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March 15, 2020 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:01:22
Episode 851 Scott Adams: #WuFlu and Coffee
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Hey everybody!
Come on in here. It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams.
And although the world is a strange and confusing place at the moment, we can still enjoy the best part of the day.
It's called the simultaneous sip, and you don't need much to participate.
No, you don't need coronavirus.
Completely optional. But if you have it, your coffee is going to taste extra good.
All you need is a coffee...
Let me try that again.
All you need is...
A cup or a mug or a glass or a tank or a chalice or a stein, a canteen jug or a flask or a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
It's a simultaneous sip.
Go. Mmm.
That's a crisis quality there.
Everything tastes better when you...
When you're worried about stuff.
Alright, let's talk about this.
There's nothing else going on, right?
Is it my imagination or did all of the other news either completely stop or we don't care about it?
So there's a whole lot of stuff that's happening that I couldn't care less about.
But let's talk about what's interesting about this flu stuff.
Here's the good news. There are three different treatments as opposed to a vaccine.
Apparently a vaccine is already going into rapid testing.
Maybe we'll see that soon.
Anyway, well, I'm going to switch topics.
I'm going to switch topics because it just occurred to me at the moment.
Trump has now said two things that are unambiguously untrue that seem to be coming true.
So the first thing that Trump said was that we'd develop this vaccine and it would be in record time.
And then the expert, Dr.
Fauci, said, well, you know, probably 18 months.
So not really right away.
And then the president would get up and he'd say, yep, we're going to have it in record time.
And then Fauci would get up again.
It's like, well, 18 months.
And then the president would say, we're going to get that vaccine in record time.
And then you read the news, and I think it was Gilead, put their vaccine into rapid testing.
And they said, hey, we've got an idea.
And I think I have this right.
I might have this wrong. And Gilead was saying, why don't we do something we never did before, which is start developing it because we're optimistic, developing meaning making it, manufacturing it, at the same time we're testing it.
Because in the unlikely event that we hit it, and I guess they're pretty confident that they're at least in the neighborhood of the right vaccine, they're saying we could be done with it and distribute it the same day.
And I said to myself, was that included in the 18 months?
Somebody says, not really.
But does the 18 months assume that we do this the way we normally do it?
Because we're not doing things in a normal way at all.
So here's what I think.
I think we're going to be surprised in the good direction.
About how quickly the vaccine is developed.
So let me give you that prediction.
We will be surprised in the positive way.
It will be done before we think it should be done.
If I were to bet who is closer, Trump saying it's any minute now, or Fauci saying it's going to be 18 months, probably somewhere in the middle.
Maybe? Because what happens if the...
Here's the wild card.
What happens if the problem starts getting, you know, 10 times worse, and only three months have gone by, and they've vaccinated people, and it apparently works, but they can't tell if there's a side effect yet, because you need to wait longer to figure that out.
But they can kind of tell it works, just they don't know if it's safe.
We're going to have a decision like we've never seen before, which is, will you take this extra risk of semi-tested vaccine that's similar enough to things we've done before that we think it's safe?
You know, the computer models, the simulations they run, I'm sure they do that.
They say it's safe, but you can't ever really know until you do the long studies.
Will we reach a point where the President will have the following decision?
Mr. President, we can get you a vaccine in five months.
The risk will be very high.
But the risk of not using it could be higher.
We need a decision.
I think we're going to see that.
Second story is, the President quite famously went out and said that Google was building some kind of a A nationally available website to, I think, figure out if they should get coronavirus medical care.
And then Google said, no, we're not.
We're not doing that.
Nope. And then it came out that it was a subsidiary of Alphabet that really had been called Google until, I don't know, 2015 or something.
So it was sort of a Google-like company.
And then people said, oh, okay, okay.
So it wasn't like 100% wrong.
It was a Google-like company within the Google universe, and you could call that a Google company, but technically it has another name, even though a Google company owns it.
And then it came out that, but then people said, yeah, but it's not going to be done soon.
And then the company says, well, you know, we're going to test it pretty soon, and obviously, if it worked out, we can make it big pretty quickly.
It's a website. How hard is it to take a website from small to big?
That's something we know how to do.
But here's the funny part.
By the end of, I think, the end of yesterday, Google announced that they, Google, were going to build a national website that That the president said they were building.
So I think in two occasions, you just watch the president bend reality in a way that only he can.
I mean, I swear to God, there's nobody else who could have done this.
And I'm not even saying it's a bug or a feature.
I'm just saying it is.
You can decide whether you like it, whether it's an accident, whether it's luck, whether it's randomness.
I don't even know what to call this.
I mean, seriously, what do you call this?
The guy who tells us, I mean, he's told us this many times, that he uses the power of positive thinking to bend reality.
And you hear that sort of thing, and you go, yeah, yeah, new age crap.
You can't bend reality.
You can't bend reality.
That's not a thing. So go read your power of positive thinking books.
Because reality isn't something you just bend by your positive thinking.
And then the president gets up there and says two ridiculously false things about this crisis.
I think both of them are going to happen.
Weirdly. I mean, one of them already happened.
So I'm 50% right already.
Somebody says, a la Steve Jobs, right?
The reality distortion field.
I think this president makes things happen by wanting them.
Obviously, the country is primed to respond, and every citizen is doing their thing to make things better.
It's kind of remarkable.
I don't know what to make of that, but here's some other good news.
There are three treatments for people who have already gotten the coronavirus, so not a vaccine, that seem promising.
And I'm hearing lots of chatter about them being promising, meaning that they're using them and they're working.
So some number of, you know, this is just anecdotal.
They haven't done controlled studies.
But anecdotally, we're getting a lot of reports that this drug called Remdesivir helps people recover faster.
And here's the better one.
I think there's some complication with Remdesivir being widely available.
I don't know the details of that, but there's some red tape or something else about that that may limit the availability.
But the other one is a cheap malaria drug.
So a drug that already exists and is widely available.
chloroquine, chloroquine, I don't know, C-H-L-O-R-O-Q-U-I-N-E, chloroquine, chloroquine, Something like that. And also a steroid called methylprednisone.
That sounds good.
I think that's what I was on.
I was on prednisone recently.
Through trial and error and massive A-B testing, the medical community is getting faster, smarter.
So, I hate to watch this like it's a speculator sport, but consider this.
The presumed path of this virus is that it will be exponential.
So it's going to be like bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, and then if it's allowed to, We're doing everything to prevent this, but if it's allowed to, that curve is just going to go sharply up, and we will be overwhelmed in our healthcare.
But that's not the only thing that is exponential.
There's something else happening right now that we take for granted that is also exponential, which is our ability to learn.
So we have literally thousands, if not millions, of A-B tests going on.
There are doctors all over the world saying, well, try this, try this, try that, try this.
And then reports are starting to come back.
Now, once enough stuff has been tried, and then probably retried, because one experience wouldn't be enough, the rate at which humanity is going to get smarter is going to be exponential.
We are going to get smarter really fast, and we're not quite at the inflection point, but the best case scenario is that now that we have the smartest, most capable people in the world, the whole planet, this has never been the case, because we're so well connected by the internet, That the entire world can be involved, and at least there's some chance that they can all have the same information or eventually have it.
The best case scenario is that human ingenuity is cranking along like a mofo, and you know that's happening.
You could be confident that the smartest people are putting all of their smarts into this.
There's a lot of smartitude going on.
And as they learn and they experiment, there's going to be an inflection point where we suddenly seem really smart.
So I wouldn't straight-line human ability any more than I would straight-line the virus, because we have a way of being dumb until we need to be smart, and then we get smart really fast.
And we're not there yet, but we're heading that way.
I'm hearing reports today that are completely not credible.
So there are things that people are saying on the internet, anecdotal reports coming in from various places.
I'm going to say that this is not credible.
At this point. But the reports are that there are lots of younger people who are having serious problems and dying from the virus.
Now that's different than everything we've heard up to this point, which is that the younger you are, the better, and there's just no exception to that.
But anecdotally, we're hearing stories of younger people who are having a real tough time with it, maybe some dying.
And I don't know what to make of that.
Some of it could be they have underlying conditions they didn't know about.
That's possible. And if, you know, hundreds of thousands of people are involved, somebody's going to have a weak immune system at any given time and maybe not know about it.
So, yeah, and there's the mutation question.
We're watching that. Yeah, has it mutated to be more deadly?
Because that's usually the opposite direction.
My understanding is that viruses typically, if not always, become weaker over time, partly because humans get used to them.
Maybe that's the only reason, I don't know.
So the British government It has this strategy of letting the virus spread to 60% of Brits so they can reach some kind of herd immunity.
But on the internet, people keep telling me, Scott, some expert or another says that you can get it more than once.
So there's no such thing as herd immunity because you can get it more than once.
To which I say those are not necessarily incompatible facts.
It could be that getting it gives you immunity, At the same time that some people could get it again.
So those could both be true, and it still could be good enough to eventually slow down the virus if enough people have been exposed.
What I don't think is true, and I haven't seen any experts say, is that in general people could get it twice.
In other words, if the same virus popped up in three years, Would it be just as bad as the first time?
And I don't think anybody thinks that.
I feel as though the experts are cautiously certain that there would be sufficient immunity built up by exposure, that even if some people did get it twice, you'd still have enough immunity.
If you do the math on the British plan of letting people get it, that would lead to 277,000 deaths from the virus.
But it should be noted that all 277,000 of those people who could potentially die, they were going to die anyway.
And if it affects mostly people over 80, it probably wasn't going to be that long.
So, while there's no good news in saying that somebody who might have lived to 85 might only live to 82, It's context.
It's part of the story, so you can make your own judgments about how much of a holocaust that is or is not.
That's the wrong word. I'm just using it figuratively.
But here's the problem.
The British model guarantees that the rest of the world gets infected, right?
Because if the Brits all get a good dose of it, There's not really any chance that no Brits take it somewhere else later.
I mean, if you're going to let 60% of your population get this thing, it's going to travel.
There's no way around it. So it seems like the Brits are going to get a lot of pressure from other countries to do what they're doing, and I don't exactly understand what they're doing.
They're acting like they're trying to stop it versus build up some herd immunity, but I'm Now it's a little uncertain at this point.
I would recommend for your mental health that you block the people on the internet who are screaming, it's just the flu, and any variant on that.
Now, could they be right?
Is there any scenario in which the people who are saying we're overreacting And I would be in that category of an overreactor, according to other people.
Is there anything to that?
What's the best argument you can make on the Stop Worrying About It side?
Now, part of what the Stop Worrying About It people are trying to do is not crash the economy.
That's a worthy goal.
But here's what they need to answer, which is why other hospitals are being overrun.
If you can answer that, then maybe you have a point.
Because the regular flu does not overrun hospitals.
The hospitals are built to handle annual flu.
They do it every year and you never even hear about it.
Apparently they do it well. But the Italian hospitals are overrun.
That's a huge tragedy going on there.
I'm pretty sure the Chinese hospitals were overrun.
They had to build temporary hospitals in two weeks.
Why would it be different here?
What would be the argument that our healthcare system would not be similarly overrun?
I don't think there's an argument for that, right?
Now we have better resources.
We have more time to prepare.
So we have some advantages that That maybe Italy didn't have.
And maybe China, because they got caught off guard there, maybe they didn't have.
So we have advantages. There is a non-zero chance we can get through this without crashing our hospitals.
But I think it's a low chance.
The most likely scenario is that at least some hospitals are going to be turning away people who are dying.
I would say that's likely.
Now, I don't think all hospitals are going to be turning away people who are dying.
But you're not going to be able to move to the empty bed in three states away too easily.
So I think in some hospitals they're going to get overrun, maybe in metropolitan areas.
But we'll certainly do, I think, a heroic job Of doing what we can in a makeshift way.
Because we've had enough time, fortunately, we've bought enough time with the airport closings that we might be able to scramble and minimize the problem.
But it's going to get ugly.
And so I recommend just blocking and just not listening to the people who are arguing, it's just like the flu.
Few people die. Why do you care?
It's like normal. Just take them out of your life.
Get rid of them. President Trump took a test to see if he had the coronavirus, and he's negative.
He says. Now, of course, all the skeptics say, would he tell us if he weren't?
And the answer is, he'd have to.
He'd have to. I don't think there's any question that if the president had been infected, I don't think there's any chance he would lie about it, because it would be obvious that Because the medical community would not allow him to interact with the rest of the government.
If you see Trump and Pence standing together as in yesterday, it's because neither of them think they have it.
I think Pence is getting tested and the president was tested.
So if you don't see the president being removed from other officials in the government, he doesn't have it.
He doesn't have it. There's no way the medical community would let this president get away with that.
And by the way, in the unlikely event that the White House doctor got co-opted to give, I don't know, just a reckless, stupid lie and say, oh, he doesn't have it when he does, do we appoint White House doctors that week?
I don't think so. Do we?
Can you imagine a White House doctor presumably should be a pretty serious, qualified person?
I can't imagine that person saying, yeah, I'll just lie and say the President doesn't have it, let him infect the entire government by going...
There's just no way.
So I would say you should completely discount any chance that he took a test and it was anything but what he said, which is negative.
So that's good news. And we're watching here a president who is responding to the public.
It was the public, you know, led by the media, of course, but it was the public who needed him to get tested.
You know, I tweeted that the other day, and I said that, essentially that, I said, you know, Mr.
President, the public needs you to get tested.
Because I wanted to put it in that term, so I didn't want to say, you should get tested, you know, who am I? I didn't want to say, doctors say you should get tested, because, again, it's up to the doctors to tell them, not me.
But it was unambiguously true that the country needed it.
We needed to check that box and say, okay, that's one thing we don't worry about, because we've got plenty to worry about.
There's plenty. So the country needed it.
And I tweeted that out, and man, did I get pushback.
The sort of automatic Trump supporters who will just, you know, back him, nobody, what he said, poured in and said, you know, he'll get a test if he needs to.
His doctor said he didn't need it.
You know, what are you trying to start here, Scott?
And, of course, he decided to get the test.
So I think it's good news when the public cries out for something and then the president does it and it makes sense.
There's nothing broken there.
That's good news. Here are some tips for managing your coronavirus anxiety.
In my opinion, the odds of The United States losing its basic services, such as water and electricity and food, transportation.
I don't think we're going to lose our basics.
I think it is funny.
We'll have shortages of prepper stuff, the emergency-sized canisters and stuff.
We'll probably have some shortages of those, but only because people are stocking up.
It's not as if the factories stopped making that stuff.
So the one thing I think that is safest to assume is that you'll have regular food.
Even if the stock market is in the toilet, farmers are still going to grow food.
Even if some of the people making it have the virus, it's a pretty low chance that it gets into your food.
I mean, it's possible, but it's a low chance.
I think the food agricultural system and delivery are going to work well enough.
So I wouldn't worry about that.
If your company is at risk and there's a financial problem, I wouldn't worry about that, but you probably won't starve.
I would recommend also taking some serious hours off of social media.
I've been trying to do that, but it's really hard.
So I'm recommending it without being able to do it.
But I'm going to work harder on it.
Because the more you focus on it, the more worked up you're going to get and the more anxiety.
So you really just need to remove yourself from it every now and then.
Don't ignore it.
Because it's important. But remove yourself from it a little bit every day.
I've been trying to occupy myself with other entertainment since I'm kind of locked in the house.
And my other recommendation is do not watch Stressful media.
Do not watch movies or TV shows where people are dying and there's tension and stress.
Just don't do it. Because your real life has all of that you need.
Watch comedies.
Watch YouTube or content that just doesn't have any scary, stressful stuff.
And watching me, of course.
Watching me is excellent.
And I would say again that I've never felt healthier than I do right now.
Like, literally. Just everything about me is working pretty well at the moment.
And it feels really good.
I gotta say that I got my health to the point where I can just sit in a chair quietly and just feel good.
Mentally I'd feel good because my body feels so...
it's operating at such an efficient level right now.
So, as Others have said it's good to do something.
So even though I feel confident we won't run out of food, you can't be confident that that will be true in every town everywhere.
So do a little reasonable planning and pull your stuff together and have a few weeks of extra.
But I think the odds of it being a super big problem are really, really, really, really small.
How many of you have had this problem?
You say to the teenager living in your house, Hey teenager, I don't know if you've been following the news, but schools are closed and you're just going to have to stay in the house for a month or maybe three months.
And not see your friends?
Do you know any teenager or child who is going to accept the following proposition?
Hey, Kevin, I would like you to have a horrible time for the next three months.
I'm just, socially, it's going to be a desert.
You're just not going to see your friends.
You're not going to have any fun. Your brain is going to want to explode.
But... You will save the lives, potentially, not necessarily you particularly, but if everybody does this, you will save the lives of 80-year-old strangers.
Good luck.
Good luck.
You're going to have a lot of fights.
So, here's what I would advise.
Make sure that the kids in your house Know that this one isn't a conversation.
If you're like most families, there's some parents who've really got the parental thing down and kids won't question them because they know that's a problem.
But for most of you, you're negotiating with kids.
Well, if I can't do that...
Can I do this? Well, suppose I only did it for a little while.
What if we went outside and played, but we were together?
So the kids are going to start negotiating with you, and I would recommend the following persuasion.
And I've already done this.
And it goes like this.
In the context of a crisis, which we're in, kids' opinions don't matter.
They will be ignored.
I'll listen to them. If you have some information, that'd be great.
I'll incorporate it.
But your opinions will be 100% ignored until this crisis is over.
This is adults only.
There's no negotiating.
Adults only. Kids don't get to participate in any decision-making during a crisis, period.
Period. Now, of course, that's the way it should always be, right?
But in the real world, you know, there is negotiations.
And I would say that you should shut down anything that looks like negotiation.
Just say, uh, uh, adults only.
Now, the fake because will work in almost every situation.
And that is, give a reason, even if it's a bad one.
And the reason could be, the government said, gotta do this.
You know, you could argue against anything, but it sounds like a reason.
And say... Adults are capable of making these decisions.
Children are not. You're not part of it.
Do what I tell you. That's it.
And that sounds like a reason, too, because adults are smarter than kids.
So say that directly. That the adults are in charge during the crisis.
That's the end of the story. How do you tell a five-year-old?
Well, with a five-year-old, you just tell them, That's the way it is.
And they cry and they scream, and then they just cry and scream.
But, you know, you might have to...
It's not like the kid is going to go steal your car keys and take your car or something.
If you tell them no, I mean, unless you drive them someplace, they're not going to get too far.
So let them cry.
That's all you got.
How about the senile?
Well, every case will be its own case, I guess.
My understanding is that this weekend the bars were full with young people who believe that they are not personally at great risk and apparently don't care if they kill a million old people by going to a bar.
And I think it's because there are too many levels of abstraction between a young person who goes to a bar And, you know, your grandmother on the other side of the country who might end up dying because of it.
And, you know, statistically, people are going to say, well, but it's not because I went to the bar.
It's because people went to the bar.
And I'm not people.
I'm just me. I didn't kill your grandmother.
I just went and had a drink.
And by the way, I didn't even get infected.
So don't blame me. So I think the millennials...
I found a mental dodge to say, well, you know, that's somebody else's problem, and by the way, they did rape the planet and leave nothing for us, and the cost of living is way higher than when these old people were young, and well, maybe it's our turn. We could use a few fewer old people.
The weird thing about this one is I was thinking, hey, we're all in this together.
You know, all the countries, all the governments, be they Democrats, be they Republicans, this will be the one time that we can all join together because it's a common problem.
And I thought, and I'd even said this, that it was kind of beautiful because you don't see everybody on the same page ever, really.
I've never seen it. It's the first time.
And then I realized That it doesn't apply to the young.
We're very much not on the same page.
People over 40, just picking a random number here, people over 40 are trying to stay alive.
People under 40 are trying to have fun.
And based on this weekend, they don't care if you live or die, if you're over a certain age.
So we have unintentionally caused a war between the old and the young.
In order for the old to survive at the rate they would like to survive percentage-wise, we're going to have to crush the young.
I don't see a way around it.
The young, and I mean 20s and 30s, are going to have to get crushed.
And by crushed, I mean we'll probably have to send the police out to send them home.
Probably have to close the bars.
Probably have to, you know, mace anybody who gathers with more than four people in public.
So, when I say crush, I don't mean hurt them.
I mean, there's some serious pain coming that the people who went to a bar this weekend don't know is coming.
Or maybe they do, and they figured, well, one more weekend I'll go to the bar.
Yeah, I did hear about the hashtag boomer remover.
That's what they're calling the virus.
the young people who would just be delighted if the old people died.
My liberal sister blames Trump no matter what.
Of course. Alright, so I'll just look at some of your comments here.
Normally I would just end this, but I'm thinking about adding a second Periscope in the afternoon or early evening or something.
What would you think of if I were to add a second Periscope just for the period of the crisis?
Because one of the benefits of what I do is it doesn't have commercials.
If you watch the replay here on Periscope.
Or if you watch it live.
Wouldn't the world be a little bit better with more content to consume?
Because you're going to run through your Netflix list pretty quickly.
Oh, so somebody's saying in the comments that the NOLA Louisiana police cleared Bourbon Street.
That's interesting. You hope I don't lose too much credibility.
Somebody says, why no CPAC outbreak that was 16 days ago?
Has there been none?
I don't know the details there.
But you're right.
Now, it could be that the one known infected person just wasn't shedding that much.
That's possible. Now, it could be that the one known infected person at CPAC washed his or her hands a lot.
Because I think we're still pretending we don't know who it is, right?
How many of you know who it is?
I'm just curious. In the comments, how many of you have seen the name and photo of the person who is accused of being the...
accused is the wrong word.
But the person we believe was the infected person there.
Uh... Oh, okay, I'm seeing lots of people.
The comments are a little delayed, but it looks like people are willing to see a second periscope.
Now, it probably wouldn't be like the first one, so I don't know exactly what that content would be, but I'm sure I can find some, take some questions or something.
So, here are the things I'm doing.
Lots of exercise, lots of fresh air, take a walk.
You would be amazed...
How much better you feel if you take a walk for an hour.
Just a nice walk outdoors.
And if the weather's bad, bundle up.
If it's raining, bring an umbrella.
But get your walk in. Don't tell yourself tomorrow.
Because you need to do something, and it makes a difference.
You can build up your immunity.
I would guess that my immunity is really humming along right now.
Because I've been getting to sleep, eating the food, doing all the right stuff.
All right. It's very difficult to know if there was a spread at CPAC. That's true.
Why did we have the freedom of assembly again?
Somebody says they'd like to hear me and Dr.
Drew on the air. We'll probably do that, Dr.
Drew, if you're watching this.
We should probably do that.
Your place or mine is less important.
But we should probably do that.
More than of all, yeah.
You know, there's a really interesting thing happening.
It's happening on social media, but you're seeing a lot of people who very quickly entered the breach.
And you're seeing people who are trying very hard to be positive influences.
I'm trying as hard as I can.
To do something productive during this.
Nival is another one, maybe the most productive thinker of our time.
So having him fully engaged makes me feel a lot better.
If you're not watching, following Balaji Srinivasan, you should.
By far, he has the most insightful comments about this whole situation, from the social, the economic, the medical.
So Balaji is one of these full-stack people who, I don't know if there's a category of knowledge he doesn't know about.
He seems to know every category of knowledge.
So if you listen to his stuff, you'll get smarter.
Scott, do you disagree with Dr.
Shiva? I don't know.
I assume you're referring to this situation, but I don't know what he says and why I would disagree.
Oh, good.
Somebody says they started walking after reading one of my books, How to Fail.
So, I'm going to get rid of that obnoxious comment.
Dr. Drew will tell you to stop spreading panic.
Well, it's a fine balance.
And let me say this. I think reasonable people can disagree about the exact right amount of preparation, worry, concern, slash panic that is productive.
And how much is unproductive?
And I would say that if you're in a situation where 10% of the public is panicking, but you had to do that to get 60% of the public to do what they need to do.
In other words, if you get the middle of the country, let's say the most typical people in the country, deeply concerned, Which is what you want, so they'll act differently, and they have to to get through this.
If 60% of them are deeply concerned, there's still going to be, I'm just going to throw a number at it, you know, 10% who are over-concerned and panicking.
I don't think you can avoid that.
I don't think there's any such thing as getting all the people to respond the same to the same message, because we all respond differently to the same message.
So, There's plenty of room for Dr.
Ju and I to be off by a degree on what's the ultimate, most productive level of panic.
But we would both agree that you could go too far, and we both agree that the panic could be worse than the disease.
So I think we're on the same page.
If there's a difference, it's maybe in a little bit of language, one degree of difference.
But both of us would be guessing, frankly.
Because nobody knows the exact amount of ideally productive worry.
But you need some worry.
You know, you don't want to get rid of it.
Because it's the worry that's causing anybody to do the right thing.
Looking at your comments.
Dr. Shiva says we're overreacting.
Well, how do you measure such a thing?
You know, I still see people saying that people are panicking, but I've not detected anything that I would call panic.
Even the people buying toilet paper I don't know that they're panicking, are they?
It just feels like, you know, you see the people with...
I saw pictures of people with carts piled high with massive toilet paper.
And I thought to myself, well, you don't know what the story is there.
Are those people panicking?
Or are they buying for the nursing home?
Right? Because if you work at the nursing home...
Maybe you need a lot of toilet paper and you're stocking up.
So you might be stocking up for the whole nursing home.
So can I just look at somebody and say, well, you've got a lot of toilet paper there, therefore you're panicking?
You saw the story of somebody who bought up all the hand sanitizers in his area and then tried to sell them at Horribly high prices.
And both eBay and Amazon shut him down and said, yeah, you can't even be on our platform.
Which pretty much put him out of business.
Even that guy wasn't panicking.
He was buying up all the hand sanitizer just to make money.
He was doing the opposite of panicking.
So, I've not seen anything in the public, let's say, I've not seen any of our professionals do anything even remotely like panic, have you?
Is there anybody you would say, oh, I watched The View and saw somebody panicking?
Not really. Not really.
I'd have to say that I'd be pretty proud of the United States for the way it's handling it attitude-wise.
I think we're doing a good job, really.
Now, I think some people are using the word panic.
to describe a set of decisions that the government and maybe individuals are making about what businesses to stay open and how far away we should stay from each other and selling your stocks and stuff like that.
But I don't know that that's panic either.
It feels like people are doing the best job they can of trying to anticipate the odds.
What are the odds?
And, you know, what kind of a country do we want to be?
And, you know, how protective should we be of our seniors?
I think people are just making decisions.
I just don't see panic.
But correct me if I'm wrong, all it would take is one example, and I'd say, oh, okay, there's a panic.
But I haven't seen it. Take the stock markets.
I read an article that five trillion dollars or whatever it was, was removed from the stock market.
Maybe it was bigger. It was a big number.
And I said to myself, and?
There's actually not even any point to that.
Yeah, five trillion of imaginary money disappeared.
Do you know what happens when we get on the other side of this thing?
We're all primed.
Every asset is already in place.
No decisions, no risks.
We just go back to work, and the stock market says, whew, thank you, and adds $5 trillion back.
Magic. So, should you panic that we lost $5 trillion?
No. No.
Because the nature of the market is it goes up and down.
It's not really a loss unless you were dumb enough to sell all your stocks when it hit the low.
That probably was a bad idea.
But I don't give financial advice.
I got rid of two assets before this happened.
So right around the time that China was saying, hey, we've got something going on over here with the flu, well before I thought I needed to care about it.
Because in the early days, I was like, that's interesting.
I'll worry about that if they tell me to later.
But there were only two assets I sold.
One was my oil stocks.
I got rid of all those.
Luckiest thing I ever did.
And by the way, I didn't even sell it because I was smart.
I actually sold it to free up some cash for something else I was doing.
It wasn't even because I was smart.
It was just the one that didn't look like it was doing much lately.
So I was like, I'll get rid of my oil stocks.
Man, that worked out. And the only other thing I got rid of was my Bitcoin.
So I got rid of all of my Bitcoin holdings.
Now, I'm not recommending that you do it.
There are plenty of reasons to have Bitcoin.
Plenty of reasons to think it'll be around for a while.
But I did not buy the argument that Bitcoin would be a...
A gold-like store that would go up when everything else went down.
I didn't think it was impossible.
In other words, I didn't rule it out.
I thought, well, it could happen.
If everything goes bad, maybe Bitcoin goes up.
It'd be good to have some. But I wasn't buying it.
I wasn't buying it.
And so I sold all my Bitcoin and it dropped by 50%, I think, since then.
Now, I'm not bragging.
Both of those were total luck.
Total luck. You shouldn't try to time the market.
You shouldn't be buying individual stocks.
You shouldn't be listening to me for any advice.
But I got lucky as hell on those two.
You have to balance that against all the times I've been unlucky.
There are plenty of those. So I think Bitcoin will be around a while.
I'm sure it will recover eventually, but I got out.
I haven't checked the when recently, but it's in tiny territory, like most of the non-Bitcoin stuff is.
Do you get financial advice or act on my own?
Good question. When I was first making some serious money with this old Dilbert thing I do, I was offered by bankers at Wells Fargo.
They had a special rich person division that does some investing for rich people.
They said, hey, we could put you in our special rich person department and we'll do investing for you in the stock market.
And I felt I was, you know, reasonably qualified to do that.
I mean, I have an MBA and a degree in economics and, you know, I pay attention.
But I was busy.
And I thought, you know, I need somebody who's really paying attention, because I'm not going to be watching.
I was working 18 hours a day then, and I thought, I'm not going to be able to watch my investments.
It's better just to have somebody else do it.
And hopefully they'll do so well, it'll pay for itself.
They bought, on my behalf, stock in Enron.
Have you heard of Enron?
That's right. The smartest people I could hire to invest my money for me put my money in Enron.
Not all of it, you know, a portion of it.
Other money they put in WorldCom.
You ever heard of WorldCom?
That used to be a company.
Now, if you tried really hard To invest someone else's money in individual stocks, and you're buying big companies.
Do you think you would even be able to find two big companies that wouldn't exist in a year?
Could you? I mean, we're in a weird economic time right now, but in ordinary times, if you're going to say, oh, I'll buy 20 different stocks for your portfolio, and then you'll have some diversification...
Do you think if you picked 20 Fortune 500 stocks, do you think you could find two of them that would be out of business in a year?
It's kind of rare. Well, my professionals did it, and what they sold to me was that they had extra insight because they talked to management.
Do you know what would happen if you talked to the management at Enron to get some insight?
Well, here's what the management of Enron would not tell My professional investors, investing professionals, they would not say, oh, you know, I have to be honest with you, Enron's just a whole pyramid scheme scam and none of it's real and it's all going to fall apart.
Do you think that's the insight that my professionals got when they talked to management?
Because that's what they sold me.
They sold me. We know them personally.
We're actually going to be in the room with them, talking to them.
So we have much better vision than you do, because we're in the room.
What the hell did that help them?
It didn't help them at all!
Alright, now, the good news is, I was just smart enough to only give them half of my money that was available for investing at the time.
Because they were also charging a fee.
I forget what it was, but let's say the fee was 1.5%.
And I didn't want to, you know, give away 1.5%, so I gave them half of my money that was available, and I took the other half, and I just stuck it in a Fortune 500 index fund.
How do you think I did with my half that I didn't manage?
I just threw it in an index fund of, you know, a bunch of American companies.
And they were picking stocks and talking to management.
Who do you think won?
Wasn't even close.
They lost a third of the money that I gave them to invest after, I don't know, several years.
They were down a third. And mine, I think, fluttered around a little bit and then took off and were fine.
Yeah. So, effectively, I cut their fee in half.
But also, I diversified because the risk I knew at the time that I had to diversify also against Wells Fargo.
So you don't diversify just among stocks.
You should also diversify who's in the mix.
And if you've only got one person who's responsible for all of your investments, you've got a problem.
Because if that one person goes bad...
Your whole portfolio is at risk.
So I spread the risk of human beings that they have any influence over my money and make sure that none of them have too much influence.
That's my advice.
Alright. Just looking at your comments here.
Did I invest in Theranos?
I did not. Yeah, the index funds will beat 90% of financial managers.
That is correct. Always have, always will, in my opinion.
What year? This was a long time ago.
This was the 90s.
All right. I actively got an oil, which is an anti-index decision.
So I still have oil stocks within my larger index fund because you can't pick and choose.
You just take the whole box.
But separately, 20 years ago or something, I had bought an index fund of oil stocks.
So the only exception to having a broad index that makes sense is if you have a sub-index Of some industry you think is going to do extra well.
So at the time I thought, okay, two industries that I think will always do well is energy, wrong, and biotech.
So I have an index of biotech stocks, and I had an index of oil stocks.
Oil stocks, basically I got out in about the same place I put it in, but it was after years.
So it was effectively a loss.
But the biostack stock is up 400% at the same time.
Now, I would only put smaller amounts in the sub-indexes.
So I still have 80% in the broad index.
But I had a few kickers.
A few kicker funds that, you know, just in case oil or biostacks did well, I could get the upside.
All right. Oil will come back.
Mark Cuban just invested in Twitter stock.
Smart bastard.
Mark Cuban, if you're listening to this, that was a smart move.
Because there's no way in hell Twitter is going to stay at the price it is.
If I had not already put all of my cash that was on the sidelines into the market, I'm fully invested in financial assets.
So I only have real estate.
And stocks. That's all I own right now.
A little bit of something else.
And some investments in companies.
But I was looking at the stocks that got whacked the hardest, and I thought, some of these are just a no-brainer.
Who is going to use less Twitter During any economic downturn, they're not.
They're going to use more Twitter. Twitter was one of the few stocks that I was also looking at to make a major shift into.
I was looking at some other things, but don't take any financial advice from me, but if you see Mark Cuban making a big move on a company like that, maybe you can take his advice.
I already own some Twitter stock.
What if Trump loses?
Well, I think that's now an option.
I think Trump losing the election went from unfathomable before coronavirus to closer to a 50-50.
So I'm going to readjust the slaughter meter down to more like a 50-50 proposition right now.
Now, the biggest thing, you know, who gets the blame, how bad is it, It takes away Trump's ability to brag about the economy.
Even if it's only temporarily in a lull, it's just the wrong timing.
So his biggest assets have been taken from him.
And even Trump's biggest supporters would say that he's had missteps with his coronavirus stuff.
You know, the not getting tested, the wrong information, etc.
But it's harder to argue that the United States is making the wrong decisions.
The communication part was really shaky, and I criticized it like crazy.
But the decisions, you know, when to close these airports, what to do, look pretty solid.
So I don't know if you'll get credit for the solid decisions.
As much as he'll be criticized for some of the words and the communication were faulty at best.
But he does seem to be learning on the job, if you will.
In other words, Trump's capability to do this stuff, if you look at it today versus even two weeks ago, I don't think it's the same.
He's not brain dead.
He's figuring out what works and adjusting.
So you see him adjusting in real time.
As long as he can adjust, as long as the feedback is getting to him, and I know it is.
He is listening to social media.
He's listening to the public. He's listening to the media.
And it's probably one of his greatest assets, I would say, is that he does respond to the public in real time.
I mean, he changes in real time.
So I don't think you'll see him...
He didn't perform as poorly as he did.
I would expect big improvements, actually.
But it's fair to say that you need a different personality for different challenges, and I don't think he has perfectly fit this.
It didn't perfectly fit in the way it perfectly fits other things, like running for president.
He was kind of perfect for that.
That's why he's doing massive stimulus.
You know, all of these stimulus stuff, you know, tax cuts, etc., I think those are mostly psychological, but that's good, because the economy is a psychology engine.
So the president might be the very...
Well, let me put it this way.
As... As ill-suited as I think the President's personality is for this specific kind of disaster, but not his decision-making.
I think his decision-making has been good.
But his personality doesn't fit this at all.
When we get over it, and it's time to crank the knob and get back to work, that's the personality he has.
Once it's go time, And it's time to crank up the economy again and get past this.
Show the world who America is, basically.
That's what he's good at.
So you're going to see the fastest...
I think this disaster...
If you can call it that, the crisis.
It's plenty bad.
Probably will get worse before it gets better.
But the recovery, whenever that starts, is going to be amazing, I think.
It's going to be amazing. And that's what Trump is just perfect for.
All right. Somebody says they're giving themselves a massive stimulus right now.
Good for you. I hear it's good for your immune system.
Andrew Yang, UBI meant under Biden's influence?
I don't know that he actually said that.
Alright, that's all I got for now.
I will maybe talk to you again this afternoon.
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