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March 26, 2020 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
53:23
Episode 872 Scott Adams: Ask Me Anything For the Simultaneous Swaddle
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Time Text
Bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum Hey everybody!
Hey Dan!
Come on in here. Hope you have your soft blankets on.
It's time to swaddle.
Simultaneous swaddle in effect.
Well, have there ever been more news-filled days than these?
My goodness. My goodness.
Let me tell you about some of the things that are happening.
Somebody has invented a two-way valve that turns a ventilator into two ventilators.
All it is is a T-connection modifying.
I assume they saw people modifying ventilators on their own, and they said, well, we'll just make a part.
And it's just this little T-connector.
You just stick it in, and boom, you've doubled your ventilator capacity.
Pretty cool. Pretty cool.
So India, the country of India, which is either the biggest producer of hydroxychloroquine, which I call the hashtag Trump pills because I don't like trying to figure out how to say the big words.
So the Trump pills are the hydroxychloroquine and the azithromycin and the zinc.
Just call them Trump pills.
Hashtag Trump pills.
So anyway, India is one of the biggest producers of the one that starts with age, and they just announced a block on exports.
So one of, if not the biggest country that makes the drug that everybody needs right now, and appears to be in at least a little bit of shortage in places.
I don't know how much.
We don't have visibility on that.
But the biggest country just decided that they're not going to give it to anybody else.
Now, is that because it doesn't work?
Do you think that the country of India, you've heard of India, probably, it's a country, you've heard that they have a lot of people there, quite a few people.
You may have heard that there are smart people in India, which is a great understatement.
There are really, really smart people in India.
Do you think that all the smartest people in India, who again are Really, really, really smart.
Do you think that they blocked exports of this drug because it doesn't work?
Maybe? No.
No, they do not.
Well, so the citizens of this country are ready to break the system.
I think that people are...
We've been lied to, let's be honest.
But not necessarily an evil lie, meaning that it's pretty obvious at this point that all of the countries see the Trump pills as a big part of the solution and they're doing everything they can to make sure they secure their sources.
Now, I assume that the United States is doing the same and I assume that our government, quite responsibly, I would say, has lied to us.
But it's a responsible lie, because if you're trying to protect a limited resource, it's kind of the only way to do it.
So I'm going to say that my moral line was not crossed by any of that.
Probably had to be done, but I would say the cat's under the bag at this point.
So what I'd like is some visibility on how much do we have, how much do we need, You know, where in this country is there a shortage?
How do we make it?
Do we even make it in this country?
I know there's at least one...
Is it Novartis?
There's at least one company that makes it, and it's an American company, but I don't think they make it in America.
So would they have the same problem if the company, whatever country they make it in, what if they say there's no exports?
You know, if it's an American company that has a manufacturing in another country...
Can we get it out? How does that work?
Because it seems like, just hypothetically, if it had been manufactured in India, do you think India would let it leave the country just because it's owned by an American company?
I don't think so.
Not in an emergency? Probably not.
So there's a big question in my mind about this.
I think it's increasingly clear that the difference between Trump's more optimistic view about getting back to work and Dr.
Fauci's more reserved approach, both of them productive, I think that they sort of mapped out the zone.
One a little bit to the cautious side, one a little bit to the optimistic side.
That gave you the zone, I think.
We would have been underserved by having one without the other, I think.
I think we would be underserved.
This gives you a sense of the range that reasonable people can think about.
It's obvious now.
Part of the difference was that Trump had some early indication that the meds would be productive, and Dr.
Fauci was probably cleverly—I can't read their minds, but it's a reasonable speculation—that he knew there would be shortage problems if he touted it, and so he was downplaying it a little bit.
So I think that's where we are, and I think now it's just sort of obvious.
Now, you don't need to go and tell all your friends this.
You know, you can simply bank the advantage that you get to hear things that other people are not hearing on the regular news.
So don't necessarily tell your friends, but just know that you're a little bit ahead of the curve, okay?
Yeah, so to the best of my knowledge, there's only one study that said it didn't work.
And that came out of a Chinese university at the same time that everything coming out of Chinese is misinformation.
So I think you can really discount the Chinese study.
Let me throw you, here's a conspiracy theory for you.
The following cannot be proven.
And I wouldn't go so far as to say I'm sure it's true.
But let me propose it.
And then you use your own judgment, everything you know about the world, and reach your own conclusion.
Is this reasonable?
And it goes like this.
One of the reasons that Italy is doing so poorly is because China is helping them.
So that's the conspiracy theory.
And the conspiracy theory, to round it out, is that the last thing China wants is for Italy to do really well.
Why, you might ask.
Is it because they don't like Italy?
No, no. It has nothing to do with Italy.
It has to do with how China will look if they're the only ones that have a big problem.
China needed some other country to be the disaster country so that when we talk about, my God, I hope it doesn't get as bad as Italy.
So, very cleverly, China is helping But does that help include giving the Italians large doses of the hydroxychloroquine?
I'm guessing no.
Maybe because they told the Italians it doesn't work so well.
Maybe because they wanted to keep it for themselves.
Maybe they didn't want anybody to know how well it worked.
Some doctors did report on it, but I don't think China can control every doctor's communication everywhere.
So the news got out.
But the only reason I can think of that Italy would do so badly, even with the older population, doesn't quite explain in my mind, doesn't feel like that's the whole explanation.
It feels as though whatever Italy is doing is different from what other countries are doing who also have infections.
Something different.
And only Italy is getting direct advice from China.
So I would at least...
Put the suggestion out there that China's reputation, the things that we do know about, so this speculation isn't something we have any hard evidence of, but the things we do know about, they're literally doing a disinformation campaign.
They steal our stuff.
They've got the Uyghurs in prison camp.
They're using the Falun Gong people for spare parts.
They're killing them to take their organs and selling them.
I mean, these are just a few of the things we know about.
If all of those things are true, and I'm pretty sure they are, is it a stretch to say that China would throw Italy under the bus so that China would always look like they did a better job than some other country?
Would they be above that?
Not at all. In terms of ethically and morally, they have demonstrated that they're not even a little bit above that.
So, Did China hurt Italy's response more than it helped?
I think you have to put that in the possibility set.
You know, we'll find out later.
If you find out later that China wasn't pushing the drugs that they know work, then that's what it was.
And we'll probably know that.
At some point, we'll find out whether Italy was using that drug, whether the Chinese were advising them or what, but we're going to know that.
Let's see.
Nothing in our home from China for over three years now, somebody says.
You know, I was shopping before the lockdown.
It was just a few days before we all had to stop doing that.
And I was just picking things off the shelf and just looking at where they were made.
It's kind of hard not to buy something from China.
I didn't realize how hard it was.
Now... You heard that Apple was helping out with the N95 masks, right?
And today they announced that they had sourced some masks and they were going to deliver a bunch.
And I said to myself, wait a minute.
Source them? Are you telling me that Apple Computer doesn't know how to put up a manufacturing plant and make things?
And the answer is, maybe not.
Because I think everybody who...
Everybody who says they're an American company and they're going to make you some face masks, the part they don't say is, well, not in this country, because we don't know how to do anything in this country.
We don't know how to make stuff.
So every time I heard a story of an American company that was going to make some masks, you have to ask the second question is, where are you going to make them?
Oh, we're making them in China.
Or we're making them in India or we're making them in Mexico.
I don't know if any American company can manufacture anything.
I don't even know if it's a thing.
So when I see Apple stepping up to help and all they did is act as a broker to find some masks that were somewhere else, I mean, maybe they helped them get going on it or something, but not exactly what I was expecting from American companies.
Now, I have not dug into the relief legislation.
By the way, did that get approved?
Where is that? I've been off the news for a little while.
But I'm starting to develop an opinion, which is that it's a complete abomination.
It looks like the Republicans and the Democrats just completely failed us.
Completely failed us.
When the nation needed them most, they weren't even a little bit willing To do it right.
Not even a little bit willing.
Yeah, so the MyPillow company apparently is making some masks and you're right, those probably are made in America.
So there is, I guess there is one guy, you know, one company anyway, the MyPillow company, I guess they do know how to make things in America because they make the pillows there.
Somebody says 3M makes M95 in South Dakota.
Oh, okay. So, that's good.
So, we do have a little bit of American manufacturing.
Somebody says the issue is ventilators.
Yeah. I think the meds, once they're available, will make ventilators less necessary because people won't get hospitalized in the first place.
Alright, let's talk about Zoom.
Did you know that Zoom, so it's a company that allows you very easily to do teleconferencing with lots of different configurations, you know, one to many and several and all that.
It is a really good product, I gotta say.
So I've used Zoom quite a bit.
Every time I use it, I'm frankly impressed.
It's just really well designed.
It's pretty bulletproof for these kinds of things.
You know, telecommunications are always going to have glitches.
But it's really bulletproof, really easy interface.
Just everything about it is quality.
So they deserve to be doing well, and everybody's using them for business now.
But there's one little problem.
It's an American company.
But much or most of their engineering and even one of their data centers is in China.
So if you are a big American company and you're talking about top secret things on Zoom, your conversation is going to China into a Chinese data center server and then, you know, sent over to the other side.
Now, hypothetically, Could the government of China listen in on every business conversation that happens on Zoom?
Well, in theory, no, because it's an American company and they must have some control over their technology even in China.
But in reality, of course, some number of the employees there are just Chinese spies.
Now, do I know that?
No. But do I know that?
Yes. Let me say that again.
Do I know that there are Chinese spies working for Zoom?
No. I have no information about that whatsoever.
Do I know that Chinese spies are working at Zoom?
Yes. Yes, I do.
100%. Because why wouldn't they?
Are you crazy? Why wouldn't they?
Of course they are. Now, and if they weren't, they will.
And if they haven't yet...
They could and they will.
So it doesn't even matter if they haven't done it yet.
It's almost a trivial point.
The point is, it is such an enormous security conflict for a country who is most famous for stealing intellectual property and our most important companies are having their highly confidential conversations.
Because when you're talking, it doesn't feel like it's a security problem, right?
We're used to the telephone.
So you don't want to put something on text.
Somebody can find it, but I'll make a phone call because nobody's recording my phone call, right?
Well, how hard would it be for some technology to just check the language and look for keywords and then record anything that had some interesting keywords?
Pretty easy. Pretty easy.
So that is a big problem.
Now, also the app TikTok is owned by China.
And that app knows a lot about you.
And it might even have asked you permission to post things on social media.
If you did, the government of China gets to follow and unfollow people on your behalf and you'd never know the difference.
Now, is that happening?
My theory is that Twitter management is not intentionally rigging anything.
But that something's getting rigged.
There's something clearly getting rigged.
And so it's got to be some third party.
So it's either hackers or apps or there's some internal person who's working for the wrong government or something.
But yeah, Twitter is clearly compromised in terms of some kind of influence.
But I don't think it's Twitter.
And I don't think that they have a way necessarily even to find out what's going on.
But we know what's going on.
I mean, that part's confirmed.
It's easy to tell that it's going on.
All right, where is our Zoom exactly?
Where is the American company that's knocking that off?
Or actually, better yet, since Zoom is an American company, ideally they would just bring their servers back here, which I think should be a law, actually.
I think there should be legislation...
That if you're a telecommunication product, it just can't go through China.
You know, we have precedent for that, of course.
So, does anybody want to ask some questions?
I've got my headset on.
It looks like some people are coming in.
That's Ad Carpe.
Carpe Donctum, are you there?
Hey, good to hear from you.
Do you have a question for me? Oh, I'm doing great.
I mean, relatively.
And stuff like that.
So you know I'm not a conspiracy guy, but I was hoping that you could provide some imagination that maybe I laugh.
Okay. Now, my question is that we're hearing lots of things out of New York City about...
Lots of people in there on ventilators and big lines and we're hearing about...
Most recently there was something about a guy dying in the waiting room waiting for a bed.
Right. And my question is, in...
The world of selfies and people who are constantly going live and people who are constantly recording video and uploading it, why are we not seeing viral videos of packed emergency rooms and hospitals full of ventilators?
Good question. I will give you a possible answer.
I would say that within the hospital, they probably don't want to touch phones because phones are just like germ machines.
So they might not have phones in any of the places where you would also have ventilators.
That's possible and probable, I would say.
Secondly, if you're in the waiting room, there are big signs that say don't use your cell phone.
I think they're talking about phone calls.
But I think most people would realize if they took their phone out in a medical facility, it's just such a grotesque violation of privacy.
It could be that just people don't do it.
Or it could be that they've done it and they keep it to themselves because they don't want to be accused of violating somebody's privacy.
Because it's an immense violation.
Right. I understand.
I don't understand all that and the HIPAA violations and privacy and everything.
But I guess the heart of my question is that, you know, Nobody abides by those things in any other situation.
So it's just very strange to me that we're not seeing at least one or two live streams coming from that room.
Well, I'll tell you, I have been to my healthcare provider's waiting room, not recently because of the crisis, and I was the only person using a phone, I think.
It was like nobody took their phone out.
I did, just texting and stuff.
I get what you're saying.
The implication is, if things were as bad as the reports, we would surely have visual evidence of that.
That's actually a good observation, but within the medical domain, you would expect a little less video than any other domain.
And I want to reiterate that I'm not suggesting anything, like I'm not suggesting that this is a giant hoax or anything like that.
I'm just asking a simple question that I feel like should have an answer, but I'm getting a lot of pushback from people.
That seems like a pretty fair question.
But the other thing might be that I think the bad spots are spots.
So if you got to the point where every hospital in New York was a death center, then the odds of a video are pretty high.
But if most of them are kind of okay, but you had a couple of bad days at one where somebody died in the waiting room, I don't know that people would take out their phone.
So we're sort of in the gray area where I could see why it wouldn't happen.
But the longer it goes, and the worse it gets, reportedly...
The longer we go and don't see video, then that's a perfectly valid question.
Thanks for that. All right. Yep.
See you. All right. Take care.
That was a good question. Oh, look at all these people who want to talk to me.
Let's do Jason.
Jason, are you there?
Jason, can you hear me?
Do you have a question? Saying is the epicenter.
And it seems to me, you know, just being here, that it's not the case, that it's very much overblown.
And, you know, there are people obviously getting sick.
There is a lot of social distancing.
But it doesn't seem nearly as bad as they're saying.
And I've seen a lot of reports.
New York Times had one, that there were people dying, waiting for beds, etc.
I just don't see that actually being backed up.
But how... How would you see that?
My understanding is, is it New York City where they've ordered refrigerated trucks for all the bodies?
The only place you would see it is right in the hospital.
So unless you're in the hospital, you shouldn't be seeing anything.
I happen to know personally a lot of doctors, family members in my social circle that right now are working in hospitals in Westchester and lower Manhattan.
And I haven't heard anything like that.
I think I would have heard that it was a horror story like that.
So I think we should really see what's going on.
It seems to me to be a little overblown.
Well, my understanding is if you're looking at it as a snapshot in time, then you're just looking at the wrong thing because everything is about the rate.
So they delivered 4,000 ventilators, which if you were taking a snapshot would probably be, you know, 3,500 ventilators more than they need right away.
But since they think they might need 20,000, we're not talking about a snapshot of today.
We're talking about the direction it's gone and all the experts saying, if you don't clamp it down, it'll turn into a disaster.
So I feel like the experts are giving you the amount of warning that is appropriate to next week.
Even more than appropriate at the moment.
Maybe that's what you're feeling. That the alarm is sort of a next week alarm, so you're not seeing it on the ground yet.
So that's my best guess.
Thanks for the question.
Let's see what else we got here.
Let's take Brian.
Brian, you look like you have a question.
Brian. Brian.
Brian disappeared. Let's try Tracy.
Tracy. Talk to me, Tracy.
You have a question? My sister lives in Manhattan and she's been quarantining herself because she's been ill with an inner ear problem.
And she was just telling me she went to the hospital today to see a rehab person to help her with this maneuver they have to do.
She has crystals in her ears that are out of whack.
And she said the hospital was not busy at all.
She doesn't know what I'm talking about when I talk to her about the coronavirus because she said she was the only patient that this rehab woman had today.
Well, so that's exactly what it should look like if it's really an emergency.
You get that, right? So the way it should look like is they've canceled all the elective surgery And they've massively increased their capacity in anticipation of what next week and the week after look like.
So what you saw is exactly what it should look like in some hospitals that haven't been hit, but they expect to.
So I think that's all you're saying.
Now, of course, we could be wrong, but thanks for the question.
You know, anything could happen.
I'm curious what's going to happen if we do a really good job of beating the virus, and everybody's going to say, see, I told you it wasn't real.
Omar, are you there?
Omar. Omar.
Come on, technology. Work.
It's cooking. Trying to get Omar on there, but it looks like that's not going to work for some reason.
Alright, let's try somebody else.
Let's try James.
James, can you hear me?
If we have...
Oh, there you are.
James, do you have a question?
Hello, do you have a question?
It's a bit one-sided, but so we talked about the coronavirus coming from China.
Could this, I mean, just saying, this is just a theory, not saying they actually did it, but could this be a test in a way that you could realign, like all the manufacturing is coming from China, but in a way, putting emphasis on it, like medical supplies and everything to be more based in China.
Well, I think the result of this will be less stuff based in China because we'll be pulling our supply lines back.
So China will be worse off.
So if you're trying to imagine that somebody intentionally let the virus out, you'd have to say to yourself, okay, who could gain by such a thing?
Now, in my opinion, nobody did it intentionally.
I think that's very, very unlikely.
But if you want to go through the mental exercise, you'd say, who could possibly win by a virus that is not selective?
I mean, it's a little selective by age, but not by country.
So if you couldn't control it by ethnicity or country, nobody would let that out.
I mean, nobody who knew what they had Would let it out.
So that would leave the possibility that they thought it would act some other way, but even that sounds impossible.
So I reject all of the intentional theories, but that doesn't mean that it didn't get out of some kind of a research lab, because they could have had it for research.
That doesn't mean that they meant it to get out or that it was a weapon.
All right. Thank you for the questions.
All right. Let me go back to that.
You saw me block somebody here because they said, look how you panicked, Scott.
Now, I don't know how many times I need to tell you this.
In the early part of just knowing that the pandemic was coming, the experts said, if we don't do anything, It will turn into X, and a million people die.
So I, quoting the experts, also said, if we don't do anything, that will happen.
That's still true, but we are doing things.
So those of you who have come to mock me because I said it could be this bad unless we do something...
You just don't belong here.
You just can't be here.
You're not smart enough. If you don't know the difference between what it looks like if you don't do anything and what it looks like if you try really hard to stop it, you just can't be here.
You have to find some other form of entertainment.
You don't understand the basics.
Right. I said to prepare...
Which is smart.
And anybody who prepared is probably pretty happy about it because you have toilet paper.
So certainly Mike Cernovich was the superstar of the early and correct predictions on this.
Nobody comes close to what he was saying and how early.
But I saw an article that was saying that the people who also saw Trump coming early Tended to be the same people who saw the coronavirus early.
And I thought that was a good observation because it's kind of true.
You know, Bannon, me, Mike Cernovich, several others.
But the people who saw Trump early saw this as well.
Is that a coincidence? Might not be.
So, all right. Let me take another question here since I got a lot of people waiting.
Let's see what Sven is up to.
Sven, I'm coming to you because I like your name.
Can you hear me, Sven? Do you have a question?
Yes, again. Go ahead.
After all this is over, how do you want to see kind of the United States change socially, governmentally?
Well, you know, some of it will be changes that we didn't realize were changes.
You know, there'll be massive changes just about how we do things to keep viruses from spreading.
There'll be massive, you know, financial changes and dislocations.
So there'll be all kinds of fairly Predictable ones.
But the fun ones are the ones that you don't really feel and see.
You just sort of notice it after the fact.
And one of them is what I keep talking about is that our government is no longer really the government making decisions.
They're kind of taking their cue from the public and from social media as it represents the public.
And so this idea of the public being almost an equal partner with the government And informing them and working with them and pushing and pulling, that's a big deal.
Because it's a whole new form of government that simply didn't exist until social media made it so.
Now the other thing that we're getting out of this is that a whole bunch of people met each other.
Who would not have otherwise met.
And by that I mean the scientists.
And the benefit of cross-fertilizing a bunch of scientists could be tremendous.
Could be tremendous. The amount of sharing.
They're probably permanently connected at some point.
So the next pandemic can be that much better.
But one of the other sort of unexpected big elements of this is Is that for how many years have the Green New Deal people been telling us that we should do this big, massive, society-changing, expensive, trillion-dollar thing to address this one problem?
Now, without arguing whether or not we should or whether or not the science is right or anything like that, forget about that for now.
Just the fact of how do you manage your risks?
And I've been saying from the beginning, if you put all of your money in this climate change thing, you've missed other gigantic risks that you would be broke, for example.
And I always said pandemic.
So that was on my short list.
I would always say pandemic, you know, meteor, climate change.
You can't spend all of your money on any one of them.
So you have to figure out the right mix.
And I think that that lesson Went from just sort of academic and people hear it and immediately forget it to, oh my God, we can't spend all of our money on the Green New Deal.
And I think that the Green New Deal probably lost a lot of support in terms of at least the energy behind it.
The same people who supported it will continue to support it, but I don't know if it has the same heat anymore because now it's kind of obvious That we would have been in a lot of trouble if we had started three years ago to become a socialist world and we just put our whole budget into the Green New Deal.
We would kind of wish we had that economic strength now.
What's that? We would have been pretty screwed in that case.
Yeah, yeah. So the Trump doctrine of making sure that you're as strong as possible, because that gives you the most flexibility against the most different threats, I think it's proven.
And so thanks for the question.
Thank you. All right.
We're going to take another caller.
Let's take Alex, who got here early.
You should be rewarded for this if you're still there, Alex.
Alex, you have a question? A question about Robert Cialdini?
Yes. And do you think that he is gun-shy since he pushed the whole Trump is dark issue in the last election?
Well, I can't read his mind.
I heard or read that he wasn't going to be involved in politics.
Again, I think he's in his early 70s, and I think he was maybe thinking that was a younger man's game or something.
But I'd be surprised if he hasn't been asked to consult for somebody, Bernie or somebody else.
And I'd be surprised if he had been asked...
That he didn't give at least a little bit of advice.
So I don't know and I can't get it in his head or what he's thinking.
But it would be surprising if somebody of that skill set had not been consulted.
Because remember, he did work on the Obama election.
So we know that.
And he probably worked on Hillary Clinton's because you could see his fingerprints on it.
So why wouldn't he? I mean, it seems like they would ask him.
Yeah, I just think he would be a little embarrassed if he had two losses on his crib sheet.
Well, you know, nobody counts it that way.
It just looks that way to you.
And he'd probably say, you know, well, must have been some voter suppression or something.
I don't know. I don't want to put words in his head, so I have no idea what he's thinking.
But just the general point that people have reasons...
Just because they don't look obvious to you doesn't mean they don't have reasons.
All right. All right.
Thanks, Scott. Thanks for the question.
Senator Mark is here.
Hello, Senator. Let's see if Steve has a question for me.
Steve? Steve went away.
I think people get shy or maybe they're not really signed up here.
Gabriel, I want to talk to you, Gabriel.
Gabriel. Gabriel, can you hear me?
Do you have a question?
I was reading a recent document stating that I guess the UK government downgraded Coronavirus to you know, I guess whatever lower tier there is aside from like Hantavirus and You know some of the more scarier things out there,
right? But I was curious You know, I don't want to ask people to place a wager on this, and this is leading to something else, but what are the odds you think that we can get...
Oh, here's what I think is going to happen.
I think that the final death count will be shockingly low.
And way lower than seasonal flu, but only because it's a full-core press.
I mean, we closed down the economy.
I mean, we're just doing, you know, Herculean efforts.
So between the fact that the meds seem to really be effective, and once those come online, this looks like a completely different problem once you have enough test kits.
Once you have enough ventilators, once you have enough meds and protective equipment, once you have enough supplies, and that's guaranteed to happen, I think this becomes more trivial.
But until we're armed, we're somewhat unarmed, And we've been on a defensive retreat.
But we're just starting to turn the corner and weapons are going to go hot in the next week or so.
And then we're going on offense.
Offense will be a lot more fun.
Go ahead. Lastly, I work as a pharmacist.
And one thing I would say is that perhaps this will help us actually better approach the flu in upcoming seasons.
Yeah. Some of these practices would definitely prevent some of the thousands and thousands of deaths that happen most years.
Right. Yeah, I would think that one of the unintended consequences is that regular flu is either more treatable, maybe they find something that works on it, or at the very least our practices get so much better that there's just less of it.
So yeah, I'm optimistic about that as well.
All right. Thank you for the question.
Appreciate it. All right.
Gabriel is one of the people I see on Twitter making smart comments, so I was happy to talk to him.
Caller went away. Caller does not want to talk to me.
Let's try Omar again.
Omar, don't run away this time.
Omar, how are you? Good, good.
Do you have a question for me?
I do, I do. But first of all, I just wanted to thank you for all your hard work every day.
You're getting on twice a day just to make everybody feel better, put on the right filters for us.
You're a national treasure, Scott, and I just want to thank you very much for that.
Well, I think everybody all over the country are jumping in and doing what they can do.
So that's the fun part, is people just say, what can I do?
What am I good at?
And then they're just doing it.
So it's pretty sensational.
Did you have a question? Yes, I do.
I'm not going to read your mind, but I'm assuming that you were just as pissed off as I was about the stimulus bill today.
As it seems like it's corporate socialism where big corporations are getting helped out and the average man is getting fucked over.
So my question to you is that since it's not necessarily that individuals should be bailed out on their needs, you know, these corporations are being bailed out based on our need for them.
So that makes them a utility.
So shouldn't the government put some kind of parameters Yeah, and I haven't dug into the details, but I know the president wanted that.
Basically, everybody wanted it.
So if everybody who was talking in public wanted it and it didn't happen, then there must have been some lobbyist effect there.
But I would have to say that Congress failed miserably.
Just failed right in front of us in a way that is somewhat spectacular.
Because they may or may not sign something.
It sounded like the president was going to be pretty flexible.
He wasn't going to He wasn't going to go to war about $25 million for this, $25 million for that, as long as they had a reason.
He may not prefer it, but at least get the country back in the road.
I don't think the President is wrong about that.
I think that he is actually playing it smart.
He's being complimentary to everybody in Congress, even though he shouldn't be.
Based on their performance, he should be castigating them.
But I think he's playing it correctly.
He's smartly saying, you know, Congress is Congress.
If they can't do better than that, I'm going to take what I can get.
But I need this. I need something, not nothing.
So something's better than nothing.
But if Congress's credibility could get any lower, I just don't know how.
I mean, this... I'm not really the guy who wants to criticize Congress all the time because it's just so easy and obvious and perpetual, but wow, this feels like a whole new level of incompetence.
You sort of imagined that when it was a national emergency, they would let the little stuff go and just focus, but they did not.
They didn't even a little bit.
They failed us completely, and everybody involved with that should be removed from office, in my opinion.
Yeah, no, I agree.
There's one thing I wanted to mention, something interesting I learned from a friend of mine who's a Chinese national.
But, you know, Alibaba is actually fully functioning, and they functioned very well during the quarantine, or during the COVID crisis.
And I didn't know why, but something that I didn't know was back in the early 2000s, I believe when SARS happened, Alibaba had to go through this whole pandemic themselves, and they had to self-quarantine the entire company.
So they were actually really well prepared to handle this.
And I'm wondering if, because the U.S. companies all went through this themselves, that in the next 10 or 20 or 30 years, if this were to happen again, we would essentially be anti-fragile in our economy.
Do you think so? Yeah, I think it depends when it happens.
If we wait 20 years and we don't have a pandemic in that time, we'll probably get soft.
Budgets will get caught and we'll get, you know, we'll get complacent.
But I would say if a pandemic comes back in three years, we're really going to be ready.
You know, it'll be fresh.
You won't have to tell people what to do.
You know, we'll just go into our routine.
So it kind of depends when.
But yes, I think that's one of the big benefits is we're going to come out ahead preparation-wise.
We'll be a much hardened society when we're done.
That's my hope. Last thing, and I'll let you go, Scott, again.
Thank you for the time. I know that you're on Instagram now and love your pics, but I'm going to suggest something you should try and tell me what you end up seeing.
Like a few TikTok, Instagram videos, and you'll get retargeted by a variety of these very impressive videos.
App companies for photos, AR, you know, video editing, all of which not only are coming out of China, but they also happen to be coming out of Wuhan.
And I just thought it was very, very strange I kept seeing this.
So try that on your end.
See what you end up finding.
Okay. I'll look for that.
All right. Thanks, Omar. All right.
Take care. All right.
Let's talk to Alec.
Let's see if Alec has a question.
Alec, do you have a question?
Alec? I can.
It sounds like it's raining. I'll get into a quieter place in one second.
My question is, what's your prediction on what's going to happen once this blows over or once we get a handle of it?
In places like Iran and Hong Kong, do you believe the protests will return in full force or is it a little bit too foggy to tell?
Too foggy to tell because even the protesters are not going to want to gather.
So at the moment, the more virus there is in Iran, Maybe the regime is even safer because people just don't want to get in the same place.
But let's say we get past the virus and people are no longer afraid to gather in public.
Iran has a lot to explain.
They need to explain the shooting down the Ukraine airline, the bad economy.
They need to explain why they're a pariah.
They need to explain why their economy is the worst.
They need to explain why the The virus was so bad there and less bad in other places.
So it's going to hurt.
But on the other hand, if you just look at all the psychology that goes into that, there is something about a national emergency that does make people also pull together and...
Put a little more trust in the regime, even if they hated him yesterday.
So it could work either way.
We're squarely in the fog of war situation, but good question.
Thank you. Thank you.
All right. Take care. Let's do...
Let's do...
Eric.
Eric, Eric, Eric.
Eric, can you hear me? Do you have a question?
Why didn't the president set the pace more on the goodies in the bill?
Like, you know, the payments directly to workers, directly to interest-free small business loans.
And then, of course, then when all the big corporate stuff has to happen too, the big bailouts, well, he blames that on Congress.
It kind of seems like he's been sitting back and letting the bill just kind of happen rather than getting out in front and taking credit for the good stuff.
Yeah, you know, here's what I would have liked to have seen.
I would have liked to see the President say, both parties have failed us.
Here's your bill. You know, I need you to vote on this by tomorrow.
Because I think the President could just say, you know, here's what you gave us with all this pork.
Here's what the Republicans wanted that basically is a giveaway to big business, according to people who looked at it more than I have.
I think the President could have said, I know what it looks like when you're not doing either of those things.
So here it is. Vote on it by tomorrow.
It's an emergency. I think he could have done it.
In any other circumstance, of course, that wouldn't work.
But I think he could shine enough light on it to just embarrass them.
Now, let me give you an example.
If the president had said, look, you've completely screwed the pooch on this.
It's too complicated. It's too divisive.
It's wrong in every way.
Here's what we're going to do.
We're going to give everybody $3,000.
That's it. And then the people who didn't deserve it, people like me, who, you know, my income is, at least some of it will be intact after this is over.
We'll probably be down about a third from newspapers that go out of business forever.
But people like me, just when I fill out my taxes, I just say, yeah, I got $3,000, but I didn't deserve it, so I'll give it back to you at tax time.
It's the easiest, because you don't even have to worry about the clawback until later.
You don't have to worry that somebody got the money you based on last year, but this was a bad year.
You don't have to worry about any of that.
You just say, boom, here's your money.
Corporations get nothing.
Now, should corporations get nothing, and will they go out of business?
And I think the answer is no.
If the government wants to help companies stay in business, and generally it's a short cashfall problem, Well, that's what banks do.
Maybe the government could guarantee in some cases, or the government could take equity.
They don't like that, but the government could.
Why can't we make a profit on this?
Why can't the government say, yeah, I'll help you out, Boeing, but I own 10% of your company, and when the stock goes back up, I'm going to sell because I'm not in the stock business.
I'm just helping you out. So it feels to me The government could have done lots of stuff to make sure that the big companies at least have funding, but we would get paid back.
It seems to me we could just directly give cash to people, and if the wrong people got cash, well, they'd probably spend it anyway, and that's good, but they can claw it back.
I think the president had a high ground play.
Now, I don't know the politics of Washington.
Maybe I'm being a little too A little too idealistic about how easy things are.
But there are things you can do in an emergency that you just couldn't do other times.
And I got a feeling that the public was so primed for leadership that the president could have said, I'm putting it on one page, vote on this tomorrow, and I don't even want to see that stuff that you handed me.
It is so far off the American people should fire every one of you.
But here's my one-pager.
Give it to me by tomorrow.
Yeah, I agree.
That would be a total home run for him.
Cernovich has kind of talked about how Trump's kind of dropped some opportunities for himself to, you know, hit, you know, etc.
But thanks for taking my call.
I agree with all that. Taking my call for my show or whatever.
All right, thanks. Take care.
Getting pretty good questions today.
All the smart people are here today.
That didn't work. How about that?
Oh, sorry, I knocked you off.
That was a fat finger, my problem.
Try somebody else. Tony?
Tony, can you hear me?
I can. Do you have a question?
What's going on with New Orleans?
Have you heard anything about there?
It seems like that's going to blow up really soon after New York.
Well, probably.
I would expect that all the metro areas are going to get hit, some more than others, and if they're vacation places.
Older places and people are more crowded.
All the usual factors.
I don't have any special intel on that.
I think with Mardi Gras in late February, there was a lot of seeds that got started.
My understanding is that Bourbon Street just continued on until the police came in and said, what the heck?
Get out of here. I think they had to close down Bourbon Street, the big crowded area there.
Thanks for your questions.
All right. Well, I seem to be pressing the wrong buttons here.
Let's try that. All right.
That's all for today. I will be back with you at 10 Eastern time in the morning.
Eastern, not Easter.
And 7 a.m.
California time for the simultaneous set.
But do not miss it. Do not miss it.
Do not miss it. I'm here to tell you that things are going to turn around.
It's all about supplies now.
Supplies of tests, supplies of meds, supplies of protective equipment, and then we go on offense.
Very close. Very close.
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