Episode 843 Scott Adams： Taking Questions on the News and Coronavirus
Episode Stats
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Summary
In this episode of Coffee with Scott Adams, we discuss President Trump's disastrous press conference, the dangers of taking infected Americans off-board a cruise ship, and the impact of a new drug called Prednisone.
Transcript
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Bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum hey everybody
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come on in we might have fewer viewers today because i'm taking questions why does that
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make sense i don't know what it does good morning it's time for coffee with scott adams
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and i'm scott adams and you are so lucky because you are in the right place at the right time
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that's important too and all you need is a cup or mug or a glass a tank or chalice or stein a canteen
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jug or flask a vessel of any kind fill it with your favorite liquid i like coffee and get ready
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for the dopamine hit of the day the thing that makes everything better it's called the simultaneous sip
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that's some good sipping right there so how many of you watched the press conference in which
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president trump went to the cdc i think put on his make america great again hat in his windbreaker as
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presidents do when they go to situations like this and disasters and i don't want to say that
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the president did everything wrong in that press conference but i think it was the worst press
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conference i've ever seen from a president gotta say um so if i'm being objective
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uh i'm reading a comment here and i i want to read it but i'm not going to uh if i'm being objective
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that was the president's worst performance at a press conference i think um i don't even know where to
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begin to say all the things that were not ideal about that i don't think it'll make any difference
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you know it's a political season so we yak about every every appearance of the candidates but
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somebody says they loved it are you kidding how could you how could you have watched that and felt
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good about it um again i don't think it's a big deal i just don't think he hit his he didn't he didn't
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hit the notes and here's what i mean by that uh i i think it was uh cn cnn who's calling it a
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muddled a muddled performance and it was kind of muddled uh there was a one point that i i just
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i couldn't watch it anymore i had to turn it off because uh he was talking about the uh testing in
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south korea and somebody in the audience said that there was testing in south korea and he you know
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he cut them off and he said there's just sampling and and uh you could see the guys behind them the
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experts going oh don't say that no and the president insisted to the reporters no you just heard from
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the experts i just heard them too they just say they're not testing in south korea they're sampling
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on those roadside tests you can apparently you can just drive up and they'll take your sample
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but that's not what the experts said they just said that the roadside stuff was where they get
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the sample and then they send it to some center where it's very rapidly tested so it is testing
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and the president said no i was here i heard it myself i'll tell you they're not testing they're
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sampling and that was just wrong and to watch his experts standing behind him and you could you could
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watch their faces just dying and they were like oh that's exactly opposite of what we said we said
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they're testing they're just sampling there um so that was less than ideal and then we talked about
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the uh cruise ship that i don't know if it's unloaded yet but as of yesterday i had americans on it
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they were trying to decide whether to treat them on the ship or to take them on shore and the president
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starts talking about how he's he's going to let them make the decision the experts will make the
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decision about what to do so that part's good but then then he says uh that he doesn't want it to
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affect his stats because the united states has a very low infection rate and if they get off the boat and
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get onto the you know onto shore that by definition raises the infection rate because now they're now
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you know in the united states and i thought to myself well that's just the worst thing you could
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have possibly said i mean really you're talking about your stats there's infected americans possibly
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at the risk of death floating just offshore of the united states and you're going to tell us about your
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stats i'm i'm really really trying hard not to curse i'm really trying hard because you know most of
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you know i'm i'm still on the this prednisone stuff that makes you uh it causes you to maybe have a
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little more anger or or flash angry more than you would and i am right on the edge of just exploding
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right now but because i can recognize it i can hold it back it's only because i know it's the drug
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if i thought this was an honest reaction if i thought the thing i were feeling and thinking right
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now were actually a reflection of exactly how i'll think and feel when this drug wears off
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i'd be exploding right now i'd be on fire because my hair is on fire right now
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and so i'll just say it calmly because i want to swear the president was talking about his stats
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while american citizens were floating offshore possibly infected now i think the stats matter
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i'm not even going to take that away from them the stats matter it matters to how we think about it
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it matters to there might be some extra risk well there would be obviously if you bought if you
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brought them onto the mainland some of the doctors could be infected of course that's the risk so
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it wasn't um it wasn't crazy to say that there's some reason that he would prefer it but he's going
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to let the experts say it so he didn't actually say anything that was technically wrong or would cause
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the wrong action so he didn't do anything that would cause the wrong action that's important
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but man that's just not the way to talk about it don't talk about your stats um
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what was the other stuff he did the other thing he did was he started bragging about how he's a
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but really the that was the time in the middle of a natural disaster to talk about your your uncle's a
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genius at mit but maybe you inherited it genetically i mean i know that you know he's it's joking and
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hyperbole and he doesn't literally mean he that he inherited genius genes he was just trying to tell
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people that he understands the situation but really wasn't the way it wasn't the time
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somebody says you are working off a fake basis use your words use your words it's okay just tell me
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what your point is you don't have to just scream in capitals that there's something i'm missing
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i'm going to take some uh calls in case you have some opinions on stuff we'll talk about the
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coronavirus we'll talk about all kinds of stuff and uh um let's just yeah oh and he said he said
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that something was perfect like his ukraine phone call i mean it was it was interesting all right
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let's see who wants to talk let's go to matthew matthew matthew matthew matthew come to me matthew
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all right matthew doesn't want to talk let's try somebody else sorry about the technology may or may not work
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guest can you hear me hello guest can you hear me can you hear me
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cliff can you hear me yes i can can you hear me do you have a question for me
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yeah i really appreciate uh the questioning period i've been dying to ask you
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what your prediction is for the the durham investigation what'll come out of that
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i'm sorry the which investigation the durham investigation that yeah well you know the the
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legal stuff i don't follow as closely as a lot of other people so if you if you wanted uh
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guesses on that something like dan bungino would be would be a better uh place but i'll give you a
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very general one my general one is he's going to say some people were naughty and nobody's going to
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well i'm i'm thinking just the evidence that's out there scott that there's going to be some there has
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to be some people indicted well i agree with you that there will be clear evidence of people doing bad
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things and here's my prediction that we the lay people will look at it and say yep that's clearly
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clearly a bad thing i guess that person's going to get indicted
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and then unless they're not famous you know some lesser famous people could always get indicted
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but i don't think any of the big names will get indicted i just think we don't live in a world
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where the people in the news can indict it at least the you know the the main ones
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now you know if you had something like a manafort that's just a different situation i mean it's a
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different level but i don't know the all of this gray area seems to go in favor of the the players
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at least on the other side so we'll see but thanks for the question
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let's see what else we got here i was expecting coronavirus questions we'll see if we get any
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i'm having a little trouble hearing you let's see if i got a volume control
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can you hear me now i do not um what's your question lynn so the crew members on that ship
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they're actually not u.s citizens they are not they are all those crew members come from other
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countries i think that that's probably one of the reasons why he doesn't want them
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all right lynn i can't hear you unfortunately you're talking very slowly or the technology is not
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working so i i apologize i couldn't hear the question and i if i'd asked you to repeat it i
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wouldn't have been able to hear it so let's see if i've got a better uh connection with somebody
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if uh if i put you on speak loudly at the very least um if you would
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timothy timothy let's see if we can get you on i'm sorry lynn i didn't mean to cut you off i just
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couldn't hear you uh okay that one didn't work let's try paul
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probably should have a producer screening calls like like important people do oh i think i actually
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added two of you can is that can anybody hear me
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no all right so the technology is just not going to work for us today
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so i guess i won't be taking questions after all but i'll take your questions on your comments
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you're saying that some of you could hear the the caller i just couldn't hear it so it didn't work
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i would have to hear it for it to work um she said the cruise ship people are not americans
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um i'm not totally sure that that makes a difference there had to be americans on it
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um i don't believe that you're saying that they're all not americans so that doesn't make much difference
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um lynn said the crew members aren't u.s citizens doesn't matter you know in this
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in this situation we're gonna have to kind of we're gonna have to be a little flexible
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somebody says it takes about 30 seconds after i add them to hear them well that wouldn't be a very good
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user experience um maybe that's just today um favorite homebrewed coffee i don't really have
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amazon is jacking up the price on their giant dried beans maybe not it's probably not amazon who's raising
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the price the way amazon works is that people have control over posting their goods and the people
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who are posting on amazon the people who have been pre-approved to post must be the one who are
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doing the gouging um there's not really any chance that it's amazon itself so don't think it's amazon
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amazon is as as far as i know has been acting very responsibly in this uh situation they've told their
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staff to stay home so i see the recommendation today is that people like me should no longer go out in
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public i've told you before how i live in the future accidentally um here's another way i live
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in the future i was telling you before in the on the topic of uh facial recognition that i've already
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lived in a world in which there was facial recognition it's because i'm a little bit famous
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if you're a little bit famous and you go out in public people recognize your face it's like facial
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recognition but only for me i walk outside and i go to the store i go to safeway and people say hey
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simultaneous sip dilbert hey so i've lived in the future where people know who i am and even what
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my job is and a lot about my biography just by looking at my face the rest of you are going to
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discover that world so someday maybe when you go to stores or parties or whatever everybody will
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recognize you by your face because they've got an app likewise similarly analogously um i'm uh i'll be 63
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in june which means i'm in the the over 60 group that are at risk but i wouldn't be a risk being
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perfectly healthy and on the youngish side of the old people unless i had a respiratory problem
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but i have a respiratory problem so i do have a history of asthma and my sinuses of course are a
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war zone so the recommendation from the cdc for me is i'll never go outside into crowds again
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think about that because that's your probably your future um except i don't think it'll last in your
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case so i'm in the future i actually can't go to public places where there are a lot of people
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if i want to follow the government's advice and i am going to follow the government's advice
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for two reasons if it were only my self-interest i i i'm not kidding about this i kind of want to get
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it over with i'm i'm definitely a pull the band-aid off kind of guy all the way i mean to my core
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i'm a pull the band-aid off guy if you've got some bad news for me i want it right now if it's
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going to hurt i want it right now if it's going to kill me maybe let's just get it over with let's do
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it so selfishly i actually kind of want to get the coronavirus and that's not even a joke now i don't
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want to go infect myself i'm not going to be an idiot but if it's going to happen anyway and i had
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a choice i'd rather sooner than later i'd rather get to the other side of it whether i'm dead or alive
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let's just get it over with and that's just a personality thing i'm not not saying that you
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should adopt that uh but there's a second and far far bigger consideration if i end up in an icu
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somebody else isn't and we're going to have some shortages so keeping myself healthy is um 100%
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in my case just you know speaking personally in my case it's really close to 100% about protecting the
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country because if the country crashes because the health care system crashes from from quantity
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i would be part of that so i'm going to do what i can do to follow the cdc's directions you know maybe
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i get infected maybe i don't but i'm going to follow the directions and lower my risk and i'm going to do
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it for patriotic reasons because if it were just for me honestly i i would get the flu i would i would
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just let's say let's do it let's uh let's dance so i'm not expecting to die and i'm not expecting
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any of you to die but i'm telling you that um we're in the new world for me it started today
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so for me today is the first day that i will restrict my outdoor active my external activities
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severely somebody says don't be fatalistic you might not get it well i think that's true might
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not get it but the only way people like me might not get it is if everybody else gets it by everybody
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else i don't mean everybody i mean a big possibly majority section of the country has to have it
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so that they can't get it again if they can't get it again then i can be around them with a low risk
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so the only way the old people will be safe in the future is when most or a lot of the young people
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actually get it don't have symptoms because young people don't have as much of a problem with it
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and reduce the number of ways it can get to me later that's the only way to kill the thing
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so i've said before that i'm reasonably sure based on observation of what we're seeing here
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that the government's plan is not to prevent it and i don't think you should go through life
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thinking that is the plan because these things don't really have that quality of being preventable
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they get they get compared to um you know the other things like what were the other things the
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SARS and the and other stuff but they don't really act the same this one might be the kind
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that just spreads faster those other ones didn't spread that fast they didn't have that quality
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but this one spreads fast and it seems to kill people now there is a question look that i would
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like to put forward to you you ready for this i'm going to give you the biggest mind mind
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word i'm not going to say imagine i was saying two words instead of one the first one starts with
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mind the second one starts with f and it's coming at you right now
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here it is we can't tell the difference between a virus that's extra deadly and one that's extra safe
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do you believe that can do you believe that we can tell the difference even even at this stage
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with all the testing and everything we've done do you think that we can tell the difference between
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a virus that's extra deadly and one that's extra safe well in order to know the difference here's
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what we would need to know then you can ask yourself do we know it we would need to know how many people
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are infected that don't have much in the way of symptoms do we know that we don't do we correct
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me if i'm wrong but aren't we finding it in 80 countries do you think it it spread in the last few
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weeks to all those 80 countries and that we caught it in 80 countries i don't think so why is it that
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here's another mystery that might be related uh africa doesn't seem to have much of a problem with it
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and people aren't sure why it's a mystery so africa doesn't have a problem that's a pretty big deal
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so there are two things here that would give you at least possibility for optimism but i do not
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encourage optimism if that sounds weird i don't encourage you to be optimistic i'm simply giving
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you the the lay of the land i'm just telling you the odds and right now if i had to guess
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i would agree with the president who believes that the death rate for this virus might continue to get
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adjusted down and there's an obvious reason for that the obvious reason is we're not good at
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testing for it and as soon as we can test we're going to find a lot more people presumably who have
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it who didn't have much in the way of symptoms so it could be that this is already the biggest most
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widespread flu you know that we've seen if if it's extra mild so let me make my case about how you can't
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tell extra mild from extra bad if it's extra bad people are dropping like flies and you can tell you
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think you know because people are dying you'd be saying oh my goodness more people died from this than
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died from the other stuff so that would be a good good indication that's extra deadly more people are
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dying but what if it's also simultaneously more people got it that part you don't know
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you know what what if it's the most viral thing that's ever been in the history of humanity
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and it's spreading like and you know just crazy but nobody's testing for it and the symptoms are
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so mild that people aren't even noticing if that's true and we haven't ruled that out yet it would
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actually be one of the most mild flus in terms of percentage in other words if you get it your odds
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of dying are just as low as any other flu it's just the more people would have it now the more people
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having it plenty big problem plenty big problem but it might suggest that that there's a way for
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it to end because if so many people get it if it's super super viral many people will get it and then
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that will prevent the people who would have the worst symptoms from being able to get it more easily
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because it would be stopped by all the people had immunity
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uh given that people like me just got the word to stay indoors and given that this virus is likely
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experts think might subside a little during the warmer summer season
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but then it might come roaring back in november uh november is polling time
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so could we see fewer elderly people voting i would say there's a hundred percent chance you'll see
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and i only thought of this just now now who does that benefit i actually don't know
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because if it's biden against trump which one of them gets the old vote do you know i don't know
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here's another factor there seems to be some kind of difference between uh liberals and conservatives
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in terms of their their gag factor or their their ickiness factor now i've seen that i'm not sure i
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totally buy the science you know there have been studies that say this that conservatives would be
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grossed down as stuff more easily than liberals is that true i don't know so but i'll just throw that
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out there as something that studies have shown to be true i'm a little skeptical of it but let's say it's true
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what does that say about election turnout if you're a conservative are you more um more freaked out
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by the coronavirus and therefore you're more likely to stay home maybe i don't know i don't think
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anybody has a handle on that so yeah in the comments you're saying the mail-in vote but here's the thing
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the the older citizens i'm guessing are also not the people who were mailing in uh votes well let me take
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that back of course there are lots of older people who are mailing in votes but i have to think it's not
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the majority and that's the group that's the hardest to change to turn into a new thing it might be easy
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for them to stay home on election day but it might be hard for them to fill out forms and you figure
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out how to mail in stuff and you know do paperwork and stuff well i think there's probably going to have
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to be a push for mail-in elections and uh as i'm thinking about this wouldn't it make sense to start
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now and have the government start pushing for mail-in votes wouldn't that make sense and wouldn't it
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maybe let me also ask this wouldn't it make sense maybe to move the election to october
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huh is that possible could you move the election up because we know with fair amount of certainty
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that the virus is going to you know come down a little in the summer and then rage back in november
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why wait till november that might be the very worst time to have an election it might be now the one
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thing about an election that's different from other things is people aren't coming necessarily
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from out of town to do it so most of the people who vote will already be in that town
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so that doesn't make it so bad as it would if it were an international conference for example
00:26:59.520
all right uh so uh having put that out there i don't think that we know at this point whether
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this is an extra mild flu or an extra terrible one we just know that a lot of people are dying
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now if you took the cruise ship for example and you say to yourself scott scott scott we do know this
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is the bad one because look at the cruise ship it's like a little laboratory and there were uh
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how many people have died on the cruise ship now give me a give me an updated number but the number
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who died on the cruise ship is obviously far worse than people the number who die on a cruise ship
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normally right number of people who would die on any given cruise ship is how many
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well let me ask you how many of you know the answer to this question how many old people die
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on a cruise ship in ordinary circumstances how often does that happen do you know what the answer
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is about once a week about once a week an old person dies on uh i think each cruise ship i'm not
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even talking about all of the cruise ships in the world i think on each cruise ship you get a you know
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one or two a week you know it's it's a big number actually and it's because obviously they don't have
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you know the high-end health facilities on the cruise ship and it's older people so it's you know
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everything the everything that you need to to kill people in one place so uh what would it mean if there
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were say 10 of them on one ship does that mean that that that that really was a bad situation well
00:28:42.280
it depends how if they were not on the ship would they have gotten to health care more more quickly
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um is it simply because they were in close quarters would a regular flu just the ordinary flu if that
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many people had it in that many in that closed spaces would it have been the same i don't know
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so yeah i'm seeing all kinds of numbers six twenty six forty five thousand single kinds of weird
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numbers in the uh in the comments so i don't know what it is but the point is uh you could have you
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could have another explanation for why there were a bunch of people dead on one ship that also had a
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lot of coronavirus so that you can't completely rule out that there's something about that that was
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unusual um but it certainly is a gigantic red flag so that said you should certainly treat this like
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it's a deadly disease you should all you should all take completely seriously the cdc's warnings you
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should do what they say uh but there is some possibility that this will will be far less of a
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problem in the end than we thought and in fact that's if i had to bet on it i'd bet on it now i'm betting
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that it's going to be less of a problem than we think not because of the virus itself being
00:30:05.400
less of a problem what i think is that when you focus the entire world on a problem
00:30:12.320
well let me back up i'm going to take a second simultaneous sip because i just woke up
00:30:23.360
that one without the introduction so i want to give you the good news
00:30:32.120
and it's of course awkward to give good news in the heart of a crisis
00:30:38.260
but there is something good happening and it has to do with where the world's at
00:30:45.480
in 2020 compared to let's say the spanish flu spanish flu happened when the world was not that
00:30:51.300
connected we didn't have internet and our medical facilities were primitive etc and we're seeing
00:30:58.300
something really different happening here and here's the way i would describe it
00:31:03.760
um have you noticed that because we're all connected and talking about this coronavirus
00:31:10.540
that i believe this is the first time we've ever had a planetary threat that everybody agreed was a
00:31:19.800
planetary threat and it's here right now can anybody fact check me on that now you're going to say
00:31:27.000
oh world war ii was a planetary threat well not really i mean it affected i don't know half the world or
00:31:35.260
whatever directly and all of it indirectly but it was it's a kind of a different situation right
00:31:42.180
but we did see the world pull together to defeat nazi germany and and the japanese ambitions at the time
00:31:50.120
but we've never seen it like this we've never seen where the citizens are all connected i'm connected to
00:31:59.340
you right now so that my thoughts are going into you you can watch in real time as your thoughts are
00:32:05.360
merging into me and i've said this about twitter and social media in general we have formed a god brain
00:32:14.820
because the the brains of the united states are no longer what they were in 1918 during the spanish flu
00:32:22.000
in 1918 it was a whole bunch of individual brains here's a scientist doing what a scientist does
00:32:29.420
maybe he can talk to some other scientists by the telegraph i don't did they have the telephone in
00:32:34.480
1918 i don't know my history well enough when it was when did everybody have commonly have telephones
00:32:41.120
it wasn't 1918 right so what were they doing telegraph write a letter to the other scientists to
00:32:47.040
to to coordinate so what we have now is wholly completely entirely different than anything we've
00:32:56.980
ever seen before we've never been this connected and we've never had a global threat that was immediate
00:33:02.960
like this one and you're just watching the entire civilization 15 billion years of evolution coming
00:33:13.960
together where as one the the citizens of earth have decided that on this question we're all on the same side
00:33:25.220
never happened before even global warming is just a controversy but there's not really a controversy about
00:33:31.780
this thing we're all on the same side we have a mortal threat we'll probably lose millions
00:33:39.020
you know worldwide it's going to change civilization we don't know how yet but it's coming
00:33:46.420
and you and i are completely connected right now i'm not separate from you we are mentally psychologically
00:33:55.980
absolutely absolutely connected that's not happened before and one of the things that that does is it
00:34:01.820
allows the what i call the god brave to be activated and you're seeing it right now you're seeing a new
00:34:11.840
form of intelligence emerging while you watch maybe there's never been anything more impressive
00:34:19.140
in all of human history than what's happening now that you don't even notice because it's so natural
00:34:25.800
you you simply have evolved into it your brain is now tapped into the collective now you might have
00:34:33.740
to be on twitter or watching television or on the phone or something for that to be active at the
00:34:38.480
moment but we're all connected right now and we have focused not a bunch of little individual
00:34:44.980
people with individual brains but we're forming a god brain now i'm not saying we're going to be a
00:34:52.200
religion or competing with your actual god if you prefer i'm saying that in effect we have now summed up
00:34:59.400
we are for the first time a cumulative brain focused on one problem one global problem at the moment
00:35:09.560
we are not one yet we're not but we're forming it fast anything that we learn about the coronavirus
00:35:17.280
in tennessee is going to be in wuhan in 60 seconds well you know as soon as it takes somebody to type it
00:35:26.860
the smartest people in the world are no longer on the sidelines in 1918 do you think the very smartest
00:35:35.300
very best people were all working on something to do with the flu no first of all they didn't have
00:35:42.320
any tools it was more of a primitive time and secondly you couldn't even find the smartest people
00:35:47.600
you couldn't find them i i turn on twitter and i see a message from uh you know balaji srinivasan
00:35:56.960
now if you don't know balaji just think one of the smartest people in the entire freaking planet earth
00:36:03.620
literally and then i go down there's a you know some messages about the coronavirus some advice from
00:36:11.500
naval ravikant again i literally speak of naval as the smartest person i've ever met true and you go
00:36:21.120
then list and you're watching all the smartest people in the world jump in and they didn't used
00:36:28.780
to be able to do that because if you were the smartest person in the world here i'm just speaking
00:36:33.660
hyperbolically but if you were super smart and you could be super useful in 1918 what could you do
00:36:40.420
you could do nothing you couldn't do a single thing but now you can and if people are jumping in
00:36:48.200
people are volunteering people are going into the fight we're not we're people aren't running away
00:36:55.160
people are going right at this thing and and a lot of and people are doing what you see me doing
00:37:02.520
essentially i mean what i did you you watched it in real time you saw me look at this feel part of it
00:37:09.640
you know i'm i'm threatened personally but all of you are as well and you can watch as i try to figure
00:37:17.900
out how to be productive now i think the best way that i can be productive is to um be part of the god
00:37:24.820
brain and to bring you voices like naval to retweet um useful things threads and such to inform you to
00:37:35.020
to keep your spirits up i've actually thought that one of the most useful things that i could do
00:37:41.580
naval went to your high school i'll bet you've got some good stories i'd like to hear those
00:37:47.880
um so one of the things that i think i can do is simply help people to know what to do if there
00:37:56.320
wasn't anything you knew to do now most people have already gotten a gotten a hint that they should
00:38:00.980
bring in some supplies etc i really think you're not going to need them i don't think anybody's going
00:38:06.060
to go hungry i don't think the power is going to go off i don't think the electricity is going to go
00:38:09.580
off i think that that all that stuff would be fine and it has to do with the fact that 80 of us will
00:38:14.540
always be healthy at any time and 80 of us can do 100 of the work if you've ever seen any big company
00:38:21.420
20 of the people could stay home on any given day and it doesn't make any difference
00:38:25.560
80 is fine and we'll always have 80 so things will keep running though the economy will just take a hit
00:38:32.700
for a while so you'll be fine but what i recommend is that you take advantage of this disaster you've
00:38:42.860
heard the saying never let a good disaster or a good crisis go to waste this is one of those times
00:38:48.820
so yesterday i was taking my long walk in the sun which i recommend to all of you i believe that all of
00:38:55.260
you should be doing the small things you can do to stay uh as healthy and to keep your immune system
00:39:01.420
just you know as good as it can get so one of those is light exercise as opposed to heavy exercise
00:39:07.660
at the moment light exercise should be your goal not building muscles you want light exercise to stay at
00:39:14.780
maximum fitness in case in case your body is attacked we need you you are all soldiers in this war against
00:39:23.020
this this invader uh and by the way naval says this the united if you were to take bets on the
00:39:31.740
coronavirus think about the odds would you ever bet against human beings in a war against any other
00:39:40.860
living object on earth well probably not because human beings have essentially conquered 100 of the
00:39:48.700
species except for this one and and we're going hard at this one too so if you were going to bet
00:39:54.860
against humans in in the field of battle of earth well don't bet against humans we're pretty pretty good
00:40:02.940
at this stuff and secondly you'd also have to bet against the united states who has ever won money
00:40:09.660
betting against the united states well that's a tough bet i suppose anything can happen but if you think
00:40:16.300
there's going to be a meltdown of society uh you know and the kind that really could get to you um
00:40:23.580
i don't know we're pretty good at this stuff so anyway my point is stay healthy take a walk and um i felt
00:40:30.380
yesterday healthier than i've felt in a long time because i'm really i'm serious about getting enough sleep
00:40:38.060
getting light exercise eating right doing everything i can to lower my stress which i'm hopefully uh i can
00:40:47.180
be part of that for you so there you go um what about alien life forms well maybe these maybe viruses are
00:40:57.580
from another planet did you know viruses are not alive that isn't that doesn't that just blow your mind
00:41:05.500
that a virus is correct me if i'm wrong i think i'm right on that right i don't think a virus is a
00:41:11.820
living thing you just can't stop it from spreading um curiosity is making it harder to sleep that's
00:41:22.380
interesting how do you grade our government's response thus far very good question and i'll give you an answer
00:41:30.300
that number one and certainly the most important thing you should keep in mind it's not your
00:41:38.460
government doing stuff for you you're in on this you're not an observer so it's like you know i feel
00:41:47.660
as if somebody in the stadium said hey you know i'm watching this football game how's the team doing
00:41:53.420
and i'm the referee and i'm looking at you and sitting in the audience and i'm saying
00:41:57.020
dumb ass you're on the field get out of the stands so if you're asking yourself is your
00:42:04.540
government doing a good job it's a fair question but let me ask you this what the hell did you do
00:42:10.380
today what did you do and i mean that seriously you the person who asked that question whoever asked
00:42:17.100
is the government doing its job i asked the same question to you did you do your job did you did you
00:42:23.260
exercise did you wash your hands every day did you tell somebody to wash their hands did you help an
00:42:27.500
old person what'd you do because i did stuff and i'll do stuff every day um but here's here's the
00:42:36.940
thing you really can't tell if the government's doing a good job or not and part of the reason is that
00:42:41.660
we're shielded from the people doing the work by the people doing the talking so if mike pence or
00:42:49.500
president trump gives a press conference that i don't think is an a plus press conference what
00:42:55.180
does that tell us about the people doing actual work nothing nothing at all it doesn't i do think
00:43:02.780
that um putting pence in charge was a good move from the outside now again you have to be really
00:43:09.420
close to these situations to know what really is a good idea and what's not to know what worked and
00:43:14.700
what didn't what makes a difference what's a big difference what's a small difference we're all
00:43:19.180
way too far away from it you and i cannot tell if the experts at the cdc are doing their job we
00:43:26.380
can't tell do i think that they probably are doing it yes do i think that they'll make some mistakes of
00:43:33.180
course do you think do i think that ultimately their their game will improve and rapidly yes that's that's
00:43:41.420
everything everything is about not what happened already everything that matters is what we get to
00:43:48.540
quickly and how quickly we get to it if they can take it from where we are to a better place and
00:43:55.100
get there fast and nobody could really predict rates and changes and what's going to happen and
00:44:00.540
the surprises that are coming but but the real the real uh the real play here is how quickly they get
00:44:09.740
better smarter and more effective it's not what they've done so far it's how quickly they can improve it
00:44:15.100
it we don't know that because they're still ramping if i had to guess again going back to the god brain
00:44:23.660
hypothesis that we are sort of forming into an entity in which the best ideas anywhere will reach
00:44:31.580
the place they need to go and we've never had that so if you have a situation where a hundred percent of
00:44:36.940
the planet is in the fight and if you're not you should be even in your own way you need to be in
00:44:42.620
the fight time to join um our our capability as a as a civilization it's unparalleled i mean it's like
00:44:53.740
nothing nothing that anything has ever existed and if you tried to ask yourself how good could we be
00:45:00.060
you know once we're ramped up we're not there yet but how good will we be by summer at this stuff
00:45:07.660
and the answer is you're going to be probably amazed you will probably be amazed at the capability of
00:45:16.300
humans so go humans we're pretty darn good at this and remember it's not you you know it's it's not you
00:45:23.660
and me we're not the ones who are making these big scientist decisions and stuff but you can be
00:45:29.580
pretty sure that the smartest people in the world are joining the fight everybody's off the sidelines
00:45:35.260
now the people who have capability are jumping in because they know they need to so this is the
00:45:40.780
fight of our lives it's the first in my opinion first planetary risk it has incredible implications
00:45:51.900
for the future maybe in some good ways bad ways too but there are going to be some good things that
00:45:58.940
come out of this and i even think that there are some analogy issues that are coming out of this one
00:46:05.740
one is that the virus is going to affect immigration not just directly because people want to close their
00:46:12.620
borders to reduce the risk of the virus obviously it'll have that effect but secondarily the way we think
00:46:19.180
about um hard to identify risks uh and it's just gonna it'll influence everything from climate change to
00:46:28.780
immigration so i think the world will be a different place once we get on the other side of this which we
00:46:33.740
will and uh somebody says somebody survived meningitis well you're tough you can come live with me whoever
00:46:47.260
survived meningitis uh i like tough people all right um will this virus affect trump's reelection
00:46:57.740
yes yes it will um it's the biggest story so the biggest story is always going to affect the
00:47:05.660
election it's hard to say whether it's good or bad yet um somebody in the comments is saying musk
00:47:14.060
says this is all dumb what he said was i saw his tweet he got over a hundred thousand retweets on it
00:47:19.980
so elon musk said yesterday on twitter that the uh all of the coronavirus panic is dumb so he said the
00:47:29.820
panic was dumb um and we don't know exactly what he meant by that so i'm not going to comment on that
00:47:39.100
because if you don't know what he meant it's hard to agree or disagree um
00:47:44.140
um i'm seeing other people in the comments who survived meningitis well we got a tough crowd here
00:47:56.220
look at that somebody says i survived ebola i don't think that's true but it's funny well a lot of
00:48:02.780
people survive meningitis and what do i have some kind of a audience that is all meningitis survivors or
00:48:09.820
something yeah you know i've said this before and i'll say it again that when you try to judge whether
00:48:20.860
your president is doing a good job it doesn't matter if it's this president or another president
00:48:31.820
oh i will finish thought so whether if you're uh trying to judge a president one of the things you
00:48:40.540
should do is um oh my god i just forgot my thought again i'm watching your comments and trying to do
00:48:48.300
trying to multitask but my point is you need the right president for the right situation there's no
00:48:53.180
such thing as a good president um there are definitely such things as bad presidents but within the good
00:48:59.660
presidents category you need the right president at the right time and sometimes a president is well
00:49:06.220
suited for one task but not another no president is more suited for negotiating with china than trump
00:49:14.220
in my opinion we've never seen anybody who was more perfectly suited for that job because he can treat
00:49:19.820
them nice and treat them tough at the same time it's kind of tough very few people could do that
00:49:24.540
that and he had the will to do it and you know the the risk profile to do it so trump is the ideal
00:49:33.580
president for dealing with trade and china but is he also the ideal president to deal with a a virus
00:49:42.540
outbreak my guess is no if i'm gonna be honest i'd rather have obama as a president right now for the for
00:49:51.820
this i know i probably just lost half of my half of my audience by saying that all i'm saying is you
00:49:59.340
can't say that a president is is good or bad it'd be more accurate to say that a particular president
00:50:05.820
is well matched or not well matched to a particular challenge this isn't it's obvious i think at this
00:50:14.460
point that this is not president trump's strongest suit but i don't know it matters because he did what
00:50:21.180
he needed to do he put pence in charge and he's not holding back any authority meaning that there's
00:50:27.260
nothing there's nothing that's a problem because the president hasn't made a decision and there's
00:50:32.940
nothing a problem because the president made the wrong decision so the president is getting it done
00:50:38.940
he's just not the perfect fit but i do think as far as i can tell he's getting it done i don't think
00:50:44.380
there's a problem at all all right um somebody says he's a fast learner well okay i gotta dump on him
00:50:55.900
one more time for his press conference and i hope i hope that at least if you don't like that i hope
00:51:03.420
that at least it builds my credibility for the future because you can't just you can't say everything's
00:51:08.780
good sometimes there's a little bit mistake trump said at the press conference yes that he found out
00:51:15.900
four or five minutes ago meaning when he found out yesterday that he had just found out that the
00:51:21.660
regular flu flu b or whatever it is just the regular flu might kill 18 000 to 45 000 or 77 000 globally in a
00:51:32.220
year and he said he just found out yesterday that the regular flu could kill that many people
00:51:39.340
and i thought to myself you need to get off the stage right now
00:51:45.740
because we all knew that i mean i think we all knew that if he just found out that the regular flu
00:51:53.180
if he just found out yesterday that the regular flu kills tens of thousands of people a year
00:51:59.340
that does not inspire confidence now again i want to say this as clearly as possible
00:52:04.700
i think all the things he's doing are good he closed the airports fast he put pets in charge he's
00:52:12.300
he got more money than he asked for you know so i don't think he's botched anything
00:52:17.100
i don't think there's anything in here that you have to worry about there's nothing that's being
00:52:22.940
poorly managed from the at least from the executive level i don't see any signs of it but the way he
00:52:28.220
talks about it he's just not the best person to be the spokesperson for this specific problem he's just
00:52:35.500
not well suited for it and uh maybe pence is all right too bad pence is boring because he's going to be
00:52:43.820
talking about this a lot um let's talk about biden's brain
00:52:49.020
what are the democrats thinking what are they thinking and this that's not a rhetorical question i'm so curious
00:53:01.260
about what's going on in their minds i talked to my most uh or let's say most uh
00:53:08.780
emotional democrat trump hater friend who i've tried to avoid for the last four years because it's
00:53:17.100
difficult to be with people who hate trump that much if you know because it's an emotional thing
00:53:23.580
but i checked in with him to find out if he was backing bernie or sanders and the reason i checked
00:53:29.260
in with him is because he's a really smart guy now what does a really smart guy went to a you know ivy
00:53:36.060
league college pays attention very well informed what does somebody who's well informed and very smart
00:53:41.580
say when their team has been reduced to bernie sanders and joe biden i was really curious
00:53:50.540
and what he said was he's going to back biden um because you know he'd like to be buddige but you
00:53:57.980
know he's not an option anymore so he's going to back biden and he said and i quote he would rather
00:54:03.420
vote for a stack of old magazines than trump and i thought to myself well i guess you are
00:54:12.220
it looks like you are going to vote for a stack of old magazines because joe biden if you were going
00:54:18.060
to describe him in a humorous analogy stack of old magazines might be pretty pretty good as an analogy
00:54:26.860
and he's going to take that choice and i think to myself but that does mean you can tell right
00:54:36.380
it does mean you can tell that biden's brain is not quite working and you're going to vote for him
00:54:42.780
anyway how interesting is that not in a good way um so now here's the second part that i wanted to
00:54:55.340
bring up it's one thing to look at your candidate and say you know i'm a little worried but we'll
00:55:00.460
be okay it's another thing to look at your candidate and then listen to trump who has clearly signaled
00:55:08.220
correct me if i'm wrong trump has clearly signaled that if biden is the nominee he's going to go after
00:55:15.100
his brain right he said it now directly he said that he's talked about joe being in the old folks home
00:55:22.460
and you know and there's something not right imagine trump being freed to brand that mercilessly
00:55:33.900
by the time joe gets to the election booth he might not get any votes this would not be close
00:55:42.300
do the democrats not understand that biden is not going to be close
00:55:49.020
trump hasn't even started on him and he's already got the entire country talking about his mental
00:55:55.660
illness it's not going to be close please do they not see this can you not give us a good a good
00:56:03.580
contest and i think bernie of course had no has no chance of winning because of his policies but biden
00:56:13.020
he's literally mentally incompetent and even his own team knows that it's not going to be close
00:56:19.740
if biden were running any kind of a conventional candidate
00:56:25.340
maybe somebody would not have mentioned the obvious that he's losing it but trump will there's
00:56:32.780
nothing that's going to stop trump from absolutely grinding that into the dirt and the best part is
00:56:38.860
the match-up because the one thing you you know that trump has as a not the one thing but one of
00:56:44.620
the big things that people complain about is that he has a speaking style that makes people say oh you
00:56:51.340
know he's not speaking like a like a sane person but you put trump next to biden on the stage and only
00:56:59.420
one of them is going to look sane it's not going to look good all right uh that's about all i got for
00:57:05.260
today it's always great to talk to you so go forward be part of the god brain you're all part
00:57:11.660
of the fight against this planetary invader um i'll be i'll be talking to you from my bunker
00:57:19.980
where apparently i will be locked in my bunker for the next i don't know year so i'm on lockdown