Episode 1289 Scott Adams： I Try to Answer all the Coronavirus Mysteries Plus Biden's Lies
Episode Stats
Summary
An elderly man in his 80s beats a home invader to death in his own home. Should it be illegal to do that to someone over 80 years old? Also, the AP reports that life expectancy has dropped by a year because of the pandemic.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
Hey everybody, come on in here. It's about time for Coffee with Scott Adams. Best part of the day.
00:00:12.040
Every single time. And you forgot your coffee. Wait a minute, hold on. Matthew forgot his coffee.
00:00:21.040
Everybody hold on. Matthew, we're waiting for you. Okay, all right. I think Matthew has his coffee.
00:00:31.480
The rest of you, do you have your cup or mug or glass, a tank or chalice or stye, a canteen,
00:00:35.360
a jug or flask, a vessel of any kind? If you do, fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee.
00:00:41.840
Join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that got
00:00:45.740
everybody going. It's the best part of the day. It's called the simultaneous sip and it's going to
00:00:51.800
happen. Wait, wait. Somebody's not ready. John? John, are you ready? Okay, now go.
00:01:03.080
All right. I think we got everybody there. So my favorite story of the day
00:01:10.660
says way too much about me. I was thinking about not mentioning this one, but I figure
00:01:22.200
I'll just be transparent about this. I don't know what this says about me, that this is my
00:01:28.040
favorite story. There was an elderly couple, man in his 80s and his wife at home and there
00:01:36.120
was a home invader. Home invader comes in with a knife threatening to kill the wife. The 82-year-old
00:01:44.780
Vietnam veteran takes his shotgun that was, I guess, displayed on the wall, takes it off the wall
00:01:52.880
and beats the guy to death with it. Now, I'm not proud of the fact that that's my favorite story.
00:02:10.140
But I have a soft spot because there are a lot of these stories. It's usually a veteran. Have you
00:02:16.840
noticed that? It's often a veteran. So I guess whatever that military training is, that's good
00:02:24.080
stuff. It doesn't wear off no matter how long you've not been in the military. Apparently, you're
00:02:31.160
still willing to take the gun off the wall and beat somebody to death. Now, I'm extra ashamed of the
00:02:38.060
following thing. That after he had subdued the guy, he finished him off. Now, once you're over 80,
00:02:49.960
I think you can do that. I don't know if somebody, say 35, had subdued an invader in their home,
00:03:00.000
and then once the person's on the ground, they beat them until they were actually dead with a blunt
00:03:06.020
object. Wouldn't there be some kind of charges? Because once you've stopped them, I don't know if
00:03:14.500
you're allowed to finish them off. But if you're over 80, and you're a military veteran, thank you for
00:03:23.760
your service. And by the way, he was protecting his wife. And let me put forth a new rule, just in
00:03:33.240
case the legal system doesn't cover every situation. Once you've subdued somebody, and they're
00:03:41.180
unconscious, in your own home, it's probably illegal to kill them, you know, once they're no longer an
00:03:48.880
obvious threat. But I would like to propose an exception to that rule. If that guy was trying to
00:03:58.680
kill your wife, if that guy was trying to kill your wife, or any family member, you can finish them
00:04:06.720
off. You can finish the job. Because let me tell you something. If anybody ever tries to kill my wife,
00:04:15.540
and I get them down, they're not going to get a second chance. I'm not going to let them ever get
00:04:21.920
up again. Because you only get one chance to try to kill my wife. That's not like a why don't you
00:04:28.600
circle back situation. You know, we're good for now. But maybe later, you know, you could take
00:04:35.100
another try at it. No, no. If somebody tries to kill your wife, it should just be legal to finish
00:04:42.940
them off. Now, I don't think that's the way the law works. But it should. All right, let's talk about
00:04:48.160
something else. The AP reports that the US life expectancy is dropped by a year because of the
00:04:57.240
pandemic. Number one, do you believe that we can calculate life expectancy that well? Maybe we can.
00:05:06.880
But I don't know if a year is something we can necessarily pick out of the noise. But if it's true,
00:05:14.300
let's say we can measure that. Maybe we can. It's possible. Maybe we can. Do you believe that the
00:05:22.720
life expectancy dropped by a year? What if it did? Suppose it did drop by a year. Would that
00:05:29.400
would that convince you that this wasn't just a bad cold? Yeah, a lot of people doubting it. Yeah,
00:05:37.520
I feel like, I feel as if the only rational opinion to have about any data is that maybe not. Maybe the
00:05:50.360
data is wrong. Because how often have we seen accurate data in the last year? Never? How about
00:05:57.760
never? Have we seen any accurate data on anything? Because everything that we've seen has been revised
00:06:06.600
revised? Do you think they're done revising? I don't think so. We haven't seen any accurate data
00:06:14.200
in a year. But then we get this new one, and we're like, well, here's some data. I guess this is accurate.
00:06:20.600
Looks like it's got a source. So if we've learned nothing from the pandemic,
00:06:26.880
the one thing we should take away is that you can't trust any of your data, any of it. Now,
00:06:33.820
you still have to make decisions. So what the hell are you going to do? You don't trust any of your
00:06:38.940
data, but you have to make decisions anyway. You don't get a pass, and even doing nothing is a
00:06:45.920
decision. So what the hell are you going to do? So you're going to have to take some guesses about
00:06:51.000
what to believe. If I had to rank the things that are likely to be true, I would say that measuring the
00:06:58.960
life expectancy, probably one of the things we can do a little bit better than other things.
00:07:06.320
Probably. I would imagine that the system for reporting actual deaths, no matter the cause,
00:07:13.200
is probably pretty advanced, I would think. Now, we don't know the cause exactly. I mean,
00:07:19.120
there could have been some mixture of causes for this. But keep an eye on that. All right,
00:07:24.380
here's the biggest question of the day. Why the hell are coronavirus deaths and infections and
00:07:33.840
hospitalizations plummeting all over the world at the same time? Is the reason that they're plummeting
00:07:42.440
at the same time all over the world? Seasonality? Because it's different seasons all over the world.
00:07:53.380
It's not the same season. And if, as happened to me this morning, when I said, hey, it's plummeting,
00:08:04.020
people said to me, and I would like to give a good impression of the average person who responded to me,
00:08:10.420
duh, Scott, everybody knows a virus is seasonal. It's seasonal. And so when you see it acting
00:08:21.060
seasonally, why are you surprised that a virus which is always seasonal is acting seasonally? Scott,
00:08:31.220
why don't you understand that? To which I say, I was not under the impression that a virus even uses a
00:08:42.980
calendar. How does the virus know? How does it know what season it is? Right? If the virus doesn't
00:08:54.200
know what season it is, how can it go away? Oh, I know what you're saying. Seasonality is really just
00:09:02.780
a shorthand for the obvious stuff, right? There's more sunshine, there's more vitamin D. When it's
00:09:10.000
warmer, the virus maybe doesn't do the same stuff. You know, plus you're indoors more. So it's all of
00:09:18.340
that stuff, right? You're indoors more. Don't get the sun. The heat doesn't kill the virus when it's on
00:09:25.720
surfaces, right? All debunked. It's all been debunked. Each component of seasonality has been
00:09:36.220
debunked. In other words, they've studied humidity. Doesn't seem to be the answer. It's not the heat,
00:09:42.880
exactly. Because let me ask you this. How much time do you spend outdoors in, let's say,
00:09:50.600
Palm Springs? Or, well, actually, they probably golf a lot in the winter. But you would notice
00:09:59.000
all of it. If any of those sub things within seasonality, if any one of them actually made a
00:10:06.720
difference, we would know that by now, right? Because you could just look at different places.
00:10:10.860
Take a place that's really hot, and it's so hot that they don't go outside in the winter,
00:10:18.440
in the summer, I mean. So they don't go outside in the summer because it's too hot.
00:10:23.220
Do they have a plunge in viruses because it's summer? Or do they have an increase in infections
00:10:32.300
because they're indoors because it's so hot they have to stay indoors?
00:10:35.840
We don't see that. So we're not seeing a correlation with staying indoors because people
00:10:45.980
do it in hot places. We don't see scientifically that it's the heat or the humidity. They test
00:10:52.200
that in labs, et cetera, and it doesn't seem to make a difference. So every component of seasonality,
00:11:00.020
including, and I hate to say this, but I think vitamin D has been debunked.
00:11:08.000
Now, I'm not going to say that for sure, but I think it has. And here's why. Because I believe
00:11:15.480
that every time you see a study about vitamin D, it's at least as likely to be a backwards correlation,
00:11:22.140
meaning that people who have low vitamin D have the worst outcomes, but people who are unhealthy
00:11:28.240
in general probably have low vitamin D. So it might be telling you nothing except that people
00:11:35.320
who are generally unhealthy are more likely to die. Number two, we know that when people get the
00:11:41.600
vitamin D concentrate or the activated vitamin D, whatever it is, in the hospitals, some studies
00:11:49.640
are saying that it makes a difference. So therefore you say, well, wait a minute. If it makes people
00:11:55.520
better in the hospital, duh, it must be good to take your vitamin D pills and get some sun.
00:12:03.200
But apparently the type of vitamin D that you get in the hospital is an activated type. You can't buy a
00:12:11.920
pill over the counter that gives you that. And you probably can't get sunshine that would be equal
00:12:17.920
to what you're getting in the hospital with that activated vitamin D. So I don't think vitamin D is
00:12:25.280
the answer, although I'm fairly confident that it's some part of the equation. But I don't think it's
00:12:34.200
the big thing. It doesn't seem to be that correlated or correlated enough with the big peaks and valleys.
00:12:41.140
Then I saw somebody said, it's really about holiday get-togethers. Because if you look at the United
00:12:49.680
States, our peaks are perfectly correlated with Halloween, Thanksgiving, and then Christmas.
00:12:58.300
And you look at the graph and you go, oh, it's pretty convincing. And then the skeptic comes in
00:13:03.620
five seconds later and says, you're forgetting the regional effects. If you look at the country's average,
00:13:11.140
it does look correlated with those three events. But if you look at regions, there are regions that
00:13:17.380
didn't have that effect. How could that be? It was only the average that looked like it. But how in the
00:13:24.840
world could there be a region in the United States that didn't have a Christmas effect? Is there some
00:13:31.340
region in the United States where they don't celebrate Christmas the same way? I don't think so.
00:13:37.020
It's pretty uniform across the country, I think. So almost everything that you can come down to
00:13:46.200
doesn't matter. What about leadership? How about leadership? We've got countries doing all kinds
00:13:54.040
of different things from Sweden to India to China to the United States. All kinds of different
00:14:02.480
leadership things. And they're all having similar peaks and valleys, no matter what the leaders are
00:14:09.220
doing. How do you explain that? Does that tell you that masks don't work? It doesn't tell you that.
00:14:16.980
It definitely doesn't tell you that masks don't work. It just tells you we can't suss out how much it
00:14:24.720
works and explain the whole curves that way. Because the beginning of those big peaks and valleys that we
00:14:31.360
see, I don't think the mask wearing was much different in the beginning of the top or the end.
00:14:38.260
I haven't seen that much difference in mask wearing, where I am anyway. But the peaks and the valleys are
00:14:43.740
still happening. So while I do believe that masks work somewhat, it definitely doesn't explain the big
00:14:52.380
differences. So then I saw a tweet this morning from a very well-informed gentleman, Vincent Rajkumar.
00:15:02.800
He's a professor at the Mayo Clinic. And he's an oncologist and blah, blah. So he's got a lot of
00:15:08.340
qualifications. And he was saying that in India, there's, you know, just like everywhere in the world,
00:15:14.860
it seems there's a big drop in infections and deaths. So it's not just that the infections have
00:15:22.240
gone down. This is an important point. If you think that the reason the infections have gone down is
00:15:27.820
something about testing, you know, Biden's in office, so we're testing less or whatever. Keep in mind,
00:15:33.780
it's the same things happening all around the world. And Biden didn't get elected anywhere else.
00:15:38.780
So it's not a Biden effect, nor is it how much they're testing. Because the correlation happens no matter
00:15:46.440
what the countries are doing. And the testing wouldn't have anything to do with how many deaths and ICU
00:15:52.680
residents there were. So we're seeing still a big mystery. And what Vincent Rajkumar adds to this is that in
00:16:03.500
India, at least, they had a gigantic spike, and now a gigantic decline. Apparently, the sero prevalence
00:16:11.400
in a few cities, Chennai is one, Chennai, if I'm pronouncing that right, was 40% in November, which
00:16:20.200
means it could easily be over 50% by now. And I think there was at least one other city in India in
00:16:28.560
which they did the study and found close to half of the people had signs of the infection without
00:16:36.460
necessarily having had any symptoms. Half. Now, if you say to me, well, that explains India.
00:16:47.880
India got some kind of herd immunity. But it doesn't explain other countries. Because other countries
00:16:55.100
did more of a lockdown. And I don't think their sero prevalence would be anywhere near 50%. It could be
00:17:02.280
close to 20. But I don't think it's anywhere near 50. And yet, the similar outcomes. So again, what the hell
00:17:11.600
is going on? Now, some of it might be that we're getting smarter about treating people when they have
00:17:17.540
symptoms. So that might be part of the ICU and death rate falling. Could be. But I know you're
00:17:25.460
going to say it's hydroxychloroquine. But the total amount of hydroxychloroquine pills that were
00:17:32.720
available in India, I saw 100 million. Now, I don't know how many pills one person takes.
00:17:39.720
But I don't think 100 million pills would explain what's happening there. Because again,
00:17:45.160
same experience in other countries doing completely different things. So even if hydroxychloroquine
00:17:52.720
works, according to the studies, and by the way, I did read a long paper saying that all of the studies
00:18:00.200
on hydroxychloroquine say they work. Now, I can't say that's true. I forget if I tweeted that. But it was
00:18:09.480
very credible. This is a problem when people like me look at scientific explanations or statistical
00:18:16.740
explanations. I'm out of my field. So I'm judging based on how it's written and whether the person
00:18:23.420
has qualifications. And, you know, I'm judging in all these indirect ways. But the argument was this,
00:18:29.400
that 100% of all the studies have shown hydroxychloroquine works. Now, you probably say,
00:18:38.660
that's not right, Scott. It was only the observational ones where you sort of look backwards
00:18:44.000
that seem to say it works. The Zelenko, the Renault, DDO, whatever. They were not randomized
00:18:52.080
controlled tests. In the randomized and controlled tests, it consistently did not show an effect.
00:19:00.200
Is that what you've heard? Would you say that this is true? As a general statement, all the ones
00:19:07.380
where you look backwards, and it's not the perfect way to judge science, but we use it if we can,
00:19:12.920
if it's the only thing we have, and those seem to universally indicate the hydroxychloroquine
00:19:19.120
probably works. But all the ones where they did a really good randomized controlled study,
00:19:24.800
the really good gold standard, it didn't work. That's what you've been told, right? Is that your
00:19:31.160
current understanding? So this paper I read, and I wish I could refer to it, made the following point,
00:19:37.080
which I'm not going to tell you is true. I'll just pass it along. The randomized controlled trials
00:19:43.720
either focused in the wrong place, meaning looking at people who already were sick,
00:19:50.520
which is not the whole point of hydroxychloroquine. You don't give it to people after they're really
00:19:55.840
sick. So some of the randomized controlled tests were just irrelevant. They're not even studying the
00:20:01.320
right thing. So throw those away. That still leaves some randomized controlled studies that showed no
00:20:06.580
effect. But there might be another reason that doesn't show effect. It could be the number of
00:20:14.380
people in the study. And if you take the number of people in the study, whether the hydroxychloroquine
00:20:21.000
worked or did not work, it wouldn't show up. Right? So the number of people in the study was not
00:20:29.380
sufficient that you could have actually proven anything, that it worked or that it didn't work.
00:20:33.940
And sure enough, they did not show that it worked. But they also didn't show it didn't work
00:20:40.240
because they didn't have enough study people. All they did is show that they couldn't show that
00:20:45.900
it worked. And how does the news present that? The news says it doesn't work. But that's not what
00:20:53.500
those tests showed, according to this person who seemed smart that I was reading. And what they did was
00:20:59.180
they took the randomized controlled tests that did study at least something close to what you were
00:21:03.780
supposed to be studying. And they added them together. I'm speaking loosely, not in statistically
00:21:11.920
technical ways. If you take the various randomized controlled tests, you add them together until
00:21:18.240
they do have statistical meaning, the benefit of the hydroxychloroquine is really clear, like it's a big
00:21:26.340
benefit. So according to this one author, the current situation is 100% of every hydroxychloroquine test or
00:21:37.240
observational trial that asks the right question about taking it early, not about taking it too late,
00:21:44.200
but about taking it early, that all of them show a big improvement. But only if you take the
00:21:52.420
randomized controlled ones and add them together so they have enough statistical weight. Now, can you
00:21:59.020
add different things together? It's not a perfect way to do it. You know, it's sort of looking at the
00:22:04.780
macro picture and doing statistics on the statistics, I guess you could say. Now, I do not promote
00:22:12.340
that point of view which I'm describing, which is somebody else's point of view and somebody who looked
00:22:17.560
into it. I'm just telling you that there is an argument out there that every look at hydroxychloroquine
00:22:25.060
showed it worked. So there's a point of view out there that says that. It is not my point of view,
00:22:32.620
so I don't get kicked off of social media. Got that? Not my point of view. Just telling you
00:22:39.720
somebody else's point of view. All right. So here's the thing. I don't think there's enough
00:22:45.160
hydroxychloroquine that was prescribed in India. I don't think 100 million tablets would explain
00:22:52.240
what's going on there. And the other problem is, apparently, if you don't get the hydroxychloroquine
00:22:57.680
pretty close to the first day you get the infection, its ability to help you decreases rapidly the longer
00:23:05.320
you wait. How many people take hydroxychloroquine the day that they get the infection? Zero? Maybe zero?
00:23:16.660
I wouldn't take any hydroxychloroquine or anything else until I had something that looked like a symptom.
00:23:24.280
And that's going to be days later, right? So I don't know that even if hydroxychloroquine works,
00:23:29.480
I don't know that could practically work. Because you don't know the day you got it. So the only way
00:23:35.620
you could do it is everybody take it all the time, I suppose. But nobody's going to take it on the day
00:23:40.120
they got the virus, because they don't know they have the virus. They're going to wait a few days. So
00:23:44.120
I'm just not even sure it would make that much difference, even if it works, the way it's being
00:23:49.440
prescribed anyway. So what do you think of, oh, I'm sorry, the seroprevalence was somewhat,
00:24:03.140
I think I may be mixing my topics a little bit. So part of the theory about India is that they would
00:24:09.140
have cross-immunity from prior coronavirus infections. Now, I thought that had been debunked,
00:24:19.520
but I don't have a source for that. Last June or so, people were talking about this cross-immunity
00:24:27.960
thing. But are they still talking about that? Because I feel like I saw something that debunked
00:24:33.940
it recently, but I don't have a source. So I'm not going to say that's true.
00:24:39.140
We'll talk about Simone Sanders in a minute. Somebody's asking about that. All right. So here
00:24:46.600
is my best guess on what it is that's driving infections all over the world. And I'll just
00:24:51.900
put this out here, because I don't have a better infection. I think the biggest factor is the degree
00:24:58.100
of strange you let into your house. Now, I'm using strange the way the old timers use strange to
00:25:05.920
refer to having sexual relations with somebody who's not your regular. That would be your strange.
00:25:14.060
So an old-timey kind of saying. It seems to me that the thing about holidays is not so much the
00:25:21.500
weather, because the weather is different all over the world during holidays, but rather it's the one
00:25:28.180
time people aren't going to wear masks and they'll be in close contact with people from other places.
00:25:33.440
I think when your family comes in town, you don't wear a mask, do you? Does anybody wear a mask if
00:25:40.360
their cousin comes into town for Christmas and your cousin is staying at your house? Are you wearing
00:25:46.800
a mask in your house because your cousin came and your cousin's from another state? Right. Oh,
00:25:54.800
somebody said yes. Somebody actually said yes. But the comments coming through are no, no,
00:26:01.020
hell no. So I think that you have this problem. The number of people who cross the transom into your
00:26:08.700
house who are not your regulars is probably 80% of the story. That's my guess. My guess is that 80%
00:26:20.460
of the infections are because you let somebody in your house who is not among your regular people you let
00:26:28.240
in the house. And that of course goes wild around, you know, holidays. And that's probably the whole
00:26:34.480
thing. Do I? Nope. Nope. I do not. So if my adult stepdaughter visits me in my house,
00:26:47.940
as she did recently, so she's socially distancing in another place typically. So I don't run into her,
00:26:54.660
you know, too many times, even though we live locally. But when my own stepdaughter comes in my
00:27:00.960
house, no, I don't wear a mask. But if anybody else comes in, when the plumber comes in, you know,
00:27:08.280
et cetera, I mask up the whole time. So anybody else who comes in my house, I'm going to mask.
00:27:13.940
But my stepdaughter? Can't do it. I just can't do it. I mean, I know I should, but I can't. Now,
00:27:25.460
I also, you know, keep a little distance and stuff, but I don't really try too hard. Right? And I think
00:27:31.620
that that's just a universal truth. You just don't mask your own family members inside your private
00:27:40.000
home. And part of it is because we're dumb. Right? We're dumb. And we think, well, my cousin looks
00:27:47.900
healthy. So I guess there's no coronavirus. Cousin looks healthy to me. And then your cousin starts
00:27:54.800
coughing. And then you go to the next level of denial. You go, well, cousin's a smoker. Probably
00:28:01.560
a smoker. It's fine. No coronavirus there. So we can very easily talk ourselves out of taking
00:28:08.420
precautions. All right. Brian Stilter humorously was arguing, I guess yesterday, that the news is
00:28:16.760
not boring without Trump. No, the news is not boring. In fact, look at all the things that
00:28:21.960
happened in January. And he said, look at all the stuff. I mean, January was full of news.
00:28:35.140
What news was Brian Stilter watching for the month of January? The only news I saw was about Trump.
00:28:44.360
What Trump did on the pandemic compared to Biden, what Trump did, you know, the Capitol assault,
00:28:51.200
Trump's impeachment, what Trump is saying. Yeah, January was full of news, Brian Stilter,
00:29:00.120
about Trump. So good luck when he's, I don't know if he'll ever be out of the news.
00:29:07.440
So now that Trump has, at least he's off Twitter, and he's maybe stepped back a little bit, we don't
00:29:13.460
know for a while. And Rush Limbaugh has passed. Who exactly is the voice of conservatives now?
00:29:22.460
Who would, there's a giant void there, isn't there? Who would you say is the voice of conservatives?
00:29:31.060
I'm seeing Tucker Carlson, Rand Paul, Ben Shapiro, Ted Cruz, Crowder, Glenn Beck. So those are the
00:29:45.880
names. Mark Stein, I'm just reading some names going by. But which one of those would carry the
00:29:53.020
weight of a Trump or a Rush Limbaugh? Which one of those has that kind of effect? Because
00:30:00.620
some of them have big audiences. Yeah, Don Bongino, Dan Bongino, Hannity. I don't know.
00:30:11.260
Don't know. I feel as if there's a void and that the ones, the ones you name are obviously the ones
00:30:19.080
who, Candace Owens, okay, Mark Levin. Yeah, you know, but all of the people that I've mentioned,
00:30:27.780
have you noticed that they all seem to be in the same sort of zone? Right? There's nobody that we've
00:30:35.940
listed who's just like obviously a level above the others in the list. They're all good names. They're
00:30:41.980
just, it's not obvious who's going to be the, you know, who emerges from that. So watching CNN turn on
00:30:49.160
the Democrats is and Biden's administration is fun. I was watching John Berman pressing Simone Sanders
00:30:57.160
on the whether teachers should get vaccinated. You have to watch that interview. It's going around
00:31:03.360
the internet. But to watch Simone Sanders avoid the question, it was a simple question. And Berman,
00:31:10.080
to his credit was, was pressing hard. And he was saying, I like this. He goes, it's not a trick
00:31:16.900
question. I feel like you guys have treated it like a trick question. Is it safe for teachers to go
00:31:23.220
back to school? And then she answers something about we think teachers should be prioritized for
00:31:29.520
vaccinations. And then John Berman says, okay, okay, that's not quite the answer to the question.
00:31:35.240
The question is, with or without vaccinations, or are you saying that they must be vaccinated before
00:31:41.440
they go back? What is your view? Is it safe for teachers to go back? Well, let me tell you what
00:31:49.360
the Joe Biden administration says about vaccinations. And like Berman is like, no, that's not the question.
00:31:56.760
It's a yes or no. And she wouldn't answer. The biggest question in the country, the biggest question
00:32:07.120
about kids going back to school, and Biden's spokesperson wouldn't directly answer it.
00:32:15.960
Are you kidding me? That's a question you have to directly answer. Let me ask you this.
00:32:21.620
Do you think Trump would not be able to answer that freaking question? Yeah, he could. Do you think
00:32:28.600
Kayleigh McEnany couldn't answer that question? Of course she could. It's not a hard question. It's a
00:32:37.360
yes or no question. Now, you can say yes or no, and then add some detail. But it's still a yes or no
00:32:43.780
question. And that was shockingly incompetent, both as communication, but also as policy. It's the biggest
00:32:54.480
question, and they can't even tell us if they have an opinion. That's like not even being there. It's like
00:33:01.720
it's like taking the time off or something. I guess there's reports that Biden's approval rate is plummeting
00:33:08.780
because of the school openings, lack of clarity. Now, remember all the words that were used about
00:33:17.000
the Trump administration? It was chaos and incompetence, chaos and incompetence. But when
00:33:24.000
this happens with the Biden administration, which sure looks like incompetence to me, I don't know how
00:33:30.120
else you could, how else could you frame it? It just looks like incompetence. Because it, and I'm not even,
00:33:36.680
I'm not even arguing against the policy. I'm saying if you can't even tell us your opinion of the
00:33:42.060
policy, that's incompetence, you know, independent of whether the policy is good or bad.
00:33:48.940
All right. Adam Kinzinger, so he's Republican, and he's, he was one of the ones who voted to impeach
00:33:57.740
Trump. And he started a group called Country First. So he doesn't like what Trump was up to.
00:34:05.400
So instead of America First, they've come up with this great, this great slogan, Country First.
00:34:13.880
I'll tell you, if you wanted to get away from the whole America First vibe, you would run to Country
00:34:22.240
First. Wait a minute. Those sound very similar, don't they? Right. The guy who's the anti-Trump can't
00:34:31.080
even come up with a fucking slogan that doesn't sound exactly like Trump. Now remember what I've
00:34:36.400
been telling you forever, that the longer Trump is out of office, the better he will look. Because the
00:34:43.000
opposition to him was reflexive. Once he's gone, and you get to actually look at the topic, and, you know,
00:34:49.720
and actually independently think what makes sense, a lot of things he got criticized for are going to
00:34:56.140
sound kind of sensible. And while Adam Kinzinger's Country First idea is not the same as America First,
00:35:05.040
if you can't even get the slogan part right, I don't even need to listen to the rest of it, right?
00:35:12.620
Because it feels like getting the slogan right, or at least not making it the same sounding as America
00:35:18.320
First, the thing you're against, or, you know, the person you're against, I guess, the policies.
00:35:24.200
I don't know. Not a good start. But country first in their context means not being political about
00:35:35.080
political decisions, but rather making decisions that are good for the country. But
00:35:40.240
Democrats don't make decisions that are good for the country, do they? Don't they make decisions that
00:35:47.140
are good for the world, not just the country? I think that's a philosophical difference.
00:35:54.200
And, anyway. So Daniel Dale, who was hired to do fact-checking during the Trump administration,
00:36:07.540
I guess he hasn't been fired yet. So in order to preserve his job, and to not make it look as if
00:36:14.840
he was just a hatchet man against Trump, he remains on the job, but now he's doing fact-checking about
00:36:21.760
Biden. Now, if Biden gave a town hall in which he made four false claims, what would be the word or
00:36:32.000
words you would use to describe someone who made several statements which were not true?
00:36:39.580
If it's Trump, would you say he's lying? You would, right? Liar, liar. But no. If it's Biden,
00:36:50.040
you say he made at least four, and I quote, false statistical claims. That's right. They were just
00:36:59.700
statistical claims. I mean, anybody can make a mistake on, like, a statistical claim. I mean,
00:37:10.480
that doesn't even count, right? How are we even, why are we even talking about it? It's not like it
00:37:17.680
was a lie. It's not like he's incompetent. I mean, those would be big problems. No, no, no. We're
00:37:24.740
talking about, like, some statistical, you know, you know, just, we don't need to talk about it. It's
00:37:31.600
just statistical stuff. Well, what were they? One, he said, Biden said if we kept the minimum wage
00:37:41.860
of $7.25, and then just, if we had indexed it for inflation, that it would already be $20 an hour by
00:37:51.620
now. So inflation would have just already pushed it to $20. So what's the big deal about $15
00:37:58.060
as a minimum wage, when it would have been $20 if you just let inflation take it from $7.25?
00:38:06.720
Except that nothing like that is true. Do you know what the inflation would have been?
00:38:13.160
Not $20. It would have gone from $7.25 an hour to a little over $8.00. So he wasn't even in the
00:38:25.960
general vicinity of the right answer. Now, that's just a statistical claim, right? It's kind of a big
00:38:32.480
one. Because the difference between doubling the minimum wage versus not even raising it is pretty
00:38:45.240
big. That's not a little statistical problem. It changes your entire impression of the topic.
00:38:53.560
Because if you told me it was true that the old minimum wage would equate to $20 if we hadn't changed
00:39:00.480
anything, I would actually find that kind of persuasive. I would say, really? Well, if it
00:39:05.320
wasn't a problem before, and it's basically the same number now, why would it be a problem now?
00:39:12.040
But in fact, it's not true. And so it changes your whole opinion of what this conversation is about.
00:39:17.480
That's not a false statistical claim. That's a real big problem for a real big topic.
00:39:24.580
What else did he have? Let's see. He claimed that a majority of undocumented immigrants are not
00:39:32.780
Hispanic. A majority of non-documented immigrants to this country are not Hispanic, he said.
00:39:40.120
What's the real number? Approximately 77%. 77% are estimated. It's hard to count exactly.
00:39:50.640
are from Latin America and Mexico. And he didn't even know that the majority are Hispanic.
00:39:59.880
He's in charge of that. He's in charge of that. Didn't know even the basics of where they're coming
00:40:09.300
from. Small statistical problem. You ignore it. That's a little statistical thing.
00:40:24.180
He was talking about, let's see, he also talked about China's demographic challenge,
00:40:28.940
because he said, they're going to end, Biden said when he came back from China one time talking
00:40:34.980
to them, they're going to end their one child policy. And they won't let in the immigrants. And
00:40:42.300
that's going to be a problem. Because more people are retiring than working in China. So he says,
00:40:49.800
how can they sustain economic growth when there are more people retiring than there are working?
00:40:55.600
And the fact check is, that's not even close to true. That's not even in the same universe
00:41:04.460
as anything that's slightly true. No, there are a lot more people being born in China than are
00:41:10.980
retiring. It's not even close. So those are just three little statistical things he got wrong.
00:41:18.720
All right. I am watching with amusement as CNN tries to handle the Governor Cuomo situation with
00:41:27.940
the nursing home deaths and then the covering up of the data, et cetera, allegedly. And now there's
00:41:35.860
a new story that Governor Cuomo threatened another politician, a Democratic assemblyman. So this is
00:41:42.980
somebody in his own party. And in a phone call, he allegedly threatened to destroy him.
00:41:50.620
Now, apparently, these Democrats are big on destroying people. I'll destroy you. Now,
00:41:55.960
remember what I told you when whoever the communications guy and Biden staff, he ended up quitting because he
00:42:04.040
had threatened that he would destroy somebody. And I told you at the time, it's actually kind of common
00:42:10.800
political talk. You know, in private conversations, I'll bet it's fairly common for a politician to or
00:42:19.340
anybody in that business to threaten to destroy somebody. I just don't think it's that unusual.
00:42:25.800
And sure enough, Cuomo threatened to destroy Assemblyman Ron Kim. Now, I would just like to point out
00:42:32.300
that 100% of the people that Cuomo has threatened to destroy are Asian Americans. 100%. There's only one of
00:42:42.520
them that we know of. But, you know, if this had been Republican, I feel like they would have pointed
00:42:47.820
that down. But here's the fun part. So Jake Tapper, to his credit, is going hard at this story and
00:42:57.060
pulling no punches, at least what I saw. How does Jake Tapper interact with his colleague, Chris Cuomo,
00:43:06.280
who works at the network, when Jake Tapper is going hard at his brother? Like, is that an awkward
00:43:14.780
situation? How do those meetings go? It feels like that would just be really awkward. But credit to CNN for
00:43:26.460
not, didn't look like they were pulling any punches, at least what I saw.
00:43:34.500
Let's see. That is about what I wanted to talk about today, except that China is claiming that
00:43:43.380
maybe the virus, COVID virus came out of an American lab. So that's what China is claiming,
00:43:50.740
that the virus might have come from an American lab. Okay. And they took the American lab virus and we took it
00:43:59.420
to Wuhan and released it near there. I mean, I don't know. What's that theory? So while I am not convinced that the
00:44:11.360
Wuhan lab is where the virus came from, I don't think that we can know that. And I certainly wouldn't trust
00:44:19.200
any of our intelligence sources on a question like that. But I don't think we'll ever know where it came
00:44:27.580
from. It was stolen from the Canadians, somebody says. Yeah, we're just never going to know.
00:44:34.960
All right. Here's my last opinion on India. The average age in India is less. Could be that they get
00:44:47.500
exposed to more things that tax their immune system. So maybe they're just more ready for it.
00:44:53.380
But there's something going on in India and other places. And we'd like to figure it out. And how did
00:45:01.800
we get to this place in the pandemic without knowing the biggest cause of what makes infections go up and
00:45:08.920
down? How could we possibly be in this situation? I mean, it feels impossible, doesn't it? That we could
00:45:15.360
be in this situation. And we still don't know the biggest cause of it. Somebody says India is Sweden.
00:45:25.920
Yeah, everything you see on the internet that says Sweden did this and got this result, you should
00:45:31.460
assume that that's all fake, or at least the credibility is zero. Some of it might be real,
00:45:36.780
but you should treat it as if it's all fake. I don't think there are any good charts about COVID
00:45:42.080
on the internet, is my thinking. We talked about hydroxychloroquine. They didn't have enough
00:45:49.040
pills even available for their own population that would have made this much difference. So even if it
00:45:54.860
worked, it wouldn't have made that much difference. They didn't have that many pills. When is monsoon
00:46:00.040
season? Yeah, I don't think it's weather. I don't think it's heat. It seems just how much
00:46:06.800
strange you let into your house. I think that's just it. Florida did it right. I don't believe that
00:46:14.020
any of the leadership hypotheses will hold up. I don't believe that in the long run you'll find that
00:46:21.220
what Florida did was the smart leadership thing. I don't think you'll find that. I think you'll find
00:46:28.360
that the biggest effects have nothing to do with what our leaders did, and had a lot to do with what
00:46:34.260
the people did in their own house probably. Just my guess. Schools never closed in Sweden. Yeah, but
00:46:40.880
all right. Oh yeah, about Kamala taking over. Yeah, so Kamala Harris is taking calls with world leaders,
00:46:47.900
and it is starting to look as if they're just prepping her for the job.
00:46:55.300
And because masks are not mandatory, it doesn't mean people aren't watching them. That's correct.
00:46:59.780
So whenever you try to compare Sweden, etc., it's hard to factor in the fact that apparently the
00:47:07.180
Swedes socially distance naturally. There's a whole lot of socially distancing going on just
00:47:13.080
naturally. They don't have many people per household, etc. That might be the whole story,
00:47:18.560
number of people per household. Yes, as somebody is asking here in the comments,
00:47:24.200
what brought the Spanish flu to an end? And the answer is we don't know. We don't know what stopped
00:47:30.640
the Spanish flu. Think about that. It wasn't immunity, because not enough people got it. But
00:47:36.940
if we don't know what stopped the Spanish flu, we're really flying blind on this one too, I think.
00:47:44.860
And I would have to say there must be some kind of natural immunity that people have, because
00:47:49.160
I don't know what else it could be. It's got to be some kind of natural immunity. Right? What else could
00:47:56.320
it be? All right, that's all I got for now. And I'll talk to you later. All right. Go back to first
00:48:07.300
principles. Give me more. Give me more than that. I hear what you're saying, but I need some context.
00:48:16.080
Am I worried about the shot? I'm going to wait until the last minute. Since it's not available
00:48:24.240
to me, I'm not going to make a decision until it is. Do you please have Montana skeptic and or
00:48:33.680
and or Tesla charts on the show to expose the Elon Musk fraud? Well, I don't know what fraud that is,
00:48:43.500
but I wouldn't bet against Elon Musk. Somebody says I had COVID, but no antibodies. Do you know,
00:48:51.840
apparently false positive COVID tests are a thing. I just heard of a number of them recently in my
00:48:59.360
personal life. And have I ever chatted with Penn Jillette? I have actually, I've hung out with
00:49:07.060
Penn Jillette after one of his shows in Las Vegas. Great guy. I like him a lot. I don't know what I'm
00:49:14.920
saying. Never bet against Elon Musk. I wouldn't. Florida did a better because they did not destroy
00:49:24.380
their economy. Well, here's the thing. We don't know why Florida is doing well.
00:49:28.820
So Florida and California acted completely differently and got the same result.
00:49:36.940
Ish. Or is it Texas? Might be Texas and California. But we know that California acted
00:49:42.720
completely differently and got the same result as as other people.
00:49:46.560
Did you miss the Texans who were frozen out from tuning in? It probably has a pretty big effect on
00:49:58.040
viewership here. Yeah. Somebody says Florida is not open and free. So they, I'm sure they have
00:50:05.560
restrictions. Yeah. I do think that not destroying your economy is important, but in terms of the number
00:50:15.020
of infections, it doesn't seem to matter what leaders do. Yeah. So I will, I'll give Florida credit for
00:50:25.400
not destroying their economy. That's for sure. All right. That's all for now. I'll talk.