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March 28, 2020 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:05:52
Episode 876 Scott Adams: It's Time For Your Nightly Simultaneous Swaddle. Get in Here!
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Time Text
Bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum Hey, Mary Rose!
Come on in here. Everybody get in here.
Andrew, it's about time.
We are about to experience the simultaneous swaddle.
This is the time of night when you find a nice soft blanket.
You wrap yourself in it.
Feel the warm embrace.
Feel your oxytocin start to spike because sometimes a baby monkey with a warm water bottle will think it's its mom and it'll be happy and well-adjusted as long as it has its water bottle.
Well, we don't have water bottles, but we have warm blankets.
This is exactly the kind of world that needs a warm blanket, if you know what I mean.
Now, I am going to take some calls in a little bit, but I thought I'd catch you up with what's happened in the Latest few hours.
So here's some good news.
Abbott Labs just got approval for a quick test that you can do in five minutes.
As little as five minutes and you can get negative results in 13 minutes.
This was a portable testing platform.
In other words, a device that weighs six and a half pounds and is about the size of a toaster.
Now, those of you who have been watching me for a while, what did I tell you at the very beginning of the pandemic?
I told you that back when 9-11 happened, the government tasked the government labs with building some technology to rapidly test blood for this situation.
They were thinking terrorist attacks, but it's the same requirement.
You need to test in the field as opposed to sending samples back to some lab.
So the 9-11 task, which the government laboratories were given, was to make it fast and portable.
So Abbott Labs has one that's fast and portable, which you've not heard of before, right?
Now I told you that I had...
Just by weird coincidence, I had visibility into that world because I watched a lot of startups pitch, hey, we got this license from the government lab.
Because once a government lab invents something that's useful for the public, unless it's military, the universities and entrepreneurs can just license it.
So it's actually a real easy process to take some technology developed by the government, non-military, And just license it and build it into your devices.
So I'd seen a number of devices that had done that, and that was like three years ago.
So I speculated that although it was not any kind of a mature business, they can build them.
So if I had to guess what happened, I think the startups probably had trouble penetrating a very established business that made a lot of money for a lot of people, probably was connected in all the political ways.
It's sort of like Uber coming in and dismantling the taxi business.
The taxi business is pretty strong, so they're going to put up a fight, as they did.
I'm guessing that the established laboratories and the way things were always done in the healthcare world It probably was hard to change until you had an emergency and then all the friction went away.
We've talked about how it's bad to have a war of any kind, be it human or be it virus you're fighting, but you can pretty much guarantee that unless the entire war is over in a week, and that doesn't seem to be the case, The humanity ends up solving a whole bunch of problems that weren't quite solvable in normal times.
You can just get stuff done in an emergency.
So it might be that the entire business of blood testing just went from this ponderous, impractical thing to something you could have in 15 minutes and you know what's wrong with you.
Think about just this one small thing.
Just this 13-minute blood test.
Presumably, it wouldn't be hard to make it a blood test for other things, not just coronavirus.
I'm just assuming that's the case.
What does it do to healthcare costs if your doctor says, well, I need a blood test, and you walk over to your medicine cabinet, and you take out a, I don't know, $25 kit, and you just test your own blood with who knows how, pinbrick or whatever. So I'm just speculating.
But there could be some immense, immense systemic improvements that just come out of this.
We've talked about what are the kids going to do when they've tasted working from home?
Do they like it? Do they hate it?
Kids probably actually want to go back to school.
But I think for a lot of people, online education will be more of a thing.
All right. So that's good news.
How fast can they scale it up?
Probably not fast enough.
But it does mean that there's a timer on the virus.
The fact that we can build a test that Abbott, you know, a big respected company, obviously, if Abbott says we can make these things, well, they can make those things.
I don't know how hard it will be to make them in volume, but it does tell you that if we're still having this problem in three months, it's pretty much solved.
I can't imagine it would take more than three months under an emergency situation to get enough to really know what the situation is.
Let's see what else we got going here.
Still seeing lots of people say that the current impact on hospitals tells you something.
It doesn't. The current impact on hospitals would tell you something if they were all full.
So you'd say, okay, you got me.
The hospitals are all overloaded.
We're all in trouble. So if that were the case, that would definitely tell you something.
Supposing it was overflowed more than any other past flu had overflown things, And I think I mentioned this morning that in 2018, there was also a hospital capacity problem in some places, just from normal flu.
But hypothetically, if we had already blown past that number into new territory, you could kind of say, okay, it looks like it was a big problem.
But it doesn't work the other way.
If we're not experiencing Any capacity problem in 99% of the hospitals, which I think is the case, actually.
They're sort of just getting ready in case something is needed.
And you've got a few hospitals who are impacted, but even they aren't running out of ventilators.
It doesn't look like it's really even that close at the moment.
What does that tell you about what the next two or three weeks or the next month looks like?
And the answer is nothing. Nothing.
If it were already a disaster, you could conclude you've got a big problem that's a disaster.
But if it's in the beginning of one, and it's a predicted disaster, and experts have their reasons, I can't judge the reasons, but they seem pretty uniformly worried, what could you tell today about hospital capacity?
Nothing. Now, one of the things you can tell is that the news and social media, to some extent, are lying to you.
So there are a few things that you can tell for sure.
So, you know, every time you see these anecdotal reports with no hospital name and no name of the doctor, I just am not buying them anymore.
I'm done with every anecdotal report with no source, no hospital, and no doctor named.
And then I did see one that looked like there was a doctor named or maybe a nurse.
I think it was a nurse. She did a video saying how bad things were.
But here's the thing.
As the creator of Dilbert, there are some things that I can tell you with great authority.
I'm an expert in this little realm of employees complaining.
And the truth is that you could have found a nurse to give a very similar rant for any hospital anywhere at any time.
You could find a nurse who will go on video And tell you everything's falling apart and management's bad and they're out of supplies.
And it's a dangerous work environment.
So the fact that a nurse went on and said, in my workplace, it's a nightmare.
You know, everything's wrong.
We're out of supplies and everything.
It could mean that.
You know, it totally could mean that.
But it also could mean nothing.
So just be aware of that.
Alright, I will take some questions, as I promised.
I just want to talk about a couple things that are hanging out there.
So, you know, Thomas Massey, I guess he had his moment, but I don't think it held anything up too much.
Maybe fact check me on that.
You know, if all Thomas Massey did was make a point, But it didn't have really any substantial difference in the timing of when the money got out, then I would say, all right, maybe even a good play, because I always compliment people for getting attention if they're politicians, because getting attention is, as I say, half of persuasion.
So if all he did was raise his profile and make a point, and now you know him as the guy who doesn't want unreasonable expenses for boondoggles, not boondoggles, but for pork or whatever, that's okay.
But if he held it up half a day, I don't know if he did, but if he did, I'd have a problem with that.
That would be way too much to make that point.
But I don't have an opinion on it because I don't know if he held it up.
Paul Graham tweeted out a couple of studies that showed that apparently we know this, in other words, this experience in other countries, and maybe in ours already, I'm not sure, But one study said that 80% of the deaths from coronavirus were very overweight.
And the speculative reason for that is that any weight in your chest area, especially if your breathing is degraded, you might have a little extra pressure just because of the construction of your chest and the extra fat cells, I guess. Now, I don't know that anybody knows that to be true, but even more generally, if you've got a weight problem, you may be less healthy than you could be if you were thinner and fit.
So here's the question that I asked, and somebody needs to do the math for me.
Let's see if somebody did.
So I asked this.
If it's true, and this is just hypothetical, if it's true that 80% of the people dying from the coronavirus Are overweight and apparently that includes the young people.
So some of the young people who are dying were not coincidentally maybe also overweight.
So that might be the big variable that people are just not talking about.
So I ask this question. If it's true that 80% of the people who die are overweight, does that put the risk for a fit person closer to seasonal flu?
Now, that doesn't mean you change your policy.
I'm not saying that if I knew the answer to that or not, I would say, oh, let's do things differently.
Not necessarily. But it's a fair question, isn't it?
And somebody needs to help me with the math.
Because I think it's straightforward, but I also think like I'm missing something dumb, so I don't want to do math in public.
But look straightforward. If 80% of them are one kind of person and you're not that, So, you know, you're in the 20%.
There is, am I doing this right?
A 4 to 1 chance, you know, that you're not going to get it or you're not going to die from it.
You might get it. And if our current estimates are hovering in that 1, 1.5% rate, which, you know, let's say it comes down to 1, that would still be 10 times What the regular flu would be, because the regular flu is 0.1.
I can't believe we all know these stats, which is amazing.
So the regular would be 0.1.
If this gets down to, let's say we test more and it comes down to 1, it's still 10 times worse, right?
10 times worse. But it's not 10 times worse if you're not overweight.
And that 4 to 1 doesn't take care of the 10 to 1.
But you start getting down into that neighborhood, right?
So, at some point, that does affect policy.
So, that's a question. We don't know if that's true yet.
I wouldn't be surprised. CNN is...
Oh, my God, they're being just horrible in their coverage.
I watched... I watched one of their pundits.
They have two people who do nothing but write a nasty article about Trump for their website basically every day and then also talk about it on the air.
And one of them, I can't remember which.
There are two of them that just do it every day.
They seem to take turns.
And one of them said, you know, Trump said this the other day and then he said this.
And I thought, uh-oh.
I guess I better listen to this.
So they play the first thing he said, and I go, okay, hold that in my mind, and now he's going to play what he said later that totally contradicts that.
And then they play it, and I say, that didn't contradict it.
I mean, you would have to think it was something else to contradict it.
Now, are you watching this?
No, it wasn't Daniel Dale.
He was on the show today.
But it's whoever does their writing.
Actually, Dale, I think, maybe has written for CNN, but he's not the one I was thinking about.
Or at least CNN runs his stuff.
I don't know if he writes for them or the New York Times.
But anyway, here's the point.
It's just mind-boggling because you watch it and they say, watch what he says now.
Now watch what he says and see how it's different.
And I listen to him and I go, nope.
No, I don't see how those are different in terms of conflicting.
They're different sentences.
Maybe one adds something that another one doesn't.
But they're not even conflicting.
And then they just act like they are and then just keep talking about it.
And I think, well, it seems you've skipped the step where you find out that they're actually different statements.
It's weird. Here's the Just a typical of what's happening, Maggie Haberman, who allegedly is an employee at the New York Times, but I don't know what she actually is, a political operative, Russian agent.
I'm not saying she's any of those things.
I'm just saying she's definitely not just a writer.
I don't know what else she is, but I feel like I can say with some confidence, without any confirmation of this, She's more than a writer.
There's somebody behind the curtain, if you know what I mean.
Her criticisms of the president tend to be the most humorous because they're basically not even trying to hide what she's doing.
Here's a quote she gives today, and she tweets about it.
A quote from the president.
I want them to be appreciative, the president says, of governors who are criticizing the federal response.
And then, of course, Greg Price tweets that and adds some context.
He goes, why don't you use the full quote, you hack?
Here's the full quote.
I want them to be appreciative.
We've done a great job.
And I'm not talking about me.
I'm talking about Mike Pence, the task force.
I'm talking about FEMA, the Army Corps of Engineers.
Completely different context.
He's asking people who admit he's done a good job to be appreciative of the people doing the work.
Maggie Haberman writes it like he was talking about.
He wants credit for it.
It's a completely different meaning.
But, of course, how many people are going to read her tweet and then also see Greg Price's tweet where he corrects her?
Not many. So it's a good strategy.
Mike Cernovich continuing to show why he's the most valuable player in this Certainly in the social media, outside of the task force, I would say most valuable player in the public, comes up with this bit of information, has a number of sources.
Did you know this?
And boy, are you going to be mad if you didn't know it.
Because I was.
Here's a fact. Northern Italy, this is from Mike Cernovich, Northern Italy for over a decade has had unusually high death rates from flu.
What? What?
Send the kids away.
Send the kids away.
Turn down your sound.
I'm giving you fair warning.
There will be cursing.
I don't like to overuse the cursing.
But every now and then there's an opportunity where there's just only one word that fits.
So you've been warned.
Turn down your sound.
Let me do this again with the proper reaction.
Northern Italy, for over a decade, has had unusually high death rates from flu.
What the fuck?
Are you fucking kidding me?
Seriously. I found this out today?
Today? And I had to get it from Mike Cernovich on the internet, not the New York Times, not the fucking Washington Post.
Are you fucking kidding me?
Now, I assume it's true, because he points to several studies, and I don't see anybody disagreeing.
Maybe if I check later, you'll see there's always somebody who disagrees with everything.
But for 10 years, from 2004 to 2014, They looked at the influenza in Italy and it was way high compared to other people.
Don't you think that would have mattered?
Don't you think that mattered?
To how much fear and panic and hoarding and everything else that happened?
I tell you, if Sertowicz doesn't get some kind of like, what's the Medal of Freedom or something?
What is the highest honor you can give a civilian?
I'll say it right now. Based on what he's done during the crisis to keep us informed, etc., I'd say it's a Medal of Freedom, whatever that top honor is.
I don't see it happening, but that's my opinion.
Elon Musk is saying it would be great to combine blood donations because a lot of people are being asked for blood donations.
With a COVID antibody test.
So if somebody's just going in to give blood, while they're there and we got their blood, why not check it for antibodies?
Because first of all, that might tell you a little bit more about the amount of infection we haven't found yet, but also they could become the sources for the serum antibody stuff that apparently the government's starting to get pretty serious about.
I saw that Eric Weinstein was making the same observation I was making on Twitter, that the World Health Organization, I told you about this, they're saying that masks are no good for, you know, there's no point in having a mask unless you have symptoms.
And the problem is, literally, every person who has a lick of common sense in the brain, but no medical training, But anybody who actually has a functioning brain sits here and sees the experts of the World Health Organization.
And every one of us hears that, that masks probably won't hurt you in all cases.
And we all just say, well, that's not right.
It's sort of obviously not right.
If the whole point is stuff that's coming out of your mouth is infecting people and you don't know who has it and who doesn't, And therefore, an uninfected-looking person could be just as dangerous of them more than one who obviously has symptoms.
Doesn't it kind of follow that the thing that stops things from projecting out of your mouth would make a little bit of difference?
So, watching these large scientific healthcare-respected organizations lie to us in a way that is so obvious I feel like they don't even respect us.
Doesn't it feel like that?
Doesn't it feel like the World Health Organization just said, they're never going to figure this out.
We'll just tell them that a heavy piece of cloth over your mouth doesn't make any difference to what's coming out of your mouth.
We'll tell them that.
Oh my God! They must think we're so stupid.
All right. I knew this was going to happen.
Somebody took a Joe Biden film and they changed it so it looks like he's putting on a Make America Great Again hat.
The funny thing is that it really is good.
It's not quite deepfake quality, but it's good.
Speaking of deepfake, now there's a company that can make Real moving deep fakes that look like they're talking and blinking and all that from one photograph and they showed it.
It's just mind-blowing.
They can take a photograph of even a painting and turn it into something that looks like a real person talking based on the photograph.
Just one. You don't even need a photograph of the side and the back.
It just figures it out.
It just figures out the rest, unless you turn to the side, even if there's never been a picture like that.
Pretty amazing. When I joke, but not really, that Joe Biden already could be a deep fake, that's actually real.
Now, I don't think he's actually a deep fake.
It's just fun to say that.
Maybe I can convince somebody that I mean it, because it would be funny.
But he could be.
We've reached that That point in civilization where I don't think he's a deep fake, but you have to admit, he could be.
It would look just as good.
This is funny. I tweeted the other day about the toilet paper supply chain, and I was estimating that probably from the first major shortage point where shelves became empty, probably we'd have to wait about a month to get it back.
I got tweeted at with some puns today from Georgia Pacific, who apparently is a big American producer of toilet paper, and they made some funny bathroom humor puns, but they were just tweeting back at me to tell me that they're on it, and they're working 24 hours a day, and it's, quote, what did they say?
At this point, we're on a roll.
It's a toilet paper company, and they're on a roll.
With TP production and our operations haven't experienced material shortages.
That was a specific question I asked on Twitter.
Didn't you want to know, admit it, didn't you want to know, is there more toilet paper coming?
Or are we getting it all processed in another country and maybe we can't get it?
I mean seriously, didn't you wonder?
Well now we have the answer.
So this is the actual toilet paper company, American company, And no material shortages.
Doesn't that make you feel better?
This is just one of the things that Twitter can do for you.
The government didn't tell me this, right?
Where was my task force saying, oh, and by the way, I know this isn't the biggest medical problem, but I know you're concerned.
There are lots of domestic toilet paper makers.
They're running overnight.
They don't have any material shortages.
Those shelves will be restocked in, you know, we don't know exactly, but we think a couple of weeks.
Wouldn't you have liked to hear that from your government?
But you didn't. You know, I had to tell you because I tweeted it and then they made bad puns back at me, but they answered the question.
So Ian Hilgar-Marthesis, who has been doing some data visualization for the coronavirus stuff, And also has been promoting something that he knows a lot about, which is the use of convalescent plasma to treat critically ill people.
And it looks like the task force and the government have now committed to pushing for that.
Now, the question asked is, did Ian's work?
Because I know it was, you know, I personally transmitted it up the line, so I know it got to the right years.
Did it make a difference?
We'll never know. We'll never know because there's a good likelihood that people have the same ideas in different places.
But I do think in terms of the public managing its government, so convalescent plasma, what that is, somebody who's recovered, they take their blood, they process it and just take the good stuff out.
Which includes the antibodies that they got for fighting the virus.
Then you can put them in people and then those people will have some antibodies to fight the virus.
So the government's actually pursuing that.
And I was just going to say that you never know if it made a difference.
You know, that Ian gave this great visualization showing how many bodies you'd need in each state.
I think he's updating it.
So you can see the practicality of it.
Because it's one thing to say, hey, We could take blood from these people and put it in these people, but you kind of need to know how much blood there is and where it is.
Ian did that calculation.
Of course, everything in this world is a little bit approximate, but he put on a state basis how many people you need recovered to handle all the people who need it, I think, who are already infected and known.
So you got that.
All right.
We saw some revision of the British model, and people said, hey, that British guy, the imperial model, I guess it was called, hey, that British guy said millions of people were going to die, and now he's revised his estimates, and so I guess he was all wrong and now he's revised his estimates, and so I guess he right? No.
No. Because before, he said we could lose millions of people if we don't act aggressively to mitigate it.
And then he observed countries acting aggressively to mitigate.
And then he went back to his model and said, okay, I'll put the mitigation in there, because now that's not guessing.
We can actually see they're doing it.
And that, of course, way lowered the numbers.
So people are criticizing this guy for being wrong.
When, at least if you listen to the way he described it, he was not proved wrong yet.
You know, I suppose he could be.
But at this point, all he said is it would be this bad if we don't do anything, but we did do something, so we lowered his numbers.
Is that a mistake?
I mean, if that's a mistake, who knows?
Now let me make a general comment about the way we've been treating each other.
Human beings, that is.
On one hand, I'm seeing tremendous bipartisan working together.
At the working level, when somebody needs to get a hold of somebody, needs something done, I feel as though, not counting Congress, Congress is a train wreck, but with just humans, that people really just sort of drop the politics to get stuff done because it's an emergency.
It's been very uplifting for Those of us who are in the battle, which is everybody basically, makes you feel good.
But here's the thing.
There's one thing that we're seeing more and more of that I can't abide.
We're in the middle of a battle, be you Democrat, be you Independent or Republican or not aligned.
No matter who you are, are you on the same team against the virus right now?
You are, right?
At the moment, we're all fighting a common enemy, so all we humans should be on the same side.
But I'm watching pundit after pundit decide that this would be the time, the middle of the battle.
We're in the middle of the battle, and pundits have decided that their contribution to the battle is to start bayonetting people who are on their team.
I'm watching article after article where somebody's saying, well, what about person X who wrote this article and they didn't seem, according to today's perspective and all we know today, don't they look dumb in the past?
That's bayonetting your own team.
Let me say it again.
We're not at the end of the battle.
At the end of the battle, everybody gets to do an autopsy and an audit and who did what right, what can you learn.
That's all good. In the middle of the battle, you don't bane at your own wounded soldiers, and that's what I'm watching happening.
I'm watching people who, completely good faith, had an opinion in the past that, by the way, a lot of other people held.
Some people had other opinions.
Somebody was going to be right, but here's the thing.
If you think that we can look at it from today's perspective, and first of all, know even who was right and who was wrong, because you can't, we only know what we do.
We don't know how it worked out for the other plan that we didn't do.
So the first thing I'm going to say is if you already think that you can look in the past and know who was right and wrong, you're a fucking idiot.
Sorry. You're an idiot.
You're unproductive.
You're borderline traitorous because you're bayonetting your own team in the middle of the battle.
You could wait. And worse, you don't know what the fuck you're talking about.
Because if you think you can tell who made a right decision about this and the fog of battle when advisers were advising different things and countries were lying to us and we had no information that was actionable.
We had suspicions, we had fears, we had experts.
But we had other experts.
We had people saying the economy is important too.
Do you think it is fair to say, given all that fog that was, that based on today, we're a little bit smarter, but we still don't know what was the right decision, the exact right day to do anything.
It's just completely illegitimate.
Now, normally I would just say, well, that's politics.
Eh, it's just politics. You know, this side criticizes this side, this guy, but this isn't politics.
Again, we're in the middle of a battle.
You should reject and give no oxygen to everybody who's looking backwards in the middle of a battle.
Later, it's fine. So, you know, I've been struggling with this myself because, as you know, as I remind you often, I believe I was the first person who said the words, close the airport, close the flights from China.
That was January 24th or something.
And so I'm trying to resist the temptation to pat myself on the back.
And say, well, look at all you people.
I was there early.
But it's just not legitimate.
Because here's the thing.
There were people saying it was a big deal and people saying it wasn't.
Nobody knew, right?
Somebody was going to be right because it was a binary thing.
It was either terrible or it wasn't.
And there were people on both sides.
The fact that some of those people turned out to be right, based on our current understanding of things, which can still change, that tells you nothing.
Nothing. Somebody was going to be right, no matter what.
Were all the smart people on the same side?
No. Were all the well-informed people on the same side from the start?
No. Were all the experts on the same side?
I don't think so. I mean, except that I think everybody's alarm started smallish and grew, so in that sense, the experts were aligned because they got more alarmed no matter where they started as they went.
But here's the thing.
If you wanted to criticize me, all you'd have to do is say, you know, could have been sooner.
Would that be true? Yeah, yeah.
Could have been sooner. So if anybody says to me, yeah, yeah, stop bragging, Scott.
You said the words before anybody said those words, except maybe Jack Basabek, who was talking about closing borders before I did.
But I can't take credit for that, because it is objectively true I could have said it sooner.
And it's also objectively true that everything we do right and everything we have done right should have been done sooner.
So if that's the quality of criticism you're getting, these are idiots.
These are people who don't understand how the real world works.
They're people who have probably never made any kind of executive decision in which there are lots of unknowns.
Let me tell you what is right and wrong and the only thing you can know.
The only thing you can be sure of is that we had to act.
That's the only thing you should be sure of.
We had to act, because not acting would be certainly the mistake.
But acting in any way that was a good guess, and then subject to modification, because remember, we can always, at any moment, if keeping everything closed is the wrong decision, So, when you're in a situation in which there's no good, reliable information, there are experts on both sides, and even the experts can't talk, because the economists know the economy, but they don't know medicine or viruses.
The doctors and experts know viruses, but they don't know the economy.
So, if those two people have different opinions, what is your leader supposed to do?
Well, thank goodness.
We might have the world's best person to be in this position.
A person who operates successfully and over decades on some kind of instinct which I believe is pattern recognition.
Let me give you my theory on what instinct and gut instincts are.
I don't believe in magic and I don't believe there's something called instinct or gut, whatever you call it.
Somehow you just magically know without facts.
I don't think that's the thing. Here's what I think is the thing.
Pattern recognition. And I don't know that we always know what patterns we're seeing.
So if you take somebody like a Trump who has probably been involved in untold decisions in which he had to make the decision And you just couldn't tell.
You just couldn't tell who was lying to you.
People were disagreeing.
It was all unknowns.
How many times has Donald frickin' Trump been in that exact situation, not even counting being president?
You know, think of all the things, all the practices he's had at this, at being president, where you don't have enough, you know, all the Afghanistan stuff.
I mean, basically everything.
You know, North Korea. It's all sort of...
Instinct, which I don't think is instinct.
I think it's people who have been around enough that there's just some pattern recognition that even maybe they can't put words to.
But you know how you can smell things before you see them?
I don't think that's magic or ESP. I think you're seeing a pattern, but you can't put words to it yet.
Anyway, if you had to pick one person in the United States that you would trust most, To not, let's say, to properly put the experts' opinions where they belong in the decision making and to make a decision that is not based on fear of anything.
Really, I think it's entirely fair to say that, and I say this about any president, by the time somebody becomes president, no matter how selfish they were before they got the job, I think the office just changes you immediately.
Now, part of it is we're watching so carefully, but there's no scenario in which the president does a bad job for the country and somehow it's good for the president.
That's not a thing. The president has to serve the people to serve himself.
Our system is designed that way.
I want a president who's not afraid of anything.
Have you ever met a president who was more comfortable in scary situations to the point where other people are scared that he should be more scared?
The thing I would worry most about is that he would make a decision about which way to go with going back to work or whatever.
That the decision would be based on politics or that it would be based on any kind of a fear he had for himself or for the country.
That would be the worst influence to put on a decision.
Now don't you trust that in this situation He's a strong personality.
He's not going to be judged by fear.
He will discount the experts, but not without not listening to them.
He will discount them because they might disagree.
What are you going to do? I think he's going to make an executive decision.
Here's what I want to say ahead of time.
It won't be wrong, no matter what it is.
If that doesn't make sense, then I haven't yet made my point.
That whatever Trump decides about the phase to go back to work, it won't be wrong no matter what it is.
And this is my philosophical take on it.
Because there's nobody who knows in advance what the right answer is.
And if you don't know what the right answer is, that means that by default, the right answer is to do something that you can adjust if it's not right.
So what you should expect is that the President will do something.
We don't know the exact details.
But if he does something that has the quality that we can measure it and pull it back and adjust it and tweak it, that's always the right decision.
Now, if he lets people go back to work early and some viruses break out and the experts say, I told you, I told you this would happen, he's still right.
Because we couldn't know until we try it and we can still pull back.
Now, you know, if we let it run too far and the viruses took over everywhere, then that would clearly be a mistake.
But on day one, it can't be a mistake because it's action, where action is required in a field of unknowns, and it's the action that will tell you if it's a good idea.
If you don't do it, You're not really going to know.
I said on Twitter, this might be the hardest decision any president has made in this country since the Civil War.
Some people say, well, what about the atomic bomb?
No. No, I don't think so.
I think if I were to rank them, because historians say World War II probably would have ended without the bomb.
Etc. And, you know, the bomb was less of an unknown, meaning that the scientists said, hey, Harry Truman, if you drop this bomb, that city's going to kind of disappear.
You know, you didn't know the details, but you knew that much.
So that's way more information than Trump has.
Trump doesn't have any kind of information that's like that.
Drop a bomb, city disappears.
Don't drop a bomb, You know, war drags on, but we probably know where it goes.
Those are knowns, or as close as you can get to a known in a war situation, which is imperfect at best.
But Trump doesn't have any of that.
He is flying absolutely blind as the bat somebody ate to cause this whole thing.
All right, I told you I'd take some questions, so I better do that.
Let's see who's got some questions for me.
I think Jesus looks like he has a question.
Jesus disappeared.
Okay. I don't know if that's because people get shy when I actually pick them or there's a technical difficulty.
We do not know.
Hey. Community Laughs?
Let's see if you're there.
Community Laughs? Can you hear me?
Do you have a question? Okay.
That would be a no. I think the people who probably signed on a while ago.
I'm going to take somebody who just signed on because that's a better bet.
Oh, that one disappeared too.
What's going on here? Maybe it's the technology.
Maybe it's not me. Let's try Amber.
Amber. Amber, do you have a question for me, Amber?
Well, I've been thinking about the – I have friends that have been texting each other and saying, you know, hey, I think I already had the corona, you know.
And I was just wondering if you had done any kind of like a little informal poll on your – Well, yeah.
Do you think they had it?
You know, that kind of thing. What kind of symptoms?
Thanks. Yeah, you know, I was planning to do that, and I can't remember if I mentioned it and then I didn't bother to look at the responses – Let me give you the story that makes me laugh when I think about this.
When Elizabeth Warren did her DNA test and found out that she didn't have much of any Native American, everybody said, how could you not know that?
Surely your family must be so dumb that they didn't know that.
I had always been told, and my family had, that we also had a substantial part of Native American in us.
And I believe that my entire life until I took my 23andMe test and found out, none.
And when I said that in public, a lot of people, a lot of people messaged me and said the exact same thing happened to me.
We'd been told all our lives that we were Native American and we got zero.
It was just made up.
So to that analogy, which is not trying to win an argument, just it's a fun story.
I, like just about every single person I've talked to, believe that I had some weird inexplicable illness in January that wasn't like anything else.
And, you know, that's my story, too.
I spent two weeks so weak and in pain, I could barely walk up to my stairs.
And I thought I was, you know, I thought I was, I didn't know what the hell was wrong.
I mean, I thought maybe I need hospitalization or something.
But I didn't have a cough.
But I did have lots of nasal congestion, like way more than normal.
So I just wrote it off to some seasonal whatever, and I thought maybe some meds I'd taken had some effect.
So we've stalled enough cleverly to look at the comments.
Look at them coming in. My daughter did too, me too.
Oh, and then also people agreeing that they thought they were Native American and they're not.
Let me just read them as they go by.
Okay, go ahead. Say your comment.
Oh no, I was going to say a couple things.
One, with the Native American, I think that they kind of have rules about keeping their DNA separate.
They don't let the DNA go out to these companies.
They keep it private.
And then if you think you have it, I think they compare it to Some other gene to determine that.
But even if you are part Native American, you have to be approved by the tribes.
Elizabeth Warren taught us that.
I didn't know that. That was actually interesting to learn.
That the tribes can set their own rules about whether you're in or not.
I don't know how I feel about that, but that's just the way it is.
All right, thanks so much.
Keep watching the comments, all the people.
Yeah, I mean, we got really sick on my end, but that was my second point.
It's like we had to...
I'm not one to get sick, but it took like three weeks and I had friends.
I had like five real close friends that all got sick for about three weeks and took them down.
So I don't know. I think we're all saying, yeah, we have it.
But there is a test that is coming out that can tell if you have those antibodies in your...
And I think that's their next phase to try and...
Yes. When we have that test and it's widespread and its availability, that's the end of it.
Alright, thanks for that question.
That was a good one.
I'm glad we did that.
If you saw the comments, just basically everybody believes they were a Native American or they had the coronavirus already.
If I had to put a guess on how many of us are right, It would be a pretty small number.
Hello caller, can you hear me?
Do you have a question? Renee?
Renee, can you hear me? Hi, what's your question?
I was actually agreeing that I thought that I had it about a month and a half ago.
I can hear you, can you hear me?
Yes, I can hear you. So yeah, it looks like in the comments that's the most common thing in the world.
So did you have chest tightness and a dry cough?
I had chest tightness.
And did you have a cough?
I had wheezing. Wheezing, yeah.
I mean, I'm not a doctor, but the list of things which could potentially be a sign of it It seemed to keep growing.
I was watching it, and I kept thinking, wait, if they keep adding things to this list, sooner or later they're going to get something that's me.
I'm like, okay, don't have a dry cough.
All right, good. Don't have aches.
Don't have a fever. I'm good.
I'm good. Then they get to diarrhea, and I'm like, ugh!
Too much information, but I was on some antibiotics.
They have that side effect. I think it was just the antibiotics.
The trouble is that we're all hypochondriacs.
If you can go through the next three weeks without having a single one of those telltale signs of coronavirus, good luck.
Because, you know, we're all going to have an ache, a fever, a chill, a cough, a wheezing, something.
I think every one of us is going to have that.
All right, thanks for the call. Thank you.
All right, let's see.
Who else is on here?
Jason looks like he's full of questions.
Jason, can you hear me?
Jason, do you have a question for me?
Jason, can you hear me?
Jason does not have a question.
Oh, there you are. Do you have a question for me?
Yeah. So, I am in the process of opening a restaurant, and I was just wondering, what's your take on the...
Hmm.
Well... First of all, I'm sorry.
I owned two restaurants and owned as a past tense, so you can figure out how well that went.
I know the life and I know the risk and I know how much work it is.
Genuinely, you have my empathy that your bad luck and the timing is freaking tragic for millions of people.
Let me give you my best chance at a positive on this.
People seem to be really ready to change their life.
I mean, a lot of people just really change their life a lot because of the new way of living.
So here's the positives.
I heard somebody say that a lot of restaurants will go out of business, but that a lot of restaurants will start up basically taking over the assets of the failed business.
Now, I know that that's a thing because when my restaurant failed, It was easier just to keep stuff in there and say, all right, you can take over the rent.
Basically, the half a million that I put into it didn't need to be spent by the person who took it over after it didn't work for me anymore.
You should have a whole bunch of people, if they're smart, they formed incorporated things or maybe the government will give them some protection against some of this stuff.
We'll see. Probably a lot of people are going to have temporary woes That will create opportunities for people to get cheap restaurants that they didn't deserve because they're not the ones who invested the money in it and built it out.
So the first thing is you'll see people coming in and filling out those spaces.
The second thing is I think people like me who did not lose my base income, it'll probably go down by a third and stay there forever because newspapers are just going to go out of business after this.
We're going to spend a lot of money at restaurants.
I think people are going to do it for patriotic reasons, for local reasons.
I don't want to say there's pent-up spending, but I think people will make conscious decisions to help their fellow travelers, especially in their local community.
Because it feels right. What's wrong with going out to dinner?
It might take a while before we feel safe to do it.
I think you'll see a massive restructuring of more takeout and DoorDash stuff, of course.
Let me make a specific suggestion.
Given that cities and towns are now more flexible, all the governments are being flexible because it's an emergency, suppose you're a new restaurant owner and you say this, look, I know I can't pack my people in my little area, but it's summer.
If I put some heaters out and I put a certain distance and I put them outdoors, will you let me open up?
So I'll do takeout, I'll do DoorDash, and I'll have a server with a face mask, You know, delivering food to tables, and it'll be just, you know, drop off and leave, no conversation, and, you know, just a good, nice space around you.
Now, the problem with that is that your local town will say, oh, no, you know, you can't put tables, like, outdoors, just in front of your sidewalk, because that's the sidewalk.
You know, you can't put them, like, you know, moving into the street, but I'll bet you can.
I'll bet if you said to my town in Main Street, there are a number of restaurants and businesses in Main Street, I'll bet, and actually I should suggest this, I'll bet if you said to the town board, the city, the Chamber of Commerce, whoever you need to appeal to, I'll bet if you said, here's the deal, every one of these restaurants is dead unless you do this.
You let them use the entire street and you close it to traffic.
Because in my town, you could easily go around.
It wouldn't be any big deal to close the main restaurant street and say, now it's just a walking street.
Everybody will have plenty of room because it's not a real crowded city or anything.
And every restaurant can just use the street.
Just put out your tables and keep it safe.
Now, would it work?
Would people go to those restaurants?
I mean, not now, but when we get a little bit looser, would they go?
The only point I'm trying to make is that you can't ever factor in the degree of ingenuity and you can't factor in the degree of flexibility that you have in an emergency and you can't factor in the goodwill of the people who didn't lose a fortune during this who just want to support you.
That's the best argument I can make.
That things will be alright in the long run, but man, it's just going to be tough, and you have all my sympathy.
I'm sorry that happened to you.
Well, it's alright, and thank you for that, and I was actually going to ask if you had a recommendation for getting out in front of this, and you already answered that, so thank you very much.
Yeah, if your local restaurant is somewhere where it's even possible to close the block, just put it out there.
See what somebody says. They can always say yes.
They can always say no. I mean, Nothing lost.
Thanks for the question. Thank you.
The restaurant and the travel business, I try not to think about it because that's where 90% of the economic pain is going to be right there.
It looks like Community Laughs is trying again.
Let's see if we can get you on here.
Community Laughs, can you hear me?
Do you have a question? Hello?
Oops, looks like it's percolating.
We lost our connection.
Looks like it's a weak connection on the other side.
Oh, maybe. Nope.
Let's try somebody else who has a better phone connection.
Let's try...
C-Pand?
C-Pand? Can you hear me?
Do you have a question? It feels like forever now, but it was about the older generation taking one for the team and stepping out and saying, you know, younger generation, you guys go, we'll take the pain.
I'm a younger guy myself, and I think we have a very different perspective on the older generation.
Let's take, for example, Prop 13.
Older generation has their houses.
Younger generation is the one suffering, paying all these things.
The burden is being shifted to the younger generation that are just buying houses now.
You see the things like the boomer remover meme, right?
Right. Or the young kids, like, out parting.
It's like, we love grandma, we love dad, we love our aunts.
But, like, I think there's some sense of we don't really care if this affects the boomers because we feel like they're the ones that destroy the planet, they're the ones...
I have a very different perspective from you.
Do you really think that the boomers would be the ones to say like, hey, we've screwed over the younger generation all these ways, but we're going to take one for the team in this case?
I just don't see it personally.
Well, first of all, let me clarify my opinion because I think you slightly misstated it.
Oh, okay. So my opinion is that the older generation might in fact be willing To go out and take a risk, but it's stupid because it's bad for all of us.
In other words, if they start going out and dying at high numbers, I can't get my operation.
So we're all screwed.
So I said the opposite of that they should take the risk.
I said they should stay home. Yeah, but staying home and not getting to live their lives because we're all kind of allowed.
Well, for a while. Yeah, for a while, the boomers are going to stay in when the younger get to go out.
I think that's guaranteed. Now, to your point, I actually appreciate the honesty in that comment.
Even when ideas are unpleasant, the honesty of it somehow helps it.
I think you're absolutely right, and I'm seeing it everywhere, that the younger generation is saying explicitly Well, maybe if you hadn't toasted the planet with your climate change and stole all the money and had a nice life and left us basically no way to even rent an apartment and have a decent life,
maybe if you hadn't done all those things and started wars that I don't care about and ruined the environment, maybe if you had not massively effed up the entire planet, I would have a little bit of sympathy for you.
Now, as a human being, Totally get it.
I totally get it.
And I would be actually amazed if that isn't a widespread thought.
But I'm not sure we, you know, it's not a productive one.
It's not a good one. It's not a mature one.
It's one that, you know, every 25-year-old who had this thought and said, well, I got my reasons.
Someday they'll be 55, and they're going to look back and say, you know...
Based on my current perspective, I might not have said or thought what I thought back then.
It was sort of a younger person's privilege to have dumb ideas, if I can say it that way.
That's my feeling. That's my reading of the zeitgeist for my generation that I'm a little more tapped into.
I think you're completely right, but how do you think your generation will feel when the experts who are mostly my generation and older say, we're going to let you guys go back You're lower risk, but you might die, but we're going to let you go back.
How do you feel about that? I don't think they'll see us being led.
I think their feeling is we're going to do this one way or the other.
Oh, that's true. The one thing that you can guarantee is that there's some kind of a natural timer on how long people will put up with this.
I've speculated it's somewhere around the six-week point.
That's where patients will just start to fall apart because it's the sort of thing where some people will always be cheaters and want to beat the system, but maybe that's in the 5 or 10 percent of the country.
But as soon as that 5 or 10 becomes, I'll just say 20, The whole system falls apart.
Because if 20% are cheating, the other 80% say, well, you know, might as well.
So yeah, I'd say six weeks is the longest we can go.
But if we go six weeks, and then let's say the experts say, you know, based on what we know today, we didn't know this before, but what we know today, two more weeks is just going to be a huge, huge difference in the ultimate outcome.
I think people would listen to it.
Yeah, you'd have a chance.
I appreciate your honesty and thanks for the call.
It's always so, it's actually surprising when you hear somebody who will go in public and say something that's just completely honest like that.
I really enjoyed that call even though like the whole time It was triggering me like crazy.
What I wanted to say was some version of, I was born poor, worked for everything I had.
Can I keep it?
Can I keep it?
None of those decisions were mine.
I didn't pollute anything.
I heard Paul McCartney say this 20 years ago.
Somebody was interviewing him and saying, Paul McCartney, you've made whatever it was, a billion dollars, and there are poor people all over the world, and they don't think that's very fair.
You've got a billion dollars.
What do you say to that?
And Paul McCartney looked at the interview, and I'm paraphrasing, it was a long time ago, and said some version of this.
Well, I worked for it.
I didn't hurt anybody.
Can I keep it? I don't know.
That one answer to a That one question made me want to meet Paul McCartney more than any living human being.
I just wanted to stand in the same room with the guy who said that.
Do you feel that?
Or is that just me? There's just something so perfect about that answer that made you understand why the Beatles were so good because it wasn't just when he was writing songs that he was brilliant in that sort of In a special way, even in an interview with just a very simple answer, it was kind of magical. It was kind of brilliant.
Somebody says, it's just me.
Well, you know, there's no musical act that everybody likes either, but I always like that.
All right. Be good to your people who you think made a mistake in the past.
You can't tell. If somebody acted, that was right.
And be good to each other.
Things are going to get better.
Pretty soon. Oh, by the way, did you see that the death rate in New York City went down a little bit?
Who predicted that would happen this week?
I did. That only went down like two people, so it basically flattened.
But it didn't go up while the infection rate was up, just as I predicted.
Things are heading in the right direction.
You'll all be fine eventually.
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