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March 20, 2020 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:08:12
Episode 861 Scott Adams: Sipping the Crisis Away. Join Me!

My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a Content: Questionable stock trades by Congress members Rep. Ilhan Omar compliments President Trump Cash to Americans plan, Ray Dalio says DOUBLE needed Chloroquine thoughts and availability Joe Biden's disgusting fake news coronavirus tweet --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scott-adams00/support

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Hey everybody, come on in here.
A little bit of technical difficulty.
But, I used all of my technical know-how to work it out.
It seems that if anybody from Twitter is listening, for some reason the Periscope would not initialize when I had the guest feature on, but when I turned it off it did.
I tested that on my phone with it out and my iPad, so there might be a little bug there at the moment, or it could be a capacity issue.
I'm guessing the internet is slowing down quite a bit.
People are noticing that already.
But, oh, why are you here?
Yes, I know why you're here.
It's a little thing called the simultaneous sip, and all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or a chalice or a stein, a canteen jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind.
Join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine to end the day, the thing that makes everything better, including a pandemic.
Join me now. Go!
Ah, just right.
Well, let's talk about all of the things.
So, big story in the news is that there were some senators who sold some stocks ahead of I had of announcing that things were as bad as they are.
And the thinking, of course, the thinking is that they traded on insider trading, but it seems like there are at least three different situations.
So, Senator Burr seems to have been more of a cleaner situation where he got some information, he sold some stocks, and I think he owes the public an explanation.
Now, My experience with these things is that you really have to hear the other side.
You really have to hear the other side.
But on the surface of it, it looks pretty bad.
So he owes us an explanation.
That's all I'm going to say.
If he doesn't explain it, I think Tucker Carlson said, and I would agree with it, if he can't explain it, he probably needs to resign.
But I'm going to say, hold my opinion until I hear the other side.
Now, the other two seem a little sketchier.
There's somebody in Congress, it doesn't matter who, who has the money in a trust, but is it a blind trust?
Yeah, there's some question there.
Then the one that is the least credible is the Senator Dianne Feinstein.
Also, some amount of stock was sold.
But if you don't realize how rich Dianne Feinstein is, it looks like bad behavior.
But as soon as you imagine that her wealth is this much, the amount she sold was like a dot in that universe.
The odds that Dianne Feinstein was doing insider trading I think are vanishingly small.
The others have a little more to explain.
But we'll wait. We'll see what's what.
I want to mention...
Something about Ilhan Omar's complimentary comments about President Trump, which of course is the most unexpected thing in the world.
And I'll remind you of this.
Whatever you think of Ilhan Omar personally or her politics, and I'm sure that the audience for this is not big fans, but setting that aside for a moment, If we can just, you know, be adult and separate the technique from the opinions, etc. Her technique has always been good, meaning that she's smart.
She knows how to capture the public's attention.
And here's what I loved about Ilhan Omar's play.
First of all, it was the right thing to do.
Being supportive of your president when he's heading in the right direction, which was maybe not day one, right?
I mean, even supporters said it was off to a shaky start.
But once the president got on firm footing, and I think he clearly is at this point, it does make sense, given the national mood and the worry that's in the air, it does make sense that the Democrats would at least try to join ranks, at least for the point of the emergency.
And she did that.
So, if you could separate yourself from, okay, what are her hidden intentions...
What's she really up to?
We can't read her mind.
We can just say what was the right thing for a leader in the Democratic Party to do right now.
It was the right thing for the country.
But there's another level to this in which Ilhan Omar solved one of her own biggest problems.
And that's the clever part of this.
Because if you can find something that's unambiguously good for the country, and I think praising the president, you know, once he was on firm footing, was good for the country, because it builds confidence, etc.
But there's another level which is just good for her, which is, you know, you could argue that Ilhan Omar's biggest So by going so conspicuously against form,
By complimenting the president, who she's eviscerated on many occasions, she makes a really smart counterpoint, which is, from this day forward, if you say, Ilhan Omar doesn't have the best interests of the United States in mind, you have to explain today.
I mean, this week.
Because, to me, it looked like, clearly, a counter-political move.
Sorry, if you can hear my cat, she's going crazy.
So she'll always have that thing to say, you know, if I were purely a political creature, why was I complimenting the president unless I meant it?
So it's very smart play.
It's good for the country.
It's, you know, selfishly politically good, but that's sort of hidden and should be by the fact that it's good for the country.
So I'd say if we could just separate what you think about her politically or personally from the technique, good technique.
And it just has to be pointed out.
I hate to be divisive, but there's something that's worth noticing in the public reactions to things.
I've said that this is a time when everybody seems to be Volunteering to do whatever it is they can do.
You know, what I can do is not that much.
I can do this, right?
So I do this.
I do this. And everybody's jumping in to do what they can do.
But the people who are least equipped...
For this situation, in many cases, are artists.
You know, writers, journalists, musicians, poets, etc.
They may not have the skill set that is immediately available.
Now, I think artists are very important, and they'll certainly be part of, you know, getting us back to normal and making us feel right.
So artists are, you know, a gigantic part of our experience and what makes life good, and it's important.
So artists are wonderful.
And sometimes I pretend to be one.
But during the crisis, we're noticing that the artists sort of default to what they can do.
And nobody cares about the art they're creating at the moment, because we've got bigger things to worry about.
And I think they're defaulting to criticism, because it's sort of what artists can do.
So, just a shout out to artists.
This isn't the time.
There will be a time when the artists are actually very important to our well-being, our mind, our public sense of who we are and all that stuff.
Art's terribly important, but not now in terms of priorities.
So you artists, I know you've got some opinions, and how about just hold them?
How about just hold them and help the Help the national mind to get to some sort of comfort and some sort of confidence and do what can be done that's good.
So cringy videos and criticisms of things that aren't going to change, just not helping.
All right. Here's a perfect example of bad behavior by an artist.
Now, I'm using artists to be writers and anybody in that field.
This is something that somebody said, where?
Oh, in a CNN opinion piece.
By not anticipating the catastrophe we are now living, Trump joins a pantheon of American leaders whose failures of imagination have come at great cost.
The perspective was very different in the Obama administration.
Alice Hill writes for CNN. And I'm thinking, Is this the right time to pretend we know what somebody's imagination was doing?
I mean, it seems, again, not reading the room.
Later? Later, this would be great.
Let's do our autopsy later.
But this kind of weak, generic concept level, I think I read his mind, but compared to the person I imagine who doesn't exist...
Who was doing the job at the same time in my imagination.
Man, the imaginary president did so well.
So let me imagine what this president did and then I'll write something about what he was thinking and imagining as if I knew and compare it to my magical thinking of somebody who wasn't actually there and doing the job and I don't really know any of the details of why they did what they did.
It was just craziness.
Just skip them. So I would say that for a while, people are going to be writing these articles.
They have to generate content.
And let's be honest, they need a paycheck, too.
Everybody needs a paycheck.
But for the time being, maybe just don't read them.
Forget about whether they're right or wrong.
Just don't read them for now. Concentrate on something else.
The approval for the president...
has jumped dramatically in the last few days.
So he went from 43% approving to 55% approving of his management of the crisis.
That's pretty good. And I would say that the public is getting this right.
Wouldn't you? Because I think the public said that's a bad start, and the polls reflected that.
That was my opinion.
I mean, my opinion was that we got off to a bad start.
But the difference is that when I say it's a bad start, I'm talking like an adult.
An adult who's lived more than three years of an adult life.
An adult knows that in the midst of an emergency, of the type we've never quite seen, I mean, nothing's quite like this experience, there's no such thing as people who were smart and knew what to do.
That's completely imaginary.
Every criticism of what the administration did or did not do right in the earliest days compares them to some magical non-existent person who knew exactly what to do.
That person didn't exist.
Who exactly was the expert who knew what to do?
I believe there were none.
Now, that's not to say that somebody didn't say the right thing from the start.
Because if you have any situation that it's complicated, there's a gray area, there's lots of unknowns, and you can either go left or right, well, if you talk to enough experts, you're going to have somebody who says go left, and somebody who says go right.
After it's done, you will mistakenly say that one of those two teams, either the go left or the go right, got the right answer.
But that's ridiculous.
Because in any situation, there will be people who say go left, people who say go right, and you're going to go one of those ways.
Somebody's going to look like they were geniuses in hindsight.
That's not how it works.
If you were in the room in the early days, you probably didn't know what to do.
And that's not because you're dumb.
It's not because you're incompetent.
It's because the situation itself was very opaque.
China wasn't giving us reliable information.
We didn't know yet how successful we would be with this or that.
So yeah, there are going to be plenty of people who say, oh yeah, I told you so.
I knew it before the president did.
It's just not a thing. It's just not a thing.
You will not find that there was anybody who just knew what to do, and here's the important part.
It's not knowing what to do.
It's knowing exactly when to do it.
Because remember, you're balancing two unknowns.
The unknown of what it would do to the economy, with potential devastating effect, versus the unknown of what it would do to our health.
These were two gigantic unknowns.
So I'm going to have no patience, no patience with the people who say that in that first week, smart people knew what to do.
That just isn't a thing. And let me say, again, that on January 24th, I was cursing in public online saying, close the airports.
You know, a full week before the president did, I think, something like that.
Now, Do I say I'm a genius because I got that right?
I mean, in hindsight, it looks right.
I do not. I do not.
That was my opinion. And when I said we should close the airports, and I was damn certain about it.
Does that mean I was right?
No. It turns out I was right, but did I know it at the time?
I thought I knew it, but nobody's really that smart.
Do I blame the President for waiting a few days?
I prefer he had gone earlier.
But blame is sort of a child's game here, because I didn't know what the President knew.
So all I knew was there's something bad happening in China, Close the airport.
Now, when I said it, and many of you experienced it live, it was sort of a shocking moment for people who didn't quite know how big the problem would become.
My reaction to it probably looked completely out of place.
But here's the thing.
Did I do that because I was smarter than you?
Did I do it because I've got a grudge against China, which I do?
Did I... Did I do it because I'm some expert on epidemiology?
No, I can't even pronounce it.
But don't let anybody else tell you just because maybe they were on the right side and they got it early like I did.
I think Jack Posobiec was even earlier than that.
I think on January 22nd, he had tweeted, you know, close the borders.
I think he had said something about close travel, but basically he was on it, you know, more than a week before the president closed it.
Do I say then, therefore, oh, you know, Jack Posobiec and I were the geniuses.
You know, we knew, and gosh, anybody who didn't know and do what we suggested got it wrong.
No. No, I don't.
Because I'm a frickin' adult.
And I've been in the world, and I know what it's like to be in the room.
If you're in the room, you know a lot more than a cartoonist in California sitting in front of his iPad shouting F-bombs saying, close the travel from China.
I thought I knew, and I thought it was important enough to get people's attention so it was fully considered.
But no, I didn't know what they knew.
I didn't have an economist saying, yeah, you know, if you do the math, you're going to kill more people closing down the economy than you will.
Maybe you wait a little. I don't know what happened in the room.
Who knows what the president was told?
Who knows what the counterpoints were?
Who knows what the opinions are?
So here's my thing. I'm going to say it a million times because maybe nothing has ever been more important.
Judge what the administration does by their corrections.
Not the mistakes.
Because in an emergency, it's nothing but guessing, making mistakes, seeing what happened, and correcting.
So if you're only judging the guessing and making mistakes part without the correcting part, you're not part of the productive world.
You're not looking at it correctly.
It's not an adult opinion.
It's almost like a childlike opinion.
Yeah, I know what the President of the United States and all of his experts should have done without being there in the room, without having the knowledge.
Alright, so enough on that.
Let me give you another perfect example.
The government, the administration is looking at these cash payments to citizens to keep people eating and get them through the crisis.
So you're seeing a reproduction of the fog of war around this question of what to do to stabilize the economy.
This is very similar in type.
I don't want to make an analogy, but it's similar in type because of the unknowns to the original decision that the president and his administration had about what to do about the virus.
So this new fog of war is just a perfect example of what I'm talking about.
Some of the smartest people in the world are saying that a trillion-ish dollars should be pumped into the economy.
Now remember, these are like smartest people in the government are saying, think about a trillion, put it in there.
Meanwhile, you may know this name, Ray Dalio, said the stimulus package is way too small and should be maybe doubled.
Doubled. A hundred percent difference.
We're talking about an extra trillion dollars.
Now, who's Ray Dalio?
Do you care? Well, you should, because everybody who's smart knows Ray Dalio is like the smart guy of the smart guys, right?
In this world of finance and economics, The people who know this world, and I count myself at least a little bit knowledgeable about it, if anybody's new here.
I've got a background in economics degree and MBA, and I've worked in corporate America for a long time.
So Ray Dalio is somebody that would be very familiar to me.
Actually, I have his book.
I have his book downstairs.
And if he goes in the room and says the right number is $2 trillion, And other people who are just as smart, you know, Ray Mnuchin and all those cats, they're all in the same room, and one of them says the right number is a trillion, and somebody else smart says the right number is two trillion.
Who's the smart one?
The answer is nobody knows.
It's sort of a guesswork.
So that's how big The difference is that the most qualified and well-informed experts could be that far apart.
So they're going to try something, right?
So in the end, there will either be a check or not a check, and that check will be a certain amount and not some other certain amount.
We're going to try it.
If it isn't right, we're going to correct.
Judge the correction.
You can see this one forming.
If it's too little and they correct, that was the right move.
If it's too much, well, I don't know if you can do too much.
Can you? Can you do too much?
Is that even a thing? So, look for the corrections, the fast corrections, for your assumption of competence.
Don't look for the first guess, because the smartest people in the world All right, let's talk about the idea itself.
So the sticking point here is that, at least the way it's been floated, is that there'd be a $100,000, $99,000, whatever cutoff And then you wouldn't get a check if your income is above that.
I don't know if that's family or individual, but the details don't matter as much as the principle.
Now, what would happen to the country in terms of our unity, our national mood, etc., if only the people under a certain income get that money?
And we all know, I mean, you don't have to be a genius, you don't have to be Ray Dalio to know this, That there would be plenty of people above 100,000, maybe below 150, whatever the number is, that lost their job and they can't buy food.
There are plenty of people.
I mean, there have to be tens of millions of people in the category that they make more than that on paper, but they can't buy groceries because they didn't get paid this week.
There's got to be plenty of people. So what happens if they don't get any money and other people do?
Well, there could be plenty of complaining, and there's going to be a lot of people saying, hey, what's going on?
So let me toss out one possibility.
And I'm just going to put that out there.
I don't know if this is a good idea.
Again, to my point, the smart people can disagree greatly in this field of great unknowns.
Suppose you did this, and I'll just put it out there as a suggestion.
I don't even know if it's a good one.
There is something very different about this situation that cannot be compared to anything that we humans, and especially we Americans, have ever been in.
And it has to do with the fact that we're all on the same team for all practical purposes.
That's a different situation, and it allows, maybe, some different strategies.
Let me just put this out here, and I said it once as a thought experiment, but I'm getting more serious about it now.
It's still just a thought, but I'm a little more serious.
And it goes like this. Could you trust the people who have sufficient incomes to get through the emergency?
I would be one of them.
Could you trust them to donate their money back?
In other words, if you just gave money to everybody with no regard to income, Could you trust that the billionaires, the millionaires, or just the people who didn't lose their paycheck, could you trust that they would donate it intelligently in their community?
You know, give everybody a check and say, you know, your president of the United States, look, we don't have time to sort this out.
But you're local.
If you're rich, I'm going to trust you to do the right thing.
Now, maybe make it easy. There could be a specific way you could donate it back.
There might be a way you can write void on your check and register it on something.
There might be some way that you can be sure that you gave it to somebody who didn't already get money from somebody else.
So maybe there's a way to register who you donated to so they don't get too much multiple contributions and when somebody else gets nothing.
So I've seen a lot of no's, but if you can...
By the way, I'm not selling this as a great idea.
I'm just putting it out there because the more ideas we have, maybe that helps somebody fix a different idea.
Somebody says some would and some wouldn't.
Now, that's the assumption that I would like to test.
Imagine that some would just keep it.
What percentage, and does it matter?
Maybe not. Maybe it doesn't matter.
But I think this is a different national mood.
I think that every person who can help is helping.
This is very different.
That gets down to why this is different than any other time.
If this were normal times, of course you don't send money to rich people.
Of course. But could you trust them?
Could you trust the citizens, the rich ones, the rich enough ones, the ones that's not even rich, but rich enough, Could you trust them?
I think yes.
Now, I would certainly, I'm not going to fight too hard with you if you say no, and that doesn't work, it'll make things worse, and people will complain because the rich people kept their money and all that, but I don't think so.
I think the way I'm reading the room is that that money would fly out of the rich people's hands as fast as they could get rid of it.
I believe that they would be racing to get rid of it.
Because you know what you don't want to be in the middle of a pandemic?
You know what you don't want to be?
The rich asshole who kept money that should have gone to the poor.
Nobody wants to be that guy, that woman, that guy.
Nobody wants to be that person.
And I think that money would just fly out of the hands of the rich.
They'd give it to a local restaurant.
They'd give it to a local business.
I think it wouldn't last 10 minutes before the rich gave it away.
That's what I think. Now, I just put it out there.
It would require the highest level of trust.
Can you trust your fellow citizens, especially the ones who have more money?
Can you trust them?
I think he can.
I think he can. And maybe it would be a good thing for the national psyche just to prove it.
Now, I'm not the smartest guy in the room on this issue, that's for sure.
Not even close.
So I'll just put it out there as an idea.
All right. Here's some stuff I'd like to know and answer to.
So, you know, we're coming to understand that this is an information problem that got turned into a healthcare problem.
You know, if we had perfect information, we would have no problem already.
It'd be solved. Because I would know who has the virus, and I'd say, oh, Bob has the virus.
I'll stay away from Bob. And then two weeks later, everybody's good.
So if you had perfect information, you'd be fine.
And as we're gaining information about, you know, what tools and what tests and who hasn't, who doesn't, what works, what doesn't, That's how we'll get over the top.
So definitely an information kind of problem.
But here's some questions with the information.
So some things I want to know.
To improve my feeling of comfort, I would like to know the following thing.
What do we know about the number of people who are treated with chloroquine And then lived versus died.
So in other words, we have death rates of just people, you know, summed up in average.
But I want to see the death rate specifically of people who got chloroquine, let's say, before they were ventilated.
You probably want to look at only pre-ventilated people because then you could imagine that it was too late.
So if you subtract down to people You don't know if it's too late or not, but it would ruin your numbers either way.
You take them out.
So no ventilated people, just people who were maybe heading that direction.
How many of them who got the full chloroquine treatment actually died?
And then of the ones who died, how many of them had an underlying condition that explained it?
And because here's what I'm going to predict, all right?
And I'm going to talk in a moment about Dr.
Fauci, who is way less optimistic about chloroquine than people who have read up on it are.
And I'll explain that in a minute.
But I want to know if this works to allow people not to die unless they have an underlying condition.
That would be very good to know. Now, the president said it could be a game changer.
Maybe, maybe not.
So he left some doubt there, but he used the phrase game-changer, and that made the public think that we've really got something good and things are going to go well.
When Dr. Fauci, who we all recognize as the one we want to listen to, if there's a tiebreaker on facts, who are you going to listen to, right?
If our president, who likes to put a good spin on things, says this, And Dr.
Fauci, who does not try to put a good spin on things, he's just trying to give it to you straight, he says something a little different, who are you going to believe?
Well, under normal circumstances, I'd say, well, maybe you want to lean toward Dr.
Fauci, but this might be an exception, and let me say why.
So Fauci was asked about it, and he said there's, quote, no magic drug, meaning that is, and then he goes on to explain, there's no magic drug that's both effective And safe.
Or has been tested to be effective and safe.
It's the has been tested part that's critical.
My cat won't shut up.
Can you hold just a second? Thanks.
You can tell this is a high-quality production, because all your high-quality productions, they stop what they're doing to let the cat out.
All right, I was talking about Fauci somewhat disagreeing with the president's characterization of this chloroquine.
So, is it a game-changer?
Maybe, as the president says.
Or is it no magic drug that is tested to be safe and efficacious?
Why would they be sort of a little bit different?
Well, are they? Are they?
Did the president say that the drug had been tested and was safe and efficacious?
He did not.
So when Fauci says that there's no magic drug that is tested, that's safe and effective, that's compatible with what the president says.
The president is just saying it could be good.
Fauci is just saying it could be good.
They're just using different words.
Basically, there's no difference.
Now, Fauci is holding back on the optimism, but I believe he also gave us the why.
Because we've already experienced hoarding of toilet paper, right?
So we're in a world where we know that hoarding would happen.
What if Fauci said, this is the magic pill?
If you have this pill, you can live.
If you don't have this pill, you might die.
What would happen?
What would happen?
Right? So, I think Fauci is playing a careful game here, which is, I believe the government might have a lot more belief in its efficiency and safety than our top expert is letting on.
Number one, it just always makes sense not to let people get complacent.
It's still, you know, an emergency situation.
And there would be several benefits of downplaying it.
The number one benefit is that it would reduce the number of people who hoard it, and it would reduce the number of people who are willing to maybe get violent to get it.
Because the last thing you want to hear is that your neighbor has some of this drug and you don't, but you have a gun.
See where I'm going with this?
How would you like a country where there's a magic pill?
Some people have it because they got a connection, whatever.
So some people are going to have anything.
Some people got it from their secret Mexico source, whatever.
And they've got the pill, but the neighbor's got a gun.
You want to live in that country?
If your government says, yeah, this is a magic pill.
If you have it, you can live.
If you don't have the pill, you might die.
Neighbor has it. The other neighbor doesn't have it, but he's got a gun.
You don't want to live in that world.
So when you look at the brain power in some of these people, so no matter what you want to say about Fauci, he's going to have his critics, he's going to have his supporters, just like everybody, right?
But he's super smart.
Nobody's saying he's not smart.
Is it smart for Fauci to downplay it a little bit for now, Until we have so much of it that everybody can have as much as they want.
Because that's where we're at, right?
Bayer said they'd send us $3 million.
But do we have them? Do we have them?
Probably not yet.
Did they come over on the plane the same day?
I don't know. Did they give us $100,000 but they're cranking out the rest?
I don't know. How many hospitals are there?
How many people might need it?
What is the projection? I don't know.
But I do know... If the supply is not directly under the control of the medical professionals, we're going to have some problems.
How many of you know a doctor who could write a prescription and you've contacted that doctor and said, Doctor, can you get me some of this quick before it runs out, just in case?
You know, I'm not your patient, I'm your best friend.
Can you get me some of this?
How many people have done that already?
A lot. A lot.
Did I try to get some of that early?
Oh, I did.
I did. I contacted my doctor by email, of course, and asked, I said, hey, I'm in the danger group.
I said, I'm in the danger group.
I'm over 60, asthma.
And is there any way I could get a hold of this since it's well tolerated?
I said, can I get a hold of it so I can take it prophylactically, meaning to prevent getting the virus if I'm exposed?
And my doctor gave me an answer that I feel like was the responsible answer, but was probably also a lie.
I think it was a lie by omission.
It wasn't a lie in the standard sense.
And my doctor wrote back, That we don't handle it in the pharmacy.
Now, here's what's wrong with that, Ansel.
It's not carried in the pharmacy.
Here's what's wrong with that.
Do you believe that?
Well, first of all, I don't know.
It's possible. But the pharmacy can order kind of anything you want.
And your doctor can write a prescription that you could take to some other pharmacy.
So, did my doctor give me a straight answer?
When she simply said, and then just dropped it, you know, we don't carry that in the pharmacy.
She didn't say it was a bad idea to take it.
It's, you know, conspicuously not there.
She didn't say, you know, leave it for the medical professionals, because then I would have been in hoarding mode for sure.
You know, I wouldn't have, but, you know, my mind would have gone there.
And you don't want to be thinking about its availability.
Like, oh, maybe if I tried harder I could get some of this.
So I think my doctor did the responsible thing by sort of taking me off the trail.
Just sort of nudging me off the trail.
And I felt it was like a gentle nudge.
It's like, not now.
That's what it felt like.
And I think that was exactly the right...
The right play. Not good for me.
What's good for me is I get an early dose and I'm protected and you're not.
Right? That's what's good for me.
But what was good for the public, I think, is the way my doctor played it, which is we don't carry that.
Now what I think that might mean, and here I'm just guessing, if I had to guess, the big medical entities that would already have some supply of this, probably some time ago got an order from the government That you can't give it out prophylactically.
Guessing. I would like to think that my government was clever enough, as soon as they thought this drug had some potential, because they knew before we did, right?
They were hearing the official news from other countries.
I would like to know that they immediately went to the people who had the supply and said, lock it down.
It's going to be only for the essentials.
I'd like to think that all of our first-line healthcare providers are getting it prophylactically by the end of the week.
There's a timing issue, of course.
But by the end of the week, wouldn't you like to know that even if you don't have it, don't you want to know your doctor has it?
You know, the doctor that's working on the front line.
You want them to have it first, right?
And that's probably where we're heading, and there's probably a limit of supply.
So I'm going to be a team player for now, and I'm not going to try to find some secret way to hoard it, even though I think I probably could if I worked on it.
All right. So I'm going to say that Fauci and the president are not really on different pages, but they're trying to manage our expectations differently.
I think I approve of the difference.
Because there's a little bit of an accidental, you know, there's some form of a good cop, bad cop, bad example.
But if the president's giving us a, hey, there's reason for optimism story, and his expert is saying, well, not so fast, that's sort of exactly where I want them to be.
See what I'm saying? I want my leader to say things will be all right.
At the same time, I want my expert to say, you know, hold on, you know, might be good, but let's test this thing.
Alright, so I'm quite happy with that.
Meanwhile, the least relevant person in the entire world, you may have heard of him, his name is Joe Biden.
Have you heard that name?
He's running for president or something?
But he's the least important person in the world right now.
And he tweets this out yesterday.
Yesterday he tweets this out.
The Obama-Biden administration set up the White House National Security Council Directorate Well, most of you know that's just fake news.
It was eliminated in the sense that those functions were folded into something else and the redundancy was eliminated.
Yeah, the redundancy was eliminated.
But this is just not true.
Now, how would you like to be in the middle of a global pandemic, the country is fighting for its economic life, and the guy who wants to be president, the only thing he added to it was fake news to make you feel bad about your president who is leading this effort?
Seriously? I mean, I don't think you could do a worse job of being even a citizen.
Forget about what it is for his campaign that's going to lose anyway.
He's irrelevant because he's not going to win.
But that's the best you could do for the country.
The best you could do for the country, Joe Biden, was to put some fake news up that makes you doubt your president during a time of crisis.
That's it? That's how you thought you could help?
Disgusting. And let me shout out some people who have been critics of the president who I think are really stepping up.
I said this before. Mark Cuban, great job, leadership.
Just love to see natural leaders just stepping up.
Ilhan Omar, praising the president's performance against type.
I give her credit.
I think Presley said the same thing.
If I'm not mistaken, fact check me on that.
And I would like to thank Bernie, Bernie Sanders.
So this is not a, this definitely is not a Democrat versus Republican thing.
Because I'm praising Bernie Sanders for being productive, for shouting down CNN about making this political.
Andrew Yang, very productive.
Thank you, Andrew Yang.
You know, good citizen.
And I think Yang really softened up the public with his UBI to make even what we're talking about possible.
I mean, it just makes it easier for everybody.
So I think Yang has been tremendous.
And I think, you know, Dana Bash, CNN contributor, I'm not sure exactly job title, but very positive, very constructive, I think.
So, big shout out to everybody who's been constructive, be they Democrats or Anything else?
But Joe Biden's not.
And I think that's worth mentioning.
Did anybody buy stocks?
Oh, yeah.
Mike Bloomberg, I believe, is donating gigantic amounts of money And at the moment, I haven't heard...
Bloomberg complained about the president.
Kasich? John Kasich?
Patriot? Exactly.
Somebody says Zuckerberg went live yesterday.
You know, I don't know what Zuckerberg's doing.
Well, I think we can guarantee it's productive.
I know Elon Musk said that Tesla could make ventilators if needed.
So I don't know if that's going to happen, but people are stepping up.
Somebody says maybe anti-malaria drug is a reason for a few cases in Africa.
That is possible.
The other possibility is that there's a genetic marker, well there's a genetic difference, meaning that the ACE2 inhibitors or whatever the hell it is, receptors in the lungs, clearly I'm not a doctor, But there does seem to be some genetic difference that makes some people more susceptible.
And some of it might be smoking and weight and obesity and things like that.
And here's one thing you don't...
If you're looking for the obvious, how many obese people do you ever see in Africa?
And every time I hear about somebody dying, are they not 60% of them obese?
Maybe 60% of the world is obese.
But if I'm asking myself why it doesn't seem to be hitting Africa as hard as you'd want, the questions you'd ask is maybe they just don't have good testing.
Maybe it is and we don't know it.
Maybe there's a lung difference that some people have.
Maybe they smoke less.
I don't know. Do Africans smoke as many cigarettes as everybody else?
You never... I can't think of a picture of Africa where I saw somebody with a cigarette in their mouth.
They must have smokers, but I don't know.
Is it a big thing there? And how often do you see obese Africans in Africa?
I don't know. It could be they could actually just be healthier.
It could be that. But it also could be that some of them are already taking the malaria drug.
That's possible. I can't imagine there would be enough people taking it.
Is it like a vitamin in Africa?
Somebody do a fact check on that, right?
Here's what I want. I want somebody to do a fact check where they overlay on the global map the percentage of people who are regularly taking the malaria drug just because they're in that zone.
Is that a thing? Do you take it preventively?
I don't even know if that's a thing.
But I'd like some visibility on that.
Alright. Somebody says, are you sure you want to go down this road?
I don't know what you're talking about.
Not many obese Chinese, but lots of smokers.
It also could be ventilation.
One thing I imagine that you have less of in Africa, correct me if I'm wrong, is air conditioning.
Now, in the cities, I suppose, they must have enough.
But I can't imagine there's a ton of air conditioning in just the general African public outside of the cities.
So maybe that's a factor, too, the recirculating of the air.
Yeah, I saw that weird press thing where de Blasio said it's okay for him to go to the gym because he needs to stay healthy to manage the crisis.
And I thought, that goes in the pantheon of bad political answers.
But again, he's a front-line leader in an emergency, and I'm not going to kneecap de Blasio for going to the gym.
You can make your own judgment about that, but At the moment, we just need to be on the same team.
Somebody says Italy is a skinny country.
Now, others have suggested that the number of young people living with grandparents probably is a big factor in the death rate, not in the rate of people getting exposed.
But we're getting a pretty good idea that there are probably five or six things going on That may have a factor.
Even the expats I know in Africa eventually stop taking it.
Oh, is it something you take for a while and then don't take anymore?
I've never heard that.
No, it's experience from HIV, Ebola preventions.
So somebody's suggesting that Africa has some kind of experience maybe that's helping them, but I don't know how that would translate into real-world action.
Somebody says, remember, you picked this road.
I don't know what you're talking about.
Somebody says it's summer in Africa.
Could be. Could be a factor.
Somebody says 50% of the world lives in malaria areas.
Italian doctor says men do not do as well as women.
Would that also be related to the fact that men don't live as long as women?
So in other words, if your problem is that old people are dying, and that it generally just, if it attacks you sort of generally, you know, it's not like, well, let me say it this way.
Among very old people, The males are going to die at a higher rate than the women, right?
So the same threat to a man or a woman at age 75 should be harder on the man, no matter what it is.
Is that true? You'd have to fact check that, but it could be as simple as, you know, men have a lower life expectancy and it's just accentuated by this.
Have I heard about the Stafford Act hoax?
Yeah. So apparently people are getting some kind of unsolicited text message saying that there's going to be some kind of martial law lockdown or something.
And we think that foreign actors are behind it.
We think that might be China, etc.
Now, you're watching that China continues to push the idea with people who clearly have been cleared by the government to blame the United States for starting it.
And apparently they're going to keep pushing that button because their domestic audience, you know, they can tell them anything they want.
And how should we process that?
It seems to me that there's legislation right now to bring the supply lines, at least for pharmaceuticals, back.
And I think there's other legislation about bringing just the supply chain in general back.
I don't think there's any chance going forward that decoupling is not going to happen.
So if you're keeping track of who said Who said the right thing first?
And you should. Because I always recommend you should look at people's predictions and then see how they did, and you should do it for yourself.
And you should say it publicly.
Because if you don't say publicly, here's my prediction, and then publicly I got it right, or publicly I got it wrong, it's too easy to forget the ones you got wrong, if you know what I mean.
If you don't put it out there so other people can remind you.
I would like to remind you that not too many people were saying decouple from China before I was.
I wasn't first by any means.
You know, Gordon Chang and Kyle Bass and those guys have been on it for a long time.
But I was early, and there are going to be a lot more people who are going to be joining that.
So if you're keeping score, keep that in mind.
All right. Isn't LA on lockdown?
Well, all of California is on lockdown as of yesterday, I believe.
So lockdown means that we can only leave the house for essential services.
So banks, you can do takeout food.
You can't go to a restaurant. You can have delivery.
You can go to the doctor.
You can get meds.
And then anybody who's working on critical infrastructure stuff, they can do.
So California is locked down.
How many of you, I'd like to see in the comments, I want to see if I've influenced you in this one way, how many of you have added taking a nice walk to your daily routine?
And I mean daily, not just something you did once.
How many of you have taken seriously going for a long walk every day?
There's a little delay in the comments, so I'll wait to see.
But just tell me how many of you are doing it.
Because I could not recommend this more strongly.
I've A-B tested it at home.
And the one time I didn't go for my long walk, man, I could feel it.
Mentally. Mentally and physically, I could really feel it.
Yeah. Nikki Haley.
I don't know what that's all about.
Doesn't trade encourage good behavior?
Apparently it did not.
The hope was that trading with China would cause them to be better partners, but instead they used it as a weakness to take advantage.
So, given that that's what we know they will do, it makes no sense to follow that plan still.
Trump had...
Yeah, and I think you'd have to say that Trump was early on and China's not necessarily our friend, but let's not be...
Let's not start a war with them, but they're not our friend.
I think Trump was early on that.
Oh, look at all the comments that are starting to come in now.
I'm very proud of you.
Because there aren't many things you can do during the emergency that you know are the right thing to do.
I mean, just unambiguously, you just know it's the right thing to do.
But taking a long walk every day is definitely the right thing to do.
Now, if you're going to...
Somebody is mentioning Nassim Taleb.
Now, to be fair, I blocked him a long time ago for not understanding this...
Now, he's a smart guy, and I'm sure if you heard his side of it, it would sound differently.
It would sound maybe better than the way I'm going to characterize it.
But he was always the main proponent of the argument that even if there was just a small chance that climate change was real, you should still put massive resources against it, because a 1% chance of doing that much damage to the Earth is just too big.
So he sort of did a math approach to it, and what's it called?
There's some principle, and he put big words to it and big names.
And I looked at it and I said, that's just a great thinking there if you only had one problem.
If we lived in a world with exactly one thing that could take down the entire economy, yeah, you should spend all your money on it.
You should really make sure you don't have that 1% chance.
But what if you have more than one problem that could take out your whole economy?
If we had put...
Here's a thought experiment for you.
Let's say that on day one, when AOC and those who supported her came up with the Green New Deal on day one, and let's say the country said, you know, sounds pretty good.
Sounds pretty good. Let's do that Green New Deal.
Now, the one thing we know about it is it would be a massive change.
Whether you like it or don't like it, everybody would agree it's a fairly massive change to the economy.
How would you like to be going through a massive restructuring of the economy at the same time a pandemic hit?
How much money would you have?
How much resources would you have?
Would you be in the same shape?
Well, it kind of depends what happens, right?
But the point is, if you live in a world where you might need an asteroid defense system, you might need a whole new pandemic recovery thing, And maybe there's a risk with climate change that you should be throwing a lot of money at too.
If you have multiple take-down-the-economy risks, the idea of massively spending resources on just one of them doesn't make so much sense anymore.
Now, can you think of anybody else in the world who said publicly and often for the past, I don't know, 10 years...
You better not spend all of your money on climate change because pandemics could be expensive too, specifically.
I've been specifically saying for probably 10 years, I don't know, if I checked it, maybe it's five, but a long time, that you've got to look at pandemics, you've got to look at literally asteroids.
Should we put a trillion dollars into building a network of satellites that can see far enough that we can send an atomic bomb and change the direction of a meteor coming in our direction?
Maybe. Maybe.
There is a very small chance we'd be wiped out by a meteor, but maybe.
So, in a world with multiple risks, You've got to be smarter about your risk management.
Somebody says, you are making excuses for what?
I don't even know what that criticism is.
I think I know what your criticism is.
Making excuses for not doing enough about climate change?
But then you would have missed the whole point.
The slaughter meter is at 100%.
So the slaughter meter is the prediction that the president would win based on current conditions, which nobody assumes would remain stable from now until the election.
So it's an artificial number.
It doesn't really predict. It just says if nothing changed, this is what would happen.
At this moment, you saw the president's poll numbers just reversed in a week.
And went from, hey, that's a pretty good job, to, you know, from not such a good job.
At the moment, there's just no way he could lose, unless something new happened.
But of course, new things will happen before now and then.
How much has the pandemic reduced CO2 planet-wide?
Smart people tell me this.
That pollution can go away quickly, you know, just falls to the ground.
But CO2 has a far longer, you know, period of reduction.
But I still think it's the right question.
Now, until somebody really, really smart who works in this field tells me this is dumb, I'm going to say that this is at least possible.
Which is that we could learn something That maybe we couldn't have learned in any other way.
Which is, does the level of CO2 come down at all?
Does it come down at all in a month where you're not putting out as much?
Now you might be able to measure that it didn't go up.
And again, it depends on the sensitivity.
I'm only talking about does it go up by a thousandth or something like that.
But it's science, right? Science can measure stuff.
Somebody's asking me about the stock market, which I haven't looked at today.
Let's see what it's doing. If my stock ticker is up to date, well, I guess you're pretty happy you bought stocks yesterday.
Wind resorts are up 25% today.
Snap is up 6%.
The broad index of the Fortune 500 is up 1.7%.
Apple's up 2.5.
All green. Nothing but green.
Somebody says CO2 is not pollution.
You need to go somewhere where people don't know that and then shout that out.
Everybody on this periscope knows that CO2 and pollution are different things.
So if you're trying to tell me The CM2 and pollution are different things.
You're in the wrong place. There must be somebody who needs to know that, but nobody here would be confused by that.
Somebody says they miss me saying measure in my normal way.
Measure. My upstate New York way.
Somebody says stop asking about stocks.
Why? American Airlines is up, etc.
And let me throw out an idea for you.
This is a poorly thought out idea.
You can immediately see the problems.
But if you're not new to this, you know that I often throw out poorly formed ideas because it might make you think of one that's good.
So in other words, it will just take your brain to a different place.
And you might say, well, your idea doesn't work, but you reminded me of something that would work.
So that's the spirit of this.
So we've got a bunch of cruise ships sitting there empty because nobody wants to take a cruise.
And it's probably not even legal at the moment.
I don't know what the situation is.
We also have a bunch of young people who want to go on spring break.
See where I'm going? What if we take the young people who were going to spend money on spring break and we say, if you let us test you, at least for a fever or whatever, And again, I know you can't always get it all, etc., so the testing is incomplete.
But suppose we say, all you spring breakers, if you were going to spend your money anyway, I'll give you a cheap cruise.
Now, how much would spring breakers like to be on a cruise ship?
A lot. A lot.
Now, suppose you said, all right, since, you know, if you agree to go on the cruise ship, You're also going to have to agree to some other conditions.
Which is, you know, if something breaks out, you're all going to be there for two weeks.
But we're going to be a lot smarter about, you know, maybe you only fill up half the cruise ship.
Maybe we've learned something about the ventilation system.
Maybe you give them a pile of chloroquine.
And they're young people to begin with, right?
So they're young and healthy to begin with.
You give them a barrel of chloroquine.
You get on the ship.
Maybe... And again, this is just brainstorming.
I do not kid myself that this is a good idea.
It's just sort of creative and moving in the right direction, and maybe you could fix it.
So fix my idea for me if you can.
Can we just load up the cruise ships with people who are low-risk, young people, who have been checked before they got on, checked while they're on, checked when they got off, to the degree that you could even do that.
One way you could save the cruise industry is by taking the spring breakers and testing them.
So I don't know how many test kits we have, but if you could rapidly test, could you save an industry by, you know, I know we need the tests everywhere and they're not enough, but just brainstorming, just stay with me. Could you focus some of the tests on an industry that could be at least kept on life support until the economy comes out?
And just maybe, you know, keep the cruise ship business alive.
How about hotels?
How about you say, you know, the Marriott in Pica City, San Diego, has zero business and basically we're going to go out of business.
But, if you're a spring breaker, you're a young person, we'll give you a deal.
Half price. There'll be nobody in the hotel except young people.
No old people will get near it.
You can't check in without taking a chloroquine before you walk in the front door.
And when you're here, you can't leave.
And before you leave, you'll be tested.
I'm just throwing out ideas.
Could you save the travel industry by saying, we're going to limit it to young people, we're going to slash the price, cut it in half, We're going to test before you get in, and you're going to be limited here.
But, you know, who would be mad about being stuck in a hotel with only other young people who are single?
Nobody. Yeah, tell me a young person who doesn't want to go stay at the Marriott with only young people on spring break.
Pay half price, but you can't leave the building for two weeks.
Might be popular.
So, This is the human ingenuity, not this idea, but at least the idea of being flexible.
Somebody says save airlines first.
So here's the thing. You might be able to do something similar by testing people before they got on a flight, but it seems like it'd be too slow.
In the case of a cruise ship, people actually will go a day early and stay at the hotel near the cruise ship.
You spend hours and hours waiting to actually board the ship itself.
So the cruise ship is already built for people to expect an eight-hour delay before they get on the ship.
That's just normal already.
But the airline industry is really about getting someplace, and then when you're there, you're a free-range chicken infecting people.
So maybe you could get enough rapid testing to make the airlines work again.
Maybe you can only fill every third seat.
Maybe N95 masks and gloves are mandatory.
So yeah, I think there's a way you could do it.
It might be different. We don't have much information on the number of COVID test kits coming.
So that's a big question mark.
I'd love to have more information on that.
All right. That's all for now.
I will talk to you again later today.
Stay safe. Stay strong.
Take a walk. Eat right.
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