Episode 964 Scott Adams: Grab Your Beverage Because it's Time For...
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Content:
Adam Schiff lied for years...but broke no laws
We do NOT know if Russia hacked DNC?
Law enforcement targeted/framed President Trump to take him out
"Cheryl The Server" theory applied to the lockdown
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If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topics to build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure.
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If your desk doesn't have a rolling chair, you're missing a lot.
Because there are very few things more fun than rolling around in your office.
Standing up and walking?
That's for suckers.
Get yourself a nice rolling chair.
True story? Well, I'll tell you after the simultaneous sip.
Because I know you're here for that. You're probably ready.
You don't want your coffee to get cold.
It's probably up. You're ready.
And all you needed was a cup or a mug or a glass of tank or a chalice or a stein, a canteen jug or a flask or a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine, the day, the thing that makes everything better, including the damn pandemic.
It's called the simultaneous sip.
It happens now.
Go. I feel my vitamin D levels increasing to acceptable range.
Yeah, yeah, I think that just happened.
Now, probably isn't a lot of vitamin D in coffee, but I feel there's nothing that coffee can't fix, really.
So I reminded myself of a story from my childhood.
So when I was a kid, my grandmother would sometimes babysit me, actually fairly often.
Yeah, my grandmother had sort of a little apartment room and a farmhouse at a farm, and it used to be where she had been married to the farmer, but her son took over.
So her son was running the farm, and she had sort of a little, you know, a grandma apartment within the farmhouse.
So I would go as a little kid, and I would have to be with my grandmother all day long.
Now let me describe what it was like to be with my grandmother all day long.
So you just have to get this picture.
So my grandmother liked to quilt.
She would make quilts.
And because a quilt is a pretty big object, you lay it down on some kind of a table device so you can walk around all the edges and put in the pieces.
And it's a long project.
So your quilt table, if you will, We'll be set up and there for days or weeks, however long you're working on your quilt.
The primary room that was her area was filled almost entirely by the quilt in the middle.
So there was a narrow path around the edges, which was the only place I could be.
Except for outside, and if the weather wasn't good, it wasn't really an option.
So my entire world as a kid was this narrow path around a quilt, but it gets better.
My grandmother weighed about 300 pounds, and she had a rolling office chair so that she could roll around the quilt without getting up and work on her quilt, and then she'd push herself around and work on the next part.
And she would turn on her soap operas, which are in this little room.
So at age, I don't know, whatever I was, eight or something, seven or eight, my entire day was...
Being chased by my grandmother who was walking around the quilt, not walking, pushing the chair around, and I'd have to move all the time.
And there wasn't any place to go except further around the quilt while she listened to her daytime soap operas.
Now, if you're a kid listening to daytime soap operas, you just want to kill yourself.
Listening to them for like seven hours in a row...
While walking around the perimeter of a quilt, being chased by a 300-pound woman on an office chair?
Well, that's how my childhood looked.
And I'm not even telling you the bad parts.
All right. Magician Roy Horn of Siegfried and Roy died from COVID-19 complications at age 75.
Now, I've been telling you that my personal standard for when I'm going to get worried is if the first famous person Under 70 dies of the coronavirus.
Because I'm looking at my odds, and I'm saying, okay, I'm a famous person, I'm under 70, so my category has so far zero deaths.
Famous people under 70 in the United States.
Then I saw this headline, and I'm like, oh shoot, I don't know how old he was.
He was 75. Which is way too young still in this world.
And I'm sure he still had some complications, I think, from the tiger attack years ago.
But sadly, he passed.
And this one felt like I got grazed.
You could hear the bullet go by.
You could feel the wind pass your ear.
And I'm thinking, famous person only five years over 70.
It's getting closer.
So I'm not going to be worried until my category has its first death, because what are the odds it would be me?
There is yet another drug cocktail combination that is getting some promising reviews.
Over at Hong Kong they've tested a, I guess it's existing HIV drug combination, so it's got Ritonavir and Loponavir and Beta Interferon.
Now, as you know, the Beta Interferon drug is what Democrat men take, the Beta Interferon, because what that does is it makes you more of a Beta.
No, I'm just kidding.
I don't know why they name it Beta Interferon, if they don't want me to make fun of it.
But here's the thing. Call me skeptical.
But, you know, all the drug companies are saying the same thing, which is, given the compressed timeline, we don't really have time to develop a whole new drug that's perfect for this virus.
It would just take too long.
So they're using all this off-the-shelf stuff just to see.
Now, what are the odds that you would have any kind of a new disease that pops up in the world?
What are the odds that a new disease, a new virus, a new anything, would be treatable with old drugs?
I mean, it's not impossible, but what are the odds that the pharmaceutical companies just happen to have on the shelf remdesivir, which isn't used for anything else?
But they got a patent, They know how to make it.
Wouldn't it be convenient if they could find some way to convince people this works for $1,000 a shot or whatever it is?
So when I see that these existing HIV drugs were tested and they got good results, I don't think they have any kind of...
It's not a full scientific study, but they anecdotally with their small group, they were getting better about twice as fast or maybe a third faster.
And I don't think they have any information on death yet, because they weren't really testing people who were near death anyway.
So, I am really, really skeptical.
Really, really skeptical of any existing drug working for this.
I'm really skeptical.
So, you know, I'll give you my estimates of odds.
Now, for those of you who are not, if you're new to this, If I say the odds of something are 80% chance that it will happen, and then it doesn't happen, I wasn't wrong.
You have to understand that or you can't play.
Saying the odds can be right, even if the less likely thing happens.
So I'm not telling you what's going to happen, I'm just giving you odds.
I'd say hydroxychloroquine, I'm still putting a 40% chance that that makes a big difference.
There's a higher chance that it makes a difference.
Probably a 40% chance that it's some kind of a game changer.
I base that on the fact that we would already know that.
If it were that big a deal, we would know it by now.
Easily we would know it by now.
There's a hundred ways we would know it by now if it worked that well.
But there's certainly indications it might work a little bit, and that's still worth something.
So 40% chance that hydroxychloroquine is a game-changer, higher chance that it has some effectiveness.
Remdesivir, I'm going to put at 10%.
I'm going to say there's a 10% chance that remdesivir is going to be the game changer.
Again, it might also have some effect in some situations, but maybe 10% chance.
Then, this HIV cocktail combination, you know, it's still way too early to know if it really makes a difference.
It's not really a controlled study or anything.
I would say, what are the odds that this cocktail that was made for a completely different reason...
Would also work well enough to be a game changer.
I'm going to say, I just can't believe that we coincidentally happily invented the right drug before the virus occurred.
I mean, that would be a big coincidence.
So, I'm going to say 20%.
20% chance that this particular combination is the magic bullet.
And then there's another hundred things out there that are being tested, right?
All sorts of monoclonal things and whatnot.
And I would say that the odds of, let's say, at least one of those things that I haven't mentioned yet, so the whole category of things that I haven't mentioned.
So I have mentioned hydroxychloroquine, these HIV drugs, remdesivir.
So those are one category.
But the whole other category that's not those...
For a game changer, let's say 50%.
I'd say there's a solid 50% chance that there's something in the pipeline that could really just yank this thing back to where it needs to be.
50-50. I wouldn't count on it.
Those are my best guesses.
These are based on nothing but having been alive a long time, looking at the dog that isn't barking, like we're not hearing that it's doing better, like the hydroxychloroquine.
But we could all be surprised.
So one of the things that Mark Cuban was saying in an interview, talking about the economy coming back online, is that the economy in 2020 is nothing like Any broken economy of the past.
And I would like to add to that thought.
The thing that's really, really weird and unpredictable about this coming economic recovery is nothing's broken, like physically.
It's not like a world war where your buildings don't exist and you've got to rebuild them.
Everything's sort of there.
Also, all the people to do the work are already here, and they're already trained.
So you've got the jobs, the buildings, the assets, the people.
It's all perfectly intact.
The part that's broken is the psychology of it and possibly consumer spending, as Mark Cuban was pointing out.
What we don't know is will the people who go back and once they can spend, will they?
Because a lot of people don't have money.
But as I've pointed out, the other thing that's weird about this one is that for something like 15% of people are unemployed, but of those 15%, how many of them were making a lot of money to begin with?
Right? How many of the people who lost their jobs, let's say servers and restaurants, you can go right down the line, retail people, they were not the big income people.
For the most part, they're the ones barely getting by.
And probably a lot of them had to live with someone else to pay the rent.
So they either had someone else who could be earning money in the family, they might be living a home.
So if you took that 15%, How much is the total buying power as consumers that was in that 15%?
Now, some of those people are going to be high-income people because you'd have to throw me in there, too.
I basically have lost my job.
I'm just waiting for the notice, basically.
In fact, my syndication company has already told me the cat's on the roof.
You know that joke. I got a letter that says, well...
The cat's on the roof.
Newspapers are going out of business.
They want to renegotiate.
They don't know if we'll get paid.
So I'm approaching unemployed, not in the way of having a salaried job, but essentially my job just went away, or it's on the path of going away.
So I don't know if I'm throwing in that average too, so my buying power will go down about 75%.
Mostly, the 15% who are unemployed were the ones who were not making that much money to begin with.
So in terms of numbers of people, it's a disaster.
Because it's a lot of people who are struggling because they don't have money.
But, if you just talk about math, the total buying power of that 15% might be 4% of the consumer purchasing.
I'm just guessing.
Because it's a big group, 15% of the public, but they didn't buy much because they didn't have much to begin with.
So the people who still had a job spent way less while they're on lockdown.
They actually have extra money and pent-up demand.
Everybody who wanted to buy a car for the last three months Well, maybe some of them did.
I think car dealers were actually open.
But probably just a lot of pent-up demand.
So if I had to guess...
Now, the real problem is that the businesses that are opening up under capacity, there's no way you can open up a restaurant or a movie theater at 25% capacity.
There's almost no point to it.
It would be smarter to go out of business at that point because you're just, you know, every day that you're open at 25% capacity, you're just losing money.
So, and I suppose it'd just be easier to declare bankruptcy.
A big restaurant chain around here, Sweet Tomatoes, I think just declared bankruptcy.
A big Nordstrom, the biggest store in my area, in my town, is Nordstrom.
Yeah, it's part of the one mall in my town.
And that just, it's the anchor tenant and they just decided that they're closing that store.
I don't know about Nordstrom in general, but that store looks like it'll be closed forever.
So these are pretty big changes.
But here's what I'm going to add to Mark Cuban's comments.
We've never been in a position where everything was not broken physically.
The people were all trained.
And here's the part I'm going to add.
We've got the best communication we've ever had.
And I think that it's that ability to instantly communicate, both in digital ways, but also social media ways, which are also digital.
But we can connect and find each other and find problems and solve problems in a way that was never possible before.
So take the most trivial example.
You saw that there were some restaurants in Tampa, I think, that closed the streets in front of the restaurant, So they can move the tables onto the street and have lots of space so that you can still have your restaurant.
Now, in theory, you can get a lot closer to 100% capacity by spreading your tables into the street.
That's an idea that would pop up in one place, then there's a news story or it's on social media, and then suddenly every restaurant hears the idea.
Now, think about the difference of having no communication or poor communication early on in, let's say, the 1918 pandemic.
And then some restaurant has a good idea.
How would the other restaurants ever hear about that good idea?
Wait for it to be written up in a physical newspaper and hope that you saw that newspaper?
Somebody says Seattle did it too, right?
Now, I don't know to what extent that idea was just so obvious that everybody would have thought of it.
Maybe. That's possible.
But I have to think that there were probably 80% of the restaurants who wouldn't have thought of it.
They just would have said, I guess we can't open up.
But the fact that some of them had that idea allows that idea to just spread across the country immediately.
Likewise, every time anybody has a good idea anywhere, it immediately spreads because we're so well connected.
So my take on this is that an economic recovery under these unique conditions should be spectacular.
The conditions being nothing's broken, everybody's trained, half the country probably has more money than before the crisis.
They're still going to spend.
The people who lost their jobs were, by and large, in the lower economic strata to begin with.
They weren't a big part of the consumer spending.
And communication is great.
If you add communication to this mix, things can recover quite quickly.
So I'm very optimistic about 2021.
Here's the weirdest thing.
Here's a dark thought.
You know, I keep watching the evolving Flynn collusion, Russia collusion story, and now that we've seen the actual documents, and we know that Adam Schiff was lying to the country for, what, years? How long was Adam Schiff lying and And a lot of our leaders are lying.
But let's just talk about Adam Schiff because he seems to be the primary purveyor of the hoax.
So my understanding is that he broke no laws because members of Congress have immunity.
So because he had immunity, he was able to lie to the country in such a way and in such a consistent and public way that he effectively attempted a coup.
Not even effectively.
He attempted a coup.
I don't even have to add effectively.
He tried to remove the government of the United States by lying consistently and grotesquely in the ways which are now obvious.
We couldn't really tell before.
You didn't really know. You didn't really know.
But now you know.
Here's the weird thing.
When you think to yourself, alright, so somebody tried to overthrow the legally elected government of the United States, what would be the penalty for that?
In your mind, what feels like the right penalty to match, it wasn't a crime, but it was a bad thing.
Let's call it a bad thing that was not technically illegal.
What do you imagine would be the appropriate punishment for that?
Well, if you're like me, Execution.
Now, you could argue, I don't believe in the death penalty, I prefer life in prison, but I don't know, I think a coup attempt, a coup attempt at actual treason against the United States, given how much this cost all of us, I mean, there is a good argument that It was really expensive, even including not being as prepared for the coronavirus.
Maybe. I'm not sure I believe that it would have made any difference, given that we had bad information about it during that period.
But it's just blowing my head up that somebody did something that a reasonable citizen, who's not crazy, who's just looking at the situation, all right, I'm a reasonable citizen, If I'm being objective, this person, we now know, we don't have to guess about it anymore, we now know with certainty, attempted to overthrow the president.
It was treason.
And it feels like the right punishment is execution.
Is that too much?
Am I going too far?
I mean, because traditionally...
That's the traditional penalty for treason.
Now, I don't think we kill people in the United States for treason.
I think actually we don't have the...
I think the death penalty is maybe on the table, but not always used, that sort of thing.
But it's just blowing my mind that I'm legitimately, not even in a political sense, just my natural human citizen instinct of how bad it was what he did...
Feels like if it had been a crime, which it isn't, the right penalty would be execution.
Is that too much?
Because I actually don't think it is.
Like, I don't even think it's a little bit too much.
Now, if you said no execution, life imprisonment, I'd say, okay, that's more of a philosophical difference.
But in terms of the extent of the crime and the extent of the punishment, it's in that range.
But instead, do you know what his punishment will be?
Almost certain re-election.
Almost certain re-election.
That's what he'll get for that.
He's going to get it rewarded.
Now, when we're talking about hoaxes, And of course, you know, I'm usually talking about hoaxes that are presented by, you know, the Democrats against Trump.
Those are the famous ones, you know, Russia collusion, the fine people hoax, the ingesting Clorox hoax, the goldfish feeding hoax.
I mean, you can go right down the line.
It's just hoax after hoax.
But it's not just one direction.
People, it's not just one direction.
I'm watching the coverage last night on the opinion shows on Fox, talking about Schiff, and I think Tucker was doing this, showing clips of Schiff saying, yes, there's plenty of evidence that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia.
So they'd show him saying that, and then they'd show the evidence that there's nobody who testified there was any evidence of that, no direct evidence of that whatsoever.
So the implication is, That the experts on oath are saying we didn't see any evidence, yet Schiff is going out in public and saying plenty of evidence.
So therefore, Schiff's a liar.
Except, he's being taken out of context.
I hate that I have to defend the guy I think should have the death penalty.
I'm going to defend Adam Schiff.
It's for your benefit, so you can sort of have a better appreciation for Of how you might be being manipulated by the news.
Here's how you're being manipulated.
When Adam Schiff says there's plenty of evidence of collusion by the campaign, his specific examples are the Don Jr.
meeting, which did happen, but the way he interprets it of course is crazy, but at least it happened.
And the fact that the president said in public that time, hey, Russia, if you can get us those emails, why don't you do it?
So when Schiff says there's plenty of evidence, he's looking at the things that we do know about, and he's simply interpreting them as evidence.
He's not talking about the same kind of stuff that That the people who were testifying were talking about.
They were talking about real evidence, like you've seen Russia do something, there's an email, there's a taped conversation, like real evidence.
But the people who said there's no evidence would also have acknowledged Don Jr.
went to a meeting and that the President did once say in public at that debate, hey, Russia, if you have those emails, Hillary's emails, So, when you see those things juxtaposed, as they say there's no evidence, and then Schiff says there's plenty, if you leave out that part where the plenty he's talking about is the stuff that we do know exists, he's just interpreting it differently, I don't feel that's exactly honest, honestly.
Now, I still think that what he did is so dishonest That he doesn't really deserve a fair shake at this point.
And of course what he was doing by defining those trivial things as being plenty of evidence is completely bogus.
Completely bogus.
But it's the complete story.
You have to say that's what he was talking about before you say it's bogus.
Otherwise, you're just confusing the listeners, I think.
And Schiff is still saying there's plenty of evidence and still using those trivial examples.
The other thing that was interesting that Tucker was talking about is that...
And I don't think I'd heard this until it was on his show.
And by the way, if you didn't watch Tucker's show last night, it was really, really good.
One of the best...
I think Tucker's show last night was one of the best he's ever done, you know, overall.
I didn't like the Adam Schiff treatment, but if you looked at the whole show, it was really good.
Because it's the first time I've seen it laid out as bare as that, you know, just showing us what happens, the things we found out in the transcripts that were important.
I think it was laid out really well.
And the thing that I hadn't seen reported anywhere, until Tucker talked about it, was that you know how the government has been telling us that we're sure Russia hacked, I don't know, Podesta or the DNC or whatever?
Remember we were all sure that they did?
And I think you remember that from the beginning, maybe you don't remember, but from the beginning I've been saying, are we sure?
Do you really believe that we can know who hacked something?
Because I've got a real question about whether we can know that.
I don't know what we can know.
We know what we're told.
But we know that we're being told, frequently we're told things that aren't true.
I mean, it's just happening literally every day.
We're being told things that aren't true by the government, intelligence agencies, the news.
Pretty much everybody's telling us untrue things.
So when I first heard that we could tell who hacked us, I said to myself, if we can tell who hacked us, then I don't know what hacking even is.
Because if these top secret intelligence agencies with the best technical hackers in the world are leaving their fingerprints on their hacks, I don't understand the world.
Because really the whole point of the hacks is not getting caught.
And you would know if you could get caught, right?
Wouldn't you know if you were leaving a fingerprint?
So, from the beginning, I said to myself, we could strongly suspect who did it, but I don't know that we could ever know.
And sure enough, the transcript shows that when asked directly if we'd know, we don't know.
It was just a lie the whole time.
So you're watching the story I know about, I guess there are 11 Secret Service people who have the coronavirus and there are several members of the Pence and Trump staff, people are pretty close to him, who have tested positive.
Neither Pence nor Trump have tested positive.
But here's the obvious thing.
I often tell you that you can predict the future when you see this situation, which is there's a situation with a big potential upside, there's a lot to gain, and there's no risk of getting caught.
So let's say it's something that isn't legal, but you know you're not going to get caught, and the gain is just gigantic.
Does it happen? Yeah, every time.
It'll happen every time.
And then the third criteria is that there's multiple people involved in the situation, meaning that it's not just one person who might potentially say, hey, I'm a good person.
I'm the only person who has this opportunity for this huge upside game, but I'm not that kind of person because it's illegal.
So if you only had one person, you might get one that was honest.
Could turn down a billion dollars because it just isn't right.
But if you've got a lot of people in your situation...
Somebody's going to take the billion dollars.
So I look at the situation of the people who have the coronavirus infections, and I say to myself, if you were, let's say, a sophisticated country that had capabilities, and you wanted to bother another country and possibly assassinate their leader who is over 70, how would you do it?
Now, I'm not giving anybody ideas, because this is just so obvious, you have to assume that every intelligence agency thought this on day one, which is, wait a minute, if I were to infect their outer circle, which is probably easy, because you could find people who work at the White House who are not themselves guarded.
You could easily infect their place where they're going to be.
I don't want to give you too many ideas.
Now, it's not something that an individual could easily do, because how would you get a little vial of coronavirus for yourself if you wanted to do bad things with it?
It would be kind of hard, unless you were personally infected.
But if you're a government, and you're an intelligence agency, of course, you can get yourself a little vial of coronavirus.
And here's the thing. Imagine, I'll just give you one example.
Iran. They have elderly leaders.
Who are the big problem?
And then you've got a number of countries in the area, I don't need to name names, who would have the capability and the motive to get a little bit of coronavirus to the advisors, and then the advisors will do the rest inadvertently.
So, as soon as I saw that Iran was having extra big problems kind of early on, I said to myself, Huh.
A very unpopular regime surrounded by highly capable enemies who could easily do this without getting caught.
And then statistically, well, you've got a pretty good chance that it's going to mess up the other side.
Huge upside potential.
Practically no chance of getting caught.
Lots of people involved.
Do you think anybody intentionally tried to infect the Iranian leadership?
Probably. Right?
Do you think Iran tried to intentionally infect the advisors of the Israeli government?
Probably. Probably.
Why wouldn't they? Or at least try.
Do you think any malign actors would try to do the same thing with the leadership of the United States?
If they would interfere with our elections...
If they would be sending us fentanyl, of course they would.
So you don't have to ask, would they?
Because of course they would.
We have such a history where it's just obvious, of course they would.
But only if there was a big gain, potential gain, and almost no chance of getting caught.
And that's what we got.
Because if somebody shows up and they have the coronavirus, How the hell would you know where it came from?
You wouldn't. It's the most...
I don't know, it's just...
On a risk management perspective, I can't imagine that this isn't being used, I don't know, by a dozen different countries trying to take out a rival country.
I mean, I would bet there are 12 countries right now that are trying to mess with some other government this way, because why wouldn't they?
Just why wouldn't they, really?
Somebody says, never heard of tracing?
Well, the tracing isn't going to get it done.
I mean, it would be too easy to put an end to that trail.
All right. The newest hoax is the Pence carrying empty boxes of...
You probably saw the videos, I think Jimmy Kimmel started it, where they acted like he was carrying empty boxes to pretend he was helping.
But in fact, he was carrying full boxes to pretend he was helping.
It's sort of a hoax of a hoax.
I mean, obviously, if the Vice President is moving boxes, It's obviously for the cameras, right?
We're all adults, right?
Nobody thinks that he was just helping out.
Of course it was for the cameras.
But I guess he joked about empty boxes or something and they got that on camera and put it together and then tried to act like he was moving empty boxes.
But does it matter? Does it matter if the boxes were empty?
It was. Just a video thing.
That's all it was.
It doesn't matter if it was empty.
I mean, if they were full of these light paper goods, it makes no difference at all.
It's the story that didn't need to be told at all.
No importance whatsoever.
I told you I've been digging into this vitamin D correlation with coronavirus and whether it helps you recover from COVID. There's just tons of information, but a lot of it is amateurs making their own graphs and not doing it right.
So I tested again my model of taking somebody's claim.
In this case, it was a graph that purported to show that the more vitamin D you had, the better you did with the COVID. But I asked people to take a look at it in my Twitter feed and All the doctors and scientists poured in and said, ah, bogus.
Bogus, bogus, bogus.
So that was good.
So it got debunked fairly quickly.
It's a good model. I think I would be using that a lot, where I'll just put it out there and say, comments, and sure enough, it got debunked.
But that doesn't mean that vitamin D has no role.
It just means that you should be really, really cautious of everything you see about it.
Everything. Literally every graph you see, every set of statistics about vitamin D, so far, has big problems, I think.
So none of it is conclusive that I've seen.
But it's still promising.
So we'll keep looking into that.
So there's a...
I guess he's a Democrat...
On Twitter, he's some kind of data scientist guy.
Yeah, he's a scientist, I guess.
And he tweets this. He goes, I feel my brain rotting every time I talk to a Republican.
Like, I want so bad to help them understand.
I'm a damn good teacher, and I honestly believe everyone is redeemable.
But good Lord, it's like their brains got swapped with the donkeys.
Now, he's a youngish guy.
I judge by his profile picture.
Youngish, he looks like 30s maybe.
Can't tell. But I love watching somebody right before the red pill because somebody suggested that he talk to me.
What would happen if he talked to me?
Well, he'll be choking back the biggest red pill of his life.
And I love being the observer of this person's journey.
Now, he's at the lowest level of awareness right now.
The lowest level of awareness is that your side is giving you the truth and the other side is lying.
That is the lowest level of awareness.
And he's a scientist. And in public, he's proclaiming himself to be at the lowest level of awareness because his view is that Republicans have broken brains and his side is getting it right.
Now, can you imagine how much fun I would have with this guy?
Apparently he's never been introduced to the next level of reality, which is none of it's true.
Just none of it's true.
It's just everybody's interpreting what they want.
But I could get him there.
And that is all there is that's happening today.
Hannity is the same, somebody says.
You've been thinking about the Democrats having the broken brains?
Yes. Well, I don't know what Hannity's thinking, so I wouldn't say that I know what he's thinking, but it is true that there are Republicans in the same situation.
I have not watched the Elon Musk interview.
I think you're talking about Joe Rogan.
It's hard for me to listen to long-form interviews.
Somebody says Don Lemon brought up the fine people hoax again last night.
You know, you do know that people like Don Lemon probably have never even heard the counter-argument.
And I think people like Don Lemon actually think it happened.
And they actually believe it happened.
Because that's widespread. Alright, I'm just looking at your talking about Barr being the worst attorney general.
We've had some attorney generals that did not bring glory to the office.
Plandemic has been banned.
Well, I'm still waiting for the counter-argument on Plandemic.
He tried to blame the shooting of the black kid on Trump.
Who did? Musk?
I don't think so. Have I ever challenged Lemon?
Why would I challenge him?
It's not like he's going to have any kind of a conversation with me.
Let's see.
Kim's still relaxing.
and Yeah, nobody's seen Kim Jong-un lately yet.
There will be more about that story.
Thoughts on Amoud Aubrey?
Well, here's some thoughts.
It's sort of a made-for-television crime.
Now, I'm going to call it a crime...
Without the benefit of the legal system having yet fully weighed in, because it looks more like a really bad judgment.
So I think what happened was everybody involved, the two people who were chasing Aubrey down, and then Aubrey, for reasons that I don't quite understand, decided to wrestle with the guy and try to wrestle his gun away from him.
And I can't think that was his best play.
So I think you had three people who were all under the wrong impression of what was going on.
I think Aubrey probably thought his life was in danger.
In some senses it was, of course.
But probably didn't know exactly what was going on and maybe thought it was a different situation than it was.
And everybody was just mistaken.
And so when I look at this thing, I hear people putting it in political frame because that's what we do, and maybe they're racist, and maybe this, and it's a symbol of what's happening in the country, and it's another example of racism and all that.
I don't know that it's any of that.
It just looks like three people who were subject to confirmation bias.
Actually, I don't even know if the If the two guys with the guns, I don't even know if they were having confirmation bias, or they were just trying to find out, and they did it in the worst possible way.
In other words, were they just trying to find out if this was the person...
I think they have some video cameras, video images of somebody trying to break into places in the area.
And of course, we haven't seen that, have we?
I'm not suggesting that the deceased was doing anything bad.
I have no information that would suggest that.
But since the people who chased him down were doing it because he matched some description of somebody who had broken into homes, but I don't know if the description was based on video, video image.
I assume there was some kind of video that captured him.
So at some point we're going to see a video I'm guessing.
I don't know if there is video.
But I think we might see a security video of somebody breaking into homes in the area, and then we can judge for ourselves.
Does it look sufficiently like the victim who got shot and killed?
You know, is it close enough where you'd say, okay, I can see how they'd make that mistake?
You know, they were just going to get a better look.
They weren't sure. Maybe they were profiling like young black male.
So, you know, you could certainly argue that racism was part of the confirmation bias.
Fair to say. I'm not sure if it's racism if it's just based on a physical look, though.
I mean, wouldn't they have done the same thing if the description had been he looked like a white hillbilly in overalls?
Overalls? Wouldn't they have chased anybody who looked like a white hillbilly in overalls if what they were trying to do was find a burglar?
So certainly the victim's race was part of the bad decision-making.
But I think that they would also have been susceptible to bad decision-making if it had been any other color as well, including their own.
Because if that was just what they'd heard, well, he's a You know, blonde guy, 45, wearing overalls.
If they saw a blonde guy, 45, wearing overalls, would they not have chased him?
You know, would they have let him go because he was white?
I don't think so. So, I think you've got to be a little more clever about saying what it was that biased them.
Because being biased by the physicality of someone who's been described It's different than being a racist.
Those are pretty different things.
The description wasn't good enough.
That's not racism.
But these things, of course, turn into something else.
Let me give you a hypothesis.
I'm just going to put that out there.
If you were a black citizen of the United States...
Let me not even pretend I can know how you feel or how you think because none of us know how anybody feels or thinks.
So anybody who's not you, you don't really know how they're thinking.
Let's be a little humble about that.
But I'll put this in the form of a question.
Let's say you're, and if there are any African American viewers on this, I would love to get your opinion right now.
So you can confirm or debunk what I'm saying.
If you're a black...
Let's say you're a black man in the United States.
We'll just make it a man to keep the example simple.
You're a black man living in the United States.
Do you think that law enforcement treats you unfairly?
What do you think? Typical black man living in the United States.
Is it your opinion that the legal system treats you unfairly?
Probably yes. Wouldn't you say?
Again, everybody's different.
You don't want to make a sweeping generalization, but I would think that's a fair generalization.
Now, let's say you're a black man.
You feel that the law enforcement has been unfair to you, and you're watching the news.
And the biggest story is that the FBI and the Department of Justice apparently just tried to frame a general, a white general, And take down the President of the United States with false accusations.
There's something happening here that, if you don't notice it, could be really, really big.
Trump just became a black man.
Let that sink in for a minute.
Trump just became black.
Think about it.
We said that Bill Clinton was the first black president.
Trump's number three.
Because Trump just shares one of the biggest experiences of being a black man in America, which is that law enforcement targeted you and tried to take you out with a bogus crime.
If you're a black guy and you're watching Trump Attempted to be taken out with a bogus charge.
What do you feel about that?
Seriously. How do you feel about that?
Because if that doesn't make you a little bit more empathetic about Trump's situation, now let's go further.
What has Trump done in terms of black people in prison?
He has quite noticeably And publicly worked hard to free black people who were, let's say, over-penalized.
I don't know if any of them were literally innocent of the crime they were committed, but they were over-penalized, like Alice Johnson, etc.
And then the entire prison reform movement.
Which is entirely, not entirely, but mostly, it's going to get people out of prison early.
Huge number of them overrepresented are the black community.
So, just by a weird confluence of things, I'm not joking.
I think Trump just became the third black president without even trying.
Because nobody has championed their side and also gotten the same treatment That I imagine they feel they get from law enforcement.
And that's a pretty big bonding experience.
Now, I don't know if Trump will ever be clever enough to tie the ideas together, because he supports law enforcement, and he's not going to be anti-cop.
That's not going to happen. But he certainly could say in public, you know, if you're a black man living in the United States, I'll tell you one thing I understand.
Imagine President Trump saying this in public.
Let me tell you one thing.
If you're a black man living in the United States and you're worried about law enforcement treating you unfairly, I get it.
I get it. There's nothing I understand better than that.
Law enforcement targeting you for a crime you didn't commit, treating you unfairly, I get it.
How much would you love to see that?
It sort of sneaks up on you.
Because when you're talking about the Russia collusion thing, you're not thinking about race relations.
It's just this little story.
But the way stories affect us, what we do is we say, is the person in the story like me or not like me?
It's just automatic.
The reason we like stories is you put yourself in the story.
And the story of Russia collusion...
I feel if you were a black man, you know, it could be a woman too, but men are more likely to be in the penal system.
But if you're a black man in America and you just watched the revelation that the President of the United States was framed for a crime, how do you not feel a little empathy for that while that same person is freeing black people from being over-penalized in prisons?
There's just no way that doesn't affect you.
Will it be enough? Who knows?
Alright. That's a mind-blower, isn't it?
I can see in the comments that some of you are really thinking about that one.
The hero's journey, somebody says.
Yeah, so movies feature a story arc where the hero changes.
So that's what makes a good story, is the hero starts out as one kind of person, and they've learned their heart is opened, or they've become better at something, whatever.
Um... Uh...
Alright. Somebody says Trump is literally a person of color because he's orange.
That's funny. Alright.
It's an interesting theory but a stretch, somebody says.
Could be. Let me give you an update on one of my predictions which looks like, based on preliminary information, Could be totally wrong, but we know that preliminary information is often totally wrong itself.
This isn't funny at all, so let me get out of my good mood so that I don't say this in the wrong way.
It turns out that these statistics for, at least anecdotally, the statistics for suicide are pretty alarming.
Now, all the smart people said economic destruction and losing your job and being socially isolated should lead to higher suicide rates, tragically.
And early indications are that that might be happening, at least more reportedly.
But I don't think anybody's done a study out of that.
I had predicted the opposite, which I was going to predict that suicide would go down And I used the Cheryl the server theory for that, which is that everything reduces when people think there's a new situation happening.
Like everything that would have happened stops happening, whether it was good or bad, because you're all just adjusting to the new situation.
And so that was my theory.
But the longer the lockdown goes, the longer it goes, the less the theory can hold, right?
So the Cheryl the server theory is only meant to be for a short time.
So I'll give you the exact theory again.
So she would say that restaurant business would go down when something changed.
So if the weather became seasonally good, business would go down because people would want to go outside.
If it rained and started to be rainy that week, business would go down because people didn't want to be in the rain.
So it didn't matter if it was good weather or bad weather.
Business always went down just because there was a change, and people change their behavior when there's some larger change.
But the Sherrill effect wears off after a few days, which is that one day of nice weather, your business will go to nothing.
But after two weeks of good weather, business goes back to where it was, people adjust, and they're like, we had a little out of our time, let's go back to the restaurant.
So we've been in lockdown so long that It does make sense that when you're looking at second, third month of a lockdown and unemployment, yeah.
At that point, you'd have to assume that the lockdown becomes normal.
As soon as being locked down starts to feel normal, and it's unambiguously worse than what even the previous situation was, and maybe people wanted to end their lives anyway, So I could see how it would go from...
So here, I will refine my prediction and say this.
I'll bet for the first few weeks, suicide went down.
But I'll bet by the final weeks...
Oh, actually, by the final weeks, it might go down again if people are saying, well, it's only one more week.
But somewhere right around now should be the worst of it.
So it probably will be higher than average for a while.
So that's pretty tragic.
So it looks like my prediction will be wrong, but maybe we can learn something from the individual weeks.
Because I do think, I do feel confident that the first week or two of the shutdown will be lower suicide rates.
And after that, I wouldn't be surprised if they went up again.
All right, um...
I'm homeless now because of the China virus.
Well, I'm sorry. You know, I've not seen much news about people going hungry, have you?
We saw some news for a while.
It seemed like there was about a week or two where every now and then you'd see the long food lines in various cities.
But I thought that the news would just keep showing more and more of them and the lines would get longer and there'd be more cities involved.
But it feels like the coverage of the food lines just sort of stopped, didn't it?
Now, is that because we have enough food?
And we still have the lines, but they're getting their food, so it's not a story anymore?
Is that why? Does anybody know what happened to the food lines?
Still there? Getting worse?
Getting better? It feels like that's...
Somebody says food lines still in New York City.
But I guess how much of a news it is...
Depends on whether they have enough.
Because you can have a pretty long line and it's not as much of a problem if there's enough food and the line is moving quickly.
That's a different level of tragedy than the people at the end of the line aren't going to get any food.
So it's looking to me like we're meeting the hunger problem, right?
Lester Holt News had it on last night.
Oh, okay. So maybe...
Yeah, it could be that just because it's not new anymore, but I would think that the news would be all over that.
Still here in Ohio.
Somebody says, Mark Cuban claims 96% noncompliance for Texas business distancing.
Have you noticed...
Let me ask this question and tell me in the comments.
Have you all noticed that there's way less compliance this week?
Is it just my imagination?
I think the lack of compliance is starting to come online.
I think most of the beaches were open in California, but I had predicted that if the beaches were still closed in California, or at least in sections like OC, if the beaches were closed on Mother's Day, That would be the end of the beach closings.
Because if you take your mom to the beach on Mother's Day, and the beach is just full of mothers on Mother's Day, especially if their kids are with them, what are the police going to do?
Because if you're looking at the power, let's say two policemen come to the beach.
If there's one mom, well, the police have an advantage.
If you have 15 moms on a beach...
And there are two police. The police are going home.
The police are just going to give up.
If you have 15 moms on Mother's Day, they're not going to get arrested.
They're certainly not going to get arrested.
They're not going to get handcuffed.
If those moms just say, thanks for the help, officer, but we got this.
Appreciate the advice, officer.
We'll take care of this.
That's it. Mothers on Mother's Day are as powerful as a bride on a wedding day.
If you've ever been through a wedding and you've observed the power of the bride on the wedding day, everybody will give the bride whatever they want on the wedding day.
It's just like a superpower.
It's like, that tree is in the way.
Could somebody... Get on a pocket knife and try to get rid of that oak tree.
And suddenly everybody would be like taking out their pocket knives.
It's the bride! It's the bride!
You know, trying to take down the oak tree with their pocket knives.
You know, chewing on it like beavers.
So, yeah. I just thought it would be hilarious if the beaches were closed on Mother's Day.
Because you know the mothers would have made a run for it, right?
I don't know if your state is different, but I can tell you California moms...
They were going to the beach.
A lot of California moms were going to the beach if they had been closed or if they had been open.
And it would have been hilarious because you know how it would have ended.
It would have been funny. All right.
There's snow in Massachusetts, somebody said.
Somebody asked, what's Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley like in the pandemic?