Episode 1279 Scott Adams: Lots of COVID-19 Good News and How to Deal With the Insurrection Hallucination
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Content:
Vaccination reduces viral load 4-fold
90% hospitalization reduction: Budesonide
A coup...or trying to stop a coup?
Impeachment theatre
AFL/CIO President supports less union jobs?
Fox News propaganda example
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Got some good news today.
Go. Ah, yeah, I can feel the pandemic receding.
So, let's start with the good news.
How about all good news today?
I think I can deliver that, actually.
I think I might actually be giving you all good news today.
I think. No, that's not true.
But let's start with the good news.
Israel has shown that the viral load from COVID was reduced fourfold on average for people who had already gotten the vaccination.
So, big question was this.
The big question.
If you get the vaccination, are you still a carrier of the virus?
And the answer is yes, but not so much.
So it matters how much.
And the good news is that the vaccination does exactly what you would think it would do.
It greatly reduces the amount of virus in the person.
And therefore, presumably, would greatly reduce the amount of viral infections.
So not only will the vaccinations reduce the number of deaths and hospitalizations, but it will also decrease the amount of spread.
Apparently a lot.
We don't know the exact number, but if it's a four-fold decrease in virus, that's probably a lot.
Probably a lot. Here's the other good news.
There was a randomized controlled study.
That's the good kind.
The kind that you should pay attention to.
Now, if there's only one of them, you still would like to see some confirmation from at least one other study.
But having even one peer-reviewed randomized controlled study is better than none.
Better than none. And one of the things that they found is that this drug called budesonide It looks like it can reduce the risk of hospitalization by 90% if you get it early.
Did you just hear that?
There's a common already available drug.
How available is it?
I have some.
Right here. Now, this is a prescription, and I use it for a different purpose.
What I use it for is I had sinus surgery surgery.
Last summer. And to keep my sinuses open, it's kind of a cordosteroid thing, I think.
And it just keeps polyps from forming in my sinus.
So I use a different form of it.
I don't use the inhalant.
I use a liquid form that I put in a neti pot, blah, blah, blah.
But the point is, this is a common drug that asthmatics use.
I don't use it for that.
I have asthma, coincidentally.
But... If this is true, and it is a randomized controlled trial, right?
And randomized controlled trials are pretty good.
And even if it were not randomized and controlled, if you get something like a 90% difference, I mean, you don't even need many controls to know you got something if you've got a 90% difference.
If you had a 20% difference Then I'd be worrying about the quality of the study and all the details.
But a 90% difference?
A 90% difference in a randomized controlled trial?
I don't know how that could be wrong.
I mean, anything's possible, right?
But it's hard to imagine that could be wrong.
So, here's the good news for the country.
The good news is we may have a widely available...
Drug that takes 90% of the risk away from people who have early symptoms, which in conjunction with the vaccinations, this is the best place we've ever been.
This is the best place we've ever been.
Somebody's saying that Budesonite is sold under the brand name Pulmacort.
That sounds right. I think that's right.
So, here's the bad news.
I already take some just prescription meds, like one for acid reflux, etc.
And some of my meds were very restricted for the past year or so, because the pandemic made it hard to get meds.
Now, I don't know where this is manufactured.
The company is CIPLA. Let's see if it tells me somewhere where it's manufactured.
Oh, fuck.
I did not see this coming.
You ready for this?
This drug, budesonide, now this is the suspension type, so I assume that they also make the inhalant, but at least they have access to the drug.
A company called CIPLA. C-I-P-L-A. And if it's true, That this can reduce, you know, the risk of hospitalizations by 90%.
This is made, manufactured for CIPLA. Wait.
Manufactured by CIPLA. So it's an American company, but it's manufactured in India.
Manufactured in India.
But an American company.
So, can an American company control how much we get from India?
I would imagine India's gonna clamp down on their control now.
So what we don't know is where the raw materials come from.
Maybe that's a problem.
The precursors would be a problem.
You know, the chemicals that go into making this chemical, they might come from China.
So we'll see. But at least it's a friendly nation, India.
So that's better than China.
All right. I mean, this is the best day.
It is the best day for the pandemic.
It's the best day.
This is the day that it looks like A human ingenuity just built the nuclear bomb.
It's like World War II, and the Manhattan Project just came in.
So the vaccinations were kind of the Manhattan Project, but they needed this other thing.
What you really needed was something that would also treat the people who got it, not just the vaccination.
And we might have it.
We might have it. Now the bad news is, if this drug is unavailable to me, I won't be able to breathe for the next year.
So the quality of my life may have just decreased substantially, but the quality of the country will be substantially improved, and I'm willing to take that trade-off.
I hope you would be too.
I hope it doesn't kill me.
All right. Biden has a plan, apparently, to open only half of the schools in the country and only one day a week by the end of April.
Does that sound good enough to you?
I keep seeing in the comments people saying hydroxychloroquine, hydroxychloroquine.
Hydroxychloroquine did not have a randomized control trial.
If hydroxychloroquine had a randomized control trial, Then we'd be talking about that.
But we'll see. If you're critical of the Budesonide story that it might turn out not to be true, you could be right.
It could turn out to not be true.
But I'm going to go with optimism for today.
So, Biden's plan is to open half of the schools by April one day a week, which is not nearly enough.
Doesn't really even address...
I would say it doesn't address any of the problem, does it?
Do you think your kids are suddenly going to get healthy and smarter because school is open one day a week?
Not really. Somebody says CIPLA is in fact an Indian company.
Well, I'm going to read the...
Oh, you know, you might be right, because the packaging is cleverly ambiguous.
Here's what it says.
Manufactured for, colon, CIPLA USA. So it's manufactured for CIPLA USA. Does that mean it's a U.S. company?
Somebody's saying here's an Indian company.
Could an Indian company just make the name of their company, CIPLA USA? I think they could, right?
There's nothing that would stop them from doing that.
So somebody says it is a U.S. subsidiary.
Manufactured for an American subsidiary?
Well, so, okay. So it's something like that.
We'll figure it out by the end of today.
So I'm wondering if Biden's plan, being very short of what the public wants, I mean, not even close to what the public wants, I wonder if it's because of a lack of PPE and protective stuff?
Is it a lack of funding?
Is that what the problem is?
Because if so, then I think you could put some of that back on the Trump administration, could you?
Because it's not today that they find themselves unprepared.
They've probably been unprepared for months.
So if the reason that Biden can't open things is because the schools are not funded well enough to have the preparations, that's a Trump administration issue.
Because they should have been ready by now.
And if they didn't give funding, you've got to blame the boss.
So Biden and Trump, I think, have to take some equal measure of this being a complete failure.
And I would say that the school reopening issue is a complete failure of government.
It's a complete failure of government.
Because it's the teachers' unions, as you know, who are keeping schools closed, doing a good job maybe for their members.
I could see why a union would want to act that way.
But the country is just getting strangled.
If you have not observed yet a child breaking down because of the current lack of social structure, where do you see it in person?
Where do you see what it's doing to kids?
It's really messing with people.
I would say that this week, I like to consider myself mentally strong.
And even if I'm not, I like to have that as my view of myself because I think it maybe helps make me mentally stronger.
If you believe you're mentally strong, I think it helps be mentally stronger.
But I've got to say...
This pandemic's starting to get to me.
I've had good days and bad days.
But I've got to say, if the pandemic's getting to me, it's really messing with people who are not as, you know, I guess I'm complimenting myself here.
I feel like I am mentally strong.
And if it's getting to me, I can only imagine what it's doing to people who are in a worse situation.
I mean, yeah.
Tell me in the comments.
Show me in the comments where you're at.
And let's say mental health-wise.
Where are you at mental health-wise?
Show me in the comments.
I'm seeing lots of comments asking me to talk about ivermectin.
Ivermectin and hydrocarbons.
Hydroxychloroquine. It's the same story.
There are reports that it's good, but we don't have the randomized controlled trials to know.
So I would not be betting anything on ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine at this point.
If either of them were the big deal that we hoped they were, we would know it by now.
And we don't. Oh, look at that.
I'm looking at your comments and I'm I'm actually impressed at how many of you are doing well, but not all of you.
Somebody's a 6 out of 10.
Somebody says they're broken.
Somebody says about to break.
Hold on. Hold on.
Hold on. We'll get through this.
So if you're close to breaking, hold on.
You'll be glad you did. Seven out of ten, fine.
Worse I've been so far.
Sorry about that.
If I wasn't crazy, I'd go insane.
Yeah.
Imagine being poor and living in a cramped inner-city housing.
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I try to imagine how this is for people who are not as fortunate as I am to be able to ride this out in relative luxury compared to other people.
And I almost can't imagine it.
It's almost beyond my ability to imagine how bad this must be for a pretty big segment of the country.
Almost can't imagine it.
But we're heading in the right direction.
All right. Here's my favorite story of the day.
And I'll give you some background on this.
I think that we don't appreciate enough the value that our billionaire class brings to the country.
Because it's easy to, like, hate the billionaires, right?
Oh, the hedge fund guys.
Oh, the billionaires.
Still know our money. So there's sort of an automatic reflex to be anti-billionaire.
I get that. And certainly not all of our billionaires are helping.
But it is true that people who started without money...
And made themselves billionaires, especially if they've done more than one thing.
If you've done more than one thing and it got you to be a billionaire, like Elon Musk, perfect example, they have essentially proven themselves superior, let's say, observers of reality and understanding how things work.
That's how they became billionaires.
Now, not all of them. Some of them just inherited or whatever.
But a lot of our billionaire class are really, really valuable to the world and the country.
Really valuable. And when you see, you know, Elon Musk recently offered a $100 million prize for the best carbon capture.
How valuable is that?
I mean, seriously.
He did something the government couldn't do.
Because he could. Not only could he, but he was smart enough to figure out what is the most important thing I could make a difference on, and then he did it with a tweet.
I'll give $100 million for the best carbon capture.
And so it's no coincidence when you see the billionaires doing things that are smarter than what your government is doing.
That's not a coincidence. There's no coincidence.
That's what made them billionaires.
That they can see reality a little bit clearer, and they're willing to act on it.
Another example of this just made me laugh.
It's the smallest issue, but again, it reinforces this idea that a lot of billionaires became billionaires because they're really, really smart.
Right? You know, whatever you want to say about Mark Zuckerberg...
The one thing you can't say about him is that he's a bad CEO, right?
He's one of the best CEOs of all time.
One of the best of all time.
Even if you don't like what Facebook is doing, his capability is just through the roof.
It's crazy. And most people would agree with that.
But here's my one of the day.
So apparently the Mavericks basketball team, Dallas Mavericks, they have not been playing the National Anthem before games, and people didn't notice for something like 12 or 13 games that they just didn't play the National Anthem.
Now, of course, it wasn't a regular spectator situation because it was reduced people in the stands and stuff.
So it was an unusual situation, but nobody noticed.
Twelve or thirteen games, nobody noticed that there was no national anthem.
And then when they noticed, the Mavericks admitted that it's a decision, and that it was Mark Cuban's decision specifically as owner of the team.
Now, here's my question to you.
For how long have we been yammering about Athletes kneeling and everybody's mad and it's making us further apart and all that.
And nobody who owned a team thought of this solution?
How about we just don't play it?
Think about it.
Why did nobody think of that solution?
Why is Mark Cuban the only person who owns a major team Who thought of the only solution that's smart?
They just don't play it.
Now, I ask you, what is the purpose?
What's the purpose of playing the national anthem?
Well, one of the purposes is it's part of the propaganda brainwashing mechanism that any solid country does.
The Pledge of Allegiance is a brainwashing persuasion mechanism that I support 100%.
Just because it's brainwashing doesn't make it wrong.
It is absolute brainwashing.
That's what it is.
It's invented for that purpose, and it works for that purpose.
That's why we do it.
So the flags and the symbols and the patriotism are part of the programming that keeps a country unified and strong.
You need it. You absolutely need it.
You can't get rid of this brainwashing.
You wouldn't want to. Everything would fall apart without it.
But, given our current situation in which the kneelers are dividing us, meaning some people are anti-kneeler, because they take the message as anti-patriotism as opposed to a message about the police, and so it divides us.
What would be the point of having a Pledge of Allegiance?
Its entire purpose is to give us better unity, But once it stops serving that purpose, why would you keep doing it?
Why would you keep doing something for unity that has exactly, obviously, the opposite outcome at the moment?
Now, someday, someday they might go back to it, and that would be preferable.
I think that would be great.
But at the moment, Mark Cuban is the only smart person in the whole game.
I didn't even think of this.
Was there even one point that you said to yourself, even one time, during this whole controversy about kneeling for the National Anthem, was there even one time you said to yourself, maybe they should just skip it?
Maybe they should just skip it.
Probably not, right?
But Mark Cuban did, and then he skipped it, and it worked out fine.
Now, some of you are mad because it would sound...
Anti-American, anti-patriotic.
It's not. It's not anti-American.
American is do what makes sense, don't be a fucking idiot.
If I could give you one explanation of what it means to be an American, it would be the following.
Do what makes sense, don't be a fucking idiot.
That's it. That's like our entire national character could be summed up in Do what makes sense.
Stop being a fucking idiot.
That's it. And Mark Cuban just did that.
He just did what makes sense.
Because it doesn't make sense to do a thing for unity when you know for sure it's doing the opposite.
Everybody else just kept doing it.
And not once did I say to myself, maybe you shouldn't.
Maybe just skip it. Now, if you're going to say he's being anti-patriotic or You know, agreeing with China or something.
That's just crazy. This is just a simple fix to a simple problem.
Here's how you should handle the impeachment trial.
Are you ready for some advice?
I usually don't give advice because nobody takes advice.
It's like an imaginary process.
But here's the thing that's getting to me.
If you look at CNN, they'll say things, usually in the opinion place, but they'll say something that their readers don't know is not news, because they can't sort out opinion from real news.
And they say just matter-of-factly that the president incited an insurrection.
Just matter-of-factly like Well, there's no question about that.
Eh, the president incited an insurrection.
We'll just put that out there like it's true, and it's a fact.
But here's the thing.
We're having this national process to impeach the president for inciting an insurrection, but yet, obviously, there was no insurrection.
Where was the insurrection?
I know what happened on January 6th.
I've seen the video. I've seen all the descriptions.
I've seen who's been charged with what.
But I haven't seen any insurrection.
I haven't seen a coup attempt.
Where was that? Did you see one?
What I saw was a guy in a Viking hat, some guy with some twist ties.
They took over an empty room because what were they protesting in favor of?
The current system being used properly, meaning a transparent election.
Was there anybody there who said, we don't care what the elections say, we don't care what the voters want, we want our leader in place no matter what the vote was?
There were none of them.
All about you, there was not one person who entered the Capitol building who if you asked them, hey look, if we could prove to you that Biden got more votes...
And he got them in the right places.
If we could prove it to your satisfaction, would you be okay with him serving as president?
I'll bet you 100% of the people who went to the Capitol would have said, oh yeah, because we like the Constitution.
That's why we're here. Because we like the Constitution.
We're not trying to get rid of it.
We're not trying to destroy the country.
We're trying to make sure the country is running the way it was designed.
Which is, you know who got the most votes, and then that person serves as president.
So you had a bunch of people who unambiguously were doing the opposite of a coup.
They were trying to stop one.
Now, the coup that they were trying to stop could have been imaginary.
Could have been imaginary.
In other words, they imagined that the vote was rigged, and that would have been a coup.
Would it not? If the vote had been rigged in favor of Biden and there's no court proof of that happening, I have to say that so I don't get banned, there's no court proof of any rigging of the election at a scale big enough to change it.
But what if it had?
There were a lot of people who believed it, and they were trying to make sure that the system had not been corrupted.
So a bunch of people tried to make sure that the current system, exactly as it's designed, Is working properly, explicitly.
That's what they all wanted.
They just wanted a little time for an audit, make sure we got the result that we wanted.
And that is being reported by the press, and now the Democrats who are doing the impeachment thing, as an insurrection.
Nothing like that happened.
In your world, there was no insurrection.
Not even close. Nothing slightly like one.
Somebody says, this is such a disingenuous spin, says Kyle.
So Kyle, I'm going to talk about you and people like you next.
If you're trying to figure out what is the right take or way to, let's say, communicate about the current impeachment, it should be mocking.
Because you should be mocking the people who imagined something that didn't happen.
There's a whole impeachment process over a thing that you know didn't happen.
You don't even have to wonder.
It's all on film.
You could interview anybody who went there and ask them the following question.
If you knew that the vote had been accurate and Biden got the most votes, would you accept him as your president?
I'll bet they'd all say yes.
Is that an insurrection?
We want the person who got the most votes to be president.
Is that an insurrection?
No, that's the opposite.
It's literally the opposite.
And it's obvious. I don't have to spin anything to say it's the opposite of that.
It's obvious.
Kyle, who thinks I'm being disingenuous with my spin, you have been hypnotized.
Now, when I say you've been hypnotized, I mean that literally.
You're actually seeing something that isn't there.
You're literally hallucinating.
I don't mean in the...
I'm not talking in some artistic way.
You're actually having a literal, physical, mental hallucination.
Because you think there was an insurrection.
You can't find any of it.
It's not on video. There are no people who would say that they were there for that purpose.
They did not bring tools that could have done it.
They didn't do anything that could have caused a change of government.
They controlled a room for an hour.
That's it. Now, I've heard people say, but what if they'd gotten all the way to Pence and Pelosi?
What if they'd actually, you know, got to them?
To which I say, what do you think they would have done?
Now, if some bad people were in there, they could have done illegal bad things, and nobody wants that.
But even if they'd captured Pelosi and Pence, was the rest of the country going to surrender?
What would make that a coup?
It would make it a crime that should be punishable by the maximum force.
But how do you control the whole country by taking one person or two people hostage?
That's not a thing.
It's not even slightly a thing.
And how would you keep them and hold them hostage with your twist ties and your Viking hat?
Now, I'm sure some people were armed, but did anybody bring out a gun?
Obviously, they didn't intend to use weapons, because they had them.
They didn't use them. And they had every reason to want to use them if it had been an insurrection.
If it had been an insurrection, they would have used weapons.
You mean actual guns, weapons.
But they use clubs. You can see a riot getting out of control, and those people need to pay for their crimes.
But we should not treat this like it's a serious matter of an insurrection.
No insurrection happened.
No coup attempt happened.
None. We should treat the people who are having this hallucination as people who are having a medical, mental problem.
You should laugh at it.
You should mock the people who believe that the president should be held accountable for an insurrection.
Now, he should be held accountable, he should, for his actions.
In other words, the president's lack of action to stop it I think is fully worthy of criticism.
I wouldn't push back at all on that.
So we should stop treating this like there's any doubt about whether there was an insurrection.
There's no doubt.
Nothing like that happened.
You can't see it, can't find it, can't taste it, can't smell it, can't find any evidence of it.
So the people who believed that Well, we have lots of examples of people on both sides of the political divide believing things that are just crazy.
Just absolutely crazy.
And we know that people can hallucinate and believe pretty much anything.
Just anything. People believe that the President of the United States once stood in public and called neo-Nazis fine people.
People think that actually happened.
It didn't. He said the opposite, if you watch the whole video.
So the right play for this is to treat it like the people who are having this are having a bad mental problem, that they're imagining something and they think that the president should be punished for what they're hallucinating to be true.
So that was for you, Kyle.
You were hallucinating. And if you're wondering how can you tell if you're hallucinating...
One way would be to look for evidence of that thing that you think happened.
See if you can find any.
You won't. You won't.
You won't find anything that looks like an insurrection.
Nothing. And you can look as hard as you want.
There won't be anything there. There will only be people telling you they see it.
If enough people tell you they can see it, it makes you see it.
But that's what's happening.
It's not there. There's nothing there.
Somebody say, the cop's funeral.
What about it? Did he just get blocked?
No, I didn't block him for that.
All right. Then let's talk about Trump's lawyers.
So Bruce Castor was the first lawyer...
I've never seen lawyers do a worse job.
Have you? If you watched Trump's first lawyer, Bruce Castor, it was the worst job I've ever seen of lawyering in my whole life.
It's not like I've seen a lot of lawyering, but I've never seen a worse lawyer.
The whole time I was watching him.
I was imagining what Trump was doing because you know he was watching, right?
I was imagining Trump at home watching this on TV. It's like, okay, here he goes.
All right, he's wandering a little bit.
Not getting to the point.
All right, he's going to get to the point now.
Bring it home. All right, he's telling a personal story.
Doesn't seem terribly relevant, but this won't last long.
All right, now get to the point. Defend my...
Okay, it seems like he's rambling again, but...
I know he's not going to keep rambling.
Pretty soon he's going to get to the defense.
Then, okay, he's still rambling.
He's not talking about anything that seems even related to the case.
I'm starting to drift off.
Can you imagine how mad Trump was when he watched that?
Imagine that your life is on the line and this guy goes all...
It was so bad, it was actually just funny.
But I hope it doesn't change things in a bad way for the president.
Now, his second lawyer, I guess, did a better job making the constitutional case.
But there was no point in even being there, really.
Because it wasn't as if there was anybody who was going to change their mind.
I guess one senator changed size or something.
But it wasn't going to matter.
It's a political process.
So arguing the law during a political process is just a waste of time.
So the Senate decided to vote that they do have jurisdiction.
Is that how it works?
Can the Senate simply take jurisdiction For something the Constitution does not give them jurisdiction over, can they just vote that they have it?
Well, that's what they did.
How do you vote yourself jurisdiction?
It seems like jurisdiction has to come from a higher source, doesn't it?
Like, how can you give yourself power?
Ah, there's something wrong with that, right?
I can see how a higher authority could give you power...
But how do you give yourself power?
And jurisdiction, specifically.
So, that was sketchy.
But again, it doesn't matter.
I could argue how it's illegal or non-constitutional.
None of that matters.
Once you say it's a political process, then you don't need to be legal, you don't need to be constitutional, you don't need to make sense, you don't need to use the facts, you don't need to argue with reason, you don't need to do anything.
As soon as you agree it's a political process, everything else is bullshit.
And yet, they have to present it like it's not.
It's like, oh, maybe it's sort of like a legal process.
That has nothing to do with how anybody will vote or what will happen to the country or anything.
And they're running this theater instead of doing their work.
But yesterday, even Fox News was reporting that work continues on the stimulus.
Do you think it is?
Do you think that Congress has no impact on their other business To take two weeks out and just work on this?
Because if this doesn't affect their other business, then maybe we should cut their pay.
Because if they can take two weeks out and it doesn't affect anything else they're doing, what the hell else were they doing?
Because if I take two weeks out of my job, it's going to make a big difference in my deadlines and the work backing up.
If you take two weeks off of your job and you don't have somebody filling in for you, Isn't that a big problem?
Don't you have a lot of work backed up when you come back to work?
But Congress doesn't have that problem?
They can just take two weeks out and it won't affect the other stuff they're doing?
Come on! Come on!
They're doing theater instead of their job.
Right in front of you. And they're not even really pretending that they're not doing that.
Any observer can see that it's pure theater.
And it's obvious it's affecting their other work, and we're okay with that.
We're like, oh, okay. It's entertaining.
Let's watch it.
I enjoy it, though.
Hello?
Do you hear the crickets?
Thanks to the financial stimulus, your credit card companies, Visa, MasterCard, Discover, and American Express have finally agreed to lower the interest rates.
As well as your monthly payment.
Have you noticed that your spam phone calls all sound like evening crickets for the first five seconds?
You answer the phone and you hear just like silence and crickets?
Like actually crickets. Do you wait for the crickets to be done?
Because you know it's going to be spam, right?
If it's a real person, they say hi right away.
Anyway. So, let's see what else we've got going on.
Here's the simulation winking at us.
The head of the AFL-CIO union, his name is Richard Trumka.
T-R-U-M-K-A. Trumka.
It sounds like Trump and Ivanka put together.
Trumka. Weird coincidence.
I guess. And he sided with Biden as Biden was reducing jobs in his union.
What? That's right.
His job is to make more...
The union head's job is to make sure that his union is taken care of and that they get jobs and benefits and stuff.
And he sided with Biden in reducing the number of jobs in his union.
And people have wondered...
Huh. What does it mean to be the head of a union if you're not fighting for jobs for the union, but you're fighting for the person who's fighting against that?
Now, here was his statement when it was pointed out to him in an interview on Axios, I guess.
Here was the way he presented it.
He said, quote, Richard Trumka did, I wish, talking about Biden and his Excel pipeline decision to cancel that project.
He said, I wish he hadn't done that on the first day because the Laborers International Union is right, Trump told Axios.
It did and will cost us jobs in the process.
Here's the fun part.
Watch how he spins this.
He goes, I wish he had paired that more carefully with the thing he did second by saying...
Here's where we're creating jobs.
So the head of the AFL-CIO, who knows that he just got stabbed in the back for supporting Biden, and then Biden cuts a bunch of union jobs, he's still defending the guy.
And the way he's doing it is saying, gosh, I wish he'd been more careful in pairing these new jobs with the ones that are being lost.
Because if he'd paired them better, we'd be fine.
It doesn't really work that way, does it?
It's not like those same jobs.
You can just take these steel workers or pipe fitters or whatever the hell they are and just put them in there.
It's like, ah, you're fine now.
You might have to relocate.
That's kind of a big deal.
Well, you're going to have to move away from your whole family if you want a new job.
So watching him do that was funny.
But why is it that Biden can...
Bitch slap the AFL-CIO and make them thank him for it.
Not only does he abuse them, but he makes them be nice to him anyway.
Why can't he do that to the teachers unions who are preventing kids from going back to school?
So he can throw this union under the bus, but he can't throw the teachers unions under the bus.
Now part of the problem is that there are more of them.
The teachers unions are local, so there may be just too many of them to find anybody to bribe.
Now, I'm not going to suggest that...
I do not suggest that the head of the AFL-CIO has been bribed in some way.
But others are.
Others are alleging that he must have been paid off or he has some benefit there because they don't quite understand why he's doing the opposite of his job, which is to protect jobs in the union.
So I have no reason to believe that he was paid off.
But I do ask this question.
Would that work? Would that work?
Because if it works to bribe union leaders, why aren't we doing that?
Can't we just bribe the teachers' unions?
Are there too many of them? Maybe if you get the big ones.
Now I know it's probably...
Or is it? Is it illegal?
Would that even be illegal?
Can you bribe a teachers' union?
You can't bribe an elected politician...
And it would be illegal to bribe a foreign company, right?
So you can't pay bribes overseas.
That would be illegal in the United States to pay a bribe overseas.
But could you bribe a teachers' union representative?
Could you do that? I mean, could you legally just say, look, you're ruining the whole country.
I'll tell you what.
We'll throw a couple of Bitcoin your way.
You know, one Bitcoin for your vote.
That's it. We've got some billionaires.
They want the schools open. The billionaires will pay it.
So we'll just pay you to change your mind.
Would that be illegal?
Suppose you did it overtly.
Could you do it publicly and say, look, all you teachers' unions, we will give you directly some money.
You just vote our way.
Somebody says, you're not very good at hypnosis, dude.
Well, Ronald, did you think I was hypnotizing you right now?
Is that why you were hallucinating?
Was I hypnotizing you and it wasn't working?
Let me tell you something about hypnosis, Ronald.
If I were hypnotizing you, you wouldn't know it.
I'll just leave you with that.
Here's another issue. Apparently the stimulus package is going to wrap into it also.
A $15 an hour minimum wage, which on Fox News, the headline says, it will cost 1.4 million jobs.
So if you're reading Fox News and you read the headlines, you'd say, well, that's pretty bad.
The minimum wage will go up.
I suppose that's good for the people who get the wage, but it's going to cost 1.4 million jobs.
So... So it's a bad idea, right?
That's what the headline says.
But then you read the story.
It was the CBO who said it would cost those jobs.
And the CBO also says it would lift roughly 900,000 Americans out of poverty.
If that's not in the headline, you are being fed propaganda.
So Fox News is giving you propaganda that $15 an hour minimum wage will cut 1.4 million jobs.
Completely true. True that it was estimated.
Not true that it will happen, but true that it was estimated by the CBO. But you've got to kind of put in the benefit, right?
If you show the cost, and then you put the benefit, like, way down in the story, that's propaganda.
That is not the news.
So if you think that CNN is giving you the propaganda and Fox News is giving it to you straight, that's not happening.
Here's a good example. If they were giving it to you straight, they would have told you both things at the same time.
Reduces 1.4 million jobs, lifts nearly a million people out of poverty.
That would be the costs and the benefits.
So, do you believe the CBO that it will cost 1.4 million jobs?
1.4 million. Do you believe it?
You shouldn't.
Do you think that they can actually estimate that?
They can't. That's not really something that you can estimate down to some kind of precision.
So if you have nearly a million people who will be lifted out of poverty, and you have maybe, and it's a big maybe, another 1.4 million who might lose their job, what would happen to the 1.4 million who lose their job?
Would they never get another job?
Well, if the economy is growing, I would expect all of those people to get better jobs, just different jobs.
And those different jobs would pay them $15 an hour.
So when you see that it would cost 1.4 million jobs, do you think that's forever?
Is it forever?
And if it's not forever, shouldn't that be in the story?
Because if it costs you 1.4 million jobs for only one month, And then those people go get different jobs at higher minimum wage.
Is that really so bad?
Here's my bottom line.
If you believe that economists can model this accurately enough to know which of these two things is better, the people lifted out of poverty versus the loss of jobs and some of those companies probably closing, which is the better thing?
You don't know. Do you think economists can actually model that?
No, no they can't.
It's their job to do it, so they'll produce a report because it's their job.
They've been asked to make an estimate.
I did economic estimates for a living.
You can't estimate this.
Nobody can. It doesn't matter how good you are, it doesn't matter how smart you are, it doesn't matter how good your models are, it can't be done.
But these estimates are useful for giving you sort of an idea of what the range of possibilities is.
And what they've told us is that the range of possibilities is in this million-people-affected kind of level, and of 370 million people in the country, right?
If I put it to you in that context, and I said $15 minimum wage...
Something like a million out of 370 million will be affected, but only temporarily, and then later they'll just get higher pay, because they'll eventually get a job.
Now, of course, how this works depends entirely on the The employment situation.
So as long as it's still easy enough to get a job, everything's fine.
If it's hard to get a job and you lose your job that was less than $15 an hour, well, you're in big trouble because you can't get another job.
But if there are plenty of other jobs and you lose your job that's less than minimum wage, you came out ahead because you lost your $10 an hour job And a month later, you got a $50 an hour job.
You came out ahead.
The company didn't.
Whoever was paying you was making less money.
But the point is, all of the ins and outs of this, and then you have to factor in the people who have more money, are spending more, that stimulates the economy in ways that we just can't model.
It's way too complicated because of the iterative nature of What happens with these people who get the higher wage, then they buy some stuff, and then those people buy some stuff, and it's like this whole iterative thing that you can't possibly model.
It is not modelable.
But I would agree that the total damage is probably in the million people-ish size.
That's the only thing you can take out of this.
So somebody says, why not $60 an hour?
Because that would be fucking stupid.
There are some things that don't really require an answer.
Somebody says, it's a bad idea to let the market determine the wage.
But the market doesn't.
If the market could determine the wage, that would be great.
But we do know that the market is not a perfect market.
In other words, there are lots of people...
Let me say something that will probably get me in trouble.
But if I say it right, maybe not.
The people who are working for minimum wage are some combination of young people who will someday make more, and older people who maybe don't have the skills that they could ever make more than that.
If you don't have the skills to make more than minimum wage, are you really mobile?
Can you just leave your job and go to another one?
Well, legally you can.
There's nothing stopping you legally from quitting your job and going to a new one.
But I would argue that the adults...
Who are kind of stuck in that minimum wage world, I don't know that they're so mobile.
I don't know that they really have that choice, because it might mean missing a paycheck and not eating this week or something.
So I don't know that they have the wherewithal, the ability to change jobs as easily as you would like.
So I'm questioning whether the free market is free in this case.
Now remember, the free market's a great idea until you get some problems such as a monopoly.
Would you agree that monopolies need to be dealt with?
Or would you say, well, it's a free market.
If the free market created a monopoly, then the monopoly's fine.
Just the way it is. Because you would have to have both views, I think.
If you believe that the free market will give you the right wage level, then you probably also should believe that monopolies are fine.
Because I don't think you can take a view that sometimes you can tinker with the free market and sometimes not.
You either have to say, we're going to tinker with it, or we're not.
And if you're not, you've got to let everything in.
And if you are, this is probably worthy of tinkering.
Probably worthy. It is one of the reasons that I got out of the restaurant business, by the way.
Although restaurants will probably have a different minimum wage.
They usually do. Let's see.
I saw a fake news story.
Somebody asked me what I thought of it.
And it looks obvious, fake news, but I'll tell you what it is, that Dr.
Fauci was allegedly, and I think this is not even slightly true, was saying that hydroxychloroquine was like a cure for SARS-CoV-2 back in 2005.
Now, why do I say that this is fake news?
Number one, if it were true...
It would be headline news, at least on Fox News.
It would be headline news somewhere in a big news organization, but it isn't.
Number two, it comes from an unknown source, so that's sketchy.
And number three, it is too on the nose.
It's a little too exactly like a conspiracy theory that Fauci would have...
Publicly said that hydroxychloroquine is a cure back in 2005.
So if you put those three things together, I would say there's really no chance that this is real.
I think it's just pure fake news, like pure fake news not even based on anything that ever happened.
So I think you should treat that as pure fake news.
The World Health Organization Got a scientist to look into whether the Wuhan lab was the source or what was the source of the coronavirus.
And this is a big surprise.
A guy who had close connections to the Wuhan lab and also had been helping fund them for years, you know, getting them funding, he says that there's no evidence that the lab was to blame.
Maybe it came from packaged meat that was shipped into the country.
One of the things that this World Health Organization guy did, and I know what you're thinking, China influences them, so you can't trust the World Health Organization, and I agree.
But he attacked the U.S. intelligence agencies, saying that they were wrong on many aspects about COVID. And then a lot of Americans said, what?
What? How can you, you Chinese puppet...
How can you say that the US intelligence agencies are not dependable?
Well, do you trust the US intelligence agencies?
Because you shouldn't.
They got wrong on the weapons of mass destruction.
They've been wrong on everything North Korea.
They were wrong on Russia collusion.
Have they been right about anything?
I don't know. Are they ever right?
So when I hear this guy, you know, Chinese puppet allegedly, criticizing U.S. intelligence, I say, well, you got that one thing right.
I mean, if you believe our own intelligence services, you're just a sucker.
Because they are not meant to be believed.
They are professional liars.
It's what they do.
So if you believe them, why would you believe a professional liar?
Why? It would be like, Taking Trump at face value for what he said his crowd size was.
Why would you ever do that?
It wouldn't make any sense.
So, my bottom line is I do not believe it is certain that the Wuhan lab was involved in creating some kind of a leak.
I would agree with the World Health Organization that if the only source we have that says it did come from the Wuhan lab As U.S. intelligence agencies, you don't have anything.
There is no credibility whatsoever to U.S. intelligence agencies on a question like this.
Now, there may be places where they would be credible, but certainly not on this.
So you should not believe, necessarily, that it came from the Wuhan lab.
I do think that point is well made.
That we don't know where it came from, but that's just the end of the story.
We just don't know where it came from.
That's it. That might be the end of the story.
Here's the weirdest thing.
Well, you be the judge.
Have you seen the pictures of Tom Brady shirtless after his Super Bowl win?
I guess he was frolicking recently in some beach.
And there are pictures of him shirtless.
Now, one of the things that people say is, my God, he looks the same as when he was 20.
I mean, it looks like he hasn't aged.
But I've never seen anybody who looked less like an athlete with their shirt off.
To the point where, if you couldn't tell that he's taller than I am, if you saw me with my shirt off, and let's say just a torso shot, and then you saw just a torso shot of Tom Brady...
I'm 20 years older than he is.
And I would look a lot more like an athlete with my shirt off, like not even close.
He doesn't look like he's ever exercised.
He doesn't look like he's ever exercised.
It's the weirdest thing.
And I wonder if that's part of his secret.
Because if you've ever watched tennis, you know Roger Federer is somewhat famous for being...
Not really trained in the usual way.
He doesn't have much muscle definition except his one tennis arm.
So it's weird when you see people who don't have obvious muscle structure who can do things that are very muscular.
So he says, show us evidence.
Well, I mean, can Tom Brady do that?
I don't know. Can he?
It didn't look like he could.
It looked like his arm was a little noodle.
And I'm not saying that I'm...
I'm not Arnold Schwarzenegger.
I'm just saying that legitimately, if you could only see my torso, you would think I was the athlete and you would think he wasn't.
And I don't know...
I don't know, like, how he can do the things he does with his spindly little body, but he makes it work.
I'm a fan, by the way, so I'm not...
I'm not trying to criticize Tom Brady.
I'm a big fan of everything he's done.
So that. Can I throw a football?
No. No. I can throw a football the length of my living room, probably.
Pete Vagan will do that to you.
Maybe that's it.
Maybe he's not getting enough protein.
You want a Scott calendar?
Yeah, he is 6'4", so he's got that going for him.
Yeah, if you saw me standing next to him, like full body, you wouldn't have any doubt who the athlete was.
I'm just saying it's weird that he doesn't have muscle definition.
All right, that's all for now, and I will talk to you later.
All right, Periscope is gone.
YouTube, you're still here.
You are kind to cats.
I am kind to cats. I don't know why you said that, but I am kind to cats.
Hello, realtor. All right.
I'm just looking at your comments, but they seem to be kind of random.
