It s only been 12 hours since you saw me last, and I think it s time for more of this. There s a reason you come here - it s so darn good! Get your day started in just the right way, and with not many commercials. Have you tried watching anything that has commercials lately?
00:15:10.000It wouldn't be real close to something that, you know, the smartest person in the world with all of the best resources could even get close to.
00:15:18.000It would just be a guess on a spreadsheet, basically.
00:17:11.000I think the whole question of, you know, closing the economy down and how long you keep, how long you close it and how you open it up and the trade off with the deaths and the politics of it.
00:17:22.000But I don't think it can be modeled, not even close.
00:17:26.000And it's one of those cases where real leadership matters.
00:17:31.000That is, somebody is going to have to peer into this fog of uncertainty.
00:18:05.000You know, whatever decision Trump comes up with ultimately about going back to work will be one of the biggest decisions in all of humanity.
00:18:14.000It's true, you know, for a single decision.
00:18:18.000There are lots of things more important, maybe, but it was lots of people making lots of decisions.
00:18:23.000I don't know if we've ever seen one person make a decision with this weight.
00:18:56.000So, for example, in this case, instead of saying, let's send everybody back to work under these criteria, you could say, how about this week?
00:19:08.000We send everybody in Toledo back to work and we'll ask you not to do any traveling because we just want to see what Toledo looks like.
00:19:37.000The other thing is you can decide who takes the hit.
00:19:44.000For example, we could say, we're going to close the economy, and if you can't eat, well, that's on you.
00:19:51.000Then that would put the heat all on people who didn't have money, and that would be his own set of problems politically, morally, and everything else.
00:19:59.000So you can make decisions based on who gets hurt the most, even if you don't know how it all plays out.
00:20:06.000So for example, the government seems to have made the decision that it will put pressure on the rich, basically.
00:20:15.000Because it's the rich who ultimately will pay any debt that we run up.
00:20:20.000It's the rich who are being asked to retain employees.
00:20:24.000It's the rich who are going to lose half of their net worth.
00:20:27.000They're still going to be rich, so you don't feel bad about them.
00:20:30.000But it looks like the government is putting so much as they can, shifting it toward the rich, shifting it toward banks.
00:21:16.000So if you sort of move your, let's say, the risk over to the banks, you've also moved it to the place where there will be most attention to solving it.
00:21:28.000Whereas if you said, well, let the poor people work it out.
00:21:38.000So the closest you can get is some informed guesses, some feelings about, you have to make some assumptions without data about, let's say, the attitude and morale of the country.
00:21:50.000Because you can't make a smart decision that the public hates so much that it blows the politics apart.
00:21:56.000It wouldn't help to do the right thing if the public was sure it was the wrong thing.
00:22:02.000So you've got, you know, you've got the persuasion, the politics, the guessing about what the economics would be, shifting the weight onto who can handle the pressure the most.
00:22:34.000Since the medical experts are saying that an extra month or whatever it's going to turn out to be would make a really big difference.
00:22:43.000But if I were modeling the economy, I'd say to myself, I'm not sure one month would make that much difference compared to the month we already left.
00:23:03.000I don't know if that'll actually make a difference.
00:23:06.000So my intuition would be to keep things locked down at least for a few weeks and then start phasing people in in a way that, ideally, if you have enough test kits, you can measure whether you're doing it correctly and adjust.
00:23:22.000But I would certainly be sending some low risk people back to work pretty quickly.
00:23:26.000Or at least I have a plan for doing it.
00:23:28.000I think, I don't know his first name, is it Nick Nolte at Rights for Breitbart, tweeted, why doesn't Trump hold a digital presser where he answers questions from people outside the media group think, and then he names me.
00:23:47.000So as a person who might ask a question of the president who's not in the press room.
00:23:53.000And I thought, that's a really good idea.
00:23:57.000Because the questions that the press are asking are just bad questions, aren't they?
00:24:56.000Did you see that tweet by Eric Erickson?
00:25:00.000Eric Erickson, a well-known conservative type, he tweeted a picture in which he was talking in a complimentary way about two brothers who went to school with his kids.
00:25:15.000And the two brothers in the neighborhood are making and selling something for $20 a piece.
00:25:22.000And then they're taking that money, and they're buying snacks for area hospital break rooms.
00:25:42.000Until you see the picture of the item in which Erick says that he added lights to it.
00:25:49.000So, the item was a cross, a wooden cross.
00:25:53.000And I guess the kids were making wooden crosses and selling them to people that they could put in the yard.
00:26:01.000And then Erick, apparently according to his tweet, he decided that maybe you could see them better at night.
00:26:07.000So, he added white lights in a fairly dense pattern.
00:26:11.000And then took a picture of it at night to show how good it looked with the white lights in a dense pattern around the cross that's in his neighbor's lawn.
00:26:22.000You probably see where I'm going with this, don't you?
00:26:27.000Because it looks like a digital version of the KKK burning a cross in the neighbor's lawn.
00:26:34.000Now, I only know of this story because Erick Erickson was trending.
00:26:40.000And I click on all the famous people who are trending to see if they got coronavirus.
00:26:45.000I mean, I hate that I do that, but I do.
00:26:47.000And he doesn't have coronavirus, as far as we know.
00:26:50.000But he's the only person who didn't recognize that adding a burning cross to the neighbor's lawn might not come across as the charitable act that he had hoped.
00:27:18.000I'm starting to get the kind of critic that disappeared for a while.
00:27:23.000I'm starting to wonder if the trolls came back.
00:27:27.000I told you that for a while my critics just disappeared.
00:27:31.000There were there were a few weeks where I didn't get any of the like really horrible trolls, the ones that say things that make your head explode because they're so stupid.
00:27:42.000They just all disappeared for a few weeks.
00:29:25.000For example, I like to use Mike Cernovich as my standard example of a lot of things, partly because most of you are aware of him,
00:29:33.000partly because he stands apart from the crowd in so many ways that he just makes a good example for lots of stuff.
00:29:40.000But Mike Cernovich has a very long track record that you could check for yourself, and it's all public, of recognizing bullshit really early.
00:31:53.000He's overselling a little bit, at least in his choice of words and, you know, the amount he talks about it, et cetera, the potential for the hydroxychloroquine.
00:32:04.000Now, if you're new to the topic, it hasn't, it hasn't been verified by, you know, good, robust studies, but there's lots of anecdotal evidence that it's safe enough and probably useful.
00:32:22.000So we don't know, but maybe it's useful.
00:32:27.000And the president is sort of mentioning it.
00:32:31.000Now, he also says the same thing I did, which is there's not proven, but he goes a little bit further in saying that he's optimistic about it.
00:32:41.000So even though he's very careful to say it's not scientifically proven, the other words he uses makes people believe that he doesn't care about that.
00:32:52.000It makes, it makes people think, ah, he doesn't care if it's scientifically proven or not.
00:32:58.000That scientifically illiterate guy, he just wants us to use this untested drug.
00:33:18.000He says, well, on a risk reward basis, we don't know if it works or not, but we do know it's been used for a long time for other stuff.
00:33:26.000And we know that for short term usage, even the experts say that the, you know, the downside is probably vanishingly small for short term usage.
00:33:35.000So that's just a risk reward assessment.
00:33:39.000Is the president the right qualifications to make a risk management judgment, which takes into effect or takes into account the different opinions of different experts?
00:33:53.000And I would say, yeah, yeah, that's exactly his skill.
00:33:57.000Remember, Trump was a real estate developer.
00:34:00.000How many of the individual skills of all the people involved in that did Trump himself have?
00:34:11.000You know, was he, you know, was he the guy who knew how to put up drywall?
00:34:17.000Well, he might know how to put up drywall.
00:34:19.000But the point is that the contractor had lots of subcontractors, a lot of skills there.
00:34:25.000And Trump was not the expert on all of their expertise.
00:34:29.000He was simply a guy who could pick out who was lying and BSing.
00:34:34.000So he'd know when he needs a new expert or a second opinion.
00:34:37.000And he was good at incorporating all this expert opinion into one executive decision.
00:34:43.000So for all the critics who are saying, you don't know what you're talking about because you're a cartoonist, they're the dumbest people on the Internet today.
00:34:53.000Because first of all, how did you not notice that all the experts were wrong?
00:34:58.000And the only people who were right about, you know, substantial parts of this coronavirus stuff, the only people who were right were the people who didn't have qualifications.
00:35:08.000But they were pretty good at spotting BS from experts.
00:35:15.000So, yeah, so I guess my point is that there is expertise in spotting BS.
00:36:06.000You know, I think the experts have to weigh in on the mail-in voting.
00:36:10.000Because my understanding is it's too easy to do ballot harvesting, which is you agree to carry somebody's ballot and hand it in for them.
00:36:20.000And that sort of gives you a little bit of control over the votes.
00:36:24.000So I would say that there's a guarantee, there's a guarantee that vote harvesting and, you know, some shenanigans will happen with mail-in votes, but it's an emergency.
00:36:39.000You know, is there no way that we can figure out how to do voting without going in person?
00:38:16.000You want to pair the person's actual, you know, biometric essence, whether they do it with a fingerprint or facial recognition or whatever, as their identity.
00:38:28.000And then check with them after the fact and make sure that what they say they voted for is actually what got recorded.
00:38:37.000Somebody says they don't trust virtual.
00:38:56.000So you probably still would have to have some mail in options.
00:38:59.000You probably have to have some in-person options, especially for the elderly.
00:39:03.000But it would be easy to imagine that a younger relative could come over and say, hey, you know, hey, mom, you know, instead of mailing it in or going to vote, why don't you just fill out your form?
00:39:15.000And I'll take a picture of it with the app and then I'll point it at you and make sure that you register that way.
00:39:26.000Venezuela, what's your take on that mess?
00:39:30.000Well, the Venezuela mess, I keep wondering when things are going to break, meaning how much further can Venezuela go without overthrowing their alleged leader?
00:40:35.000Somebody says that's a third party vote.
00:40:38.000Well, it's not a third party vote if your grandmother puts in her social security number and your grandmother says on camera, you know, hi, I'm grandma, blah, blah, blah.
00:42:29.000So, you know, you just look at the face and then compare it to the name and then the facial recognition says that's the wrong face for that name.