d join me now for the simultaneous sip.

No notification. Somebody says there might be a setting that I need to flick here to make sure it shows up on Twitter and I got to make sure I set that. All right.

I saw something very interesting today on Jesse Watters' Twitter feed. He tweeted out some ratings for the cable news shows. And I want you to think about all the things that have happened in the past year and then I'm gonna tell you some of the ratings of the shows and see if you can find a pattern.

All right, so I'm gonna first tell you the ones that went down. So these are all the ones that, comparing I think it was the first quarter of this year to the first quarter last year or something like that. As viewers in April — it's April to April. So it's last year's April to this year's April. The ratings for the cable news shows. So these are the ones that went down. See if you can figure out any correlation or pattern.

Kennedy went down 5%. We've got Rachel Maddow down 13%. The Ingraham Angle down 2%. The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell down 10%. Bret Baier down 8%. Martha MacCallum down 8%. America's Newsroom down 1%. That Sun. Fox and Friends. All In with Chris Hayes down 20%. So the two biggest drops — now the three biggest drops are Chris Hayes on MSNBC, Lawrence O'Donnell on MSNBC, and Rachel Maddow on MSNBC. What did all of those folks have in common? Well, it's an obvious answer. They were all super anti-Trump and they were all fully in on the whole Russia collusion hoax.

Now they lost massive audience when it turns out that everything they've been telling the audience was a bunch of, as the president says, ridiculous BS. And it looks like the audience is punishing them. But it may be just as simple as the people who — well here's the open question. Did their ratings go down because the audience doesn't trust them as much? Which would be massively meaningful for what's going to happen in 2020. If the reason that the anti-Trump shows went down is entirely because they don't trust their own news sources, that would kind of look like a Trump landslide coming. It would look like anybody who was capable of changing their mind already did. They just left their news source and said, okay, I got hoaxed for a year. I don't need this. That's possibly what happened.

But I would say it's more likely that what you're seeing is that the audience isn't getting their dopamine hits. If you turned it on and saw all the delightfully potentially bad news about, you know, orange Cheeto as they like to call the president, you probably felt good every time you watched those shows. And now you turn it on, it's like I've been lied to for a year. Nothing bad is happening. It feels so bad. I'm so dumb. So I think the dopamine value of those shows just disappeared.

Now who is up the most? Now you probably get to say to yourself, well so obviously you know Fox News is up because they were closer to an accurate view of the world in this case. But I just told you that there were several shows on Fox News that actually went down. They actually went down. But one that went up is The Five. So the show that went up the most — there are two shows that went up the most: The Five on Fox and Tucker Carlson. So The Five was up the most, 10% from one year ago. They're up 10% in a context in which even shows on their own network are substantially down. And Tucker Carlson up 9%, again in the context where shows on their network and CNN are down.

What do Tucker Carlson and The Five have in common? Go for it, those of you who watch both shows. What is it that would make their ratings sharply up when even shows on their own network are down? I just want to see if anybody has the answer here. Okay, the simple answer — somebody said it's the two best shows on Fox. I would agree with that. And I like a lot of the shows on Fox, but yeah, those are the two best shows. But I would say there's something else. I would say they were closest to the truth of the opinion shows. If you were to look at all of the opinions that came out of The Five for the last two years and all of the opinions that were on Tucker Carlson for the last five years, they match reality really well. You know, on average. I'm not saying everything they ever said was accurate. Nobody would be. But if you look at the shows that seem to have taken a hit, they are probably the ones that were the least accurate about what the world would look like in a year. So I don't know if that's a coincidence.

It could be that those two shows are just so well produced and well written. And by the way, talking about Tucker Carlson, I would say Tucker Carlson's show for the past maybe two months or so has been unbelievably good. I mean compared to even his own shows of the past, they really are standing out as shining beacons of just good stuff. And The Five is just always exceptional. By far The Five has the most collective talent, best production values, best concept, best energy, best chemistry. I mean it's just really a level above most things of that genre. Really maybe everything in that genre.

All right, so I want to give a shout out to that. So what do we take from that in terms of what 2020 looks like? Well if the only thing that changed was that fewer people are watching MSNBC and CNN, what would that tell you about what's going to happen at least in the opinion polls? Because the opinion people are the ones that are making people adopt their opinions. So if the opinion people are getting more audience for let's say a more pro-Trump kind of vibe and the other ones are getting less audience, and our opinions are almost coming entirely from the media, wouldn't that suggest a big, big advantage for the president? Because the other team isn't even watching television anymore. Or they tuned to The Five. I mean there's no evidence that people actually turned off MSNBC and turned on The Five. That would be a pretty big mental leap. But just the fact they're watching less of it on the other side should make a difference because they would be less influenced by the news. We'll see.

All right, the funniest things that are happening today are number one the economy is just screaming. We can almost run out of words for how to describe the economy so good. Now to be fair the deficit, you know the debt, is really kind of scary. But I'm not sure we even know what debt means in terms of an entire country when the country is the United States. So it doesn't make sense to me. And really to economists I think they would agree we really don't know how much debt we can handle. And the weird thing about the debt in the U.S. is when you have a situation where the borrower is so much stronger than the lender. In the sense that suppose the United States just decided not to pay back — I'm not saying that'll ever happen — but you can't compare the debt for the United States to really anything. It's not like credit card debt. It's not like other companies or other countries' debt. It's just a completely unique situation because of our economic strength. So I don't know what it all means.

I did see the president tweeted today about the situation with Russia collusion. And now Bill Barr is looking into how did the FISA warrants get started, who started the whole Russian investigation, was there something suspicious there. And of course most of you think that there was. So the president, to my tremendous delight — you know I get a dopamine hit from a lot of President Trump's tweets. First of all they're so tongue-in-cheek and they're so well-crafted that, you know, let me go out on a limb here and say I don't really think this is going out on a limb. I believe history will record that Trump is the best tweeter of all time. Does that feel fair? I mean not just that he's president but that the way he does it is just better than other people do it. You can fault him for as many things as you want to and you know I won't take that argument today. But you gotta give him that. You know the one thing you got to give him is he is the best tweeter of all time by far. I don't even know who would be second choice.

And part of it is genius at tweeting. And it really is genius in that he always has sort of his tongue in cheek. He's working on more than one level at a time all the time. He's presenting information and he's persuading. He's making you think about what he wants you to think about. So he's doing a lot but it's also freaking funny. Even when it's not over-the-top a joke, every time I read his wording I can see like a twinkle in his eye and like a slight smile as he's like, oh this is gonna be great. You can almost hear his thought process. You read the tweet and you get this full historical imagination of what it felt like when he wrote it. I don't get that from other people. When I read other people's tweets I'm just reading the tweet. When you read the president's tweet you're seeing a whole show in which you imagine what he was thinking, where he was, how he wrote it, you know the joke that he was playing, et cetera.

So anyway by saying in his tweet today that this whole Russia situation was bigger than Watergate it was of course a callback to the many times that CNN would exhume Carl Bernstein — who as you know has been dead for at least ten years — but they would dig up his grave and they would put some electric stuff on him and he would shock back to life like the Watergate zombie. And they would put him at a desk and put a necktie on him and say, "Carl, Carl we don't have much to talk about that's bad for the president. Can you please say it's worse than Watergate?" Of course Carl has been dead for ten years so he's a zombie. So they're like, okay we'll just dump it in. Just flail a little bit. You go, "Watergate, there's worse than Watergate." And it looks like Carl Bernstein but really he's been dead for 10 years. And we were subjected to zombie Carl Bernstein for what, two freaking years? I hate that guy. Because there are some people that you see that you say okay they're partisans, I understand. You know it doesn't matter. I'm not saying that I disagree with them. It's just that in his case the impression he left — again I can't read his mind because he's been dead for ten years — but the impression he left was that he was not a legitimate player. The pundits I consider legitimate even when they're badly spinning, even when they're twisting the facts, they're part of the process. We kind of understand what they're doing. But Bernstein seemed like he was trying to change the result of the election and he looked less credible than just about anybody on television. Somebody says Dan Rather is worse. Yeah Dan Rather is sort of a clone.

So watching the president mock them with "bigger than Watergate" was delicious beyond compare. Okay it wasn't that good but it was pretty darn good. And you know he was doing it for us. You know he wasn't saying that just because it tweaks the other side. He does that for the base. It feels like he's talking to us. It's like, oh thank you. Thank you for saying that. I'm so happy they used that exact phrase. Excuse me because it didn't bother me.

All right, the other news. I don't know, is the president just the luckiest person in the world? Because there's a lot of luck that comes into play when you're president. I happen to think he's great at his job for most topics, not so much healthcare, but he's great at his job. But you can't understate how important luck is. Now let me give you another one today. The news was that in a pretty extensive trial they found that a combination of AIDS drugs will suppress the virus in people who have it to the point where the odds of their partner getting it even with unprotected sex is zero. Zero.

Now if you haven't heard this news I'm just gonna say it again so you can know that you heard it correctly. A major trial of I guess it's a cocktail of AIDS drugs given to people who were in relationships and having sex. They had apparently unprotected sex or protected sex in some cases but over an extended period of time the number of people who got it from their partner who was on the suppressive drug was zero. Zero. I don't know, we should just cancel the news today, right? If the news talks about anything else today I feel like it's almost abusive because this is like the best news. Well you know it would be hard to rate what's the best news but among good news this is about as good as you can get for good news. It happened to happen during the Trump administration. Now I'm not going to suggest that Trump had anything to do with that. And yeah I think people are talking about budgets and whatever and I don't know the details there. But it certainly is a suggestion that the Golden Age is upon us. The age where we can fix all the big problems. We have the resources. We just need to get our psychology right which is pretty hard. So I just had to note that. What an amazing, amazing accomplishment.

It does not mean the end of AIDS by any means. I mean it's gonna take a lot of work and a lot of money to take it to the finish line. But we now have a clear path. You know we probably can't prevent people from getting it because I don't think it's used as a prophylactic in that way. But if everybody who knew they had it was on it and eliminated the risk of spreading it, I think you can get to zero eventually or something like it. Amazing.

There was a video by Dan Crenshaw. Popular Republican. People seem to love Crenshaw. He's a straight shooter, a veteran. He's got everything going for him. He's got the full package. And he did talk about not wanting to get into the Paris climate accord. He went through the numbers. It's very persuasive. It would be impossible to see anybody who saw Crenshaw's presentation — which as far as I know is a hundred percent accurate. I didn't see anything that I even questioned as being maybe a little gray or anything. It looked a hundred percent accurate.

Here's what he did. He accepted climate change as a risk. Remember he's a Republican so he's a Republican who accepts climate change and CO2 as a risk. So right there he's more credible than most Republicans. Because whether or not — I'm going to talk about persuasion not science here. So what I say next is about persuasion not science because I don't understand the science. Persuasion-wise the very strongest thing Crenshaw could do is agree with the other side. That's called pacing. You're worried about climate change. I acknowledge that's a problem. All right, so it takes all the energy out on the other side. Now what do you do about it? Okay I accept your argument. Climate change is a big problem. Now what?

Now the part that he presents is really, really good because then now what is that the way forward is probably using a lot of carbon fuels but better ones, more efficient, moving more toward gas. Apparently the U.S. has lowered its CO2 emissions and if we helped other countries do that they would lower theirs. But here's the part that bothered me. As smart as Crenshaw is — and he's really good in this public sphere. He's an A player for sure. An A player where I would put say the president at an A+. But he could be an A+ pretty soon. And sort of toward the end of his video where people may have stopped watching and it just as a throwaway he throws in nuclear energy. Now that feels to me like a mistake. Because even though you know I get that in the short term probably natural gas and other things are the things maybe he wants to focus on because they really make a difference and they do it pretty quickly. I know it feels like there's something missing. Something he's not telling us about that specific topic. Is he not completely down with nuclear? Is he not completely up to date on how good things are in that area and where it's going? So I would put this as a question. What does he know that I don't know that you don't know about nuclear that would cause him to downplay it? Because that seems opposite of reality. Reality seems to be that there's so much activity in progress and it literally is the only way out of a climate change risk no matter what you think about it. So I just have a question why he's soft on nuclear when he has to know — unless there's something I don't know but he should know by now — that nuclear is the thing he should be emphasizing. So I don't know. Maybe he just thinks politically it's not time. I don't quite know what he's thinking there. But he's a straight shooter so I feel like he would have presented that topic in a straight way unless there's something we don't know. So I'd love t