their government didn't have the moral authority, the technical expertise, or the risk management ability to decide for them.
And so they decided for themselves and just figured out how to beat the system.
I'm not recommending it.
I'm just saying it'll be very funny when we share the stories.
Not that I have one.
I've been totally good.
I know you haven't. I'm not going to read that comment.
Alright, that's enough for now.
Have a great night of sleep.
And have a great night.
Tomorrow is going to be way better than today.
▲
Export Selection