Episode 1289 Scott Adams: I Try to Answer all the Coronavirus Mysteries Plus Biden's Lies
My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a
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Content:
Elderly couple threatened by home invader
COVID seasonality?
John Berman presses Symone Sanders on opening schools
Adam Kinzinger's group...Country First
Biden's "false statistical claims"...they aren't lies!
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Everybody hold on. Matthew, we're waiting for you.
Okay, alright, I think Matthew has his coffee.
The rest of you, do you have your cup or mug or glass, a tank or chalice or stein, a canteen, a jug or flask, a vessel of any kind?
If you do, fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. Join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine at the end of the day, the thing that got everybody going.
It's the best part of the day.
It's called the simultaneous sip, and it's going to happen...
Wait, wait, somebody's not ready.
John? John, are you ready?
Okay, now, go.
Alright, I think we got everybody there.
So, my favorite story of the day says way too much about me.
I was thinking about not mentioning this one.
But I figure I'll just be transparent about this.
I don't know what this says about me, that this is my favorite story.
There was an elderly couple, a man in his 80s and his wife at home, and there was a home invader.
A home invader comes in with a knife, threatening to kill the wife.
The 82-year-old Vietnam veteran takes his shotgun that was, I guess, displayed on the wall, takes it off the wall and beats the guy to death with it.
I'm not proud of the fact that that's my favorite story.
I But I have a soft spot because there are a lot of these stories.
It's usually a veteran.
Have you noticed that? It's often a veteran.
So I guess whatever that military training is, that's good stuff.
It doesn't wear off no matter how long you've not been in the military.
Apparently you're still willing to take the gun off the wall and beat somebody to death.
Now, I'm extra ashamed of the following thing.
That after he had subdued the guy, he finished him off.
Now, once you're over 80, I think you can do that.
I don't know.
If somebody, say 35, had subdued an invader in their home, and then once the person's on the ground...
They beat them until they were actually dead with a blunt object.
Wouldn't there be some kind of charges?
Because once you've stopped them, I don't know if you're allowed to finish them off.
But if you're over 80 and you're a military veteran, thank you for your service.
And by the way, he was protecting his wife.
And let me put forth a new rule, just in case the legal system doesn't cover every situation.
Once you've subdued somebody, and they're unconscious, in your own home, it's probably illegal to kill them, once they're no longer an obvious threat.
But I would like to propose an exception to that rule.
If that guy was trying to kill your wife.
If that guy was trying to kill your wife, or any family member, you can finish him off.
You can finish the job.
Because, let me tell you something.
If anybody ever tries to kill my wife, and I get them down, they're not going to get a second chance.
I'm not going to let them ever get up again.
Because you only get one chance to try to kill my wife.
That's not like a why don't you circle back situation.
You know, we're good for now, but maybe later you could take another try at it.
No, no.
If somebody tries to kill your wife, it should just be legal to finish them off.
Now, I don't think that's the way the law works, but it should.
All right, let's talk about something else.
The AP reports that the U.S. life expectancy has dropped by a year.
Because of the pandemic.
Number one, do you believe that we can calculate life expectancy that well?
Maybe we can. But I don't know if a year is something we can necessarily pick out of the noise.
But if it's true, let's say we can measure that.
Maybe we can. It's possible.
Maybe we can. Do you believe that the life expectancy dropped by a year?
What if it did? Suppose it did drop by a year.
Would that convince you that this wasn't just a bad cold?
Yeah, a lot of people doubting it.
Yeah, I feel like...
I feel as if the only rational opinion to have about any data is that maybe not.
Maybe the data is wrong.
Because how often have we seen accurate data in the last year?
Never? How about never?
Have we seen any accurate data on anything?
Because everything that we've seen has been revised.
Do you think they're done revising?
I don't think so.
We haven't seen any accurate data in a year.
But then we get this new one and we're like, well, here's some data.
I guess this is accurate.
Looks like it's got a source.
So if we've learned nothing from the pandemic, The one thing we should take away is that you can't trust any of your data.
Any of it. Now, you still have to make decisions.
So what the hell are you going to do?
You don't trust any of your data, but you have to make decisions anyway.
You don't get a pass, and even doing nothing is a decision.
So what the hell are you going to do?
So you're going to have to take some guesses about what to believe.
If I had to rank the things that are likely to be true, I would say that measuring the life expectancy is probably one of the things we can do a little bit better than other things.
Probably. I would imagine that the system for reporting actual deaths, no matter the cause, is probably pretty advanced, I would think.
Now, we don't know the cause exactly.
I mean, there could have been some mixture of causes for this.
But keep an eye on that.
All right, here's the biggest question of the day.
Why the hell are coronavirus deaths and infections and hospitalizations plummeting all over the world at the same time?
Is the reason that they're plummeting at the same time all over the world Seasonality.
Because it's different seasons all over the world.
It's not the same season.
And if, as happened to me this morning, when I said, hey, it's plummeting, people said to me, and I would like to give a good impression of Of the average person who responded to me?
Duh, Scott!
Everybody knows a virus is seasonal.
It's seasonal, and so when you see it acting seasonally, why are you surprised that a virus which is always seasonal is acting seasonally?
Scott, why don't you understand that?
To which I say, I was not under the impression that a virus even uses a calendar.
How does the virus know?
How does it know what season it is?
Right? If the virus doesn't know what season it is, how can it go away?
Oh, I know what you're saying.
Seasonality is really just a shorthand.
For the obvious stuff, right?
There's more sunshine, there's more vitamin D. When it's warmer, the virus maybe doesn't do the same stuff.
Plus you're indoors more.
So it's all of that stuff.
You're indoors more, don't get the sun.
The heat doesn't kill the virus when it's on surfaces, right?
All debunked.
It's all been debunked.
Each component...
Of seasonality has been debunked.
In other words, they've studied humidity.
Doesn't seem to be the answer.
It's not the heat, exactly.
Because let me ask you this.
How much time do you spend outdoors in, let's say, Palm Springs?
Or, well, actually, they probably golf a lot in the winter.
But you would notice, if any of those sub-things within seasonality, if any one of them actually made a difference, we would know that by now.
Because you could just look at different places.
Take a place that's really hot, and it's so hot that they don't go outside in the winter.
In the summer, I mean.
So they don't go outside in the summer because it's too hot.
Do they have a plunge in viruses...
Because it's summer? Or do they have an increase in infections?
Because they're indoors, because it's so hot they have to stay indoors.
We don't see that.
So we're not seeing a correlation with staying indoors, because people do it in hot places.
We don't see scientifically that it's the heat or the humidity.
They test that in labs, etc.
It doesn't seem to make a difference.
So every component of seasonality, including, and I hate to say this, but I think vitamin D has been debunked.
Now, I'm not going to say that for sure.
But I think it has.
And here's why. Because I believe that every time you see a study about vitamin D, it's at least as likely to be a backwards correlation.
Meaning that people who have low vitamin D have the worst outcomes, but people who are unhealthy in general probably have low vitamin D. So it might be telling you nothing except that people who are generally unhealthy are more likely to die.
Number two, we know that when people get the vitamin D concentrate or the activated vitamin D, whatever it is, in the hospitals, some studies are saying that it makes a difference.
So therefore you say, well, wait a minute, if it makes people better in the hospital, duh, it must be good to take your vitamin D pills and get some sun.
But apparently the The type of vitamin D that you get in the hospital is an activated type.
You can't buy a pill over the counter that gives you that.
And you probably can't get sunshine that would be equal to what you're getting in the hospital with that activated vitamin D. So I don't think vitamin D is the answer, although I'm fairly confident that it's some part of the equation.
But I don't think it's the big thing.
It doesn't seem to be that correlated or correlated enough with the big peaks and valleys.
Then I saw somebody said, it's really about holiday get-togethers.
Because if you look at the United States, our peaks are perfectly correlated with Halloween, Thanksgiving, and then Christmas.
And you look at the graph and you go, oh, that's pretty convincing.
And then the skeptic comes in five seconds later and says, you're forgetting the regional effects.
If you look at the country's average, it does look correlated with those three events.
But if you look at regions, There are regions that didn't have that effect.
How could that be?
It was only the average that looked like it.
But how in the world could there be a region in the United States that didn't have a Christmas effect?
Is there some region in the United States where they don't celebrate Christmas the same way?
I don't think so.
It's pretty uniform across the country, I think.
Almost everything that you can come down to doesn't matter.
What about leadership?
How about leadership?
We've got countries doing all kinds of different things.
From Sweden to India to China to the United States.
All kinds of different leadership things.
And they're all having similar peaks and valleys.
No matter what the leaders are doing.
How do you explain that?
Does that tell you that masks don't work?
It doesn't tell you that.
It definitely doesn't tell you that masks don't work.
It just tells you we can't suss out how much it works and explain the whole curves that way.
Because the beginning of those big peaks and valleys that we see, I don't think the mask wearing was much different in the beginning of the top or the end.
I haven't seen that much difference in mask wearing, where I am anyway, but the peaks and the valleys are still happening.
So while I do believe that masks work somewhat, it definitely doesn't explain the big differences.
So then I saw a tweet this morning from a very well-informed gentleman, Vincent Rajkumar.
He's a professor at the Mayo Clinic.
And he's oncologist and blah, blah.
So he's got a lot of qualifications.
And he was saying that in India, there's, you know...
Just like everywhere in the world, it seems, there's a big drop in infections and deaths.
So it's not just that the infections have gone down.
This is an important point.
If you think that the reason the infections have gone down is something about testing, you know, Biden's in office, so we're testing less or whatever, keep in mind that it's the same things happening all around the world.
And Biden didn't get elected anywhere else.
So it's not a Biden effect, nor is it how much they're testing.
Because the correlation happens no matter what the countries are doing.
And the testing wouldn't have anything to do with how many deaths and ICU residents there were.
So we're seeing still a big mystery.
And what Vincent Rajkumar adds to this Is that in India, at least, they had a gigantic spike and now a gigantic decline.
Apparently the seroprevalence in a few cities, Chennai is one, Chennai, if I'm pronouncing that right, was 40% in November, which means it could easily be over 50% by now.
And I think there was at least one other city in India in which they did the study and found close to half of the people had Signs of the infection without necessarily having had any symptoms.
Half. Now, if you say to me, well, that explains India.
India got some kind of herd immunity.
But it doesn't explain other countries, because other countries did more of a lockdown, and I don't think their seroprevalence would be anywhere near 50%.
It could be close to 20%, but I don't think it's anywhere near 50%.
And yet the similar outcomes.
So again, what the hell is going on?
Now some of it might be that we're getting smarter about treating people When they have symptoms.
So that might be part of the ICU and death rate falling.
Could be. But I know you're going to say it's hydroxychloroquine, but the total amount of hydroxychloroquine pills that were available in India, I saw 100 million.
Now, I don't know how many pills one person takes, but I don't think 100 million pills would explain what's happening there.
Because again, Same experience in other countries doing completely different things.
So even if hydroxychloroquine works, according to the studies...
By the way, I did read a long paper saying that all of the studies on hydroxychloroquine say they work.
Now, I can't say that's true.
I forget if I tweeted that.
But it was very credible.
This is a problem when people like me look at scientific explanations or statistical explanations.
I'm out of my field, so I'm judging based on how it's written and whether the person has qualifications.
I'm judging in all these indirect ways.
But the argument was this, that 100% of all the studies have shown hydroxychloroquine works.
Now, you probably say, that's not right, Scott.
It was only the observational ones where you sort of look backwards that seem to say it works.
The Zelenko, the Renault, DDO, whatever.
They were not randomized controlled tests.
In the randomized and controlled tests, it consistently did not show an effect.
Is that what you've heard?
Would you say that this is true?
As a general statement, all the ones where you look backwards and it's not the perfect way to judge science, but we use it if we can, if it's the only thing we have, and those seem to universally indicate the hydroxychloroquine probably works.
But all the ones where they did a really good randomized controlled study, the really good gold standard, it didn't work.
That's what you've been told, right?
Is that your current understanding?
So this paper I read, and I wish I could refer to it, made the following point, which I'm not going to tell you is true.
I'll just pass it along.
The randomized controlled trials either focused in the wrong place, meaning looking at people who already were sick, which is not the whole point of hydroxychloroquine.
You don't give it to people after they're really sick.
So some of the randomized controlled tests were just irrelevant.
They're not even studying the right thing.
So throw those away. That still leaves some randomized controlled studies that showed no effect.
But there might be another reason that doesn't show effect.
It could be the number of people in the study.
And if you take the number of people in the study, whether the hydroxychloroquine worked or did not work, it wouldn't show up.
So the number of people in the study was not sufficient that you could have actually proven anything, that it worked or that it didn't work.
And sure enough, they did not show that it worked, But they also didn't show it didn't work because they didn't have enough study people.
All they did is show that they couldn't show that it worked.
And how does the news present that?
The news says it doesn't work.
But that's not what those tests showed, according to this person who seemed smart that I was reading.
And what they did was they took the randomized controlled tests that did study at least something close to what you were supposed to be studying, and they added them together.
I'm speaking loosely, not in statistically technical ways.
If you take the various randomized controlled tests, you add them together until they do have statistical meaning, the benefit of the hydroxychloroquine is really clear, like it's a big benefit.
So, according to this one author, the current situation is 100% of every hydroxychloroquine test or observational trial that asks the right question about taking it early, not about taking it too late, but about taking it early, that all of them show a big improvement, but only if you take the randomized controlled ones and add them together so they have enough statistical weight.
Now, can you add different things together?
It's not a perfect way to do it.
Sort of looking at the macro picture and doing statistics on the statistics, I guess you could say.
Now, I do not promote That point of view which I'm describing, which is somebody else's point of view and somebody who looked into it, I'm just telling you that there is an argument out there that every look at hydroxychloroquine showed it worked.
So there's a point of view out there that says that.
It is not my point of view, so I don't get kicked off of social media.
Got that? Not my point of view.
Just telling you, somebody else's point of view.
All right. So here's the thing.
I don't think there's enough hydroxychloroquine that was prescribed in India.
I don't think 100 million tablets would explain what's going on there.
And the other problem is, apparently, if you don't get the hydroxychloroquine pretty close to the first day you get the infection, its ability to help you decreases rapidly the longer you wait.
How many people take hydroxychloroquine the day that they get the infection?
Zero? Maybe zero?
I wouldn't take any hydroxychloroquine or anything else until I had something that looked like a symptom.
And that's going to be days later, right?
So I don't know that even if hydroxychloroquine works, I don't know that it could practically work.
Because you don't know the day you got it.
So the only way you could do it is everybody take it all the time, I suppose.
But nobody's going to take it on the day they got the virus because they don't know they have the virus.
They're going to wait a few days. So I'm just not even sure it would make that much difference, even if it works, the way it's being prescribed anyway.
So what do you think of...
Oh, I'm sorry.
The seroprevalence was somewhat...
I think I may be mixing my topics a little bit.
So part of the theory about India is that they would have cross-immunity...
From prior coronavirus infections.
Now, I thought that had been debunked, but I don't have a source for that.
Last June or so, people were talking about this cross-immunity thing, but are they still talking about that?
Because I feel like I saw something that debunked it recently, but I don't have a source, so I'm not going to say that's true.
We'll talk about Simone Sanders in a minute.
Somebody's asking about that. All right.
So here is my best guess on what it is that's driving infections all over the world.
And I'll just put this out here because I don't have a better infection.
I think the biggest factor is the degree of strange you let into your house.
Now, I'm using strange the way the old-timers use strange to refer to having sexual relations with somebody who is not your regular.
That would be your strange.
An old-timey kind of saying.
It seems to me that the thing about holidays is not so much the weather, because the weather is different all over the world during holidays, but rather it's the one time people aren't going to wear masks and they'll be in close contact with people from other places.
I think when your family comes in town, you don't wear a mask, do you?
Does anybody wear a mask if their cousin comes into town for Christmas?
And your cousin is staying at your house.
Are you wearing a mask in your house because your cousin came and your cousin's from another state?
Right. Oh, somebody said yes.
Somebody actually said yes.
But the comments coming through are no, no, no, hell no.
So I think that you have this problem.
The number of people who cross the transom into your house who are not your regulars, Is probably 80% of the story.
That's my guess.
My guess is that 80% of the infections are because you let somebody in your house who is not among your regular people you let in the house.
And that, of course, goes wild around, you know, holidays, and that's probably the whole thing.
Do I? Nope.
Nope. I do not.
So if my adult stepdaughter visits me in my house, as she did recently, so she's socially distancing in another place typically, so I don't run into her too many times, even though we live locally.
But when my own stepdaughter comes into my house, no, I don't wear a mask.
But if anybody else comes in, when the plumber comes in, etc., I mask up the whole time.
So anybody else who comes in my house, I'm going to mask.
But my stepdaughter?
Can't do it. I just can't do it.
I mean, I know I should, but I can't.
Now, I also keep a little distance and stuff, but I don't really try too hard.
And I think that's just a universal truth.
You just don't mask Your own family members inside your private home.
And part of it is because we're dumb, right?
We're dumb. And we think, well, my cousin looks healthy, so I guess there's no coronavirus.
Cousin looks healthy to me.
And then your cousin starts coughing.
And then you go to the next level of denial.
You go, well, cousin's a smoker.
Probably a smoker.
It's fine. No coronavirus there.
So we can very easily talk ourselves out of taking precautions.
All right. Brian Stilter humorously was arguing, I guess yesterday, that the news is not boring without Trump.
No, the news is not boring.
In fact, look at all the things that happened in January.
And he said, look at all the stuff.
I mean, January was full of news.
Mostly about Trump.
What news was Brian Stelter watching for the month of January?
The only news I saw was about Trump.
What Trump did on the pandemic compared to Biden, what Trump did on the Capitol assault, Trump's impeachment, what Trump is saying.
Yeah, January was full of news, Brian Stelter, about Trump.
So good luck when he's...
I don't know if you'll ever be out of the news.
So now that Trump has...
At least he's off Twitter, and he's maybe stepped back a little bit, we don't know, for a while, and Rush Limbaugh has passed, who exactly is the voice of conservatives now?
Who would...
There's a giant void there, isn't there?
Who would you say is the voice of conservatives?
I'm seeing Tucker Carlson, Rand Paul Ben Shapiro, Ted Cruz Crowder, Glenn Beck.
So those are the names. Mark Stein.
I'm just reading some names going by.
But which one of those would carry the weight of a Trump or a Rush Limbaugh?
Which one of those has that kind of effect?
Because Some of them have big audiences.
Yeah, Dan Bongino.
Hannity. I don't know.
Don't know. I feel as if there's a void and that the ones you name are obviously the ones who...
Candace Owens.
Okay. Mark Levin.
Yeah, you know, but all of the people that I've mentioned, have you noticed that they all seem to be in the same sort of zone?
There's nobody that we've listed who is just like obviously a level above the others in the list.
They're all good names.
It's not obvious who emerges from that.
So watching CNN turn on the Democrats and Biden's administration is fun.
I was watching John Berman pressing Simone Sanders on whether teachers should get vaccinated.
You have to watch that interview.
It's going around the internet.
But to watch Simone Sanders avoid the question, it was a simple question.
And Berman, to his credit, was pressing hard.
And he was saying, I like this.
He goes, it's not a trick question.
I feel like you guys have treated it like a trick question.
Is it safe for teachers to go back to school?
And then she answers something about, we think teachers should be prioritized for vaccinations.
And then John Berman says, okay, okay, that's not quite the answer to the question.
The question is, with or without vaccinations, or are you saying that they must be vaccinated before they go back?
What is your view?
Is it safe for teachers to go back?
Well, let me tell you what the Joe Biden administration says about vaccinations.
And Berman is like, no.
That's not the question.
It's a yes or no.
And she wouldn't answer.
The biggest question in the country, the biggest question about kids going back to school, and Biden's spokesperson wouldn't directly answer it.
Are you kidding me?
That's a question you have to directly answer.
Let me ask you this. Do you think Trump would not be able to answer that frickin' question?
Yeah, he could. Do you think Kayleigh McEnany couldn't answer that question?
Of course she could.
It's not a hard question.
It's a yes or no question.
Now, you can say yes or no and then add some detail, but it's still a yes or no question.
And that was shockingly incompetent.
Both as communication, but also as policy, is the biggest question, and they can't even tell us if they have an opinion.
That's like not even being there.
It's like taking the time off or something.
I guess there's reports that Biden's approval rate is plummeting because of the school opening's lack of clarity.
Now, remember all the words that were used about the Trump administration?
It was chaos and incompetence.
Chaos and incompetence.
But when this happens with the Biden administration, which sure looks like incompetence to me, I don't know how else could you frame it.
It just looks like incompetence.
And I'm not even arguing against the policy.
I'm saying if you can't even tell us your opinion of the policy, that's incompetence.
Independent of whether the policy is good or bad.
All right. Adam Kinzinger, so he's Republican, and he was one of the ones who voted to impeach Trump.
And he started a group called Country First.
So he doesn't like what Trump was up to.
So instead of America First, they've come up with this great slogan, Country First.
I'll tell you, if you wanted to get away from the whole America first vibe, you would run to country first.
Wait a minute. Those sound very similar, don't they?
Right. The guy who's the anti-Trump can't even come up with a fucking slogan that doesn't sound exactly like Trump.
Now remember what I've been telling you forever, that the longer Trump is out of office, the better he will look.
Because the opposition to him was reflexive.
Once he's gone, and you get to actually look at the topic, and actually independently think what makes sense, a lot of things he got criticized for are going to sound kind of sensible.
And while Adam Kinzinger's country-first idea is not the same as America-first, If you can't even get the slogan part right, I don't even need to listen to the rest of it, right?
Because it feels like getting the slogan right, or at least not making it the same sounding as America first, the thing you're against, or the person you're against, I guess, the policies.
I don't know. Not a good start.
But country first in their context means not being political about...
Political decisions, but rather making decisions that are good for the country.
But Democrats don't make decisions that are good for the country, do they?
Don't they make decisions that are good for the world, not just the country?
I think that's a philosophical difference.
Anyway. So Daniel Dale, who was hired to do fact-checking during the Trump administration, I guess he hasn't been fired yet.
So in order to preserve his job and to not make it look as if he was just a hatchet man against Trump, he remains on the job, but now he's doing fact-checking about Biden.
Now, if Biden gave a town hall in which he made four false claims, what would be the word or words you would use to describe someone who made several statements which were not true?
If it's Trump, would you say he's lying?
You would, right?
Liar, liar.
But no, if it's Biden, you say he made at least four And I quote, false statistical claims.
That's right. They were just statistical claims.
I mean, anybody can make a mistake on like a statistical claim.
I mean, that doesn't even count, right?
How are we even, why are we even talking about it?
It's not like it was a lie.
It's not like he's incompetent.
I mean, those would be big problems.
No, no, no.
We're talking about, like, some statistical...
You know, just...
We don't need to talk about it.
It's just statistical stuff.
Well, what were they? One, he said...
Biden said if we kept the minimum wage of $7.25 and then just...
If we had indexed it for inflation...
That it would already be $20 an hour by now.
So inflation would have just already pushed it to $20.
So what's the big deal about $15 as a minimum wage when it would have been $20 if you just let inflation take it from $7.25?
Except that nothing like that is true.
Do you know what the inflation would have been?
Not $20.
It would have gone from $7.25...
An hour to a little over $8.
So he wasn't even in the general vicinity of the right answer.
Now, that's just a statistical claim, right?
It's kind of a big one.
Because the difference between doubling the minimum wage versus not even raising it is pretty big.
That's not a little statistical problem.
It changes your entire impression of the topic.
Because if you told me it was true, that the old minimum wage would equate to $20 if we hadn't changed anything, I would actually find that kind of persuasive.
I would say, really? Well, if it wasn't a problem before, and it's basically the same number now, why would it be a problem now?
But in fact, it's not true.
And so it changes your whole opinion of what this conversation is about.
That's not a false statistical claim.
That's a real big problem for a real big topic.
What else did he have?
Let's see. He claimed that the majority of undocumented immigrants are not Hispanic.
A majority of non-documented immigrants to this country are not Hispanic, he said.
What's the real number?
Approximately 77%, 77% are estimated, it's hard to count exactly, are from Latin America and Mexico.
And he didn't even know that the majority are Hispanic.
He's in charge of that.
He's in charge of that.
Didn't know even the basics of where they're coming from.
Small statistical problem.
You ignore it.
It's a little statistical thing.
I'd say that's a pretty big difference.
He was talking about, let's see, he also talked about China's demographic challenge because he said they're going to end, Biden said when he came back from China one time talking to them, they're going to end their one-child policy And they won't let in the immigrants, and that's going to be a problem because more people are retiring than working in China.
So he says, how can they sustain economic growth when there are more people retiring than there are working?
And the fact check is, that's not even close to true.
That's not even in the same universe as anything that's slightly true.
No. There are a lot more people being born in China than are retiring.
It's not even close.
So those are just three little statistical things he got wrong.
All right. I am watching with amusement as CNN tries to handle the Governor Cuomo situation with the nursing home deaths and then the covering up of the data, etc., allegedly.
And now there's a new story that Governor Cuomo threatened another politician, a Democratic Assemblyman.
So this is somebody in his own party.
And in a phone call, he allegedly threatened to destroy him.
Now, apparently these Democrats are big on destroying people.
I'll destroy you.
Now, remember what I told you when whoever the communications guy and Biden staff, he ended up quitting because he had threatened that he would destroy somebody.
And I told you at the time, it's actually kind of common political talk.
In private conversations, I'll bet it's fairly common for a politician or anybody in that business to threaten to destroy somebody.
I just don't think it's that unusual.
And sure enough, Cuomo threatened to destroy Assemblyman Ron Kim.
Now, I would just like to point out that 100% of the people that Cuomo has threatened to destroy are Asian American.
100%. There's only one of them that we know of, but if this had been Republican, I feel like they would have pointed that out.
But here's the fun part.
So Jake Tapper, to his credit, is going hard at this story and pulling no punches, at least what I saw.
How does Jake Tapper interact with his colleague, Chris Cuomo, who works at the network, When Jake Tapper's going hard at his brother.
Like, is that an awkward situation?
Like, how do those meetings go?
It feels like that would just be really awkward.
But credit to CNN for not, didn't look like they were pulling any punches, at least what I saw.
Let's see. That is about what I wanted to talk about today, except that China is claiming that maybe the virus, COVID virus, came out of an American lab.
So that's what China is claiming, that the virus might have come from an American lab.
Okay. And they took the American lab virus and we took it to Wuhan and released it near there.
I mean, I don't know.
What's that theory? So, while I'm not convinced that the Wuhan lab is where the virus came from, I don't think that we can know that, and I certainly wouldn't trust any of our intelligence sources on a question like that, but I don't think we'll ever know where it came from.
It was stolen from the Canadians, somebody says.
Yeah, we're just never going to know.
Alright. Here's my last opinion on India.
The average age in India is less.
Could be that they get exposed to more things that tax their immune system, so maybe they're just more ready for it.
But there's something going on in India and other places that we'd like to figure it out.
And how did we get to this place in the pandemic Without knowing the biggest cause of what makes infections go up and down.
How could we possibly be in this situation?
I mean, it feels impossible, doesn't it?
That we could be in this situation?
And we still don't know the biggest cause of it.
Somebody says, India is Sweden.
Yeah, everything you see on the internet that says Sweden did this and got this result, you should assume that that's all fake, or at least the credibility is zero.
Some of it might be real, but you should treat it as if it's all fake.
I don't think there are any good charts about COVID on the internet, is my thinking.
We talked about hydroxychloroquine.
They didn't have enough pills even available for their own population that would have made this much difference.
So even if it worked, it wouldn't have made that much difference.
They didn't have that many pills.
When is monsoon season?
Yeah, I don't think it's weather.
I don't think it's heat. It seems just how much strain you let into your house.
I think that's just it. Florida did it right.
I don't believe that...
Any of the leadership hypotheses will hold up.
I don't believe that in the long run you'll find that what Florida did was the smart leadership thing.
I don't think you'll find that.
I think you'll find that the biggest effects have nothing to do with what our leaders did and had a lot to do with what the people did in their own house, probably.
Just my guess. Schools never closed in Sweden.
Yeah, but...
All right. Oh, yeah, about Kamala taking over.
Yeah, so Kamala Harris is taking calls with world leaders, and it is starting to look as if they're just prepping her for the job.
And because masks are not mandatory, it doesn't mean people aren't watching them.
That's correct. So whenever you try to compare Sweden, etc., it's hard to factor in the fact that apparently the Swedes socially distance naturally, right?
There's a whole lot of socially distancing going on just naturally.
They don't have many people per household, etc.
That might be the whole story, number of people per household.
Yes, as somebody is asking here in the comments, what brought the Spanish flu to an end?
And the answer is, we don't know.
We don't know what stopped the Spanish flu.
Think about that. It wasn't immunity, because not enough people got it.
If we don't know what stopped the Spanish flu, we're really flying blind on this one, too, I think.
And I would have to say there must be some kind of natural immunity that people have, because I don't know what else it could be.
It's got to be some kind of natural immunity.
Right? What else could it be?
All right, that's all I've got for now, and I'll talk to you later.
All right. Go back to first principles.
Give me more. Give me more than that.
I hear what you're saying, but I need some context.
Am I worried about the shot?
I'm going to wait until the last minute.
Since it's not available to me, I'm not going to make a decision until it is.
If you please have Montana Skeptic and or...
And or Tesla charts on the show to expose the Elon Musk fraud.
Well, I don't know what fraud that is, but I wouldn't bet against Elon Musk.
Somebody says, I had COVID but no antibodies.
Do you know, apparently false positive COVID tests are a thing.
I just heard of a number of them recently in my personal life.
And have I ever chatted with Penn Jillette?
I have, actually. I've hung out with Penn Jillette after one of his shows in Las Vegas.
Great guy. I like him a lot.
I don't know what I'm saying.
Never bet against Elon Musk.
I wouldn't. Florida did better because they did not destroy their economy.
Well, here's the thing.
We don't know why Florida is doing well.
So Florida and California acted completely differently and got the same result-ish.
Or is it Texas? It might be Texas and California.
But we know that California acted completely differently and got the same result as other people.
Did you miss the Texans who were frozen out from tuning in?
It probably has a pretty big effect on viewership here, yeah.
Somebody says Florida is not open and free, so I'm sure they have restrictions.
Yeah, I do think that not destroying your economy is important, but in terms of the number of infections, it doesn't seem to matter what leaders do.
Yeah, so I'll give Florida credit for not destroying their economy, that's for sure.
