My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a Content: Expertly managing the psychology of the American people Immunity certificates in Germany Homemade masks --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scott-adams00/support
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| Hey everybody, come on in. | |
| It's the morning and it's time for the simultaneous sip and coffee with Scott Adams. | |
| Hey Omar, good to see you. | |
| Come on in here, Mary. | |
| Always a pleasure. Darren, first day on Terrascope and you have the good luck to come here Darren Fox, you are the luckiest periscope watcher of all time. | |
| Good morning, good morning. You know, if you'd like to participate in a simultaneous sip, and you know you do, you do want to, well, all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass of tank or chalice or stein, a canteen jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind, to fill it with your favorite liquid. | |
| I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine of the day, the thing that makes everything better, including the pandemic. | |
| It's called the simultaneous hip, and it happens now. | |
| Go. Well, many of you saw my Periscope last night, and you know that I thought that the President's most recent press conference on the coronavirus is the best he's ever done, | |
| in my opinion. I think he had the best tone, following the experts, showed command of the topic, showed confidence, showed decisive leadership. | |
| I thought it was the whole package. | |
| So I would say it's his best performance yet. | |
| But does that make everybody happy? | |
| No, it does not. Because the big news, of course, is that the president moved his aspirational target... | |
| From the middle of April to the end of April. | |
| A few more weeks, and I don't think it'll be done then, necessarily. | |
| It might be a few weeks after that. | |
| I would say this was exactly the right way to play it, even though it looks like a mistake. | |
| Here's why. If you could design in advance the best way that the President could have played it, if you had perfect hindsight, How would you advise him to play it? | |
| And this is with knowledge of how things turned out. | |
| Now, if you had knowledge of the way things turned out, you probably would have played it exactly the way he did, which is to set a date that wasn't so far in the future that people would panic, and it wasn't so far in the future that people would start to hoard again. | |
| So people wouldn't say, my God, it's going to be weeks and months. | |
| I better re-hoard. | |
| So instead, he says, you know, We're going to make the decisions based on the data. | |
| So he always left himself the opening that things could stop changing a minute. | |
| He always said that as clearly as possible. | |
| But aspirational, we're going to shoot for this date. | |
| Now that date was soon enough in the future that it probably did not cause anybody to do much of any extra hoarding. | |
| And also felt, huh, I could handle that. | |
| I could do a few more weeks and see how it looks. | |
| I could probably handle that. And then as we get a little closer to that deadline, the president has looked at the data, listened to the experts, and extended it. | |
| That's probably the very best way this could have played out. | |
| Because if he had originally said April 30th, it would have felt really hard. | |
| But by saying, you know, the cat's on the roof, if you know what I mean, that's an old joke, you know, sort of easing us into it, I think that psychologically we were more primed to say, okay, a few extra weeks. | |
| I've gone this far. | |
| It hasn't been the worst thing in the world. | |
| I can go a few extra weeks. | |
| So even if he had had perfect hindsight and had known from the start exactly when the new dates were going to be, it probably was better to have an interim date and then just ease us into it. | |
| Because managing our psychology is... | |
| One of the biggest parts of his job right now. | |
| But here's my favorite part. | |
| The president in pivoting from the guy who wants to open up maybe too early and go back to work maybe a little bit before the experts say, changed overnight into the guy who really is going to lock us down for quite a few weeks. | |
| So if you're CNN, What do you criticize? | |
| Because you've got to be on the opposite side. | |
| How do you get on the opposite side of somebody who has had two opposing opinions in 24 hours? | |
| How do you do it? | |
| So if you've watched the president's enemy press, either CNN or MSNBC, they're a little left-footed today because they don't quite know what to do, especially since the way the president pivoted Was publicly and obviously, in response to his best experts, giving him their best advice. | |
| What are you going to do? | |
| I mean, seriously, you're his critic, and he just took the advice of the experts, the very thing that people are most concerned about this president, and he did the opposite. | |
| What are you going to do? | |
| So just watch for this for purely entertainment purposes. | |
| Watch how desperately the anti-Trump press is just searching for something that he did wrong. | |
| Now, of course, we would expect that the criticism would start landing on the should have taken it seriously sooner, we should have been more prepared sooner. | |
| Now, of course, almost every day I'm going to tell you that's the loser's criticism because everything should have been done sooner. | |
| Just all the time. | |
| Everything in life, on every situation, on every topic, from the beginning of time to the end of time. | |
| If there's something that was good to do, probably you should have done it sooner. | |
| It's just universally true. | |
| But in this case, the president has a stronger defense. | |
| And you'll have to fact check this for me, but I was just reading an opinion piece in the Washington Post. | |
| I forget who wrote it. And the author was saying that no other country prepared better. | |
| In other words, we didn't do as much as we could have to prepare for how bad it is, but neither did Canada. | |
| Neither did anybody else. | |
| So if you're going to judge Trump harshly for, I don't know, what, not listening to the experts early on, not preparing, you're going to have to explain why all How many countries are there in the world? | |
| Several hundred. You're going to have to explain how hundreds of other countries acted no differently. | |
| Everybody knew, but nobody did anything? | |
| Or was it only dumb old Trump who was the only one who didn't do anything? | |
| No, that didn't happen. Turns out everybody who had the same information as Trump, which was really the leaders of all the big countries, they all had the same... | |
| Basically, preparation, which is not well enough. | |
| Now, somebody's saying South Korea and Singapore prepared the best. | |
| I don't know if it was preparation or was it response. | |
| They may have responded the best. | |
| And I'm going to... | |
| You know, I hate to go against... | |
| The experts. No, I don't. | |
| I love to go against the experts. | |
| It's just a dangerous and dumb thing to do most of the time. | |
| But I'm going to do it right now. | |
| Here's my non-expert opinion. | |
| Subject to... I don't know if we'll ever be able to fact check this, but I'll put it out there anyway. | |
| In my opinion, South Korea's success... | |
| And somebody said Indonesia. | |
| In my opinion, the success of, let's say, Japan, South Korea, and Singapore is more mask wearing of even the people who don't have symptoms. | |
| So that's my prediction. | |
| My prediction is that when, I don't know if we'll ever be able to determine this, but after it's all said and done, and the people are doing the autopsy, and they say what worked, what didn't work, I think that the countries that had the highest percentage of mask wearers, which was probably I think that the countries that had the highest percentage of mask wearers, which I think some of the Asian countries, especially if they already had some pollution problems, which probably doesn't apply as much except in China. | |
| But I've got a feeling that the number of masks is going to be the most, the variable that explains the most about why some countries did well, And I don't think it's going to be the testing alone. | |
| Testing will be a factor, but I can't wrap my head around How a country that's, you know, this many millions of people, but no matter how many tests they have, it's only, you know, a small percentage. | |
| I can't wrap my head around how that's the biggest factor when there are so few tests compared to people. | |
| But if 80% of the public people who went outside wore a mask, I'm not sure that's true, but I could easily imagine in South Korea, 80% of the people going outside had masks pretty quickly. | |
| Is that true? I need a fact check on that. | |
| But that feels like that would be a much more aggressive and direct way to battle it. | |
| So we'll just see. That's just my guess. | |
| And I also think that when there are more of those masks in the United States, that we'll see a big drop. | |
| The daily deaths, I'm having a little trouble understanding the data, but it feels like the number of deaths is starting to not increase as much while the number of infections is still zooming, which is the good news, especially since the FDA approved The use of the hydroxychloroquine, and I think the chloroquine as well. | |
| It's now approved for people who want to use it for treatment. | |
| I think that also allowed maybe more manufacturers to make it, so there's a supply problem. | |
| Here's a question for you. | |
| I'm just going to put this out there. | |
| I have no idea if this is a good idea, because I can't think through all of the parts, so maybe somebody else can. | |
| What would stop the government from saying, again, this is a poorly thought out idea, I think there are problems with it? | |
| I'll just put it out there. | |
| Suppose the government said... | |
| That just for the period of the crisis, we'll create a second currency, and it will be a cryptocurrency that's our own crypto. | |
| We'll just make something up. | |
| Or they can use one that exists and just endorse it. | |
| And they'll just say, we're going to assign these crypto coins to everybody below a certain income, or even just everybody, and They will expire at the end of three months or six months, whatever. Or they'll be automatically converted to cash. | |
| I suppose you could do that too. | |
| If you just force the exchange to do it. | |
| I don't know if that would work. | |
| Because then it would drive down the value. | |
| This is the part I haven't thought through. | |
| So the point is, could you have a temporary cryptocurrency that would operate at the same time as the dollar? | |
| All the people who are doing okay and still have some dollars, they just go ahead and spend them like usual. | |
| But if you lost your income, and you don't have a dime, you could use the crypto, and then the government would sort of guarantee its value on the exchange. | |
| In other words, the government could buy and sell the crypto to balance its value. | |
| And it feels like the government could just create money out of nothing for a while, and then just make it go away by forcing you to convert it. | |
| Would that work? And I think it's the I think it's the winding it down part that doesn't work. | |
| If you wound it up, you'd probably have to run it forever or somebody would lose. | |
| I haven't thought that through, but I feel like there's something there. | |
| I just can't hold all the parts in my head enough to know if it would really work. | |
| Bill Gates seems to be quite in favor of the longer shutdown, the six to ten weeks, he thinks, which makes me feel a lot better about everything. | |
| I'm not going to say that Bill Gates is right about everything all the time. | |
| Who is, really? But who's got a better track record? | |
| Have you ever seen the comparing Bill Gates' oldest predictions about what the world would look like, comparing it to what the world actually looks like? | |
| Have you ever seen those lists of things he said would happen, and then you compare it to what happened, and you look at it and you go, uh, this is the same. | |
| Is he from the future? | |
| Because he's really good at this guessing what's happening in 20 years business. | |
| So, for Bill Gates, who is quite informed in this and quite good at math, as you know, if he thinks 6 to 10 gets us past the hardest part, I'd rather be on his side. | |
| You know, all things equal. | |
| How would you feel comfortable if your opinion was the opposite of Bill Gates on something he's really looked into? | |
| I mean, this isn't something that he's sort of Here's an interesting thing. | |
| This week, and maybe the next week too, I'm watching the people who had been saying it was just the flu and seeing, just from a, you know, people watching perspective, watching their voices go from a full scream, it's just the flu, you idiots. | |
| Can't you see what we see? | |
| It's obviously, it's some kind of a hoax. | |
| And, you know, every, there's a little more data, a little more data than, you know, fewer people are saying that and They're maybe not as loud and fewer, and they're not quite as loud. | |
| And I feel like this week, this might be the week that because the actual hospital impact will be a little more clear, I think those voices are going to start to get really quiet. | |
| Now, I would love for them to be right. | |
| Wouldn't it be great if the people who say it's overblown and we'll get on top of this in no time and it's no worse than the flu... | |
| Wouldn't it be great if they're right? | |
| But I think the odds of that are shrinking every day. | |
| Still possible. You still cannot rule out, you know, if you're being objective, you can't rule out that things go a lot better than the experts thought. | |
| My prediction is ridiculously optimistic. | |
| In that we will save a lot of lives from just being shut down, fewer car accidents, fewer just industrial accidents, fewer ways to die in general. | |
| And that even though we will lose thousands, I've already lost thousands to the coronavirus, that I don't think we'll net more than 5,000. | |
| Now, nobody else agrees with me, so if you're trying to place your own bets, be aware that nobody in the world has my prediction. | |
| It's the dumbest, most outlier prediction anybody can make. | |
| Because the government is thinking this, even if we do a good job, the government is saying, even if you do a really good job and do everything right, we're talking tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, it's going to be a big number, say the government, and I'm going full contrarian on that. | |
| But I'm not saying that they were wrong about the potential problem. | |
| I'm saying that the experts were largely right about how big-ish it was, in an order of magnitude way, but that we'll be more successful than people imagined, so that our innovation will make a big difference. | |
| Now, I think that this is interesting, but the The prospect of the hydroxychloroquine working well enough to at least keep people from hospitalization, which is the whole game. | |
| To me, the entire game comes down to does the hydroxychloroquine, if given early, and do we have enough supply? | |
| That's a big question. If given early, does it keep people from being hospitalized? | |
| Anecdotally, that looks to be the case. | |
| And even some Largish, small studies. | |
| They're small studies, but they're not tiny, tiny. | |
| It seems to indicate it does. | |
| But I don't know if you can trust anything yet. | |
| I don't trust... | |
| So here's my current thinking. | |
| I don't trust any small study in this country or any other. | |
| I don't trust it. | |
| And I don't think that we can. | |
| Because even in good times, when you've got plenty of time to do peer review and everything else, Even in good times, half of the things that get peer reviewed and accepted turn out to be false. | |
| And that's when you've got plenty of time and everybody's doing their best, slowest, most careful work. | |
| How good are the studies that people are slapping together in an emergency? | |
| In theory, the quality of those studies should be the lowest of any studies you've ever seen because they're so fast and they're smallish and things are imperfect because it's a crisis. | |
| But that doesn't mean it's wrong. | |
| And what I'm looking at is, until I find any doctor who is working on this problem who would not personally take it, I'm going to think there's something there. | |
| Correct me if I'm wrong, have you seen one doctor, even one, literally just one, I'll say one American doctor who is actually working with these patients, who would advise against taking that drug? | |
| Is there even one? If there's one, I'm going to say to myself, well, maybe there's something there. | |
| I used to have a phone here. | |
| I was going to check the stock market, but I guess I can put my phone somewhere else. | |
| All right. So I think that's going to be good. | |
| There's an article that says Germany is considering, and I think considering is the key word here because it's not like this is imminent, but they're considering issuing thousands of Giving people immunity certificates. | |
| So you would get some kind of a certificate that said you had already had it, you're over it, you have an immunity, so you're allowed to go back to work and mingle, I guess. | |
| Now, I was trying to think, and again, this is not imminent, it's just something they're considering in Germany, but I thought to myself, how would you execute that? | |
| Because if you say, okay, let's say 10% of the public can go back to work, how would the authorities know If they saw people on the streets or working in the shops or whatever, how would they know that was the right 10%? | |
| Because people would massively cheat. | |
| They'd say, I'm not immune, but nobody's going to know. | |
| I'm going to go back to work. | |
| And the police couldn't stop and check everybody, right? | |
| I mean, they could check some people, but they're not going to say, show us your papers. | |
| Show us your papers, do you? | |
| Are you allowed here? | |
| Show us your papers. So that doesn't feel like that would work. | |
| Just too many people involved. | |
| Then I thought, well, suppose the people who have the immunity had to wear a lanyard. | |
| It's just got, like, the certificates right in the lanyard. | |
| It's like, yeah, I passed. And then I thought, well, that would take five seconds for people to 3D print those things or photocopy the fakes. | |
| And you couldn't really, you know, how could you tell? | |
| So here's my suggestion. | |
| My suggestion is this. | |
| If the government clears you, and maybe a doctor has to do it, the doctor goes into his database and plugs your social security number into it. | |
| Now you're registered as somebody that a doctor has certified. | |
| You can't do it yourself. A doctor has certified that you have immunity. | |
| So you're in the national database. | |
| Then, here's my idea. | |
| You build an app So that maybe only the police can tell. | |
| So let's say in the beginning, it's just something law enforcement can tell, and they can track everybody's phone, and they can see on the map all the dots, and the dots are either green or red. | |
| So if the police go into a neighborhood that's opened up and the stores are open, they can pull out their app, and they can say, okay, green, green, green, whoop, there's a red. | |
| And they can just say, oh, the red's 20 feet over there, and then it can walk over and say, or even click on it, because the police might have the secret database, you know, all your privacy's gone, and just click on it and say, uh, looks like Bob, 20 feet over there, there's a red. | |
| Bob? Bob? | |
| Come here for a minute. Bob, you do not have the immunity certificate. | |
| Go home immediately. | |
| Could you build an app in which at least law enforcement could walk through a crowded street and see on the map if there's a cheater? | |
| I think so. | |
| Now, you'd have to give up immense amounts of privacy to do it, but we're certainly at that point where that could happen. | |
| And, of course, the The brute force way to do that is with facial recognition, right? | |
| But people are going to be wearing masks. | |
| So what do you do with facial recognition if so many people are wearing face masks? | |
| So you probably have to do it with a database situation. | |
| A person I don't know on Twitter asked this question. | |
| Are we going to have a civil war? | |
| Because this extra lockdown is going to make people pretty antsy. | |
| And so a person reasonably asks, is this going to lead to civil war? | |
| Now, there are some things that are hard to predict, and there are some things which are not. | |
| This is solidly in the category of not hard to predict. | |
| So let me tell you exactly what's going to happen vis-a-vis the question of a civil war. | |
| There will not be one. | |
| Not even a little chance. | |
| Nothing could be closer to zero or more zero than the odds of a civil war, let's say between now and the end of June, just to put a period on it. | |
| The odds of a civil war in the United States are the lowest they've ever been right now. | |
| They'll never have been lower. | |
| Here's why. In order to have a civil war, you have to have an enemy that's in your own country, somebody in your country you're fighting against. | |
| Who's that? Who's the enemy? | |
| No, the enemy is the virus. | |
| We're all on the same side. | |
| You don't get a civil war when your entire civil community is fighting the same external, in this case it got into the country, but it's fighting a third party. | |
| That's the most unifying thing that could ever happen to a country. | |
| So we are, in whatever is the most opposite of a civil war, It's what we're experiencing now. | |
| We're experiencing the most unity. | |
| You can even see it in the news. | |
| Even the news is going easy on the president. | |
| This is the most unity this country has had in my lifetime by far. | |
| There's nothing even close... | |
| Well, 9-11 maybe. | |
| 9-11 was one of those points in time. | |
| What were the odds that there would be a civil war within a month of 9-11 happening? | |
| Zero. Zero. | |
| Zero. The odds of a civil war, when this country is threatened by any kind of external force, the odds of a civil war just goes to zero. | |
| And that would be true of every country, really. | |
| Countries bind together. | |
| So, if you're going to make a list of things you should worry about, the odds of a civil war, that one's just zero. | |
| We've never been further from that. | |
| If you're worried that, and the person that I commented to said, well, there's going to be looting. | |
| Well, it's kind of hard to loot right now because unless people went out en masse, looting doesn't work. | |
| You can't be the one looter. | |
| You can't be like, well, nobody else is looting, but I'm going to do some looting. | |
| Those stores are all empty. | |
| I think I'll break a window. Because if you're the only one, you're kind of noticeable. | |
| Your odds are being caught 100%. | |
| So you can't loot one-on-one, and I don't think we'll have crowds because people are still well-warned enough that nobody's going to really form a looting crowd. | |
| It would be a bad strategy. | |
| You would just be giving each other viruses. | |
| And then, how many burglaries or home invasions are we going to have when everybody's staying home? | |
| Zero? Well, probably not zero, but... | |
| Not many people are going to have their homes burgled when they're home all day. | |
| So burglaries are going to be down, murders are going to be down, a lot of crimes are going to be down, as well as accidents. | |
| So no, no risk of a civil war. | |
| And I think also no risk of not having food. | |
| Because if you want to rob your neighbor... | |
| Let me just give you the scenario. | |
| Let's say you're out of food and you have a gun. | |
| And you go to your neighbor and you say, I've got a gun. | |
| Give me all your food. | |
| What is your neighbor going to say in the middle of this crisis? | |
| I think your neighbor is going to say, what's the gun for? | |
| Here's some food. If you need some more food, I'll make a run to the grocery store for you because Safeway has plenty of food. | |
| Nobody's running out of food. | |
| You're running out of money maybe. | |
| And if you need me to help you with some food until the government check comes in or whatever, sure. | |
| No problem. No problem. | |
| So nobody's going to rob people for food simply because there'll be plenty of people saying, I'll give you food. | |
| You don't have to rob anybody. | |
| Alright. Let's see. | |
| Um... So the range of people who might die, according to, in the United States, according to experts, is everything from, you know, maybe 100,000, if you did everything right, 200,000, to 2.2 million. | |
| And I guess the 2.2 million is what got Trump to say, yeah, let's close everything. | |
| Now, as I've said before, if you're playing it politically, and you're just Let's say the only thing you were interested in is getting re-elected. | |
| I don't think that's the case. | |
| I've said this before, but no matter who you are, be you Democrat or Republican, by the time you become president, I think there's something about the process and something about the office that really does guarantee... | |
| That your interests are for the benefit of the public, and you're being watched so carefully. | |
| So I think all presidents genuinely want what's best for the country, but they also want to get re-elected. | |
| The best thing for getting re-elected is to not make the mistake of doing too little. | |
| So you can see this in a number of ways. | |
| So if the relief package had been one trillion after somebody had suggested it should be two trillion, that would have been just a mistake. | |
| Politically. I don't know what it would be economically, but politically it would clearly be a mistake. | |
| Psychologically, probably a mistake. | |
| Because you don't get penalized for being too decisive or too aggressive in an emergency. | |
| You can get penalized for not doing enough or being weak. | |
| So every time the president has been presented with a tough option, the one that makes him look like a strong leader, versus the weaker version, He has consistently picked, correctly, the strong option. | |
| Now, the strong option, at the moment, most people would agree that the strongest option is to close down. | |
| That's different from the right option, the optimal option. | |
| Who knows? I'm not smart enough to know. | |
| But if you're just trying to judge it on the strength of it, whatever that means to each of us, we can interpret that a little bit differently. | |
| But closing the whole economy at the risk of the president losing the crown jewel of the thing he cares most about in terms of his accomplishment, which is the economy. | |
| So you're watching the president who cares more about the economy than maybe anybody. | |
| I mean, we care for our own individual outcomes. | |
| But I guarantee you this president... | |
| Really, really cares about the economy for all the right reasons and all the personal reasons. | |
| And don't forget, the Trump business could be bankrupt at the end of this. | |
| Now, Trump has said they've got a good balance sheet, but you need a really good balance sheet to get through no customers for three months or whatever it's going to be for the Trump properties. | |
| So, When you watch a leader who is making a decision that, in my opinion, will bankrupt his own fortune, Trump might actually be broke by the time he gets out of office. | |
| And that has less to do with the whole economy than it has to do with the fact that he's in that leisure industry. | |
| And the leisure industry is just going to be the hardest hit. | |
| So watching a leader... | |
| Make a decision that, in my opinion, might bankrupt his own company and his own family. | |
| It might. I don't know if it will. | |
| But I would say it's got to be in that 50-50 risk just because everybody in the industry has got to be at least a 50-50 risk of bankruptcy at this point. | |
| So that's a strong decision. | |
| Strong decisions can be right and they can be wrong, but they almost never are politically wrong, so long as they're also compatible with what the experts are saying. | |
| So Trump is so politically right on this, and also, according to the experts, right, he's about as right as you can get. | |
| You could argue he should have been there sooner, you know, what was he talking about yesterday. | |
| Those are good conversations, but at the moment, he's as right as you can get. | |
| All right, so I guess Joe Biden appeared on Meet the Depressed, and he was not asked about the accusations against him by a woman who used to work with him on his staff, on his staff, if you know what I mean. | |
| She was working on his staff during the 90s. | |
| And she has very credible sounding claims that he metooed her pretty hard. | |
| Which is not funny. | |
| Nothing funny about that. | |
| And it sounds credible. | |
| But, you know, even when she tells the story, how do I not get myself in further trouble? | |
| But, what the heck, I'll get myself in further trouble. | |
| Even as she tells the story, the way she tells it, and she's the She's the victim in the story. | |
| So you'd expect the victim to put the spin on it that is friendliest to their version. | |
| And even she says that Biden, even with his alleged bad behavior, seems to have genuinely been confused about whether it was welcome or not. | |
| And there's something in that that's important to understand. | |
| Especially that has to do with male, let's say male perceptions over time. | |
| The way she tells the story, the alleged victim and the accuser, who again has a very credible sounding story, the way she tells it, it sounds like he made a way too aggressive move, the type that you certainly should be asking for a little bit of agreement and Being on the same page about, | |
| and without getting into details, let's just say he way crossed the line of something you should do without knowing it's okay. | |
| Let's just say that that's unambiguous. | |
| But, even the way the victim tells the story, it's as if he didn't know. | |
| That he literally didn't know it wasn't okay. | |
| Because he acted in a way that you would only act if you were literally confused about why it didn't go well. | |
| And I have to say, what do people say about that story, even through the eyes of the accuser? | |
| If they take the accuser's version of it, how do you process that? | |
| When you know that even her version is that he didn't know he was doing something wrong. | |
| Even the way she tells it. | |
| We have the benefit of hindsight, so we can see it perfectly in hindsight. | |
| So we know it's wrong. | |
| There's no ambiguity when we're hearing the story. | |
| But it is at least a little bit feasible that Joe Biden in the 90s, the way things were, not saying they should have been that way. | |
| I'm not forgiving anything, so don't take me out of context. | |
| But you can kind of see that he actually wouldn't know, which is not an excuse. | |
| It's more of a historical... | |
| Point of interest. | |
| It doesn't forgive anything. | |
| Have you noticed that the standard for quality for broadcast interviews has gone way down in a good way? | |
| Let me give you an example. | |
| I'm so old that I was around in the corporate world when computers were invented. | |
| Meaning that I lived in a world with typewriters as the main business tool and watched computers come in and replace them. | |
| And during that transition, there was this weird thing that happened in corporate America. | |
| And if you're young, you're just going to laugh at this. | |
| Just have pity for the people in my age group that we went through the following. | |
| So I'd be in my cubicle in corporate America and I'd need to write a memo to, let's say, some manager in another group. | |
| But I had to go through my boss. | |
| Now, that doesn't sound so bad, right? | |
| You have to write a memo to somebody who's above you in another department. | |
| Well, of course, you should probably go through your boss just to make sure you don't do anything dumb. | |
| But the way we had to do it was I would have, in those days, a little computer with a dot matrix printer. | |
| So the process was I would write up my letter in the draft form and print it on a dot matrix. | |
| But you are not allowed, you are not allowed to give a I print out from a dot matrix printer to a manager in the company because that would be unprofessional. | |
| It's a dot matrix printer. | |
| It had to be typed on a Selectrix typewriter. | |
| So you take the dot matrix printer and you give it to your boss's secretary at the time, back when that was actual job title, and the secretary would retype what you typed but on a Selectrix. | |
| And then she would show it to you And then you'd say, now there's some typos, and she'd have to retype it. | |
| And then you'd be happy that she had typed what you had on your dot matrix, and then you would take that to your boss, and your boss would change it every time. | |
| Not most of the time, not a lot of the time. | |
| Every time. And then you would start from scratch again. | |
| And you would go back to your dot matrix printer, and you would make the changes. | |
| You give it back to the secretary. | |
| She would retype it, Honest Electrics, with errors. | |
| You would have to change those errors again, because it's being retyped from scratch. | |
| And then you show it to your boss again, and your boss says, you know, yeah, there's one thing I forgot to tell you. | |
| And then he changes it again. | |
| And you go right back to the cycle again. | |
| So the process of sending a memo to somebody in my own company that I knew personally, who just happened to be a level above me in management, Could take two weeks. | |
| That's not a joke. | |
| You could spend two weeks, because you have to get your manager's attention time after time, and the secretary has to not be working on something, two weeks to send an email to somebody that you know who is 100 yards down that way in the office. | |
| Two weeks. That was typical. | |
| So, what happened, of course, is that things evolved to the point Where the casualness of communications went way, way, way, way down, because they just had to. | |
| So at this point, in any business, I think it wouldn't be that big a deal to send a poorly written, mistyped email to somebody at a level above you, copy your boss or not copy your boss, everything's more casual now. | |
| So the world accepted The casualness of email, because you just had to after a while. | |
| You couldn't wait two weeks every time to exchange a memo. | |
| But I think the same thing is happening because of this shutdown. | |
| I'm watching a lot of the major broadcast networks doing basically Skype-quality interviews with split screens. | |
| And I'm watching it and I'm thinking, I don't mind that at all. | |
| So I'm watching people who have to mute their camera because their kids are screaming in the background and the cat walks by and somebody opens the door behind them and you hear a siren in the back and stuff. | |
| And the news industry, of course, would prefer not to do that. | |
| They'd like a nice, clean, professional headshot. | |
| Well, yes, Ted, thank you for asking that question. | |
| Let me talk about my professional knowledge and give you the background. | |
| That's the way it's always been done. | |
| But I think the shutdown... | |
| What's this called, by the way? | |
| Do we have a name for this where we're all staying home? | |
| It's not a quarantine, is it? | |
| But I think it's lowered our expectations or... | |
| Or at least our standards for what a split-screen interview would look like. | |
| And I think that's actually going to be accrued to the good. | |
| In other words, I think the whole TV split-screen interview thing may forever become more casual. | |
| And maybe anybody can do it. | |
| At this point, I think I have the hardware and software that I can put on a nightly news show that would be similar in quality to CNN. In terms of two bad interview things on the screen, because that's what they're doing right now. | |
| So, some people are yacking that Fox News will have some legal liability because they downplayed the coronavirus. | |
| Now, when I say they downplayed it, I don't mean Fox News as an entity. | |
| I mean, there were individuals, mostly opinion people, who downplayed it. | |
| Now, can you sue a news organization if their opinion people had the wrong opinion? | |
| That doesn't seem like a lawsuit you could win, does it? | |
| At what point is having the wrong opinion legally actionable? | |
| Especially if your show is clearly presented as opinion. | |
| If somebody gives you an opinion and you act on it like it's a fact, well, that's a little bit on you, isn't it? | |
| So all the news businesses have that problem of making sure that your opinion stuff and your news stuff is clearly delineated. | |
| There's a real issue that people can't tell the difference. | |
| I think CNN is a little more ambiguous about what's opinion and what's news. | |
| I think Fox does a much better job of labeling. | |
| Who's an opinion person and who's a news person? | |
| I mean, it's a little more obvious over there. | |
| But still, you do know that people are turning on Hannity and treating it like it's the news, even though he's as clear as he could be that he's an opinion show. | |
| But people probably take it as news. | |
| You have to know that's true. | |
| But could it be actionable? | |
| I can't see how. | |
| I'd hate to think it would be. | |
| So there's a weird little article about the president of Mexico... | |
| Who was visiting, I guess he was doing a political visit to the home turf of El Chapo. | |
| So the area in Mexico where El Chapo, I don't know if he was born or his family was there or whatever. | |
| So El Chapo was in jail. But the Mexican president stops and goes over and shakes hands with El Chapo's mother. | |
| I think it was her birthday or El Chapo's birthday, somebody's birthday. | |
| And acted like they knew each other pretty well and they were quite friendly. | |
| And it's on video that the president of Mexico stopped his motorcade, got out, and personally shook hands with the elderly mother of El Chapo and had some nice words with her. | |
| Instead, he got her a letter. | |
| I assume her letter was something about her son. | |
| And I thought to myself, how am I supposed to feel about that? | |
| How am I supposed to feel About the president of Mexico being quite friendly with El Chapo's mob. | |
| Certainly raises an eyebrow, doesn't it? | |
| Well, I've been saying for a while that we should maybe just drop the charade that the government of Mexico and the cartels are separate entities. | |
| I mean, they certainly have separate job descriptions. | |
| But I don't think we can assume that the government is trying to crack down on the cartels, can we? | |
| I would say that that's not a thing. | |
| All right. I wonder if we're going to see a bunch of authors going on podcasts, such as mine, because they can't do booktours. | |
| So let me put this out there. | |
| My knowledge of the book industry... | |
| Is that there are two big releases each year. | |
| So there's a big release in the spring or the summer. | |
| Spring or summer. So it's coming up around June-ish, I think. | |
| I don't know exactly the dates. | |
| But then there's another one in the autumn. | |
| Before Christmas. So my books I usually release in the autumn because they tend to be gift items for Christmas. | |
| But there could be a whole bunch of authors who can't do a book tour and can't sell their book and they just spent a year or two building this book and just can't market it because you can't get on TV, nobody wants to interview, etc. | |
| So I'm hoping that the podcasters of the world can pick up the slack. | |
| And maybe reach out to some of the big publishers, because they would be hungry for audience at this point. | |
| I would imagine all the big publishers, it shouldn't be hard to find one. | |
| If there's a favorite author you think has a book coming out, and you're a podcaster, and you said yourself, under normal circumstances, I would never be able to get this famous author to come on my little podcast. | |
| But I'll bet you could now. I'll bet you would be surprised that you could get an author to come on your podcast now. | |
| Because the options are low. | |
| Alright. Looking at your comments. | |
| Getting phone calls. | |
| I don't know what that means. | |
| Corona and chill. Let's see. | |
| There will be an avalanche of new books. | |
| So, Stefan Molyneux is using Zoom. | |
| Well, you know, I think using Zoom for podcasts is no risk. | |
| You know, the fact that Zoom's traffic goes through some servers in China would be terrible if you were a big corporation with corporate secrets. | |
| but if you're just doing a podcast that you're going to release anyway Zoom would be a great product let's see Brett Easton Ellis does this on his show Okay. Good time to call your favorite celebrity. | |
| Dennis Miller went on Dave Rubin. | |
| Wear a mask, Scott. | |
| So I opened a cupboard yesterday and I found an N95 mask. | |
| That, I don't know, it's been sitting on a shelf for probably a few years. | |
| I don't know why it was used or when. | |
| And I thought to myself, okay, if an N95 mask is sitting in a dry cupboard and there's no great humidity or any problems like that, and it's been there for a few years, is that safe? | |
| I mean, I know it's safe from the coronavirus because it's been sitting there since before it existed, but is it safe in general if it's just sitting in a Can any prior germs live there for years? | |
| I don't know. Doesn't it seem to you that we should get going on genetic testing? | |
| Because I think that might be another way to get some people back to work faster. | |
| And We probably only have to let people who have been exposed to it out at first. | |
| That might be the first wave. | |
| But soon after, it seems like you also should release people who might be, let's say, they've got a prescription for hydroxychloroquine and they have a genetic makeup that's the least dangerous one. | |
| Suppose you had those two things. | |
| You're on the drug. | |
| Let's say the doctors decide, okay, you do shed maybe a little if you catch it, but you were also on the drug at the same time. | |
| Maybe you'd not even notice you had symptoms, so maybe technically you could shed it, but the odds are low. | |
| I can imagine that we would keep tweaking our strategy based on what we learned. | |
| And I can easily imagine that people who had the right genetic makeup, let's say they're not overweight and chronic smokers and elderly or whatever, and then they're also on the hydroxychloroquine, maybe that's the second wave of people who can go back to work. | |
| All right, I have a suggestion for you. | |
| Are you ready? It goes like this. | |
| Do you remember during the Revolution, the Revolutionary War, there was a famous seamstress Her name was Betsy Ross. | |
| Betsy Ross and her friends sewed flags. | |
| Betsy Ross, famous for sewing something at home to help with the fight. | |
| We have that same situation now. | |
| Wouldn't you like a government-approved design with experts? | |
| Wouldn't you like that the administration just published a make-it-home mask Sew it yourself either by hand or maybe with your sewing machine. | |
| Some specifications about what materials to use because you wouldn't want to go to the store to buy materials. | |
| You'd want to be able to use that old pillowcase or the old jeans, the jeans that you don't wear anymore. | |
| You want to be able to cut out some pieces. | |
| So wouldn't you like to have a Betsy Ross design, just to do a call back to famous seamstress, a Betsy Ross design that you could make at home? | |
| You know, prior to us having enough N95s, etc. | |
| I think you would. | |
| Because people are at home. | |
| A lot of people know how to sew, especially a certain generation. | |
| They've got their sewing machines. | |
| You don't think your grandmother and her sewing machine would sort of be happy to have something to do? | |
| If she had the design and the government specifications, would she make some Betsy Ross I think she would. | |
| I think she would. It might be a good thing to do just to make people feel like they're part of something. | |
| All right. I think that's all I wanted to talk about today. | |
| So you saw a post of a woman sewing masks. | |
| Yeah, I think that all over the country there are people making their own masks, but I don't think they're working on a common design. | |
| So it's the feeling like you're part of the larger effort that adds a little fun to it. | |
| And giving it the Betsy Ross brand, if you will, takes you back to a time when you had to sew a piece of fabric and it actually made a difference to the war effort. | |
| And we're there. | |
| Now there are also sewing machines that you can program, right? | |
| Can't you program a sewing machine to whip out masks fairly quickly? | |
| If you had cut the squares, or if you had cut the components, couldn't you program these new sewing machines even at your home? | |
| You know, they're pretty programmable to just go and put a mask. | |
| Now, there are also sewing machines in which you can sew like a pattern on something. | |
| Could you not create a mask design For the people who have the programmable... | |
| I guess you could do it by hand, too. | |
| But programmable sewing machine to put a little American flag on it. | |
| So that you... | |
| Let's say it's a... Any color... | |
| Could be any color mask. | |
| But the common design is that where your mouth is would be a little American flag or something like that. | |
| Maybe it's on the side. I don't know. | |
| Wherever it goes best. Be kind of fun. | |
| All right. That's my best suggestion for the day. | |
| Um... Oh, somebody says their church has done thousands. | |
| Yeah, all I really want is a common design that's the Betsy Ross version, and you can put a flag on it. | |
| That's what I'd like to see. | |
| They're not OSHA safety approved. | |
| That is true, but I think the experts are coming around to the idea that it's better than nothing. | |
| Better than nothing. Alright, that's all for now. |