Dr. Scott Adams joins me to talk about the coronavirus pandemic, the hydroxychloroquine trial, and the new drug, remdesivir, and why it might not be as good as it looks.
00:08:38.000Are those differences in New York City the kind of differences that you would say, oh, don't worry about the rest of the country because they're not like New York City?
00:08:49.660Is that statement, do you find that statement to be reasonable?
00:09:11.900Would the rest of the country look like New York City, even when New York City is mitigating?
00:09:17.640So the best comparison is you're taking the smallest risk, which is that New York City with full mitigation and the rest of the country without it, could you get to some horrible situation?
00:09:53.380Because the whole point of the coronavirus and flattening the curve is that New York City, it's hard to slow it because of the density, so people are just giving to each other too quickly.
00:10:05.380But in the rest of the country, you could slow it down, right?
00:10:29.660So fact check this, that the rest of the country would, in fact, there's no reason, we have no reason to suspect, you know, you don't know what's going to happen, but you have no reason to suspect that the rest of the country would not eventually come up to New York City levels if you let it.
00:10:48.880In other words, if you said, all right, the rest of the country looks pretty good, let's take off the controls.
00:10:54.840Would the rest of the country reach the same ratio as New York City?
00:11:21.180Well, I saw an article today that we might never have one.
00:11:24.520Bill Gates thinks it could take two years, which would be too long to be in lockdown.
00:11:30.200So, the people who said this is just the flu have to explain this math.
00:11:38.640They have to explain to me why the rest of the country would have a different experience over time, not as quickly.
00:11:45.320We all agree that it wouldn't happen as quickly, but over time, wouldn't you reach the same number of deaths as a ratio as you did in New York City?
00:18:37.300And anybody who acts confident about their opinion, either going back to work or staying locked up longer, if they're acting confident, you should immediately ignore them.
00:18:48.580Like, the moment you see strong confidence, you should run the other direction.
00:18:54.620Now, that's partly one of my issues with Candace's opinion on this.
00:19:00.080It's not even the details of the opinion, which I end up being very close to.
00:19:05.360In other words, my opinion isn't very far from Candace's.
00:19:08.440I don't even know if there is any difference, actually.
00:19:10.400But the difference is, at least she presents herself publicly as being very certain that that's the right answer.
00:19:21.080I can't get close to that level of certainty, even though I'm leaning in the same direction.
00:19:26.460Now, I'm not sure that it's bad to act certain when you're not.
00:19:31.100I don't know if that's the wrong thing in this situation, because certainty is part of what influences other people.
00:19:39.000And even I'm watching the show as a spectator, and I say, you know, if I could, if I could influence people to maybe agree with my best guess, maybe I'd do that.
00:21:25.420I think what it was is that she was seemingly suggesting not paying attention to the government guidelines.
00:21:34.960So it could be that Twitter just said, oh, it's just too dangerous to have people suggest that we should ignore government health and safety guidelines.
00:24:07.060I don't like one bit the way she's expressing it in this case because I think her level of confidence is misleading, but that's a personal decision.
00:28:45.460So here's the fun part, and I can put no assessment of credibility on the next thing I tell you.
00:28:51.100So a Twitter user, who shall remain nameless, took that photo and ran it through.
00:28:56.040Apparently, there's a piece of software which is for this purpose, to find out if something's been photoshopped.
00:29:03.400And the way the software allegedly works is that it finds edges.
00:29:08.340So if the edges look either too good or not good enough, that's telling you something, right?
00:29:13.900So there's the sharpness of the edges, like, you know, let's say the difference between Kim Jong-un's body and then his background, that distinction.
00:29:25.000If it's too sharp or too fuzzy, that should tell you something based on the software.
00:29:28.880So this Twitter user took that photo, ran it through the software, and what did the software say?
00:29:36.000Well, according to him, and I'm not an expert at analyzing the output of that kind of software,
00:29:43.900according to him, it's unambiguously a fake.
00:29:46.300Somebody is yelling at me, in all caps, saying, you are angry, not funny.
00:30:32.660And if it is a thing, I don't know if it was analyzed correctly after it ran through it.
00:30:38.840So, if somebody could, tell me, is there software that allows you to analyze a photo for Photoshop manipulation?
00:30:48.900If that exists, run that photo of Kim Jong-un cutting the ribbon through it, and then tell me, in your opinion, does it look like it told you something?
00:30:59.580And let me know if that software seems reliable.
00:31:05.160This Flynn investigation stuff is just blowing my mind.
00:31:15.840I don't know if you're having the same experience, but I made the mistake of watching the Netflix special about Waco at about the same time that all the Flynn information was coming out.
00:31:28.720Well, man, you don't want to do those two things at the same time, do you?
00:31:34.860I mean, you don't want to be watching the Waco Netflix special at the same time you're learning about the Flynn manipulations to get him to be guilty.
00:31:47.140Let me talk about the Waco thing first.
00:31:48.900So, if you're young or you just weren't following that, so Waco, there was a religious cult.
00:31:58.080David Koresh said he was the Messiah, and he got a bunch of people to believe him and live in this compound in Waco.
00:32:05.380And he convinced the husbands that they should not sleep with their own wives, but only he could.
00:32:13.040And he was doing them a favor by having sex with all their wives while they couldn't because something, something, God.
00:33:12.540And I think they had the answer for that, but that wasn't the big problem.
00:33:17.480So, anyway, the Waco showed the mismanagement of the FBI and the ATF and how, basically, they killed these people for having different lifestyles, basically.
00:33:27.860They basically just slaughtered a bunch of people for disagreeing with their lifestyle, but living an otherwise legal life, they just didn't want to be bothered by other people.
00:33:37.840Now, you can disagree with all that they were doing.
00:33:44.680But the Netflix special did, I thought, a very balanced job of showing the good and bad on both sides.
00:33:55.540And so, if you ever thought the FBI was good and the Branch Davidians were bad, that's going to really get messed up in your mind by the time you're done watching this.
00:34:04.280You can't come away from that special without thinking that the government has a lot of bad dudes in it who do bad things.
00:34:12.180Now, given that context, you know, of course, like all of you following this Flynn stuff, and if you just follow the Flynn part itself, it's just jaw-droppingly like you can't even believe it.
00:34:25.260It doesn't feel like you could be living in a country where that could have happened in your lifetime.
00:34:31.380And so, I'm actually having trouble incorporating this new information about Flynn into the part of my brain which holds reality.
00:34:41.700And it's not as if we haven't been, you know, warned that this was all coming and, you know, we saw it coming from a mile away.
00:34:50.420But now that it's all confirmed, beyond any doubt that I have, you know, maybe somebody else has doubt, but all of my doubt has been removed about what was happening with the Flynn situation.
00:35:01.980And it's obvious he was just targeted for destruction.
00:35:06.940Was it just that he was an important part of the Trump administration?
00:35:12.920Well, here's where it gets interesting.
00:35:15.640So, Andrew McCarthy, writing in National Review, basically makes the case that the reason Flynn was targeted for destruction is that he was the only one experienced enough in the new incoming Trump administration that he would have known their game and been able to,
00:35:35.900he would have been able to spot the fact that there was a coup being unfolding.
00:35:42.200The coup meaning removing the president by simply looking and looking until you found something illegal or you forced some error.
00:35:51.500So, in other words, according to Andrew McCarthy, and it's amazing that he can write this article and people simply just read it.
00:35:59.380Like, you just read it, like it was no big deal, like you're reading about the weather.
00:36:04.560It's like, oh, let's see what Andrew McCarthy's reading.
00:36:38.980These people are guilty of obvious treason, treason, something that would have destroyed the biggest country in the world in terms of, you know, the credibility of his government.
00:36:59.080Now, I think Andrew McCarthy goes further than the evidence does.
00:37:04.480I don't think he would claim otherwise, so I don't think I'm disagreeing with him here.
00:37:08.240But I disagree with the certainty of the conclusion.
00:37:15.420Because the certainty of the conclusion that the reason that Flynn was targeted was because he was too capable, and if they got him out of the way, then Trump was just a sitting duck with nothing but inexperienced people around him to protect him.
00:37:31.840But if you said to me, Scott, give me another hypothesis, I would say, well, maybe it's just as obvious as you think it is, which is they went after everybody they could get.
00:37:50.800So it could have been they would have gone after anybody they could get, because we've watched the anti-Trumpers do exactly that.
00:37:58.380If anybody shows a little bit of weakness, like right now they're going after Michael Caputo, because because he had some humorously offensive tweets in his past.
00:38:09.640And that's that they were just offensive.
00:38:11.560They weren't anything else, nothing with an ism on it, you know, no racism, sexism.
00:38:18.340I mean, you could try to put that stuff on his tweets, but they're really not there.
00:38:21.760He's just being humorously offensive, you know, in character that the bad guys target anybody who's prominent in the Trump world to try to take him out.
00:38:34.920By the way, I'm predicting that in the next month that that's going to happen to me.
00:38:40.780Sometime in the next 30 days, I would expect to be taken down by somebody in the mainstream media or otherwise, probably probably a mainstream article.
00:38:54.740Because you noticed yesterday that the president retweeted me three times and then four or four times.
00:39:02.080If you count the fact that he also retweeted a tweet that I retweeted talking about Greg Gutfeld, what he was talking about on the five.
00:39:11.680So presumably people who are watching the president, and that's a lot of people, probably scratched their head and said, why is the president retweeting this random guy so much?
00:39:25.420And at some point, they're going to say to themselves, we need to take this guy out because his voice is being influential.
00:39:35.520Now, if you remember the 2016 election, and you may remember that Bloomberg did try to take me out.
00:39:45.340So Bloomberg did a hit piece on me, and it was obvious that it was a hit piece from the start.
00:39:50.680It wasn't anything but a hit piece from the way it was set up to the way it went.
00:39:56.000And I mistakenly thought that I was so clever that I would answer questions in a way that would be so disarming that even though I knew it was going to be a hit piece, it wouldn't work out the way they wanted it to.
00:40:09.900So that's what I naively thought would happen.
00:40:12.960What I didn't count on is them just making stuff up, taking things out of context, you know, the usual stuff.
00:40:19.300So there was no way for me to avoid getting hit in a hit piece, even though I thought I might be clever enough to avoid it.
00:40:29.100Now, if it were a live recorded interview, nobody's going to touch me in a live recorded interview.
00:41:54.760There are some people who are good enough at communicating that the mainstream media just won't have them on live.
00:42:02.060But I do predict that they will try to entrap me, or maybe not even interview me, in which they'll take a bunch of stuff out of context.
00:42:11.080And they'll dig up things that are fake news from the past.
00:42:13.680And they'll put together a little package to show that nobody should listen to me because of all those bad things I may or may not have done.
00:42:19.840So that's my prediction that I'm probably in the crosshairs by now.
00:42:26.540Anyway, so Andrew McCarthy thinks that getting rid of Flynn was all part of the bigger plan to clear the way to get rid of Trump.
00:42:35.660Do I buy that hypothesis, that theory?
00:42:38.600And the answer is yes-ish, meaning certainly that had to be part of it.
00:42:46.620I would say it's fairly safe to say that at least a little bit of their thinking was if you get rid of capable people around the president,
00:42:58.180you know, you can kind of whittle from the outside until you get them.