My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a Content: Part 2 of 2 --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scott-adams00/support
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| Who knows? All right. | |
| CNN is reporting that they're stunned. | |
| Stunned, I tell you. | |
| By Trump's totally ordinary behavior at press conferences. | |
| And by totally ordinary, I mean he insulted a reporter of CNN for just sort of trying to stir up crap. | |
| Now, is that a news story? | |
| We've got this coronavirus thing, the economy is in trouble. | |
| I'm pretty sure we have some real news. | |
| But is it news that Trump acted exactly like Trump for the billionth time in a row? | |
| Do you know what would be news? | |
| Trump not acting like Trump. | |
| That would be news. | |
| There's some news. What's not news is Trump acting like Trump. | |
| All right. So that's meaningless news. | |
| It's sort of almost news porn for people who just want to hear bad stuff about Trump. | |
| That's fine. But it doesn't have any meaning. | |
| You're going to hear lots of stories from people who work at hospitals. | |
| And those individual stories will sound like this. | |
| Ah, it's all chaos. | |
| Nobody knows what's going on. | |
| Nobody knows what they're doing. | |
| We're just running around like chickens and there's so much... | |
| Let me put a big caution on those stories. | |
| In every organization that's doing anything big, you could throw a dart into a group of employees. | |
| Which would be very cruel and dangerous. | |
| Don't throw a dart into a group of employees. | |
| But if you did, that dart would hit somebody who, when you said, all right, pull the dart out, stop complaining. | |
| Tell me what you think about management. | |
| What would they say? It's just random organization company doing any big organizational thing. | |
| What would random employees say about what's going on? | |
| Let me tell you. Management doesn't know what it's doing. | |
| It's not communicating. We're running around like chickens with our heads cut off. | |
| It's chaos. Nobody can agree. | |
| We don't know where we're going. | |
| Where's our strategy? | |
| Our strategy! | |
| Said every employee... | |
| Of every organization who's going through any kind of a big reorganization or change or transformation. | |
| So you're going to hear all those stories. | |
| Listen to the people who are a little closer to the top of the chain to find out what's going on. | |
| Because it would be very normal that the people at the bottom don't know what's going on. | |
| It would be more concerning if the people in management didn't have a pretty good handle on it, or at least they're trying something and quickly adjusting, which gets you to the same place. | |
| A little bit slower than magic bullet, but it's the right process. | |
| So don't put too much credibility on Low-level staffs tweeting and getting out messages about how bad things are. | |
| Don't ignore them because they are red flags. | |
| So if you hear these reports, I think the press should try to contact them and maybe dig in and compare it to what the management is saying and get an independent view. | |
| So you should definitely pay attention to them as red flags. | |
| But until the press is, you know, to the extent that the press is doing its job, until you get a little more from management, you don't have the picture. | |
| That's just a caution that you might hear some alarming stories that might not tell you what's going on. | |
| All right. I put out this provocative thought, and I was quite surprised the smart people did not totally reject it. | |
| And it's a category I'd have to say I don't understand well enough to have a firm opinion, so I put it in the form of a question and it went like this. | |
| If the government created and issued a government-backed cryptocurrency, so in other words, if the government made its own version of a Bitcoin or some other crypto, and just gave it to everybody who had low income and at least had the capability of having a smartphone and could figure out how to get it and spend it, Now, of course, there are practical issues about who can use a crypto wallet. | |
| It's a little complicated, etc. | |
| But I just put it out there for the conceptual feedback. | |
| And it was interesting. | |
| There were people on both sides. | |
| So I'm going to stop well short of saying it's a good idea. | |
| But I will say that the objections I heard didn't make sense. | |
| So there were people who said, no, you can't create a government cryptocurrency because that would cause inflation. | |
| To which I said, Bitcoin got created. | |
| Did that cause inflation? | |
| I don't think so. | |
| Did it? Maybe. | |
| I mean, didn't notice. Didn't seem to be much of an impact. | |
| Now, it could be that Even Bitcoin, as big as it is, is not big enough to cause inflation, but a government crypto, especially used massively like this, maybe it would. | |
| But there are a lot of unknowns on this. | |
| But I just put it out there, because the one thing that cryptocurrency does is it creates money out of nothing. | |
| So instead of running up our debt or printing money that could cause inflation, the two ways that you sort of produce money in the normal way, It's just a third way to produce money out of nothing. | |
| But it's a little disconnected from the rest of the economy, so I don't know if it would have the same effect. | |
| I just put it out there. So that's a question, not a suggestion. | |
| But I think at some point there will be a... | |
| I mean, it's obvious that at some point the government will have a crypto. | |
| Right? So if you're going to have one anyway, maybe this is the time to do it. | |
| I don't know. Um... | |
| You're going to see the death rate for coronavirus falling quickly, especially because of the meds, and also because we'll be doing more testing, so we'll find more people who didn't know they had it. | |
| We're getting good news about serum therapy, convalescent serum therapy. | |
| Now those are fancy words for taking the blood from people who have already recovered, taking out the good parts, you know, what's left is in the serum, I guess. | |
| So they reduce the blood down to the useful parts and inject it into somebody who doesn't have it yet, or maybe somebody who does have it. | |
| I think it could go either way. | |
| But it would give them antibodies without them having to develop it themselves. | |
| And 91 out of 157 patients... | |
| Treated this way showed clinical improvement within 48 hours. | |
| Not bad. Now that's only 91N of 157. | |
| I believe that the chloroquine and the other drugs in combination, etc., are getting far higher improvement rates than that. | |
| But, here's another one. | |
| Somebody says, read Trump tweet. | |
| And before I do that, I'm going to do that right now. | |
| Okay, let me just look at Trump's tweets. | |
| There must be something going on that's interesting, or you wouldn't have alerted me to that. | |
| One moment, please. | |
| Please hold. All right. | |
| Oh, well, there we go. | |
| 41 minutes ago. | |
| Hydroxychloroquine and hydroxychloroquine Remember, this is coming from the president, so this is not a medical person. | |
| Hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin, taken together, have a real chance to be one of the biggest game-changers in the history of medicine. | |
| The FDA has moved mountains. | |
| Thank you. Hopefully they will both... | |
| H works better with A. In other words, combining those two drugs works better than taking one another. | |
| To put into use immediately. | |
| People are dying. | |
| Move fast and God bless everyone. | |
| Let me tell you some behind-the-scenes information. | |
| Now, this is word of mouth. | |
| It's hearsay to you. | |
| I know the person and I know the source, etc. | |
| So put it with a grain of salt. | |
| But this is something I've heard. | |
| Which is, was it yesterday? | |
| Maybe yesterday morning or the day before? | |
| I was asking about the FDA and approval. | |
| And what I heard, and again, grain of salt, right? | |
| Any anonymous information you want to take with a grain of salt. | |
| But what I heard was that Trump was telling the FDA... Get it done. | |
| And as in, we're not going to wait for you, you're just going to do it. | |
| Just freaking do it. | |
| Just make this happen. | |
| So I think the President was putting all kinds of pressure on the FDA. Now, is that safe? | |
| Has the FDA maybe cut some corners? | |
| Because the President's putting pressure on them. | |
| Imagine how much pressure the President of the United States, this one in particular, could put on you If you want something done and it's a national emergency. | |
| Well, that's the kind of pressure that nobody's ever seen. | |
| I mean, you've never been in that situation. | |
| Will you ever be like the choke point for a national emergency and the most important leader in the entire world, in my opinion, is putting pressure on you to make a decision that's not maybe medically what you want it to do? | |
| There's a little bit of risk there. | |
| I'm not going to lie. There's a little bit of risk there, but it's a risk I would have taken, based on what I've seen. | |
| I'm assuming the President's seeing stuff functionally similar to what we're seeing at this point, meaning that these are so low risk, because they're existing drugs, we have some experience with them, and they're such a high gain, that the risk-reward is just blatantly obvious. | |
| And I think the President, especially because you take them for short term... | |
| The side effects are more long-term use, but we don't need it long-term. | |
| It's sort of a two-weeks-and-done situation or less. | |
| And I think the President is just completely right. | |
| The bureaucracy had to do what the bureaucracy does, but I think he pushed them to act faster than they've ever acted before. | |
| And I think the President's optimism will be greatly criticized today. | |
| But he said something interesting at the press conference. | |
| I hated and loved it at the same time. | |
| I had a hate-love relationship with this statement. | |
| And the president said that, you know, you never know. | |
| He was talking about chloroquine, not the hydroxychloroquine, which is even better. | |
| He said, you never know. | |
| Good indications, but personally, he said he was optimistic. | |
| And I thought, well... | |
| You know, he might be getting a little bit ahead of the medical people, but I don't think so. | |
| So I think he's going to be proven right. | |
| And the part that I didn't like, but I liked a little bit, is he said that he's been right a lot. | |
| He looks at him and he goes, you know, I think this is going to be really good, and I've been right a lot. | |
| Now when he said that, I thought, well, you don't need to say that. | |
| You know, you don't need to say... | |
| You're right. This isn't sort of the time to keep score. | |
| It's a national emergency. | |
| But on the other hand, I thought, well, it's kind of true. | |
| It's kind of true. | |
| When he closed the airport, what did everybody say? | |
| Too soon. Don't do it. | |
| And now they all say he's right. | |
| And you can go down the line. | |
| There'll be plenty of stuff for people to complain about, and they will. | |
| But he's been right a lot. | |
| In the context of an emergency, what the public wants to know is that the leader's been right a lot. | |
| So I liked it because it showed confidence, and the public needs to know he's right a lot, and I think he's actually right about that, that he's right a lot. | |
| I'd be the first one to criticize him if I didn't think that was objectively true, but I think it is. | |
| So let's talk more about the economy. | |
| So I think, like I said, I think that we're going to be sending the young back to work as soon as we have a really, really good handle on the meds. | |
| But I wanted to go through a long tweet thread that I sent out yesterday that I tried to capture for people who don't understand economics and haven't sort of lived in that world. | |
| I wanted to Give you a little framework so you understand what you're seeing and what to worry about and what not to worry about. | |
| So I'll just run through this. The first thing you should do is not compare this epidemic to any other epidemic because it really is its own thing. | |
| It's not the Spanish flu. | |
| It's not SARS. It's not the regular flu. | |
| It's not the common cold. It's just not anything. | |
| So the moment that you... | |
| Try to predict the future by comparing it to something, you're already off the rails. | |
| Because that just doesn't work. | |
| So don't compare it to anything. | |
| Just know what we know about this and use that. | |
| The second thing you need to know is that the economy is a psychology engine. | |
| So all of the physical assets, all of the business models are completely intact, and they'll be intact if it's one month or two months or three months or one week. | |
| That stuff is sort of going to be there waiting. | |
| So that's good. But if we keep our psychology right, the economy won't crash. | |
| Because the economy is all about what do you expect tomorrow? | |
| Well, I'll invest today because I expect tomorrow people will buy stuff. | |
| So expectations and psychology really are the engine. | |
| And there are A number of us who are working very hard to keep that psychology intact. | |
| You might even say, if you were to describe my job at the moment, and I would say, in the crisis, everybody has a job. | |
| It's not the one you're paid for, but you all have a job. | |
| You know what your job is, right? | |
| Sometimes your job is just to stay out of public. | |
| Sometimes your job is to help somebody else. | |
| Sometimes your job is your medical professional. | |
| My job, which I assigned to myself based on ability, Is to keep the psychology engine intact. | |
| And you'll see plenty of smart people who understand economics who are doing the same. | |
| If you see somebody who understands economics and is scaring you about what's going to happen, then you should say about them they don't understand economics. | |
| Somehow they went to college, got a degree, got on television to talk about economics. | |
| But if they're scaring you, They don't understand economics because economics is fundamentally psychology in the practical world. | |
| So I'm going to do what some of them maybe are not doing right yet. | |
| Bill Ackman, he's an investor, so you have to be careful of anybody who's made bets on this. | |
| So there are people making bets on the downside, bets on the upside, and then there are just some people who are just frightened to death. | |
| So I would ignore individuals no matter how talented. | |
| I would sort of look for the consensus. | |
| Because individuals are just going to be scared and or have a bat in the other direction. | |
| That sort of thing. | |
| So I wouldn't worry about Bill Ackman or any specific person who seems a little frightened. | |
| There will be very smart and knowledgeable people who are just frightened. | |
| Everybody has a different button, right? | |
| The thing that frightens you won't be the thing that frightens me and vice versa. | |
| So you just know that there's a huge individual difference in how frightened people are that is independent from what the world is. | |
| So I and people who understand economics as a psychology engine are going to hold this together. | |
| We're going to. Because we have the ability... | |
| We have the time. I'm not going anywhere. | |
| We have the motivation. | |
| If you have ability, time, motivation, and the technology to get it out, you can guarantee that the people who understand this stuff will hold it together. | |
| Now, there'll still be plenty of people who are flipping out, but on the whole, people like me, And people who have the calmer voices and understand how economics work, we will hold this together. | |
| You just have to listen to us. | |
| And you can do that right now. | |
| Now, keep in mind that we don't know if a trillion-dollar aid or two trillion is the right amount. | |
| Experts disagree. | |
| And if experts disagree, what do you and I have to say about it, really? | |
| Except this. If you had a choice between approving two trillion or one trillion, Which is the right decision? | |
| Mathematically, hard to tell. | |
| Because there's a cost for doing too much, and there's a cost for doing too little, and we can't predict either one. | |
| And yet, there is a right answer, and it looks like this. | |
| You have to go with the big number. | |
| If the big number is out there, you've got to take it. | |
| In the same way that when President Trump said, well, we might need $2.5 billion, and the Democrats said, how about something like $9 billion? | |
| Because we've been here before, it's going to be more expensive than you think. | |
| Whoever says the biggest number wins in an emergency. | |
| So for confidence and for the engine of the economy, which is psychology, there is one right answer, and it's the big number. | |
| But, because there's a risk with the big number, there's a way to gain this. | |
| You announce approval of the big number, and then at the same time you announce that you're going to use half of it, and then reevaluate. | |
| You win. Because we'll probably be smarter in a few weeks, and we'll know if that second half, that second trillion, is critical or not. | |
| But if you announce the whole two trillion, People say, okay, thank God they're not being stingy. | |
| Thank goodness they're going for the big number. | |
| Thank goodness they took it seriously. | |
| And then you still just approve for immediate release the smaller number. | |
| And the big one's just waiting. | |
| It's already approved. So that can get out in a few days. | |
| So the smart way to play this is to approve the big number. | |
| The psychology engine of economics stays intact as best it can. | |
| And then you still monitor it as you go, so you can pull back when you need to. | |
| Next, the human ingenuity that's being concentrated on this thing I feel like we're not only going to get past this, I feel like we're going to cure the common cold. | |
| Now, that might be a little hyperbole, but the amount we're going to learn about dealing with all of the pandemic situation is tremendous. | |
| And I think the human ingenuity, we're seeing it already. | |
| I mean, in every possible way, from the medical community to economics, you are seeing ingenuity like I've never witnessed, not even close. | |
| I have to think that in World War II, there was a similar explosion of ingenuity because you just had to. | |
| You just had to figure out how to live when everything was getting blown up. | |
| But in my life, since I didn't live through World War II, I've never seen this degree of human ingenuity. | |
| It's breathtaking, and we'll be talking about that for decades. | |
| And I like to say it this way. | |
| Ask Warren Buffett how smart it is to bet against the U.S. economy. | |
| Because people are looking at the economy and say, ah, some people think it'll come back, some people think it'll go lower, some people just, you know, it'll all disappear and we'll all be an agrarian society. | |
| But Warren Buffett has a pretty good track record. | |
| And I haven't seen him talk about this recently, but do you think Warren Buffett is betting against the U.S. economy? | |
| Nope. Nope, I'll bet he's not. | |
| Because he never has, and I'll bet he never will. | |
| So if Warren Buffett, and here I'm just speculating because he hasn't said anything, but he's never bet against the U.S. economy, and I think you could take some comfort from that, even now. | |
| There's no way he's going to bet against it. | |
| Next, you can count on the people who have money, the people who got through the virus crisis intact financially. | |
| You can count on them to go back hard and spend. | |
| I'm going to commit right now that the moment I can leave the house, I'm just going to be raining cash on my local economy. | |
| I'm going to eat out as much as Christina wants to go out to dinner. | |
| I'm going to buy stuff locally. | |
| I'm just going to spray money into the local economy. | |
| I'm pretty sure that anybody who has the ability to do the same is going to be thinking in those terms, if only because they have a lot of pent-up demand. | |
| They've been home too long. | |
| So that's good. The biggest economic variable after the virus itself is what's going to happen because of it. | |
| What things do you change because we went through this experience? | |
| And the biggest thing, obviously, is the supply chain. | |
| There's no doubt anymore that we'll be decoupling from China. | |
| How many of you a year ago, when I was saying decouple from China, How many of you thought to yourself, good luck, Scott, but that's not going to happen because that's just crazy. | |
| The China-US trade is just so big and so important, we're not going to decouple. | |
| Slowly, quickly, we're just not going to do it. | |
| It's too important. A year ago, that just sounded crazy, didn't it? | |
| Decouple from China. What do you think now? | |
| What do you think now? | |
| Well, now you think it's guaranteed. | |
| So when I say it's guaranteed, I don't mean we'll stop doing business with China. | |
| I don't mean that. I mean that you're not going to see much new going there. | |
| You're definitely going to see the critical businesses come back, pharmaceuticals, etc. | |
| And I would recommend that that become a cabinet-level job. | |
| I think we need a cabinet-level, doesn't have to be a cabinet, but a cabinet-level position. | |
| To do nothing but repatriate our supply chain, because it's now a critical, defensive situation. | |
| So I think that's going to happen. | |
| That's guaranteed. And that'll be tremendous for the economy. | |
| I think businesses that were profitable before the virus will have no problems getting bank credit to go back to work. | |
| If you're a bank, the very best loan you want to give somebody is for a good business that you know is good. | |
| It's been in business 20 years. | |
| And they've got a temporary shortfall of cash for an identifiable problem that's already been fixed. | |
| Oh my God! If you're a banker, and by the way, I used to be a bank lender. | |
| I used to make loans to businesses in my early days. | |
| If you're a bank lender, you never get to see that. | |
| Well, sometimes you do. But it's your favorite kind of loan. | |
| Your favorite loan is the business that's already proved it can make money, had one problem, needed a little cash to just get through, and they've already solved the problem. | |
| You can't get better than that. | |
| That's your best loan right there. | |
| So banks are going to be having a heyday. | |
| The good businesses will come back reliably. | |
| The weak businesses may close, but maybe they were going to anyway, if you know what I mean. | |
| If you're new to following me, I should mention that I have a degree in economics and an MBA. If anybody is just popping on here to watch the cartoonist talk and I'm talking about economics, you're saying to yourself, well, that doesn't make sense. | |
| Why am I listening to an artist about economics? | |
| But I do have some background in this stuff. | |
| And here's something else you should have confidence in. | |
| Me. We're going to get through this. | |
| And I will guarantee you that the psychology of our economic engine will stay strong. | |
| Strong enough. It's going to take a hit. | |
| But strong enough. And I'm dedicated full-time to that. | |
| I'm going to be talking about all the topics related around it. | |
| I'm not going to be focusing on the economy. | |
| But there are smart people who have your back. | |
| And they're going to keep the psychology right. | |
| We're going to keep the Focus in the right places. | |
| We're going to make sure the press is doing its job. | |
| And we're going to have a continuous pipeline of advice and feedback to our government. | |
| Now, I said this before, but I just need to say this every time it happens, because you don't see it happening, and I do. | |
| I have experienced, I don't know... | |
| Eight times in the last few days, probably eight different times, I've seen something that I thought would be useful for the government to know. | |
| In some cases, it's people putting together factories and they need the government to know they're building something that would help. | |
| In some cases, it's information, etc. | |
| But in eight different occasions, I sent an idea up the line and And heard confirmation that it reached the White House, meaning the actual staff that would make the decisions on it, in hours. | |
| And sometimes less than an hour. | |
| Sometimes less than one hour. | |
| A good idea or input would go all the way up to the very committee in the government that cares about it, and I would give feedback right away. | |
| And sometimes it meant introducing some people and doing some things. | |
| Now, I'm just one person. | |
| I don't know how many people are interacting with their government, but I've got to tell you, Our form of government tends toward bureaucracy in normal times. | |
| And in normal times, it's just hard to get stuff done. | |
| Let's admit it. Your government just builds layers and layers of complexity until it's just hard to get anything done. | |
| But in the emergency, that's all gone. | |
| It is all gone. | |
| There is no friction between somebody who wants to help and has a good idea and your government. | |
| They have just become one entity. | |
| The public and the government were not even different people anymore. | |
| It used to be there's the government and there's people. | |
| We just did this. | |
| Government and people. | |
| Same team. Same objective. | |
| Eye on the ball. | |
| Everything. So we're going to get this done. | |
| So here's what you look for. | |
| Look for your government to say... | |
| That they're considering a phased, phased approach to coming back. | |
| And it will be based on having pop-up tents and extra capacity for the mildly sick people who went back to work, maybe, got it, took some pills, rested at home until they were good to go. | |
| So everything is trending in exactly the way you want. | |
| It will look worse. | |
| If there's anything that you need to know in the next... | |
| A week, maybe two weeks, the economy is going to look really bad. | |
| It's supposed to. | |
| That means that our strategy of moving up to the line is getting close to the line. | |
| And when we get close, it'll be about the same time that we have enough of the meds and enough pop-up tents to give them out. | |
| And then it's back to work, people, in a phased way. | |
| And if you don't own stocks, if you don't own stocks then... | |
| Honestly, I'd feel bad for you. | |
| And I have to be very careful there. | |
| I do not, do not take financial advice from cartoonists. | |
| But honestly, I'd feel sorry for you if you didn't own stocks and the president said, we're looking at a phased approach to putting people back to work based on health and availability of this medicine. | |
| That's coming. In the next two weeks, the president of the United States is going to stand in front of the country and say, Some of you are going back to work, and here's why. | |
| You're going to feel a lot better. | |
| So my job is to keep the psychology of the economy strong until that day the president stands in front of you and says, some people are going back to work. | |
| We're going to be careful, but we're starting now. | |
| So there's your good news for the day. | |
| I will try to get back with you Later today. | |
| But you should trust that good, well-meaning, capable people are all over this. | |
| And we'll pull you through. |