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April 11, 2020 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
57:40
Episode 906 Scott Adams: Simultaneous Sip Doesn't Happen on its Own. Get in Here.

My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a Content: The current Democrat dilemma Back to work by location or individual risk? Outrage by privacy and freedom people Freedom or privacy...we can't have both anymore --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scott-adams00/support

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Time Text
Hey everybody, come on in here.
We've got stuff to talk about.
If you caught me earlier this morning at around, I don't know, 4 a.m.
my time, you probably think this is a bonus that it is.
I did not do the simultaneous SIP. I was just testing my My microphone situation.
And the test was successful.
Yay! But this is the real thing.
Yes. I've combined the simultaneous swaddle with the simultaneous sip.
This is a first.
Now I don't want to blow your minds, but these two things can happen together.
So for the first time ever, a world premiere, the most important thing that will ever happen this year, The simultaneous swaddle sip.
Yeah, it's coming at you.
And what do you need besides a blanket?
Well, it would be good if you had a cup or a mug or a glass of tank or chalice or sign, a canteen jug or flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better, including the damn pandemic.
It's called the simultaneous swaddle sip.
And it happens now. Go!
And just as I suspected, it's twice as good.
Swaddling good.
Sipping good. Put them together.
I think you see where I'm going.
All right. So, I feel Great empathy for different groups of people during this time of crisis.
But I have a great deal of sadness and sorrow for this group.
They're called Democrats.
You've probably heard of them.
And the Democrats are having an especially tough time because until Trump makes a decision about how to open up the economy, they don't know what to disagree with.
So they're all poised to oppose the president, but the longer he goes without saying which way he's going to go, the longer they have to go without knowing what they're opposing.
So what do they do in the meantime?
Because they can't offer an opinion.
That would be the most dangerous thing.
Imagine you're a Democrat, and your number one thing in the world is beating Donald Trump.
That's all that matters. And you don't know what he's going to do.
You only know that when it happens, you have to be on the other side.
But between now and the time it happens, you have to have an opinion.
Because a lot of us are on social media, we're pundits.
So somebody asks your opinion.
And they say, should we go back to work, let's say May 1st?
Or should we stay locked down for a while?
What are you going to do?
If you're a Democrat, this week...
Any Democrat, a pundit, politician, and somebody says, tell us what you would do.
How would you do it?
They can't give you an opinion.
Because if they do, there's probably a 50% chance that it's going to go in the other direction.
If they say, open it up, Trump might say, how about a few more weeks of keeping it closed?
And vice versa. And all of those Democrats don't want to take a 50% chance...
Of being on film, you know, on video, not film, but on video, saying that the President should do exactly what he ends up doing.
Think about that. What if Joe Biden comes out and says, you know, I've talked to my own experts, and I think we should open up May 15.
Let's say Joe Biden says that in advance.
A week goes by, and then President Trump says, I've talked to my task force, It turns out that May 15th is a good day.
So I'm going to open up everything on May 15th.
Well, what does Joe Biden do?
He just said that's the right decision.
But yeah, I know May 1st is the date, but LA is already talking about extending it.
So I'll give you a little prediction.
Probably is not going to be May 1st everywhere.
So... I think you're going to see some big places push it in a few more weeks, like L.A. is my guess.
But yeah, the Democrats are completely silenced, except for weird questions about how the Surgeon General refers to his own grandparents.
You get that? One of the biggest criticisms of the President's coronavirus task forces, like the best they could come up with, Because remember, until they can commit to an opinion of their own, there's not much to criticize.
You kind of have to say you would go the other way in order to say he's going the wrong way.
So the best they could come up with is they send Alcindor, the woman, to accuse the Surgeon General of using the wrong language when referring to his own grandparents.
That was it. That was the sharpest criticism of the administration, is that an African-American surgeon general referred to his own grandparents in the way that they lovingly referred to their own grandparents and his family, and that became a national headline, because it was all they had.
So that should tell you something about the slaughter meter, shouldn't it?
I'm very amused To watch what I call the growing wokeness and the red-pilling of people on this whole prediction model question.
You know, the idea that there is such a thing that people believed a little while ago, say last week, people believed that you could do something with math and your algorithms and your spreadsheets, your formulas and your variables, and if you did it just right, The alchemy would work out so that you could actually predict the future.
Until a week ago, people thought that was actually a real thing.
That there were people with spreadsheets and formulas and math who could actually, and I'm not joking, predict the future.
Most of the world believed that that was the world they were living in.
They thought they lived in a reality where there were such wizards You know, in a little windowless room somewhere.
We don't know who they are. But the wizards have done their math and their magic, and they can actually see the future.
Now, I know nobody claims that they can see the future perfectly.
I'm not claiming that.
But the whole point of the models, right?
What you thought last week?
Didn't you think that last week the models were more likely true than not, at least statistically?
And they would give you at least a statistical glimpse into the future?
You thought that, right? What do you think this week?
This week? This week you probably think the models are just things that experts make up to persuade you.
Because models are just things that experts use to persuade you.
The models are used to persuade you what the experts believe is true.
In most cases, they actually believe it's true.
But they don't have a good way to explain it and to convince people to act on it.
So they build the model.
But the model is not truth.
The model is just complete BS. It's just marketing.
And then people think that the model actually produced information.
When in fact the model produces no information.
It is simply a reflection of what the experts are trying to persuade.
So watching people like, I'll use Brit Hume as my example.
The reason I use him as my example is because I have a lot of respect for him.
So that makes it more interesting.
Because it's not very interesting if people that you know are idiots were wrong last week and now they're trying to figure out why they were wrong last week.
That's not interesting. You know, dumb people being dumb is not a story.
But when you see somebody as experienced and smart and accomplished as Bray Hume, who certainly sees the whole field, or so you would think, and I feel as if, just watching his tweets and his reactions to the models and Fauci and stuff, I feel like I'm watching him getting red-pilled in real time.
Like he's understanding that the experts were not intending...
To tell the truth. In other words, they were intending that the model would scare you because that's how they could get the compliance that they legitimately thought they needed.
So I believe everybody involved is doing their level best to produce a good result.
Nobody in the story has bad intentions.
Nobody in the story is not smart.
Everybody in the story is smart.
Smart, very accomplished professionals.
You know, Bray Hume in the news business, Fauci in the medical business.
But watching people realize that the models were never intended to tell you the future, they were only intended to persuade, is really a big mind effort, if you know what I mean.
And a lot of people are waking up into a new reality in which they realize that the so-called experts certainly know more than we do.
I'm not saying you should ignore experts, but you can't trust them To give it to you straight when that doesn't work.
So in a perfect world, the experts would say, here's what we know, here's what we don't know, here's why we have a strong consensus in this direction, but this is all we know.
We don't know more than we know.
Here's what we know, and here's our recommendation.
If they did that, I think the scientists know it wouldn't work.
Because it wouldn't be persuasive, it wouldn't scare anybody, people would look at it and say, well, you don't know, right?
You just said, you just told this expert, you know some stuff, but you're not sure, and there's a whole bunch of stuff you admit you don't know, and lots of variables that are just assumptions, so am I going to act on that?
Am I going to act on your big bunch of guesses?
You know, probably not.
So instead, they put it in the form of a model, and then people look at the model and they say, well, I wouldn't necessarily trust these scientists, their opinions, but hey, the model's a model.
I mean, now it's just evidence.
Now it's just objective.
Now it's just a fact. Look at this graph.
And of course, it's not objective.
It's not a fact.
It's just the experts finding a way to communicate that works.
So I asked this question just before I came on, one minute before I came on, and I wanted to see in the answers if anybody answered it.
And the question was this.
I said, does there exist this kind of American?
Anywhere in the country, out of 327 million Americans, is there any one of us who would fit the following description this week?
Okay? Does this person exist?
Someone who believes that the coronavirus models were bogus, but they believe that the climate science models are credible.
Does such a person exist this week?
Now, if that sounds like an opinion, I'm not trying to make it that way.
I'm trying to make it...
I'm not giving you an opinion on climate science or coronavirus.
I'm just saying that if you were of one kind of mind...
Which is that models don't work.
Wouldn't you apply that to both situations, given that they're both highly complicated, lots of assumptions, etc.
So I think that the most consistent kind of person is someone who believes the coronavirus models were good or good enough, but also believes that the climate models are good or good enough, directionally.
And I'm just curious If there are people out there who have split the difference and said, yeah, models can be terrible and this one's bad, but, well, this one's still pretty good.
Do they exist?
I think there'll be fewer and fewer of them.
I'm seeing a question that says, is Mark Cuban on the task force?
I do not know.
I do not know. The composition of the task force is going to be really interesting, isn't it?
The President said something like he wasn't even sure what party they belonged to, because he indicated he was thinking in bipartisan terms for the committee, but I wonder if it actually ends up that way, because Republicans are going to be more likely to search out and ask other Republicans.
But it would be good if he had some Democrats on there.
I think that would be the smart way to go.
So, here's my big question for the week, or maybe the month.
And I want to see if any of you have some visibility on this, or maybe you could tweet it at me afterwards.
And the question is this.
There seem to be, in a general sense, two ways to reopen the economy.
One of the ways is to do it by geography, and say this is not a hotspot, so this zip code can open up.
And you could imagine that there would be obvious logical reasons why that would make sense.
But another way to go, and of course it might be a mixture of the two, but another way to go just to keep them straight in your head is you would reopen the economy to people who were low individual risk.
So it wouldn't matter where they were.
It would only matter if they individually had a risk of dying if they caught it.
So that could include people who were recovered, people who were young, People don't have complications of other health problems, that sort of thing.
And the question I asked is if you had to have a plan that, let's say, was biased in one of those directions, because it's probably going to be a combination, right?
My guess is there'll be something about geography, but there'll also be something about individuals, right?
It's going to be a little of both. But if you had to emphasize one over the other...
Which one would get you the greatest statistical effectiveness while also opening the economy?
I'm going to look at your comments here for a moment because, yeah, so everybody who says do both, that's not the comment I'm looking for.
Because I know it will be a combination of both.
I'm asking about weight.
Yeah, stop saying both, please.
We all know it's both.
Some amount of both.
But is it primarily...
Okay, it looks like people are just going to say both in the comments because nobody wants to make a decision here today.
So, and did I hear somebody in the comments who's saying, I favor individual...
But is that the same as saying it would be the most effective?
You might have a personal preference because it gets you back to work faster.
But define effective.
I would say effective would be the best balance of economic recovery with low death rate, but you would have to make that decision yourself.
So I'm not going to give you a standard for that.
Just what's your sense of it?
Because the thing that has me stymied is it usually risks are at least a little bit obvious from 30,000 feet.
Usually you can look at two choices and know which one's the risky one.
But in this case, I actually don't have a guess.
Somebody says they missed the question, so I'll ask it again.
If we reopen the economy, would it be smarter to focus on geographies That don't have a problem.
Or would it be smarter to focus on individuals, no matter where you are, and if you're a low-risk individual, go back to work, knowing in advance that it will be a combination of both.
But you could have an emphasis on one.
You know, it could be mostly about geography with a little bit of individual stuff, or vice versa.
Somebody says regional is most effective.
Now, I don't know why.
If it's been studied, then I think I would accept that answer, but just stating that one would be more effective than the other without a reason is not convincing me.
Because I'm trying to game it out in my head.
I think you're doing the same thing right now, which is you're literally creating a little picture in your mind of like a zip code, and then you're seeing people coming in and out, which is, of course, you're ruining the integrity of the zip code.
They had no problems until people started coming in and out.
So if they go back to work...
Don't they just get the same infection rate eventually as New York and everybody else?
It was just a matter of time, right?
Actually, I'm starting to form an opinion, very preliminary, and it goes like this.
If you do it by geography, but you don't limit travel, you are guaranteed to bring the virus in into a situation in which nobody's in lockdown, So the risk of spread is basically guaranteed.
And if you've also not limited the high-risk individuals, if you haven't made any difference about anything else, you should expect that you would reach something like 60% infection eventually, because that's what it takes to get to herd immunity, I guess.
So that's one model.
But compare that to the model where you still have mass infections because you're sending the people who are safe back to work.
Except the mass infections would be almost entirely on people who have a very low chance of dying from it.
So if you send the people who are individually most likely to survive, they can get you close to herd immunity.
Which, by the way, is now even questioned.
We're not even sure we have herd immunity, but still operating on that assumption.
So I'm going to say that your best play would be to send as many young people out to get infected as you possibly could.
And then try to get them to herd immunity with the fewest number of deaths as you possibly could.
That's my current opinion.
Because if you just do it by zip code, there's too much leakage from other places.
And then they have exactly the setup that causes Italy, which is you're not doing any social distancing, you know, at least not the aggressive kind.
So, all right, that's my preliminary opinion, but I would like to hear experts, because I don't feel like I could settle on that as a...
Somebody says geography with strict borders.
I thought about that. It depends how you define strict.
You would, of course, have to let supplies and goods and services, well, goods mostly, cross the border.
You could probably limit services if you had to.
It would be really inconvenient, but people could get their service within the boundaries if they had to.
They might just make some adjustments.
Yeah, I can see that.
Alright. Here's one of the big question marks in my mind.
I, of course, have a special place in my heart for the restaurant business.
I used to own a couple of restaurants.
It didn't work out for me, which is no surprise, by the way.
I like to hasten to tell people, That when I opened my restaurants, I did it when I was rich enough that it didn't matter to me financially if they made it or not.
Now, they didn't make it, but it's not like I was surprised or anything.
However, it was an immensely rich experience, which I would probably do again if I had the choice.
And I learned just a ton.
It was good for the town.
I employed a lot of people during that time, so I'm glad I did it.
So I have a little bit of insight into that business that you wouldn't necessarily have if you had only been a customer, not an owner.
And here's what I think might happen because of this coronavirus situation.
Certainly in the next year, I don't see how restaurants could be profitable.
And most of them would go out of business, the independents especially.
And the reason is that most independent restaurants have to operate pretty close to 100% capacity to even have a chance of profits.
So if you take your average neighborhood independently owned restaurant and you take 10% of their profits away, they're already negative.
That's probably all it needs to take, I don't know, 75% of restaurants into negative territory because it's not a big margin business.
So my guess is that for the next year, there isn't really any reasonable way that the smaller restaurants could possibly stay in business for that long.
You know, doing things the way they've always done it, which is trying to pack the room, and it may not even be illegal.
So here's what I'm thinking. I'm imagining the ways that restaurants could quickly reconfigure to become a different kind of business Without spending a lot of money, something that would immediately boost their income and maybe give them a chance.
Here's some brainstorming ideas.
One idea is to rent tables in the restaurant for work-at-home people who just want to go someplace that's not their own house.
Now, if you work at home every day, you already know where I'm going with this, right?
If you work at home You've got kids there, and you've got a spouse there, grandparents, you've got dogs running around, you've got people delivering stuff.
It's kind of hard to get any work done in your own house sometimes.
So I know a lot of people who would be willing to rent a table in a restaurant, let's say during the afternoon hours, let's say 2 p.m.
to 5 p.m.
And let's say the morning from 7am to 11am.
And you can just rent a table.
Now you can stay there and get some food to go or eat your lunch there also.
Or you could eat your lunch and then just stay and rent the table for a few hours.
You just bring your laptop and you just do your work, but you don't make any phone calls.
So that's one model.
It basically combines what Starbucks already does successfully.
Which is essentially they rent you tables, but they don't directly charge it.
They sort of embarrass you to buy Starbucks products.
And if you buy their products, well, then you sort of have indirectly rented a table that you can sit at and use your laptop.
The president's already talking about making meals tax deductible for businesses.
I think that'd be a big change and great.
Here's another change.
Since we're all getting, a lot of us are getting hooked on take-out and delivery, but the problem with take-out and delivery is the same analogous to the problem of online school.
I complain about online education because all they did is take a camera and point it at somebody who knows how to teach.
And that's not even close to where online education could be if you had the right team and you did it right.
Likewise, with restaurants, what restaurants did for takeout, and especially during the crisis, is they took the items that are on their menu...
At the prices that they're listed on the menu, added on top of it the delivery fee, which is usually the fee that the delivery company does, and then basically they just took the same business model and said, well, how about if we bring it to your house?
Now, that's okay.
It meets a lot of needs, and if you have a high income, it's a good alternative.
But if restaurants are trying to succeed in this new environment that One way they might go is to become a meal replacement business, maybe in addition to the high-end stuff.
But you can imagine them changing their business into almost an exclusively meal replacement business, in which they maybe are not doing the high-end steaks, but every night they have three or four choices that a family of four would want to eat.
And then they price it, So that it doesn't, you know, it's not outrageous.
So a lot of it has to do with the pricing.
So I think they could make a meal replacement model, which they do not have now.
Right now it's a restaurant model that they deliver to your house, which is not the best of both worlds.
That could be redesigned.
I also imagine that you could turn regular restaurants into drive-thrus or drive-ups, Or like the old days where you went to a diner in your car and the server rolled up on roller skates to the door of your car.
So there's a business in my town that sells ice cream.
It's called the Dairy.
And it's been there forever, and it's an institution in my town, and it's a drive-up.
So basically you get in line in your car, and usually teenagers come out and they ask you what you want in line, so that by the time you get up to the front of the line, they're almost ready and they just hand it to you and you pay.
So it's very efficient, but here's what's interesting.
The business was not really designed as a drive-through business.
I think it just sort of evolved that way.
And then they started changing the street.
So there was so much business for this one ice cream place that the town started putting cones out and sort of making it easier for a long line to form.
And so I could easily imagine that some restaurants would transform their parking lot into the restaurant.
So you could drive up in your car Order from your car.
Maybe there's a movie or something playing in the parking lot, and you've got people on roller skates or not bringing your food up, but they're trying to keep a distance, right?
Or maybe they don't even bring the food up.
Maybe they just leave it on the table with a number and you go and get it yourself.
Whatever's the least contact.
I also think that maybe movies will just go out of business.
Because I'm not sure that going to the movies even makes sense anymore.
In my opinion, going to the movies was sort of the default plan if you didn't have anything fun to do.
I mean, in the old days, going to the movies was actually an event that you liked doing.
But today, with our attention spans being so small and movies being so bad, and the alternatives on our phone from Twitter to YouTube being so good, Actually going to a movie and sitting there in suboptimal conditions, it's just not as good.
And I feel like the pandemic might just end movies as a business and just move it to your house and your phone.
All right. I am fascinated by the fact that this Russia collusion, coup situation is Has gigantic breaking news right in the middle of the crisis, and nobody cares?
Like, I'm going to talk about it, and even I can't find a way to care about it, even as important as it is, because of the alternatives.
And so I guess John Solomon confirmed on Sean Hannity's radio that there are multiple grand jury subpoenas going out on behalf of Attorney General John Durham.
We're also learning that the FBI knew that the FISA applications were bogus and that the investigation was bogus, and they did it anyway.
So now a lot of stuff is unredacted, and we're learning more.
We saw an unredacted thing with George Papadopoulos, in which the Whoever was the intelligence operative was trying to get him to admit some kind of crime, and he was doing whatever is the opposite of admitting a crime.
He said, no, nobody would do that.
That's illegal and stuff.
And he sounded like he meant it because he didn't know that he was being, he didn't know that he was talking to an operative.
And he was talking, it looked like he was just talking frankly.
And it's pretty clear he didn't know about anything that was out of ordinary.
He didn't know anything. I mean, it's pretty clear when you see the conversation.
And now we know that.
And now we can sort of go back and rewrite our own personal histories of whatever we thought about this situation before.
Because I started out skeptical.
I started out skeptical that there was some kind of organized coup attempt.
I'm still not sure what organized means.
As in, I don't know if they had a leader.
I don't know if they had meetings.
I don't know if they were all aware of the other people on the plot.
I'm not saying that that's demonstrated.
But it's pretty clear that a lot of people had the same A somewhat spontaneous notion that if they could degrade the president in any way, it would be good for their team.
So my guess is there was a little bit of colluding.
You know, certainly there were individuals talking to each other about what they could do or would do.
But I don't know how organized it was.
I mean, was it organized down to the point of trying to put their own person in charge?
Or was it somewhat autonomous?
People just knew they didn't like the president, that they didn't care?
Maybe they didn't care who replaced him as long as it was a Democrat?
Because that's a different coup.
One kind of coup says, I'm going to get rid of the person who's there, but I'm going to put in a specific person who's my person.
That's a coup. The other one is just sort of people acting out their own personal trauma.
Just deciding, oh, I can do this, and I feel bad about the president, so I'll do this small thing I can do, and I'll hope other people are doing things, and oh, I see the news is doing their thing, and now I see the other Democrats are doing their thing.
Oh, looks like we're all doing this thing now.
I feel like it might have been more like that.
We'll find out. So there's the big debate I'm seeing.
It's about the police state, you know, or the things we're doing for the coronavirus.
Is it pushing us too far into 1984 and Big Brother and dictatorship and police state?
And these are all things to not joke about, and they're all serious.
But some of the examples are...
You know, churches are being forced to not hold services together.
License plates are being recorded of anybody who does, so they can be followed up with later.
One town, the sidewalks have been designated for which direction, so you can get in trouble if you're on the wrong sidewalk, walking the wrong way.
You can get in trouble if you're surfing by yourself, sitting on the beach all by yourself.
So there are all these things that, you know, you can get dragged off a bus for not wearing a mask, depending on your city.
And then there's the talk of some kind of identification documents if you can prove you have antibodies.
Now, of course, a lot of the freedom people, which is most people, but a lot of the conservatives I'm seeing are saying, you know, damn it.
You know, it's gone too far.
We're giving up our freedom.
Our freedoms for this, and it's not worth it.
I have no respect for any of those opinions.
None. I have no respect for that.
So all the people who say, you can't be closing the churches and telling us where to surf and the beach and giving us IDs and all that, I have no respect for the people whose opinion is we can't do that because it's bad for freedom.
Unless... They believe all those things and they can put a number on it.
If you can put a number on it, then it's actually an opinion.
Otherwise, it's just bitching.
If you can say to me, look, I think that the state should not put all these restrictions on us.
I think we should be allowed to live our lives.
The people who are in more danger, they know they are, they can hide.
The rest of us, why don't we reopen the economy?
That's a good opinion if you can put a number of deaths on it that you're willing to accept for your preferred plan.
Without that, you're just bitching.
Nobody should even listen to you whatsoever.
So if all you're complaining about is somebody wasn't allowed to go to church, wasn't allowed to surf, whatever, I have no respect for your opinion.
None. Unless you can tell me how many people you're willing to kill to reserve that right.
And then I might agree with you or I might disagree, but I would fully respect an opinion that had a number on it.
Here's the worst thought you're going to have.
I don't think it's bad, but you might take it that way.
I think in order to get past the coronavirus situation...
We're going to have to make one of the hardest choices a free country ever made.
And it goes like this.
We can have privacy, or we can have freedom, but we can't have both anymore.
And here's a specific example.
Freedom would be the freedom to, you know, go to work, go where you want, go to the beach, go to church.
So that's the freedom I'm talking about.
The freedom of where you go and what you do.
In order to have that in the age of coronavirus, you would almost have to give up your privacy.
Because I don't see any way we could ever get there unless some people are willing to have contact tracing.
Let's say you have their phones monitored where they are so you know who touches, who gets in contact with somebody else.
Maybe something like the ID cards.
You know, it could be digital.
It doesn't have to be a physical document or a card you have in your wallet.
But I think probably the very minimum we're going to need to do is to give up our privacy about who's been tested, what the result is, and where they've been in terms of contacting other people.
Short of doing those things, I honestly don't see any way past it.
I don't. Because even if you had testing, you still sort of need to know who's tested and who isn't, right?
Don't you feel like you...
You have to have some records of who got tested and who didn't, so there's your privacy there.
People will know if you didn't get tested, probably.
Now, I don't know if they're even collecting that information, but I don't think we can get to the other side without giving up freedom.
Now, here's the good news.
This is something Eric Weinstein was saying, talking about going to Mars.
And one of his points, I hope I'm presenting it accurately.
There's always that risk I'm not.
But one of his points was that as humans become more godlike in our powers, in other words, one person, We'll have the power to build a nuclear weapon and destroy half of the country.
So as individuals get more and more powerful, which is just a given, right?
We'll have our drones and our weapons of mass destruction, and you'll be able to buy a coronavirus on the dark net.
So people will get more and more dangerous, and the only way to protect against that Eric Weinstein was saying, well, some of us are just going to have to leave the planet and go to Mars.
But I don't know how that solves it, because how do you get only good people on Mars?
I mean, eventually some terrorists are going to end up on Mars too, so I don't think you can escape it.
I believe that the only way we'll be able to live together, as each of us individually gain God-like powers, is to give up privacy.
In other words, The system is going to need to identify people who are developing the plan so they can stop them before they do it.
Otherwise, we just won't be able to live on the same planet.
If there's only half of 1% of us who are crazy and willing to kill the rest of us, that's the end of the planet.
Because that half of 1% will have the complete capability to ruin the rest of the planet, will have the motivation to The ability to do it, and nothing can stop them except a complete loss of privacy so that you can see it developing.
So this is the toughest thing we will ever have to do since maybe the American Revolution.
We will actually have to explicitly decide to give up one of our most cherished rights, privacy.
But here's the good news.
I think we can figure out how to do it Without the big downside risk.
Now, of course, as soon as you give up privacy, and I don't know if somebody said this in the comments yet, but I would expect it.
The moment you give up privacy, smart people will say, well, that's just the beginning of the end.
Because once you give up privacy, the government knows too much about you, and then tyranny can happen and dictatorships because they have too much control over you because they know too much about you.
Now, I have empathy for that position, but I think we can cleverly get past that with this insight.
As long as the government also doesn't have privacy, you'll be fine.
The worst situation is if the government, let's say the people running the government, they have all of their privacy, and they can operate behind closed doors, and you don't know what's happening, but you've lost all of yours.
That's the worst possible situation.
Because that's pretty much begging for a dictator at that point.
But, suppose our transparency of a government is complete.
Whatever that means.
So I'm talking conceptually now.
So if the government has a meeting, you find out what they talked about.
If somebody decides to find out your name...
In a government database, maybe the system is designed so you get a message.
And it says, huh, the governor just looked at your name on this list.
And then you could say, hey, I'm going to tweet about this.
Why is the governor looking at my name on a list?
What's that got to do with anything?
Now, I'm just trying to make up examples so they're bad ones.
But the point is, if we, the public, could see everything that our leaders were doing, which we can't now, so it would require much more transparency, then we would not be in so much risk that they would abuse our lack of privacy.
Now, I think also you could game the system to protect privacy while getting still some of the benefits.
For example, Apple and Google have this Have this announcement where they're going to make it possible for you to have an app that would track who came in contact with whom because your Bluetooth would be on and your Bluetooth would recognize each other when you came close.
So if you get the virus and you get tested and you have it, some app and algorithm can find the people you were with and send them a message and say, you know, be careful or whatever the advice is.
Now, it would be easy to write this system so that no human being was ever directly alerted to who was involved.
In other words, the programmers could create the system and then just let it run, and nobody would actually see who was getting the texts.
So, you know, you could have some anonymity built into the process, but, as all of you will quickly note, that doesn't really protect you.
Because the programmers can find out who you are.
They wrote the software.
They can find out who you are.
And the government can tell the programmers to find out who you are.
So really, the government has full access to finding out anything they want about you, but they already have that.
The government can already find out anything they want about you.
You only think it's different.
So my point is, if we can build some tools that you would think would give up some of your privacy, As long as the government was also more transparent than it is now, we could make it work.
And we could protect your anonymity, except for maybe the programmers.
But then if you have enough visibility, even they can't do anything bad with it because everybody's watching.
So that's the basic idea.
I think that's where we're going.
Utopian thinking. Is it?
I would say utopian thinking would be...
If you believe that people would act upon their good nature and good impulses.
So I would think an impractical utopian opinion would be, oh, people will share.
People will not be selfish.
Once people have all they need, they won't steal.
But I don't believe any of that.
So what I just described, I think, is the opposite of utopian because it makes the worst assumptions about human nature.
If your system is going to survive, it needs to make the worst assumptions about people and still work.
Let me give you two examples.
Democracy. Democracy works, and a democratic republic, they work, even though all the individuals voting are mostly idiots.
And still it works, right?
So you can make the worst assumption about the citizens But you can still see that a system well-designed cancels out the idiots.
And you still get something that all the idiots say, well, it looks good.
I voted. I feel good about this, even though my person didn't win.
Likewise with capitalism.
Capitalism makes the worst assumptions about human beings, that we're selfish, and that we'll do anything to screw somebody else as long as we can get away with it.
And then they built this system called capitalism.
We all act selfishly, And it makes us rich.
That's a good system.
So, likewise, with this privacy question, whatever you did, you'd have to design it so the worst impulses of human beings is built into the system and it still works.
So whoever said, I'm thinking like a utopian, you would be right if I'd ever made any assumption about people doing the right thing.
But I always aggressively make the opposite assumption that we're all evil and selfish and Unless somebody's watching.
So that's why I add the transparency, because the government would be evil and selfish if you weren't watching.
All right. Saying things could be more efficient is not utopian.
Correct. Correct.
Yeah, we're a constitutional republic with democratic principles.
I'll give you that.
Scott is famous, so he's already a non-private person with nothing to lose.
Well, first of all, I respect that comment, because it echoes some things I've said before, that I've effectively lived in your future, which is that I've lived in a world for decades in which I don't have privacy the way other people do.
Meaning that I assume hackers are trying harder to get my stuff.
I assume that people in the government, people in social media have snooped in my messages.
I mean, I just assume.
Do you assume that...
Would you assume that any big social media network has looked at your actual messages, your private messages?
Would you ever assume that?
Probably not, right? Because they wouldn't care.
So you have the privacy of nobody caring.
But I do assume that everybody who's a famous person probably has had their private messages looked over by programmers and developers and other people like that.
So I've always assumed that I don't have privacy the way other people do, just because there's more interest in violating it, and of course it's possible.
The people who program the systems have every ability to look at all the information, of course.
The specific type of privacy I was talking about, even I still have, which is the privacy of movement without being tracked.
So the specific privacy I was talking about is losing my privacy of who I talked to and where I was.
And I'm saying that I would give that up too, because at the moment I have that same privacy you do.
Nobody knows where I drove my car yesterday.
Only I know. But I would give that up.
If it meant it's the only way to go back to work.
Are you saying the nanny state is inevitable with advanced technology?
I don't want to use your term because there's something different about what I think.
What I think is that the system that'll work is not the nanny state where the government is sort of the nanny and you're like the children, but rather something more like a standoff.
No, mutually assured destruction is what I call it.
So instead of saying it's a nanny state, I would say what I favor is mutually assured destruction.
Which is, hey politician, you have the physical ability to violate my privacy.
But if you do, you're going to lose your job.
Because I'm going to know about it.
We have so much transparency, I'm going to know about it.
So if you violate my privacy for no good reason, you lost your job.
So, the system that I think would work would be mutually assured destruction.
Now, nothing's perfect.
So could you design a system in which there's just no way anybody could violate your privacy without getting caught?
No, probably not.
But I'll bet you could get most of it.
I'll bet you could do a real good job.
Nothing's perfect. And if you can't design it, then I'd probably vote with you that you don't want to give up your privacy.
I wouldn't give up privacy unless we had that extra transparency.
Okay. The death rate for healthy people is much closer to flu-like.
Why would they lose freedoms?
I feel like you haven't been paying attention.
Can somebody in the comments answer this question before I have to?
Why would the people who are not at risk any more than regular flu, the people who are healthy and young, let's say female, why should they be prevented from going out when their risk is no greater than it is for other stuff?
Now, actually, it is greater, but you could argue it's in that range.
Does anybody want to give the answer?
Because I'm frustrated that it's not obvious.
All right, so it might take a while because there's some time lag.
Let me give you the answer. The answer is that all you people who do not have a risk of dying, not much risk, the young people, the idea is that you'll go out and get infected and take it home and kill grandma.
So it really isn't about you.
So if you were the only person who existed, and only your personal risk mattered, yeah, go back to work.
In fact, if the only thing that mattered was you, why would we be doing any of this?
The odds of you dying are pretty darn low.
The entire purpose is to protect people you don't even know, whose names you'll never know.
Now, if you say, I don't want to do that, the cost-benefit doesn't work, well, you can make that argument.
But don't make the argument that individuals can just manage their individual risk.
We don't live in that world.
Your risk could kill me.
And we have a pretty long history of saying that you can have your freedom unless it kills me.
Yeah, you can smoke your cigarettes unless it's around me.
You can drive without a license, unless it's on the road that I'm on, you know, a public road.
So, you know, all of our rights are balanced against other people's costs and benefits as well, and how could you change that?
I mean, that's not the way it changes.
So anybody who thinks that this situation will be the one situation in the world in which only your individual risk will matter, you need to wake up.
You don't live in that world.
You don't live in a world where only your individual risk will be the determinant of what the policy is.
It's always about what you do and how it affects other people.
It couldn't be any other way.
There would be no point in having a government if everybody can just do what's in their personal best interest.
That's the whole point.
All right. This comment says, I am stuck on this.
If we do this for 100,000 to 200,000 lives, why not for 80,000 or 50,000?
Good question. Here's my answer.
Almost everybody who is thinking wrong about this makes the same mistake, which is to compare the mitigated low number with the unmitigated number of regular flu.
So the unmitigated number of regular flu could get up to 50,000 or 80,000, right?
And we as a society have decided, yeah, if that's how many people you lose, 50,000 to 80,000 a year, we think we should leave the economy open for that.
So the questioner asks, well, if it's only 50,000 to 80,000 and we keep it open for the regular flu, And it looks like it might only be $60,000 for this one.
Why wouldn't we keep it open for this?
Because they're not the same!
One is with full mitigation.
One is with no mitigation.
You're comparing a rock to a giraffe.
If you're stuck on that, you haven't been paying attention to anything.
The most important thing you have to understand is that if we did not mitigate the coronavirus, it's not going to be 100,000 deaths.
It's going to be a million.
It's going to be a million.
Now ask yourself, how powerful is the shelter in place, the social isolation?
How much does it work? Well, according to the models, The difference between what we're doing to mitigate and not is the difference between a million people dying and something closer to 100,000.
Maybe it'll even be lower.
So it's about a 10 to 1 or a 20 to 1 death rate between mitigating and not mitigating.
Is that not clear? All right.
What if the flu is at 200,000?
If the regular flu...
Was it 200,000?
Then we would certainly have a conversation about closing the...
I hate that phrase, having a conversation.
We would be debating whether we should do something about it.
But you're also still missing the point.
If the regular flu had the risk of killing a million, we would treat it just like this one.
So maybe I can summarize it this way.
For every risk that has a risk of killing a million people...
We always treat that risk the same way, as very serious.
And if a risk might kill 50,000-ish, it has been our way to let it go.
50,000 people die in cars or less.
So you can think of lots of things in which sub-50,000 people die.
But you can't think of too many things that kill a million people.
Oh, smoking, actually.
Smoking's kind of a special case because it's grandfathered in and people are literally hooked on it.
Somebody says, I will never trust the rulers.
Well, that's a good...
Somebody says, Exasperated Scott is most amusing.
Well, could I be more exasperated than intelligent people comparing a fully mitigated flu with one that's not?
I mean, if I see that comparison one more time, I think my head is going to explode.
Because that's really, that's the most basic thing you have to understand.
If you don't understand that we can only have the 60,000 or 100,000 deaths with aggressive mitigation, if you don't understand that, and that the real number to compare to the flu is a million, and I think that's low, by the way, as some smart people are starting to say, we don't really have a plan that doesn't kill 2% of our population times 0.6%.
Let's say herd immunity happens around 0.7.
70% of the public has it.
You can get herd immunity, according to Dr.
Oz, 65 to 70%.
So let's say 70.
So even if we slowly go back and manage our risks...
We're probably going to get to 60% of 327 million times 2% people are going to die.
They just won't die all in three months.
So we might be able to spread out the hospital impact, which would be a thing.
But when you talk about going back to work, unless you've got the testing in place, or DNA testing or therapeutics or vaccines or something, Unless you have those things, you're kind of talking about killing a million people, just spreading it out.
So we'll see what happens.
Anyway, that's all I got for today.
Well, no, I'll have more today.
Tonight. I'll have more tonight.
Somebody says, what about fentanyl?
Fentanyl's not legal as a recreational drug, so that's already illegal.
All right, I'll talk to you tonight.
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