Episode 914 Scott Adams: The Best Simultaneous Sip EVER is Right Here
Episode Stats
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Summary
In this episode of The Simultaneous Sip, Scott Adams answers a question about the disappearance of Antifa and Black Lives Matter, and tries to explain why China shut down flights from Wuhan on January 25th, 2020.
Transcript
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Hey everybody, come on in. It's time for the Simultaneous Sip. Coffee with Scott Adams. Aren't you glad you're here? I'm glad you're here. Otherwise I'd be talking to myself. And that's crazy.
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If you'd like to participate in what promises to be, I think I can say this with some confidence, the best Simultaneous Sip ever, it's coming up really soon.
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And all you need to participate is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or a chalice or a canteen jug or a flask or a vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee.
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And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better, including the pandemic. It's called the Simultaneous Sip. Happens now. Go.
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I was right. I was right. Did you feel that? Best one ever, right? I thought so. Nailed it.
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All right. Let's talk about all the things. There are many things and we should talk about them.
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Adam Townsend asked this provocative question on Twitter. He says,
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Why isn't Antifa, the anti-fascists, protesting lockdown's fascism elements?
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And I thought to myself, yeah, why is Antifa not protesting the government telling people to do stuff like stay home and don't go to work?
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Isn't that exactly what they're supposed to be doing?
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Or more generally, did somebody stop paying Antifa?
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You know, not just because of the virus, but did Antifa just go away?
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And if Antifa just went away, did they take Black Lives Matter with them?
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So it seems to me that Antifa and Black Lives Matter just sort of disappeared, didn't they?
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Just you wake up one day and there's no Antifa and you don't really notice.
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And the day goes by and there's no Black Lives Matter.
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And next thing you know, a year has gone by and you haven't heard from them.
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I mean, it feels like a year for Black Lives Matter, Antifa, more recently, I suppose.
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Now, I would like to remind you, because I'm getting lots of heat from people online,
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You know, the normal thing for Twitter is that I would say 80% of all the critics I've ever had
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are complaining about something they imagine, I think, or they imagine I said,
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So with that in mind, I thought I would clarify my opinion.
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So on January 24th, I was loudly and with much profanity saying we should close travel from China
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And I quite reasonably thought, if China's going to close Wuhan,
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because whatever they're looking at, we don't want that.
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Now, closing flights from China is a very small cost relative to what we're seeing now,
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the close down of the entire economy, or much of it.
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And to me, that seemed like a completely reasonable insurance cost.
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You know, when you buy insurance, if you don't have a car accident,
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you can't say the insurance was wasted, because you buy it to manage your risk.
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You know, it's not wasted if you don't need it.
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And so to me, closing the flights from China was like an insurance model.
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It's like, it probably won't make a difference, but it might.
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And if it did make a difference, it would be a big difference.
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So I was very forcefully and early on closing flights.
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I don't believe that I've ever offered an opinion about the lockdown
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I mean, I've offered suggestions of how it would look, but I've not, is it, can anybody
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I've not offered an opinion on whether we're being too restrictive or not restrictive enough.
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And what's confusing is I have criticized the thinking or the information from people on
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So I think people believe that if you criticize somebody's argument, that you're on the other
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Why is there even an other side about a medical slash economic question?
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But we can certainly identify when somebody's thinking about it in a, let's say, a less useful
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So I've been quite aggressive trying to correct people's way of thinking, which is completely
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different from telling them my opinion and, you know, and doing that.
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But enough time has gone by and enough things have happened that I feel like I'm comfortable
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So this will be the first time you've heard my opinion about what we should do in terms of
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I'm somewhat influenced by, well, not somewhat, I'm influenced by what we've learned so far.
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I'm influenced by the reaction of the public, which is a big variable.
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You know, I take the emotions, the feelings, the, you know, the, you know, just the energy
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But here's, here's sort of what I might call the last straw that makes it easy to have
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Because I even, you know, last 24 hours, I was thinking, I don't know, I think I could
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Apparently, Nancy Pelosi was on one of the late night shows, and she was doing a remote
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tour of her refrigerators in her home to show how she was stocking up, I don't know, for
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And she's standing in front of two sub-zero refrigerators.
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The total cost of her refrigerators, just the refrigerators, the two of them, is more than
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And she opens it up, and it's well-stocked in her mansion with ice cream and stuff.
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And I think other people had a similar response, which is, our multi-million dollar leaders don't
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seem to have, I don't think they're reading the room right, you know what I mean?
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If Nancy Pelosi is showing us how much food she has stocked in her two expensive side-by-side
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sub-zero freezers, I don't think she's reading the room right, do you?
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That feels so out of touch with whatever is the experience of the, you know, the working
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class and the people who are suffering this week.
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You know, it just made it easy to have an opinion.
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My opinion on this is similar to, but different, from my opinion about how we should come up
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And my opinion on abortion is that men should just stay out of it, because the, except for
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the money decisions, we should be involved in money.
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And I'm not saying you shouldn't have a right to talk about it, you can do whatever you
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I'm just saying you get a more credible decision if whatever we come up with is what the majority
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of women support, because they have more skin in the game, you know, for all the obvious
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So I'm not saying that men should not have a vote, or, you know, I'm not taking away your
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I'm just saying if you want the most credible set of laws, whichever way they go, pro-abortion
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and against abortion, the most credible is the ones that women as a majority support.
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Likewise, and learning from that, but it's a different situation, obviously, analogies
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But taking from that, and I look at the decision to go back to work, I'm pretty sure that my
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decision about my personal risk should be irrelevant.
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And I've tried to hold that to be true, because it'd be real easy for me to say, you know, and
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this is true, my personal experience isn't that bad.
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I'm literally in a mansion that I built to have everything I want.
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I'm, you know, my income pretty much is going to, you know, go down 75% when newspapers go
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out of business by the end of the year, I think.
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So I'm taking a big hit, but not like somebody who lost a job.
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You know, I'm not taking a hit like somebody who can't pay their rent.
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So from a moral and ethical perspective, I would not try to take my specific, unique
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situation and say, well, let's run the country based on what's good for Scott.
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So I've been waiting to see, not only if we can learn more about, you know, the facts of
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the virus, who's getting it, et cetera, how deadly is it, you know, what treatments do
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But also importantly, I was trying to read the room and try to find out where the country's
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at, because it doesn't matter if you think we should do something, if you know the country
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There's no point in talking about what you should do if it's impractical.
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And I realize this could be off a little bit because I probably see more traffic on social
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I believe that the country as a whole, and again, so far, this is not my opinion.
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The country's opinion as a consensus seems to be very strongly, this is my sense of it,
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It seems to me that the sense of the country is moving very much toward they'd rather open
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up, go back to work, even if it does cost hundreds of thousands of lives.
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So that's my read of the room, is that the country was sort of waiting and seeing, you
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know, but at the moment, and certainly the direction of things, is moving very strongly,
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this is my feel for it, very strongly toward if our only choice is that people die now or
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later, which seems to be the only choice, because we don't have a vaccine, we, you know,
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basically a lot of people are going to get this thing, I think the country has decided
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And I'm looking at the comments, and I realize that I think the people on this periscope are
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not exactly a, you know, a random subsection of the planet, but I was, I was very much trying
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to figure out if people were speaking only selfishly.
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Like, I was trying to get a sense, all right, are you only talking about yourself that is better
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for you to go back to work, let's say you're young, you don't have much risk, or are you
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really thinking about what's good for the country, because it's hard to sort those out.
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And I've come to a decision that it doesn't matter.
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It doesn't matter if other people are thinking about their own personal situation, or if other
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people are thinking about what's good for the country, kind of doesn't matter, because
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they're both on, they're both moving in the same direction, of what's good for the country,
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and what's good for the individuals is starting to look the same, as in, time to open up.
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So, this will be the first time you've heard my opinion.
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My opinion is, I would like to support the consensus.
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I'm not positive the consensus opinion is in my best interest.
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But, do I or do I not have the freedom to stay hiding in my house as long as I want?
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I do have the freedom to hide in my house as long as I want, if I want to manage my own
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So, for the good of the country, the good of the world, it does seem to me we've reached
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Well, you know, everything he says suggests to me that he's got just exactly the same
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On day one, it's very hard to say, hey country, I think you should go out and accept, I don't
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know, a million deaths, 200,000, whatever the number is, I think you should just go out
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and accept those, because I might not be one of them.
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Because even though I'm in a risk group, I know I can hide, you know, and I'll get good
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And I think we've just gotten to the point where people sort of thought about it for a
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And I also don't think it matters what the government thinks at this point, because I
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think the public, this is my read of the room, my feeling is the public has decided to go back
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The government can pretend to be in charge, and the governors can pretend to be in charge
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Because if the public decided on May 1st, hey, you had your chance, I'm going back to
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Well, there aren't enough police in the world to arrest them.
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And by the way, the police would probably just go back to work too.
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So, you know, it's sort of a fantasy that the government is in charge.
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The government is in charge if they have credibility.
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The government is in charge if they have more information than we do.
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But in this situation, I believe the government and the people have pretty much the same information.
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I don't believe that President Trump really has some kind of secret information that you
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So I think we're perfectly capable to make this decision collectively.
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So the question about whether the governor should be the main people making the decisions for
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their states versus the president, I think that's obvious, doesn't it?
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Is there anyone who disagrees with that, that the governors are closer to the situation
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and they should manage the specifics of their state?
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So I think your government is doing exactly what you'd want them to do.
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But they're also saying, Trump says this clearly, it's the governor's decision.
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But if they do something grotesquely wrong, we're going to get involved.
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Describe any situation that would be better than what the president has offered to us.
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But the governors can decide, but if they don't have a plan that looks like a real plan in
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the next couple weeks, the public will decide, right?
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You know, the governors get first chance, but if they don't decide or it doesn't look like
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a real plan that actually gets us to work, I think the public will decide.
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And I think that we have decided as a civilization, decided as a country, that, let me say it
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Because I don't think we should enter a decision like this.
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Because, you know, this is a big, it's a big expense either way you go, right?
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So these are adult decisions, and I think we ought to be able to talk about them plainly.
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It turns out that the so-called greatest generation has one more war.
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So the people who, you know, lived through World War II probably thought they were done
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But it turns out that they're right back in it.
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And the people who will take the most casualties in this war is the same group whose age group
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So we are asking the greatest generation to take one more for the team.
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Likewise, we would be asking these people in their 80s, you know, part of the greatest generation,
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And again, it would be for the good of the country.
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We would be asking them to sacrifice for the country.
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Do you think the greatest generation is up for it?
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Now, of course, every individual will have their own independent opinion, so they're not all yes.
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But what would lead us to believe that the greatest generation has changed?
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I think if you gave them the choice, you know, the ones who are still, you know, mentally alert,
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if you went to your, you know, people who lived through World War II and say,
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look, could you take another, you know, can you take one more war?
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Can you fight one more war for the whole country?
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So, Tucker Carlson, last night, he had a doctor slash scientist, I don't know what he was,
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some expert, and he was saying that he has a strong suspicion, it's not confirmed,
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but that the virus has already spread much farther than we know.
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Now, if it's spread much farther than we know, the implication was that that's good news,
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because it would suggest that the death rate of the virus is far smaller,
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maybe even in the neighborhood of current regular flu.
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But, that doesn't mean it's safer than the regular flu,
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because there are two elements that make the flu dangerous.
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and the other is how viral is it, how many people are going to get it,
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And, if it's true that more people have it than we know,
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that would suggest that the death rate is lower.
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That one variable, the statistic of how likely you will die if you get it,
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And I think Tucker needs to make that clarification,
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in the sense that that would be the more complete picture.
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and we find out that the number of people who die from this virus,
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pretty much similar to every other virus anybody ever got,
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I think that if we were to reopen the economy now,
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now being in the next few weeks under some smart plan,
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would people look back at this and say it was a mistake?
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I think you also have to look at the closing of the economy
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And I don't know that it was the wrong decision.
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Somebody is clarifying that the expert on Tucker's show last night
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so, yeah, somebody's helping me out with the percentage.
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you're a little bit blind about the basic data.
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That's why that one wasn't as bad as others could be.
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But do we think that if we did not mitigate the coronavirus,
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do the experts say that the virality we're seeing from it
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So is anybody saying that this one seems to be no more viral
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gets 5% to 20% of the U.S. population every year.
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And I saw another source that just took the middle ground
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are the experts predicting we'll get the coronavirus?
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But what happens if the percentage of the country
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How many people die per year from the regular flu?
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and another one said that 8,000 to 20,000 deaths is normal,
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so that still would be a problem with the models.