Episode 992 Scott Adams: I Put on my Angry Pope Hat and Make Rulings About Churches, Pharma, News Business and More
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
Content:
Wray begins internal review of General Flynn case
Coronavirus key data
Joe Biden apologizes for being cavalier
Freedom of religion versus the pandemic
Whiteboard: HCQ alone or HCQ + Zinc
Financial incentives to embrace or knock Hydroxychloroquine
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But today I'll be putting on the Pope hat and making some judgments.
So today will be a more solemn affair.
But first, we must enjoy the simple pleasure of this simultaneous sip.
It's coming up! And all you need This is a cup or a mug or a glass or a tank or a chalice or a cyan, a cancine, a jug or a flask or a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine of the day, the thing that makes everything better, including the damn pandemic.
It's called the Simultaneous Sip and it happens now.
Go! Let me start With a confession.
Are you ready? It's a medical confession.
Last night on Periscope, people asked me why I kept whistling when I'm talking.
And you're probably going to hear it again today.
And so many people mentioned it and they were worried that I had an asthma wheeze or that my nose was whistling or something.
So let me tell you what it was just to get it off of your mind, okay?
You will probably hear it again today.
I was back on prednisone for last week or so because of the sinus problem.
So it clears up my sinuses.
And what happens is that my speech production changes completely.
So the process of producing speech Which actually involves your old cranium situation.
It is a bit off right now, because at the moment I'm tapering off.
So last night people were asking me on Periscope, are you stoned?
What's wrong with you? And what was wrong with me is that I'm just on the tapering off part of the prednisone.
When you're in the middle of it, it's sort of like a superpower.
It just creates a Just incredible energy and focus, and you can just do anything.
Physically and mentally, you're just operating at about 30% better for about a week.
So I used that time when I knew I would be operating at a higher level to get a bunch of stuff done.
So whenever I've got a problem, I always say, all right, I've got a problem.
I have to stay home for a month or whatever the problem is.
How can I make something out of that?
And then you figure out what can you do that you wouldn't have done before?
Staying home for a month. So the prednisone I knew was going to screw me up.
It basically turns you into a different person for a while.
And it's really freaky.
Because you are a different person.
I mean, your personality changes.
I warned Christina so she knows what's coming.
You get more aggressive.
Definitely more aggressive.
I'll tell you the weirdest thing about the prednisone.
You lose all fear.
And you don't realize it's gone until one day you think to yourself, huh, when was the last time I worried about anything?
It's just gone. All of your fear.
Now, I'm not saying that you should take it, of course.
Obviously, you know, this is a Doctor-prescribed drug, and it's pretty dangerous stuff.
If you take it too long, you get in real trouble.
But the experience of taking it for a very short time is really mind-altering forever.
It's mind-altering in the sense that you get to experience living in another person's life for a week, because you really do live in another person's life, in which you're more angry, but you're not afraid of anything.
So it's pretty dangerous.
I mean, it would be really easy to imagine that you could get in a fight.
You know, I probably wouldn't get in a fight, but it's easy to imagine somebody could get in a fight like that.
So I took advantage of it to do a whole bunch of work that I wouldn't have gotten done otherwise.
Man, was I productive!
Oh my God!
The ability to focus?
Incredible. The ability to work out?
Incredible. So, you know, you saw my photos in which I was showing my muscle growth during the pandemic.
And some of that, I think, is because it was easier to work out, just on the prednisone.
Anyway, so, if you hear that whistle, it's not my asthma, it's just my speech production is temporarily a little weird.
Let's talk about the news.
FBI Director Ray has launched an internal review of Michael Flynn investigation to which all of us said, what?
What? Are you kidding me?
That the FBI director did not already have an internal review of the Flynn situation?
What? It sounds like the news that you think You think couldn't possibly be news.
When I read this, I kept reading and thinking, did I just travel back to the past?
Are you telling me that Ray didn't already have an internal review?
Doesn't he need to get fired just for that?
Do you have any confidence in Director Ray when you find out that he just started a review?
And where the hell has he been?
Shouldn't that guy be all over the news explaining stuff?
I feel like he's got a lot to explain.
So he might have perfectly good reasons for why he didn't do it, and one of those perfectly good reasons might be that someone else was doing it for him.
So maybe he didn't need to do anything if other people were doing the work, you know, Durham or somebody, the IG. So he might have a good excuse, but wouldn't you like to hear it?
Wouldn't you like to know why you waited?
So I would say this gives me zero confidence in the FBI. Now, of course, the FBI had a credibility problem because of everything from the fake Russia collusion hoax,
etc. But if you assume that the biggest job of the director of the FBI is to return them to credibility, Could you say that the guy who's not showing up on TV is doing that?
It feels like he's not.
So I would say, I would put a question mark on that.
So I'm not going to say he's doing a bad job or that he needs to be fired, but I can say that the job he's done so far does not give me confidence, and I would think that would be job one, would be to give you confidence.
And he, just for myself, don't have it.
Here's the most interesting data that I would like to have about the coronavirus that I don't think I'm going to get.
But I really, really want this data.
So there's a story about a woman who cut hair, I think at Supercuts or someplace, and had cut 81 customers' hairs after she had symptoms.
Now, I don't know why she kept cutting hair when she had symptoms.
I assume she needed the money, which is tragic in its own way.
But she cut 81 customers' hair, so they're doing the contact tracing, and apparently she had really good records.
So this is the interesting part.
So her records were so good that people could tell exactly who she spent, however long it takes to give a haircut.
20 minutes? Men's haircuts, probably.
So let's say it lasts maybe 15, 20 minutes.
And so there are 81 of them.
Now here's the interesting part.
Both the customers and the person cutting the hair wore masks.
So you have the two things put together, and this is what makes it interesting.
The current working presumption, subject to change of course, from the medical community, is that wearing masks seems to be the number one thing that helps.
So they're wearing masks, the number one thing that helps.
But at the same time, the activity that they were involved in, which is close, continuous contact of two people, is exactly the worst situation if you're trying to avoid getting the coronavirus.
So you have the worst situation protected by the best protection, and there are 81 examples.
Don't you want to know how many of those 81 got it?
That would tell you a lot, wouldn't it?
Because we're making decisions about opening retail, we're making church decisions, every other kind of decision.
Wouldn't you really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really want to know how many of those 81 people caught it?
I would say that should be a national story.
that we should follow from beginning to end.
To the extent that privacy isn't an issue, maybe it is, but I'd like to track it.
Two weeks from now?
Can we go back two weeks from now and test every one of those 81 people?
Now, of course, it gets confused by the fact that they could be getting it from other sources as well, so maybe there's no way to test it.
I guess you'd have to test them as soon as possible.
And then, yeah, I don't know.
Maybe there's some way to tease out a useful number from that.
All right, so I just want to talk about this again because it's so much fun.
But giving credit to Gateway Pundit, who got it from, let's see, PJ Gladnick at the Citizens Free Press blog.
Who found this obscure little audio from a Michael Merconish program, I don't know what it was, in which Amy Klobuchar had mentioned that she thinks her husband was on hydroxychloroquine and he recovered from the coronavirus.
Now that doesn't mean the hydroxychloroquine saved him or made a difference, but the awkwardness that that puts her in is just sort of wonderful.
Because you know that she's going to be asked about it.
Now, let me take a poll here.
So Klobuchar, of course, is in the news, primarily because she's still on the shortlist for maybe vice presidential pick by Biden.
Now, do you think there's anybody except Kamala Harris who's on the shortlist anymore?
How many people Now believe that Kamala Harris will be the vice presidential pick for Biden.
In the comments, it'll take a minute for them to catch up to real time, but watch the comments and see how many of you think Kamala Harris is the likely vice presidential choice.
In the comments, go.
And I'll read them off for those listening to it.
Me, yes, me, me, not yet.
Harris, yes, me.
Somebody says Stacey Abrams might.
No, no. I do.
Me. Yes. Harris, yes.
Not me. Yes.
Harris or Klobuchar.
There's no question now for Harris.
I guess so. Yep, of course.
Yes, yes, yes, yes.
Alright. So you can see now the trend.
So at least, I don't know, three quarters of you.
Oh, there's a few more no's coming in.
Oh, I'm still getting some no's on Kamala.
Alright, so here's my only point.
Closer to maybe half...
Half or 60% maybe say yes for Kamala.
Check your opinion today compared to what it was two years ago when I first started saying that Kamala Harris would be the likely presidential candidate, not the vice presidential candidate.
But then I updated it when she withdrew.
I updated it to the idea that she would be Biden's vice presidential choice, but really the Did you not watch that go from the least likely thing you ever thought would happen to about 60% of you think it's a lock?
Did you not watch that?
That simulation conformed to what I told you it would do for two years.
You watched reality slowly morph into the direction I told you it was going to go.
Now, if I miss this, I'm going to be really disappointed.
And I think there's at least a 50% chance that it's not Harris.
And the 50% chance is just that gigantic wildcard That nobody really is good at guessing vice presidential picks.
It's just a category of thing that's the hardest thing.
In fact, I've never gotten one right in the past.
Every time I've ever tried to guess a vice presidential pick, I've gotten it wrong.
I think 100% of the time I've been wrong.
And it's because their selection It looks pretty deeply into governors and people in important states and then there's the vetting and you don't know what they found out about any particular candidate.
So in some ways it's the most opaque thing in politics.
It's the thing you know the least about before the actual pick happens.
So I would say there's a 50% chance I'm wrong.
But to get this close and have a 50% chance of being right, I mean, just my opinion is 50%, that's kind of weird, isn't it?
It's kind of weird, you have to admit.
So, CNN has effectively taken out Biden's MeToo accuser.
Did you know that?
Did you see all the news yesterday about...
Tara Reid, the accuser of Joe Biden?
No, you didn't.
You didn't see that because the story just went away.
Do you know why the story went away?
Because CNN killed it.
So not just CNN, but the anti-Trumpers, they managed to look into the accuser, Tara Reid, until they found out there were some discrepancies.
There was a little bit of discrepancies in her...
In her history, it turns out that, at least this is the claim in the news, I don't have any independent information about it, apparently she had claimed that she received a Bachelor's of Art degree from Antioch University in Seattle, but the school tells CNN that she never graduated from that university.
So the person that we would depend on for her accurate accusation against Biden, the person we depend on to be credible, according to CNN, lied about where she got a degree in college.
Now, would you believe anything else she said?
Nope. Unfortunately, no.
Which doesn't mean it didn't happen.
I'll always have to stop and make this distinction.
You can be credible and wrong, and you can be not credible at all in telling the truth.
So those are still possible, so I like to make that distinction.
So I would say that Tara Reid, in my personal view of things, went from 100% credible when she first made the accusation, Because she had some contemporaneous reports where she'd mention it.
It was her mom called into the Larry King show.
It didn't look like she had a reason to lie exactly.
So on day one, completely credible.
But then you tell me that at one point in her past she lied about where she got her degree.
And I say to myself, that's not a normal lie.
That's a little extra, isn't it?
Now again, I'm depending on CNN to be telling me the truth, because I don't want to throw this poor woman under the bus if CNN has given me fake news.
Now what are the odds that CNN gave me fake news?
Pretty good, right?
Pretty good. So let's say that there might be more to this story about the school.
It could be that she was, you know, if it turns out that she was one credit short, And she claims she graduated?
I'm not really going to care about that.
Right? I mean, do you really care?
If it turns out she was one credit short or something like that?
If it turns out she was almost a graduate or something like that, would you care too much?
Not really. I would say that would be close enough.
If you're trying to get a job and you're one credit short from your degree and you claim you got a degree, does anybody care?
Yeah, that's a little white lie.
So we haven't heard her side.
If it turns out that this is sort of a harmless white lie, the sort of thing that people do on their resume, then I would judge it differently.
But if it turned out that she just made up a college and said she got a degree there, then I don't think you can believe anything else she says.
Are you with me? If it's true that she just made up a college degree There's nothing else you could ever say that you would ever find credible.
Again, even if it's true.
It might be true.
So, I'm going to give the play of the week to CNN, because they actually took her out.
They actually looked into her until they took her out.
And they did. It looks like they took this story right out of the news.
So, political play of the week, CNN. So, we're still talking about Biden and his comment about...
I just have to read his quote again because it's so funny.
Biden said, if you have a problem figuring out whether you're for me or Trump, then you ain't black.
Now, of course, he's getting criticized for everything.
The people on the right are entirely illegitimately claiming...
That what he meant, as if we can read his mind, we can't, that what he really meant is that, you know, basically it's just assumed that black people will vote for Democrats no matter what they do.
They're just taking it for granted.
Now, of course, nothing like that happened, but that's how it's being reported on the right.
And if you buy into that interpretation, you really have to ask yourself, you have to ask yourself, Are you letting your own team brainwash you?
Now if you're doing it for fun, or for politics, because you just know it works, it is pretty effective.
So if you're just doing it because it works, as long as you're self-aware that this is not a real story, this is a completely manufactured story.
This is manufactured news.
Usually it's manufactured in CNN, but sometimes, sometimes Fox News will manufacture a little news.
And this is clearly manufactured news in the sense that there's certainly no evidence that what Biden meant, meaning his personal feelings, his internal unstated thoughts, We're that blacks sort of were automatically going to vote Democrat just because it was assumed and it's automatic and they don't have to do anything to earn it.
Nothing like that isn't evidence.
What isn't evidence, of course, is that Biden thinks that he's a better choice for the black community and he was telling him that.
That's it. He just said, I'm a better choice.
There's no story here whatsoever.
But of course, we're going to look into every word choice.
And now people are saying, hey...
Are you pandering because you said ain't?
Did Lunch Bucket Joe say ain't because he was talking to a black audience and so he was talking down?
He wasn't using his regular vocabulary?
Well, how did he answer the complaint?
When he was challenged about it and asked to apologize, he did.
As a good Democrat, he apologized.
And then he said he shouldn't have been cavalier about it.
So the people who are saying that Joe Biden was talking down and reducing his vocabulary in an insulting way, as if he's being condescending to the black community, when he talks about it, he pulls out cavalier.
About half of the people in this country don't even know what that word means.
So can you say that when Joe Biden is talking, and obviously when he was apologizing, he was talking to the black community as well as everybody else, but do you think he would use a word like cavalier?
I think the thing that you could conclude is that he just uses lots of different words in different contexts and it doesn't mean anything.
I think that he definitely was trying to be casual and funny when he said ain't.
I don't think it has anything to do with who he was talking to.
I think he would have said that to anybody he felt comfortable with because it's just a thing.
It's a thing people say.
They say ain't when they're trying to emphasize the thing.
It's just an emphasis word.
Alright, so that story is you'd think it would have no legs, but then it does have legs because part of what Biden claimed was that the NAACP Had endorsed him.
It turns out that the NAACP doesn't endorse anybody.
So it's like not what they do.
So they had to put out a statement that says, not only did we not endorse Biden, but we don't do that.
So that's funny.
You'd think this story would just go away, but it doesn't.
All right, let's talk about churches.
I'm going to put on my Pope hat here for a moment.
Because, you know, the President's weighed in on the question of whether churches are essential.
For those of you who are new to my periscopes, I will give you this context.
I'm very pro-religion.
Very, very pro-religion.
But I'm not a believer myself.
I'm pro-religion for other people.
Meaning that I observe That other people find tremendous benefit from living a religious-inspired life.
Why would I want them not to have that?
Now, of course, you can make your case for people misusing anything, whether it's a religion or it's a gun.
People can misuse anything.
But a tool is a tool.
And people use it to great effect, in my opinion.
Good for civilization, good for families, good for people.
So I'm all pro-religion.
I want you to have as much as possible.
Secondly, I'm pro-Constitution.
The Constitution is very clear about your religious rights.
Your federal government, your state government, nay, none of your governments can take away your religious right.
That's pretty prominently written in your Constitution.
So, is the President of the United States right when he says your religious institutions are essential services?
Let me check my Constitution.
Checking, checking, checking Constitution.
Looking for the exception, the virus exception to the Constitution, the part where the Constitution says you have freedom of religion unless there's a virus, looking, looking, doesn't seem to be here.
Doesn't seem to be here.
President, I judge him to be 100% accurate.
100% accurate.
You have a constitutional right to your religious expression and your federal government.
If they try to stop you, I will join you in fighting them.
Oh, people are saying, is that a different opinion than I had yesterday?
No. No, I'm not done.
Did you think I was done?
No. So far I have on my constitutional hat.
While wearing my constitutional hat, I agree with the President and I agree with, I think, every single one of you.
I'll bet there's not one other person on here who disagrees with what I just said.
But that's my constitutional hat.
If we were only constitutional people, we'd be dumb.
But the entire context of the conversation is your soul, your entire spiritual self, your spiritual life.
So there's at least one more hat I have to put on, wouldn't you say?
I mean, we're done with the constitutional part.
That's unambiguous.
In my opinion, there is no wiggle room whatsoever constitutionally.
But we want to be thorough.
And so we're going to put on the Pope hat and give this a second look.
And now, from the perspective of my...
I'm not sure I'm wearing this right.
Maybe it goes like this. Does anybody know how a Pope hag goes on?
Is it more like this?
Or is it more like this?
Given the straps, I'd say it's more like...
No, this looks like dog ears if I wear it like this.
Well, anyway, you get the idea.
So, let me take the Pope perspective.
And I will take the advice to imagine what would Jesus do?
Would you agree that that's a fair standard?
Because whether you're Christian or whether you're Muslim, you would recognize Jesus as a wise figure, and let's say you might view his role in the universe differently, whether you're Jewish or Muslim or Christian or anything else.
But most people would agree that there was probably an historical figure, at least, and that He had some good things to say.
So let's take that approach and say to yourself, what would Jesus do?
If Jesus knew that churches were essential services, would Jesus say to you, take off your masks, go to church, sing as loudly as you want?
Would Jesus say that?
No. No.
My judgment is, That Jesus would not say, take off your masks, go to church, pack in tightly, and sing as loudly as you want.
I rule that he would not say that.
Would Jesus say, put on your masks, observe social distancing, be smart?
I think he might.
I think he might.
Would Jesus say...
You can get in your car and stay in your car and have an outdoor service in which your religious leader is standing up there away from you and your family that you've been quarantining with and locked down with.
They're in your car and nobody else is in your car and nobody else comes up to your car and you don't even open your window as somebody does.
Would Jesus allow you to stay in your car and go to church?
I'm praying a little bit, trying to get a reading on this.
Something's coming in.
I'm getting something now.
Yes. Yes, he would.
Yes, Jesus, as it turns out, from best we know, was not an idiot.
Because the people who say that you can't stay in your own car with your family and worship your God are idiots.
They're not your leaders.
They're not your religious leaders.
They're not your role models.
They're idiots.
They're idiots. Jesus was not an idiot, as best we understand.
So my ruling is that Jesus' ruling would be maybe stay in your car, be smart, but absolutely, go back to church.
So, would Jesus...
Agree with President Trump?
Well, certainly would agree on the going back to church, but be smart.
Be smart, people.
Now, let me adjust and conform.
Yesterday's opinion that sounded different from this one.
So if you heard me talk about it yesterday, here's the difference.
When I was talking about it yesterday, I was making a bad assumption.
The assumption being... That people would just sort of go back to church in the normal way, which of course seems like a bad idea.
So if you're going to try to take care of your fellow humans, going back to business as usual at the moment is a terrible, terrible idea.
But I don't think anybody's going to do that.
The reality is, smart people are not going to do what I just said.
Go sit next to each other without masks and sing out loud is literally the very worst thing you could do.
So, churches open?
Yes. Being dumb about it?
No. So don't be dumb about it.
All right. Brett Stevens wrote, or is it Steffens?
I think it's Stevens, in the New York Times, had an interesting article about Flynn.
And it was interesting to see somebody writing in the New York Times about Very much being against the way Flynn was handled.
So to have somebody come down unambiguously in the New York Times against the way the government handled the Flynn thing was interesting.
Now, of course, he had to soften that because it's the New York Times.
So he had to put in there the, well, Trump did the same thing, and it was also bad, and it's a good thing he got impeached, Because what he tried to do with Biden and Ukraine was basically the same thing, which is use the organs of government against a political opponent.
To which I said, my first thought was, okay, I can see how you'd make that analogy.
Because in both cases, it appears to be the government using the organs of government, the power of government, and using that power against a political opponent.
And I thought, yeah, that does describe both situations.
That does describe all situations.
But there might be one difference.
I'm just going to put this out there.
There's one slight difference between the Flynn situation and the Biden-Ukraine situation.
Maybe you know what it is.
Does it stand out for you, that one difference?
Flynn was innocent?
That's a pretty big difference.
Flynn didn't do anything. He literally just showed up for work and did his job.
That's it. Flynn not only just showed up for work and did his job, but he showed up early for work.
He showed up early for work and did his job.
And the organs of government were turned against him.
Is that exactly analogous to Hunter Biden working for Burisma?
And whatever problems that might cause for the person who might be the next President of the United States, Joe Biden, his father, do we not think that that's at least a little worth looking into?
Right? And secondly, Flynn was actually convicted.
Flynn was convicted.
There's not even any kind of a court case or anything against Hunter Biden or Joe Biden.
There's no kind of wheels of government working against them.
It was simply an investigation.
Here's the better analogy.
If you want to compare the Flynn situation to the Ukraine-Biden situation, here's the right analogy.
If they had looked into Flynn and said, well, it looks like we didn't find anything, and walked away, that would be the same.
Because Looking into them is actually pretty legitimate.
Even if you tell me that they didn't have enough reason to look into Flynn, I would say to myself, well, it's not a perfect world.
If they legitimately thought there was something there, and they legitimately looked into it, and they legitimately found out fairly soon that there was nothing there, and they had legitimately walked away, I don't know that I would have much of a problem with it at all.
In that case, it would look like a simple mistake that was okay.
Meaning that somebody thought, oh, I think I see some signs that this is worth looking into.
That's okay. Seeing some signs to look into something, looking into it, and then finding out that the signs were misleading?
Well, it's a mistake.
It's the smallest one in the world.
It's what you expect people to be doing.
So I thought it was clever for Brad Stevens to make that analogy because if you weren't very critical about it, you would fall into thinking, yeah, those are kind of the same.
But there's a pretty big difference between somebody who didn't do anything and somebody who's taking money from Burisma for doing not much of a job.
I just don't see those as the same.
All right. So the story about China increasing its pressure on Hong Kong, I have two feelings about it.
One is, of course, I don't like the Chinese government, and what they're doing, of course, is a human tragedy, and I feel great empathy for the people in Hong Kong who didn't deserve this, and it's not going to be good for them.
So it's all bad. On the other hand, It also can't be stopped.
There isn't any future in which China doesn't have full control over Hong Kong.
That's really not...
There's no world in which that doesn't happen.
So I have a different opinion about things that can't be stopped, which is I try not to worry about them too much.
We're going to talk about the whiteboard in a moment.
I see you asking about it.
We'll get to that. All right.
Bill Maher is doing some more mind reading.
And, you know, I always talk about the sign for cognitive dissonance.
So cognitive dissonance is when people's world doesn't make sense, but they need it to.
So they paper it over with some weird thinking that makes things that don't make sense make sense.
And so that's how you spot cognitive dissonance.
It's not just a difference of opinion.
Because differences of opinion, usually you can trace back to, oh, you have a different assumption than I do, that's why your opinion is different, or you have different facts, or you have different priorities.
So usually if it's just a different opinion, you can spot why, but sometimes there are just words that don't even make any sense, and that's cognitive dissonance.
See if you can decide which one this is, from Bill Maher.
He said, quote, I think he was talking to Michael Moore on his show last night, and he said, quote, just the impeachment, you know, I mean, if I could do it over again, I wouldn't, because it just emboldened him.
Maher continued, he's talking about Trump, just emboldened him.
Now he can conduct this war on accountability and nobody even, it barely made the papers.
I bet you people are watching this and going, wow, I've never heard that because the news is all about COVID. Now, it's obviously correct that the news is focusing on the COVID stuff.
But I have seen a lot.
It seems like there's been a lot of coverage about the firing of the IGs, etc.
But here's the part that I question.
So Bill Barr is saying that the impeachment emboldened Trump.
What is the logical connecting tissue between the impeachment...
And an emboldened Trump.
What is it about the impeachment that logically would embolden someone?
Does anybody understand what that even means?
Because doesn't it sound like just two words were put together?
Right? So that's your sign for cognitive dissonance.
Cognitive dissonance would have looked, if it had been an actual reason, Like a real reasonable reason.
It would have looked more like this.
And this is not real.
This is just an example. It would have looked more like this.
Now that he's been impeached, he knows that the Democrats wouldn't want to go through that again and fail again because it makes him look bad.
So he's got a little freedom because it's less likely he'll be impeached a second time because he can't be any more impeached than he is.
So if he'd said something like that, I would have said, okay, Maybe I agree or I don't agree, but at least I see the connecting tissue.
But to simply put it out there like you can see it too, well you can see it, right?
The impeachment in which he got impeached emboldened him.
Do you know what would embolden me?
Not being impeached.
You could replace that impeached with not impeached and you could say the same sentence.
You know what emboldened the president?
Not being impeached.
It emboldened him.
Do you know what emboldened the president?
Getting impeached.
If you can put the opposite in the sentence, and it doesn't really change it because it didn't make any sense in the first place, it's a nonsense thought.
So it looks to me like cognitive dissonance.
So, of course, we cannot know the internal thoughts of strangers.
So we can't know that's true.
We just know that it has all of these signs of it.
So that's the only part we can know.
Here's a question for you.
Can you trust the news about coronavirus and vaccines and therapeutics when the news business is primarily funded by pharmaceutical companies?
That would be not a real question.
Sort of a rhetorical question.
We have a weird situation where the biggest problem in the world is in the topic of a virus and therapeutics and vaccines.
And nothing is more important than getting accurate information.
Because it's such a big deal, if you get the wrong information, millions of people die if you get the wrong information.
And our source of information is the one source That's not credible.
Because the news business is not credible under the specific situation that they're funded by the people who have enormous financial gain by things going their way.
So I would say that the news, again, separating what is credible from what is true, I would say that the news business is no longer credible On the specific question of what vaccines or medicines or therapeutics work.
So let me state that as a fact I'll die on.
So this is beyond an opinion.
I think this gets into just reasonable observation.
That if somebody makes a ton of money from pharmaceuticals, They're not a credible source for your information about those pharmaceuticals.
Would we all agree on that?
That feels like just a statement of fact.
Now, again, that doesn't mean the news is wrong.
It doesn't mean they're intentionally lying.
It doesn't mean they've done anything.
It just means you can't trust them.
So not trusting them is different from saying they've done something wrong.
They could have done everything right.
But can you trust them on this narrow question of any kind of medication, vaccine?
You can't. You can't.
Now, I don't think I'm talking about the moon landing conspiracy, who shot JFK. I'm not talking crazy talk.
I'm talking about the most basic thing any business person would say is true.
If you have a ton of money riding on it, not a little bit of money, We're not talking about a few pennies.
We're talking about billions.
Possibly, possibly trillions.
The size of this is actually in the trillions.
Do you think that you can trust news that's funded by the people who could make trillions?
No. No business person with any experience would trust anything they say.
But unfortunately, we're going to anyway because we're so used to trusting the news.
You know, the people on the right are going to trust Fox News, the people on the left are going to trust MSNBC and CNN, even though we know we shouldn't.
We really, really shouldn't.
Can I give you an example to make my case?
Alright, here is what you should expect if the pharmaceutical companies have corrupted the news.
Are you ready for this?
Are you ready to have your mind blown?
Here it comes.
One way you could tell, not 100%, but this would be a strong indicator, that your news has been corrupted by the pharmaceutical industry would be if Fox News and CNN agreed.
Right? If I could give you an example, In which Fox News and CNN agreed on a pretty important story.
And let's say that that story was about Trump.
Right? Let's say, how often do CNN and Fox News agree on how to frame a story about Trump?
If they both framed it the same way, would you say, I think there's something external happening here?
Well, let's take a look.
Let's look at the news today.
As you know, CNN has been reporting that the hydroxychloroquine studies are actually showing that the hydroxychloroquine, the so-called Trump pills, if you could call them that, are actually deadly.
Actually deadly.
And indeed, there's been yet another study Yet another study showing that if you give the hydroxychloroquine to people who are at death's door, more of them will die than if you hadn't given it to them.
So CNN is reporting that, that more of them will die.
And what they don't do on CNN is mention that if you don't test it with the zinc, I'm not sure you've really tested the thing that has the most promise.
Because this is CNN's trick.
And their viewers are not wise to this trick, but a lot of my followers are.
Which is, there are really four things that you could test in this world.
Now, I'm throwing out... I'm going to ignore the azithromycin from now, just to simplify.
Because there are really three things you could think about, but just to keep it simple.
The hydrochloroquine alone...
Which if you give it to people who are near death, and those are the studies that we keep seeing on CNN, it's bad.
It doesn't seem to work.
Now, is this a surprise, given that we know that the hydroxychloroquine can have some heart issues with people who already have heart issues?
Are the elderly people who are dying from coronavirus, do they have strong hearts?
Probably not. So, I'm not even a doctor, but If you said to me, Scott, do you think this is a good idea, a drug that you know it's really only risk factors, seems to be if you've got some heart issues, should we give it to a group of people who are at death's door and have weak hearts?
I would say, you know, if they're going to die anyway, maybe you should test it.
You never know. It might work.
They did test it, and it didn't work.
Are we surprised? Well, not really.
It was worth testing.
Probably worth testing.
But not surprised that it didn't work.
But where are our tests for the other categories?
And where is our test for the one that has the most promise?
Because the whole point of the hydroxychloroquine, we're told, is that it's a delivery system for the zinc.
Where's that? Have you seen this test?
Because CNN will tell you This has been tested and therefore the president is not doing something that's safe.
That's what CNN says, right?
Go to foxnews.com today and see what they say about this.
Same thing.
They say hydroxychloroquine in yet another study shows it to be dangerous for people who are desperately ill.
But then they say, and at least Fox News mentions, that the president is taking hydroxychloroquine with zinc.
So let me ask you this.
Are these two different drugs?
Is hydroxychloroquine a different drug than zinc?
And the answer is, for marketing purposes, and the way our brain considers them, they are two separate drugs.
If you take these at the same time, Does your body know that you have two drugs, or does your body just know that there's some new chemicals in it?
Your body doesn't know that's two drugs.
Your body says that's one drug, right?
It doesn't know you combined two drugs.
That's marketing. That's packaging.
That's manufacturing. That's the way your brain holds things.
It holds them as two different drugs.
But your body doesn't know the difference.
Your body only got one drug.
It was a combination of these two things.
So when they say the president's taking this drug that's killing people, is that true?
It is not true.
It is basically a lie.
It is a lie if you leave your readers the idea that the president, who's taking this drug, which is a combination of two things, is the same as this drug, which is just one of those things.
When you know, anecdotally, anecdotally, we don't know, that's why you want to test it, that it's the combination that might be the powerful part.
Now, so the point is, Fox News is misleading its readers the same way that CNN is.
And they're both misleading them in the same direction, which is to think that the hydroxychloroquine with zinc is a bad idea, Because something completely different has been tested.
And not only was it something different, but the whole presumption was it's a first symptom drug to begin with, and we haven't seen this tested.
Who's testing this?
So we get the ones that fail first?
Isn't that a coincidence?
All the ones that fail are the ones that are coming in first.
Huh. Is that because the ones that were the least likely to work were also fully funded?
Maybe. Who knows?
So, today there's news.
So that's your first signal that the news is not giving you real news on pharmaceuticals, because both Fox News and CNN are doing something that's completely illegitimate, in my opinion, treating the one drug like it's the same as the combination of the two drugs.
And I don't know any reason you would do that other than to mislead.
Intentionally or unintentionally, it's clearly putting the readers off the track and moving them off the scent instead of helping them understand what's going on.
So I would say that's a pretty strong indication that the news is no longer credible when it comes to any kind of pharmaceutical or medical thing.
Just to make it fun, just to put a bow on this, do you think this could get any better?
Oh, it's getting better right now.
Because I'll bet you haven't heard this news.
This news is hot off the press.
I just tweeted it like just before I got on.
And let me read it to you.
It turns out that in India, which is...
What is India famous for making?
They're the biggest manufacturer of a drug.
What's that drug? Oh yeah.
Hydroxychloroquine. Okay, so in the United States, the two big news organizations, left and right, have weirdly and uncharacteristically taken the same side.
Huh. It's almost as if the pharmaceuticals are influencing that.
But let's look at India.
Now, India, if you imagine that the pharmaceuticals influence their news, wouldn't you kind of expect that the country that is the number one producer of, even though it's very cheap, They produce a lot of it, so it must be a lot of money.
Hydroxychloroquine, the main producer of hydroxychloroquine.
If they were to test hydroxychloroquine, do you think that they would get a good result or a bad result without even knowing anything about science, without knowing anything about medicine?
Would the people who make a fortune producing this chemical more likely tell you it works?
Let's read today's news.
According to, this is news from India, the premier health body, so their big health body, looked at three different studies.
Now when I say studies, I don't mean they were drug trials.
They were studies of looking at what happened when different groups were given hydroxychloroquine for a prophylaxis, meaning preventative.
According to India, there are three separate studies that show very strongly that the, and again, it's a retrospective study, it's not as reliable as like a controlled study.
So the first thing you need to know is this is not a confirmed clinical gold standard, you know, Fauci-level clinical style, clinical trial.
But it's three different sets of data in which they have a lot of data, The data seems reliable, as far as we can tell.
We don't know. But it seems reliable.
And it all goes in the same direction.
And apparently the people who took hydroxychloroquine, I guess it was mostly front-line workers, had way fewer infections than the people who didn't.
So in India, the news is opposite of the United States, and coincidentally, coincidentally, Their pharmaceutical financial incentive is also opposite of the United States.
Huh. Huh.
Is that a coincidence?
Is it a coincidence that wherever the money leads you is where the science ends up?
Huh. Now, that could be a coincidence.
You actually can't rule out a coincidence.
Can you? You can't rule out a coincidence.
We live in a world where coincidences are just rampant.
So it could be that the Indians are all wrong.
Three separate studies, and all three of them were wrong.
Could be. Now somebody says, was it with zinc?
And the answer is, doesn't say.
So the article doesn't mention it one way or the other.
But if you were taking hydroxychloroquine preventatively, and you were a frontline healthcare worker, Would you not be taking zinc?
Right? Because zinc is sort of suggested that it might be helpful no matter what.
It could be that the zinc is the only thing that matters.
You could find that out in the future too.
So do you think that the healthcare professionals who have also heard what you've heard, that it's the combination of the two that's good, do you think they weren't also taking a zinc supplement?
Probably they were. Probably they were.
It's also possible that maybe they had enough zinc in them because they were younger people and they weren't unhealthy to begin with.
But here's where I would be cautious.
Here's some caution for you.
What would be different about the people who voluntarily took hydroxychloroquine from the people in India who had the same opportunity and decided not to?
Is there anything that you could determine about those two groups that would skew your results?
And the answer is, yeah.
Yeah, there is.
Right? The people who would say, I'm going to do everything I can to avoid coronavirus are the people who are going to take a chance on this drug.
Is there anything about that personality type that might protect them?
Yeah. They're the ones who are extra, extra concerned.
The people who are most concerned probably do a whole host of things, from washing their hands more, not touching their face.
There are probably a whole bunch of things that you do if you're in the more concerned group.
So, if what you heard from this is hydroxychloroquine works, because India did three separate retrospective tests and it looked like there was a strong effect, you didn't hear me.
If that's what you got out of this, you didn't hear me.
India has a gigantic financial incentive in saying this stuff works.
The United States, the news industry anyway, has a gigantic financial incentive, probably, to say that it doesn't.
Because there are so many vaccines being worked on, I would imagine that just about all of the people who have some connection to advertising on the news, they probably all have at least one division That's working on a vaccine or a therapeutic and there's a lot of money involved.
So I wouldn't trust anybody on the question of hydroxychloroquine.
Alright. Somebody says it's basically free.
Why not have it on the ready?
And the answer is apparently we don't have enough of it.
So there's actually a shortage of it.
You can't say something is free At the same time, you said there's a shortage of it.
Because in a capitalist system, the price of it, in the context of a shortage, should be going up on the black market pretty high.
I'm looking at your comments here.
So there's a Peter Salk article somebody sent to me.
Can you still hear my whistle?
By the way, the whistle is being produced in my teeth and mouth area.
So don't worry about me having any kind of medical problems.
Shouldn't we all be required to wear goggles?
The answer is no.
So people are asking if you should wear a face mask, Why shouldn't you also wear goggles?
Because the medical experts are telling us that your eyes and your mouth are places where viruses can get in.
And the answer is that you don't wear a mask to keep viruses from getting in.
You wear a mask because you might be asymptomatic and to keep them from getting out.
Your mouth produces droplets.
You're shooting them out of your mouth.
Your eyeballs do not produce droplets.
Tears that are shooting out of your eyes.
If you could shoot tears out of your eyes just walking around, then you would have to wear goggles too.
But as long as you're shooting things out of your mouth but not out of your eyes, you asymptomatic people are fine.
Alright. So last night I had more of a whistle.
I'm consciously trying to avoid doing it, so I'm I probably got it under a little bit of control.
There should be no requirements, only suggestions.
I don't know.
You know, I'm on the side that says anything you do temporarily for the purpose of medical should not be viewed in the context of the Constitution.
Because everything we do medically is an exception to the Constitution.
Not everything, but we do lots of medical things that if you were really going to look at them compared to the Constitution, you'd have some problems.
For example, people who are considered not capable.
If you were judged to be not mentally competent, you'd basically lose all your constitutional rights.
Show me in the Constitution The place where it says being mentally incapable is where you lose all of your rights as a citizen.
It's not there. So we fairly routinely make non-constitutional decisions for the benefit of medical necessity and trying to do the right thing.
I mean, nobody's being a dick for just trying to do the right thing, trying to keep people alive, right?
Nobody's trying to violate your constitution.
Which brings me to my final point.
You will see, especially on the right-leaning media, that the real purpose of this shutdown is to train the citizens to put up with anything.
And it's to exercise control.
And it's all about people's internal need for control.
None of that's real.
You should discount everybody who tells you that they're looking into the minds of strangers Be those strangers governors or pundits, and they can see that on the inside, even though they're not saying it,
and there's nothing in their philosophy that would suggest it, that internally you can tell that their real plan is their globalist plan to squash the human rights of people and exert their control over them before they take them to the gulags.
All right. In my opinion, there's not one person on the planet Earth who is thinking along those lines.
None. I know the news on the right likes to paint Whitmer as somebody whose real goal, her real goal is power.
It's about something in her personality.
Can you see her personality?
Is that in evidence?
All we see is people making different decisions.
That's all we know. All we know is that 50 governors made 50 slightly different decisions as people do.
Lightfoot in Chicago arresting people.
Do you think that mayors are arresting people to satisfy their internal need for control?
Nothing like that's happening.
In my opinion, I hate to be the bearer of good news, but allow me to be the bearer of good news.
We are experiencing a one-in-a-lifetime situation.
This is once ever.
I don't know if you'll ever see this again, and the part that's the once ever, not just the fact that it's a virus, the once ever part is that we're all on the same side.
Once ever. We're all on the same side.
Those mayors who are making decisions, it's not because they're working out some kind of inner turmoil with their emotional state.
It's not some big global conspiracy.
Every mayor is just trying to make this work.
They're just trying to get to the other side of it with a good result.
There's nobody in this story who's a dick.
There's nobody in here who's just trying to get one over on people.
You know, I refuse to believe there's anybody that bad.
I do. I just refuse to believe it.
Now, you could say I'm being naive, but in order to make your point, you'd have to find at least one person ever who is willing to say it out loud.
It's like, yeah, you know, I don't mind all these people dying.
I don't mind the economy being destroyed.
I just want a little more control.
I need to control people.
I don't think it's a thing.
I really don't.
So I think you should release on it, and also I think that anybody who's telling you that they can see it, it's one thing to say, I speculate it might exist, but I have no information that would confirm it or even suggest it.
That would be fair. I'd accept that, yeah.
I believe it might exist, but there's no evidence of it.
That'd be fair. But if somebody says it's obvious, it's clear, I can see it, I can see their thoughts, I know what they're thinking, it's part of their massive plan for global domination, you should discount that person's opinion on everything else they ever say for the rest of your life.
That's it. That is someone who's not really dealing in the observable world that you're living in.
Somebody says it's about corruption.
I don't know what that means.
What's that mean? It's about corruption.
Exactly who is doing what to get rich on this?
I mean, there's lots of profiteering on supplies and stuff, but if you're talking about the mayors and the governors, are the mayors and the governors taking bribes to keep us closed longer?
I don't think so.
They might take bribes to open us sooner, but nobody's taking a bribe to stay closed, are they?
I doubt it. So, I've said this about the presidency as well.
I don't think...
Somebody says the Rothschild.
There's... I don't know.
It just seems funny that the Rothschild somehow would have something to gain by keeping the economy closed.
I don't think anybody has anything to gain.
The unique characteristic of this is that nobody can gain...
By doing it wrong. We may have a different opinion of what's the right way to do it, and how soon, and this specific technique, but there's nobody, nobody, even in the wildest stretch of your imagination, there's nobody in any elected office who's going to come out better by doing a worse job.
Nobody comes out ahead by doing a worse job.
It's just not a thing.
Alright. If a thousand wise men say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing, somebody says.
I suppose that's true.
Somebody says the China deal led to the plandemic.
So somebody thinks that there was a plan to stop the China trade deal by a plandemic?
Eh. Somebody says, you are naive.
That's what people say right before they get blocked.
Block. There, you don't have to worry about my naivety anymore.
Problem solved. Alright, so that's my show for today.
And I hope you check me out on Locals, where robots read news.
It has a comic quite often.
And a lot of other material over there that you don't see anywhere else.
That's all for today, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.
