Episode 957 Scott Adams： Let Me Tell You About the Psychedelic Mushroom I Accidentally Ingested Called CNN
Episode Stats
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Summary
It's a special evening edition of No Coffee with Scott Adams, featuring a guest appearance by CNN's Anderson Cooper, and a special guest appearance from Scott Adams himself. Scott Adams talks about the coronavirus epidemic, and how we should all pay our respects to the heroes of the healthcare field.
Transcript
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well it's a very special evening edition of no coffee with scott adams because it's it's the
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evening who drinks coffee at night this guy yeah caught you off guard today to have a
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a beverage, do you? A bong or a joint, it's fine. Whatever. Beer. It's good. It's evening.
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You can. We're not all working tonight. But I am. I never sleep. But you should. It's
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good for you. Join me now for the bonus simultaneous sip. It's happening now.
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So, let's see. You know, one of the things that we do not give enough credit for, and
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sometimes, every now and then, I think we should pause and show our respect for the healthcare
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workers. Specifically, not only are the healthcare frontline workers handling the biggest pandemic
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in 100 years, at great personal risk. But on top of the pandemic, they're also handling an epidemic of
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people who are ingesting disinfectant. And man, are they doing a good job. Because I don't know about
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you, but I haven't even heard one problem with that yet. Have you? Because I know there's a lot of it
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going on, because the press told me it was a pretty big problem. And the fact that you're not hearing
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much about it, just, well, I'm led to believe that our healthcare workers are handling not only the
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coronavirus. Wow. But they've, they've reduced this epidemic of disinfectant drinking to, you don't
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even hear about it anymore. It's like, it's like it's not even in the news. I mean, you can't get
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better than that. So slow clap for the frontline, healthcare workers who make it seem like the
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epidemic of drinking disinfectant wasn't even real. I mean, seems like it. But we know it was.
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So I made the mistake of turning on CNN tonight.
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Right. And it's really hard to do this next part without stopping to pause every few seconds and
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saying, I'm not making this up. So if I could maybe just say once in the beginning, that anything I say
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for a while, until I tell you otherwise, I swear to God, I didn't make it up. It's actual real.
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So I turned on CNN, just for the laughs. Honest to God, that's why. All right, not a joke. Man,
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was I not disappointed. The experience was like being on mushrooms. And I've talked about, you know,
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this one time I'd ever done mushrooms when I was 21, I guess. And the thing I took away from that
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experience, the mushrooms, was that you could experience a whole different world, but everything
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still worked. You know, everything looked different and new and wonderful and bizarre. And, you know,
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you'd never seen anything before. You know, you'd look at a chair and it was like you'd see, you're
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seeing it for the first time. You'd be like, you'd be amazed by it. But at the same time, you knew what
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it was. Oh, it's a chair. You sit on it. You knew how to work it. So it was like everything in your
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world changed. And yet somehow you still knew how to work it. It was the weirdest experience.
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But turning on CNN and seeing an alternate universe is just absolutely mind-blowing. It
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was actually, for a while I felt like, and this again, remember I told you, I'm not making this up.
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So what follows is not an exaggeration. It felt like an almost psychedelic experience
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because I got to feel a whole different reality and I spent enough time in it that I started to
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feel like what it must be like to be a full-time inhabitant of that movie. Let me give you a taste
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taste of what I learned in 10 minutes of CNN. This was an Anderson Cooper show.
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That the coronavirus is unstoppable, but the president stopped it wrong. I mean, that's a
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little hyperbole, but there's some version of that, that there's nothing we know how to do
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in any possible way that could stop this thing. And the president is at fault for not stopping it.
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And I'm listening to this and I'm saying, do you not know that those don't go together?
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That if it can't be stopped, it's also got to be true that you couldn't have stopped it wrong
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because of the can't be stopped part. Have you noticed, I think to myself, that every country is
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doing something completely different and getting largely the same result? Has anybody brought that up?
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No matter what any country does, we don't know why some things worked and some don't. There are
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some that are actually getting a better result, but we can't identify any one thing or a combination
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of things with any kind of reliability that would tell you why it worked. It could be that none of the
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things the government is doing makes any difference. It could be entirely social. It could be entirely
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density. It could be entirely how many foreign travelers there are. It could be entirely where
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you are on the timeline of getting it or already had it. We don't know anything about this thing.
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But the thing we do know is we don't know how to stop it, not even a little bit.
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So in the other universe of CNN, it's an unstoppable problem that the president is a big old dope
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because he didn't stop it. I guess. You know, of course, I'm putting my own words to it, but that's
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the sense you get from watching it. He had some woman who was an expert on pandemics and he asked
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her sort of what the best case scenario was. So here's an expert on pandemics and here's her best
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case scenario. So remember, the context is that the Trump administration has done bad things. They
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haven't handled it right, right? That's the permanent context. The Trump administration,
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totally incompetent. So it would be reasonable to say, well, if everything they've done is wrong,
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what would it look like to do it all right? And so they have, they give their pandemic expert a chance
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to give them the best case scenario. If you did everything right, give us the rosy picture. What
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would it look like to be competent? And she said this, that we'd develop a coronavirus vaccine by
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year end and it would be the really good kind, the kind that doesn't even need to be refrigerated.
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And we would get 20 million people signed up to be like an army that would scour the world and
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we'd produce tons and tons of this vaccine that works and we've got it in record time. And the 20
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million people would go across the world, they would find every villager in every remote city,
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they'd give them a vaccine, bam. And then she said, but that's kind of impossible.
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Because you know why? It's impossible. There's no way that's going to happen by the end of the year.
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And if it did, by the end of the year, we're going to be pretty close to herd immunity, whether we like
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it or not. It's not our plan. But by the end of the year, by the time we've scoured the planet with
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our 20 million people, what year is that? Is that even 2021? 2022? So the best alternative
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to all these mess ups that this dumb old orange, stupid monster of a science denying
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orange thing, all of those mistakes are not nearly as good as the alternative, which was
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clearly explained, which is magic. Magic. Because there's no other solution. That's the best
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case scenario is literally something that can't happen. Do they even know how to compare things?
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That's not comparing things. When you compare things, you're supposed to compare it to something
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that could happen. If you compare it to things that can't happen, you're doing it wrong.
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For example, if somebody said, hey, Bob, what are your career aspirations? And Bob said, well,
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I'm going to go to law school, I get good grades, go study art, try to be a lawyer. Not bad.
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What's your other alternative, Bob? Well, other alternative is I'll sprout wings out of my ass
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and fly to Mars. Bob, that's not actually an alternative. Because what that has going,
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working against it is the impossibility of it. Because you're not going to sprout wings out your
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ass and fly to Mars. So really, you haven't offered me an alternative. You've just told me an impossible
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thing. So you're doing it wrong. That was a terrible example. But you know what I'm, you know where I'm
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coming from? Oh, I'm not done yet. Then Anderson Cooper spreads the idea that the president disbanded
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the crisis task force. Wait for this. You have to hear this. Anderson Cooper speculated because he
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did say that he can't know what somebody is thinking. And then he went on to tell us what
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somebody is thinking. But at least he admitted that it can't be done before he did it. That's
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progress. And he said that, he's speculating anyway, that the president disbanded the coronavirus
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task force because, wait for it, he was embarrassed for getting called out for suggesting that maybe
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people should ingest disinfectant to cure the coronavirus. Which, as you know, but apparently
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the viewers of CNN don't know, never happened. He puts it out there like it happened. That didn't
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happen. The president was talking about light as a disinfectant. There is a real product in testing
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right now that injects, literally injects, the disinfectant, the light, into the lungs. They don't
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know if it works yet, but it's based on solid science. There are real, you know, serious companies
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doing it. It's not shady people. So, but on CNN, there's still, days after it's been the most widely
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debunked story in the face of debunked stories, they're still, they're still reporting it like
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it's fact. And I asked myself, because I really don't know the answer to this, do their viewers
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really think that happened? I mean, imagine living in the world where you think that the leader of
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your country may have tossed out the idea of drinking bleach. And just think about that. Think
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about you wake up in the morning and you're like, oh, oh, oh, you start screaming because you know you
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woke up into a world in which your leader is an orange monster who's encouraging people to drink
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poison and die. That's actually what you think you woke up into, an actual world like that. And why
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would you think that? Because it's on the news. It's actually on the news. But of course, it didn't
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happen. So, all right, but there's more. There's also the magical thinking that the president should
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have done something sooner. All right, that's, that's going to be the main attack on the president
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is he didn't take it seriously sooner. But of course, the reason he didn't take it seriously
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is that the experts were advising him, and they had not yet turned up the heat. So he was doing
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everything that his critics asked of him, which is he was, he was very clearly, quickly, and
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unambiguously following expert advice. It just happened to be wrong. So you'd think they would
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mention that. You'd think that would be part of the story that, yeah, maybe he was a little slow on
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this based on our perfect hindsight. But are all of the reviewers so dumb that they don't know that
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we only know it now? We didn't know it then. If it was so obvious then, tell Tony Fauci because he
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didn't know. Apparently he didn't know. Now, of course, China is, you know, to blame for giving
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us bad information. So there are perfectly good reasons for it. But on CNN, those perfectly good
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reasons, which are China lied, Fauci was fooled, Fauci gave Trump bad advice based on bad data from
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China. Trump followed the bad advice. That's the story. But over, over on, over on CNN, he just started
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late. That is so different. That is not even the same universe. Yeah, he was just, yeah, he was dumb.
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He just started late. And their viewers watch that. They go, yeah, big old dumb orange monster told us
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to drink bleach and he didn't take a pandemic seriously. My God, I, I'm so afraid of what's
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going to happen. I need Joe Biden. Stat. They, they also talked about disbanding the task force
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as if that's crazy. Now, here's where having some experience in different domains really serves you
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well. And I'm going to guess that there may be some, you know, experience lacking in the people who
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were on the, on the, that episode. And here's how this works. When the government disbands the task
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force, that is not the same as not working on the problem. You'd think that they would explain that
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anybody who's had any experience in a big organization knows that it is very common to,
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you know, build, build a task force. It does its work. And then, you know, when it gets past the
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critical period as we, as we have in a sense, because we now have enough supplies, we have enough
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ventilators, we have a blueprint of a plan, you know, everything that can be done by the federal
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government sort of been done, which is that they backstop the states to the point where the states
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really want to do their own thing. The citizens of those states want the state to make the decision.
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They don't want the federal government to make it. And, and the president said, well, who gets, who's
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the best? And here's the beautiful part. We can't tell the difference between genius and stupidity.
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We really can't. You know, we think we can, but we can't. It looks identical because both a genius
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and a stupid person will do something that doesn't make any sense to you. So if you don't understand
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why somebody is doing something, just keep in mind, there might be two reasons, not one.
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One is that they're smarter than you, right? This might, this might be an example of that. So the
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way CNN is reporting it is that the president's just sort of trying to put the responsibility of
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who dies on the states so that he can get reelected. Because people are going to die no matter what.
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But if the president says, all right, it's up to the states, then the responsibility is on the states,
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and it's a political move. And so the president is cleverly moving responsibility for killing people
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off to other people. Now, is that what's happening? Yeah. Yeah. That's one of the variables.
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But of course, it's CNN. So they can only handle one variable at a time. So is there anything that
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a president does that's not political, you know, a few months before the election? No, come on.
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Everything has a political dimension. But is that the reason that you turn it to the states
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around now? I think he said at the end of the month. No. The reason that you turn it over the
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states is genius. It's genius. Here's why. What have I, and by the way, this won't be the first time
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I've said this. So if you remember some of my earlier periscopes, I was making a big deal about the
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fact that the federal government is the wrong instrument for making the decision. Because it
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is a life and death decision. And you put your president in this position, and he should not make
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the decision. And the position is this, Mr. President, do you want the poor people to die,
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the sick people, or the old people? Because whichever way you go is going to move, is move the emphasis.
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There's a lot of overlap in those groups, obviously. But the emphasis of who dies is going to be largely
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determined by whether you're favoring the economy or the absolute avoidance and health aspects of the
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virus. So the president did what the Constitution understands he should do, push responsibility down
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whenever it's practical. More importantly, if it's a life and death decision, which these are,
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that also needs to be pushed down to the closest level of authority that's closest to the individual.
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Because if you're going to make life and death decisions about me,
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I would much rather have somebody who lives in my house make the decision.
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And if that's not possible, I want one of my closest neighbors to make the decision.
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If that's not possible, somebody in my town. If that's not possible, my county. If that's not
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possible, my state. If that's not possible, all right, last choice is the federal government.
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But if it's life and death, and it might kill me, or it might kill my grandmother, and somebody's
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going to decide, do you go? Or is it grandma? I want that decision pushed down to the lowest level.
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And I've been saying this, right? You know, I know I always get blamed for defending the president,
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no matter what he does. But you can fact check this, that I've been saying it for a while,
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the presidency is the wrong place. Let me also tie this to something I've said consistently for a
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while, too. On the question of abortion, I've said that the only person who shouldn't be in favor of
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abortion under any circumstances, no matter what party they're in, is whoever is the president.
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And the reason is that the president should be the only person in the country who will never kill
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an American, period. Now, maybe, you know, the death sentence for federal offenses and the military
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are sort of separate things. But you want your president to say, if that's a gray area, I'm out.
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But if it's a gray area about who lives and dies in the United States of the innocent citizens,
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or the arguably innocent citizens, when you're talking about a fetus, different opinions,
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you don't want the president on that conversation. That's the only person in the whole country who
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should say, I'm out. I'm out. You know, drive that down to the lowest level, because it's life and
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death. Now, if you can get away with the Supreme Court handling it, that's cool. But in any case,
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the president should get out of that decision. And he should get out of the life and death
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decisions for the coronavirus. And by disbanding the task force, the guidelines are in place.
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I think the public can very much look at the guidelines from the federal government.
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They can look at what their state did in variance to those guidelines. And then they can look at the
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other states. They can make up their own mind. I mean, I'm not sure we'll ever be able to,
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you know, know for sure who did the good job. There are just too many variables involved.
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But we'll be able to look at it. And if you ask me, this is really exactly the right time to disband
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the task force. I believe we have, we got tons of information. How much of it was accurate?
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Right? The task force gave us probably, you know, more inaccurate information than accurate,
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if I'm being fair. Now, that's not necessarily their fault, because there was no accurate information
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to be had. So they were passing along the best they could with the best intentions. But the result was
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that we were not better informed. You know, were you better informed because they told you that
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masks don't work? And I mean, I don't have to go through the list, right? You're not really better
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informed. And so I think we've been, we've all been educated up to the level that we don't need
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the task force anymore. So I would agree, that's the right time to get rid of it. I'm totally on with
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that decision. But here's the funniest part of that Anderson Cooper episode. He had a guy who was the,
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he had been the former CDC emergency preparation person. Okay, this is really important what his job was.
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In a, I think in a prior administration, he had been in charge of emergency preparation at the CDC.
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And Anderson Cooper had him on to talk about what the CDC is doing, right or wrong at the moment.
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You're in charge of the CDC emergency preparation.
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Because shouldn't we have been all prepared by now? Because you were the head of emergency
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preparation? And maybe there's a good reason. There might be actually a good reason why we're
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not prepared. And Anderson Cooper was interviewing the guy who was in charge of preparing. Now,
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one of the questions you might ask would be, hey, guy who used to be in charge of preparing,
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I'm just curious, why didn't you do some preparing? Could you answer that question? That question was not
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asked. Because, because the narrative of the show is that Trump is, you know, orange man bad. So I guess
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that didn't come up. All right. So much happened since this morning. It's interesting. Here's a question
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for you. I was listening to Dr. Carlson's show, and he was talking about going through the whole timeline of all the
00:24:08.400
bad things that China did to conceal how bad the coronavirus was. And then worse than that, they not only
00:24:16.060
concealed it, but they, well, they, they concealed it. And then they bought a bunch of PPE, PPE for
00:24:25.000
themselves, meaning that they got a bunch of masks and they, you know, started buying stuff so they'd
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have enough. And then by the time the rest of the world found out that it's actually a pandemic,
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and we would try to buy ventilators and masks, there wouldn't be any, because China would have them
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all. Now, let me ask you this. This is going to be a real mind effort. All right. You ready for
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this? I know you can handle it, but only because those of you have been watching my periscopes long
00:24:55.460
enough, you can handle a challenging thought without retreating to your bias. I, I'm trusting you to do
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this. All right. You're China. You're President Xi. Your experts come to you and say, we got a problem.
00:25:09.820
We let down the coronavirus. It looks like it might destroy much of the world. Could be hundreds of
00:25:17.540
millions dead. We don't even know how bad this thing is, but I'll tell you what, we're going to run out of
00:25:23.100
medical supplies really fast. What do we do? Now, you're President Xi. You have two ways to go. One is
00:25:31.820
complete transparency. You say, immediately tell your peers in the scientific community,
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immediately alert the UN and the World Health Organization, and tell them that we have created,
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accidentally, but we've created this massive problem, and you all need to get ready.
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What would happen? Well, what would happen is China would not have nearly as much access to
00:25:55.420
medical supplies, right? But if they don't tell the world, then they can hoard the supplies.
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Let me ask you this. Which one did their population want them to do? If the people in China had been a
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democracy, and they could vote on that question, which of course wasn't possible, but if they could have
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voted, would they have said, you know, it was an accident, and it's every country for itself.
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We have the advantage that we found out first, because we created the accident, but it was an
00:26:33.260
accident. And it's every country for themselves. And by the way, this could be so bad that if we take
00:26:42.220
care of ourselves well enough, we will be the leading country in the world when this is done,
00:26:47.720
because this might take out the United States. What would you do if you were President Xi?
00:26:56.440
Moreover, what would you do if you were any resident of China, and your choices were telling the world
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and your own population, you know, dies on the streets for lack of medical attention, and the right
00:27:10.120
proper, you know, protective gear, your entire country is destroyed, your economy goes to hell,
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there's cannibalism on the streets, or you make it somebody else's problem. Because after all,
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what is the motto of the United States? The motto of the United States is not, let's treat everybody
00:27:31.120
equally. Nope. The motto of the United States is, make America great again. America first.
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What would we do if it was the United States? What would President Trump do in the exact same
00:27:47.580
situation, but in the United States? If somebody came to President Trump and said,
00:27:53.380
we messed up, this virus got out, this is totally our fault. But if you tell the rest of the world,
00:28:00.600
10 million Americans are going to die. If we put it off and make it their problem, there might be 100
00:28:09.380
million people who die in other countries. But we might be able to save 10 million here. And we're
00:28:14.900
not even positive about that. I mean, we're kind of guessing, but it feels like that. And they say that
00:28:20.300
to President Trump, what's he do? Would President Trump stay true to his often stated philosophy of
00:28:30.660
America first? Because if he did, he'd do the same thing China did. Or would he say, this is bigger than
00:28:37.180
all of that? This is just bigger than all of that. Now, I don't think that President Trump would have
00:28:42.740
even had the option, because we don't stop freedom of speech. So if it happened in our country,
00:28:48.040
our scientists would just talk to the other scientists, that would be it. So it wouldn't even be a
00:28:53.200
question of the president being involved in a decision. The information would just flow out like it does
00:28:58.640
from the United States. So I just put that out there to say, nobody is harder on China than I am. As most
00:29:08.700
of you know, they killed my stepson with their fentanyl in 2018. At least I blame them, at least
00:29:15.640
partially, partially. Of course, he's to blame primarily. And I hate them more than anybody hates
00:29:22.760
them. Trust me. When I look at this, and I say, this is a real one off. I don't know if any other
00:29:31.080
country would have acted differently. I don't know. Do you? Do you know if any other country would have
00:29:38.280
acted differently? Because I don't know. Now, I don't think that that matters in terms of how we
00:29:43.680
treat them, because they did make their choice. And part of that choice is that they would have to
00:29:49.600
accept the blowback. In other words, they made a decision with full knowledge, I assume, right?
00:29:56.620
They had to have full knowledge that there was a high likelihood this would all come out,
00:30:00.940
and they would have, you know, possibly devastating long-term effects. But maybe it was just a better
00:30:06.820
bet. Maybe it was. If their economy opens up sooner than ours and does better and faster than ours,
00:30:13.920
it was a good bet. So, I don't know. Those are the things I'm thinking.
00:30:20.560
So, did you see the story about the British scientist expert who recommended quarantine for
00:30:32.220
everybody and lockdown for everybody and then found out that his married mistress was coming
00:30:37.700
to his house during the lockdown and then going back to her family? Like, oh my God. I don't have
00:30:45.940
anything to add to that story. But if you haven't seen it, just go read the story for entertainment
00:30:50.660
purposes, because it's just jaw-droppingly awful. All right, here's the funniest thing that happened,
00:30:56.520
which is that President Trump finally decided to give a nickname to Kellyanne Conway's husband.
00:31:04.160
Now, before we laugh about this, let me explain something about humor for the few people who don't
00:31:12.520
know. Now, I've often said that one-third of the public actually doesn't have a sense of humor.
00:31:17.740
But even the people who do have a sense of humor, they're, you know, varying degrees. And there's
00:31:22.760
a nuance that I don't know if everybody appreciates. And it goes like this. If an ordinary person
00:31:31.000
had made a deep insult about Kellyanne Conway's husband, what's his name? George? George Conway.
00:31:36.780
And had made that comment about his physicality, you know, any part of, you know, what he looks like
00:31:44.900
or whatever, that wouldn't be funny. Even if the actual insult was kind of clever, I don't think I
00:31:51.140
would be amused by that. Because this is random person saying an ugly thing about somebody who,
00:31:57.380
you know, maybe isn't the best looking. That's not fair. Like, I'm not cool with that at all.
00:32:03.380
But, when the most powerful person on the planet calls George Conway, who is, you know, of course,
00:32:13.740
the president's biggest critic, probably. When the president of the United States, the most powerful
00:32:18.680
person in the world, calls George Conway, moon face? Well, that's just funny. I'm sorry. That's just
00:32:29.260
funny. That's just plain funny. Now, I get that not everybody thinks that's funny. But the part of it
00:32:37.140
you have to understand is that it's the president's position that makes it funny. Because that's the
00:32:42.880
thing that makes it out of sync, right? If an ordinary troll says an ordinary insult to even a
00:32:51.260
famous person, you don't even register it. It just doesn't mean anything. Because it's completely
00:32:57.780
within the expected universe. So, remember, I was teaching you the, I think I was teaching you,
00:33:04.840
about humor, and how if you can create a situation that makes sense, but it doesn't make sense,
00:33:11.660
then people's laugh reflex will be triggered. So, you want to create situations that have a humor
00:33:19.300
logic to them, but they don't actually make sense. And then the brain will try to make them make sense,
00:33:24.220
but it can't, because it doesn't make sense. And then you'll laugh. It's sort of like a being
00:33:28.700
tickled. It's like a reflex. Well, if an ordinary person insults another person, there's nothing
00:33:35.280
unordinary about that, and your brain just processes that. Oh, troll, insults, victim, bam, no laugh. But,
00:33:44.140
if the most juvenile and yet super clever, which also doesn't make sense, that it could be juvenile
00:33:52.880
and super clever, because it's both. So, that's the first thing that shouldn't fit together. It's
00:33:59.560
like, wait a minute, that's juvenile, but it's also like ridiculously genius. But it's also juvenile,
00:34:08.420
juvenile, but a juvenile can't be a genius. And so, that's the first thing that hits your humor reflexes.
00:34:16.280
You can't reconcile that it really is kind of genius. It's just juvenile at the same time. And
00:34:22.160
then you can't reconcile why any of those two things would ever come out of a sitting president's
00:34:27.900
thumbs. And then you just go, I can't even understand this. And then you just start laughing,
00:34:33.960
because it's all things that don't belong in the same place. Now, the president, you know,
00:34:39.140
I've often said that he's, he's unable to be uninteresting. I don't know if he even knows how
00:34:45.220
to be uninteresting. His just normal, normal mode is always interesting. And part of the way he does
00:34:53.120
that is that he makes things, he puts things together that your brain doesn't want to put together.
00:35:00.120
Like, you can't quite make sense of it, but you sort of know what he's talking about. And he does
00:35:05.340
it so often that you lose sight of it as a technique, that he's continually putting not quite logical
00:35:13.000
things together, and your brain is trying to keep up, and it's trying to cement them together as he's
00:35:17.460
going. And while you're struggling with the last one, he's already on to the next one. It's like, oh,
00:35:22.880
but how will Mexico pay for the wall? I don't even know how that works. And then he's on to the next
00:35:29.760
topic. And so if you know, it's part of the show, you can really just enjoy it the way many of you do
00:35:38.420
the way I do. I mean, and it's just from an entertainment perspective, it's just amazing.
00:35:45.240
Right? But if you think he's evil, and he's up to up to bad news, you just think he's a double guy
00:35:50.820
rambling. So you missed the show. Did you notice that the idea of closing the streets in front of
00:36:01.300
restaurants actually is catching on? So you probably heard me mention it, you probably heard
00:36:06.340
Greg Duffield mention it on The Five. I think he mentioned it like three different times on The Five.
00:36:11.500
Probably other people have had the idea as well. And the idea is that since you need space,
00:36:15.860
and it's always healthier to be outdoors with this virus situation, that where you have a density of
00:36:21.760
restaurants, you know, if you have several of them on a sort of main street, as long as you have,
00:36:26.720
you know, surrounding streets, so you can go around, just close the street. Now, in my town,
00:36:31.540
we have that exact situation. We've got a tiny little downtown, but it's mostly restaurants,
00:36:37.640
or a lot of restaurants, not mostly, a lot of restaurants. And they fairly frequently close the
00:36:43.300
street for, like, street fairs and events and stuff. So it's sort of built for that. It's just
00:36:47.420
perfect. So I sent that idea. I guess there's a restaurant in Tampa doing it. There's some other
00:36:52.600
people playing with it. And it's just the obvious solution. So I sent that idea to, you know, one of
00:36:59.600
the best restaurant guys in my town to see if he can make that happen. Let's see. What else we got
00:37:08.440
going on here? Oh, speaking of Greg, so the president tweets this, just like out of the blue.
00:37:19.320
You know, I told you the other day that the president tweeted me, like, three times in a row
00:37:24.820
the other day. And you wake up to the president tweeting you, and it just doesn't even feel like
00:37:30.140
reality anymore. You feel like you're in some kind of weird other world again. It's like doing
00:37:36.060
mushrooms again. And so imagine, you know, you're Greg, and he just, you know, he just,
00:37:41.700
he just, you know, wakes up like it's any other day, you know, goes to work, does his thing.
00:37:48.200
And then somebody says, uh, do you see what the president tweeted? What? You didn't see? What?
00:37:56.640
Did you see what the president tweeted about you? What? Now, I don't know if it went down like that,
00:38:02.660
but maybe he did. Anyway, this is what the president tweets. He goes, wow, congratulations
00:38:08.640
to Greg Gutfeld, a one-time Trump hater who has come all the way home, which is hilarious.
00:38:14.860
His ratings easily beat no talent Stephen Colbert, nice guy Jimmy Fallon, which is just a wonderfully
00:38:21.540
dismissive insult, nice guy Jimmy Fallon, and wacko last placer Jimmy Kimmel. Greg built his show
00:38:28.740
from scratch and did a great job in doing so. And I love that last line. Oh, that last line is just
00:38:36.820
that, you know, the dagger, you can feel the dagger going in just because, you know, that Greg beat all
00:38:43.760
of these people. And he's a, you know, he says good things about Trump now and then. So, you know,
00:38:49.780
Trump's just putting the dagger in and the dagger is like, it's an inch in. And then he gets to this
00:38:55.280
last line and, you know, and you can feel like, oh, that hurts quite a bit. That dagger is about
00:39:00.740
an inch in. And then the president says, Greg built his show from scratch.
00:39:07.840
Oh, just stop and think about that. You know, all these other three guys who didn't get as good
00:39:17.080
at ratings as Greg Gutfeld gets on the Gutfeld show, Greg Gutfeld show. Every one of them just
00:39:23.940
inherited a show that had such a long time audience that they couldn't have ruined it if
00:39:29.680
they tried. Think about the difference between just inheriting somebody's chair, which is largely
00:39:36.840
what the other three did, and convincing, wait for this, convincing a conservative news network
00:39:46.400
to run a humor, irreverent show at night. Like, how do you even do that? Even obviously,
00:39:55.400
you know, red eye gave him some, some traction on that. But so the guys on, you know, two top rated
00:40:03.360
shows for their time, time range, you know, the, the five and Greg Gutfeld show. But I just love
00:40:09.900
the way the president threw these other guys onto the bus and then backed over them and then ran over
00:40:15.300
them and backed over them again. But when you throw in that last part, it's like, he built
00:40:20.000
it from scratch from nothing. He built it from nothing. That's a whole different level.
00:40:28.800
All right. Ben Shapiro tweeted the, probably the best description of what's going on right
00:40:39.500
now. So you should take a look at that tweet thread. I tweeted it. I tweeted it so you can find
00:40:44.460
in my, toward the top of my Twitter feed. And he makes the following point, which I agree
00:40:52.340
with. I have one small disagreement, which I'll mention. And that is that what Ben Shapiro points
00:40:59.840
out is that we don't have a plan and we sort of didn't notice it. Meaning that our original
00:41:06.540
plan made sense. We were going to try to spare the hospitals from overcapacity by bending the
00:41:13.360
curve. And we were going to do that with social distancing. Mission accomplished, I'd say,
00:41:19.460
wouldn't you? So that plan seems to have been successful. But now we're at the phase where
00:41:28.960
that plan is doing its thing. And as Ben asks, and, and then what? Like, what's, what's the
00:41:38.720
next thing? Now, I, obviously they're going to try to open up businesses slowly and cautiously
00:41:43.520
and all that. But are we, why are we just opening them all? Are we, are we holding out for a
00:41:52.160
therapeutic? Are we holding out for a vaccine that's never going to happen? Are we, what
00:41:59.540
exactly is the long range plan? Because if the plan is that we have to basically just live with
00:42:07.780
it, which means getting it, uh, if there's herd immunity, would that be great if there's not herd
00:42:14.400
immunity? Well, that's what it is, but we don't really have an option anymore. You know, I've said
00:42:20.560
people are already criticizing the president for, um, not starting soon enough and, you know,
00:42:26.100
and maybe being too fast to end it. So he gets, you know, he gets blamed for both sides. Um,
00:42:33.080
but I'm not so sure, uh, anybody knew, you know, what was the right thing to do. All right. So here's
00:42:41.520
the point. We, we have to recognize that there is no plan to get rid of it, right? There's, there's
00:42:49.280
nobody even suggesting that something could happen for it to go away. Certainly not before
00:42:55.460
hundreds of thousands of Americans die from it. But we, there's some reason we're not saying that.
00:43:02.760
Why can't we just say that? And Ben was making this point as well, that we should be able to
00:43:07.760
expressly say, this is what we're going to do. We're just going to live with it because we don't
00:43:13.700
really think there's anything that's going to change within the planning horizon. And if we don't
00:43:19.860
get back to work, it could be too late. So, um, so I, I think his point of view is good. Now,
00:43:28.360
the one thing he said that I'll, I'll, I'll slightly quibble with is that he said, if you don't have a
00:43:33.380
timeline, you know, an estimated time of when you're going to do what, then you don't have a plan.
00:43:39.340
I would disagree with that because I think in the context of a, uh, ever changing situation where
00:43:46.180
your data is different every day, that having a plan almost doesn't make sense. We're really more
00:43:52.720
in a situation where we're responding rapidly, which I would call a plan. So we certainly have
00:43:59.200
a plan of, uh, rapidly responding to what we learn as we learn it. If we developed a therapeutic that
00:44:05.640
works, we would rapidly implement it. If we learn that genetics make a difference, we would rapidly
00:44:10.860
implement it. So, I mean, that is the plan, but it doesn't require a timeline because nobody knows
00:44:17.100
when this vaccine might or might not happen, when some therapeutic will work or not.
00:44:24.960
So I wouldn't worry about the timeline part of it, but it is true that there's something like,
00:44:30.140
uh, a lack of a plan. Now, part of it is people don't want to say that they want to kill old people,
00:44:37.680
unhealthy people, minorities, and poor people. And who does, right? Who wants to say in public,
00:44:46.420
you know, if it's up to me, I'll save this group and kill this group. Well, I'll go first.
00:44:53.700
How about I go first? So here's your choice, Scott. You've got to have a policy that would favor
00:44:59.540
favor or not favor any of these groups, the elderly, the people with comorbidities and the
00:45:10.280
poor. Now there's an overlap, of course, but if you do something that helps people financially,
00:45:17.700
you know, helps the poor, you're probably going to kill a lot of old people. The people with
00:45:23.480
comorbidities, you know, they probably have bad luck no matter what you do. And so, Scott, who do
00:45:30.840
you want to kill? Old people or poor people, many of whom especially are African Americans who have
00:45:39.160
a special risk apparently with the coronavirus. Who are you going to kill? Old people or African
00:45:45.220
Americans? Go ahead, Scott. Say it. Say it in public. Who are you going to kill? Are you willing
00:45:50.980
to say that in public? That you would kill old people or you would kill African Americans and
00:45:56.220
poor people? Go ahead. Say it. Okay. Old people. That's my choice. I choose old people.
00:46:06.820
If you can say that too, or even if you can say the opposite, but if you can say it out loud,
00:46:13.280
you get to sit at the adult table. You could be right. You could be wrong. I would only ask you to
00:46:20.240
have good intentions. You could be selfish. That's totally allowed. You could say, you know,
00:46:25.740
this is good for me. Yeah, I don't care about other people. This is the way I want to go. It's
00:46:31.680
just good for me. If you can do that and say it out loud, you too get to sit at the adult table
00:46:37.140
because you can be selfish as an adult. You're allowed. Our system allows you to vote for who you
00:46:43.020
think is going to help you. That's built into the system perfectly fine. But if you can't say it,
00:46:50.740
you got to stay at the kid's table. And then you just pretend like there's magical solutions and
00:46:56.360
magical vaccines and you don't have to make trade-offs. That's the kid's table. Go sit there.
00:47:04.360
So I said it out loud. I would say if the poor and the African American community first, to the
00:47:12.260
extent that your policies can have an emphasis, I'm not even sure if that's possible. But if it can,
00:47:19.020
that's the way I'd go. So in other words, I would go back to work a little bit faster
00:47:22.900
than maybe some others. Not so fast that it's crazy. And really, I said before, I said this morning,
00:47:30.160
that if it turns out that you had to wait another three weeks in California, that's what it looks
00:47:36.720
like. Another three weeks. Three weeks probably isn't the difference between living and dying. It's
00:47:43.580
probably not the difference between your company failing. Everybody's saying so. But keep in mind,
00:47:49.520
they're all economically ignorant. Let me tell you why things are not as bad as maybe you think in terms
00:47:55.380
of the companies that are going out of business. You're going to hear all these stories from the
00:48:00.020
financially ignorant portion of the press, which is almost everybody, saying that all these
00:48:06.820
restaurants are going out of business and closing, etc. What they won't tell you is what is the
00:48:12.760
landlord going to do? What do they do with a building that used to be rented and now it's still a
00:48:23.060
restaurant, but they own it? What are they going to do? Well, the smartest thing the landlord could do
00:48:29.320
is make a deal with the owner, the restaurant owner, and say, look, you didn't pay me for three
00:48:35.840
weeks. You're totally underwater, but so is everybody. So is everybody. Can you come back?
00:48:44.200
And the best thing for me is you come back, because that's the best thing for the landlord.
00:48:50.760
And that will always be left out by the financially illiterate. That all these companies that are
00:48:56.180
declaring bankruptcy and closing and saying they'll never open up again? That's not exactly true.
00:49:03.280
Quite a few of those that think they're closed for good are going to come back to a world in which
00:49:08.760
people are way more flexible than they imagined. They're going to have banks that say, you know,
00:49:15.040
you're bankrupt. I'll still give you a loan. Imagine that. Imagine a world where you're going
00:49:21.600
to be able to walk into a bank and say, I'm bankrupt last week. Will you give me a business
00:49:28.160
loan? And the bank will look at you and say, were you in business three months ago in a successful
00:49:34.320
restaurant? Yes, I was. And then, you know, restaurants actually are hard to finance. So maybe a restaurant's
00:49:41.700
the worst example, because it's going to be hard for them to get a loan. But it's always hard for
00:49:46.420
restaurants to get funding. But for an ordinary business, the bank is going to say, I'm not sure
00:49:53.060
I care that you're bankrupt. I care that, you know, it's a real business and you can pay the bills.
00:49:59.460
But everybody who came in this week is bankrupt. It's like, it's universal now. So I think that you
00:50:05.300
would hear a lot of fake bad news that people will imagine as if somebody went out of business
00:50:11.780
in a world where everybody else didn't. But in a world where massive numbers of people went out of
00:50:17.940
business, the options are very constrained. And the most obvious best option for almost everybody
00:50:25.400
is to get really flexible and put those people who are out of business back in business as quickly
00:50:31.620
as possible. So I think they could be and a business and then back in business faster than
00:50:36.900
you think, just because it's the easiest way to go for everybody. All right, those are the things I
00:50:42.180
want to talk about. Somebody says another three weeks is ridiculous. Well, it might be ridiculous
00:50:49.700
scientifically, but I don't think it would be ridiculous in terms of death. You know, I don't think
00:50:57.140
anybody will die from poverty in three weeks. And I don't think it will be a measurable difference.
00:51:10.940
Texas woman put in jail for cutting hair. Oh, that's the other thing I want to say. When this
00:51:16.180
is all over, when when all the restrictions are off and everybody can move freely. I want us all to
00:51:23.060
share our stories of massive cheating during the lockdown. I know you got your stories. I know you
00:51:30.820
do. I see you. You're smiling. You're smiling. Because I know that you snuck somewhere. You saw
00:51:39.140
somebody. You know you did. You let some people come over to your house. You know you did. I see
00:51:45.940
you're smiling. You. Yep. You. Yep. Busted. So when this is all over and you don't feel the
00:51:53.860
red, hot, searing pain of other people's judgment upon you, I want to hear your funny stories of the
00:52:02.100
things you got away with. Because somebody says slept with neighbor, which I'm sure is true. Because I
00:52:10.660
think there are going to be a lot of stories about people who maybe, let's just say, did not obey
00:52:18.660
their government if they didn't feel that their government's rules were, let's say, perfectly
00:52:25.060
crafted. People who may have massively cheated on this social isolation thing just because they
00:52:34.500
thought their government didn't have the moral authority, the technical expertise, or the
00:52:40.180
management risk management ability to decide for them. And so they decided for themselves and just
00:52:47.860
figured out how to beat the system. I'm not recommending it. I'm just saying it'll be very
00:52:51.700
funny when we share the stories. Not that I have one. I've been totally good. I know you haven't.
00:52:59.860
I'm not going to read that comment. All right, that's enough for now. Have a great night of sleep.
00:53:05.060
And have a great night. Tomorrow is going to be way better than today. I promise. You just wait and see.