All Episodes
Previous Next
March 27, 2020 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
54:14
Episode 874 Scott Adams: Taking Your Calls for the Simultaneous Swaddle
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hey everybody come on in here Hey, Jan. Get in here.
Do you have your soft blanket?
It's time for the simultaneous swaddle.
And questions. Yeah, questions.
There is so much news that I've got to do this twice a day just to get it all in.
Two hours a day of live streaming.
And I love every minute of it because I get to spend it with you.
Now, if I were President Trump and I was trying to tell you how good the simultaneous swaddle is, well, I would say things like this.
I would say it might be the best ever.
It could be the best ever simultaneous swaddle.
Everybody's telling me they've never seen anything like it.
I mean, they've never seen anything like it.
It's the simultaneous swaddle, and even my critics are saying they can't believe it.
They can't believe it. Nobody's done this before.
It's the most amazing thing we've ever seen.
Yes, if I were President Trump, that's how I would sell this.
So, some of you may have questions.
Let me mention a few things before we do that.
If you're trying to guess how long it will take you to get paper goods on the shelf, Let's say toilet paper as the prime example.
I have an estimate.
And the estimate is approximately one month from whenever the shelves were mostly dry.
And the reasoning is this.
If you were to guess of all the people who did a little hoarding and all the people who didn't, because surely there were people who didn't do any or didn't do much.
If you were to take the average, I think the average is That each family had about a month of supply.
Now, that's a guess, of course.
But it feels about what people would do on average.
Some people would have six months.
Some people would forget to go to the store.
They would kind of balance each other out.
So I'll say a month. So if things were normal, it would take about a month.
But of course, as soon as they got here, they would be hoarded.
Unless... The stores put a limit on it and say, well, you know, two toilet papers for you, and at which point the problem is solved.
So I think it's a month from the day that it started.
So that's my estimate for that.
Have you seen some news about Joe Biden in the comments?
Because I looked for the news on the front page of CNN and Fox News, And I kept looking, this was earlier, maybe there's something there now, and there was no mention of a little story about Joe Biden.
Have you heard it?
Well, I don't know what really happened or really did not happen, but there's a Me Too accusation that has the patina of credibility.
The patina of credibility.
You don't get to say patina too much in public, but anytime I get a chance, I'm going to go right in there with the patina.
So, if you haven't heard the accusation, send the kids away.
Send the children.
Children, go play with your screens.
Get away from this adult activity.
So there was a woman who worked as a staffer, I guess, in the 80s and 90s in his office, and she alleges, alleges, I say, that he forcefully tried to kiss her, and let's say that he put a part of his hand in a place that she didn't want.
Now, I haven't checked yet, but I'm going to guess that the hashtag...
Will be trending by tomorrow.
Hashtag finger-banging Biden.
Was that not a winner?
Finger-banging Biden?
You might have to spell it with a G or not the G. I'm not quite sure yet.
But is this story true?
I don't know. Who knows?
Who knows? Apparently she had contemporaneous reports and She was backing up somebody else who had similar reports and blah, blah.
Well, I don't know about any of that.
But what I do know is that I can't quite imagine him getting elected at this point.
It went from hard to believe to, okay, that's over, to impossible.
So I just tweeted around a video that Kamala Harris just did.
She was talking about the vote for the relief package, whatever it's called.
And Long ago I had predicted that she would disappear after withdrawing from the race and that she would retool and she would actually get consultants who would coach her on her physical mannerisms and how to use her hand gestures and even maybe how to dress and all the basics of a politician, how you look, how you talk, how you move.
And I don't know, maybe she just had a good day.
But it looks like she came back improved.
It looks like... Now, of course, many of you are blind to it because you don't think she can get elected.
You don't want to vote for her.
She did something bad a million years ago.
Blah, blah. Willie Brown.
But I'm not talking about that.
I'm just talking about the transformation of a...
Let's say a candidate who had a lot of rough edges in terms of style...
And I just predicted that it would somewhat dramatically improve from the time she disappeared, mostly to the time that she needed to reappear.
It looks like that's happening.
So does that mean anything?
We'll see. I guess she's in the top three for consideration, but there's a There's a Latina senator in Nevada who's also high on the list.
And that might make sense demographically.
That might make a little more sense.
So there's no certainty about Kamala Harris, but it's fun to watch.
All right. One of the most interesting questions...
Is that there are very reasonable people, people I know from Twitter, from years and years of experience, who are smart and rational and usually right, who believe that the coronavirus thing is overblown and that the hysteria was out of proportion to what it would ultimately become, and that it was a mistake to have the economy shut down so hard.
Well, here's the thing that makes this so interesting.
In the end, we'll never know.
You know, you think that eventually, well, we'll find out in the long run, but in this case, we won't.
We actually won't know if it was a gigantic mass hysteria or we did a really good job in stopping it.
We'll never know. Now, the wild card, of course, I say this all the time, is the meds that are being tested, whether it's the Hydra Chloroquine or something else, the Erasmus, whatever it is.
And then China thinks they have something, but that's probably a lie.
So there must be a dozen or more different meds that have at least some promise, and they're being tested pretty quickly.
So what happens if the meds work?
Let's just say hypothetically, let's say if the hydrochloroquine works and the supply gets up to speed pretty well, wouldn't that look like we beat the curve because people would go back to work, maybe they get a little sick, but they don't die, they don't need ventilators, the hospital isn't crashed, people aren't that worried, we protect the old people for a little while longer, everybody's smarter about washing their hands.
So, to me it seems like we have a pretty distinct path out, and at least there's a possibility, I don't know what the odds are, but there's a possibility that we'll get to that better place without running out of ventilators.
Now, that's based on the fact that we have enough at the moment, but what's tomorrow look like?
You know, the whole reason that we were building like crazy It seems like all the smart people who know epidemics and follow this for a living, they seem pretty unified that this is going to be bad.
So you can't tell anything from the snapshot in time.
You have to look at what they say is going to happen.
But what if it doesn't happen?
What if we get a total handle on this and deaths are under 5,000 for the country?
Which, by the way, is my...
I'm going to make that my prediction.
So my prediction...
It is fewer than 5,000 deaths from coronavirus in the United States.
Now, that would be at great odds with the experts, but it assumes innovation.
So it assumes a tool comes online that hasn't been used yet.
So that's the optimism, that we would get smarter about doing that.
Maybe we test better.
You've seen amazing things about the test kits.
By the way, here's another prediction that I made a while ago.
I told you that I'd worked with startups at Berkeley, and this was just even a few years ago, and one of the things I saw is that they had a whole bunch of technology that they were making different companies out of, but all had the same quality, which is there had been developed over the years rapid ways to test blood.
So, after 9-11, and after, you know, bioweapons scares and stuff, and anthrax, the government tasked the labs to find a way to very rapidly test blood for bioweapons.
Now, that would include, of course, the ability to test for, you know, a virus.
So, I told you that I had the advantage that I'd seen all these startups who could do this much faster and more cheaply and just with, you know, desktop units and stuff, and I predicted That those would start coming online, and I think that's what we're seeing.
I'm not sure it's the same technology, but I would imagine that the ability to rapidly test blood is something that did not exist in the old fossilized system where you send it away to the lab, but I assumed that it was something that existed It could be ramped up, and it looks like that might be happening now.
So that could be great. So what happens if we find a way to test everybody cheaply at home and accurately?
Well, will the people who say, I told you it wasn't going to be a big deal, are they right?
Who would be right?
Would they be right by saying it was mass hysteria?
Well, only because a miracle, you know, that human ingenuity found a way to solve it.
I don't know. On the other hand, we don't know too much about China, for example, how they got a hold of it on top of it, or if they did, even.
It could be that that was the hydrochloroquine as well.
All right. You're in a town hall with Congressman Schiff.
Got a question I can ask.
Yes. Congressman Schiff.
Um... Is there anything that's good that couldn't have been done sooner?
This is a general question.
Because all day long, you're watching idiots on television criticize anybody.
Whether it's Trump or anybody who's criticizing anybody, it's all the same empty criticism.
Should have been done sooner.
Everything should have been done sooner.
After the fact, we're all geniuses.
Oh yeah, I should have been done sooner.
Which completely loses the fact that at the time, nobody really knew what to do.
But you have to do something.
So you do something, maybe it works, maybe it doesn't, maybe you adjust.
But I have no patience for the people who are going to do an autopsy on basically a brand new situation.
Did you see a CNN anchor interrupt Navarro constantly?
I did not. But it sounds fun.
I hope there's a clip of it.
Do you know how many cell phones have gone dark?
Good question. I don't know.
Maybe we'll get that sometimes.
Let me see if I can take some questions.
Let's check our technology.
Let's see. How about Euler?
If I pronounce that right?
Euler? Euler?
Hello. Do you have a question for me?
Adrian, I've read all your books.
I'm Brazilian. Can you hear me?
Yes, I can. Go ahead.
I just want to know how can I use more visual persuasion when speaking and writing?
Because I see you here in the Periscopes and when I read you, I see you have a lot of visual persuasion and I read in Wynne Bigley.
And I just want to know that...
Yeah, it's really just a matter of training yourself in practice.
There's nothing magical to it.
You just have to know that visual persuasion works better and then keep that in the front of your mind because most of us can find a visual way to describe things if we're trying.
So it's really about reminding yourself to try.
I'd say that's 80% of the technique and then 20% is are you good at thinking up visual analogies?
Most people are. So there's nothing more to it than that.
I hope that helps. Yeah, because I see you and President Trump doing it, and it's great.
I try to use it. I'm a lawyer when speaking in courts and writing my files and stuff, and I just want to know how could I get better on that.
But thanks, Scott. Yeah, just remind yourself and just do it.
So that's really all it is.
All right, thanks. Thank you, man. Thank you.
So there's some things, especially in persuasion, that are just practice.
You just got to remind yourself and then you just got to do it.
And there's not much more to it that makes it that interesting.
All right, Beth, are you there?
Beth, Beth, Beth, can you hear me?
Do you have a question, Beth?
Yeah, you've been talking about the Golden Age coming for a couple of years, and I was wondering if you think this might accelerate it.
I think this is very much like the third act in the movie.
It's like everything's going well, and then, oh my god, it's the problem you didn't see coming, and it's going to ruin everything, and there's no way we can get out of it.
But we will, of course.
Yeah, I think so. Like, I think people are going to have a lot less tolerance for inefficiency and wasting time and that sort of thing.
Well, there's one good thing about an emergency is that it reveals all your weaknesses.
And man, have we seen all of our weaknesses.
And I would say there's nothing that's worked worse than Congress.
I think Congress just gets a failing grade.
Both sides. I mean, you can't argue.
It's undeniable.
That was really just disgraceful, I think.
And it has nothing to do with Republican or Democrat.
I don't think it was just disgraceful as a body.
I agree. And did I answer your question?
What was your question? I asked if you thought that this event would accelerate the golden age.
Yeah. You know, it's going to take a little while to get on our feet, but I'm always on the side of it's going to be faster than you think.
I have one more question when you're done.
Go ahead. Yeah, I was just going to say that the guessing that things will be faster than you think when humans are trying to solve a brand new problem, it's almost always the right bet because we're really good and you get smarter and smarter and smarter until you're smart enough and we get there quickly.
Where humans are always slow is if you hire somebody to remodel your house.
You ask your lawyer to turn something around in a day.
In the real world where you're just doing, it's my job, I'm just going to work, I'm getting a paycheck, everybody's slow then because it just doesn't matter.
But in emergencies like Y2K, we really do excel at that stuff and we do it faster than you think.
I guess Afghanistan would be an exception.
What was your next question? Have you always been an optimist?
I would say that I've always been an optimist internally.
But I actually had to learn to be an optimist externally because I thought that complaining about things was entertaining.
That is habitual for people.
Yeah, and it's a gigantic character flaw that until somebody is kind enough to be cruel, you'll never see in yourself.
Because complaining is just the easiest thing to do.
What are you thinking today?
Somebody was mean to me.
I'm late. I got a stomach ache.
So it's the most automatic thing because you're thinking about your problems if you're trying to solve them.
So it was a friend of mine who in alcohol may have been involved years ago who basically just told me I was too negative and I was just wearing around and I thought, what?
I'm not negative at all in my mind.
Indeed, the topics I talked about were downers.
It was bothering other people far more than it was bothering me.
I was the one with the problems.
You learn that you just can't burden people with a non-stop fire hose of complaints and problems.
Nobody wants to be around that.
I had to learn that the hard way.
I hope there's somebody brutally cruel in your life who will do the favor to you that somebody did to me.
I'm the optimist in my house, so it's cool.
And thanks for doing these.
It's super helpful, and yeah, it gives me perspective.
I appreciate it. Good.
Well, thanks for the questions. Take care.
All right.
Let's see who else we got here.
We're going to go to Kevin.
Kevin, you look like you got something to say.
Hello, Kevin. You got a question for me?
The part about the wall and the example and everything, and it rings true.
So what I've noticed in the press conferences with Trump, and he had an interview with Sean Hannity tonight, is he seems to be dialing it back a little bit.
He still gets a jab in there, and he kind of explained it on Hannity tonight.
He said that he's going to run on his record, so he's not going to do what he did last time.
You know, that's interesting because I was thinking of pointing it out, but I hadn't decided if it was my imagination.
It looks like the President is taking a conscious effort to be more bipartisan, not just for the length of the crisis, but it looks like a strategy, doesn't it?
It looks like he's...
Because he can obviously turn it on and turn it off.
If he's meeting with the Queen, he turns it off.
So we know he can turn it on and off.
So when it's off...
You have to know it's conscious, right?
Because the default is on, so turning it off is the hard part.
So it looks like he's made that decision, and I think his instincts are right on, because he doesn't have much to run against.
I mean, right now, Biden's just decomposing while we talk.
But... I think just being nice, if he gets a little bump from doing a good job handling the crisis, which we all hope, even if we don't like the president, you still hope he does a good job of the crisis.
If he gets that done, You've seen even his support with women just took a big jump up.
People are going to be remembering this more than they'll remember every other thing he's ever done just because of the recency issue.
So if he gets us through this, and let's say the skeptics who say it was never going to be that big after all, They're going to go nuts because they're going to say, you didn't save us.
There was nothing there to begin with.
Oh, it's so unfair.
Don't get reelected because it's a trick.
It's a trick. So you know that's coming.
You can see that from months away.
All right. Thank you.
There is one other thing, too.
You mentioned you were the first one that I heard mention about the ventilators and using up More than one for more than one patient.
And he also mentioned that on Hannity tonight.
He also mentioned that they're using 3D printers to print an adapter that will do this for up to four.
And also CPAP machines and the anesthesiologist's ventilator.
Yeah, all the things that you probably heard from me fairly early.
I think you were first.
Yeah. Yeah, maybe so.
And the thing that I predicted, you can see right in front of you, the way that they basically quadrupled ventilator capacity.
Who saw that coming? Really, who saw that coming?
Well, let's just quadruple it with a little valve here.
And in a thousand different ways, people are making that kind of little innovation that turned into big things.
Very impressive. All right, thank you.
Thank you, Scott. All right.
Let's see. Take another question here.
Let's go to Psychic Brian.
Psychic Brian. Psychic Brian, can you hear me?
Do you have a question? Hello.
My call. Thanks for taking my call.
What's your question? I have a question on hypnosis.
Sure. I was wondering if hypnosis can change the simulation that you're living in.
You've talked in your scopes about simulation.
We might be living in a simulation.
And that's my second part.
Do you think hypnosis can change your own simulation that you might be living in, and how long would that take if you were practicing, say, hypnosis?
Well, no, I don't think there's any way that hypnosis as a practice in which you sit in front of one person and they go into a relaxed state, I don't think that rewires the simulation.
And of course, anytime I talk about the simulation, it's just for fun because it's a completely unprovable situation.
I just like it because it's provocative.
But it does seem as though you can change movies.
And let me give you a specific example.
If you were the most common one, you know, is Donald Trump a dangerous monster or do you have TDS? You know, the two different movies?
Yes. Keep in mind that everybody in both movies survived a...
Many cases procreated, and they live their life in a completely different reality.
So you see it every day, and you're going to see it again whenever we get past this crisis, if it doesn't get as big as people said, to movies again.
And people will live there forever, and they will never have to resolve them.
So when I say that you can change your reality, you can change your filter on it and just enter another movie.
Yes, that's what I mean. Your movie, your movie.
Not so much the simulation, but the movie you might be in.
So you probably can't change it to any movie, but it's clearly an obvious, you know, you can just observe it a thousand different ways that people are in different movies.
And you do see people occasionally switch movie.
You know, it's usually big news because it's so rare.
You know, a Democrat who decides to be a Trump supporter, that sort of thing.
And I have experienced in my own life changing my filter, usually with some psychedelic experience or marijuana or something.
But the experience of it is that your reality changed and you're just in a different movie for a while.
You can still shop and, you know, live and broker.
And that's changed your life.
I mean, it's for the better. You changed your filter and you became more successful over the years, more well-known.
Well, I think, yeah, that's a little bit of A-B testing.
And, of course, you always need a little luck.
But, yeah, I just try filters.
And when my filter doesn't work, I say, well, that filter didn't work.
Let's see if I can adjust to a better one.
All right. Thank you for the question. Thank you.
Thank you, Scott. All right. Bye.
Let's see what Dunny has to say.
Because I don't know anybody else who has that name.
Dunny, D-U-N-N-Y. Dunny, are you there?
Do you have a question? Good.
So when you started doing the nighttime podcast, it reminded me of when Ted Kopp on Nightline started in the late 70s with the hostage crisis.
Oh, yeah, that's how it happened.
I was wondering where you think I might go, or it'll be fun to watch where it goes.
But anyway, thanks for everything.
Appreciate all your talks.
Thanks for the question. You know, I don't plan it.
I didn't plan to do the morning ones.
I just sort of evolved into it.
I didn't plan to be a commentator about persuasion.
I didn't plan to write my last three books until I had an idea and did them.
I always tell people to build your talent stack so you can go in a lot of different directions.
When this is over, if I've done a job that people would want to see more of in whatever way, it would open up opportunities.
But I don't have a plan in advance about what I would do with that or where I take it.
Probably just something that's more and better along these lines.
Maybe do some more interviews, see what that looks like.
But thank you for the question.
Keep it up. Thank you. Let's see what else we got here.
Let's try Brian.
Brian, can you hear me?
Brian, Brian, Brian, technical difficulty, maybe?
Okay, that didn't work.
This must be excruciating if you're listening to it on a podcast.
I'm sorry. All right, let's go to the Krusty Krebs.
Krusty Krebs, are you there?
Hello, Krusty. Do you have a question for me?
Apparently not. Okay.
Seems he may have walked away.
Alright, I'm in some weird mood.
Let's try somebody else.
I swear I will get a real guest on here.
Let's see if Jet Girl is there.
Jet Girl, are you there? Hello, do you have a question for me?
And your perspective on the statistical data that we get, whether it be something that's brought together as in, it's not Walthary, but whoever's gathering it in, I think in DC there's a hospital that's gathering all the data and just ones coming out from all over and how you feel, how much of it is true, and just what your overall opinion is about that.
The numbers are so non-believable in terms of the likelihood that they're actually accurate.
It's so low that we're really in a complete fog of war.
The only thing you can do is try stuff and see what happens.
And even then, as we've talked about before, you still don't know if things change because of the thing you tried.
It's a real guessing situation.
So let me just go through some of the numbers that I have more or less confidence in.
I don't believe we know how many ventilators we will need, and I don't believe we know how many are ordered, and I don't believe we know how many we have.
I don't think we have any visibility on that.
Because if we did, I think the government would say, oh, here it is.
It's just three numbers.
We need, we have, on order, three numbers.
If they knew, they'd tell us, which means they don't know.
Likewise for all the other PPE, there's no visibility.
And I think that has something to do with the fact that a variety of entities are springing up to meet the need.
And I don't know that anybody has an idea how many of them can deliver and when.
Are they real? So I think we just don't know.
Do you think the shortage is a fear or do you think it's realistically shortages?
Well, the shortages are based on what we anticipate for the most part.
There are only a few hospitals that look like they're starting to run low in real time right now.
But for 99% of the country, there's a shortage in the sense that they think they might need some down the road pretty quickly, in a week or two.
Nobody knows. So that's the thing.
Will the social separation work?
Will all the people who are coming in now who are probably getting Hydra chloroquine, are they not being hospitalized so the problem is already solved?
I mean, one of the possibilities is that the problem is already solved.
It just takes a while for us to see it run through the system.
What I mean by that is if the hydrochloroquine is at least keeping people from having to be hospitalized, and there's lots of anecdotal but not scientific evidence of that, then maybe it's already solved because it's just a matter of supply.
I've got to believe that those are coming online pretty quickly.
Probably the New York hospitals are already using it.
The people that you're hearing are dying today.
There are probably ones that were maybe a little too far gone, or maybe ones that would have died under almost any condition because they were that fragile.
But what you should see, if the meds are working, is that the death rate will stabilize even as the infection rate is climbing like crazy.
So that's what I'm predicting.
So I think we'll get through it, and I think it will be less than the worst case by far.
But we'll never know if it was because we stopped it.
It'll just drive us crazy forever.
Alright, thanks for the question. Thank you.
I'm starting to notice that people do not look like their icons.
Bella, are you there?
Do you have a question? Okay, what's your question?
Can you hear me? I can.
Okay, cool. So, I'm a I'm a recent college grad and I'm just wondering now with like how the economy is going, what kind of career field should I go into because I'm a business student and I just had an interview for a mortgage company for a sales job,
and they were really excited about me, but they are holding off on the official offer letter because they just don't know how things are going.
Well, you know, I wish I could tell you everything will be great in three months.
But there's a pretty good chance that the people who did not already have jobs, of course, will be the last ones to go back to work because people will prefer to hire the people who are already there.
But I think you just have to hold.
It's probably, you know, try to hold on through the summer and then a lot of stuff will start opening up.
It would be my guess, you know, subject to lots of uncertainty.
But that's the best I can say.
Maybe there's something you can do temporarily or part-time or something, but For the good jobs, they're coming back.
It might be three, six months, so you might have some waiting to do.
I'm sorry that you have to, that your timing was so bad.
Although I suppose if you had gotten the job a week before, you'd still have lost it, so it wouldn't have ended up about the same.
All right, well, good luck for that, and thank you for the question.
Thank you. Yeah, a lot of people getting worried.
I don't think anybody's going to starve, but it's going to get pretty tense.
All right. I don't know how to pronounce your name.
Is it Timjir? Timjir, can you hear me?
Do you have a question? Yes.
Hey, what's your question?
Thanks a lot for taking the call.
I just want to quickly say I've been a big fan, read all your books.
Thank you. And thank you for doing these periscopes.
They're the perfect combination of objective and subjective.
So that's been very useful.
I'm a software engineer.
I work up here in Montreal, in Quebec.
So we've been remote for two weeks.
Everything's shut down. But funny enough, we've been the most productive we've ever been.
So what would be your predictions on Well, you would think that people would say, hey, this work from home thing works so well that we just got to keep doing that, but there are a lot of obstacles to working at home.
One of them is that there might be other people home.
I've been working from home for 20 years or whatever, and if somebody else is home, Even though you're working, it's really hard to convince them that they shouldn't tell you about the dead animal that's in the swimming pool.
You know, it's really hard to convince somebody who's not working, who's in the same house, that that suspicious smell needs to be investigated right now because the house might blow up.
It could be gas. And, you know, when other people are in your physical vicinity, they just have a lot of emergencies.
You know, not the kind where you're going to die necessarily, but just a lot of stuff you've got to look into right away.
So, in my case, Christina is amazing about understanding that separation and stuff, so I don't have any problem with her, but a lot of people are going to have that problem.
Working at home is kind of hard if somebody else is there, especially if some of the time it's kids.
A lot of people are going to be desperate to get back to work.
There won't be that many people who said, you know, I'd like to do this every day.
A lot of people don't like their commute, but that's really different from wanting to be home all the time.
It's a good change of pace, maybe once or twice a week.
My guess is that managers tend to be tyrants, and so for their own little fiefdom, they're going to want you to come in so that you're physically there, so they have somebody to boss around and talk to.
I think humans being humans...
This may change things up to 20%, meaning maybe there'll be 20% more telecommuting after this, but I don't think it's 100%, maybe 20%.
That's my guess. All right.
Thanks for the question. Thank you.
All right. This was an interesting question.
Let's see if we can keep it going with Nils.
Nils? Nils, Nils, Nils.
Nils, do you have a question for me?
Nils, are you washing the dishes?
Get over here. Ask me a question.
Hello, this is Nils. Yes, Nils.
What's your question? Wow, I tried to call you the other day and I hit the wrong button.
This is really wonderful to talk to you.
I was going to be funny and disconnect you, but I won't do that.
It would have been hilarious. Alright, what's your question?
I have to say, Scott, I've been following you for the last two years.
I've gotten my father into you, and I have been living the golden life.
Okay, I swear I didn't do that.
He just got disconnected.
I promise you, I did not do that.
But it was kind of perfect.
All right. Bye, Nils.
We'll have to try it again. I swear to God I didn't do that.
Even after I said it would have been funny, it looks like maybe I did, but I didn't.
All right. Can you hear me?
Do you have a question? What do you think will be the triggers that turn this whole thing around and we get back to a normal life?
Well, my greatest hope is that the meds keep you out of the hospital.
And if that's true, people will take their chances with getting sick.
The other possibility is we find out that 80% or some huge number of the public already has it.
And then we'd say, oh, well, if half of us had it, we're closer to some kind of accidental herd immunity.
The other thing is, I think this is going to be maybe the black...
What is it? The underdog or the black horse or the black swan or something.
Not the black swan. But the thing you don't see coming.
But it's just sort of plodding along.
And it's that the blood serum stuff where the people who have already had it and recovered have the antibodies.
And you can isolate them in the serum and put it in another person and it gives them, we think, some immunity.
And that one's always just sort of thrown in the list.
It's like, oh, this has happened in ventilators and pills and stuff and a blood serum thing.
But the question is, is that the one that could ramp up the fastest?
Because how many recovered people do you need and how much serum do you get out of them to handle how many people and how long does it take?
Now, under a normal situation, you wouldn't want a lot of healthy people going in and doing this weird blood serum thing.
Actually, I don't even know if it's for before you get it.
To keep you from getting it, or is it to help you after you've gotten it?
I think maybe both. So we'll see.
That one just keeps plodding along without getting much attention, but the math of it and the practicality of it suggests That we could scale it up.
So maybe that'll be the thing.
Anyway, those are the three things I think are by far the most important.
And then also the cheap tests that you can do at home because if we could all cheaply and immediately test at home, we'd have no problem tomorrow.
So any one of those things could end up being the thing.
But we probably have at least four things Optimistically.
We might have at least four things that are the thing, you know, on top of the social isolation.
So I feel as though it's starting to look like a mismatch, you know, us versus the virus when it's been exactly the opposite till now.
It's still a mismatch.
So we're right on the cusp of having a real good visibility about these other tools and then we go on offense and then it gets fun.
Not for the virus. All right.
Thanks for the question, Nancy.
Thanks. Let's see.
How about Patches?
Patches, I'm adding you because your name is Patches.
Patches, do you have a question for me?
Thanks. I have two things to talk about really quickly.
They're both related to the Trump pill And one of them is basically China, which I kind of go along with your theory that they're kind of evil.
And I think they're probably not announcing the pills because it allows them to continue to increase their control of their society over there.
Well, there's actually maybe even another reason, which is one of the studies that said the pills don't work, and by the way, the French study that said that they do, people online are saying that's debunked.
I usually side with the debunkers.
If somebody says something's true and then somebody says that study's debunked, if I don't know anything about it, I usually side with the debunker.
The debunker's usually right.
Not every time. But there was one study out of Xenzhen University or something in China that indicated that the pills don't work.
But in the same article, they said, well, but these expensive drugs that are made in China, well, they really work.
You don't want to try these cheap ones that you can get anywhere, probably don't work.
What you want is these really expensive ones that you can only get in China.
So, you can't really trust anybody at this point.
Yeah, I guess the whole thing where they built the hospitals and shut the hospitals down so quick, I thought was suspicious.
Like, it just wasn't contained by locking some doors to that point, that they had something going on beyond just social distancing to...
Get rid of the hospitals.
To me, it seems obvious that they had some kind of therapeutic treatment that made a big difference, but maybe we'll never know.
Who knows? This goes back to the same issue domestically.
I'm in Gainesville, Florida, and I'm listening to our local politicians talking today, and a person called and was like, is there any treatments or pills for this?
And the local medical people were like, No, we can just put you on respirators and do this and do that.
I'm like, is this ignorance or is this more the wink-wink, we're just not going to tell people we know how to do something about this?
Everything that's happening under the hood, you know, the people who are talking individually, you know, person to person, suggests that the doctors are prescribing it and it works.
All of it. 100% of the anecdotal evidence.
Again, not scientific.
We all want a scientific study.
But 100% of the anecdotals from doctors is, yeah, we're giving it and it works.
But it's all on the down low because...
I guess my point on this is that because it's on the down low, there might be some people who don't get the word and don't treat their patients as well as they could.
And if there's people dying in other hospitals because they don't understand there is a protocol they could do because no one's really come out and said, hey, try this.
Yeah, you know, if you're talking about the patients, they definitely might not be informed.
I think at this point, there's probably no doctor in the country who's not informed on that.
Probably every doctor is informed on that.
I just feel like it, or 99%.
So it would be not a big problem.
You've got more faith in that than I do.
Maybe so. All right.
Take care. Thanks for the questions.
Let's take at least one more.
Let's see what David wants.
David's been waiting here patiently.
David, David, do you have a question for me, David?
Hi. When you were speaking about the premonition, especially, I think it was a shower faucet or the temperature gauge.
You just knew something was going to break.
This is... A question about having premonitions.
Do you remember that?
It was in the shower or something, was it not?
Yeah, I had a long story about a broken shower that I expected to break.
I have those quite frequently.
I've started to refer to them as memories of the future, people like that.
That's awesome. I was curious, I kind of have two questions.
Has this ever happened with Christina, and do you think that's why you guys...
Sort of came together. And the second question, if you don't want to answer the first one, that's fine.
But the second one is, do you think with, because I think you've influenced, I mean, thousands of people by now at getting better at understanding the system of reality of persuasion that we're in and how people use that skill.
Do you think as part of the golden age, if you will, of our psyches, people will become better at maybe getting premonitions or Well, no, I have fun talking about new-agey stuff, but fundamentally I wouldn't put money on any of it.
So I'm a deep rationalist at my core, but it's really fun to talk about the premonitions and the simulation and the affirmations and stuff.
And I don't have reasons for why some of these appear to be true or appear to work.
It could be an entirely psychological phenomenon, confirmation bias, but it doesn't make it any less fun.
Here's a thought experiment.
If I said to you, I'll tell you what, I can make you think you're having an extraordinary life, but in reality it won't be.
Will you take the deal?
And you'll never know the difference.
There'll never be a time when somebody taps you on the shoulder and says, hey, hey, you're hypnotized.
You'll never know.
You'll just have a terrible life But you'll think it was great.
Would you take the deal?
I would. That's your reality.
If you think it's great, it's great.
So at least that much I feel is objectively true.
You can change your filter on life and it effectively changes your reality.
But beyond that, anybody's guess.
Fair enough. Has Christina had any of these experiences real quick?
And I'll go, thanks. I don't know if she's ever mentioned it, so I couldn't say yes or no specifically.
I do know that when the first time I saw her, my feeling was of seeing the future.
But the thing you can never separate is whether you could have made something happen just because you wanted it.
So when I saw her, it felt like seeing the future.
But it's also something I immediately was attracted to and put some effort into making it happen.
So I don't know. Who knows?
It's all fun to talk about anyway.
All right. Thanks so much. Thanks, David.
Let's do one more. Let's take...
I'm trying to guess based on...
The weird little icons that you have.
And half the time, I can't even get your gender right.
But I think this is Jennifer.
I'm good. How are you?
Do you have a question? And in Donald Trump taking care of this bill that the Congress...
The whole country is so furious.
Is there any chance you think he would do something and pick up this free money and strip out some of that pork?
Well, you know, depending on what station you're listening to and who's talking, The bill is either a gigantic mistake in a hundred ways, or it all makes sense if you just heard why.
I've heard both versions of those, but the one that maybe really set me back was listening to the president describing how good it was.
He added a little context to each one, and I thought, Oh, it does have provisions, so they're not going to do a stock buyback.
Okay, that was one of the things.
And it seems aimed at keeping employees employed more than just helping them.
And it's a loan, so they have to pay it back.
And as he's talking about it, I kept waiting for the things that I knew I was going to hate.
And then he got to the, was it the Met?
What is it? The Kennedy Center.
So he gets to the Kennedy Center, and I'm like, okay, okay, he's just going to go off on this.
He starts saying how he likes the Kennedy Center, and he talked him down from 35 to 25, and a lot of people are employed there, and I'm like, what am I watching?
Now, in that case, I'm pretty sure that was – and I think he actually said this, that you've got to do a little negotiating.
So I think he was softening it, but it's obvious that wouldn't have been his perfect bill.
So I guess when I listened to it, the big stuff, because even if you can hate the little Kennedy Center thing, but it's not big compared to the rest of it.
And he actually had some reasons behind everything he mentioned.
And so I would say I'm, I know, 60% well informed about what's in there.
And the big stuff looked at least like it had some rationale.
You know, I don't know if anybody's smart enough to know that this is the worst idea in the world or the best.
You know, I always talk about the economy being a psychology engine.
And this is clearly a case where getting something done was more important, way more important than getting it exactly right.
Because, you know, you can always send out more money.
But if you do nothing, everything's falling apart.
So they got the big thing right.
So the big thing was do something and make it a big number.
You probably heard me talking early in the process.
People were talking about one billion and then at the high end people were saying, Or two trillion, I mean.
One trillion or two trillion. And I said from the start, it's got to be two trillion.
And the reason it's got to be two trillion is not because I'm a genius who knows what the budget needs to be to get the best result.
It's because the number's out there.
As soon as the number's out there, it's got to be the big one.
Because this is a psychology play.
You want the country to say, I didn't stop at anything.
I could have saved money, but I'm not going to save money to let one person die.
So as soon as the two trillion was out there, it had to be two trillion.
Because that's the psychology engine and how it works.
All right. Did I answer your question?
Yeah. And real quick, though, I was kind of curious.
I was wondering why Donald Trump doesn't maybe have people from the military in his news conferences.
When I watch their briefings, I feel so much better about what's going on.
I thought he did until recently, right?
Did he have one of the members?
Yeah. Yeah, I saw one guy in uniform, but I just was kind of curious what you thought about the optics of having him be a wartime president.
Yeah, you know, it's a careful balance because you don't want it to look too military because that's scary.
And some of the smartest people watching this have predicted that the military would eventually be having to be playing an active role within the country, which would be scary.
Even if they were doing everything right, and they probably would, right?
The military is very capable in so many ways.
Just the optics of it would be bad.
So it's okay to have one up there now and then, but I think I'd rather very civilian look just for the psychology of it again.
But thanks for the question. Thank you.
All right. I think I'm going to end it just about here.
Yeah, we've got the Navy medical ship that's going to sail up there pretty soon, and I don't know.
Maybe we're getting a handle on this.
I think the news that comes out in the next two days is just going to be...
So important. Because, you know, we're going to find out if the hydroxychloroquine works.
And that's going to be a real big day.
And if it doesn't, and it might not, you know, the president says that.
I say it often, even though I'm very optimistic about it.
I say it often.
Might not. Just can't tell.
But I feel positive about it.
All right. Why is ship going to California?
Well, there's one to California and one to the East Coast.
So I think they've got two of them and they put them where they expect the biggest problem.
All right. That's all I got for now.
I will see you in the morning and I hope you have a terrific night.
▲
Export Selection