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March 18, 2020 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
26:40
Episode 856 Scott Adams: Making You Feel Better Before Bed
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Ba dum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum Hey everybody!
Hey Chris. We're going to have a light crew tonight.
You've got lots to do at night.
And you're not addicted to watching me at night.
Yet. Yet.
Well, I thought I would do a little bonus periscope because it's an emergency.
You know what you don't get enough of?
Entertainment. When you're locked up in your house.
It's a rainy day here, but I still got my workout in.
I just put in a very large order of food from my local restaurant.
And I'm watching my map as the car is approaching.
I'll have to get off when they get here.
I even bought a little extra.
I bought a whole entree.
I may or may not even eat.
But it's a local restaurant, and I'm just sending my money their way.
I'm going to spread it around.
Hope you're all doing the same.
Now, the side benefit of that, of having them deliver hot food is, you know, aside from not having to cook, is that you get to keep the food that's already in your house.
So my supply of, you know, whatever excess I have for an emergency, well, it's untouched.
I'll just doordash and support the local businesses.
Now, I don't think, and I'll say this a million times, I don't think we have a food problem.
Take, for example, nobody is hoarding broccoli.
Nobody. Nobody's hoarding broccoli.
Because broccoli doesn't last very long.
As long as you're willing to have your food delivered or send somebody who is invulnerable to go get it for you, you've got plenty of food.
There's not really any chance that the vegetables are going to run out.
Worry about it when the vegetables run out, but it looks like there's not even any slight risk of that.
All the businesses are responding, and I don't know if you can feel it yet.
Can you feel it in the zeitgeist?
You know, the zeitgeist is a German word because there's no word in English that has that same meaning.
And it's basically that general feeling in the air.
Well, who knew?
Who knew that the coronavirus would be the thing that brought us together?
But it's happening. I have never seen less political partisanship than this week.
I mean, at least not in the era of Trump.
Am I right? You know, there's still some people who are doing their political thing.
But as somebody mentioned in the comments, and this is worth calling out, I don't know if you noticed that Dana Bash, CNN, one of their more prominent personalities, I don't know, she would be like a frequent guest or something.
And Dana Bash said on CNN, without reservation, that the president's communication style is now Right where it needs to be, and that's the leader that we've been waiting for.
And I think she's right.
Now, nobody's been tougher on the president's communication than I have.
And I've got to tell you, it's been painful, because I don't want to be the one who criticizes him.
It's just way less fun than talking about the things he does right.
But he wasn't crushing it.
The public spoke.
The media spoke. I'm sure his advisors spoke.
But here's the good news.
He adjusted. And boy did he adjust.
And I was trying to figure out, what changed?
Some of it is, maybe his thinking about it may have changed.
But it occurred to me that when he was struggling on his messaging was when he had to give us bad news.
And it was the kind of bad news that you kind of really would hope didn't necessarily come true.
So imagine Trump's perpetual optimistic personality, and he has the hardest job in the world, which is to tell the public, there's a really bad thing coming, and there's not a whole lot we can do to completely stop it.
We're going to do the best we can.
His personality wasn't suited for that.
He has a lifetime of optimism, and The leadership of the moment called for him to be brutally honest and sort of pessimistic.
Pessimistic maybe is too far.
But he had to be brutally honest about bad news.
I don't think that's his sweet spot.
But we're no longer in that phase.
We have passed into war.
This is war.
We're at war with an entity, this virus, that we're trying to divide and conquer.
We're trying to beat it. We're using every tool in the arsenal and we're making new ones.
But it's a war.
And it turns out that Trump's good at war.
Because as soon as the message was, we're under attack, we're going to beat this thing, suddenly he was fixed.
Because optimism works when you're in the war.
You know, as long as it's not crazy optimism, you know, not the salesman stuff stuff, but the, you know, we're going to beat this, we're going to get this, you know, stick together, that sort of thing.
That works when you're in the war.
It wasn't right, you can't use that optimism when the trouble's coming.
And that's the big difference.
So I think one of the things I've often said about the president is that he is an extremely nimble learner.
Meaning that he became a real estate tycoon.
He learned that. Then he learned how to use the media.
He learned how to build golf courses.
He learned licensing.
He learned these businesses. He learned how to be a television star.
And then he learned how to be a president.
He's sort of an autodidact of people, in a sense.
That if people are involved, he can learn how to do this stuff really quickly.
So two things happened. The situation changed to be more compatible with his aggressive personality.
You know, aggressive is what he does well.
Honestly, it's why a lot of us support him in the first place, is that he's more aggressive than other people.
Honestly, that's the biggest part of his appeal.
One of the biggest parts is that he'll simply go where others won't go.
And sometimes you need that.
Maybe you don't need it every year.
Maybe you don't need it every decade.
But every now and then, You need somebody who will come in and just do the stuff that you wish had gotten done, but it's just too hard and nobody's going to be that aggressive.
And that's him. So, I think we're close to turning a corner on ingenuity.
Not turning a corner on the problem.
There'll still be more cases tomorrow and maybe the day after.
But are you feeling the amount of human energy that's going into this?
Are you feeling the smartest people in the world just self-organizing into this mind-blowing power that we've never seen before, at least focused on a single issue?
I just saw a list.
I don't remember everything on it, but it was all a good news list.
So, you know, were you expecting to see a long list of good news?
Now, it's preliminary good news.
But it turns out that China has essentially written up their experience.
And when you read it, it gives you kind of a playbook.
Because China tried a lot of stuff...
They tried it fast, they tried it hard, and they learned, and they learned, and they A-B tested, and they learned, because they had to.
They had a lot of people to, you know, I hate to say experiment on, because that's not the mindset, but they had a lot of experiences by which they could see what worked and what didn't, and they wrote them up.
And you look at the document, and it's almost a recipe for beating this thing, in terms of the medicines that they used to treat.
And again, apparently this...
This malaria drug that's been around for a long time, hydroxychloroquine, or whatever the other one is, totally works.
Apparently the question about whether it's effective feels kind of answered, even though anecdotally there were so many anecdotal experiences and they were so consistent.
Kind of looks like it works.
So, there's that. Somebody's saying Plaquenil.
I think that's the manufacturer's name for it versus the generic name.
Oh, thank you. In the comments, there's the word chloroquine.
Chloroquine. And then there's one that's apparently even better that's hydroxychloroquine or something.
So there's that. Then there's also a number of other drugs that I didn't recognize that the Chinese tried and got good results with.
And then also we saw Ian on Twitter suggested the idea of taking the blood from people who had recovered and therefore had antibodies And I guess there's a process where you can take the good stuff out of the blood and give it to other people and get some immunity.
And, you know, Ian just floated this idea, was it this morning, I think?
It was early this morning, or yesterday, I guess.
And then the Chinese report came out, I just saw it today, and one of the things that they tried was that.
And apparently it has some promise.
I don't know the full outcome, but it was worth trying and it was worth it for them to mention it as something that others should try.
So, and apparently they've done it, yeah.
So there are a whole bunch of drugs for treating.
And then there's news coming out of various places about vaccines.
I think that'll take longer.
But the effectiveness of the drugs that are, at least preliminarily, it's still too early to say, we have a drug that will fix this, you're all good.
That's not what I'm saying.
I'm saying that the indication is so strong that we're ready to turn the corner.
We haven't turned the corner. We're prepping to turn the corner.
You can almost feel it.
It's in the air now.
You're seeing people being so amazingly creative and just self-motivated, you know, self-organizing, self-motivated.
So, on the treatment front, it's looking really good.
Now, the other thing that, of course, all of us, you know, we observers who are not experts, and we think we're experts because we, you know, we watched Hannity for 15 minutes or something, but...
We're all crying for more test kits.
Where's our testing?
Give me my test kit. Blah, blah, blah.
Just watching my DoorDash approach here.
Excuse me. Got to get that back on the map.
And here's the thing I don't know.
I don't... It seems to me that the regular news business became kind of hollow because it turned into just talking about what Trump did today, which you don't need any base reporting for.
So the only base reporting that we're seeing is coming out of just a few outlets.
You don't see much of it on TV. Joel Pollack's done some for Breitbart.
I think the Washington Post has done some, probably the New York Times.
I imagine the Wall Street Journal.
But there's not as much investigating.
And the question that I have is, what's up with the test kits?
What is up with the test kits?
My guess...
Is that there's a whole lot of activity going on to prepare to make them, and maybe they're already starting to crank them out in volume.
It's not the making it, it's the volume part.
My guess is that by sometime next week, we're going to have a god-awful number of tests.
Because that's sort of who we are.
We're a country that can manufacture stuff.
And we can retrofit stuff, and we can figure stuff out, and we can solve problems.
And the best of us are focusing on the biggest problems.
The best of us. So, I would take a lot of comfort from the fact that we've now had enough time that the smartest people in the world, no doubt, are starting to spin up factories to turn out the test kits.
That's probably... If you have the treatment...
And the test kits, and you had them, let's say, in the next 30 days, you know, widely available.
That might be optimistic, but America.
Can America do that in 30 days?
In 30 days, do you think America could get these drugs into our pharmacies?
By the way, I checked my pharmacy, and I can't get that.
You know, a drug I just forget every time I mention it.
So the drug that's working and widely available for malaria is not in my local pharmacy.
I don't know if it's because my doctor was a little unclear about why.
Could be because we don't need it.
Not a lot of malaria here.
Maybe. Maybe that's why.
More likely, the government has already confiscated it.
Maybe. Because there can't be that much of it that was sort of already in shelves with the big medical, in this case it was Kaiser.
And it makes me wonder if the government didn't just say, you know, give it all to us and we'll control, we'll guess it because it's going to be like gold.
Maybe. I mean, just guessing.
It could be that they just don't keep it on stock.
So I don't really know. But how hard would it be to get it?
How hard would it be to crank it out?
I don't think there's any chance that whatever manufacturing company makes us, I don't think there's any chance they aren't cranking it out right now.
In all likelihood, the manufacturing is operating at 200% already.
We'll see if they can get enough.
Somebody said 47% false positive results.
Is that on the test?
I'm told that the tests don't have to be 100% accurate to be 100% useful.
It's better if they're accurate.
But if you can catch most people, You really, you know, you can knock down the viral effect enough that maybe you can get a handle on it.
So you don't have to beat it into complete submission.
You just want to wound it, and the testing might be able to do that.
Chloroquine, right. Chloroquine.
That's the name of it. 17% are asymptomatic.
Yeah, the only thing I know, because we're all armchair experts here, right?
The only thing we know for sure...
Oops. Looks like my food's delivered.
It's a no-contact delivery.
So I'm looking at the security camera and...
I should get a text in a moment because the new protocol is that you leave an instruction to just leave it at the front door and then they text me when it's there.
There it is. So they're just texting me to say that they have delivered it to the front door.
Perfect. It's a really good system.
You know, if you're not hooked on the home delivery of Restaurant cooked food.
I get it. I get it. It's a luxury.
Not everybody can afford it.
Even I don't do it often under normal conditions.
But man, it's a good product.
You know, if you don't mind paying a little extra, just the app and the Delivery.
They're really good. It's one of the best products going.
Anyway, so there's that.
So I think you're going to see testing coming online, and you're going to hear good news about that probably in a week.
I hope I can give you some good news about some stuff I know about that you don't know about.
But there are patriots who are trying to get some masks built and some other necessities, and they're working overtime on that, and it's happening.
Now I want to give you another piece of optimism.
I saw a tweet from the head of the FCC. And let me see if I can find that there.
Boom, boom, boom.
Hold it. So I hope I can pronounce his name right.
Ajit Pai. P-A-I. So chairman of the FCC. And so I tweet and I thought, you know, he'd be a good person to ask about this, you know, doctors practicing across state lines.
So I thought, what are the odds and what are the odds that the chairman of the FCC follows me on Twitter?
I didn't think it was very high, but I check, and sure enough, the chairman of the FCC follows me on Twitter.
So I followed him back, you know, I wasn't even following him, and DM'd him, and said, you know, because I think his tweet was about telemedicine, and I said, when do we see the executive order for selling across state lines?
Now keep in mind, this is just me sitting in my desk, In California.
And I sent a message to the head of the FCC in the middle of an emergency, productively.
This is not kids' business.
It was a productive suggestion.
And he gets back to me, like right away.
I got a direct message to a central figure in our government With an important input that we need that exception for practicing across state lines, just reminding they've got a lot under play.
They've got a hundred things going, but sometimes it helps just to move the important ones up to the front, make sure they're there.
So he gets back to me in basically total agreement and said they're working on it hard and hopefully we'll get some movement on it.
Now, you know, that's far from the detail that would make me completely happy, because I really would like to know where this is going.
And then I just messaged back.
And I said, who needs their mind changed to get a temporary federal order?
I can help. Because I can help.
Because of you.
So, you know, we've seen that the public is just part of this process now.
We're not spectators anymore.
So if I can find out the name of somebody who's resisting, is there anybody resisting?
Because I have a hard time believing there's anybody on the other side of the question, which is partly why I suggest it.
It should be a no-brainer.
And, you know, obviously the states have their licensing boards and they're a problem, but they're also not relevant because emergency.
If the federal government, if the president says, here's my executive order, you can practice across state lines, and the state bar says no, who cares?
Who cares? If the federal government says, yeah, it's temporary, but you can do it, and the state says no, I don't know.
I think there must be some way that the feds could immunize, so to speak, doctors against any kind of harm.
So part of why I wanted to talk about this is that there's going to be a lot of criticism of who did what, did he do it in time, was it the right thing, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And that's just natural, because we're in the middle of something that we've never seen before.
Nobody's ever seen this.
Nobody knew what to do. There was no game plan.
We do what we always do.
You've heard the famous saying about war, you know, everybody's got a strategy until the first bullet is fired.
Some version of that.
The idea is that you can have a strategy, but as soon as you get into the battle, You've got to improvise.
It's the improvising that's the thing.
It's not the strategy, because the strategies go on after the first bullet.
I think that was the case here.
Certainly we could have had exactly the right strategy from the first moment, but I'm really skeptical anybody was that smart.
Not the greatest experts, and certainly not the people they were advising, our politicians.
So I don't think it was reasonable that we would hit a home run on the first pitch.
And I think at the moment, people are doing a pretty good job of focusing on the ball, you know, focusing forward and not, you know, chewing ourselves to death with that stuff.
Just let me do this and then I got to go.
So, Excuse me. The house is full today with only the people who live here, not anybody else.
So, I just wanted to tell you that little story of incredible government efficiency.
That, you know, an idea can get to the right person, and I've been watching it all week.
There is no friction between a good idea and the person who needs to hear it.
There's no friction. I've never seen this before.
I have a lot of, as you know, corporate experience, business experience, and it's very rare that a good idea can get to the person who needs to hear it without any friction.
That's just now.
Nothing else is happening but that.
And the degree to which people are working together on this is amazing.
It's just amazing. I tweeted the other day that you're going to see some surges of human ingenuity that will just be mind-boggling.
I'm already right on the edge of mind-boggled, but I don't think you've seen anything yet.
I feel like we're on the beginning.
We're in the elbow. I told you from the start that what this is going to look like is nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing from our side.
The humans, no fight back, no weapons, no nothing.
Just getting worse, just getting worse.
Until it isn't.
When the weapons are ready, when the atomic bomb is assembled, Look at virus, and we're getting close.
We're not there. We're not there.
Hold on for another two weeks, and I think things are going to turn around.
The president's messaging is on track.
The experts are on track.
They know exactly what to do.
China, thank you.
The president thanked the people of China and President Xi for the great work of not only getting it under control over there, but for also being transparent At this point, I think the president's being sincere about the transparency and telling us what they did and what worked and what didn't, because that's the thing that will protect us.
Do you love it or hate it that the president is being so generous to China?
Now he was also calling it the Chinese virus as recently as yesterday.
In my opinion that was a mistake because it's just the wrong time to be political.
It just is. But when he says to China this is also political but I think in the context of a pandemic it's the right play.
In the context of a pandemic Praising the work of the other countries is just where you want to be.
Even if you're not sincere about it, that's where you want to be.
So, get on the right side, pull together, unless you're single, and then you'll have to pull by yourself.
And then I got a recommendation for some entertainment.
I just watched the Ford vs.
Ferrari movie that's now available on Pay-Per-View.
And I gotta say, for a guy who says on a regular basis there are no good movies anymore, pretty good movie.
Pretty good movie. You will not be disappointed by that movie.
It's really well done. And well done in, I would say, a more classic American film way.
Like, it reminded me of older films that I liked, but it was still a modern film.
It tells the real story about a racing team, Ford, trying to beat Ferrari.
But that doesn't give you the real flavor of it.
That's the backdrop for trying to be a Ferrari.
But it's way more interesting than that.
Characters are great. The actors are great.
Plot is great.
Every part of it is actually a great movie.
I can't find one weakness in it.
So watch that. If you like stuff like that, it'll make you feel good about America.
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