Episode 970 Scott Adams: ObamaGate, COVID19 Fake News, Fake Polls and Fun

Hey, everybody. Well, what a great day. No, really, this is going to be one of the best days of the whole week. And what better way to kick it off than the simultaneous sip. That's right. That's right. You said it at the same time. And all you need to enjoy the simultaneous sip to its maximum potential. I'm talking maximum potential here. We're talking about the kind of simultaneous sip that will boost your immune response. I'm talking about the kind of thing that will move mountains, change civilizations. Yeah, that kind of simultaneous sip. And it's coming at you, but all you need. All you need is a cup or a mug or a glass of tanker gels or sign, a canteen jerk or flask, a vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better, including the damn pandemic. It's called the simultaneous sip, and it happens. Now go. I feel like I could eat raw pangolin right now. Wouldn't bother me. Nope. Easy. Weird comments today. Let's talk about my notes instead of your weird comments about hot dogs. And I don't even want to read the rest of that stuff. It's a weird day today. All right. I noticed this morning that I've got 150,000 views for my video that's pinned on my Twitter feed. Teaching you the user interface for reality. And 150,000 views is a lot for what I do. And I actually went back and watched it again, like a viewer. There's a strange phenomenon that happens when I make these videos. And I first noticed this when I used to give speeches and a lot of interviews, live interviews. I could do an hour long interview, and when I walked away, I would have no memory of it. I mean, I would have a general memory of it, but I wouldn't really remember what I answered or what I talked about because I do so many of these. And so I did the. The user interface to reality video, and I kind of forgot about it instantly, the way I always do. Not in any special way, but the way I always do when I walk away. It's like, okay, I know I talked about that general topic, but I don't hold it in my memory as a whole. So when I watch myself on playback, I have this weird experience of watching it. Like. Like I'm watching it for the first time. Like it wasn't me who just said it 24 hours ago. It's the strangest thing. It's like. It's like a third party experience where you're just watching somebody else. Because I don't know what I'm gonna say. Just like you don't when you're watching it. Because I don't remember what I said in what order. And as I'm saying it, I'm watching it. And I had the weirdest experience watching myself talk and saying things. I didn't quite know what I was going to say as I said them. But here's the thing that I got out of it. I did not know how much persuasion technique I built into just my regular communication until I watched it as just an observer, which typically I'm not in that head. And I thought to myself, my God, somebody says, were you high? Yeah, I was, of course. But was it the evening? You should know the answer to that question. But that's not why I don't remember them. The reason I don't remember them is common over my entire career, no matter what my mental state. But you should watch. If you watched it once for the content, you might. If you're just interested in technique, especially if you've read Winn Bigley. If you've read Winn Bigley, look at the persuasion technique that I use throughout and especially look at the this one variable which I actually talk about in the video, which is curiosity. Watch from the very beginning how I. How I tweak your curiosity to keep you for what is a pretty long video. And then ask yourself if you can feel it as it's happening. So that's the fun part. So see if you can feel yourself getting curious and actually feel the persuasion trapping you to watch the rest of it. Just interesting to see if you felt it. All right. The biggest fake news of the day is about testing. I would call this a double fake news. So basically it's fake news on Fox News, it's fake news on cnn. It's just all fake news. Here's what I think is happening. So this is my best interpretation of what's happening. I won't give this 100%, but it feels like this is what's happening. When the administration says that and President says specifically, anyone who wants a test can get one. Is that true? Because he says it multiple times, said it yesterday. Anyone who wants a test for the coronavirus can get one. Or is it true, as CNN is reporting consistently, it's just not true. Bill Gates would say it's not true that we don't have as much. You can't get a test just because you want one and we don't have enough. So they can't both be true, right? Can it be true that everyone who wants one can get one at the same time that we don't have enough? Can they both be true? So one of them is true and one of them is a lie, right? Which one is it? Both lies. Both lies. Here's the answer. I think I'll give you my theory. I think that when the President says anyone who wants a test can get one, he's talking Mafia talk. Here's what I mean. Hey, doctor, can I get a test? Why do you want a test? I just want a test. I mean, I think I might have it. You know, it would be nice to know if I had a. If I had it. Maybe I want to be around old people or something, but I want a test. And then the doctor who also in my example, happens to be a member of the Mafia, just to make it interesting, the doctor says, you don't want that test. And then the patient said, no, I do want the test. I'm just curious. I'd like to see if I have it. Could mean a big difference to me. And the doctor says, these tests, you only want these if you've got symptoms. And the patient says, no, I want it. I don't have any symptoms. I just want it. And the doctor says, you don't want that. You don't want that. You only want that if you have symptoms or if you're being contact traced because you had contact with somebody else, or you're part of our random selection for testing the antibodies. Those are the three times you want it, the other times you don't want it. Oh, so I can get a test if I want it, but you're telling me that I don't want it? Now you got it. You got it. You can get it if you want it, but you don't want it in those other reasons, right? Oh, yeah, I guess that was my Dr. Fauci impression. It wasn't supposed to be Dr. Fauci, let's not make this ethnic. That's my generic Mafia impression from the Godfather. Could you recognize it? I thought it was spot on. So I would say that both sides are lying by omission. The Trump administration is lying that anybody can get one. And you know, of course, if you're talking about 50 states, there's some little anecdote about Ohio doesn't have enough of whatever. I'm sure it's true that in some places they're struggling to get enough because that would just be normal. Right. 50 states, they're not all going to be equally ready. That wouldn't even make sense. But it can't be true that anybody can get a test just because they want one. Right. The President is sort of talking mafia talk because remember, and I'm not guessing on this because his expert, the. What is it? The second in command at the Health and Human Services says it directly. And by the way, he's really good. I forget his name. Who's the guy who's number two at the Health and Human Services? Girauer or something. But I thought he was excellent when he broke down that the tests are for if you have symptoms, if you're part of contact tracing or you've been selected by whoever for asymptomatic testing just to see what's in the atmosphere. And I thought that's actually a really good answer. And that would be a way better answer than the way the President is doing it because he's too easily taken, let's say literally, I guess. And I don't think that the President is speaking literally, but when you're talking about health related objects or situations, you really need to talk literally. You know, that's where he gets in trouble. Yeah, it's Girard. So I thought Girard did a really good job of just setting it up. Three reasons that you need testing. We do have enough testing for those three reasons. Our focus on opening the economy is that testing. We have enough for that. I think that's fair. But. But they don't say that. They say everybody can get a test. That's just technically not true. Here's what enough tests look like. So over in China, they've decided that they're going to do some more testing in Wuhan because I guess they got six new cases recently. So that was a little uptick. They're concerned about that. So China is planning to do 1.1 million tests per day just in Wuhan for 10 days in a row. 1.1 million per day in one city, 10 days in a row. So it's not spread over 10 days. They're doing 1.1 million a day for 10 days, one city. How close are we to being able to do that? Not even close. Right? No way. Maybe we can get there by say end of the year or something, but we're not there. So when somebody like Bill Gates or apparently China says enough tests is what it looks like for Wuhan, that's what it means to have enough tests. If you want to do enough testing to actually stamp it down and eradicate it. You're looking at that level of testing, and we're not close to that. We're at the. Yeah, you can have a test if you want it. No, you don't want it, you don't want it. That's what we have. I do think it is true, however, that probably amazing and heroic things are happening in terms of ramping up. So I think when Jared talks about how amazing our testing is increasing, it's like a hundred fold since 30 days ago or some number like that. I think that's real and that should be lauded and we should be pretty darn happy about that. But I think that we all have to be a little bit grown up about what is possible to scale up to that level of testing that we would need. And to do that in two months is really sort of unprecedented. I mean, to expect that it would have gone smoothly is asking a lot of a country that doesn't do anything smoothly. So anyway, it is entirely possible that you could do a great job of getting testing together from wherever it was to wherever it needs to be. You could do the greatest job in the world and still not get close to where you needed to be. And I think that describes our situation. I do think the government probably did a great job of increasing testing. It's just hard and it takes a long time. So what would be the standard to say that they had done it well or not done it well? It's purely subjective. Should it have been done in one week? Well, it wasn't, so they failed. Should it take six months? Well, they'll probably beat that. They'll probably have all the testing they need in less than six months. Is that a big success? Depends what you're measuring it against. And we don't know what was par. What would be a good job? What would that look like? We don't know. There's no reporting on that. So you can't even tell if we did a good job or a bad job. I would say there's not sufficient evidence that you could even have an informed opinion about whether the government is doing a good or bad job. You can tell if there's enough, but you don't know if they got there the right way or the best way. One of the funniest things that you will ever see, and it's funny because it works. You know when somebody does a really dumb trick and it works and you think that shouldn't have worked? That is the dumbest trick in the world. It's so obvious what you did. How does that work? And CNN did this. They ran a poll in which they were asking people in the CNN poll who they trusted the most to give them accurate information about the coronavirus situation. And on CNN's poll, interestingly enough, they found that people trusted CNN more than they trusted Trump to tell them about the coronavirus. Now, here's the funny part. Why in the world would people not trust Trump? What would cause that to happen? Could it be nonstop reporting by fake, fake news cnn, that he had wondered aloud about drinking household disinfectants, which of course never happened? Could it be that they're reporting on his hydroxychloroquine, which was smart risk management conversation by adults, which they turned into, he wants to kill people for no reason. Could it be that the reason that CNN viewers, or at least anybody who saw a CNN poll, I don't know if they were just viewers. I hope not. If it was a decent poll. Why. Why is it that people might not trust Trump? Well. Well, maybe because all the reporting is fake and people believed it. When Kayleigh McEnany, the new press secretary, was asked why, she used to think something about Trump, and then she changed her mind and she said, well, I used to read, I used to listen to CNN and naively believe it, which was a hilarious answer. Doesn't CNN's poll kind of answer itself? Like they actually had the guts to deliver fake news about what Trump was saying for months and then do a poll of whether you trusted Trump's opinions and they weren't even real ones? That takes guts. Okay? You have to admit that's funny, right? I mean, isn't it kind of funny that they can get away with this? They can make up the news and then blame it on Trump. Here's a little thing that I just thought was funny. So I watched the press conference. I think many of you saw it yesterday, in which the reporters were wearing masks and the President wasn't. Now, we've all talked about the President not wearing a mask. I think he just doesn't think it looks presidential. And I'm not so sure he's wrong about that. I'm a little bit on the fence on this one, because Trump's instincts on this stuff, the visual persuasion, are really strong. So I would say that he is probably taking a chance. Not probably. I mean, if he's not wearing a mask, it's riskier than if he were. So let's agree that that's just statistically a truth. But how much of it is? How Much of a risk is it, for any one person who is otherwise healthy? It's not the biggest risk in the world. You don't want your president to take risks, but that's not the biggest risk in the world if everybody else is being tested and he's not shaking hands anymore, that sort of stuff. So you can see why Trump would take the chance, but you could also see why a reasonable person would say, maybe you shouldn't, or be a better role model, whatever. Anyway, you can see the argument. The part I loved is that the reporters didn't have an option. The reporters. So here's the visual for me that Trump wants the press to shut up and they get up and they've got masks literally covering their mouths and they're mumbling. I have a question. I have a question that you can barely hear through my mask, but the President doesn't have a mask. So the fact that the press was literally muzzled, and we watched it, they stood up and they were muzzled, and then the President wasn't muzzled. I just loved the visual. It was just this wonderful moment of where the President was getting a perfect visual persuasion. Now, you could argue that he ruined it by getting snippy at the end and walking off, but even at the end, my impression during the entire press conference is that he was boring, but in a good way. Every now and then, you want Trump to be boring, right? Because you don't want him to make news on some topics. And every time he talks about the science or anything about coronavirus, in my head, I'm saying, no, don't do it, don't do it. Just. Just talk about the political stuff. Don't talk about the science. No, no, don't go there. And then he goes there. But the thing, the thing I always say about Trump is that he doesn't know how to be uninteresting. It's the most consistent thing you've ever seen. He can't be uninteresting. So he gives the press conference totally, totally straightforward. Didn't get too political, stuck to the facts. Seemed just professional and competent. And I thought to myself, yeah, that's good. It's professional competent. Looks like he's on the ball. I'm a little bit bored. I think I'm watching an Obama press conference. And then at the end, he gets all snippy with the press. You don't need to know the details, but he made the end of it memorable. Not in a good way, because he just walked away after a while. Thank you very much. He was out of there. And I thought to myself, well, there it is. He cannot make an appearance boring. He doesn't know how to be boring. So at the end, he'd been boring the entire time. He's like, well, put a little dessert on there. And now it's national news. Let's see, let's see, let's see. We got other stuff here. One of the most interesting elements of the fake news, and let's call this a battle between the left and the right news, is this frame. Was Trump a big success or a big failure? And was Andrew Cuomo a big success or a big failure? Well, it seems to me that both Cuomo and Trump largely followed the advice of experts for pretty much everything, wouldn't you say? As far as we know. Right. I don't think either Trump or Cuomo departed from experts, but there might be one exception for both. The one exception, I believe, at least the way it's being reported is, is that Trump departed from experts when he decided to close travel from China except for U.S. citizens. And that was. Right. So now we agree that Trump, what would you call him, he did what the experts were not telling him to do. And now we all agree that that was the right decision, but otherwise, I think he just did what the experts told him to do. Now the states are not doing what the experts told the states to do, but that's sort of on the states. So Trump was compatible with the experts except for one big, big call, a very big call which he got right. Is that a fair defied. Thank you. I couldn't come up with the word defied. The experts. Is that a fair summary? Could. Do you think that even the other side would say, yes, right or wrong? Trump followed the recommendation of the experts with just that one exception, closing the travel. And he got it right. Cuomo, as far as I know, I could use a fact check on this, but I think Cuomo probably followed the experts, too. The one question I have is returning people to the nursing homes, which turned out to maybe kill 5,000 people. Now, do we know there's a hole in the reporting? I don't know if you've noticed this, but this is very missing. Why did Cuomo, or did he even know about it? Did the governor himself know that patients were being returned to nursing homes? I mean, did he sign an order like that? Did he talk to somebody? Did an expert say it would be okay? So when you're evaluating Cuomo, the part of the news that we don't have because we don't have good reporting or I haven't seen it, maybe somebody has reported it. Is was Cuomo simply following the best expert advice when he said, what do we do with these people? If that conversation even happened? Or was that a case where he violated or defied? Defied. Did he defy their advice? Somebody saying, yes, he did, but also he signed the order to do it? People are saying in the comments. So let's say that that's true. There's enough of you saying he signed the order. Did he know that that was what the experts were advising, or did he know that the experts did not advise it? Because I don't know if they did or did not. Were there any experts involved? So I would like to know more about that reporting. It sounds like all of you are fact checking me and saying he did sign the order, so he was aware of it. But being aware of it doesn't mean it was necessarily a mistake. Unless we also know that the experts told him not to do it. Cernovich has the order from Cuomo on his Twitter, but that wouldn't tell us if the experts had recommended it. Right? Okay, so forget about the question of whether he signed it. Let's say he did. Let's only focus on was he advised? Because it's looking like Trump got everything right, at least in terms of being compatible with the experts, whether it turns out right or not. And the one thing he wasn't, he got right. Closing travel so is Cuomo the same? I don't know. I will say this again and again and again. When we're blamed. We're looking back in the past, in this fog of war, once we have our perfect vision of the future, you know, we'll be so smart in the future and we'll look back and say, well, we should have done this, we should have done that, and I'm not going to stand for any of it, whether it's Trump mistakes or Cuomo mistakes, alleged mistakes, real mistakes, any other governor's mistakes, any experts mistakes, any of it. Because we were asking people to make decisions without the benefit of all the information. That was the task our leaders were given. Our experts and our leaders please make our decisions. We all understand we don't know what is the right answer. And we're going to have to guess and we're going to have to adjust. Guess, adjust, guess, adjust. So when you ask your leaders to guess what's right, try it and then adjust. Because that's the only thing we had. We didn't have good information, you know, wouldn't it be great? Use all our great drugs on our great information. We didn't have any of that. We were totally in the dark. And so if you're totally in the dark and the only thing you can do is try stuff and then adjust, and then we note that our leaders were doing exactly that, trying stuff and adjusting. I'm not going to tolerate for this Governor got it right and this one didn't. Because if you got 50 governors, somebody's going to get it right. Does that mean they're the smart ones? Does it? Because you can't demonstrate that. You can only demonstrate that it was done 50 different ways and they got 50 different results. You're not going to really know who is the smart one. You're really not. So we should be easy on ourselves, meaning our leaders who had to make those decisions, be they Democrats or be they Republicans. I know it doesn't work that way, but we should. All right, here's the weirdest thing. Oh, I love the fact that I think Tucker Carlson is the only one who talks about this. That there actually is no evidence of Russian hacking on the Podesta's email. Did you know that? Because it's been reported as just a fact that we know the Russians hacked this. But if you actually dig down now we know with the Obama gay stuff coming out that we actually don't know that. And I think you remember very early on when I was talking about it, the way I was talking about it was this, how is it we know that Russia was hacking? Because if we know that Russia was hacking, I don't know what hacking is. That's the part I was lost on. I was like, are you telling me that our highest level government spy hackers leave a trail that tracks right back to them? Those are like the best hackers in the world working for top secret intelligence agencies. They don't know how to hack something without leaving a trail. So that part was just mind boggling to me that anybody believed that we could actually know. Certainly you could leave a trail that it was someone else, couldn't you? Isn't that common? So I always took that as I hear what you're saying that you know Russia did it. I hear you're saying that you got your secret sources. Well, I'm not going to buy the Seth Rich part of that story. You know, I don't rule anything out if I don't have reason to rule it out, but I don't have a reason to rule that one in. All right, so here is this two world thing happening with Obamagate. First of all, I very much love the fact that President Trump has embraced the Obamagate hashtag and label because Russia collusion has now been rebranded. It was the final step because it was one thing to say Russia collusion. Russia collusion. But that brand of the topic made Trump look guilty just. Just when you talked about it, because they had Russia collusion right in the name of the topic. Well, now that we know that that didn't happen, at least in terms of the president's involvement or the administration, it needed a new name. And Obamagate is just sort of perfect political branding. Now, I'm not saying, you know, I'm not giving you a moral opinion. I'm just saying that it's effective from the Republican perspective to call it Obamagate. You saw how sticky that was. It was like the major trending thing. And it also, it just, the name of it now puts it on Obama. But here's the question, what do we know that Obama did? Here's what we know. Here's what we know. And then I'll tell you what the two worlds have divided into. Okay, here's what we know. That Obama reportedly voiced concern. Voiced concern. So this is not gave an order. He simply was voicing concern about potential Russian influence with the Trump administration. Now, that's what the reporting is. So the only thing we know is that Obama asked the question, I think, of Comey and Yates. Should we do anything differently because there's some concern about Flynn and Russia. Now, is that illegal? Is it illegal or even unethical to wonder aloud whether there's any kind of Russia connection that's important to know with Flynn? Now, you say to yourself, but, Scott, there's no evidence that there's a problem. But you know, everything, everything that matters with whether this is an Obamagate or just a series of bad decisions by individuals. The difference is what Obama's internal mental state was and what the internal mental state of Comey and Yates were when they had the conversation. That's not in evidence. The thing we don't have in evidence is what anybody was thinking. We only have in evidence what people were saying. And what Obama was saying was a question. It wasn't an order. It wasn't in order. I did think he said, give me the answer to the question, which is, should we treat Flynn differently? Now, was the simple question from Obama, should we treat them differently? In other words, brief them fully and all that stuff. Was that question really an order? And was that question an order with details like wiretap him and spy on the administration. Could you say if the only thing you knew and you could never prove more than that is that Obama simply asked the question, would that be enough to say that he ordered the takedown and the coup of the United States? Can you connect those dots? Because I can. Somebody says it's unethical to wonder aloud. Why would it ever be unethical to wonder aloud if somebody was compromised by Russia? I don't get that point. Now. Trent Gowdy was on. Was it Hannity's show or Tucker's show? I guess Tucker show. And Trent Gowdy said that there's a as yet still redacted memo. So there's part of some memo, it might have been Susan Rice's, but Trent Gowdy says with a big smile because he's seen it, you haven't, that when that gets unredacted, that we're going to know a lot more. So here's what I suspect. If I'm just looking at what's been reported and the new stuff that's been unredacted, I don't see evidence that Obama ordered ordered takedown of the government, the incoming government. So it's just not there. What is there is a lot of circumstantial evidence. What is there is a lot of stuff to speculate about. What is there is that reasonable people could look at this and say, you know, Scott, I get that you're not like looking at the smoking gun, but there's a lot of smoking guns and there's way too many of them for this to be coincidence. So let me say as clearly as I can, I'm not telling you that Obama didn't order it. I'm not telling you that. Trey Gowdy. I'm sorry, not Trent Gowdy. People are correcting me in the comments. Trey Gowdy, not Trent. So, yeah, so I'm not telling you Obama is innocent. I'm saying I haven't seen the evidence, have you? But it's being reported by Fox News, mostly types. It's being reported that the smoking gun has been found and now we have the evidence that Obama ordered basically a coup. But I don't see it. I don't see it at all. The only thing in evidence is he asked the question, which wasn't the worst question in the world to ask because I've defended Trump for asking in private meetings, you know, crazy questions that just really are, you know, you throw out there, you see what happens and you move to the next crazy Question. So asking questions that are a little out there, it's not that unusual. I don't think. So. If I had to guess where this is going, I would guess that the further unread actions will lay clear that there was more of a plot here then we know. So if I had to guess, somebody says, if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck. Well, that's where you're wrong. If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it's usually confirmation bias. If you don't get that, you're not operating at the highest level of understanding of your reality. Let me say that again. You've heard the old saying, if it walks like a duck, it talks like a duck. It's probably a duck. Completely false. And if you ever believe that you're wandering around in a dream world, if it looks like a duck and walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it only might be a duck. It only might be. Did you happen to see the Bill Barr edited video that NBC showed? According to the NBC video that you saw with your own eyes, you saw him laughing and saying, well, the winners get to write history. Ha ha, ha. You saw it with your own eyes. You saw Bill Barr walking like a duck, talking like a duck, quacking like a duck. How could you be wrong? He was just laughing at winning and ignoring the rule of law. You saw it with your own eyes. How could he be wrong? It's right there. Well. Oh, except we soon found out that it was an edited video and you didn't see it with your own eyes. You saw the edited clip, which when you see it in its entirety, it literally reverses the meaning because he says, you know, winners write the history. But, you know, we hope it'll be written compatible with the rule of law, because it needs to be basically paraphrasing. So if you're still stuck in walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it's a duck. You've missed the last three years because it's all, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, but isn't a duck. President Trump did not suggest drinking bleach. He did not call neo Nazis. Fine people. But a lot of people saw it. Except they didn't. They think they did. They thought they saw the duck quacking and walking. How could it not be a duck? I saw it. Duck, duck, duck. It's a duck all the way. Except it wasn't in any of those cases. It's never a duck. So you need to Lose that mindset. However, I would predict that things seem to be heading in a direction where we will know it's a duck. So don't worry. I feel like I'm going to end up where you are. Because some of you, I know that those who watch me regularly can get uncomfortable if my opinion differs too much from yours, because I hear that all the time. But I expect that our opinions will converge. It's just that you're there based on circumstantial evidence. I need a little bit more. I don't think you're wrong necessarily. I just think that maybe you're a little ahead of the evidence that's been presented, that's all. But we'll probably end up in the same place. The other thing that I thought was interesting and again, I found this out on Tucker's show. I gotta tell you, Tucker Carlson's show is just one of the best things ever. I mean, you know, I have my quibbles about some of the stuff that's on there, but that would be every show. I mean, any show I would have some quibble about that. But the, the quality in which he lays out, I guess the view of the world that you weren't seeing anywhere else. It's just really well done. I gotta say. It's really well done. This whole Obama gay stuff he laid out really cleanly. I thought, here's my question, where's the worst than Watergate guy? Where's Carl Bernstein? Because I'm not going to be happy until I see Carl frickin worse than Watergate. Bernstein go on cnn, ideally cnn, and say, you know, if I'm being honest, if I'm being honest, Obamagate is way worse than Watergate. Now I don't think he can say that yet because for the same reason that I'm not saying it, because I think you need that. That gun isn't quite smoking in my world yet. I think it will. I think we'll unredact until we know what's going on. But I just need to see Carl Bernstein say, I gotta admit, Obamagate's worse than Watergate because if the allegations are true, it's far worse. It's not even close, wouldn't you say? Not even close. Somebody said, what is the threshold for evidence? The threshold for evidence would be something that is reported reliably. That Obama said, that's it. So if all he did was ask a question, that's all we know. But if he said, go take these guys out, investigate them, anything like that, any direct order or it could be even a note by an assistant. So it could be an assistant's note that says, you know, the boss wants us to do this or that. I would take that as, you know, if those notes were taken at the time, I would take that as evidence. All right. And some part of the story I don't quite think we understand all of, and that is this. Some part of the story is that there's some underlying desire by the Obama administration to keep the pressure on Russia and not so much on China. So Obama wanted to be a little bit more anti Russia, friendlier with China, and knew that the Flynn and the incoming administration were the opposite, that they would be a little friendlier toward Russia, a little less friendlier toward China. And I asked myself, what's behind all of that? Don't you feel like there's some kind of money thing behind that? Because if you were to look at it on the surface, and Tucker said this last night, Flynn apparently was writing off Russia as a declining power, one that's not actually a risk to the existence of the United States. Isn't that just true? Wouldn't you agree that we don't have any reason to be in a war with Russia, and in the long run, it doesn't look like they're going to dominate us economically. So if you were to compare the rising China just because of population alone, and that will give them more money collectively just because of the number of people, if China just goes the way it's going, how could you even compare the risk of China with the risk of Russia? It looks like 100 to 1. I don't even know how you'd put them in the same conversation. And that's what Flynn said. Flynn said declining power, no economic risk. It's a regional power. But China, China is looking to dominate the world, and that could really, you know, have a big impact. So what was it that made the Obama administration see the world opposite of that? What was that? And the only thing I can imagine is lots of economic interests in China. So the only thing I can imagine is that, you know, billionaires and politicians, etcetera, had so much business with China, but relatively little with Russia. Right. How many billionaire Democrats are doing big deals in Russia Besides, maybe Trump tried to and didn't. So if I had to guess, I would say that rich Democrats wanted to keep their business in China, thought that Trump was a risk to that, and wanted to put the pressure on Russia instead. He always needed an enemy, so I guess they wanted Russia instead. All right, now there's one tantalizing bit that we're finding out that Molly Hemingway reports that when Obama was having this meeting that we've just learned about early on in which he was talking about the transition, that according to Molly Hemingway, Obama asked the people who would be leaving at the end of his administration, I think that was guys like Brennan and Clapper to leave the meeting. And he kept only those two people who would be continuing on in the Trump administration, James Comey and then Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates. And then Molly says that's where they started hatching their plan to make sure that the incoming administration would not find out what they had been doing. Is that in evidence? Is it in evidence that that's where they started hatching their plan to make sure that the incoming administration would not find out what they had been doing or what they had planned to continue doing in terms of spying on the Trump administration? Is that in evidence? I would say I would need to see the documents that supported that. All right. Yeah. And I guess that's where we're at. So we're just interpreting that conversation as meaningful or not meaningful, depending on who you are. All right, here are some things affecting this coronavirus stuff that are sneaking up on us. You know, I don't think we're going to have any kind of a magic bullet for defeating the coronavirus, but there's a whole bunch of stuff that in little ways seem like they're going to chip away at it until it's important. Here are all the things we're doing that probably will bring down the curve. So individually they're not very meaningful, but if you add them together, so we got the masks and social distancing, no doubt that makes a difference. We now know that the nursing homes have to be extra protected and that should cut the deaths in half, wouldn't you think? If the only change we made was better protecting nursing homes, death rate gets cut in half. So we know we'll probably do that. Right. The hydroxychloroquine seems to have some effect. It's not a magic pill, but it does seem to help. So you got a little bit of that going on. Apparently the ventilator situation, we're getting smarter and not killing people with ventilators now. So if, if you were to simply subtract from our death toll all of the nursing home deaths which we now know how to prevent, and also all of the ventilator caused deaths which are tragic and it happened when they thought ventilators would make things better, but probably were Making things worse and actually killing people. So if you took away all the ventilator deaths that we now know better how to avoid with the nose cannulas and the proning people on their stomach and all that, the new techniques that they're using, those two changes alone might drop the number of deaths by half, wouldn't you say? And then you add on to that just knowledge that we have with the testing we can test better. And even knowing that I think the African American community, and especially men, are getting whacked harder and you can't directly turn that into action. It's hard to say we know which groups are getting affected and then directly turn that into something useful. But I feel like we might be. I mean, just the fact that if we know that the black population has twice as much problems in terms of outcomes, there might be some way to use that information productively to protect a group of people better than we're doing. So just the fact that we know more has given us tools to attack this thing. And I think it has to be said that we probably have a pretty good chance of keeping the curve flat for a good while. The projections on Death at least one model has 137,000 by the end of August. Where is that compared to what you thought it would be? Of course, we don't know if that's real yet. But compare the 137,000 projected deaths from coronavirus, of which many of you suspect are being over counted, to the regular flu deaths, which we now suspect are close to zero. If you've missed that story, I talked about the doctor who looked into how we count regular flu. It turns out the way we count the number of people who die from the regular annual flu is we don't count them. That's it. Nobody's ever counted it. We don't count how many people die of the regular flu. It's determined by an algorithm. They've got some model. So basically we have no idea. So it's not, it's not a coincidence that you don't know anybody who died of the regular flu, but you probably do know somebody or you know somebody who knows somebody who died of coronavirus, because you're saying to yourself, well, if the numbers are somewhat comparable, why do I only hear about people dying from this one thing? And my whole life I've never heard of anybody dying from this other thing. Some of you have heard of people dying of flu, but it's rare. So the real number of people who die from the regular flu might be a Few thousand every year. A few thousand. That's it. So you should be comparing. Let's pick a number. Let's say 5,000. So 5,000 for regular flu. That's probably the real number. The reason that it's inflated is so you'll get a shot. It's so you'll get a vaccine. Of course they want to scare you with the flu so you'll take it more seriously. So let's say that the new estimate is over 130,000 more deaths than the regular flu. If you were to buy those projections, and I don't know that you necessarily would, would you say, uh, oh, I changed my mind. I thought it was no worse than the flu. When the information I was getting, which was flawed, was that the regular flus, you know, 20 to 60,000. This one's going to be around 60,000. They looked about the same to me. Is there anybody yet who is willing to say, okay, you got me, this is not the regular flu? Have you seen anybody do that yet? I don't know if I've seen anybody explicitly say, okay, I was fooled. I thought it was no worse. But now I'm seeing these numbers. Now I know how you counted the regular flu. Wow, these are completely different. I don't know if anybody's having that realization. The Supreme Court stuff is sneaking up on us because I guess they have some huge things going on. Deciding whether we can look at Trump's taxes right before election. How cool is the movie? You might hate it or love it, but how cool is it that sometime over the summer you may or may not get a look at Trump's taxes? Now? I don't think we should. In my opinion, it's just. It's unnecessary and it just gives political fuel for taking things out of context. So basically, Trump's taxes is a gigantic opportunity for his enemies to take things out of context. That's it. Misinterpret it, take it out of context. So it would be a gigantic story. Most of it would be fake, as we know. But that's not even the only thing happening. They're talking about daca, LGBTQ rights. I don't know exactly what that's about. And, you know, even redacting, unredacting some stuff, I mean, there's. There's some big stuff coming. So if you think this summer is going to be boring politically, it's not. Somebody says Mueller saw his taxes. That's a good point. Did Mueller see his taxes? Because one would assume he could. Right? Because it's only A question of whether the public sees them. So if Mueller saw them and he didn't raise any flags, then we would only be worried about people taking things out of context and interpreting them wrong. All right, Grinnell is doing a great job of pushing the declassifications. One imagines that's why he was put in that job, because he's going to push all the declassifications. Where are we with the golden age? Good question. Here's what I think. I think this coronavirus, much as Joel Osteen said, in his own way, he put the religious spin on it, but I don't. I think that the coronavirus situation is making us rethink all of our systems and all of our assumptions, and that when you do that, it lays bare the flaws. So the coronavirus has surfaced every problem with everything, because as soon as you get that little extra catch in the system, anything that's not working right breaks immediately. So you saw breaks in the healthcare, the food supply, you saw breaks in all kinds of stuff. But even education, commuting, working at home, I mean, just everything from shaking hands to what does your social life look like? Is all going to be rethought. And when you rethink things at that a fundamental level, when you shake the box and then you turn your geniuses loose, what you've done, likely. Likely what you've done is created an opportunity for one of the biggest entrepreneurial surges in the history of humankind, because usually your society gets a little ossified. You know, the regulations build up and it's just hard to get anything done. And then suddenly the coronavirus comes. What happened to doctors who couldn't practice telehealth across state lines? Was there ever a reason for that? Was there ever a good reason doctors couldn't make a phone call across state lines? No, there was never a reason for that. So that rule just went away. Will it stay away? Don't know. I think there's a good chance of it. But if it did, it could completely transform, you know, healthcare. You know, why would you go to a doctor if there's one right on your screen and you can just order your meds, or you could go to Walmart and have the test that your doctor tells you to get. Yeah, just go to Walmart, tell them you need a 1, 2, 3 test. You go to Walmart, take a little blood, give it to your telehealth doctor. I mean, there are gigantic structural changes that are just going to sneak up on us. It's because things changed. And it opened up all these paths for entrepreneurs. So I think the golden age is guaranteed at this point and that the coronavirus will be like its third act. It will be the thing you had to get past for the good thing to happen. Now, I would argue similarly that if you take World War II, while nobody would ask for World War II in the same way nobody would ask for a coronavirus, it is true that World War II sort of rebooted civilization. And it did create all these new technologies that we built for, mostly for military reasons. It gave us nuclear energy. I think it gave us radar, space technology, rockets. So when you reboot civilization and you wipe away all your assumptions, in the case of World War II, you destroy half of your buildings. You can start over. And it almost always turns into an entrepreneurial surge because there's just new opportunities and chaos. So the golden age is coming for sure. 2021 is your start date for that. That. Let me talk about all the bankruptcies. So we're seeing lots of airlines and other companies declaring bankruptcy. The first thing you need to know is that bankruptcy doesn't mean going out of business. It means that they're trying to get some relief for their creditors so they can maybe pay less or whatever and stay in business. So bankruptcy is a way to stay in business, not a way to go out of business. That's the first thing. Secondly, there are a number of companies who are saying, we're going out of business. So you'll see store owners saying, all right, we're closed for good. But are they? Imagine the coronavirus is over. The landlord has an empty shop, and the person who's there is closed. They just walked away. What does the landlord do? Well, if they're smart, they say, the very best tenant I could have is the person who's already designed the space for exactly their business so I don't have to put in a bunch of improvements and rip this stuff out to make it a different kind of thing so I can rent it for someone else. The best bet for the landlord is to say, okay, I know you didn't pay me for three months, and I know you can't pay me for another three months, and you're still the best bet. Will you. Will you start up again? So I think you're going to see that a lot of companies that think they were closed forever because there were so many of them end up being reopened here. Let me say that clear. If you are the only person who goes out of business and the rest of the economy is fine, you got a problem, it's your problem. You failed when everybody else was doing fine. Now you failed in your business. What does the landlord want to do? Get rid of you and get somebody in that business that can succeed so that they can pay the rent. That's not this. This is massive failure that was nobody's fault. If you've got a potential tenant who was just part of a massive failure that was nobody's fault, that's your very best person to bring back as your next tenant. So I think you're going to see a lot of businesses reinvived because everybody will understand that there was nothing wrong with the business. It was just the situation. And as the situation normalizes, so too you would expect that at least the better businesses that should have stayed in business will revive. That's what I think. Yeah. There are a lot of businesses that have never been busier. I tried to go to the bike store, my local bike store, because bicycle repair and sales stores are open because they're, they're actually transportation critical infrastructure. But you can't even get in a bike store in my town. You have to wait on a sidewalk. And I waited so long, I just gave up. So you can't even get in the bike store. So they're doing okay. Will 21, 21 be the golden age if Trump loses in a different way? I mean, the entrepreneurs won't be affected by Trump losing so much. So probably entrepreneurially, yes. Politically, no. Why are dog parks closed? Well, I think same reason is, I keep seeing. This always bothers me. You know, Fox News sometimes likes to take the easy. The easy sounding political statement. So I saw last night that they were questioning why you could do some things but you couldn't play tennis. Do you not understand why you can't play tennis during a coronavirus thing? Is there anybody who's confused why tennis, where you're standing pretty far apart, do you not understand why that would be banned? Because the whole point of tennis is you're continually touching the tennis ball that the other guy just had in his hand. That's like the whole game is holding a ball in your hand that the other guy just had in his hand. You might as well make out with your tennis partner because, I mean, that's about as much exposure as you could possibly give to two people. You might as well just like take your clothes off and snuggle if you're going to play tennis because you're sweating, you're breathing on the ball, and then you're handing it to the Other guy. It couldn't be a more perfect setting for spreading a virus. Well, even if you wore gloves, I suppose that might be able to help. I suppose. But still, the virus would be flying off the ball and it's airborne. Right. Every time you hit the ball, in theory, every time you served and you hit the ball, the air droplets would come off the ball and into your face. So I don't think there's a glove solution. So when I watch Fox News and they say these crazy rules that don't make any sense, why can you take a walk in the park or whatever, but you can't play tennis? Well, there's a reason. There's a reason. Here's the other one. You can walk on the beach, but you can't sit on the beach. And Fox News acts like they don't understand why. That's why that would be different. Let me explain it to you. If you're walking on the beach, you almost certainly are keeping social distance, except for the person you're with who probably came from your house. If you sit on the beach, imagine a bunch of teenagers sitting on the beach. Are they going to socially distance? No. No, they're not. So it's perfectly reasonable to assume that if you let people sit on the beach, they're not going to be so good. But if you let them walk just the natural way people react, they're not going to walk right next to other people, so they get the social distance. Now, is that smart or not smart? I don't know. I don't know. But it's not crazy to act like that's crazy. It just bothers me. It's like you might think that doesn't make that much difference. And you could argue that freedom should allow you to be on the beach anyway. That would be a good argument. A good argument would be just let people do whatever they want and we'll work it out. You could agree with that or disagree with it. That's a good argument. Let freedom be free. Let them collect on the beach any way they want. I'm not sure I would even disagree with that argument, but I'm only calling out the fact that there's totally a difference between walking, which is probably entirely safe, and collecting in groups. No matter where you're collecting on a group, beach or otherwise, we don't know that to be true. I've got a feeling that sitting on the beach outdoors is about as much risk as, you know, nothing. But it's not crazy to imagine there might be some there. All right. They're told they can sit on sand but not chairs. I don't know about that. Yeah, I'm definitely of the camp that you need to make your own decisions about which of these rules to obey. I do think that the wearing masks in businesses that require them, I feel like that's, that's one you should take seriously. If not for yourself, for your fellow citizens. There are other things I saw today that teenagers who have boyfriends and girlfriends, they're not being allowed to see them. So they're doing weird zoom meetings and they see each other six feet away and stuff. And here's a question I want to ask you. Do any of you have teenagers in your house? I want to ask this question. How many of you have a teenager in the house who is not hanging around with friends and boyfriends and girlfriends? Aren't all of your teenagers finding a way to, to hang out with other teenagers? I'm just. Wait a second and see your. Your comments. My, my assumption is that the, the amount of cheating on these guidelines is massive and that people are just sort of doing it on the down low. That's my assumption. All right. Elon Musk instead of Elon Musk. Shouldn't Elon Musk make us a mask? I'll tell you that. Here's the mask I want. I want the mask that has a built in far UV light so that it's killing whatever's behind my mask. All the time. It's just on. It's just a little UV light shooting at my lips. It's just killing anything that gets near. Why can't I have that? Why can't I have the Tesla of masks? All right, that's all for now. I will talk to you later.