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March 24, 2020 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
37:33
Episode 868 Scott Adams: Grab a Soft Blanket and Get Ready to Relax Before Bed
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Hey everybody!
Come on in. Just checking my Twitter to see if anybody's put any questions there for me.
Oh, it looks like there are.
Alright. Do you have your blanket on?
If you think that this isn't better with the blanket on, oh, I feel sorry for you.
Sorry, I just covered up my sound.
So did you all see the Biden deepfake?
So evidently Joe Biden has been replaced by a digital reproduction, a deepfake, and it made its debut today.
I'd call it version 1.0.
They got all of his flaws and speaking imperfections in there.
So I thought that was really good for version 1.
But you can tell by his hand motions, too robotic.
The president should do this.
So we don't know what they did with the real Joe Biden, but maybe he'll come back.
I have to assume that he's being...
Kept alive in some kind of a coma-like state somewhere deep below a mountain.
Or not.
Possibly. Here's an idea for you.
Don't you think That there's a high likelihood there's some genetic propensity to all of this.
And I don't mean necessarily ethnic.
I mean that there must be something about some people's bodies that make them a little extra susceptible.
So what would you think of the idea, just put this out there, of rapidly testing the DNA, do a full sequence, I don't know all the right words, but you test the DNA of all the people who died, From the coronavirus.
And maybe you don't bother testing the ones that are over 80 because you kind of know that anything would have taken them out.
But the people who are, let's say, under 60, who also died, what do you want to know if their DNA has anything in common?
Might be something about their lung receptor or something like that.
So given that DNA testing is fairly easy...
And we could test, I don't think it would be that hard to test the DNA if people either have already died or started collecting it now.
And wouldn't we know fairly quickly if there was anything they had in common?
So that's one way we can get back to work.
We can identify the people who are relatively invulnerable.
Nobody's invulnerable, but the people who are the least likely to have problems and say, well, maybe you guys and gals go back first.
Now, if you're watching, if you're having this experience of flipping back between CNN and Fox, There's the two movies forming, and it's a really funny one this time.
Except, you know, we might all die if they get the wrong answer.
That's not funny.
But if you turn on CNN, you'll find out that the, I'm going to call it the Trump pills.
So the pills that Trump keeps talking about as having great promise, if you turn on CNN, they don't.
That's just not true.
And they've got a study that says that the Trump pills don't work.
It's a brand new study.
Then you turn on Fox, and expert after expert will say, oh yeah, those Trump pills, they work.
And then you go to NBC, and the headline is, two people tried to take the Trump pill and died from an overdose.
So maybe it'll kill you.
There's something wrong with all of these stories.
And I don't know, I don't think I've decoded it all, but here are a few things.
First of all, the study that CNN is saying shows that the Trump pills...
Don't work are different pills.
So that's the first thing.
So the thing that CNN says, you know, is what the president is referring to, and then they say, here's the study, and it doesn't work.
But it wasn't exactly what the president was referring to.
So I think what they studied, and I need a fact check on this, but this is just my quick read on this, is that the study was for chloroquine.
But I believe that the one that is presumed to be the good one is a version of that hydroxychloroquine.
And then there's a second difference, which is even the study that said the chloroquine didn't seem to make a difference said only by itself.
But when paired with the azithromycin, even the chloroquine And the azithromycin package did seem promising, and they said that should be immediately studied some more.
But the actual thing that is, I believe, fact-check me on this, but I believe the thing that they're going to study in New York, the thing that's far more effective and promising than the chloroquine, that CNN says sort of doesn't work, Based on that one study.
It's not really the one.
That's the different drug.
So here's the challenge.
When the media is talking about the pills that Trump is talking about, you've got to be careful which ones they're talking about, because apparently there's something that makes a difference when you use them together, and it's the hydroxychloroquine, not the simple chloroquine.
That's the one that's a good one, apparently.
Now, what about NBC running this story that somebody took chloroquine and died?
You know, there's nothing funny about that.
A couple took it and died.
But then you go to the first paragraph and it's actually, it was some kind of cleaner for fish tanks.
It wasn't even a pharmaceutical drug.
They took a different drug that just had a similar first name that was used for cleaning your fish tank, and they died.
Now, I think the headline should have been a couple mistakes, real drugs, you know, mistakes, aquarium cleaner for drugs, and dies from taking it.
I mean, I feel like that should have been the headline, right?
That they took the wrong thing, not that they took something that's like the right thing and died.
That was pretty bad.
All right. There's something very interesting about to happen that I think is going to make you glad that you have a president who has his experience, Trump's specific experience.
Here's the way it is. I'll start by...
A related or unrelated story, but I'll tie it in.
If you hire a lawyer and it's something you don't know anything about and you're just a normal person, you hire a lawyer and it's some topic you just don't know anything about, you just need the lawyer's help, should you take the lawyer's advice?
Well, on day one, yeah, yeah, the lawyer knows about it.
And you don't. That's why you got the lawyer.
So yeah, on day one, you're going to take the lawyer's advice.
But here's the secret.
If you work with enough lawyers in the business setting, the corporate setting, You still have to incorporate more variables than your lawyer will.
So your lawyer's going to say, what's legal?
There's a risk here.
Should I do it? Well, there's a risk.
But should I do it?
Well, you know, I'd maybe say no, because there's a risk.
But the legal risk isn't the only risk in the world.
There's the risk of losing money, the risk of reputation, you know, all kinds of risks.
The risks of how do the employees take it, whatever.
So the boss...
In these cases, has to get the input, but knowing that the input is not all the variables.
So the boss still has to make the adult decision, which often can be counter to one or more of the experts, because that expert is in a domain.
And let's take this to the current situation.
So if we have a situation where Dr.
Fauci says, yes, keep everything closed for a longer time, That's really a medical judgment.
And the president is balancing other considerations.
One of them is psychological.
There's a pretty big psychological cost to this.
The other, of course, is just raw lives.
And sometimes you don't know.
Is there anybody who's smart enough to know if you take it this many days...
The economic impact will be a crossover with more people dying from a bad economy than they would have died from the...
There's actually nobody who can do that calculation.
So the first thing you need to realize if you want to be an adult in the conversation is that nobody knows.
And if Fauci and Trump have a different opinion...
About which of the paths is going to save the most lives or kill the most.
That's a pretty fair difference because neither of them know.
It really is going to come down to this weird, indefinable business judgment experience, hunch, gut feeling, instinct...
Put any kind of words on it.
But these are decisions that would be made without the benefit of the very information that would allow you to do it rationally.
So, who do you trust in a vague situation where there's a big economic cost, there's a psychological cost, there's a medical cost?
What kind of person do you trust in that situation?
And I've got to say, Trump's got a pretty good skill set for exactly this generic situation where the economics and the psychology and the experts, they may be pointing different directions, and you just have to make a decision.
Somebody's going to make a decision.
It's going to be right.
It's going to be wrong.
We'll fix it as quickly as we can if it's the wrong one.
But it's a really, really adult decision, and this is sort of the reason you don't let anybody be president.
Because we're going to be asking Trump, this will be one of the great decisions of all presidential history, if you think about it.
You know, you could say, decision to go to war in World War II, but weren't we going to do that anyway?
You know? So you can think of a lot of decisions that were big ones.
You know, the Civil War, freeing the slaves, civil rights, lots of big decisions.
But I'm not sure if any of those decisions were as murky and immediately high stakes as this.
I feel like the decision to go to war...
In a world war situation was actually sort of a no-brainer.
It was a matter of when, but you kind of knew you were going to get sucked into it.
And, you know, other decisions are a little more obvious that you're picking the right side, but this one is not like that.
I don't think that there's anybody who can honestly say, oh yeah, I'm smart enough to know that, you know, we've got to End this on Tuesday because that's the crossover when it's worse to wait than it is to go back to work.
Yeah, dropping the atomic bomb, that was a pretty big decision.
And certainly in terms of life and death potential anyway, this might be in that same category.
It might actually be that big in the worst case scenario.
Now, I'm still...
Very much in the camp that the only statistic that matters, you're going to see lots of numbers, and the only one that matters is the death rate of people under 60 who got the combination of hydrochloroquine and azithromycin.
So it's all of those combinations.
So they've got to be under 60, have no preconceived Preconditions, health problems, and also get the drug relatively soon after it was obvious that they had some symptoms.
If those people are still dying next week, we've got to rethink everything and hope that there's another drug behind it that's better, etc.
But if we find that it's either so low that it rounds to zero or it's zero, all the weight of All the weight is toward going back to work in a week or so.
It's a little bit negotiable, but we're not talking a month.
I don't think it's going to happen.
The other thing is that you can't underestimate the degree to which people will adapt.
So if you just imagine that you say, hey, go back to work, and everybody acts the same way at work, I don't think that's the case.
Do you? I think there's going to be a lot of scrubbing down.
I think there's got to be a lot of wearing face masks, social distancing within the business.
Even if you have to go to work, maybe you still make a phone call instead of being in the same room.
So you can't really put any kind of an estimate of how much a difference that makes.
The fact that going back to work is not really going back to work the normal way.
It's a whole different way.
So there's that. I don't know what they're going to do with travel, but let me just throw out some possibilities.
It would be easy to imagine that the hotels would be allowed to maybe have people in, I don't know, half capacity or something.
So maybe a half capacity and then nobody can be in the same space in the lobby or something.
I don't know. Maybe there's a way to get there.
Maybe only for the younger first.
But I think we'll be able to phase things in and it looks like that's where it's heading.
Now, I would like to suggest some apps.
So I told you about ProjectN95.com, where if you're looking to get medical equipment or your supplier that's looking to provide it, you can find each other on there.
So that's one. And I told you about the Nextdoor app.
And if you're over 60, And you think you might need a little help, somebody picking something up from the store and groceries or whatever, the Nextdoor app will let you look at your neighborhood and see anybody who signed up to do that.
You can see exactly where they are in the neighborhood.
You just go, oh, it's my neighbor, Bob, and his 19-year-old daughter is home from college or whatever.
And so in my neighborhood, there are a few people who signed up for that, and there was somebody I knew, and so I actually...
Again, had some groceries delivered by somebody who has a much better immune system than I do.
So that's working very well.
Now, this is awkward, but I'm going to put it out there anyway.
For some reason, this pandemic has allowed people to say, yes, it's okay to be a capitalist.
So you can be a capitalist...
And you can even make money.
Let's say you're making face masks or you've converted your factory to make hand sanitizer.
Nobody's telling them they can't make money, right?
They just can't price gouge.
So in that spirit, so that apparently that is acceptable behavior so long as the behavior is good for the public, I will remind you again that my startup has two apps which are, just by coincidence, perfectly suited for this situation.
So one of them is called Approach.
It allows you just to track any two or more people on a map temporarily.
The same way if you have food delivered, let's say DoorDash, Your app will show the DoorDash are coming to your house.
Well, you can use my app for free.
It's a free download. It doesn't cost you anything to use it.
The only people who ever pay are if they want to brand it and put their name on it.
That's optional. And so anybody who just wants to be delivering food to an old person, checking on an old person, or just knowing where each other are, Just use the app.
And the beauty of it is, it's got a timer on it, so you set how long you want to watch each other.
So you just set it for half an hour.
You don't have to worry that you're giving away your privacy.
It's just for the transaction, and then it times out.
So it's called Approach, and it's in all the app stores.
The other one is called Interface.
That's also in the app stores.
It allows you to make a video call to an expert in anything.
Now, originally, months ago, we thought, oh, this might be good for doctors, but we had a problem.
Which is, to make it really useful for doctors, you need to practice across state lines.
Because you couldn't rely on the fact that the one doctor who was available at that moment was also in your stage or licensed for your state.
But, because of the emergency, that restriction has been dropped, at least temporarily.
So, temporarily...
The app is ideal for that.
So if there's anybody who's, let's say, quarantined at home, and apparently there are some medical professionals who are self-quarantined because they had some exposures.
So if you wanted to help out, you could set the price to zero.
So, let me be clear about that.
Nobody has to charge for anything.
You can just set your price to zero.
It's an emergency if you just want to help, you want to give advice, maybe a resource, maybe you want to find out how to find a buyer for your mask, you know, any kind of thing like that.
Anything that would connect an expert with somebody who needs it in the face of the crisis, you can use the app, set your price to zero.
You don't have to, but If you've lost your job and you have something to add that you think people would pay for, I don't think it's immoral to charge for your time if you lost your job and you're trying to pay the bills.
But make your own decisions about what is right.
You can set the price as you like.
So it's called Approach, for seeing each other on the map temporarily, and Interface, to have a video call with an expert and And find them.
The beauty is you don't have to know their contact information.
You just find them and set up a call, and the app does all that for you.
All right. What would you use approach for?
You would use it if, let's say, you were a neighborhood...
Young person, and you were going to deliver groceries for some elderly people, as I did tonight.
And I was out of the house taking a walk, not with other people.
Taking a walk. And it was handy for me to know when I needed to get back to the house because I could see, you know, in theory, she didn't click on the link, but in theory we could have seen each other and made sure that I was there when the groceries came.
Which were left at the doorstep.
And I washed my hands thoroughly.
So taking all the precautions I can.
All right. I'm going to see if you've got any questions here on Twitter as I asked.
Here's a question.
How many people have to die of the coronavirus before you will start wearing gloves and makeshift face masks?
I don't know.
I guess that's an individual choice.
Is April 1st a good target for restarting?
I think we'll know a whole bunch more in another week, especially about the meds.
So every estimate about COVID When things will get better really depend on getting more visibility in the next week.
So we're in an information war, and we are just absorbing information like crazy.
Okay. Can I use a bike pump as a ventilator?
Any chance of manual ventilators operated by younger volunteers?
I don't know. You've seen a whole bunch of people who have had ventilator inventions.
I tweeted one around where somebody made a very cheap one because if you get rid of all the extraneous features, the things that you might need but you probably don't, and you just make the cheapest possible ventilator, it's only just a few parts.
So you just need a little logic board and a motor and then the device that goes in.
That was a little bit of an oversimplification.
But apparently you could bring the price way down and start cranking them out if you wanted to.
Will this outbreak make the national debt a bigger focus in the future?
I don't know if anything can make that a...
The national debt is the weirdest thing because everybody's sure it's important, but they're not sure how important or when or what you do about it.
So we all just sort of act like it's not important while we all say it's important.
It's the weirdest...
You know, disconnect. Because there's nobody who doesn't think it's important, and yet there's nobody who treats it as it's important.
It's a complete opposite of how we think about it and what we do.
All right, let's see.
How about a phone app that listens for sneezes and coughs and then warns you when your phone maybe needs a cleaning?
I Well, What about the idea of having your phone listen for a coughing?
Because don't you think that the government can listen to your phone if they want to?
Would it be the worst violation if...
Just imagine that it's just a computer that's listening, so there's no human who's listening in your phone.
It's just a computer.
And if the computer hears in your household through your phone...
The sound that it identifies as a cough, maybe it sends you a text message and says, you know, hey, do you have a cough?
If you do, check out this link.
It'll tell you what to do. It's not the craziest idea, because remember, we're in total emergency mode.
And again, No human would be hearing you talk.
It would literally just be the computer listening for the sound of a cough, and that's it.
It wouldn't be listening for anything else.
Now, of course, you don't trust it, because once it's listening, it could do anything.
But in theory, you could actually build that out, right?
When will Congress move the stimulus forward?
You know, I'm almost too amazed to be angry.
Are you having the same reaction I am?
Because, you know, again, it's the two movies problem.
Because if you go to CNN, they were trying to stop a corporate giveaway.
And they've got a pretty good point.
And then you go to Fox News and the Democrats put in a bunch of silly pork that nobody wants to consider now.
Independent of whether they're good or bad ideas, they have nothing to do with the topic at hand.
And so the Republicans are like, ah, not that.
So the fact that our leaders can't make that happen, I mean, I feel actually somewhat insulted by the things that were added in.
So from the perspective of the Democrats, I literally just feel insulted.
Because right in front of our faces, as if we're not watching, or we don't care, or even as if it makes sense or it's the right priority, they just stick a bunch of unrelated things in the bill and it they just stick a bunch of unrelated things in the bill and it it.
Now, don't you feel just literally insulted by that?
Because they're treating us like garbage, basically.
Like we're not the important part of the equation.
It's like, oh, getting in my little pet funding thing is the important part.
No, it's not really.
It's not really. I think the important part is the people.
So, from the Democrats' perspective, it's embarrassing.
And it's just insulting.
But I don't think the Republicans got it right, did they?
Because they had this big sloppy bill with not enough controls on it for what they're going to do for the big corporations.
And I agree that, you know, it's a serious...
Seriously, you know, we should consider doing things for big companies if they're employers and we can make a profit off it.
Because remember, the Republican plan, if I understand it correctly, is it's not just giving money to big companies.
I believe we take stock.
Can somebody...
Somebody's lighting up my phone right now.
Um... Why isn't that turning off?
Sorry, I've got too many devices in here.
They're not all turned off. But the Republicans, I don't think, are doing much better.
Because their bill's kind of sloppy and doesn't seem to have the right controls and makes people suspicious that it's going to go to the wrong place.
I'm not happy about that.
I mean, I can't even take sides on this one.
It looks like both sides just screwed the poach.
Am I wrong? Doesn't it look like neither side really...
Really did the job of the American people.
I can't even pick size on this one.
It just looks like a ranking competence.
But it's not even the normal kind where maybe we don't notice it or they hide it a little bit.
If they were trying to hide it better, I'd have a little bit of respect.
But neither the Republicans nor the Democrats seem to be hiding the fact that we're not the top priority.
Am I wrong about that?
There's no pretense anymore.
We're just not the top priority.
I don't even know what to say about it.
It's so mind-boggling, I don't even know how to get mad about it.
I almost can't believe it, I guess.
They said it was step one.
Step one, is it?
Yeah, and is it impossible to simplify?
It just seems to me like we ought to find a way to simplify.
Let me say again something I said earlier, but I'll say it better.
There are a whole bunch of bills that we pay that you can't avoid paying.
For example, if you live, you're paying either rent or mortgage, you're paying some kinds of insurance and energy and phone and stuff.
So those are bills that you're not going to ever walk away from.
In other words, You're never going to have a time in your life when you say, you know, I don't need electricity and gas.
I don't need it. So that's not going to happen, right?
So all those companies that charge us every month for either a standard amount or how much we use, they have our names, and they kind of own us.
Because they know who you are, and they know where you live, and they know what you owe them.
So here's where I'm going with this.
Suppose we said that all of those people who bill you every month from rent to mortgage to electricity to cable, etc., that they all just have to forgive your bills for two months.
They just can't collect anything.
But because these companies have a hook in you, they know where you are, they bill you, If you want to have electricity in California, there's nowhere else you're going to go.
If you want to walk away from your loan, well, good luck.
You can't get another loan if you're a deadbeat on the other loan.
So you're kind of a little trapped with these companies.
And that means that they could just forgive your costs and tack it on in the future.
In other words, PGD, the power company here, could say, nobody has to pay us for two months.
Just don't pay us. But at the end of two months, we know where you are.
And even if you move, we're still going to connect to you.
And we'll just add 10% to your bill once the economy gets going.
It'll just be a little extra.
It'll be as if we gave you a loan.
Right? So it'll be as if we gave you a loan because you're going to pay us back because we got our hooks in you.
You know, the bank can always find you, the insurance company can find you, your energy company can find you.
Now, the area where you can't do that, where you just have to give people money, is buying goods.
You know, physical things like a loaf of bread and a new iPhone.
For that, people just gotta pay.
And maybe we gotta give them money for that.
But I can see a situation where the government just says, alright, you just gotta suspend Payment.
Maybe there's some means test where you have to prove you're out of work.
Maybe you have to prove that you've applied for unemployment.
Something like that. So people like me, I still pay my bills.
So PG&E would still have, I don't know, 80% of its revenue?
Could my power company stay in business if for two months it only made 80% of its revenue and then it made up the difference later because it's tacking it on to catch up?
Well, it might have a shortfall too.
But then maybe the government can handle that.
So the point is, there probably are some really clever ways to get where we need to get.
That's all I'm saying.
The danger is the virus to everyone, not just the people with those incomes.
Yes. Did the Golden Age jinx us?
Oh, I think you're going to be surprised.
The Golden Age apparently had a third act.
We're in it. This is the third act.
This is the problem that looks unsolvable.
Until you do. That's what makes it a good movie.
There's no doubt we're going to get on the other side of this, and we're going to do it without destroying the economy.
I will rest my entire reputation on the following prediction.
We're not going to wreck the economy.
And the reason you can be sure of it is that wrecking the economy would definitely be worse than even the number of people that would get the coronavirus.
I mean, everybody sort of agrees with that.
We're going to know when we've gone too far.
You know, not exactly, but we're going to know we're in the range of, oh, this is as far as we can go.
So don't worry that the shutdown lasts forever all the way to destruction.
No chance.
No chance.
There's actually no chance of that at all.
It will last until it's painful because the more pain that we can reasonably take, the better shape we're going to be.
There's some magic zone where we've taken a little bit of pain and the economy has taken a pretty big hit, but not enough that we can't climb out of in a year.
So we're entering the Goldilocks zone now.
The area in which, well, that's as good as we can do for protecting people and also protecting the economy.
It's in the next, you know, maybe the week after this.
You're really into the crossover zone, I think.
And you also have to read the room, right?
It doesn't matter what the government wants the public to do.
If the government loses our trust, people are going to just do whatever the hell they want, and there's not enough government in the world that will stop them.
So they need the people to think that what they're doing is reasonable, and they see the same thing we do.
They see the amount of pain and suffering that this coming week is going to have.
So, don't let anybody kid you.
This coming week is going to be rough in a lot of different ways.
But, it is the week that we will complete our weapons, I believe.
We'll know what works and what doesn't.
We'll have much better visibility.
And then we go on offense.
Because in this war so far, we have cleverly done a strategic retreat to our homes.
We've divided so that we can conquer.
We have built our weapons factories.
They're going up all over the place.
We've tested our weapons, testing them this week.
We're loading up We're stocking up our ammo, big shipments of these drugs just in case, coming our way.
And we're just about ready to go to war.
We need test kits, we need soldiers, we need tents.
And they're coming.
It's all coming.
So you don't have to wonder how it ends.
You can wonder when it ends, that's the right question.
But it ends with us winning.
And getting back to where we were and better.
So this is the third act, but like every other third act, like every other third act, it will be solved.
So I'm quite proud of the country.
I'm quite disappointed with Congress at the moment, but I think that the force of public opinion will force them to get something done pretty quickly.
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