Episode 976 Scott Adams: The COVID-19 Cure, Biden's Raisen-Brain, the "Worse Than Watergate" Guy
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Content:
Are Jennifer Rubin, CNN, MSNBC Russiagaters self-aware?
There's a cure for coronavirus...but only on FOX news
Sorrento Therapeutics discovers STI-1499 antibody
STI-1499 flushes coronavirus within four days
Obamagate...a coup and unmasking, are the walls closing in?
Don't wear masks that reduce infection by 80%?
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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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But until we have those things, and I'm sure that they're near, we can get a head start on it with a little thing I call the simultaneous sip.
Yes, it will boost your immune system.
You think it won't?
Well, you're no doctor.
Okay, some of you are doctors.
But I think you'll back me on this.
The simultaneous sip will boost your immune system, probably protect you from, I don't know, Cancer, coronavirus, strikes from meteors, pretty much everything.
Well, that's why you don't get your medical advice from cartoonists.
But all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass of tank or a chalice or a stein, a canteen, a jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled...
Pleasure. The dopamine hit of the day.
The thing that makes everything better, including the damn pandemic.
It's called the Simultaneous Sip.
And it happens now.
Go. Ah.
Alright, I have a fun game for you to play.
Are you ready? It goes like this.
Find a Biden supporter online.
Challenge them To make the following definitive statement.
I challenge you to say publicly here on Twitter that you believe Joe Biden is mentally competent.
Now you say to yourself, well, that's no problem.
They're just going to say, sure, he's mentally confident.
Right? Not anymore.
Not anymore. I tried this with a guy online.
And I just said that directly because he made some comment about Biden being better than Trump.
I forget what it was. And it was right after I... Oh, it was after I tweeted yet another Biden blowing his sentence clip, which is ironic because I blew my sentence describing Biden losing his mind and blowing his sentence.
It doesn't mean I'm crazy.
Not yet. Not yet.
And so... Somebody on Twitter made the comment that Trump's no better and showed a clip where Trump is mashing some words, which of course we all do.
And so I thought to myself, does he really think that looks the same?
Because you could do a mash-up of anybody who speaks a lot in public getting their words wrong.
Everybody knows you can do that.
But does that look the same as the Joe Biden stuff?
Can you really look at me honestly and say, yeah, it's just the same thing.
Everybody misses a word now and then.
Put them all together, it's going to look pretty bad.
So I just said, can you state directly here on Twitter that you believe that Joe Biden is mentally capable?
What do you think he did?
He might have changed the subject.
Actually, he actually said directly he still prefers Biden.
So without answering the question, do you think he's mentally capable, he actually said he still prefers Biden.
I'm thinking, you know, especially since this was done in public on Twitter, that would have been the ideal time to say, Oh, he's mentally capable.
Duh. I wouldn't be supporting the guy for President of the United States to have his finger on the nuclear button unless I thought he was mentally capable.
I mean, uh, duh.
And we're actually in a situation that is so divorced from anything that's sensible or just makes any sense at all that people are literally and in public Preferring the guy that they can't even say in public that he's mentally capable.
And they want to put him in charge of the nuclear arsenal.
I'm not even making this up.
I'm not making this up.
So you have to try this technique if you run into any perfect situations online.
Let me know how it goes. I think there are three different clips of Biden Just going off the rails just the last 24 hours.
The best one, of course, is when Biden's saying, we've lost 85,000 jobs.
No. No, it's tens of millions of jobs.
It's 85,000 lives.
If you can't tell, then he starts going, and millions and millions of things, and And he's just completely off the tracks.
So I watch it, and I actually don't know.
Did he actually momentarily think that it was 85,000 jobs we'd lost?
It makes you wonder if he actually thought it for a moment, or did he just mash the jobs and the death numbers?
It looked bad, whatever it was.
Then also yesterday, I think Trump is on the way to having one of the best weeks anybody ever had.
Biden also said that he doesn't remember Tara Reade, but he advised that if women believe her, that they probably shouldn't vote for him.
What? What?
It's everything that you shouldn't say all in one sentence.
The first part where he says Biden says he doesn't remember her.
He doesn't remember her?
She worked for him for a while.
She doesn't remember him?
I'm not sure that helps him.
Do you think it helps Joe Biden that he has a memory problem?
Because isn't the first thing you think when he says I don't remember her Do you say to yourself, oh, well, there's so many people who have worked for him over the years.
He meets a lot of people.
Yeah, that seems reasonable.
Just some rando in his office.
He wouldn't remember her. Or does your brain immediately go to, wow, what else has he forgotten?
Right? Because of his age and his brain is in question, the first thing you think is, well, he may have forgotten her.
But he's pretty quick to deny that he didn't have sex with a woman he doesn't know existed.
Because if you can forget she existed, maybe there are other things you could have forgotten, if you know what I mean.
Now, the part that Joe does well, I would say, is that his denial of this does seem unambiguous.
Have you noticed that? If I'm being fair, If we're being fair, his denial is pretty darn good.
I have to say, his accuser is very credible.
Remember, credible doesn't mean true.
It just means that everything about her seems consistent and believable.
So I would say I would put complete credibility on the claim, but at the same time, it could also be true that the denial can be credible.
You could have a credible claim and a credible denial, and they could both be solid gold credibility.
Only one of them could be true, but they could both be credible.
I gotta say, Biden's denial of this, given that he's not the most clever with words, you would expect that if it was a fake denial, in other words, if he had an actual memory of it, and he was just lying, I feel like his words would reveal it.
Because he's just not that good with concealing his thoughts in clever words.
Every time I talk about Biden not being able to talk clearly, it just totally ruins my fluency.
I know that's going to happen again.
It gets in your head.
But anyway, I would rate the quality of Biden's denial...
Really good. Really good.
Only from this perspective.
He says it clearly and confidently, and he doesn't leave any wiggle room when he denies it.
He also says, and this helps his denial, he says that it's on a character.
So even though he says that he doesn't remember it, he's saying, you know, I would certainly remember assaulting somebody in a hallway, basically.
You know, Which seems a fair thing to say, right?
It's like, okay, that's so out of character.
I don't have to remember or not remember.
That's just not me. It would be like if somebody accused me of eating a steak last week, and I say, I don't remember that.
They can't really come back to me and say, all right, well, you said you don't remember, but I remember it, so, you know, there it is.
No, because I don't eat a steak.
So given that I haven't had a steak in 30 years, I don't have to remember if I had a steak last week.
I know I didn't, so I can know it without having a memory.
Biden has a similar situation.
From his telling of it, right?
I'm not saying I'm getting in his head, but from his telling of it, that's a pretty good denial.
It's like, okay, that's like you're describing a person who's a whole different person.
I don't have to remember to know I didn't do that.
I can tell you with confidence I've never sexually molested anybody in the hallway.
Right? I mean, I know that about myself.
Do I have a memory of all the times I've been in the hallway?
Not really. But I know who I am.
And I didn't eat a steak last week.
And I didn't sexually molest anybody in the hallway of the Capitol.
I want to be specific about the hallway there.
Alright, I have this great enduring curiosity about this, and I wonder if you do too.
Are the people who have been lying to us about the Russia collusion thing and now are trying to lie to us that the Obamagay thing is no big deal at all, are they self-aware?
Do you have an opinion on that?
And I'll throw out some names in particular.
Jennifer Rubin, Maggie Haberman and Carl Bernstein, the worse than Watergate guy.
I'll just use them as my three example people.
Do you think there's any self-reflection going on?
And I actually don't know. This is a legitimate question.
I'm not even sure which way I lean on this.
Do you think that in their quiet times they say to themselves, oh my God, I wonder if the country realizes that That we lied to them for three years, misled them deeply, and we're still doing it.
Do you think so?
Because somebody says I've spoken to them.
All three of them? That would be weird.
I'm looking at your comments because I'm actually very interested in seeing your opinion.
Some say they're believers, unaware, mental illness, they're all nuts.
Three horrible people.
That sums it up. Part of the swamp.
They're sick. So look at your opinions.
They're just all over the place. Self-loathing.
Not a chance. Two movies on one screen.
Either way is bad.
No, they don't care.
Yes. Alright, so your answers are all over the place.
So you're about where I am, which is, it's just hard to tell.
But I want to see if you...
If you get this impression, you know, we're all stereotypers and we're all biased.
We try not to be.
So you try not to put your bias on the news, but you can't really help it.
And I'll tell you, if I watch, let's say historically, not talking about the last year or anything, but...
Historically, if I watched a Republican on the news, and let's say the Republican was saying something I didn't like, what was my feeling about that Republican?
Well, usually my feeling was, oh, that's coming from some religious base that I'm not buying into all that or something.
So I would often think, oh, they're starting from some philosophical starting place.
That I don't buy into, so therefore it makes sense that we don't have the same opinion on a few things.
So when I see a Republican, I'm just, okay, they've got this philosophy or religion or something, and it's incompatible with this.
All right, I get that. But when I see a lot of the Democrats, let's say the anti-Trumpers in particular.
I'm not going to say Democrat. I'll say anti-Trumpers.
When I see the anti-Trumpers, such as Carl Bernstein and Haberman and Jennifer Rubin and some of the hosts on CNN such as Don Lemon.
What is your just impression of those people?
Is your impression that they're coming at it with a different philosophy and that's why your opinion doesn't match?
Is your opinion that they're coming at it As basically criminals who are just making stuff up to make money and they know it's not true.
I mean, it wouldn't be illegal, but sort of a fraudulent intent.
Does it register that way with you?
Or do you register it as mental illness?
So I'm going to give you my opinion, which is that it registers as mental illness.
Which is different from saying it's mental illness.
So I'm not going to give you a diagnosis.
I'm not a doctor.
Even though my medical opinion has so far been better than the experts on the coronavirus, but that's probably just a coincidence.
We're not going to say that that's a trend that should continue.
But when I look at a lot of the anti-Trump critics, the way it registers to me, and I'm going to be careful with my language, right?
I'm not saying that they have mental problems.
That would be totally irresponsible.
I'm not going to say it.
I'm going to say it feels like it.
So I can only talk about myself.
So this is just a comment about my self.
When I watch the anti-Trumpers on TV, not all of them, some of them are perfectly reasonable people, but there's a class of them, the really hardcores, that read to me like mental illness.
Now, you were aware from your own life that And by the way, when I say mental illness, I don't mean there's necessarily something organically wrong with them, but rather that they're troubled by whatever the situation is.
So let's just say troubled in a way that would be a mental distress of some sort.
It doesn't necessarily have to have a name on it.
I'm not saying it's bipolar or something that has a name.
That's my take.
I wonder if anybody else has that.
Answer this question.
Do you receive them, just your human sensors?
Do you read them as mentally having a problem, or as just lying?
Or maybe they're right, you're wrong.
Who knows? Alright, just looking at your comments as they come in, they're a little out of time.
Alright. And is it a coincidence that Carl Bernstein hasn't been on television?
I suppose he's hiding in his basement and may not have all the technology he needs.
But has Carl Bernstein been on CNN since Obamagate became Obamagate?
Have we seen him since then?
Because I have to wonder if they feel comfortable putting him on.
Wouldn't you love to know what the conversation is at CNN privately?
Wouldn't you love to know what the producers at CNN and the on-air talent are talking to themselves about right now?
Right? Wouldn't you love that?
Because I feel like I know what Fox News is saying, you know, the producers and stuff, because I feel like what they're saying ends up on the page.
Don't you feel like you know exactly what the producers and on-air people at Fox News think?
Because I think they just put it on the air.
You see it. But are the CNN people putting on the air what they think?
Because it doesn't look like it.
Maybe it is. It doesn't look like they're trying to put on the air the things they actually internally think to be the truth.
It feels like They must be in some kind of weird world.
Here's the fun part.
It's a big organization.
There must be people in CNN who are on both sides, internally.
There must be people who say, okay, okay, we just have to say we were wrong about this for three years.
I mean, this is embarrassing.
We should just admit we were wrong for three years.
And then there's probably some other producer saying, we don't have to do that.
We don't have to do that. Because the Republicans don't watch this station.
The only people who watch it are the ones who are going to believe anything we tell them.
We'll just tell them we weren't wrong.
We'll just say that didn't happen.
We weren't wrong. It'll be fine.
Watch this. And then they just act like it didn't happen.
And it's fine.
It totally works.
They can literally create any reality they want so long as they know their people are walled off from the rest of the competing opinions.
And they are.
All right.
Who is it?
Jennifer Rubin, who's still saying the walls are closing in on Trump's lawless presidency.
And I guess there's clips of her saying the walls are closing in all through the Russia collusion stuff.
I mean, it's so absurd now in an entertaining way that I can't do anything but laugh at it.
If you're not watching CNN just for the jokes, well, you're missing a good show.
Well, I buried the lead.
Buried the lead, as they say.
Here's the biggest story of the day, if you haven't heard it.
Maybe you've already heard this.
Maybe this is the first news you're getting.
So, there's a cure for coronavirus.
Just let that sit there for a minute.
Oh, I should say more about that, yes.
There's a cure for coronavirus.
Maybe. Maybe.
But it's only a cure on Fox News.
If you go to CNN, there's no story about this.
So what did I tell you when there are two networks and one has a story that says this is totally true and the other one Not so much.
Well, it means you shouldn't believe it yet.
I'd let this one age a little bit because it's brand new news.
I think it's news from probably yesterday afternoon.
But it's a California-based biopharmaceutical company called Sorrento.
California. Representant.
You know, if you want some smart people, come to California.
We got a lot of problems in California.
We got your Your hypodermic needles on the streets.
We got your taxes.
We got your immigration problems.
We got your homelessness. We got lots, lots of problems in California.
But the other thing we have, we got some smart people here.
We got some smart, smart, smart people in California.
And some of them are at this company, Sorrento, and they have made the following claim.
So Sorrento Therapeutics will announce their discovery, I guess today, Of the STI 1499 antibody, which is a good one.
I don't know, if you're keeping track of your antibodies, this is the good one.
The STI 1499, oh yeah, that's a good antibody right there.
So I guess it's a company that had millions of antibodies sort of in their library for just this sort of reason.
So that they could run their tests against, I don't know if it's computer simulation or actual tests, but they were probably computer simulation, just guessing.
But they ran their tests against all their existing catalog of millions of antibodies, and they found this one that's sort of a superstar.
And what it does is it wraps around the coronavirus.
It just puts a wrapper around it, and it can't infect you.
And it just gets passed from your body.
Do you believe it? Yeah, San Diego company.
But here's the thing that just caught me by surprise.
If you're a legitimate traded company, you've got to keep some credibility, right?
What would be worse than making a claim that you knew was just BS? And then, you know, three weeks later, everybody knows you lied, you're a public company.
What's that going to do to your stock price?
Remember, this is a billion-dollar company.
So, you know, it's a serious company, billion-dollar company.
At least that's what somebody offered to buy them several months ago.
A billion dollars. And this is the exact quote from the company.
We want to emphasize there is a cure.
Not a therapeutic.
Not a vaccine.
When have you ever heard a legitimate American biotech company Say, in direct language, we want to emphasize there is a cure.
There is a solution that works 100%, Dr.
Henry G., founder and CEO of Sorrento Therapeutics, told Fox News.
If you have the neutralizing antibody in your body, you don't need the social distancing.
You can open up a society without fear.
They found there was one particular antibody, blah, blah.
Now, if this guy's lying, well, he could be wrong and not lying, right?
He could be maybe just optimistic.
But how unusual is it for a CEO to make a claim of 100%?
Cure. He used the word cure, and he said 100%.
Have you ever seen that?
Ever. Now this guy is either so far out on a branch that he's just a nut.
Because even if you were 99% sure, you wouldn't say 100.
You just wouldn't.
I mean, nobody responsible would say 100%.
Unless, unless they actually believe it.
Nobody responsible, and we don't know if he's responsible, right?
We don't know this guy. He could be like the biggest bad guy in the world.
We don't know. So if he was the biggest bad guy in the world, yeah, he could make a crazy claim.
Apparently some big companies have made crazy claims already and gotten in trouble.
So it wouldn't even be the first pharmaceutical biotech company during coronavirus To make a claim that wasn't true.
So it wouldn't be the first time.
So if you're evaluating this, you'd have to say, why is it only news on Fox News?
That's your first red flag.
Why isn't there more widespread coverage of this?
Is it just because CNN doesn't want to give you any good news about coronavirus?
I hope not. I doubt that would be the case.
Is it because the claim is so ridiculous, meaning ridiculously optimistic, that CNN just said, I don't know about this.
It could be they're just better at news.
I hate to say it.
But you can't rule out the fact that Fox News bit on something and the CNN reporters are saying, that's a big claim.
You know, I'm not going to write that.
If you had not used the word cure, fine, we'll write a story about it.
If you had not said 100%, okay, fine, we'll write a story.
It's promising. We do that all the time.
But it could be that these claims are so absurd, maybe true, but they're absurd-sounding in our brains at the moment, that the other news organizations just went, uh, I don't even know if we can...
I don't even know if we can report that.
Yeah, so it might be just a time lag.
Maybe it takes a little while before they report on it.
But I'm going to tell you this is highly, highly unusual for anybody at that level to make that kind of claim.
It's either career suicide, right?
Because this founder...
He's got a billion dollar company, so basically he's a super rich guy unless he messes up.
And he didn't need to do this.
Remember, this is a company already successful and a founder who's probably already worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
He doesn't need anything.
There's nothing he needs.
Would he get in front of the world, risk his entire company, his entire fortune, on a lie this way?
This ridiculous? Now, of course, there's also the possibility he's not lying, but he's also not right.
Yeah, I mean, that's the obvious possibility.
But full disclosure, don't take any advice from me on financial stuff.
You really shouldn't. I've had a number of situations where I've been right Guessing on some financial stuff, but probably as many when I'm wrong.
So, you know, I feel like I get the politics right more often than not, but don't take my advice on finances.
Really don't. Except for general concepts like diversification.
But just full disclosure, I bought their stock this morning.
Stock in Sorrento.
Now, you should not buy stock in Sorrento if you think it's an investment.
It's not anything like an investment.
It's just something that dumb people like me will do because...
I guess I just wanted to bet on optimism.
If you told me, was that a smart thing to do?
No. No.
It is not smart, not even close to smart, to put your actual hard-earned money on a news story about one company making a claim in a context where lots of companies are making claims and most of them are not true.
But I just found myself wanting to bet on optimism today.
Sometimes you just want to bet on optimism.
The stock has already gone up so much before I bought it that I can't even imagine it will be a good idea.
You should be hearing me in a week saying I wish I hadn't done that.
That's what I would expect.
But I just want to bet on optimism today.
I want to go into the weekend field that way.
All right. So here's the fun part.
When these various states are being reviewed for how they're doing with their reopenings, the early indications seem to be there's not any problem with the early opening places.
There doesn't seem to be a big change yet, but it's too early, and there are lots of other factors, such as summer.
Maybe the reason that the southern states that are opening up earlier are getting a good result is because it's warm.
What if it's just warm?
So we will never know why something worked and why it didn't, but we will all be sure we did.
Everybody whose bias is that we should open up quickly will look at the states that opened up quickly, and they're going to say, well, it's right in front of you.
Look, they opened up quickly.
It went fine compared to the other states.
No better, no worse.
So therefore, we were right all along when we said you should open up early.
That's what people will say.
There will be no reasonable basis for that opinion.
Because we won't know, probably never, we won't know what worked.
We'll never know.
When this is all done, for the rest of time, smart people will say, okay, You got it wrong.
The real reason it didn't go wrong in Florida, let's say it doesn't.
The real reason was the weather turned.
The real reason was they dealt with things differently.
The real reason was that people social distanced on their own.
The real reason was, you know, it's going to be like that.
The real reason was people stopped shaking hands.
You'll never know why something worked or even if it worked.
I don't think we'll ever be able to tease it out of the data, but man, people are going to be sure.
People are going to be sure they see stuff in that data that they don't see.
And so I just said on Twitter this morning, you know, it's called the anecdotal data, and somebody said to me, Scott, Scott, Scott, Florida, you know, they closed late, they opened up early, they don't have any problems.
Is that anecdotal?
Is it anecdotal, Scott, that Florida not only closed late, but they opened early, meaning that they were open more than other states, and they still have acceptable death rate?
Is that just anecdotal, Scott?
To which I say, yeah, that's what it means.
That's like literally the definition of anecdotal.
That's exactly anecdotal.
That lacks a rigorous scientific analysis.
That's anecdotal.
And still, the fascinating two-movie situation with this Obamagate unmasking.
This is a really interesting one.
So, on CNN, the Obamagate thing is nothing but gaslighting and conspiracy theory, and there's nothing to it.
On Fox News...
It's bigger than Watergate, and it's this giant conspiracy to spy on a political campaign using the organs of government.
The worst thing ever. Which one's true?
Can't both be true.
Well, I'm going to be on the side of saying that the walls are closing in.
Doesn't it feel like that?
It feels like the walls are closing in on the Obama administration bad people who did whatever they did with FISA and spying on Flint.
But, at the same time, I'm going to say, those walls have not completely closed in.
So if you think that you see the direct evidence of the crime, It's not there yet.
It's not there yet.
Do I expect that we'll ever see it?
I don't know. Because sometimes you never see, there might not be any indication of what people were thinking, which is really the entire accusation.
The accusation is what were they thinking?
Because if we found out, you know, if we found the documents to say why they wanted to unmask and why 39 people needed it, what if there's a good reason on there?
Could be, right?
39 people had to fill out legal paperwork That could be discovered to say why they needed to know that Flynn was the other person on the transcript.
They must have written down reasons.
How bad are those reasons?
Do they just leave those boxes blank?
Or do you think they said something like, in the context of my work, I need to know where we are vis-a-vis Russia?
That's it. That's all they have to say.
Anyone who unmasked, whether they're a diplomat or Obama's chief of staff, who you automatically think, what do they have to do with any of this?
But since the issue was the very nature of the relationship between the United States and Russia, basically everybody in the government who had some kind of an official role had a reason to know that.
I don't know how common it is that they would unmask to get a little bit of data about something.
That stuff we'll learn.
So it does seem to me highly, highly unusual based on what we know.
So again, if you're asking my opinion, it sure looks guilty.
It sure looks like a coup.
But I don't have the direct evidence yet.
And I'm going to hold off for it.
You don't need to. A new study suggests that COVID-19 cases could be cut as much as 80% if people wore masks.
What? 80%?
First of all, do you believe that?
Do you believe that if everybody wore masks, and I'm assuming that the hypothetical here is that you'd wear them as soon as you woke up, right?
You know, just everywhere.
Do you think it would cut coronavirus spread by...
80%? Because I'll bet that's not far off.
Yeah, I don't know if it's 80% or 60% or 50%, but it does feel to me, if the people who were infected were wearing them, why wouldn't it reduce it?
I mean, it just feels like you should.
So how far we've gone from masks don't work...
Imagine you were the Surgeon General, And you wake up in the morning and you're the guy who's famous for saying in public, don't get a mask, masks don't work.
And then you wake up, and it's still the crisis.
You're still in the middle of it.
People are dying by the thousands.
And you say, yeah, actually, if you had not told people that, it might have cut the spread down by 80%.
What? What?
I'm the Surgeon General, and I gave people advice.
The wrong advice, and if I'd given them the right advice, it would have reduced infections by 80%.
Well, it wouldn't have, because we didn't have enough supply.
But in theory, this is some of the worst medical advice of all time.
If you had to guess what was the worst medical advice of all time, well, probably back when they said smoking was good for you, that was probably the worst medical advice of all time.
But I would say second place, Would be that masks don't help you in an infection.
Really, that had to be the second worst advice.
Alright. I keep seeing more and more things that vitamin D is going to be important.
I got my vitamin D supplements.
So I was holding off.
I was just using the sun and everything.
I still just ground the sun.
But... I didn't know if I wanted to also supplement, but I thought that the risk-reward of that was good.
So I'm going to do maybe 1,000, 2,000 units a day.
So that would be way under a level that I would have to worry about having too much of it, but it would be probably protective in a general way.
Not necessarily a coronavirus way, but in a general way.
Vitamin D apparently is good for you.
Mitch McConnell conceded Thursday that he was wrong to claim that Obama had left no kind of coronavirus plan behind.
Apparently there was a detailed Obama administration plan for how to deal with a coronavirus breakout.
But what we don't know is would that plan have helped us have enough PPE? No.
Would that plan have told us what to do about closing the airport?
Doubt it. Did that plan have anything in it about risk management if you thought hydroxychloroquine worked but it wasn't proven?
No. So I don't know what was in that detailed plan.
I think it was mostly about which organizations talked to who and who was in charge.
I think it was more of a framework for how the government organizes, if I'm right.
But did you hear any problems on that regard?
We've heard tons of problems of, you know, hey, where's our ventilators?
Where's our PPE? You know, tons of problems about outcomes.
But have we heard one complaint?
And I'm not saying it didn't happen.
I'm just saying it's weird that we haven't heard about it.
Have we heard one complaint that the real problem was that the government didn't get self-organized efficiently?
Or that they didn't know who to talk to, didn't know who was in charge?
You know, I'm sure on the ground there was plenty of that complaining, because there always is.
Hey, who's in charge? Who's doing this?
But in terms of, you know, you're the country and you're looking at your government, how'd they do?
Was there anything in the Obama coronavirus plan that made any difference?
Because don't you think everybody knew what the CDC's role was?
Probably. Don't you think everybody knew the president was in charge?
I think so. Don't you think that all of the different organizations that knew immediately, uh-oh, I have a role in this?
Don't you think that as soon as they read the news and said, oh, I'm a virus department, or I'm a medical this, or I'm FEMA, or whatever, don't you think every one of those organizations said immediately, oh, this is where I jump in, and the way I connect to the process is the way I always connect?
So I'll call the CDC, make sure they know who our main contact is.
I'll hit the president's office, make sure he knows we're up and running.
I've got a feeling that the Obama plan that said how you organize for the pandemic probably just happened spontaneously, because every organization already knows who they are.
If you know your organization has a certain role, and the time comes for that role to come into play, probably there wasn't that much of a problem figuring out who does what.
You know, just sort of normal business stuff.
Just my guess. According to Scott Gottlieb, MD, who is a great follow, by the way, on Twitter, he says the national data is showing that the number of coronavirus deaths is plateauing or going down a little bit.
But I don't know. Do we still have some kind of a time lag problem?
I'm not sure I'm going to believe anything yet.
And so what is CNN talking about today?
They've got this whistleblower, Rick Bright.
So he's the ousted director of, I guess it was a vaccine agency in California.
And he's complaining now, among other things, that the N95 masks that we bought were not effective.
Now, here's the thing.
You know, I like me a good whistleblower.
You know, whistleblowers are important.
I like a good whistleblower now and then.
But if your whistleblower is complaining that the masks we bought from Asia were not effective, I just don't know that that's on us.
Is that on the government that products they bought were poorly made?
I mean, obviously we wish they had known to check or they'd done some testing or something, but it seems to me that in an emergency situation everybody just bought everything that they could buy because the alternative was worse.
Wouldn't it be Way better to have a mask that was half effective than not being able to get a mask.
So I think everybody did what they could do, which is just buy every freaking thing you can get and live with the consequences, which was, unfortunately, the best risk management thing they could have done.
But CNN's turning it into a whistleblower story about how, I don't know, they did a bad job at buying masks.
Also, according to CNN, the hydroxychloroquine story is dead.
It's a done deal, it doesn't work.
Were you aware of that?
Were you aware that in the other movie, it's already a fact that hydroxychloroquine doesn't work and might just be bad for you?
Did you know that? Because that's not the story on Fox News.
I mean, I don't know if Fox News has talked about it recently.
But CNN's evidence is two studies, one that said it had no harm and no benefit, and another one that said it had no benefit, but it did have harm.
In terms of strokes or something.
But given that we know that this drug has been around forever, that's not really credible?
That suddenly this is the only case that those drugs cause problems?
Oh yeah, the one and only time that these drugs that have been around forever, the one time they cause problems is this time.
Maybe, but the other study didn't show anything like that.
So, you know where I had been.
I had been at a 40% chance that hydroxychloroquine would make some kind of a big difference.
You know, I'd started down higher, but I lowered it.
And the reason was that I hadn't heard good things about it.
But isn't it still true that doctors are using it?
Let me ask you this.
So you've got CNN saying, yeah, the studies are in, it's useless.
Isn't it also true that the doctors are still prescribing it?
So why would the doctors, whose job it is to prescribe it, still doing it in a widespread fashion when CNN says, oh yeah, studies are in, it's over.
What's wrong?
What's going on here?
Hey! Now it could be That my information is behind the times.
It could be that, let's say a week ago, doctors all over the country just stopped using hydroxychloroquine.
Maybe they saw the news too.
Maybe they read CNN and said, oh, darn.
You know, it was promising, but I guess there's no reason to try it now.
I don't know. Where's the reporting on that?
That's a pretty big story. Are doctors still prescribing it?
All right. Let's see, what else we got here?
A user on LinkedIn sent me a long description about the monetary situation.
You know, I was asking, can we just print money?
Can we just print money?
Because I thought to myself, there's something about this unique crisis situation that we've never seen before that might be the one and only time That you could just print money.
And any other time it would cause, you know, you'd have inflation, or if you borrowed you'd cause debt, etc.
But I was thinking, I don't know, there's something about this.
Everything seems to have lined up where we can just print money.
And haven't you been waiting for somebody to tell you you can't do that?
Right? Aren't you waiting for an expert to come on TV and say, um, you could print a little bit of money.
I mean... Maybe you could print half a trillion and you could live with that.
But you can't just print four or five trillion dollars.
You can't just print the entire GDP of your country and just hand it out and say, hey, here's some money, spend it.
There has to be some kind of cost down the road.
Have you seen one economic expert say that there would be?
Where is that? Don't we usually have two sides to everything?
Where's the other side that says, I've got to tell you, whatever it's going to end up, I'm guessing five trillion, but fact check me on that.
Wherever it ends up, where's the person going on TV, an expert, an economist, who says, look, look, look, you're all dreaming.
If you print five trillion dollars, even under these unique situations, You're dead.
There's no way you can recover from that.
You've just ruined your economy.
Where's that guy? Or woman?
Where's that person? Right?
It's conspicuously missing.
How could everybody be on the same side that we can print five trillion dollars?
What in this universe am I missing that is so big that I don't understand why we can not just invent five trillion dollars?
So I wanted to read to you, if you don't mind, can I read to you a little bit of a lengthy explanation of this?
Because I'm not sure I understand it all, but maybe some of you will.
This is from Paul Vallejo, and he gave it to me on LinkedIn.
I don't think he'd mind.
If I read it.
So on the question of money printing.
Point one. In normal circumstances, printing money creates bank reserves.
So some of you are already lost, but just stick with me.
This would throw the Fed Fund's interest rate off target, so normally you can't do that.
So the first point is, in a normal situation, you couldn't just print money.
So that's what I've been saying. He goes, however, now that interest rates are at zero, and they might even be negative pretty soon, this does not matter.
The Fed could print and not alter the Fed funds rate.
And again, most of you are not going to be able to follow that.
If the Treasury does not issue bonds to mop up those reserves, the supply of bank reserves lowers the Fed funds rate.
And again, the only thing I want you to get into the technical part is that this is somebody who knows what they're talking about.
Now, I can't fact check it.
Because I don't know enough of the context to know if any of this is wrong, but it sounds like he knows what he's talking about.
He's looked into it. The buying and selling of bonds modulates the Fed funds rates to be on target.
Point two, neither China nor any other country has to buy our printed money.
So it's not a debt obligation.
We're not borrowing money from China, which you'll see on TV. People say we are, but that's not what this is.
First, because it does not have to be issued in bonds.
Second, even if it was insisted that it be issued in bonds, the Fed could buy them.
So I guess the Fed can buy her own debt.
And he goes, the Bank of Japan owns most of the Japanese government bonds.
So your government can issue a debt and then just buy it.
So it could just basically be its own debt, I guess.
And the U.S. banking system could do it with regulators' agreement.
All right, so I guess you need some regulator agreement to do that.
Sounds doable. So he says, normally printing money creates inflation, because it creates demand without supply.
This is an exception, which is what I've been saying.
We're in an exceptional period.
The exception is due to debt inflation.
Here we have to get into the paradox of thrift, so it starts getting more complicated, blah, blah.
Second brief, banks create money when they lend.
Okay, there's more.
I'll stick out of it.
I'll get out of the lower detail.
But the point of it all is that this is someone who does seem to understand all of the mechanisms of the system and is agreeing with the one point which is there might be something about this specific situation.
It might be the one time you can print five trillion dollars.
Isn't that weird? Now, who saw that coming?
Could anyone see coming That we could just print money.
Surprise me! Alright.
And that is mostly what I wanted to talk about.
I'd like to just update on yesterday I mentioned that the locals platform that I'm moving some of my other content to, extra content.
This will still keep going on as always, the Periscopes.
But I'll be putting some extra stuff, including these, on locals.
But I sent so much traffic there, I crashed their server.
So if you tried to go there yesterday and it didn't load, that was my fault.
I sent a few hundred thousand people there all at once, and it crashed it for a few minutes.
So just give it a, you know, if you try it again today, it's probably fine, I'm sure.
Yeah, and the only people I see weighing in on the question of printing money are people saying, yeah, you can.
You absolutely can print money right now.
All right. Snickers update.
She is resting comfortably.
My dog. Yeah, she's on pain pills, and the pain pills are masking the pain well enough that she doesn't seem to be in discomfort.
So she seems happy.
The hard part is keeping her non-active, which is not easy.
Alright, and thank you for subscribing today.
Alright, let's all watch this Sorrento story.
Watch it for two things.
One, to see if it gets reported on CNN or anyplace else.
Because if it's on Fox News and then you never see it anywhere else, well, judge the credibility based on that.
Alright. Thanks so much for those of you who did go to Locals, and I will talk to you tonight.
