Episode 1315 Scott Adams： The Newest HOAX From the Washington Post, CNN Turns on Biden, Shocking Poll
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Summary
Is it ever okay for a man to wear a v-neck t-shirt? And who would win in a fight between Elton John and the Pope when it comes to same-sex unions? This episode is brought to you by DIVE Studios and edited by Annie-Rose Strasser.
Transcript
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La la la la la. Hey everybody. Come on in. Yeah, it's time and you found the right place.
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Congratulations. You're doing great today. And may I mention, because I don't know if
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anybody's said it yet, but you look great today. Have you lost weight? I don't know.
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You just look healthier, younger, sexier. And it could be because you've been enjoying
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a little thing that's good for your health. You know what it is. It's called the simultaneous
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hip. And it's going to happen now. But only, only if you have a cup or mug or a glass, a
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tank or chalice or stein, a canteen jug or a glass, a vessel of any kind. And only if you
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filled it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. And join me now for the dopamine hit
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at the end of the day. The thing that makes everything better. Yeah. It's called the
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simultaneous sip. Have you heard of it? It's big. It's all over the world. And it's happening
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now. Go. Suddenly, I feel a psychic, if not a spiritual connection to every other simultaneous
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sipper everywhere in the world. But what about the people who did not sip? They're dead to
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me. It's like they don't even exist. But I'm sure they'll get with the program. Well, let's
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talk about the most important thing of the day. I just tweeted a poll for Women Only. And
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I'll ask the same thing here. So Women Only, answer me in the comments.
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Is it ever okay for a man to wear a v-neck t-shirt? This looks v-neck because I'm wearing
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a microphone, but it's not. So that's the question. Is it ever okay for a man, women only, only
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women, only women? Is it ever okay for a man to wear a v-neck t-shirt? Answers are overwhelmingly
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yes. Somebody's wife says no. Sure. Yes, yes, yes. No. I love them. Yes, yes, yes. Sure.
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Prefer them not to work, somebody says. Well, I've heard it depends on the guy. So I've heard that
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if your chest area and your arms are in reasonably good shape, you can pull it off. But if you're
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kind of hairy and you haven't worked out, maybe you shouldn't. All right. Well, we settled that.
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Let's talk about something else. I put a micro lesson on reframing, how to reframe your experience
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on the Locals platform. It's a subscription platform for seven bucks a month. You get all of my wisdom
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that you can't see anywhere else. And I was looking at the responses to it, and it looks
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like it's life-changing. And I hoped it would be. But the idea of just looking at things differently
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and then how that will change how you feel about things and how you act is a really powerful
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thing. So a lot of people are saying it's just literally life-changing. But in other news,
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Elton John has condemned the Pope for ruling that same-sex unions are sinful. And I thought to
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myself, that's kind of a fair fight, isn't it? Elton John versus the Pope. In many ways, they're the
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same person, aren't they? If you hold it, you had Elton John. Just do this exercise. Just imagine
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Elton John. And then just think sort of generally about Elton John's vibe. You know, just feel him
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just generally. Hold that in your head. Now think of the Pope. Same guy. It's the same guy. Wouldn't
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you like to see them have a cage fight and the winner gets to decide who gets married? I'd like
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that. I mean, it's two people who like flamboyant clothing and being in public. And I was trying to
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imagine who could referee this fight. And obviously, God would be the best referee. And so I'm imagining
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the Pope praying over this and praying to God. And unlike regular people, if you pray to God,
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you don't feel him actually talking back usually. Maybe some of you do. It's more of a feeling,
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right? But if you're the Pope, it's more like a phone call. And he's like, hey, God, you know,
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I've got this situation. Elton John is mad at me because of this same-sex union thing. I came out
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against it. And God would say, wait, who? Who's against you? Elton John. Elton John, I love Tiny
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Dancer. And the Pope would be, okay, let's not get sidetracked. Just a question about these sinful
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same-sex unions. Who's right, Elton John or me? And God says, have you heard Levon? It's amazing.
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I play it all the time up here in heaven. And the Pope would be, can we stay on the topic?
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So anyway, I think Elton John would probably get the nod if it came down to that.
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Did you see the shocking video of a small plane in Florida crashing into a car
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on the ground? Apparently, a few people died. Yeah, I guess a few died. It's a shocking-looking
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thing. But you have to have really bad luck. I'm not making fun of this. I'm just saying,
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you have to have really bad luck to die because a plane hit you while you were driving in your car.
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Again, I'm not making fun of it. But that is really bad luck.
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And one of the little insider things I happen to know from hanging around pilots is that the type
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of plane that this was is called a Beechcraft Bonanza. And it has a nickname. It has a nickname
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that the company who makes this airplane really doesn't want me to say. But I'm going to say it
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anyway. Among pilots, they call this plane that crashed, it's nicknamed the doctor killer.
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Yeah, I can see it in the comments. Somebody already knew that. Yeah, pilots call that type
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of plane a doctor killer. And the reason is that rich people, and doctors just being an example,
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will often get this plane and not realize that it's a little bit hard to handle. It's a little
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bit more powerful than an average plane in that class. If you were to compare this to, say, a Cessna,
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this is just stuff I hear from pilots, that a Cessna wants to land. If you get a Cessna anywhere near
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an airport and take your hands off the controls, the Cessna will just sort of land. Now, that's an
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exaggeration. You really have to land it. But it lands really easily. Whereas the high performance
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planes come in at a much higher speed, and they're built for performance, they're not built for the
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subtleties of landing. And so they're kind of difficult to land. This one is in the slightly
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difficult to land category. But I'll tell you what really struck me about it, no pun intended, is that
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when you see the video, the plane comes in at an angle like this and actually hits nose first.
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Now, I feel like it's almost impossible to hit nose first if you're still flying. So either he lost
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flight control or the pilot was unconscious, because there's almost no way that even if you lost all
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engine, you still wouldn't hit at that angle. There had to be a steering problem, I think. So when it
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comes out, we'll find out. All right. This, I almost canceled everything I was going to say today,
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just to go on a swearing, cursing streak about the next story. And this just happened. I guess
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Joy Reid was interviewing Governor Newsom about who he's going to appoint to replace
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if Senator Feinstein were to retire. And Joy Reid asked if he would appoint a black woman to the
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U.S. Senate if Feinstein retires. And his answer was, I have multiple names in mind, and the answer
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is yes. So the governor just said that if you're white, you're not in consideration for the job.
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If you're Hispanic, Hispanic American, you're not in consideration to be a senator. If you're
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Asian American, you are not considered to be a senator by the governor of New York who gets to make the
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decision. Now, I'm trying really hard to not curse. But isn't this everything that the United States
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isn't? This is everything we're not. You've probably noticed that I've been relatively, compared to a lot of
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people, relatively not much of a critic of Governor Newsom. I think he's got some explaining to do,
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right? There's some things he needs to explain. But I also generally thought, you know, he was sort of
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a well-intentioned, and he's certainly smart, right? So he has some qualities. I'm not going to ignore
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that. And I was forgiving about, you know, coronavirus decisions, because I've said everybody's guessing on
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that. And even immigration is just a tough place to be, right? Because if anybody had like a great
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solution for immigration, it would have been done by now. So I'm not even too hard on him on the things
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that clearly he seems to be failing on. Everything from forest management to energy management, a lot
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of failing. But I've been relatively okay. Well, not okay. But as a critic, I've been holding back a
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little bit. I don't know if you've noticed it. Seems like almost everybody is harder on him than I am.
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And then this happened. Alright, I'm not going to get through this without swearing. So here's your
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official warning. If you've got kids in the room, probably want to put the earmuffs on them right
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now. When you tell me, Mr. Mayor, I'm sorry, not Mayor, but Governor, that I'm not qualified for a job
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because of my skin color. Well, at that point, let's just say, you've gone too far. Now, I would
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act exactly the same way if he'd said, he didn't, but if he had said, I won't appoint a black person to
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be senator. Imagine that. How would you feel about that? Well, I'd be pretty pissed, because that's not
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the country I don't live in, right? Would you want to live in a country where your governor said, no, I'll
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definitely not appoint a black person for this senator job. You won't get even considered if you're
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black. Well, immediately, he would lose his job, of course. But you should be really, really mad. Like, if that
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happened in your country, the whole point of the fucking country is that we don't do that. Let me say
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it again. The whole fucking point of America, the whole fucking point is that we don't do that.
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That's the thing we don't do. You can do every other fucking thing. Everything. You can murder
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people. You can do all kinds of terrible, terrible mistakes. But in America, that's the one thing we
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don't fucking do. If you get that wrong, the whole experiment, you might as well just throw it in the
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fucking toilet. Like, the moment you can sit, the governor can go on television and say right to our
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faces, that your ethnicity will disqualify you for one of the top jobs in California.
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That's not the country you want to live in. And it has nothing to do with the fact that which
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ethnicity he decided to prefer for this. It has nothing to do with which one he picked. Exactly the
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same, no matter what he said, as long as he was saying some people can't be senator. Now, I get
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that diversity is important. And if you gave me a choice of having more diversity or less, I would
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take more. Certainly in a representative government, I think that's just healthy. So I want more, but not
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like this. Not this way. Is this the way you get it? Oh, my God. And the fact, the shocking thing is
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that he could say this proudly. He didn't say it like, well, you know, sheepishly, I might have to
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go this way. No, he said it like everybody should be patting him on the back and giving him a raise and
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reelected him. Yeah, I'm going to discriminate by race. It's amazing. And so I would say that this
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turned me from being, well, if Governor Newsom, you know, survives the recall, you know, so be it.
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That's what the people wanted in the state. But now I feel like I have to end him politically.
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Now I feel like I can't ignore him anymore. Like he went from, it's hard to ignore, but I can do it
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to I can't ignore this. I can't ignore this. It's way over the line. CNN held a focus group of
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Republicans who are hesitant about getting the vaccinations. And they wanted to sort of see what
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was in their heads. Like, why is it you'd be hesitant? And Anderson Cooper, who was talking
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about the segment, acted very surprised that the Republicans on the panel were being persuaded by
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science as opposed to politics. That's right. Anderson Cooper was actually surprised that the
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Republicans sounded rational. And when they said when the vaccinations, you know, first were
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announced, we were more skeptical, because we wanted more science. As more science comes in, and you know,
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we can watch the experience and get more and more information. We're more persuaded to take it,
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because we have more scientific information. And Anderson Cooper acts like he's fucking surprised
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that Republicans would be persuaded by information and science. Now, here's the thing. Are you surprised?
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I wasn't surprised, because I don't think there's anybody who isn't who isn't persuaded by additional
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information and science over time. Right? And I think he thought that it was Trump or just
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republicanism or something that was causing these people to be skeptical, as opposed to being completely
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smart, and simply being cautious, and wanting to have as much information as they could. So it's
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amazing that he's amazed, I guess. There's a story today, because the press is just so bored without
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Trump. They have to reach into the past and try to pull something back to the present to make a story
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of it. So I guess when Kushner, his last trip to the Middle East, or Israel, talking about the Abraham
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Accords, and he ran up a hotel bill of over $25,000 for room and board. And that's a big story. Do you know
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why that's a big story? Because the public doesn't know what first class hotel accommodations cost.
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It's about that much. Something like that. So, you know, could he have traveled more cheaply? Yeah,
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probably. Probably. Did I mention that Jared Kushner has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize
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for the good work he was for the good work he got done on these trips? You could argue that he could have
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traveled cheaper, but you can't argue that he didn't do something worth it. In fact, I would argue he's the
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only person who, you know, he and Avi Berkowitz might be the only people in the government who deserve the
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amount of travel accommodations that they received. They got nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
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It's amazing. So I certainly don't care about his hotel bill. David Boxenhorn on Twitter tweeted an
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article from the Times of Israel saying that they got their R factor down to 0.78. I don't think anybody
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could really measure that. Do you think any country can really measure their R factor accurately?
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But maybe they can get in the range. So if you were not up on what the R factor is, if your R is one or
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greater, it means that each person, you know, might be spreading it to enough people that it will
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spread. That's the worst explanation ever. Let me try it again. If your R is over one, it means the virus
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can spread. If it's under one, it will probably die out naturally by not having enough people to spread
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two. And we're not being, you know what I'm talking about. I don't have to do better than that. But Israel's
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already under one, reportedly. I don't know how reliable that is. I wouldn't say that's the most reliable
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kind of thing. But it's not way over one. And if you're looking for any positive signs, this one's a
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good one. Because Israel's doing well on the vaccinations, and they're getting the outcome
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that is predicted. So anytime your science says, if you do this, you'll get this outcome. And then you
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do this, and you get that outcome. That's pretty good news. All right. In the George Floyd case,
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Jack Posobiec reports that juror number 51 admits she cannot be impartial after hearing that the city
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awarded George Floyd's family a record 27 million dollars. Now, shouldn't they all say that? Is there
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a juror? Now, presumably all of the jurors know about this 27 million because one juror talked about
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it in front of the other jurors. So if they didn't see it in the news, they heard about it in the courtroom.
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Who would be dumb enough to say that they would not be influenced by that? Because of course
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everybody would be influenced by that. Wouldn't you worry if somebody said they weren't influenced by
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that? Because it means they already decided. If anybody tells you that they would not be biased
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by this $27 million award, it's only because they've already made up their mind. That's not the person
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you want on the jury. And so I ask you this. Why are we bothering to have this trial? Because I don't
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see any way that the trial outcome could be considered credible or that it wouldn't get overturned by some
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higher court for saying your trial was ridiculous. There's no chance in hell that Chauvin got a fair
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trial. So I don't know the, I don't know how this works legally, but shouldn't the judge just cancel
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the trial and try to find a venue that maybe is, you know, less likely to be this biased? I feel as
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if they have to, you know, I feel as if they have to end the trial at this point. I don't know if they
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will, but they have to. Um, so there's a Rasmussen poll result coming this morning. I don't know if
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it's published yet, but you'll see it. And they asked the question of whether people believe that
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Joe Biden was actually making the decisions of the presidency or somebody else was making those
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decisions for him. What percentage of the United States, I don't know if this was likely voters or
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not, because lots of times they limit things to likely voters, but I don't know if this one was,
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but what percentage do you think the poll said are people who believe that Biden is not actually in
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charge? If you guessed 47%, you would be right. It's funny. I'm seeing estimates of like 70% and 60%.
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Here's what I think. I think those are closer to true. I believe that, uh, Republicans all said
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Biden is not in charge and the Democrats probably mostly said he is in charge. And, and that, uh,
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if you actually, if you were to talk to a Democrat privately and nobody would ever hear what you ever
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said, the two of you, and you get, you get your Democrat, your Biden voter in a, in a closet,
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you say, look, nobody will ever hear this. Just tell me the truth. Do you think Biden's in charge?
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How many people in the closet when nobody would ever know what they really said,
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how many of them would say that Biden's really in charge? Right? I'm not so sure that the Democrats
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think Biden's in charge. I think they don't care. I think that they think that, oh, maybe it's Obama's
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behind the curtain or Hillary Clinton, or, you know, it's just the, uh, the technocrats or the money
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people or whatever, but maybe they're just okay with it. So that's interesting. Uh, there's an, a brand new
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hoax has been revealed, and this one's a big one. The Washington Post, uh, back in January 9th had
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reported that Trump had a phone call with the Georgia state elections, uh, with, uh, I guess the
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Georgia state, whatever, election official. And he reportedly said, but it turns out he didn't,
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but it was reported that he said, find the fraud. Now find the fraud was interpreted as, even if it's
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not there, go find it or give me a result that says there's fraud. I don't care if it's really
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there or not. So that's how it was interpreted. But it turns out he never even said it because an
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audio of the call was just released, never said it. And it was one of the key pieces of, uh,
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evidence for the impeachment trial. Think about that. A key piece of the impeachment trial
00:24:25.860
was based on a hoax. Now that's not true. Did I just tell you that a key part of this big public
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impeachment process was a hoax? Because that's not true. Two hoaxes. Two hoaxes were key pieces of
00:24:47.140
evidence presented. One of them was the fine people hoax, which the Republicans debunked in
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public. And the other one was this one, which wasn't debunked at the time because we didn't
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have the audio. But now we have the audio and you know that the president never said find the fraud
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and the actual things he said were not offensive at all. He was telling them to, you know, look into
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it and they might find some dishonesty there. Nothing like find the fraud. So, uh, then I have,
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I said, shouldn't the senators who, uh, perpetrated these two frauds, uh, for impeachment, shouldn't
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they be impeached? Should it not be impeachable to use hoaxes to try to change the government of the
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United States? Now, somebody else, uh, on Twitter saw that and said, oh, whoa, there's a difference
00:25:41.720
because those senators who use these hoaxes, they did not know that there were hoaxes when they used
00:25:48.620
them. Do you accept that, uh, explanation? Let's say it's true. Let's say that the, uh, the senators who
00:25:56.980
used both of those hoaxes, let's say they thought they were both true. Is it okay? No, no, it's not
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okay. Because we don't judge them by what they were thinking, do we? We judge them by what they do.
00:26:13.300
We don't judge them by what they're thinking. Because that's what they were trying to do with
00:26:19.460
Trump. They were trying to say that, well, let me say that differently. When Trump was giving his
00:26:25.820
speech in which he said, go, uh, protest peacefully, people said, yeah, he said peacefully,
00:26:33.820
but he intended to cause more of a riot or an assault. And so the president, they were trying
00:26:41.840
to impeach him based entirely upon what they believe he thought. Um, right. It was based on
00:26:51.780
what he thought, but ultimately it was more about what he did, wasn't it? So regardless
00:26:58.040
of what Trump thought, he would also be criticized by simply doing it, you know, simply getting
00:27:06.140
people stirred up, no matter what anybody thought it resulted in maybe more, more activity or
00:27:12.320
rioting than would have happened. We don't know, but that's a reasonable assumption. And
00:27:17.840
so why should the senators who allegedly did not know these were hoaxes, why should they
00:27:25.840
get a pass just because they didn't know? I think we should judge them on what they did,
00:27:33.720
not on what they knew. Take the, uh, the coronavirus performance. President Trump, uh, allegedly
00:27:42.140
was lost the election because of coronavirus performance. If, did anybody know the right
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answer? Do you think that the, that the president knew that his actions would have a suboptimal
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outcome? No. So if the president allegedly made a mistake, but he didn't know he was making
00:28:07.600
a mistake. Does he, does he get a pass? Cause he didn't know he was making a mistake. No,
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we don't judge people that way. We judge them what they actually did. And what these senators
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actually did was trying to change the government of the United States on the back of two hoaxes.
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It doesn't matter that they didn't know they were real. It doesn't matter. They should be removed
00:28:32.500
from office because they did the thing. They did the thing. That's it. Um, all right. The, uh, here's,
00:28:45.300
I love this story. If you don't mind, I'm going to be a little self-indulgent. I'll tell you about
00:28:53.640
the news here. It's a big story, but I'm going to be a little self-indulgent. Just warning you.
00:28:59.380
Um, there's a big article that you should read in New York magazine by David Wallace-Wells in
00:29:06.080
which he goes through all the various countries of the world and how they dealt with the pandemic.
00:29:10.960
And he's trying to figure out why some did better than others. You know, the big mystery that we all
00:29:15.880
have. Now the bottom line in a very large and article, that's really good. You should read it.
00:29:21.860
I think it does one of the best jobs I've seen of really putting things in context of who did what
00:29:27.540
worked and what worked and what didn't. But here was the bottom line. Nobody knows what worked.
00:29:34.220
That's the bottom line. When you compare countries and one had a good result, one had a bad result,
00:29:40.920
there's no pattern. There's no pattern. You just can't tell that what people did made that much
00:29:48.720
difference. Now there does, there does seem to be a big difference between the Asian countries'
00:29:54.300
performance, which was generally good, and the European, Western, United States, South American
00:30:01.700
countries, which was generally mediocre or bad. But we don't know exactly why. Because even within
00:30:10.980
the Asian countries, Japan did not do aggressive mitigation, but had a great result.
00:30:18.700
So you're tempted to say, well, all the Asian countries did everything right. The other
00:30:25.400
countries did everything wrong. Duh. Of course the result is different. Except that doesn't hold
00:30:32.020
up. You just look at Japan and you say, they didn't do everything right, and they got a great result.
00:30:37.760
And then you look at New Zealand, and you say, well, maybe it's more because of being an island.
00:30:43.060
Maybe the island thing makes a difference. So it looked like that the bottom line was that
00:30:49.520
it might be just chance. Just chance. Yeah, there's a big factor of obesity and age. So I think youth
00:30:59.300
and lack of obesity explains Africa. Basically, I think Africa can be completely explained by lack of
00:31:08.900
obesity and youth, in my opinion. Now genetics, we haven't determined yet how big a factor that is,
00:31:16.160
but surely that's a factor. Surely it is. But I don't know if it's an ethnic factor or a factor
00:31:21.800
within ethnicities. I would say that's an open question. So do you remember that early on in the
00:31:31.860
crisis, I made a prediction that I believe nobody else in the world made? And that prediction was
00:31:40.000
that the leadership decisions would not be determinant of the outcome. Did you hear anyone else in the
00:31:47.920
entire world ever say that? Just me, right? And this article kind of makes that case as well,
00:31:56.200
that now that we kind of know how things turned down, mostly, mostly we know, there is not a
00:32:03.140
correlation between how people acted and how the outcomes were. And we don't know why. The experts
00:32:10.100
are actually baffled. Now, they do know a whole bunch of things that make a difference. We know the
00:32:16.320
vitamin D makes a difference, the weight, probably the genetics. There's a big difference maybe in just
00:32:24.140
where you are located, what kind of travel patterns you have, are you a travel destination,
00:32:29.840
when did it hit your shores, how close were you to Italy. It turns out that proximity to Italy
00:32:36.960
is probably one of the biggest factors. Because Italy, well, you know, was sort of the second hot
00:32:44.080
spot after Wuhan. But there was something else in this article that caught my attention,
00:32:50.700
and I would like to read it to you. Okay? And you'll see why I'm reading it to you. It'll be
00:32:56.980
obvious in a minute. So this is from the New York Magazine, David Wallace Wells writes,
00:33:02.920
By American standards, Cuomo, talking about Governor Cuomo, did move quickly, putting his state in
00:33:08.620
lockdown just 20 days after the first confirmed case, three times faster than Washington State or
00:33:13.880
California. But he waited for cases to arrive on his doorstep to act. And even then, his first
00:33:22.980
instinct was to reassure rather than disrupt. In that, he was far from an outlier. Through the winter,
00:33:31.320
getting to the good part here, through the winter, the guidance from America's public health
00:33:35.560
establishment was clear. Beamed to the public through columns and op-eds, like those in the New York
00:33:40.900
Times, warning, quote, beware the pandemic panic. And in the Washington Post, arguing, quote, we should
00:33:48.260
be wary of an aggressive government response to coronavirus. Other headlines from the time, quote,
00:33:54.940
we should de-escalate the war on the coronavirus. That was from Wired. Coronavirus is scary, but the flu
00:34:01.400
is deadlier, more widespread from U.S. today. The flu is far bigger threat to most people in the U.S. than
00:34:08.300
the Wuhan coronavirus. That's from Business Insider. And before flu comparisons became a talking point
00:34:16.500
of the pandemic denier right, they were the reassuring focus of the establishment left. So the first point
00:34:25.820
is that the left-leaning people in the establishment were all telling you that the pandemic should not be
00:34:32.520
worried about. Keep that in mind. All right. And here's the money paragraph. Perhaps the
00:34:42.240
short-sighted and self-interested president, meaning Trump, would never have moved more quickly or more
00:34:48.480
emphatically in response to a different kind of warning. But governors might have, and mayors,
00:34:54.700
and the public at large. Instead, the cause of the alarm was picked up not by those in positions of
00:35:02.040
social authority or with the power to enact preparatory measures, but by a rogues' gallery
00:35:09.760
of outsiders and contrarians. Peter Navarro, Trump's personal China hawk, Scott Adams, the Dilber guy,
00:35:19.860
Balaji Srinivasan, a cryptocurrency evangelist from Silicon Valley, Eric Feigl Ding, a nutrition-focused
00:35:29.400
epidemiologist, then affiliated with Harvard, who got a bit out over his skis in a series of panic-inducing
00:35:38.040
tweets, then came in for a professional drubbing by his colleagues. Now, I could not enjoy this more.
00:35:49.860
Because in this long article about all these world leaders getting everything wrong,
00:35:57.720
I got called out by name as one of the few people in the country who got something right.
00:36:05.540
Now, I would like to make a few comments in the Murray-Gell-Man way. You know the Murray-Gell-Man
00:36:14.640
amnesia theory that you can always tell what's wrong with an article if it's about you or about
00:36:20.560
something you're an expert on. Now, in this case, I have a little insight. So let me tell you what the
00:36:26.300
news may have gotten not wrong, but maybe could have put a little more context on here. Listen to the
00:36:33.560
descriptions of these people. Number one, Peter Navarro, Trump's personal China hawk.
00:36:39.480
Is that how you would describe Peter Navarro as a China hawk? If you were just going to do
00:36:46.240
one description, China hawk? How about economist? How about famous economist?
00:36:55.040
All right. So that's what they left out about Peter Navarro. Then they talked about Scott Adams,
00:37:00.740
the Dilber guy. What'd they leave out? They left out my degree in economics, my MBA, right? I'm just
00:37:12.220
the cartoonist now. I'm the Dilber guy. So the first two people that are listed in the rogues gallery
00:37:18.400
to make us look like we're fringe nuts, they left out that we're both trained economists.
00:37:26.840
This matters because this was a math question, basically. The spread of the virus and how to do
00:37:36.680
risk management, it's kind of closer to an economics question than a medical question.
00:37:42.560
And if you leave out the qualifications of the two people who got it right, you know, being alarmed at
00:37:50.960
the right level of alarm at the right time, they both had the same education. That's not an accident.
00:37:58.300
If you leave that out of the story, it makes it look like we're like lucky, crazy people or something
00:38:04.660
instead of people who had exactly the right training to know what to do in this situation
00:38:11.320
and got it right. Isn't that a big difference in how you see this story? Because it seems presented
00:38:18.280
like, oh, there were some crazy outliers who guessed right or something. And then the next one is even
00:38:24.940
funnier. Balaji Srinivasan, he's described as a cryptocurrency evangelist from Silicon Valley.
00:38:34.060
Now, is that true? Yes, that's a true statement. You would probably embrace it himself. I think
00:38:43.020
Balaji would agree that he is a crypto evangelist and he's from Silicon Valley.
00:38:48.280
True enough. Here's what they left out. Calling Balaji a crypto evangelist is like calling Einstein
00:39:00.100
Jewish. Well, actually, I don't know if he's officially called himself Jewish, but it would
00:39:07.840
just be like picking one little thing out of somebody's life that might be the least important
00:39:14.460
thing about Balaji. Now, I won't get too much into Balaji's qualifications. But let's just say that if
00:39:23.440
you added up all of the brains of the people watching this, and all of your skills and all of
00:39:28.780
your talents, and you could somehow sum together all of our skills and intelligence, it would roughly
00:39:36.160
equal one equal one Balaji. Right? He's not normal. Like when you just refer to Balaji as a crypto guy,
00:39:46.100
you're missing the story. He's not a crypto guy. He's a guy who knows more than you know about more
00:39:55.860
things than you know even exist. He's not normal smart. He's like the kind of smart where it's,
00:40:03.940
you know, I'm the dog talking to a person. Like if you talk to Balaji for five minutes,
00:40:10.020
the recording that starts playing in your head is, I don't think I'm the same species.
00:40:15.060
I can't be the same species. Because I'm not that smart. And so they leave that out. Literally,
00:40:24.260
Balaji is literally famous in Silicon Valley as being one of the smartest people on the planet.
00:40:29.700
Right? And they just call him a crypto guy. Somebody said spell his name. So I will. First name is
00:40:38.720
Balaji. B-A-L-A-J-I. And Srinivasan is S-R-I-N-I-V-A-S-A-N. Yeah, you should follow him on Twitter.
00:40:54.040
Sure. So, God, I want to make some news here, but I'm not sure if I should.
00:41:05.700
Yeah, what the hell? What the hell? Do you want to hear some news? I don't know if this will get
00:41:12.900
outside of my little atmosphere here. So here's something that you've never heard reported.
00:41:19.480
I probably shouldn't even tell you this. Let me think about it.
00:41:29.840
No, I'm not going to tell you. I can't tell you. All right. Sorry about that. I apologize for that.
00:41:37.500
All right. There's a story about North Korean leader Kim Jong-un's sister.
00:41:42.040
And apparently she's responding to the Biden administration. And she said about the Biden
00:41:49.780
administration, if it wants to sleep in peace for the next four years, it must refrain from
00:41:54.520
causing a stink as its first step. And I thought, I wonder if this is just how North Korea opens up a
00:42:01.540
dialogue. It looks like I made everybody mad. I'm looking at the comments.
00:42:12.040
All right. I'll tell you. You want me to tell you? All right.
00:42:23.380
When the news first came out that the coronavirus had broken out in Wuhan, and we started to see the
00:42:33.260
video of what the Chinese were doing, as you might imagine, the White House was trying to decide what
00:42:41.700
to do. No surprise, right? There was also, you might not be surprised, this would not be news,
00:42:50.040
that there were two sides. There were factions within the White House who were arguing we should
00:42:55.880
close travel with China. And there were factions who said, no, no, no, that's, you know, it will kill
00:43:01.680
the economy, etc. Travel especially. And here's the part you don't know.
00:43:10.660
Somebody at the White House, who shall remain nameless, contacted me and said, we're having
00:43:16.560
this discussion in the White House. And a lot of people in the White House watch your show.
00:43:21.260
How can you make your argument, basically? So the White House did ask me to weigh in to try to
00:43:30.220
influence the internal debate by having somebody external to the White House lay it out in a way
00:43:37.560
that, you know, is outside of the system. So that it's no, it's, you know, it wasn't Don Jr.
00:43:43.680
And so I did. And some of you probably watched live the day that I came on, I just came unhooked
00:43:54.020
on closing travel from China. And it was soon after that that the president, just a few days after
00:44:00.420
that, the president actually closed travel from China. Now, when you first heard me talking about
00:44:06.540
it on live stream, did you say to yourself, that's never going to happen? Because the first time you
00:44:14.200
heard somebody say, we should close all travel to China, you might have heard it from me. You know,
00:44:18.980
if you were watching this, I probably was the first person to, to talk about it. And even when I was
00:44:26.700
saying, I was saying we absolutely have to close travel from China and have to do it right now.
00:44:31.640
But even as I said it, I didn't think it could happen. Honestly, I just didn't think it could
00:44:37.320
happen. But I knew it had to, like it was important. I'm seeing in the comments, people are
00:44:44.140
guessing, you know, famous names that you know who work there. It's not one of the famous, you won't be
00:44:50.040
able to guess it based on somebody who's in the headlines. I'll just tell you that. Okay. So it turns out
00:44:57.720
that a number of the people in the White House follow, follow this live stream, or they did in
00:45:03.140
that administration. And occasionally, and by the way, this is not that unusual. It wouldn't be
00:45:10.200
terribly unusual for factions within any administration to reach out to somebody, you know, in the public
00:45:18.100
to get an assist. Pretty normal stuff. So it was fun to see that this article in the New York
00:45:27.400
magazine sort of called me out on that. But they don't know the real backstory. So there you have it.
00:45:41.240
Yeah, they do it all the time. It is a normal process. And I don't know who else was part of that.
00:45:47.300
But yeah, there's, there's more of that story. All right. CNN looks like they're doing this slow
00:45:58.000
turn on Biden, because they have to have some bad stuff to say about him so they can produce news.
00:46:04.300
And Stephen Collinson, who's the designated Trump hit person who does, you know, frequent articles that
00:46:12.160
are all anti-Trump forever. This is what he said about Biden's handling of the child migrant surge.
00:46:20.040
So this is CNN coming down hard on Biden for basically kids in cages, but without the cages.
00:46:29.180
And this is an exact quote from CNN. But it's hard to argue that the Biden administration's
00:46:34.320
handling of the politics of the child migrant surge has been adept. That's pretty, pretty biting.
00:46:42.160
Compare that to things he said about Trump. Now let me read it again. If this isn't the weakest
00:46:51.300
criticism you've ever seen, I don't know. All right. But it is hard to argue. Why do you have to,
00:46:59.660
why do you have to soften the first part of the sentence? It's hard to argue that the Biden
00:47:05.140
administration's handling of the politics of the child migrant surge? Oh, oh, it's not a problem with
00:47:14.400
the surge itself that Biden caused. It's not a problem with all the children who are being,
00:47:21.700
you know, in this bad situation, which I thought was the whole point, that it's bad for children.
00:47:26.820
No, no, no, no. It's hard to argue that the Biden administration's handling of the politics of the
00:47:34.980
child migrant surge has been adept. It's hard to argue that it's been adept. Biting, biting commentary.
00:47:45.580
I don't know how the Biden administration will be able to sleep at night after this takedown by CNN.
00:47:50.600
So it looks like there's reports that Senator Rick Scott is preparing some kind of a DACA amnesty deal
00:48:02.360
that would, if we can build the rest of the wall, a bunch of people could be given citizenship.
00:48:11.980
That doesn't have any chance, does it? Is there any chance for a bipartisan anything in this country?
00:48:18.340
I don't think so. It feels like immigration can't be solved, but with a bipartisan anything,
00:48:24.280
because no, just nobody will do it. So I'm not saying it's a bad play. I think Senator Scott
00:48:32.220
is making exactly, exactly the right move, because you want to see that your senators are at least
00:48:40.060
trying. And, you know, I never, I'm never bothered by somebody putting on a deal offer. You know,
00:48:47.700
you do this, we'll do this. Even if I hate part of that deal, that's what a deal is. So kudos to
00:48:55.960
Senator Scott for trying to be productive. I don't know that this is going to succeed,
00:49:03.280
but at least it's adult behavior. You know, I don't mind people failing, doing the right stuff,
00:49:10.300
and at least bringing up the topic, getting people to talk about it, see what can and cannot be done.
00:49:18.100
I imagine it will fail, but it's, it's adult. And so I appreciate that. As I keep saying that we only
00:49:26.080
have a handful of senators who do anything. Am I wrong about that? Every time you hear somebody doing
00:49:31.840
something, it's the same handful of people. It's going to be, you know, it's, it's Tom Cotton,
00:49:37.060
it's Rand Paul, Senator Scott. It's, it's just like five, six people doing everything.
00:49:43.480
Everybody else is just watching as far as I can tell.
00:49:45.840
All right. All right. Just looking at your comments. And I would like to suggest a following
00:50:03.540
psychological phenomenon. It goes like this. I've told you that we're seeing not much reporting on the,
00:50:13.520
uh, the discomfort of getting your vaccination. Now it was reported by even the people who make
00:50:20.380
the vaccinations that there would be some discomfort, but aren't you surprised that the
00:50:25.600
news business, both left and right, are just not really reporting on that? Really not at all. And
00:50:33.600
that feels like a, um, a decision to make sure that people don't get talked out of doing it.
00:50:40.420
Right. But here's an interesting thing. Even though a lot of people know that they know it
00:50:47.080
hurts. And I've talked to people, uh, personally. So I've had personal conversations with people who
00:50:53.620
just got the shit kicked out of them with the second dose. So I guess the first dose gives you
00:50:58.140
like a sore arm, but by the second dose, you're going to miss work. You know, you're going to miss
00:51:05.240
24 hours recovering. But here's the thing. I'll bet if you talk to anybody who had a really tough
00:51:12.620
time, they're not complaining. And that, that's the psychological part. And you say to me, Scott,
00:51:20.680
you're going to get this shot and, you know, I hate to break it to you, but you're going to have a bad
00:51:26.400
day. The next 24 hours for you are going to be pretty bad. What do I say in reaction to that?
00:51:34.680
Give me the shot. What do I say when I'm writhing in whatever discomfort it is? Not writhing. It's not
00:51:41.460
that bad. But you know, when I'm all, let's say shaky and I don't know, sore or whatever it is the
00:51:47.120
next day, how do I feel psychologically when my body is having all these reactions and I'm not
00:51:53.720
having a good day? How do I feel? Terrific. It's the weirdest thing. But if you could, if you could
00:52:01.360
say right now, I'll give you that second shot, you're going to be writhing in pain. I would only
00:52:07.020
be happy. There's not one part of that that would make me unhappy. Number one, I would know that the
00:52:13.060
pain would be done in a day. And that always helps, right? If you know, there's a, an end date to your
00:52:18.240
discomfort. That, that makes it easier. But the fact that I would feel free or, or soon to be free
00:52:26.120
from the, the risk of the pandemic, that psychological comfort is so much bigger than
00:52:34.580
missing a day at work that people aren't even complaining about it. You know, think about it. In the
00:52:41.480
United States, we'll complain about anything. There's nothing we don't complain about. Zero people
00:52:48.040
I've heard complain about the vaccination taking them out for a day. I've heard nobody complain.
00:52:55.080
I've heard people say it was bad, but even when they describe it, it's not really a complaint.
00:53:02.360
It's interesting. I've never seen anything like this where people can be physically,
00:53:06.480
you know, sickened by something temporarily. And they won't complain. Because we feel so good
00:53:15.060
about getting to this point we've all been waiting for. It's like, give me the shot.
00:53:19.120
It's interesting. Well, I still don't know where I can get the shot. I found out that I'm eligible.
00:53:26.220
Yay for me. I didn't realize that hypertension can get you, can get you there, especially if you're
00:53:32.760
close to the, you know, the age anyway. So I'm bumping up against the age. But I also have
00:53:38.520
hypertension. So I guess that got me in. But I can't get it. As far as I know, there's no availability
00:53:45.200
of this shot whatsoever. For me personally, my health provider doesn't have it doesn't seem to be
00:53:53.120
available anywhere else. So I told you before that people being, let's say concerned about getting
00:54:01.240
the shot would never be the problem. That the problem will only be supply. Because there will
00:54:08.020
always be enough people to use up all the supply. And then those laggards will watch everybody else
00:54:13.740
get the get the shot and they'll start to convert. And you're not going to have it in the end,
00:54:18.720
I predict you won't have a problem getting enough people vaccinated. Maybe 80%. I don't think we'll get
00:54:26.320
to 100%. Oh, actually, we could get to 90. But we'll never get to 100. All right. Somebody says
00:54:37.920
Mississippi gives it to anyone above 18. But they probably don't have it. It doesn't matter that they
00:54:44.440
say they will. Yeah, the Alameda Fairgrounds, you need to that's where I would get it. It's the closest
00:54:50.620
to me. But you can't get an appointment. All right, that's it for now. And I will talk to you
00:54:57.160
tomorrow. All right, YouTubers. Walgreens. Yeah, I know that the I know all the places that do give
00:55:08.020
the shots, but they just don't have appointments. All right, that's all for now. I'll talk to you tomorrow.