Real Coffee with Scott Adams - February 18, 2021


Episode 1289 Scott Adams： I Try to Answer all the Coronavirus Mysteries Plus Biden's Lies


Episode Stats


Length

50 minutes

Words per minute

140.694

Word count

7,105

Sentence count

538

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Hate speech

9

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

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

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
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 0.71
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 0.99
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. 1.00
00:16:47.880 India got some kind of herd immunity. But it doesn't explain other countries. Because other countries 0.75
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 1.00
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 1.00
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.
00:28:27.500 Mostly about Trump.
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.
00:40:18.440 I'd say that's a pretty big difference.
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 1.00
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 0.65
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 0.98
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 0.99
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, 0.97
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.