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April 11, 2020 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
56:18
Episode 905 Scott Adams: Swaddle in Place. Come Learn a Useful Trick With Me.
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Do you like my exciting new introduction?
You get to watch the lights come on and the shades go down.
Except one of my shades isn't working.
Hey, get down there. There we go.
There we go. It's exciting, isn't it?
Sort of like a little build up.
I know. But back to me.
That's enough of that. How the heck have you been?
I missed you. It's been 11 hours.
And somebody says, does Christina still cut your hair?
Well, she's in social isolation in a different house.
So I was going to cut my hair on livestream today, but I didn't feel like cleaning up the hair in my office, so I'm not going to do that.
I'm not taking Twitter questions, but if I see something go by, I'll take a question.
So here's what's happened since last we spoke.
I saw Brett Hume tweeting a quote by Anthony Fauci, Dr.
Fauci, in which Fauci was saying that he's never had much trust in models.
And Brett Hume, I'm paraphrasing, but basically Brett Hume said, why are you telling us now?
Because you seemed pretty confident not too long ago.
You seemed pretty confident back then.
But now you don't trust models?
And here's what I find funny about that.
The reason Fauci says he doesn't trust the models is that they're only as good as the assumptions they've put in them.
Is that wrong?
Is Fauci wrong that the models are only as good as the assumptions?
No, of course not. Of course not.
We all know that. And is that the most ordinary expected thing you could ever say about models?
That it depends on the assumptions you put in?
It's just the most obvious thing.
So I said in a different tweet today that I would lose respect for any expert who believed models work.
Any expert, doesn't matter what the field is, if they say these long-range, multi-variable models work, and actually can give you a photograph of the future, I would not trust those experts, if you know what I mean.
But what was funniest about this is, Brit Hume is probably One of the most experienced news people.
He's seen everything from every angle.
One of the sharpest observers of political life especially.
And apparently Bray Hume thought these models were actually telling you something.
To which I think, really?
How do you get this far?
and not know that long-range prediction models are not telling you even slightly more than you could just guess.
Because if they could, anybody who had that kind of superpower to predict the future, even with a little bit of edge over chance, would be a trillionaire.
If anybody could do it, somebody would do it to get rich.
There would be a million ways you could exploit that to get rich.
So, no, Dr. Fauci, my opinion of Dr. Fauci, Fauci just went up a level when he said he doesn't believe the models, the virology models.
So that is the correct answer, Dr.
Fauci. I see that the ex-FDA head, Dr.
Gottlieb, is saying that we should go back to work, but ideally we should have widespread screening.
Now, I would like to nominate for the most useless thing that anybody can say about the coronavirus, is we should have widespread testing.
Why don't we have more testing?
Hey, I've got an idea.
Why don't we do testing?
You know, South Korea did some testing.
Why don't we do some testing?
Hey, I've got an idea. Has anybody thought of this?
We could do some testing.
Have you realized, am I the first one to think of this?
That if we could test people, and we could test a lot of people, that would really help.
We'd know who had it and who didn't.
Wow! I'm so sick of people going on television or in the news to tell us that it would really be good if we could test.
If we had the tests, if we could, I'm pretty sure that would have been right at the top of the list that our experts would have wanted to do.
Please stop saying we should do more testing.
There's nobody who disagrees with that.
We just can't do it.
So you know what would also be good to stop this pandemic?
Magic. Why don't we use magic?
People, people, are you not thinking it through?
Just use magic.
Oh, magic isn't real?
Well then, we'll just test.
We'll just do massive...
Oh, we don't have massive tests?
They don't exist? And we can't make them that fast?
Oh, alright.
Well, the good news is that there are a number of exciting developments in the world of testing.
Now, by the way, one of my best predictions, I believe, based on some information I had that most people didn't have, is that the world of testing Quickly testing stuff had moved way, way into the future, but hadn't quite been productized yet.
In other words, there were a lot of startups who already had licensed technology from government labs that would allow you to very quickly check things inexpensively and accurately in the field.
So I'd seen a number of startups trying to exploit that technology, so I predicted early on That you would suddenly see, leaping into existence, this technology, because now it was an emergency, so funding could be had, and things would get ramped up quickly.
And just like I imagined, I think you're going to, well, I'm pretty sure you're going to see some new stuff.
Let's just say I get to see things before you do, and there's some exciting stuff coming in that realm.
Here's an interesting positive thought.
The president said something along these lines, but I want to extend the thought.
So the president was making his economic prediction.
He said, you know, the second quarter's going to be bad.
The third quarter, maybe you could start to think about things getting better.
But the president thought that there was lots of pent-up demand and that the fourth quarter could be record-setting.
I really, really like the way he puts that.
Because he's being very, I'd say, conservative about what would happen this quarter and next.
Obviously, they're not going to be great.
But then he gives us a pretty legitimate, most optimistic case that at the end of this year, things would start picking up and maybe even set records because of pent-up demand.
That could happen. I mean, it's just as likely that there'll be soft demand because people got crushed economically.
But you could see the people who didn't get crushed just stepping it up and having a little extra spending.
I could see that. But here's the part I want to add.
And I think that the president referred to this, but I'm going to take it a level deeper, which is we've never had a time in our history where so many of us took a time out and just stopped working And sort of had time to think about things.
Now you think to yourself, well that's not a big deal.
I mean we often take vacations and we take the weekend off.
It's not that big a deal that we have time to think about things.
But here's what's different. Because of the restrictions placed on all of our lives and the economic impact, etc., almost everybody had to rethink from the ground up Everything they do.
You had to rethink how you eat.
How do you get food?
You had to rethink your social life.
You had to rethink travel.
You had to rethink cleaning.
You had to rethink shipping.
You had to rethink your job and every part of your job.
You had to think education, family structure, who's babysitting, all of it.
All of it had to be rethought.
Now here's my positive spin on this.
I think that that process makes people realize there's just a ton of stuff that needs to be better.
How many people realized that they could get more work done by not commuting?
Just to pick one simple example.
I've got a feeling that people saw different ways to do things.
They saw red tape being cut.
They saw people doing things faster than they thought.
They saw innovation.
They saw people stepping up.
And everybody had to rethink from scratch, how could I do this job I had been doing?
What's the smarter way to do this now that meets all these different requirements?
And I think what's going to happen, and maybe we'll never be able to measure it, but I think that there's going to be a systems innovation surge.
When I say systems, I mean the system of how do you travel to work, the system of how do you go to school, the system of the workplace, how do you organize it, and everything like that.
So I think people are going to fundamentally rethink all of our systems.
And as you know, I'm the biggest proponent of making sure you've got good systems.
And it could be really gigantic in terms of its long-term impact, simply the fact that our creativity is was challenged in this concentrated way.
So it'll take a while for those benefits to work their way through the system, but I think they could be really big.
I was trying to think of all the things that will be different after we get back to work.
Certainly the work-at-home thing, I think the argument for self-driving cars just got way stronger.
As I often say, persuasion is not just about how good your argument is.
It's also about getting people's attention.
So the things that people think about the most, they irrationally think are the important things because they're thinking about it.
So if you can make somebody think about something a lot, it will become important to them when it wasn't before.
So here's my point on that.
A lot of attention will be put on the natural death rate of driving only because we have this weird experiment when people stop driving for a while.
So you can actually really see in concrete terms how many people did not die because we weren't all in traffic.
And I think what that's going to do is it's going to push people toward thinking, wait a minute, We saved...
I'm going to pick a number.
I don't know what the real number is.
People are going to say, are you telling me we saved 25,000 lives by not driving?
And that we could bank that savings and always save 25,000 lives, or for the full year, maybe it's 50,000.
Could we save 50,000 lives a year just by having self-driving cars that would almost never crash?
I mean, if you did it right, they would never crash.
So I think the self-driving cars just went from, you know, something you'd like someday to, my God, why don't we hurry up on this?
Because you can save 50,000 lives a year.
That's as much as we close down the entire economy for.
I think contact tracing is going to be the thing.
Did you see the story? That I guess Apple and Google have decided to release, I don't know, some standards, technical standards or an API or something.
But the idea is that They're making it possible to build apps where you can tell if you've been near somebody.
So let's say you were diagnosed with having coronavirus.
You could, with a few pushes of whatever buttons on your app, and maybe you don't have to allow it.
I don't know if you have to give permission or the government is just going to do it.
At some point you have to give permissions.
So maybe you give permission from the LSATS before you've been diagnosed so that your Bluetooth is telling you who you're bumping into all day who also has their Bluetooth on.
So the idea is that You could look at the digital trail and send people a text and say, hey, you stood within four feet of this person who has coronavirus.
Go get it checked. Or something like that.
That could be huge.
You know, if you were going to make a short list of all the things that could get you back to work, well, one of them would be widespread testing, which we can't do yet, but maybe in a few weeks.
The other would be magic, of course, which doesn't exist.
So that would be great. And then we have this new thing, which is these apps that will do the Bluetooth contact things, which doesn't exist.
But one imagines that in a month or so, maybe, we could have something like that working.
But all of those, and maybe the hydroxychloroquine makes a difference.
Maybe genetic testing will tell us something.
So we probably have four different ways that we could attack the virus.
So I think we'll get there.
I think education online will change completely.
I think the biggest thing that will change online education is the first time somebody does it right.
In my opinion, it's never been done right.
Now, it's not like I've seen every online course, but nothing I've seen.
And what I mean by...
Doing it right is somebody that takes a Hollywood movie kind of a model and they hire somebody who's just good on camera, looks good, talks well, somebody to write the script, somebody to do the graphics, somebody to direct it.
So you've got a real movie production, but it's just a college course or a class.
And once it's done right, And especially you would also do a lot of A-B testing, so you might test it out with small crowds before you finalized it, you know, to make sure that you're saying things clearly, etc.
So to basically produce a class the way manufacturers produce any other product, which is it goes through testing and research and polling.
You've got a team of experts coming together.
It's a long-term project.
Right now, we just point a camera at somebody who knows how to teach, and they just teach.
But as soon as somebody does it right the first time, it's going to turn into a real business.
And it might be... I would argue...
All right, here's another prediction.
I will argue that the biggest business of the future will be online training.
Eh? Eh? How do you like that prediction?
I'll say it again just so there's no confusion.
My prediction is that the biggest industry in the future, the one with the most dollar amount, will be online education.
Because the courses are going to be...
Colleges will eventually have to disappear because they don't really make sense.
For the price for what you're getting, they just don't make any sense.
So I think regular colleges will start to fade away.
Online education will grow.
And just keep getting better.
And I think that when people are producing...
Imagine what you would pay.
Just think about this.
Imagine what you would pay...
To have a course that you needed, let's say you needed it for your job or it was part of a degree program, but you could take the course that was as fun as watching the best movie you've watched.
Like, it's just really entertaining, but you're also learning it at the same time.
How much extra would you pay for that versus the boring one that makes you want to take your brain out with a spoon?
Well, you would pay a lot for that.
Not everybody, but there would be enough people with money who would pay a lot for that training that's a little bit better.
And I think eventually the transmission of information and training will be the biggest market in the world.
That's what I think.
Tucker Carlson asked a question that has had me scratching my head since I heard it.
And I guess I need a fact check on this because there's an assumption in this or a fact that I'm not sure about.
But what Tucker said was that outside of Wuhan, there hasn't been a major breakout in China.
There hasn't been another city in China that got real problems like New York or Wuhan.
And Tucker says, what's up with that?
Because we also learned that maybe the virus is even way more viral than we thought.
So how could it be way more viral than we thought?
Millions of people have left Wuhan since the worst part of the pandemic.
They're traveling all around.
It's super viral.
And we don't have other major outbreaks in China?
How would you even speculate that that's possible?
Well, let's do that.
Let's speculate. Number one is that China is lying.
Okay, that's the obvious one, right?
The most obvious one is they're lying.
But if what happened in Wuhan was happening anywhere else, how would we not notice?
Is it possible that That something as big as Wuhan or a half of Wuhan, you know, would still be gigantic, right?
It would still be a really big deal.
How would we not notice that, even with their control of the media and everything else?
We would know, right?
So one possibility is it is happening, and China is like, you know, millions of people are dying and we just don't know.
I guess it's possible, right?
I guess. That's one possibility.
Here's another possibility.
They have a vaccine.
Right? What's the possibility that they have a vaccine?
Well, here again, you have the same problem as the first example.
If they had a vaccine, it means they would have vaccinated, what, hundreds of millions of people?
Do you think there's any chance we wouldn't know that If hundreds of millions of people were forcefully vaccinated in a period of a few weeks, yeah, we'd know that, right?
Again, we don't have great visibility about everything happening in China, but something of that size, we'd know, right?
So I'm going to rule out vaccination, and I'm going to rule out that it is actually big outbreaks everywhere, because we would notice those two things.
Here's another one.
Suppose hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin and zinc work really, really well.
And by work really well, I mean well enough that it doesn't overwhelm your hospitals even if you've got an outbreak.
Would you know, would you be aware of it, if a lot of regular Chinese people were having something that was like a mild cold, But they were taking their meds, and it didn't hospitalize them, and they got better in a week.
Would the rest of the world know that that was happening on a massive scale?
Well, here again, we might know, because that's a lot of hydroxychloroquine.
If they're handing it out like candy over there to their billion or whatever plus people, wouldn't we know that?
I think we'd know. But of the three choices, it's the one we would least likely know.
Would you agree with that?
That if they had a vaccine they had forced hundreds of millions of people to take in a few weeks, we'd know that.
If millions of people were dying, we'd know that.
But if they were giving out massive amounts of hydroxychloroquine any time somebody showed the first signs of symptoms, would we know that?
Because let's say they only gave it to the people who showed symptoms.
Would we know? Maybe not.
So if I had to guess, I would say that would be the one that's slightly more likely, or it could be some other therapeutic.
I'm hearing a lot of people worrying that the crackdown and the shelter-in-place orders and all that are the beginning of softening us up for the ultimate dictator move, where all of our rights and freedoms are taken away from us.
I'm finding no sympathy for that opinion.
Because first of all, I don't think it's happening.
I just think we're doing what we need to for the emergency.
And when it's over, we'll get rid of the things.
So there's some sense that any kind of surveillance or tracking or lack of privacy would just automatically become permanent even after we solved the problem for which they had been implemented.
I don't think so.
I don't know. Of all the things I'm going to worry about this year, it doesn't make my top 100.
Now, maybe, maybe I'm missing something, but to me it looks like The United States is really good at tweaking things when they need to and then untweaking it when they're done.
I don't know. I think that you would have to have a different mindset in your public for that to be a big risk.
I said this before, but I'll say it again, which is the great asset that Americans have is the American idea.
The idea of what is right and fair and The brainwashing that we all got as kids, you know, to be patriotic.
And I say brainwashing, but not in a negative way, because to have a coherent society, you kind of have to brainwash people to be on the same page, culturally, religiously in some cases, but at least in terms of the Constitution or the law.
So you need some brainwashing.
The United States does it really well.
It's created a society of very independent...
We'll resist at the drop of a hat.
So there's something about the American mind that I think really makes the whole dictatorship thing seem ridiculous.
You would have to see our minds change a whole lot Before you would see me getting worried.
But as long as our minds are good, then what we're doing with the details is not the beginning of the dictator state.
It's just what we need to do to solve a problem right now.
That's what I say. I asked this question about whether the deaths are being correctly characterized and added to the right categories for the coronavirus deaths especially.
And I got two feedbacks from ER doctors.
So I asked, is there an ER doctor who can confirm the following belief?
So this is my belief.
My belief, without being an ER doctor, is that they probably are quite good at accurately identifying the real cause of death.
I'll give you my simple examples, which is if somebody had diabetes for 15 years, And they come in and they die within a day of respiratory problems and, you know, the classic red eyes of the coronavirus patient.
And, you know, it has every sign of coronavirus that it probably wasn't the diabetes that they've had for 15 years.
It could be, but it'd just be this weird coincidence that that was the day you died.
So that's my simplified story.
But as one ER doctor explained to me, That the doctors do actually look at the patient's history, what's happened recently, the entire constellation of factors, and then they decide what the cause of death is.
There's a whole process for doing it.
And at least for this one ER doctor, it was his opinion that they're categorizing is probably 95% correct.
So that's one opinion.
That's somebody who has signed a lot of death certificates.
So this is coming from somebody who has personally signed hundreds of death certificates from the ER. And he says, in his opinion, that they're probably 95% correct because they're pretty responsible and there's a logic to it and there are ways you can tell most of the time.
I got a second opinion.
So the second ER doctor had a different take on it, and it went like this.
He too was not disagreeing with the basic premise that a doctor can know the accurate cause of death, let's say 95% of the time.
So both doctors seem to be on that same page that the doctor knows, and that it's not a problem of the doctor not knowing.
Okay, so just hold that, put a pin in it.
Two doctors who actually do this work are sure that they do a pretty good job, and I think that they would tell me the truth.
If they knew they were guessing, I think they'd say, well, honestly, it's hard to tell.
We just take our best shot.
We think we're right most of the time.
I think they would have said that, right?
Because why wouldn't they? It's not like they wouldn't have to hide that.
It's people doing the best they can with the information they have.
It wouldn't be any kind of a bad mark on the record or anything.
But instead, both of them seem to believe that the doctor can actually identify the cause of death and that the All the evidence is going to be pretty clear 95% of the time.
But the second ER doctor added this little bit of flavor to the discussion and said, yes, but there might be tremendous economic incentive to cheat.
To which I said, just paraphrasing a longer conversation, to which I said, I don't believe that a doctor would cheat for the benefit of the hospital.
Because the doctor has all the incentive in the world to just do their job right.
I don't think there are a lot of doctors who are going into the doctor business to guess something over on the world.
I think most doctors just want to do a good job.
And so I said to myself, I can't really see a doctor intentionally mischaracterizing the cause of death When the doctor's pay won't change anyway, but maybe the hospital will make more money.
And so I couldn't square that.
And so here was the counterargument, which I give some weight to.
It goes like this.
The hospital has a relationship with the doctors in which the doctors need to make the hospital happy, and the hospital has to make the doctors happy.
And if either of them become unhappy, then they don't have a relationship, and that's not good.
And so the thought was that if the hospital definitely wants more coronavirus outcomes in terms of death certificates, that even though the doctor is not inclined to lie, and even though the doctor doesn't have a direct benefit, it's really the hospital that has the benefit, would the doctor be a team player and maybe be a little bit flexible on the ones that are sort of on the fence?
To which I say, good point.
Yeah, that's a good point.
I would imagine that's exactly what to expect with human beings.
It has nothing to do with hospitals and doctors, but with human beings, you could expect if somebody has a relationship and money is involved, that if somebody wants something, you're kind of going to be sort of subtly, if not directly, pressured to give that thing that your partner wants.
But here's my summary of this.
I don't believe doctors, in any kind of major way, would lie about the cause of death.
Nor do I think that there are many cases that are on the fence.
That gets down to that 5% that probably could go either way, so maybe there's some mistakes.
So I wouldn't be surprised if there's a 5% bias because doctors want the hospital to Feel good about the doctor and everybody's playing along and the hospital makes money so the doctor still has a place to work and stuff like that.
But we don't have a way to measure it.
So it's just my experience of life and my understanding of humans is that probably the deaths are being coded 90 to 90% correctly, which is good enough to think there's not some giant problem here.
That's my opinion. Could be wrong.
Let's see. I love giving you reminders of things I said years ago so that you can see whether or not they came to fruition.
One of my favorite predictions, and it was my favorite because I knew that not a single person believed that this would happen, nor did anybody take it seriously.
And here it is. I said in 2015 that Trump would not just change what we thought of politics, but that he would alter our understanding of reality itself.
And I said it a number of times publicly, and almost nobody ever engaged me on that by saying, well, what do you mean?
Like, what exactly does that mean?
And if they had, I don't know if I could have explained it, but let me give you some examples.
So we saw, for example, that facts don't matter.
I mean, that was a gigantic mental shift, right?
You went from a world in 2014-ish in which you thought facts actually matter and that people use them to make decisions.
But I told you they don't.
And that that's not the way people are.
People don't use facts to make decisions, except for the minor things that are either really obvious or they have no emotional content.
But for most of what we do, we're emotional creatures and we rationalize it after the fact.
So I think most of you have come around to believe that is true.
And think about how massive that is.
Changing your understanding of reality from facts matter to they don't matter?
That's a pretty fundamental change.
And I think a lot of you have gone on that journey with me.
But here's just a few other things about reality that have changed in just the last few years.
And it's funny when you see them all together.
One is, the Russia collusion thing, wasn't there at least some point in that when you said to yourself, well, I don't believe this is actually an organized coup attempt to overthrow the...
The elected President of the United States.
What do you think now?
As of this week, we know that basically the FISA process was completely abused.
Attorney General Barr says basically, well, it could be incompetence, but it certainly isn't looking like it, and we're looking to see if anybody needs to go to jail.
So that's your Attorney General.
So Whether or not, no matter what we find about, you know, once we get to the bottom of the Russia collusion thing, no matter what we find, wouldn't you say that your belief about what's possible got modified a little bit?
Because I would have said, no, you know, if somebody had described this before any of it happened, and said, Scott, give me a read on this.
Tell me if you think this could happen.
Deep state actors...
We'd put together this BS charge about Russia.
They'd create this whole conspiracy, and it would be the grounds for impeachment, and they would remove a legally elected president with just a bunch of stuff they made up.
I would have said to you, I don't think so.
I'm not sure that's a thing.
And then we watched it happen.
We watched it happen.
Now, there's some of you who said we've known for years.
I would question what...
Knowing means in this context.
There were certainly people who were confident that it was always a big conspiracy and people who thought it wasn't.
But I don't know if anybody knows.
I always point out the fact that there are always smart people all around every topic.
So if you ever get to the point where you know the answer, some of them will be right.
But if you can't tell which ones are right ahead of time, I don't know if it's anybody knowing they're right.
Or it's just people are on all sides, so somebody's got to be right.
Anyway, so we have a different opinion about how slimy the people in our government are and can be.
We've lost all trust in our intelligence agencies.
I mean, I have to admit that the Iraq weapons of mass destruction and even other notable failures that they've had, I think, weren't they surprised by the fall of the Iron Curtain?
So there's some famous failures of our intelligence agencies, but did you think that they might not even be working on your side?
Did it ever occur to you that our most trusted intelligence agencies were actually not even on your side?
They're not even on your team?
But we know that now, because obviously there were important members of them who were working against the interests of the American public.
How about the World Health Organization?
Two weeks ago, Did you think that was a legitimate international organization in which they were working toward world health?
I kind of did. I kind of thought it was an actual organization dedicated to world health.
Well, I don't know what the World Health Organization is, but it's nothing like that.
Looks like it's some kind of Chinese propaganda organ.
How long ago was it that you thought the news was real?
I came to this one sooner than you did because I've said this before, but because I'm often the subject of the news, I have a front row seat to see how inaccurate it is.
Because when they're talking about me, I know if it's accurate.
I'll be like, I didn't do that.
I didn't say that. That's all inaccurate.
But most of you are just observers.
You're just in the audience watching people like me get ripped apart by the media and you think, well, it's probably true.
They wouldn't say it if it wasn't a little bit true.
It's probably true. But now you all know that the news is made up.
Right? Basically, everything you thought about the legitimacy of the media, that's all gone, isn't it?
I don't think we think there's any legitimacy to the media at this point.
Here's another one. This is also really new.
This is a fresh one.
Long-term prediction models don't work.
This might be my favorite.
Because I've spent 10 years of my life arguing that whether or not climate change is a big problem or not a big problem, the prediction models are not science.
They're whatever assumptions you put in there.
They're not science. And I think that this week...
The entire world is ready to say, both Democrats and Republicans, I think the entire world is looking at this and saying, wait a minute, where have we seen this before?
All the experts were on the same side.
They had a complicated prediction model which they used to convince the politicians and the public of something very expensive, but then those models seemed to be not as accurate as we had hoped.
What's that remind you of?
Well, I think that one of the big changes that's going to come out of this is that it's almost impossible to argue for climate change anymore.
Because in order to make the argument, you're going to say, and, you know, we've got to do some climate change, and here's my argument.
Here's my long-term prediction model for 80 years.
And people are just going to say, put that down.
Put it down. Put it down.
And they'll say, no, I made a model.
You see my graph?
They'll say, put it down.
We're not going to listen to your long-term models anymore.
Now, even Fauci said that he didn't use the models to decide to close down or to agree to close down the travel from China or to agree to close down the economy.
Rather, he said that the striking things were the experience that they observed in China and Italy.
So even Fauci said they don't use the models.
Fauci said, no, I just looked at what happened in other places and said that's a problem.
Now, I think climate change is similar to that.
I wouldn't put too much credibility in the models, but it might be true that the experts can just look at the data and say, hey, it's getting kind of warm and we think we know why.
Maybe we should be worried about that.
But the model part, the models are not going to be accurate.
All right. Here's another thing I learned.
Did you know that money can just be printed?
Did you know that? Now, on some level, you didn't know that, right?
You knew that we have printing presses.
And most of you are, you know, educated people watching the news.
So you knew... That the United States could always just print more dollar bills.
Just print more money, put it in circulation.
So you knew that we could do that, but didn't you think it was a bad idea?
Didn't you think that you could do it?
Physically, you could print more money, but you don't want to do that because it would create inflation.
The simple reason for that is if there's more money in the system...
Then people are willing to pay more for their goods and services, and then the people who sell them say, hey, I've got a lot of demand.
I think I'll raise my prices.
So if you flood the system with too much cash, you can cause inflation, so there's no point in doing it.
So there's no way you can just create money out of nothing.
Except, I think we just did it, didn't we?
Because in an environment in which Inflation is basically impossible.
With the exception of the hoarded goods that are...
There's some price gouging.
For normal goods, nobody's going to be able to raise a price.
So the United States just printed...
I don't know, do we literally print it?
Or is it digital? I'm not sure exactly how that works.
So it's probably a digital process.
But we created, I don't know, trillions of dollars?
And the only downside of creating trillions of dollars...
Was that it might cause inflation, which under this special condition, can't.
It can't, right?
Nobody can raise the price.
There's not enough demand for a while, anyway.
So I feel like I'm missing something obvious.
Because, you know, I actually have some background in this stuff, and I'm pretty confused.
But did we find a trillion dollars of free money?
Can somebody work that through me?
Because I think there are greater implications than the simple ones that I'm explaining.
So there must be some downside...
That's a little more than I think.
But you know, I always say that President Trump is good at finding free money on the table and picking it up.
It's like, hey, free money?
Anybody want this? And when I heard that we were going to fund this stimulus, if you want to call it that, not by borrowing, but rather by printing money, and then I realized that inflation isn't going to go up even though we print the money, I think Trump found...
Two or three trillion dollars laying on a table.
Am I wrong?
I have to be wrong, right?
Is Joshua Gans, if you're watching this, an actual, a real economist?
What am I doing wrong?
I mean, did we just create three trillion dollars out of nothing because we had this weird opportunity where there was no chance of inflation?
Did that just happen? I'm actually curious.
I don't know. But it might have.
It might have. If you had to bet on this, you should bet that I'm wrong about this, by the way.
You should bet that there's some big variable that I'm not thinking about that would explain it all.
But otherwise, we just created $3 trillion out of nothing.
How does that change your view of reality?
It's messing with mine, I'll tell you.
My view of reality has taken a beating if we just created $3 trillion out of nothing.
Now, how hard is it going to be to argue against health care for all and paying off student loans when we just created $3 trillion out of air?
How are you going to argue against Let's say Bernie's big ticket stuff as Biden is carrying it forward.
How are you going to argue against it because you don't have enough money?
If you just printed $3 trillion.
I see somebody saying, yes, you are wrong.
Normally I block people for just saying you're wrong without giving a reason.
But I'll give you a special dispensation today.
Because I also think I'm wrong, I just don't know why.
Alright, so maybe somebody can fix that for me.
So, just to make things fun, the anti-Trump press has designated an official race baiter.
So, it looks like they, I don't know if they pick teams or how they do this, but somebody who works for PBS named Yamiche Alcindor apparently gets to sit in the White House Press Secretary and And try to start race wars.
So she asked all the dumbass questions that make the headlines because you shouldn't ask these questions and it's the wrong place and it's just not helpful.
So she was asking the surgeon general who's African American and he used some language to refer to grandpa and grandma and he was using some Culturally relevant language.
And she called him out for it because it sounded racist.
And then this poor black guy, who's the Surgeon General of the United States, has to explain on camera to the designated race war starter in the audience, this poor, you know, he's reached, I don't know, maybe the pinnacle of, you know, at least in terms of public service, being the Surgeon General, Young guy.
I mean, this is quite a good job, right?
And he has to stand up there listening to this woman asking if he's racist?
Seriously? Now, here's my opinion.
I think she should be kicked out of the room by the administration.
That's not too harsh, is it?
Because if somebody's coming into the press conference for this emergency crisis situation...
To ask this dumbass question that has no value except to get people upset about race for no good reason whatsoever when we should be doing the opposite and pulling together.
Under normal conditions, a lot of the press is asking these gotcha questions.
But would it be unfair to uninvite her and just yank her credentials?
I would be okay with that, wouldn't you?
If these were normal times, I'd say maybe not.
Let them ask their questions, etc.
But I think she should be kicked out of the room because she's operating opposite of the national interest during an emergency and there's nothing added.
She added nothing.
He was talking about the language that he uses for his own family.
Come on.
That poor guy. I mean, I've been pretty critical of the Surgeon General because of the face mask thing, and he had a comment on that.
But even I felt bad for him having to go through that.
Alright.
Is RT or the Hill anti-Trump press?
I don't know what that means.
Yes.
And have you noticed that the president is being extra nice to Jim Acosta?
And he's also being extra nice to the governors, even the Democratic governors.
And the president is also being extra nice to Joe Biden.
At least, you know, not the campaign ads.
Those are pretty vicious. But the things that the president himself says, he complimented Joe Biden.
He complimented the governors.
He And he's even calling Jim Acosta, Jim.
Have you noticed that? And he was actually sort of joking with him a little bit at one point.
So it even looks like the president and Jim Acosta have some weird detente that I'm sure is temporary.
But at least I like it during the...
I kind of like the show, honestly.
You know, I think the world would be worse without Jim Acosta.
You know, if we're being honest.
The one thing I'll give him credit for is that he understands the show.
So I'm not going to say that Trump is a genius because he knows how to operate showmanship for his advantage, even though it's not typical politicking.
He knows how to use it.
Well, Acosta does the same thing.
I'm not going to compliment the president for doing that well.
And then watch Acosta do it well and not give him the same compliment, which is, Acosta knows what his job is.
I mean, the way he's decided to define it, his role in the world.
And he knows it's some form of wrestling.
And he knows it's more about the show.
And he brings the show.
And what does the president do?
Does the president back away from the show?
Never. That's what we love about him.
He never backs away from the show.
So he goes into the show, and then you've got the president doing his show, and Acosta doing his show, and it's news for the night, and they kind of like it.
Now, you also need real reporters and stuff, and a lot of the things that Acosta says are so ridiculous they make your head explode.
But in the context of the show, he's a good character.
You know what I mean? If you were going to cast this as a movie...
He'd be a great character.
So, in terms of my enjoyment of watching the whole movie, as it were, I like Jim Acosta.
He's a good addition to the movie, if not to your sense of information.
Alright. I'm going to teach you the most valuable thing you've ever learned, and I'd like to save this for the end, because only the people who really, really care are here.
Are you ready? I'm going to give you a little life hack that really could change Fundamentally change your life.
It's such a little thing, and it can really change things.
And it goes like this. I learned years ago that touch, you know, the act of touching somebody or something, is a skill.
You think it might not be.
And you think to yourself, oh, I know what you mean.
Like somebody who's a trained massage therapist who wouldn't know how to touch people correctly...
And maybe if you're just randomly touching somebody, you wouldn't do it so well.
No, that's not what I'm talking about.
That's part of it. So yes, there is some technique about learning where to touch people and how hard and everything that will make you feel better, but that's not what I'm talking about.
I'm talking about intention.
If you were to have, say, you were walking through the underbrush, and some of the underbrush was rubbing against parts of your body, including your Your naughty bits.
Would that excite you?
Probably not. Because even though there was some sense of something touching you and your naughty parts, it probably would not even register as anything exciting because there's no intention involved.
The bush has no intention.
Absent intention, touch loses all of its power.
This is the thing that will change your life.
I learned this because I couldn't understand why some people can touch you and it feels great.
Let's say in the context of dating or whatever.
And other people can touch you and it doesn't feel great.
It doesn't feel like much of anything.
And it doesn't seem to be related to how much you like the person or they like you or what they look like or your chemistry.
There's something that some people have that's actually a skill that if they just lay their hand on your shoulder...
Some people can make you feel good, and some people can't.
And I figured out what it is.
And it's intention.
And you can even test it on your animals.
And here's specifically what I mean.
When you're touching somebody, whether human or pet, you should be thinking to yourself, in your mind, the internal thought should be, how does this feel to the other person?
In other words, you're putting yourself in their head, and you're focusing completely on the task.
If you do those two things, you focus completely on the task, and the other person knows it, and you put yourself in their head and touch them in a way that you would imagine if this were you, you would like it.
Even though you might be a little different, you'll have to learn what they like and adjust as you go, but that little bit of intention will turn an ordinary touch into almost an electric experience.
Now, you won't believe it until you try it.
But try this experience of touching somebody.
Have you ever had somebody who is, let's say, you convince your boyfriend, girlfriend, spouse to scratch your back?
And they're just going to scratch your back.
Let's say you like that. For example, let's say you like it.
If that person is also reading their phone and scratching your back while reading the phone, their intention is gone.
It's just a mechanical thing.
And it's just like the branch that brushes you in the forest.
Even though it should feel exactly the same, as soon as the intention is gone and the focus is gone, it just becomes something scratching you.
So, once you find somebody you can actually touch, so it might be a while.
Try that. Try complete focus.
Put yourself in their mode.
And then do that. You'll also learn the massage therapists, the best ones, and do that.
That's the difference between a great massage therapist and a good one.
They might have the same moves, but one of them is going to be electric, and one of them is just going to feel like something on your back.
All right, you see in the comments that there are some people who are agreeing with it.
Nobody is disagreeing with it.
So most of you just are probably hearing it for the first time like you never really thought of it in those terms.
Try it. If there's somebody in your house or a pet or something, try it.
Nursing doesn't.
I think you're confirming in the comments that when you learn to be a nurse that might be part of the training for the empathy, etc.
Does that make sense? Alright.
And that's all I needed to tell you.
Stop stealing my booze.
Alright. That's all for now, and I will talk to you in the morning.
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