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March 19, 2020 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
35:17
Episode 858 Scott Adams: Come Relax With Me. You Need it.
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Hey everybody, come on in.
Bless.
Let's talk.
So, you've probably gotten a lot of time on your hands.
I don't know about you, but I've picked my skills, my challenges.
You know, I've told everybody that they should come out of this with an extra skill, because you have all this opportunity to learn something, you know, online or some hobby you wanted to get together.
And somebody's yelling at me because Tucker's on.
You've got a DVR. We're working out.
So I forgot what I was talking about.
I'm sure it was fascinating. Everybody's yelling at me because Tucker's on.
You know, you could watch this on replay.
Or you could watch him on replay.
It's a thing. You know, I'm having a harder time watching Tucker because he's been right about everything, which normally would be a good reason to watch something.
But he's right about how terrible things are, and I find it a little overwhelming.
So I'm giving myself a major diet from TV news at the moment and pundits.
I still love The Five.
I still like some of the shows.
I think I'm going to get a smaller scare.
So I'll watch the ones I don't think are going to scare me, basically, as long as I can get the news in any way that I want.
But I thought I'd give you some good news.
Now, good news should not be mistaken for, hey, everything's going to be good in a week.
I think we got a couple of tough weeks out of us.
But there are some really good things sort of shaping up and bubbling up, some of them I know about, and I thought I would share them with you.
Oh, I was going to mention the two skills that I decided to enhance.
So I'm going to still work on my studio setup.
I've got yet another path to go on that.
I think I've finally figured out something that would give me a stable way to have call-in guests.
And then you can't stop me.
Because that really is what you need in order to have something that a lot of people want to watch.
You have to have guests every now and then.
And since I livestream, I would like to livestream and have a guest, and there's apparently no hardware and software in the world that does that reliably.
There are lots of them that do it, and you know lots of people who are using them.
But if you talk to them privately, it's like, okay, privately, does this work every time?
Oh, no, that's a big problem.
There's always some little thing that changes, and you've got to update the software.
Anyway, enough about me. So I'm working on my biceps and my studio, and by the end of this crisis, I expect to have really big arms and a kick-ass studio.
Because I can. I have the time.
There's absolutely nothing that would stop me from having those two things.
And if you haven't picked out something that you're going to be better at, well, maybe it's time.
All right, so here's some good news.
In the past...
Two days. Just think about human ingenuity.
So that's the context.
How good are people?
And how good are they in an emergency?
And how good are they when everybody's on the same team looking at the same problem at the same time?
My hypothesis has been that you ain't seen nothing.
That, you know, there's going to be a long delay while we're making weapons, but man, are you going to see some stuff that'll be mind-boggling.
And it's starting now.
The mind-boggling part is starting now.
Here, in 48 hours, this is what human beings did, just with ingenuity.
We tripled the capacity of doctors.
Today. Just today.
Do you know how we did that? Mike Pence announced that the, I think it's Health and Human Services is going to announce a regulation.
I'm not sure what the word is.
Let's say it's a regulation or advisory.
It doesn't matter what it is.
But they're going to allow doctors to practice across state lines.
Now, if you want to feel confident About your government.
Consider that, you know, that's an idea that I put up through the pipeline.
You know, ordinary guy sitting in Pleasanton.
And next thing you know, it's the law of the land.
And effectively, it triples the capacity because for every city that's impacted, there are plenty of doctors who are not yet impacted who are happy to help.
Retired doctors, etc.
So in 48 hours, we tripled the number of physicians who were available at least remotely.
We still need hands-on people.
In the last 48 hours, Humans figured out how to quadruple the number of available ventilators without buying ventilators.
I told you about this.
There's a quick little hack you can do just using stuff that's already in a regular hospital.
So they don't have to go to Orchard Supply or Home Depot and buy anything.
It's just some medical stuff that they just repurpose, turn a ventilator into a four-person ventilator.
I think they may end up staying with two.
But that would be a doubling. So in 48 hours, and this is not counting adding doctors, not counting buying new ventilators or making them, we quadrupled the ventilator capacity, potentially, and tripled, probably at least tripled, this is just my own numbers off the top of my head, but something like that, tripled our medical advice capacity.
Wow. 48 hours.
Our food supply?
Coming back online.
We have the most robust, mature, you know, experienced food supply line probably in the world, I would think.
I don't know. Maybe somebody has a better one, but I would guess we have the best one.
And sure enough, snapping back.
It's snapping back.
I would say if you could put a number on this, I would bet that the average person has reduced their number of contacts.
This is just for sizing.
This is not any kind of real data.
But from something like 25 people a day to maybe five, and most of the five are the people in your family or the people you're going to see anyway.
Think about that. Putting numbers on this.
We reduced it from probably 25 to 5.
That's just numbers I'm making up, but it feels like that.
Number of test kits.
We've scaled up so that already anybody who a doctor says should get a test can get a test.
Pretty good. Now, we're way short of Of being able to massively test everybody who doesn't have symptoms so you really know what you're doing.
But there's all kinds of stuff happening.
Companies are going into wartime footing.
The smartest, best, most capable people are just spinning up factories.
I know more than you do.
I'll be telling you more as the days go on.
But there's some things that I've heard that are still a little early in the incubation stage.
But there are some heroic Stuff happening out there.
You know, people are stepping up like crazy.
So here's my guess, is that the number of test kits will, you know, got off to a slow start.
But when we start cranking these out, you know, America is still pretty capable.
And we're going to crank out a lot of tests.
And apparently there's some kind of breakthrough.
I don't know how hard it would be to develop it, but just I'll mention it.
For something you would test at home and get a result at home, I guess.
Or maybe you mail it?
Probably mail it, I would guess.
But still, you could do the test at home without having to go somewhere.
Now, I don't know if that'll catch on or it could be scaled up as quickly as it needs to be, but don't count anything out at this point.
You can't count anything out.
We might be able to scale this up like you've never seen.
Same with all the other supplies from masks to gloves to everything else.
I can guarantee you that there's a lot of manufacturing muscle going into that right now.
now, a lot.
The number of potential meds that could be used to treat this, that now different countries are reporting are effective, they report it's effective.
And I think there are...
I was trying to keep track of how many there are.
And I think there are something like 10 of them now.
There's something like... Ten different meds that various countries have tried and have written up reports that say, you know, without the benefit of a clinical trial, they're saying basically everybody we gave this to got better, and the people that didn't get it, you know, not even close.
So I've seen at least three of the ten that the evidence, you know, just again, anecdotally, Looks really promising.
And I don't know what it would take to make more of these pills, but it can't be, you know, it's not like the Manhattan Project.
It's a pill machine.
Operate it faster and more, build another one.
We can make pills.
Then what about the record we set for getting a vaccine into a trial?
65 days? Did I get that right?
I may have that wrong, but fact check me on this, but didn't we break records you couldn't even imagine could be broken?
65 days to get a vaccine into trial, and there's a whole bunch of others that are right behind it?
That's amazing. Now, here's an interesting thing that's happening, and I'm going to tweet around as soon as this is written up.
I'll give you more information about it.
But there does seem to be some suggestion that blood serum from recovered people gives you some immunity.
And, you know, the other countries have experimented with that, and they thought it worked.
So here's the question. You know, could you scale that up?
And I'm going to have at least a well-thought-out answer to that pretty soon.
So people are stepping up, and you'll know where it came from when it happens.
The New York Times did a despicable hit piece on Dr.
Drew. I don't know if you saw that.
I don't recommend you go look for it.
But they're lumping him in with the so-called flu deniers.
Now here's the problem. As far as I know, and you'd have to fact check me on this, but I believe that Dr.
Drew has always been 100% compatible with Dr.
Fauci. Who are you listening to?
I mean, if Dr.
Drew listens to the top expert in the country who's running the thing, And his opinion, you know, he's changed his opinion, but also so has Fauci in terms of what we should do and when.
Right? Am I wrong?
I'm pretty sure that Fauci's opinion of what we should do and when has evolved as the situation has evolved.
My impression is that Drew matched him in lockstep as evidence came out, as more facts came out.
I think he was perfectly compatible.
Am I wrong about that?
I feel like I've been watching them both And I've seen no distance between their opinion.
And in fact, Dr.
Drew stops and says almost every five minutes when he's talking about it that his North Star is Dr.
Fauci. He's known him from long before.
He's the best. And he just conforms to his expert opinion as soon as it happens.
So... I really have a bad feeling about the New York Times deciding to make political hay out of this, especially a medical professional who's completely compatible with the top expert in the field.
And that's kind of despicable.
I think they have some explaining to do when this is over.
Now again, we'll do our autopsy when it's all over.
A lot of people have some explaining, but let's focus forward.
That happened. Can't take it back.
Can't go back in the past. It happened.
So let's focus forward.
How are you guys feeling?
I have to say...
I'll give you a little road map of how my sort of attitude and worry has migrated.
I think I was most worried...
When I wasn't sure that the president was on his game.
And I think we all had that feeling, right?
You know, it felt like he did a great job of stopping the airport travel.
Can't take that away from him.
That just will always be one of the greatest presidential decisions of all time, probably.
In my opinion, that will rank as one of the great presidential decisions, no matter what else you like or don't like about what he does here.
So you can't take that away from him.
But his communication was a little spotty, and I want to correct myself and apologize to the president for a criticism that I didn't realize I didn't understand the full context.
And now I do. And the criticism was that when the president tweeted in the middle of the emergency that it was a, you know, blah, blah, it's a Chinese flu or Chinese virus, I winced along with much of the country because I thought, okay, he's doing his thing where he's being provocative and draws attention.
It's productive for him.
He uses it. Maybe it makes the bass happy, etc.
But despite all that, it just seemed tone deaf to me.
It's like, now? Now?
Now you're going to do that?
I love it when you do it in normal times.
I mean, nobody likes it more than I do.
You see me laugh until I cry at his tweets.
I mean, you've seen it yourself.
But now? Now?
Really? This is the time to do that?
But here's where I was dead wrong.
Because I think some of you had the same feeling, maybe.
Dead wrong. Completely wrong.
Here's what the president did.
He saw the reports. And by the way, this is from the president.
I'm not reading his mind.
I'm telling you what he said directly today.
That, you know, he was asked at the press conference, why did you call it the Chinese flu?
Because we're so dumb. We can't do real investigative journalism.
But maybe if we can trap you into saying something provocative, we'll take it out of context.
So why did you call it Chinese flu?
I believe that was exactly what they asked him.
I think I nailed it, exact wording.
And the president, I forget who the reporter was, it's forgettable, it doesn't matter, and says, why are you calling it the Chinese flu?
And the president, dead serious, just looks at her and he goes, because it came from China.
Now, if he'd stopped there, you know, I might have said, well, you know, this is still in the weeds, I don't want to care.
And then he said, and then he said, That a Chinese diplomat, and I saw this tweet myself, is claiming that the virus was spread by an American service person, maybe intentionally, in Wuhan.
And the president said that when that rumor is out there that America started the virus, from that point on, it's a Chinese flu.
I don't know if he was calling it Chinese flu or Chinese virus, I forget.
But With all due respect to the people of China, let's not make this personal.
But if you're going to try to brand us with this, don't try to brand.
Do you have children at home?
Everybody has children at home?
Turn off the sound or ask them to leave the room.
There will be cursing.
Are you ready for that? There will be cursing.
It's coming. I gave you a warning, so you only have yourself to blame.
In the context of the Chinese government, obviously the Chinese government had to approve of this diplomat, and he was a minor diplomat, but still.
You know, he was an ambassador to some country, it doesn't matter.
And so he says he blames the United States for it.
Now, if you're going to try to brand That on the United States.
A good time to do it would be if the President of the United States was maybe Obama, President Obama.
You know, a good time to try branding us with this would be, I don't know, Bill Clinton, President?
George Bush? George Bush?
Either George Bush? You know, that might have been a good play, China.
Might have been a good play to try to brand us for that.
But you know when it doesn't work?
When the President of the United States is the best fucking brander in the whole universe.
Sorry, China. You're not going to out-brand our fucking President.
You're not going to do it.
He branded them like they were cattle.
And if you didn't catch it, let me explain it.
When the president said it's a Chinese virus, he knew fucking well that it would cause a shit storm.
And what do you remember about it?
Don't think what he said.
Don't think what the question was.
What are you going to remember about it?
It's a fucking Chinese virus is what you can remember.
My president did that.
I'm proud of him.
Good job. And what are we talking about?
Chinese virus, Chinese virus, Chinese virus.
Do all of you now know that China made the dumbest move they've ever made?
They tried to out-brand Donald fucking Trump like bitches.
And it didn't work.
He just branded their ass right back to Wuhan.
I loved it.
And so let me say, I apologize for criticizing my president for doing that.
I didn't know the context, didn't know why he did it.
But, good move.
Nice play. And China?
Don't fuck with us like that.
Try something else. Try hacking us.
Try negotiating a better trade deal.
You might have a chance.
Don't try fucking out-branding President Donald Trump.
That's just not gonna work.
Dumbest thing you ever fucking did.
She. Alright.
Swearing is done.
The cursing is over.
Now let me tie this story back to my original point.
When the virus first started, I felt like our president got off to a shaky start.
But as I've said often, the one thing you can't take away from him, even his critics can't take this away from him, he's a really fast learner.
I mean, you've seen him jump from industry to industry and then dominate it, becoming president on the first try.
Well, it wasn't first try, but he became president without practice of being a president or a politician.
So here's why I feel so much better.
I feel so much better because we're on war footing.
The president has fully embraced the war president model.
And boy is he good at it.
So he wasn't really good at the woe is us, bad stuff is coming our way.
But man, you give him an enemy.
Let's say China.
He's really good at that.
So you don't want to be his enemy.
And So, you know, he's just one part of a very large machine that's working on this.
And I would say that, and I've said this before, but the more I say this, the more this is going to be a filter you're going to want to look at.
Long before the coronavirus, I had told you that we were approaching the golden age.
Doesn't feel like it today.
But we were approaching the golden age because we no longer had material shortages.
And that all of our problems that were remaining were information problems in disguise.
In other words, if you had enough information, you could solve it.
The virus is the perfect example.
It is purely an information problem that is disguised as a medical problem because that's the outcome of not having the right information.
But watch our information acquisition process.
Seven billion human beings all on the same path in terms of the same objective, at least those that are paying attention.
Each of them have hands and eyes and ears and brains and they're all like little sensors.
And all of those sensors in the form of human beings all over the world are sensing their world and they're absorbing information at an incredible rate and filtering it and finding what's good.
So the information that it would take to defeat the virus It's moving very quickly, but the nature of it is you don't see the impact until it reaches some critical mass.
So imagine, if you will, that our information went from nothing, you know, fog of war, if we had information, it was more likely wrong than right, to something, to something much bigger.
And we're sort of here right now.
We need to get here.
You know, something like multiple of that.
But the rate at which we're going, that's not going to take long.
So the testing kits, for example, are information gathering.
The knowledge of what worked and what didn't is information.
The knowledge of how to change a ventilator so it helps four people.
The information of how to operate it if we need more people is information.
Even starting up these little wartime factories to rapidly build medical equipment I'll bet that's almost entirely an information problem in terms of how long it takes.
Because in an emergency, you get rid of the obstacles.
So you got the money, everybody's on the same page, you're going to skip some steps of approval and stuff like that.
But imagine you don't have that friction.
You're trying to build an emergency factory and there's no friction of complaints or policies or programs.
It's all been wiped away. What's left?
What is the obstacle that's left?
It's pure information.
Because if everybody who was involved in the project suddenly could magically know exactly what to do, and here's the important part.
When? In other words, they would only drive to the site just as the site was ready for that exact piece.
That'd be an information solution.
So information. Ultimately, it's how we beat all these things.
It gets translated into technique and strategy and weapons against it.
And our information is increasing insanely.
There's a story out of Israel that Israel, and I know what you're going to think about this before I say it, but Israel is apparently tracking every resident's phone location and knows a record of where it's been.
And they're crunching those numbers so they can find out if somebody is identified to have it.
They can actually reverse the history and find out all the people who had cell phones that were standing within infection distance.
And they send them a text message and say, are you coughing?
Because you stood next to somebody who was infected.
Maybe you should stay away from people for a little while.
Now... That's what can be done.
Now, do you think that other countries couldn't do that?
No, of course they could.
I mean, the more advanced countries would be better at it.
But yeah, every part of that is well within the quite doable range.
Now, if you're wondering how is that possible, the phone companies already have a record all the time of where you are with your phone.
They just don't share it.
But it's an emergency. So, apparently in Israel, they shared it.
I don't know their situation with their phones over there.
So, how do you feel now?
Right? Because under normal circumstances, the public would say, no effing way.
You are not going to track me everywhere I go.
But in an emergency, if it's the difference between crashing the economy and not, Would you allow the government to track you?
Let's say for three months.
Now, of course, you're all cynics and you say, Scott, Scott, Scott.
If we let them do it temporarily, they will build the capability and then they'll just do it permanently.
To which I say, what reality are you living in?
They already have the capability.
Do I know that? No.
Of course not. It would be a state secret if anything like that were happening.
But do you think there's any chance That the countries who can do it are not looking into it.
Right? Because now that Israel's announced it, the cat's out of the bag, people can react to that, we can see how people react to that, etc.
So I tweeted when I saw the story about the Israel situation, I said in public in the tweet that I give permission to the United States government to track my phone for the duration of the crisis.
Now, of course, they don't need my permission, right?
That's what... That's what an emergency is.
There's no point in having an emergency if they have to get my permission to do something.
They just need to do what they need to do.
But it's got to make it easier.
It's got to make at least it more possible if citizens say, you know, under every other condition, no way.
Under this condition, go for it.
But check in again in three months because you need a hard stop on this in three months.
Maybe you need a federal judge or something appointed just to make sure it gets shut down at some point.
You can take care of it.
These are the kinds of things that could be fixed.
So, I would say that our leadership team is A+. You know, I had a few things I was sort of waiting for to make a judgment on how competent the government was being.
One of them was to see how long it would take for an announcement that doctors could practice across state lines for the duration of the emergency, at least.
It turns out it didn't take that long.
I don't know how long.
Was it a week? But that's pretty darn quick, you know, in governmental terms.
So, you're welcome.
You know, I don't have any way to know that that wouldn't have happened on its own.
I just know that I worked really hard on it.
And I do know that the idea got to the right people at the right time.
So that's all I know. But one has to think that, you know, for every time you have a brilliant idea of doing something, Probably somebody else had that idea, because it wasn't so non-obvious.
Certainly the telehealth people probably had to have that at top of mind.
But if the citizens helped brought it along a little bit, maybe we helped in some small way.
So I was looking to that to see if it got done.
Because if that simple thing couldn't get done, What kind of confidence would you have in your government?
I mean, really? So that was like a real marker of confidence to me, that a no-brainer thing, indeed, was treated like a no-brainer.
Nobody pushed back.
That was it. No pushback.
I think it just sailed right through.
The other thing I looked for is whether politics is taking a side seat.
And when you see the Republicans try harder to give money to the low-income people to get through the crisis than even the Democrats, I don't know that that's true.
I'm just saying that for hyperbole.
Both the Democrats and the Republicans are trying hard, sincerely, to do something that looks pretty socialist, at least in the short run.
We'll call it a different thing.
It'll be an emergency. It's kind of socialist in the short run.
So we're seeing people get, at least in some sense, free health care for this particular situation.
The UBI is almost certain to happen.
And I don't think anybody's paying their school debts at the moment.
So nobody on the Republican side, well, maybe somebody, probably somebody is, but I haven't seen it.
They don't seem to be pushing back Against doing something that Andrew Yang thought was a good idea a year ago.
I mean, you would expect that, right?
If we were just being political, you'd expect that the Republicans would say, no, keep your socialism, we'll work it out.
But they're not. So watching the Republicans become completely flexible about what's on the table and what's not, It's encouraging.
It's very encouraging. Somebody says Nancy Pelosi is being political.
Well, she's also, you know, other than approving some money, I'm not sure she has much of a role.
It looks like an executive branch thing once the Congress gives them money, and they have.
Let's see.
Just looking at your comments.
Thank you.
This isn't socialism.
This is stimulus and healing.
You're also well trained that you don't want to use that word socialism.
But anytime you're redistributing money from the rich to the poor, even if it's going through the government, you can call it whatever you want.
The point is that the Republicans are not balking.
Any idea that looks like it could be productive.
So that's what you want to see if you want to have confidence.
That's exactly what you want to see.
So we got that. So if you ask me, every part of this looks like we're getting smarter and better.
And if we're focusing on the past, it's a mistake.
I think we can look at that stuff later to learn something.
What about the election with the virus stuff going off?
Well, I think we're going to work it out.
My guess is that November is a long ways away in emergency time.
I've said this before. But in normal time, you wouldn't be able to retrofit your entire election process and do it quickly and get it done.
But I have to think that in the context of an emergency, We probably have ten different ways we could retrofit the system and make it work so people don't get infected.
So my guess is the primaries are probably going to get cancelled.
Maybe the convention will get cancelled.
Maybe both conventions will get cancelled.
If one of them does, they'll both get.
But I don't know that we needed any of it.
Because nobody's doubting that Biden is going to be the nominee, right?
Nobody's really doubting it.
Do you need a bunch of people to be in a room to figure that out?
There's got to be some way to work that out.
So I think it'll just be an inconvenience in terms of the political process and people will work it out.
That's my guess. Somebody says, should I buy a gun?
Well, it's probably too late.
Probably too late.
That's a personal choice.
All right.
Somebody says flu season has to end in some time.
Does it? Well, regular flus do.
We'll see. Alright.
I think I said everything I want to say.
I think Tucker must be having a good day over there because all my audience went over to watch him.
But I will talk to you in the morning.
So, stay alive!
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