My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Content:
Howard Kurtz notes polls never move, regardless of events
Frank Bruni (NYT) doesn't care if Biden is mentally declining
Did Oliver Darcy admit CNN mandates uniform host opinions?
Phil Kerpen notes that it's still mostly the elderly at risk and dying
Is Stacy Abrams a Mike Bloomberg cutout to run America?
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You and I get to enjoy this sacred time in the morning.
And when I say sacred, oh, I mean sacred.
Yes, I do. Because we get to enjoy the simultaneous sip.
I almost feel sorry for the people who aren't here.
They do not get to enjoy the simultaneous sip.
And it's so sad because there's so little that they need in order to enjoy it.
How much do they need?
Well, all they need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or a chalice or a stein, a canteen 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! Is it my imagination or are my zinc levels rising right now?
Feels like it. So here's a little insight.
So we've been talking about hydroxychloroquine and the president taking it.
And I've mentioned a number of times that the studies that show it being used without zinc, maybe the azithromycin matters too.
But if you test it without the zinc, you're testing it without the active part.
So of course that doesn't work.
But I'm starting to see some indications, unreliably, I'll put that unreliably part in front, and I'll put it on the back as well, unreliably, that it might be the zinc that's the only part that matters.
So it might be the hydroxychloroquine was always just a fake-out, and it was only the fact that it was paired with the zinc.
It might be just the zinc.
So I'm seeing some people talking about that online.
But again, I will bookend this with unreliable.
Unreliable. Everything you hear about therapeutics, vaccines, vitamins, minerals, just assume every bit of it is unreliable.
Because it is. None of it is reliable.
But keep an eye on zinc.
I'm going to say that that has caught my attention.
All right.
This Joe Rogan move to Spotify.
I I'm trying to decide how big a deal this is.
Now obviously it's a real big deal for him.
I'm delighted that he made that work.
Joe Rogan, I often talk about as one of my examples of a talent stack done right.
If you were to look at each of Joe Rogan's individual skills, you would say to yourself, oh, that one's really good.
That one's pretty great.
That one's good. That one's great.
But you wouldn't find that one specific thing that he does better than all the people in the world.
What you'd find instead is about 25 things He does better than just about everybody.
If you could do 25 things better than just about everybody, you get to be Joe Rogan and probably have a $100 billion payday.
So when I say he does 25 things well, I'm talking about everything from And to be honest, you have to manage your look if you're on a video thing.
He does that well. He's got a great look that works for what he does.
He's got a whole bunch of skills he can talk about.
He's funny. He's good on video.
He does stand-up.
He knows how to work in an interview, obviously knows how to deal with people, knows about a whole bunch of topics.
I mean, I don't know how many skills he put together, but it's probably something like 25 different sub-skills that he stacked together just over time.
You can just see him building up the power level over time.
But here's what really impresses me about it, aside from the fact that he strategically managed his career better than I don't know, better than everybody?
You know, has anybody ever done it better than that?
Because, you know, if you look at other stuff like, you know, Facebook or, you know, somebody starts a social media platform, quite often there's a big piece of luck involved.
Or, you know, somebody was going to make a Facebook and, you know, Zuckerberg was there.
But if you look at Joe Rogan's career, I mean, he just carved that out of a rock.
That just wasn't there.
It wasn't going to happen on its own.
I think social media platforms probably were going to happen.
Somebody was going to make one, and one of them would be the better ones.
But the Joe Rogan experience, that just didn't have to happen.
He just carved that out of nothing.
So that's just more impressive to me.
So here's the interesting part that I'm tracking.
I have a theory that one of the biggest forces affecting civilization is known but underappreciated.
And that is that our attention spans are shrinking.
And our attention spans are shrinking for the obvious reasons, right?
Our digital devices give us little quick hits of dopamine to the point where I actually timed, and I told you this before, I timed how long it takes me To turn on my regular legacy television and wait for the prompts to come on and work through them and find a show.
It takes about 18 seconds, which I find unbearable.
18 seconds of just looking for something to do while you're sitting there is way longer than I'm willing to wait.
Because in 18 seconds I could have 5 to 10 dopamine hits from Twitter.
Or I could go to locals and get five dopamine hits in 18 seconds.
So I would say that normal legacy stuff is no longer competitive because our attention spans have shrunk below the baseline that they can get.
My regular television on a regular TV in my living room just isn't that fast.
I don't know how they're going to make that fast enough.
But I would say more generally the advertising model is going to But the problem is that I think advertisers are going to notice it didn't make much difference, that they're not getting as much benefit from advertising as they hoped, except for the kind of advertisement where you're finding out about something existing, which always works.
If you don't know something exists, you're not going to buy it.
But among the generic stuff, advertising doesn't seem to make much difference.
So there's that. But I think the attention span part is the other.
So I think things are going to move towards subscription services.
And then here's the big prediction.
Digital warlords.
So I'm going to make up that term and see if it sticks.
Digital warlords.
So a digital warlord would be not somebody who's interested in war.
I'm just using it as a colorful term.
But rather somebody who has a community.
That is defined usually by a subscription.
So now Joe Rogan is going from an advertising model on wherever he is, to Spotify, and I don't know exactly how that's going to be handled.
I guess if you're a member, or maybe if you're not, you can watch it there.
But whatever the deal is, I think he's just being paid directly by Spotify.
So he'll be leaving, I think, I think he's leaving the advertising model behind.
I too... By going to locals, I have a subscription model that I'm pursuing.
And what happens in both cases is that you end up walling off the people who care from the people who are just trolls, which is a gigantic breakthrough.
If you're a creator, having any kind of environment where the people who want to be there are there, and the people who are just trolls aren't there, it's sort of like heaven.
So I would not be surprised to see more sort of digital tribes, if you will, tribes of preference.
People say, yeah, I'd like to be behind that paywall, pay a few bucks a month and be part of that thing.
So I've got a feeling that depending on who the personalities are and what the purpose of forming these little digital warlord things They don't have any power, they're just maybe influence.
It could be a big deal.
Imagine if you would, somebody putting together a subscription base that had a million people in it.
If you had a million subscribers to your online whatever, your content, you would have a lot of influence over stuff.
Because you could make anything viral.
All you'd have to do is say, Here's my tweet, and your million subscribers would say, I'll retweet that.
I like this person.
So, kind of look for that.
That's my prediction, that you'll see communities slash tribes behind subscription services where there's entire power bases built up.
How much does that matter?
Well, let me give you two examples.
Today in the news we find out that the president has signed an executive order to look into the regulations that got temporarily cancelled for the coronavirus to see how many of them should stay cancelled.
Now one of the ones on the list is allowing telemedicine across state lines.
Now if you've been with me since the beginning of the crisis, you know that that came from this.
So the idea to drop that restriction of telemedicine across state lines happened because I happened to be aware of that issue, because my own startup, OneHub, we dealt with that, so I just happened to be aware of it as a big deal.
So because of you, The audience.
You allowed me to have a higher visibility.
So my visibility in the world is completely dependent on how many of you there are.
Because you're the ones making this a thing.
You're the ones who retweet me.
You're the ones who basically give it all the energy.
Because you gave it energy, that allowed me to have a channel, if you will, Through Jonah Shumate, who was helping me connect the good ideas that were coming through me.
I wasn't coming up with them all, but a lot of people were suggesting things to me.
And then Jonah, who had watched his Periscope, and he's working in the office of Representative Crawford, And so he was helping me get the good ideas to the people who were asking for good ideas.
And in the beginning of a crisis, the people in charge are really looking for ideas.
Like, okay, do you have an idea?
Anybody? So it was a perfect time for good ideas to get to the right place.
And the telemedicine idea came from this experience, you know, through Jonah.
Send it up to Mark Meadows.
Mark Meadows said, good idea, it's on the list.
And next thing you know, telemedicine is legal across state lines.
Boom. How big a deal is that?
Might be a gigantic deal.
I mean, that's the sort of deal that could change the entire cost structure of healthcare.
That's how big a deal it is.
And I'm not sure it would have happened without the crisis and without, you know, Without noticing that there was this little crease of opportunity, I aimed for the crease because I thought, okay, you can see that there's this little crack in reality where if I can get through it, This telemedicine thing might be sticky, might be able to make this change.
Otherwise, regulations and the AMA, I don't know who else would be involved with it, but obviously it wasn't going to happen on its own.
So, somebody said New York is not allowing telemedicine.
Nothing's easy, is it?
Alright, so here's another example.
Mark Schneider was pointing out Recently, and I noticed as well that Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter, tweeted out an article about the Department of Energy, started a new Office of Nuclear Energy Project.
So the government is basically putting in $230 million to boost Generation 4, the so-called new generation of nuclear development, That will be resistant, pretty much impossible to melt down, at least melt down in the normal way that you think about it.
So they'll be designed that if they fail, they just stop working, which is the big problem with current nuclear designs.
If they fail, they can release radiation and be bad for the neighborhood.
But the new designs would be designed that if they stop working, they just stop working, which is a good thing.
And they could be designed to be modular and smaller and have a whole bunch of, you know, cost and safety benefits that would be way beyond anything that we're looking at in the current generations, which are actually also pretty safe.
Generation 3, I think, has had zero problems, and that's the current generation.
Anyway, here's the story about this.
So Mark is speculating, and I think this is reasonable, That maybe Jack's exposure to Generation 4 and the fact that he would retweet that article probably, I don't know, probably is too strong.
But he may have heard it from here, because I know Jack watches this sometimes.
So if you're watching Jack, hi.
Now, what's interesting about this is that not only is, of course, anything that Jack tweets is going to make news, because...
Because it's Jack. But he would be associated more with, you would imagine, in your own biased thinking, you would imagine that Jack would be associated with the political left.
Now, I would say that's probably not...
I hate to categorize anybody else's opinion, so I want to be really careful the way I say it.
I would say that Trying to pigeonhole Jack into a category would be a mistake.
And that he is in the category of free thinkers, who I believe would just follow the data.
So if the data skews left, I think he'd go there.
If the data happens to be compatible with something on the right, but the data's the data, I think he'd go there.
Now, you can't say that about a lot of people.
I would say that about...
Joe Rogan. Just to throw him back in the conversation.
I believe Joe Rogan is neither left nor right, but would look at an argument and would judge it and go where the argument takes him.
I don't think there are a lot of people in the world who do that, try to do that, or even can do that.
Naval Ravikant would be another example.
I would always trust Naval to look at the whole field, look at the data, and then make a decision that, you know, Common sense and reason and wisdom and data take it to.
I would never expect any of the guys I just mentioned to just go left or right because that's where the team is.
They just don't do that. Cernovich is another one.
Can you imagine Cernovich just taking a team side?
No. It's just not part of his makeup.
He's going to follow the information, have his own opinion.
So I would say that Jack's in that category of a fairly small group of people that you could depend on To just look at the argument.
Matt Taibbi, that's another good example.
Matt Taibbi you could depend on to just look at the whole field.
So what's the big deal about this is that I've been trying to educate people watching this Periscope about Generation 4.
Most of that comes from Mark Schneider's work, and maybe it made a difference.
So maybe this is another example.
We don't know. I mean, Jack reads lots of stuff, so he may have known about this from other sources and just thought it was interesting.
But there's a good chance that what we're doing here to educate all of you is having an effect.
It's illegitimate to trace any one thing back to one source, because it's a big world with lots of variables.
But I like to think that we were productive, at the very least.
Productive in getting the Generation 4 message out.
So thanks to Mark Schneider.
Changing the world. I like the old saying, you know, the pessimist says, well, one person can't change the world.
What can I do? Just one person.
I can't change the world.
And then the smarter person says, the only way the world has ever been changed is by one person.
It's always that way.
One person always changes the world.
Because it starts somewhere.
Things don't start with a thousand people.
They always start with one.
So, if you want to be the pessimist, you can say that one person can't change the world.
If you want to be the optimist, I just gave you two examples where it happened.
Maybe. Alright.
Here's my favorite story of the day.
This is from a tweet from Trump.
I think this is today or yesterday.
Roger Stone has been treated very unfairly.
So it's not the first part of the tweet that's funny.
It's way for the end part.
The first part's just the setup.
Roger Stone has been treated very unfairly.
How about that jury forewoman?
Does anybody think that was fair?
Disgraceful. Stay tuned for Fox News and guys.
And then he says...
Guys like low-rating psycho Joe Scarborough are allowed to walk the streets?
Open the cold case!
The cold case!
So if you don't know what that story is about, Joe Scarborough and the alleged cold case, Jake Taffer tweeted the president's tweet and gave you some context.
So Jake says, yet again, the president uses the death of Now,
I won't weigh in on the opinion If this is cruel exploitation or indecent, because we're in the political season and it's hard to think of anything that isn't.
Is there anything in this whole political race that isn't indecent and cruel?
I mean, Pelosi just called Trump morbidly obese yesterday, which surprisingly, I saw a write-up that says he's actually only Just a few pounds into the obese category.
Because he's so tall, he can handle the weight better than most people.
So he's only barely into the, you know, you should lose a good 10 or 20 pounds would be good for him, I think, according to his doctor.
But he's not morbidly obese.
So we're in a world in which people will say absolutely anything.
Don Jr. used the pedophile word against Joe Biden, and of course there's no evidence or even allegation of that, and he didn't mean it seriously either.
It was obvious he didn't mean it in the literal sense.
But we're in that world where people will say absolutely anything about anybody, And once you've learned that there's no limit on what ridiculous things you can claim, why would you stop with something that's only a little bit ridiculous?
Right? So this is one of the president's great skills.
I talk about finding free money and picking it up.
If you know you live in a world where the other side can say the Steele dossier might have been real, that's the world he lives in.
Trump did not make the rules.
There was no point at which Trump said, alright, let's agree on the rules.
Do you think it's okay to make wildly ridiculous claims that are even involving illegality and jail terms and everything?
Do you think that would be okay?
He never was in that conversation.
It just became the standard.
If you're playing a game...
And someone else has said, here are the rules.
And then you play with those rules that someone else established.
Are you indecent?
Well, you'd be indecent if you made those rules.
If you were the one who came up with it in the first place, or the first one to act indecently, you'd have something to answer to.
I think so. I think it would be fair to say that if you were the one who introduced the idea of going too far and making...
Ridiculous legal allegations against people based on no evidence whatsoever.
If you're the one who started it, yeah, I think you'd have some explaining to do.
But I don't think he started it.
I think he simply said, well, what are the rules of the game?
I'm going to play this game.
Can somebody explain the rules?
All right, all right. Wait, you're telling me I can say absolutely anything.
I can just make stuff up.
I can make an allegation to somebody murdered and raped and genocide.
Anything? And the answer is, yup.
You can say absolutely anything in a political context.
Apparently there's just no restrictions whatsoever.
Not only that, but if you were to artificially limit yourself and the other side did not, you can't even win.
So not only is he playing by the rules, he's playing by the only rules that can win.
The hard rules.
The ones where you can say anything.
And so he is.
So I just look at this as funny because when Trump accuses Joe Scarborough of this, and I should say as clearly as possible, I would imagine I wasn't there.
But I would imagine that Jake's framing of this is accurate, meaning that it probably is true that there's nothing that would suggest a crime even happened, much less that anybody in particular was associated with it.
So I think it's true that there's literally nothing there.
But the fact that the president calls it a cold case, you have to know that's tongue-in-cheek, right?
It's tongue-in-cheek because, A, he knows people will believe it, B. It might make a difference in terms of the back and forth of how people feel about things.
It might change people's opinion of Joe Scarborough.
So the fact that he would be so ballsy to throw in the suggestion that Scarborough murdered a young woman in his office is so...
Yeah...
I don't know how you could take it too seriously, but somebody will.
Somebody's going to believe that really happened.
All right. Let's see.
So here's an interesting story.
So Dr. Carroll, it's a man's name, Carroll, K-A-R-O-L, Sikora, he's an oncologist and former chief of the World Health Organization's cancer program, So he's looking at the data from around the world where some of the lockdowns have ended, and he's puzzled.
He's puzzled.
Because if you look at where the lockdowns ended and people have gone back to work, the death rate is not spiking.
And according to him, he says it's as though something has changed, meaning there's something that's keeping the virus from raging, It's as though something has changed and none of us can explain why.
Do you remember when Trump made that statement he's been continually mocked for that we might see the virus just go away?
And people said, that doesn't happen.
Viruses don't just go away.
And then there was some other famous virologist who said the same thing.
He said, you know, sometimes these things just go away.
And here's the funny thing.
You don't know why.
So even the top experts say they don't know why any virus goes away.
They know it does. Somebody's saying herd immunity, but apparently the experts do not say that.
Apparently viruses go away with...
It doesn't take much herd immunity, so that's not the primary thing.
There's always some. But apparently that's not the explanation.
It's part of the story.
But I guess we don't know why some viruses just go away.
If I had to speculate, well, I will speculate.
I'm going to speculate that some people are more likely to get any particular virus.
And it could be that you reach herd immunity at like This is just speculation with no background whatsoever.
It could be that for some kinds of viruses, you reach an effective herd immunity at maybe 30% infected.
Now, if everybody could get every virus, 30% wouldn't stop anything.
But if it turns out that viruses can affect some people and sort of not affect others...
Maybe 30% is enough.
So maybe there's some mystery like that.
That's just speculation.
Don't take that seriously. But I love the fact that after everything we've learned and studied and all the experts and everything, that we could do the one thing that everybody agrees should make the death rate go up.
100% of experts agree that loosening the restrictions on travel and everything It should make the death rate go up.
But maybe it's not.
What if it doesn't?
So this is what I've been telling you for the last day or two.
In two weeks, if everything's loosened up, and in two weeks the death rate either declines a little bit or stays flat, it's over.
We're back to work.
Because you're not going to be able to keep anybody home If after a few weeks of loosening up, there's no change in the data in terms of worsening.
If it's not worsening two weeks from now, I think things are going to open up.
Now, when I say things are going to open up, I don't think large events are going to happen right away.
But things like school, for example, and go to work and open your restaurant, but do things smart.
I think all that's going to come together pretty quickly if this holds, which is, we don't know why, But the rates are not going up as much as possible.
Here's my best guess about why the rates are not going up.
It's not much of a guess, actually.
There was another study, a team of scientists in Hong Kong.
They did some tests with, I don't know, hamsters or something.
And they determined that wearing masks is 75% effective.
It reduces droplets by 75%.
Doesn't it seem to you that with all the masks people are wearing and the attention they're giving to social distancing and also learning what the worst things are?
We've learned now that if you're around somebody who's singing or talking loudly for a long time, you're going to get it.
You now have an excuse not to be around loud talkers.
If you've got a loud Howard in your life, you know that person who just talks too loudly all the time?
Apparently they're the spreaders.
You could probably live with somebody who was a soft talker and didn't talk much.
I'll bet Christina could have the coronavirus tomorrow, but because she doesn't talk much and she's a soft talker, there just wouldn't be much coming out of her mouth.
But apparently the loud talkers and the choir singing, so if there's singing involved, Apparently there's just more volume and you could be a super spreader just by being a loud talker.
So just knowing that, knowing that if you stay out of those specific environments, probably nobody caught the coronavirus at the beach this weekend.
Don't you think that just about nobody got it at the beach?
I'll bet. I'll bet there was something close to zero transmission of all the people who went to the beach all weekend.
So now that we know stuff like that, and of course every fact that I give you is subject to being changed tomorrow, learning new things, but don't you think that between masks being 75% effective and that we've all learned what to do and what not to do for a while, I wouldn't be surprised if we could go back to work and keep infections dropping.
I'll bet we can. So I've got a feeling you're going to see non-stop good news for the next few weeks.
I'm watching this Susan Rice story about apparently we've got new documents or something and it turns out that Comey was selling the idea of General Flynn being maybe suspiciously tied to Russia based on the fact that they had more communication than Comey expected that they would.
Keeping in mind that these are people who have to work together in a few months Because that's the job that Flynn has, and that's the job that Kislyak has.
They're doing the most normal thing in the world, which is getting ready for the new administration, and these are the very people who would be talking.
Now, is that a good reason to suspect somebody being a spy?
Because let me ask you this.
If it's your job to talk to somebody In another organization or country.
And you talk to them a lot.
Would that be an example of doing your job well?
Would it be an example of not doing your job?
Or would it be an example of being a Russian asset?
I'm pretty sure that if you talk a little bit more than normal...
To the person who it's your job to talk to, and wouldn't it be good if you had more communication, not less?
That's more of an indication of doing a good job.
Do you remember I told you about the new CEO move when Pence and Trump were first elected, but not yet sworn in?
It was a few months there.
Already started to bring jobs back.
He wasn't even on the job.
It was the new CEO move where he went to, I guess, Ford and Carrier, tried to talk him into keeping jobs.
I don't know how successful it was, but it left the impression That Trump and Pence were jobs, jobs, jobs.
We're going to give you jobs even before we're on the job.
I'm not even going to take a paycheck.
I'm going to be so fast on this job stuff, I'm all over it with the jobs.
If you watch Flynn doing exactly the same thing that I praised at the time as somebody doing the job before the job even starts.
Yesterday on last night on Periscope, somebody was asking me about how to do a job interview.
I didn't give you this advice, but it's good advice.
One way to get a job is to just do it without getting paid.
Let's say you're working at your corporate job.
And you're doing your regular job, but the job you want is some other job, a better job?
Just start doing it.
Do your own job.
Weekends, nights, spare time, whatever.
Just start doing the other job.
Because you're going to be the obvious person to be promoted into it if you're already doing it.
At least a little bit. So I have nothing but the utmost respect for people who start their job before they start their job.
If you ask me, who's the superstar in the administration?
The one who waited for Inauguration Day, or the one who started hard on day one on the top priority?
Russia's kind of a top priority, right?
You know, it's in the top three, probably, for that kind of job.
And so, if the guy hit the ground running, worked extra hard before he was even getting a paycheck, let's send him to jail for that?
That's what happened. He was a guy who did extra work before he got his paycheck on exactly the right priority.
And they almost sent him to jail for it.
Unbelievable. Anyway.
So, I don't know if we'll ever have enough of a smoking gun that Obama or Susan Rice or anybody are going to have to answer to it.
I don't think so. I think it will end in murkiness where it is and then everybody will just retreat to their side.
So Howard Kurtz, who talks about media and Fox News and elsewhere, he was talking about the fact that the polls don't move no matter what happens in the real world.
That no matter what Biden does, no matter what Trump does, the polls come out and they're just bouncing around in the same little narrow level.
It's as if our preferences for voting are completely now disconnected from the candidates.
And he makes a good case, because literally, no matter what happens, the poll numbers don't change, and there's some stuff happening.
Here's one example that Howard Kurtz gives in his article about something that you would expect to change the polling, but it didn't, and it's this.
He talks about Trump, quote, proudly announcing that he's taking hydroxychloroquine He said if that doesn't turn public opinion, then Trump must be invulnerable.
Now, does that sentence capture what really happened?
Would you say that a good description of events is that the president proudly announced that he's taking hydroxychloroquine against the advice of most medical experts?
Number one, the word proudly is your tip-off For mind reading.
Did the president say it proudly?
Did you pick up proudly?
Did you detect that?
Because I didn't. I detected matter-of-factness.
I detected him talking in terms of risk management.
Certainly there was a political dimension.
But did you see proudly?
See, that's one of those keywords that just says, whatever follows in the rest of this sentence...
Can be safely ignored.
Because if you start out with a mind-reading word, it's like, alright, I've now connected to his mind.
I can see some pride in there about the hydroxychloroquine.
Let us go on.
No, you don't need to go on.
Once somebody admits they're engaged in mind-reading, stop reading.
There's nothing that follows the word proudly that could possibly help you.
But here's the rest of the sentence.
He's proudly using it against the advice of most medical experts.
Now, is that a true statement?
Yes. That is a true statement.
It is against the advice of most medical experts.
It is not against the advice of the president's own doctor.
The president's own doctor...
Said, yeah, if you want it, risk management makes sense.
Go ahead. We're monitoring you so it's not like a regular person.
Don't you think it was important to mention that the president's own doctor was okay with it?
Do you think it would be important to notice how many people on the front line who are medical doctors are using it?
Do you think it would be important to note that something like a quarter of all doctors would?
And that it's an off-label use, so any off-label use is going to be 75% of doctors think it's a bad idea.
That's an exaggeration.
But the point is, if it's an off-label use, you're not going to get everybody to agree.
What would be the other example of an off-label use where all the doctors are on the same page?
Probably not a lot of them.
Might be a few. So here's my...
And he also talks about Joe Biden having a complicated life and...
Oh, well, this is something else.
So there's another story on CNN, I think it was, talking about Tara Reade, the accuser of Joe Biden.
And it was saying how she has a complicated life and there are conflicting accounts that muddle the efforts to understand Tara Reade's allegation against Joe Biden.
In other words...
CNN hired two women to research and write an article.
The fact that they're both women is important to the story because Biden was accused by a woman.
And the two women go through Tara Reid's background trying to paint a picture that maybe she's not the most reliable witness.
So it's basically just a takedown of a witness.
Real nice. Because what about that credibility?
By the way, you know the whole all women should be believed, but we believe Joe Biden this time, blah, blah, blah.
I feel like the way we should be talking about that is credibility, which is different than being true.
Something can be credibly reported, and then you find that it's not true, but it was still credible sounding at the time.
And I think that with these accusations, you should say that the accuser is credible, If the accuser is credible.
Tara Reid, I think, is credible.
But then you should also be able to say that if the accused has a pretty good defense, you could say that's credible too.
There's nothing wrong with saying that both the accuser and the accused have credible stories.
Only one of them is true at most.
They could both not be true.
But only one of them is true at most.
But they could both be credible.
And I think you just leave it there.
You can be credible.
Turned out you're wrong, but you can still be credible.
Alright, so here's my larger point.
It seems to me that Howard Kurtz and most of the world is looking at it as still a contest between two candidates.
But I think it ceased being a contest between two candidates some time ago.
Instead, it became a contest Between the news media versus the other news media.
And so I would propose this.
The reason that no matter what the candidates do doesn't move the polling, what Howard Kurtz, the way he described that is that people just go onto their team and it doesn't matter what their team does wrong, they're just going to be on their team.
So there's lots of evidence for that.
So I'd say that the Howard Kurtz's interpretation is a credible one, meaning that it does look like it's just team play in politics, and we are ignoring the flaws of our preferred candidate to emphasize the flaws of the other ones, and that's all that's happening. Maybe.
Maybe that's all that's happening.
I would like to give this a different spin.
The reason that things don't move no matter what the candidates do is that the other side never hears it.
It doesn't matter what Joe Biden does if his team isn't aware of it.
They just don't see the same reporting as the other side.
So I would argue that we're no longer in a system in which you have something like democracy and something like the candidates making their best case and then the public listening to the candidates And then the public making a decision based on the candidates.
That's probably what it used to be.
But today, this is absolutely nothing but a massive brainwashing operation.
And you've got two massive brainwashing entities competing.
So you've got the left mainstream media, CNN, MSNBC, who are doing this massive brainwashing operation.
If they succeed, it literally doesn't matter who the candidate is.
Do I need to prove that it doesn't matter who the candidate is?
Because the candidate is Joe Biden.
Do I need any more additional evidence that it doesn't matter who the candidate is?
That's pretty conclusive, isn't it?
There's no questions left.
If Joe Biden as the candidate is good enough, then it's not about the candidate.
We are not in a world where the candidate matters.
Think about that.
We drifted into a world where the actual quality of the candidate is not a variable.
Because it's not.
It's not. You could replace either candidate with anybody, and their poll numbers would be frickin' identical.
Anybody. Now, you've got the two most different weird candidates in the world.
I mean, we've never seen anything like this.
There's nothing like Trump.
We've never seen anything like that.
But there's also nothing like Biden, somebody decomposing in their own basement on the edge of death, who's leading in the polls to be the next president of the United States.
There's no way this has to do with the candidates anymore.
We've completely left that world.
It is just The persuasive power of the right entities and the persuasive power of the left-leaning entities, and that's the battle.
The actual candidate, you can substitute them and it wouldn't matter.
Now, of course, because we only talk about the candidates and their opinions and their personalities and stuff, it seems the opposite, but that's the magic trick.
To bolster my speculation, Here's an example.
So Frank Bruni, writing for the New York Times, says this.
And look how direct this is, to my point.
So Frank Bruni says, Please tell me why I should care whether Joe Biden is declining mentally...
What? Let me read that first sentence again.
Please tell me why I should care whether Joe Biden is declining mentally when President Trump...
Bottom-down morally long ago.
He goes, I'm serious.
I'd rather drink milk past its expiration date than arsenic.
So here's a Biden supporter who's saying directly and in public that he's supporting somebody with declining mental ability and that he's happy about it, meaning that he prefers it over the alternative, because here's the alternative.
That Donald Trump bottomed out morally long ago.
Now suppose that was true.
What if that was true?
Let's say it was true that his interpretation that Trump bottomed out morally long ago.
Wouldn't that indicate that we would see the impact of that morally bottoming out by now?
In other words, would your taxes be higher because Trump allegedly bottomed out Morally?
Long time ago?
Remember, he's saying it happened a long time ago.
So if there are impacts from all this morally bottoming out, we'd be seeing them now.
Did Trump not close the airport on time from China because he was morally challenged?
No, I think he got that right.
Did Trump not Cut the regulations that were limiting us during the crisis.
Did he fail to cut some regulations because he had morally bottomed out?
I don't remember that story.
I think he just cut regulations really quickly.
Did we not get ventilators on time because the President had morally bottomed out?
I don't remember that story.
I feel like we got ventilators and more than we needed.
And just go down the line.
Pick any topic.
Trade deal, taxes, you name it.
Supreme Court. Find me one example where the events of the world or the decisions of the president somehow would correspond to this horrible problem that he had morally bottomed out.
What exactly was that?
Can you give me an example of that?
Now, I get it that you don't like his personality and his character.
I get it. We've heard you say that.
But can you give me an example of how that affected me?
Can I have a choice of somebody who...
I can't see into his soul, so I don't know if there's anything dark in his inner soul and his mind, but I like low taxes.
I like being tough with China.
Give me an example of where things went wrong.
So, the fact that Frank Brunei...
I wish I could pronounce his name, so I apologize if I'm saying wrong.
The fact that he would say out loud that he would pick somebody in a declining mental state, in his own words, declining mentally.
And he says, why should he care?
Holy cow. But he goes on.
So there's more of this Frank Brunei stuff.
Let's say...
Oh, you're saying that Trump has bottomed out morally, and here's an example.
So here's how you know that's a big problem, that Trump bottomed out morally.
So listen to this. The example is that Trump said recently that Biden, quote, has absolutely no idea what's happening.
Trump also said, quote, He doesn't know he's alive.
So, Trump is questioning the mental ability of Joe Biden, and that's an example of Trump's low moral standards.
In the same article, the very first sentence, the author of the article, Frank Brune, questioned Joe Biden's mental ability.
I'm not even making this up.
I mean, I'm reading it to you right here.
So, The statement is that anybody who would question Joe Biden's mental acuity is being morally low, and the author does that in his first sentence.
He questions Joe Biden's mental acuity in the first sentence.
And that's his best example of what's wrong with Trump, is the thing he did in his first sentence.
Now, if you're telling me that these people have a great awareness of their own actions, I would say maybe not.
I'm being told in the comments that the pronunciation is Bruni.
I hope that's right.
And then Frank Bruni goes on to talk about Biden and he says, quote, Besides, the precise agility of his mind has nothing to do with the fundamental decency of his values.
At the end of the day, and by the way, anybody who says at the end of the day, they should no longer be writers.
You should have to change professions if you ever use this sentence in public writing at the end of the day.
That's your writer's tip of the day.
The most hack writing in the world uses the phrase, at the end of the day.
I mean, really? You couldn't find another way to express that?
At the end of the day, Biden can be trusted to do what Trump didn't and won't.
Meaning, stock his administration with qualified professionals.
Now, is that true?
Is that true?
Do you think that Trump has not stocked his administration with qualified professionals?
I would say Steve Mnuchin is a superstar.
I would say that all of the departments seem to be doing their jobs for the most part.
I've got some questions about the FDA. I would say that Pompeo is great.
I think you could name a whole bunch of people who are actually really, really good, couldn't you?
I would put Jared on the list as being a superstar.
I don't know. I've got a feeling that you could pick apart any administration and you could find a number of political hires.
Aren't there always political hires?
Sort of built into the process.
I don't know that Trump is doing any better or worse in terms of staffing.
That's just an opinion.
What would be your...
Yeah, well, Purdue, okay.
So there... Yeah, so I'm not going to argue...
That the Trump administration had all superstars.
But is it really different?
I mean, could you really...
Do you think you could objectively look at the people that Trump has hired and cycled through and fired and rehired?
Do you think that you could really put any administration up against any other?
And that one would look like the incompetently staffed one?
I feel like no.
I feel like they would all look like...
Here's my guess.
I feel like every administration is probably 70% effective people and maybe 30% political, you know, I had to return a favor.
But that's also how you get elected.
If you haven't taken some political favors, you probably didn't get elected.
So we all just sort of wince and say, eh, I hate that part.
But they all do it.
It's how they got elected. It's fairly transparent.
You know, when a big donor becomes a cabinet head...
Yeah, Peter Navarro, I'd say he's a star.
A good example. So, I don't know that this claim holds up.
It would be interesting if there was any...
I don't know if there's any way to actually prove it.
But it all comes down to a very subjective statement...
Some group of people are less talented than others.
We don't know that. That's completely unknowable.
If you're not there, you don't really know.
So, and this really sums it up, all right?
My hypothesis is the candidates have stopped mattering.
It's just a brainwash competition between the left media and the right media.
I will Put a bow on that point by talking about Oliver Darcy.
He's with CNN. So Oliver Darcy is tweeting about the fact that the Fox News hosts had a variety of opinion on the president taking hydroxychloroquine, which we know to be true.
So it's a true fact that the Fox News hosts have talked about it differently.
Unambiguously, they've talked about it differently.
But they've also had experts on it.
Who also talked about it differently.
So, Darcy writes this, Fox can't get its stories straight.
What? Can't get its stories straight?
What's that mean?
Did I just describe a network that, quote, can't get its stories straight?
What does that mean?
Should there be one story?
Why can't Neil Cavuto have a different opinion than Laura Ingraham?
Is that not allowed?
Why couldn't Tucker have a different opinion than somebody on The Five if he does?
Don't know if he does. Why can't they do that?
And the fact that a CNN person would start with the very first sentence, Fox can't get its story straight, doesn't that indicate that if you work at CNN, Wait for it.
Yeah, somebody's already ahead of me.
Wait for it. Isn't he telling us fairly directly that at CNN they have to get their story straight?
What does that mean?
What does it mean to get your story straight?
Well, the context he's offering is that everybody says the same thing.
I believe he's admitting in public that Fox has a diversity of opinions and And CNN does not present a diversity of opinions apparently by choice.
He's saying it directly.
If you use the phrase, get your story straight, as a criticism of the competing network, how do you not interpret that as CNN works hard to get their story straight?
And since the story is opinion...
Whether you should or should not say something or do something with hydroxychloroquine, it's really an opinion story, given that the experts have different opinions, and we know that.
Should you get your opinions straight?
I think CNN just admitted that they're not even in the business of news.
That seems like a pretty direct admission.
So that's fascinating.
All right.
All right.
Let me see if there's anything else to talk about here.
Uh...
uh...
Phil Kirpen, K-E-R-P-N, had some interesting string of tweets, and he's talking about the fact that the elderly are still the main people dying.
So even today...
On May 20th, we've known now for how many months have we known that age is the biggest risk factor?
We've known that since, correct me, January?
Have we known since January that this virus really attacks the elderly super, super hard?
We've known that, right?
How long have we been talking about the strategy of super protecting the elderly And then letting the younger people take more of a risk.
We've been talking about that for months.
And yet today, the elderly, the very group that we've identified, and everybody agrees, there's no conversation on this, everyone agrees these are the most dangerous, at-risk group, and we're not protecting them.
Now, I have to think that people are doing a lot of stuff.
There must be a lot of activity going on to try to protect them, but we're failing.
Can you believe that?
After three months of knowing exactly who's at risk, exactly, I mean, you could list them, let's say, okay, here's one, 85 years old, you're at risk.
We know who's at risk, at the highest risk, and we're still not protecting them.
What's up with that? Is there something about the nature of the virus that is just too hard?
Maybe you can try as hard as you can and you just can't get it done.
But today? Still?
Still they're dying at the rate they're dying?
Do you know what the correct rate of death from coronavirus should be for anybody over 80?
If you're over 80, What should be your death rate from coronavirus in the United States?
Zero! Zero!
That's what it should be. If there's an 85-year-old who's having any contact with somebody who could have also had contact with the coronavirus, aren't we doing it wrong?
Isn't there some way that you can make sure that they don't have any contact with the virus?
There's got to be a way to do that.
Clearly, we're not getting it done.
Alright, so that's the bad news.
But we don't like to end on bad news, do we?
We do not. So, recapping the good news, here it is.
You want to hear really good news?
I'm going to give you some real direct, reliable good news.
Yesterday I talked to the most successful real estate broker in my area.
So a friend in the neighborhood is probably the top real estate producer in my area.
And as of last night, I asked, what's the real estate market?
Because I thought to myself, oh, real estate's going to get killed, right?
Don't you assume? Don't you assume real estate is going to get killed?
Goodbye, troll.
And so I asked her, what's happening with real estate sales?
And guess what? Strong as ever.
This week, homes are being sold for higher than asking price.
This week. So I'm in Northern California, just for reference.
Now, Northern California, where I am in the East Bay outside of San Francisco, we're sort of Silicon Valley adjacent.
So it's a lot of people who didn't lose their jobs because a lot of technology jobs, they just worked at home.
So, you know, I'm in an unusual area in that we were unusually lightly affected.
But could you imagine that people are paying over the asking price for homes this week?
Isn't that mind-blowing?
Doesn't that tell you that the economy is going to come back faster?
Of course it does. Yeah, interest rates are low, so that makes a big difference too.
Somebody says our beach condo is on fire in Florida, meaning lots of demand.
So here's what I expect.
Look at the stock market.
Did you think the stock market should be...
I don't know what it's doing at the moment.
Let me just take a peek at it so I know if...
Stock market's up!
So it's up sharply.
Did you see that coming?
Did you see the stock market up sharply and home prices selling above their asking prices?
There's something happening here that's a big deal.
Now, I gotta say, I think there's something about the Trump administration that even people who don't like Trump still think he can goose the economy.
I feel like even his haters In their secret moments would say to themselves, I hate everything about this president.
But if I'm being honest, privately, if I had to pick one person in the history of civilization to be the president during this exact situation, meaning that somebody needs to get the economy going, honestly, I can't think of a better choice.
And I'm not just...
Cheerleading for the president because I also was vicious in my criticisms of the early crisis task force and the reporting on them and a lot of stuff about that.
So I've been vicious about his communication, his empathy, etc.
early on. So I'm not just giving him a free pass here.
But honestly, he is exactly the right person for this next phase.
Exactly. And I say this all the time, and I believe I'm the only person in civilization who holds this opinion.
There's no such thing as a good president.
That's my opinion. There's no such thing as a good president.
There is only a lucky coincidence between the problems and the situations of the time and the right personality with the right skill set.
You can have exactly the right president for exactly the right problem.
We have that right now.
We did not have exactly the right president for exactly the right problem When it was empathy and sort of caring for the psychology of the country and saying things that made you feel safe about the medical situation and talking about them in the most clinical ways as opposed to getting people all worked up about some drug that hasn't passed enough tests.
So Trump was not the right fit for that.
But man is he the right fit for this next part.
Don't you see it? Is this just me being crazy?
Because I feel like you couldn't pick a better person for this.
By the way, I just saw Bloomberg's name go by in the comments.
I only recently learned that Stacey Abrams is working for some organization that's funded by Bloomberg.
So is Stacey Abrams Mike Bloomberg's play to run the country?
Because presumably A lot of politicians have at least one billionaire that's sort of their friend, if you know what I mean.
So, is Stacey Abrams just a Mike Bloomberg cutout?
And he's actually still running for president, but he's going to do it by trying to get Stacey Abrams as the vice president, and then Biden would be sort of less important.
That's what it looks like, right?
It looks like a Mike Bloomberg play to run the country.
That's my take on it.
Anyway... I think the economy is going to do great in 2021 and beyond.
And the golden age is coming.
We're going to have our Generation 4 nuclear energy.
You've got AOC saying that the Green New Deal doesn't even have a price tag.
Rather, it's a set of shared values.
Do you know what value I share with AOC? Same ones you do.
Turns out, yeah.
I would like cheap, clean energy with no risk of the planet overheating.
I don't know how big the risk is, but I'd like that to be zero.
And I'd like to do it with Generation 4 nuclear and smarter technology.
