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April 13, 2020 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:00:58
Episode 909 Scott Adams: Was Live
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That is good swaddling right there. - Well, come on, everybody.
It's time for your evening.
Climb down from your perch of worry and start to feel good about the day and feel a little more optimistic and get ready to relax into an awesome night's sleep.
It's going to be good.
Well, we have some controversial things.
We'll talk about some interesting things.
We'll stimulate your mind.
But, when it's all done, your brain will be exhausted.
You'll be in a perfect condition to drift off to sleep.
Boy, will you be happy.
So I did a little poll on Twitter, because I can, and I asked people, how many people think that that weird...
Sickness they had in January, because so many of us report something like that.
How many of us think we actually had coronavirus already?
Oh, whiteboard is coming.
Don't worry. And how many people do you think said that they think they actually had the coronavirus already?
And of hundreds and hundreds of people who answered.
So I'm also one of the people who had a weird Whatever was wrong with me in January was not like anything I've experienced before.
Couldn't walk upstairs, short of breath on everything, thought I was going to die.
But I didn't have a cough, so, you know, maybe it wasn't it.
So it turns out about 48% of the people answering the unscientific poll think they already had the coronavirus.
Now, what does that do to To your calculation about risk and your calculation about going back to work.
What does it mean if, let's say that something like 48% of the entire country thinks that?
Because I don't think there's any reason that the people who follow me on Twitter are more likely to think they have the coronavirus.
You know, it's not a scientific poll.
But if I had to guess, I'd guess that half of the country...
Everywhere you ask would say, you know, I did have some strange illness in January.
Now why this is important is, in order for the government to make a decision about when to go back to work and how, the public has to be supportive.
If you're calculating the odds of, you know, catastrophic hospitalizations, or even your own odds, Or your odds is somebody in your family would get it from you.
Those sorts of things. It really, really is going to be influenced by whether you think you already have the antibodies, right?
How could it not be?
And so I worry...
That that's exactly the sort of thing which could be like a gigantic influence in public opinion, which would of course have a gigantic influence on what the government could do, because the government can't really do something that the public hates too much.
You need a little bit of support, right?
So I wonder about that.
So it would be great to be able to figure out how many of us have actually had it, In some statistically valid way, so that you could get talked down at the odds that you're one of the few people who had it.
Because I don't think 50% of the country had coronavirus in January.
I mean, maybe.
Maybe. Somebody said, does Scott get the flu shot?
You know, I used to, but I haven't the last two years.
Because it feels like the odds of it making a difference are so low that I can't tell myself to walk across the parking lot and get a shot.
I probably should, you know, if I were being super rational about it.
But the benefit in terms of mentally, how much benefit I think I got, I think they're just guessing.
With these flu shots, like, you know, they're trying to guess which one is going to be the active one, and it's already too late by the time the shot is put together.
So I probably should, but the benefit has shrunk to the point where I can't motivate myself to do it.
So don't take my advice on that, that's for sure.
All right, I was asked to look at a video, a documentary, called Out of Shadows.
This might get me thrown off the internet.
We'll find out. Now, Mike Cervich mentioned it on Twitter, and that alerted me to it, and somebody asked me my opinion on it, so I thought, alright.
I was doing a little drawing anyway.
I needed something to listen to, so I listened to it.
And it's definitely worth watching.
But I also say that things are worth watching when I don't think they're true.
Alright, so... It's definitely worth watching in the same way that I love all the ancient alien TV shows.
I don't quite think those shows are necessarily spot on what really happened, but they're really fun to watch because I'm always amazed that they can find so much evidence for any damn theory that they want.
So it doesn't have to be true to be recommendable.
You can make your own mind up about how much is true.
But anyway, It's a Hollywood stuntman who said he sort of ended up going down this rabbit hole of discovery about what's really running the world and how things really work.
And he had the following revelations, if you can call it that.
Now again, you get to decide, are these true revelations or is he over-interpreting or crazy or what?
But here are the things he believes that he has plenty of evidence for.
Number one...
That the CIA is and always has been influencing movies and books and entertainment to brainwash the public for whatever reasons the CIA and the country think would be good for the country or good for somebody.
So claim number one, CIA influences popular culture on a routine basis for some effect.
True or false? I would say obviously true.
How is that one even in question?
At the very least, we all know that the military has always worked with Hollywood to make sure the military is portrayed in a good light.
And that's clearly just propaganda for the country.
I'm not saying it's evil.
I'm not saying it's wrong.
But of course. Now you should also expect, and here's my general statement about these things.
Whenever you have a situation where it's possible to do something, and there are a lot of people involved, so it's not just one not making a decision, but lots of people are involved, it's possible to do something, and there's a gigantic upside gain, potentially, not necessarily, but potentially a huge upside gain, and almost no risk.
What happens in all of those situations?
In all of those situations, bad behavior happens every time.
So you don't have to ask yourself, huh, I wonder if this is one of those rare times when there was something to gain, something devious was easy to do, it would almost certainly work, The upside potential would be incalculable, and the odds of being caught and punished are basically nothing.
You don't really have to ask.
You don't have to ask, is there evidence?
You don't even need evidence.
Now, in the film, he offers some evidence and talks about things that are unclassified, and it's fairly convincing.
But I don't think you need any evidence.
Because, of course, it's being done.
And you can extend that thought.
Of course we're doing it to other countries.
Do I need any evidence to know that the CIA is attempting, anyway, to influence other countries by influencing their media and their news?
Well, I have no evidence to suggest that's true.
Except, it's true!
Because... They can.
There's a big upside. There's not really much penalty of getting caught.
That's it. As long as those factors are in place, of course it's happening.
And you should assume that other countries are also trying to influence our media, our news, etc.
For a documentary that's making shocking claims, I found it fairly ordinary, at least on that part.
So there's a second part that's even more fun.
So I judge that true.
Although maybe some of the examples...
Here's where I depart from the documentary.
I don't think we can necessarily spot those cases.
We might think we can.
You might look at a movie now and say, ah, now that I know the CIA is doing it, I can tell that that part of the movie was influenced by the CIA. You can't do that.
That's not a thing.
If they're doing it, they're probably clever enough that it's not going to be heavy-handed, or if it's heavy-handed, such as making the military look good, Then it's probably exactly what you think it is.
But I don't think you can necessarily spot those clever ways that they're influencing the media.
Sometimes it's obvious.
Actually, let me back that up.
If you're watching a movie, it might always be obvious, even if you think it is.
Well, sometimes that's a little bit obvious.
Like when NBC does stuff.
You look at NBC and you think, oh, they should just change their initials to CIA? Because sometimes it's just so obvious.
But you can be wrong about those two, so I suppose I can be wrong about that.
All right. The other big part of the claim...
Is that there are, in fact, very large and active pedophile rings at the highest realms of power in Hollywood and in government and among rich people.
Do I judge that to be true or false?
Of course it's true.
Is anybody doubting that?
Does anybody doubt that there are powerful groups?
I don't know if they're all connected, but there are clearly powerful groups within different countries, different organizations, clearly powerful pedophiles in Hollywood, plenty of reporting on that.
Now, I don't know if they have meetings.
I don't know how much they share.
You have to assume that there's some of that too.
So I'm going to say that the general claim that there are gigantic...
Widespread, semi-organized, and sometimes very organized pedophile rings, I would say is true.
Now the second part of that claim is that the CIA may also be somehow associated with some of this because it allows them to get dirt on people that they could later influence.
Now, do you think that the CIA, or let's take any intelligence agency, it doesn't have to be the CIA, it could be any other country, do you think that any intelligence agency would try to get compromising sex-related or even illegal behavior activity of important people such that they could influence them later?
Yes! Yes!
Of course! Why?
It's easy to do.
It has a huge upside.
Almost no penalty for getting caught.
And a lot of people are involved.
It checks every box.
So again, you don't need any evidence to know that there's plenty of pedophilia going around at high levels.
I feel like you all agree with that, right?
How organized it is and You know, if you're going to throw in Hillary Clinton, then I've got a problem with that.
Like, I don't think there's any evidence that Hillary Clinton's in on it.
So, you know, you can extend it to the point of ridiculous.
But certainly there's plenty of it going on.
And you should assume that every intelligence agency everywhere, in every country, is taking advantage of it wherever they can.
So, certainly, there would be some kind of, you know, overlap between that stuff.
There's another... The parts that I was...
I thought were interesting is that even though it was sort of taking the...
I hate to even use the word because I'm going to get...
So I don't want to get blocked on platforms.
So I'm going to reverse a word, okay?
The second part of the word is gate.
And the first part of the word is a round, flat food item...
That has sauce and cheese on it usually.
I don't want to use the word because the voice to text will pick it up and I'll get kicked off of YouTube just for mentioning it.
So this is mentioned.
But interestingly, even though it's a documentary promoting that these things exist, it did not find any evidence that Kama Pizza was involved with any of it.
So I thought, well that's At least that's fair.
I didn't find any evidence that that one business was involved, and indeed nobody else has either.
But it did mention that there was a similar store right on the block or across the street that had as its logo the international sign for plantophilia.
I don't know if that's true.
Somebody would have to fact check that, so I'm not sure I believe it just because it was in a documentary.
But And then here's the part that was really interesting.
You know all those emails that got hacked, and you know the stories about the references to that round, flat food item.
And you know that that is allegedly, and I guess there's pretty good evidence for it, that it's a code word for people operating in this shadowy world.
And it's been a while since I've seen the actual emails.
And so I was showing the actual sentences that this word was used in.
And it's laughingly obvious that they're not really talking about the food.
Now, I guess there's some chance that they were using this specific food item as a code word for some completely unrelated thing.
That's possible. But you can tell quite clearly from the sentence they weren't talking about food because of the way it was used.
I mean, it's obvious it was not about food.
So it was a code for something, and it's well known that this code apparently exists in that shadowy particular underworld.
So I have to say that that was pretty compelling.
Pretty compelling. Now, What I always warn against is with any documentary, if you don't see the counterpoint, you can really be convinced by one side of any argument.
So with that caveat, I've only seen their explanation.
Maybe the next person would say, no, those are not even the right emails.
That's from something else.
Or they might say, no, you fool, there was nothing across the street.
He made that part up. So I don't know what the counterargument is.
But if you were just to judge it by itself and you didn't look for any other context, pretty convincing, I've got to say.
But it doesn't mean it's true.
Then the other part there that for me was sort of a tell that it wasn't all true was all the satanic stuff.
So there was quite a bit of tying that world into the satanic world.
And the whole satanic stuff, honestly, none of that rang as probably true.
Can't rule it out.
Don't rule it out.
But it's a little bit too on the nose, like the McMartin preschool case, which had similar allegations and turned out to be false.
Anyway. Let's see.
Apparently the New York Times wrote up a piece in which they were trying to excuse Biden from the allegations against him for some Me Too stuff back in the 90s.
And they tweeted...
A part of their own article, but then they had to go back and change the article, but they left a tweet.
And the part that they got to get rid of is that they're trying to excuse Biden, and they said that they couldn't find any evidence in his past after they did their research.
They couldn't find any, you know, bad behavior, quote, beyond hugs, kisses, and touching that people were uncomfortable with.
Now I'm thinking, what do you mean they couldn't find any bad behavior Aside from hugs, kisses, and touching that people found uncomfortable.
And so it's one of those self-canceling sentences like, wait a minute, that is bad behavior.
If they were uncomfortable and you kept doing it.
Or even if they were comfortable with it, it would still be bad behavior by the standards of the day.
So I guess they had to go back and get rid of that sentence in the article, but they had already tweeted it and they kept the tweet up so that they were busted.
And of course, All the alert pundits said, New York Times, you're not even pretending to do journalism anymore.
That is not even trying to hide it anymore.
I mean, it was purely just trying to defend Biden against exactly the same kind of accusations that Kavanaugh had.
And making them just completely reverse their stand, the whole media really, reverse their stand and argue the point that they were just arguing the opposite of a year ago so they look like idiots.
Fun! All right.
I'm going to save my...
No, I'm going to do the controversial part first so that I don't end on that.
I think you'll appreciate that.
So I've been mowing the lawn on Twitter.
What I mean by mowing the lawn is that I say something that I know will get people all worked up and that I know who to block.
So I thought I was kicking up the Chinese trolls because I have a suspicion that you've heard the reporting that there's massive Chinese...
Interference already on social media, so there are lots of Chinese bots pretending to be real people dealing with people.
Now, I assume I would be on their target list, or at least in the top 100, right?
Because I'm sure they've got lots of targets.
Probably in the top 100 just because of the things I say, and I'm near the top of the hating the Chinese government.
So one would assume that I'm probably on their radar one way or the other.
And so I thought, well, I'm going to see if I can I can surface them by saying something that they would be more likely to respond to than normal people.
Now I think this strategy failed completely.
It's possible that some of the people I blocked today were Chinese agents, but probably none.
Because what I did was I accidentally kicked up all the people who have really bad arguments about freedom.
And they got really mad at me.
Now, all the people who got blocked, it's not so much because they had a different opinion.
Again, I don't block people for different opinions.
Don't do it. It's not even personal.
It's not like I hate you for doing it.
It's just I prefer not to have any involvement with people who think that that makes sense.
So here's how I ratcheted this up and caused trouble.
There were a few things I suggested.
One is that there could be an app that you would voluntarily, and that's the key word, voluntarily every day put in your particulars of your temperature and, you know, if you have any symptoms.
And then that would be able to maybe, it wouldn't work every time, of course, but it might pick up some hot spots where you wouldn't get them otherwise.
Now, what were the two major comments to that?
And this is like the story of my life, because I surfaced a lot of ideas, and I can't tell you how many times this happens.
So on the comments, The commenter will come in and say, that will never work.
And they'll give reasons why this will never work.
And the comment right below it will be, oh, it's already being done.
Here's the name of the company.
And it's always the one right after the one who says, that could never work, Scott.
You dreamer. You crazy, crazy guy.
Next comment, oh, here's a link to it.
They've been doing that for a year. So it turns out, I thought, I knew that there was an app that came with a measuring Measuring device?
A temperature device that was paired to the app.
But I mistakenly thought that that's all it did.
I thought it was only temperature, and my idea was to ask if you'd lost your sense of smell and do you have any other symptoms.
But I've been informed, I think reliably, that the temperature app also asks those questions.
So it would be fine for exactly what I said.
So, it'll never work.
Say, all the smart people on the internet, followed by, oh, it already works.
There's a company doing that.
You should get one. I can't tell you how many times this has happened to me.
All right. Now, here's the other thing that got people worked up.
So, people complained that...
I was trying to limit their freedom to, you know, the freedom to just go back to work even if there was some impact on other people.
They claim that as their freedom.
Now, I don't disagree with that, by the way.
We'll get to my opinion here.
But I don't disagree with that.
That would be exactly a description of freedom.
Yeah. Freedom would be you can go to work even if there's some negative effects.
But What I did find is that I thought I would help clarify people's thinking about this freedom thing.
And that's where things got bad.
And I said, you should be thinking in terms of three levels of freedom.
The not having freedom is what we have now.
So right now we don't have freedom because the government says stay home and it feels like there would be penalties if we disobeyed that.
So right now that's no freedom.
But People mistakenly think that freedom would be the ability for anybody who wants to go to work, while anybody who doesn't like that risk doesn't have to.
They can go to work, or they can stay home, and then everybody has freedom.
To which I say, no, that is incorrect analysis.
That's only half freedom.
If you want to get to actual freedom, you have to let your neighbor kill you If he doesn't want to take the risk of you going to work, that's freedom.
So you have to get rid of all of the rules and all of the penalties for bad action.
So if you're keeping some penalties because of these actions will have a bad impact on other people, such as, you know, wear your seatbelt.
It'll keep the health care costs and insurance down for everybody.
So I was just trying to be helpful.
In my provocative way, by saying, you're not advocating for freedom, you're advocating for just another type of limited freedom.
And I'll bet you that every person who said, you can't take my freedom away, if I want to go to work, it doesn't matter, even if it has a bad effect on other people.
How many of the people with that argument do you think have driver's licenses?
Because what's a driver's license?
That's the government telling you you can or cannot drive, and the only way you can is if you've demonstrated to the government that there's a good chance you can keep other people at least a little bit safe because you know how to drive, and you're wearing glasses, and you've met the minimum requirements of a driver.
So we don't live in a world in which we're not continuously trading off our privacy and our freedom to To get benefits.
In fact, the entire...
Well, this is an exaggeration, but a big part of what the government does and why you have it is to make exactly those decisions of saying, all right, all right, you really want this to work better, but unfortunately the only way this is going to work better is if I take a little bit of this freedom away from you and maybe this privacy too.
Are you okay with that?
Now, sometimes we get asked and sometimes we don't, but the point is...
Everything we see in government is this process of weighing the benefit of losing a little freedom with the positive that could come from that with full exposure and visibility.
We all know what we're arguing about.
We all know that's a trade-off.
So for those people who think that they should have the freedom...
And by the way, I still haven't given you my opinion.
If you think you've heard my opinion...
You haven't. I'm simply describing the field.
And so the people who say, yes, I should be able to go to work because I feel the risks are low to me, and I also don't think the risks are that high to other people relative to other risks, so I think I should be allowed to go to work.
Now, here's what might surprise you.
That's a reasonable argument.
That's completely reasonable.
That's somebody who said, alright, I'm looking at all the pluses and minuses, and I know that a lot of people would die under this plan, but all things considered, I think we're better off this way.
At least the people who don't die are better off.
And the people who don't have loved ones die are better off.
So that's a completely reasonable opinion.
And I think people believed that I was fighting against that.
I would say I'm still evaluating, so I haven't come down on that or the opposite.
I feel like I'd need to know a lot more, just like the crisis team needs to know.
Here's my question for those people who have that opinion.
What is your assumption about what happens to the health care system?
Because, you know, I would like to have health care.
At the moment, I don't really have a healthcare system.
You know what I mean?
Because I've got two operations that were scheduled.
Or one was going to be scheduled.
But do I have healthcare?
I pay for healthcare. The reason I can't have healthcare is because these people want to exercise their freedom to go to work in the future, hypothetically.
So let's say the government said, oh, we're out of it.
You're right. Just operate responsibly.
You're responsible people.
Act like adults.
Do what you can. And so people go to work because they think the risks are worth it to them and to the damage to other people.
They go to work.
What do they think happens to the hospitals?
Somebody says BS. That's a block.
So I'm going to block all the people who are just not even willing to think about all the variables.
At least let me finish.
Alright, somebody said the hospitals are empty.
That might be the least aware comment of the day.
Let me explain for the billionth time.
I don't know how you could be watching the news and not be aware of this.
Most of the hospitals are empty because they're getting ready.
for the push and they cancelled all the people like me who had two operations upcoming and so they're they're intentionally empty so that they can be ready just in case so you should think of that as like insurance it's not a mistake to get ready just in case it's not a permanent state it doesn't tell you anything about where the virus is going It just tells you that at the moment, they're ready. That's all it tells you.
There's no other information you should get from that.
But if you look at New York City and Italy and some other places, I think we're beyond arguing whether it would have an impact on your health care.
So, do other people have the freedom, or should they, have the freedom in this country to go to work If the probable impact, let's say that they just do it with no restrictions, they just want full freedom, I just want to go to work.
If the probable outcome of that is that healthcare is unavailable to me, is that okay?
No, it might be, because remember, almost everything we do has an impact on other people.
If I drive my car, I might kill you with my car.
So can I drive a car?
Well, here's...
And this is the thing that people argue.
Here's the thing. Society has decided that the risk with cars is acceptable, and we have a healthcare system that can handle that.
Society has decided that some people smoking cigarettes, while not ideal, is acceptable, and our healthcare system is sized to handle that.
They've decided that you can do your extreme sports, and our healthcare system is sized to handle that.
In fact, you can drink your alcohol.
Our healthcare system is sized to handle it.
So if you're comparing going to work and knowing that you're going to spread the virus and, according to every expert, would overload at least some of our metropolitan cities, that's not the same.
We're not sized to handle it.
If we were sized to handle it, your argument would be far stronger.
Somebody says New York City is not the USA. But it would be, according to all the experts.
Now, I'm not going to overrule the experts.
I'm just going to say, I don't believe there's anybody who has a virologist in their title who doesn't think this would sweep through the country if we didn't mitigate.
Can somebody fact check that?
Is there anybody who's an actual professional who's in this virology field Who has come out and said in public, you can just not mitigate.
Just don't do anything and we'll be fine.
Or do they all think it will turn into some version of New York at some rate?
It just might not be overnight.
All right. So fact check me on that, but I feel like I'm pretty firm there.
So there was so much loser think in my...
Let me call out the specific loser think.
So a lot of people were doing the one variable thinking.
They were just thinking about, ah, my freedom.
Freedom's absolute, my freedom.
And they're forgetting about all the other variables, like, okay, there's a reason you get a driver's license.
It's to protect the other people.
It's not about one variable.
So one variable thinking, a chapter in my book on loser think.
They also compare it to the wrong things.
I gave you the example they're comparing it to driving.
It's a bad comparison because driving accidents don't overwhelm our hospital systems.
They use the slippery slope argument that if you do this, anything you do voluntarily, well, if it's a good idea, it's going to become the law.
I've got a whole chapter on why the slippery slope doesn't make sense.
Now, there are things that do progress, and I would certainly admit that if you had a voluntary app that was so good that the government said, you know, It's so good, we're just going to make that mandatory.
Of course that could happen.
But it would happen because it's a good idea.
It's not a slippery slope to move in a direction of better ideas.
I agree that you could slip toward bad ideas as well, but we generally don't.
We don't slip there.
We make decisions and we go there willingly.
And then of course there's a failure of imagination and a A mind-reading element where people kept accusing me of really having a sinister plan for a tyrannical dictatorship.
Like that was my secret plan, and that's the reason I was suggesting some ideas, is that it was all really to soften you up, sort of like the CIA is doing, and that they thought of softening you up for the totalitarian takeover of all your rights and your privacy.
Weirdly, and maybe somebody can answer this for me.
Weirdly, something like 60 to 70% of all the people who complained in a specific way also had icons that were black and white designs.
Yeah, they were black and white.
Now, there aren't that many black and white icons, or what do you call it?
Yeah. The icon for your profile.
There aren't that many that are black and white.
But why is it that about 70% of the people who are arguing for an absolute freedom, no matter the cost, why is it that 70% of them had black and white, but different designs, but black and white?
Does that mean something?
Is there some kind of belief system in which that's a style?
Is it Q? Is it?
Somebody said Q, and it could be that, because I was wondering if there's...
Oh, your avatar, yeah.
So people's avatars were not even black and white people, necessarily.
They were just designs. So here's why I'm asking if they're Chinese agents.
If you were China, what would be one of the most damaging things you could do to the United States?
I'll answer the question. The most damaging thing you could do to the United States would get on social media, pretend to be real people, and argue that the most important thing and the only thing we should be looking at is our freedom to go back to work.
Because that is going to basically cause us to rage with virus, while China will lie and say, ours is under control, look, we have zero again today.
So China would like to pretend that they got everything under control with their system, Hey, that Chinese Communist system.
Look what we did. Got that under control.
How are you doing with your freedoms over there?
How about your freedom?
Did your constitution work out for you?
Oh, a million people died.
Oh, so sorry.
Can we ship you some defective masks and gowns?
Would you be happy? Can I steal your IP? Can I send you some fentanyl?
I'm not going to say that all of the people who are coming at me today, a lot of them, they came in a wave.
They seem to all come at once and they seem to have very similar arguments.
Those similar arguments are identical to what I would do if I were the Chinese government and I really wanted to mess with this country bad.
And you know they do.
Because they're doing it. I mean, it's not like I'm guessing.
We've caught them doing it exactly the way I'm describing it.
So, Are these Americans who have six levels of loser think, meaning their mind reading, failure of imagination, slippery slopes are real, comparing the wrong variables, one variable thinking, that's a lot of bad thinking for one person.
Right? Isn't that a lot of thinking mistakes for one real person?
Because my observation is that real people can have one or two, sometimes three.
Have you ever seen a real person have six simultaneous, glaring, obvious elements of loser-think in one opinion?
I don't know if these are real people, folks.
So, let me just say this.
If it turns out they're all real people and they're just, you know, Q-followers or something, I totally would believe that.
So, I'm not coming down on the opinion that these are definitely Chinese agents, but their opinions are identical.
I'll die on that hill.
I will die on the hill that the worst thing that China could do is try to get us to ignore the health concerns of others and just go to work without any restrictions.
That would be their most clever plan.
If they're not doing that, they're not as smart as we think, because that's what I'd do.
What would you do? What would you do, seriously?
What would you do? And they might even be playing both sides.
I mean, they might have trolls that are arguing we should stay locked up forever because that's bad for the economy.
Trolls that are arguing we should just go out and have a civil war or get our rights back because the conflict is good, too.
China wins both ways.
All right. Now let's talk about something happier, which is the economy.
And this is kind of fun. So this is the thing I wanted to leave you with.
I'm going to start weird.
Have you ever noticed how similar a virus is to an idea?
In both cases, an idea or a virus, they're things that use humans as hosts.
They cause a physical change in you.
In other words, in order to store an idea in your head, it's associated with a physical and chemical change in your brain.
If that physical and chemical change went away, then so would the idea.
And likewise, a virus becomes part of you.
It's incorporated with you, at least for a while.
And then both of these can spread by contact.
Now, I'll get to a point.
It's really worth it.
You're going to love it.
So, among our ideas, and this is just some samples, right, it's by no means complete, are the ideas of our constitution is important, capitalism, entrepreneurship, risk management, science, engineering, and even optimism.
These are all ideas that we hold as important, and they've been developed over centuries and eons, and these are the ideas that basically keep us working well.
Now, at the moment, we are compatible with most of our ideas, meaning that the human species, which are the host, work well with the ideas.
So if the ideas succeed, well, they can only do it because our physical bodies and brains, you know, we're also reproducing and succeeding.
I think the best way to look at this is that it's not humans against virus.
Rather, our ideas, which you can almost think of as separate entities, that the ideas are in a war with the viruses, and the humans are nothing but the battlefield.
We're nothing but the battlefield.
But because humans are humans, we think that we're the players, we think we're the central characters, but we're not.
We're the canvas, we're not the painting.
We're just the battlefield.
The raging battle is between the ideas, Which, if you watch them, the ideas have almost automatically, with the help of the people as their hosts, the ideas have immediately emerged.
Hey, here are a bunch of ideas for fighting the virus.
Then the ideas started combining and getting stronger and evolving.
Did you see how many ideas sprung out of this crisis?
It was like an idea of a volcano.
Just... So as soon as the host was threatened, the ideas sensed the threat because if the host dies, the ideas die with it.
And so the ideas, using the humans as their base, just started forming and fomenting and just formed this furious amount of energy in every part of our society or our life was reimagined.
So, the ideas went into full battle mode.
Full battle mode immediately.
And it changed everything.
It just put their hosts on shutdown.
The hosts are saying, we want to go back to work.
And the ideas are saying, not yet.
Now, these ideas collectively form the economy.
Because it's these ideas that cause us to be motivated.
We work with our arms and legs.
We buy things. We trade things.
And then there's a whole bunch of physical stuff.
You know, the buildings, the jobs, the products, the machines.
But those all start with ideas.
And the ideas motivate our bodies, and then we build these things.
So the economy is mostly a bunch of ideas.
That's the important part.
But keep in mind, if you blew up all of this stuff, let's say there's a world war and a lot of stuff gets destroyed, as long as the ideas are intact and we're not dead, we could probably figure out a way to get back to a good economy, such as after World War II. But what if it goes the other way?
What if we lost all of our ideas, but we still had our products and our tools and our buildings?
We're all dead. Because it's the ideas that matter.
These are the important things.
The physical manifestations of them are also important, but those can all be changed.
If you mess with this stuff, everything breaks.
So this stuff immediately just started super-evolving.
When we're done with this, our ideas will have risen to a new level of being, if you will.
It's almost like they just went into rapid evolution and improved and merged and combined into this wondrous thing.
All right. So here's the first bit of optimism.
You can't kill this.
You'd have to kill all of us.
If there's three of us left over, we're going to reassemble, right?
Because the idea is just need a host and then they'll build back your economy and everything.
So The first good news is the strongest part of the war is in really good shape.
The ideas rose to the challenge and it looks like they're going to get it done.
But there will be some technical problems with The economy.
And I would just call out these three.
Of course, you could make a really long list of all the problems.
But primarily, there's going to be credit problems where people didn't pay their bills and then can't get loans, can't pay off their debts.
Banks might be in trouble.
You've got a demand problem where, yeah, we got products, but nobody has money to buy them.
Where's my demand? And then, of course, food.
I think food We'll be solved because we're a compassionate country and we're not going to run out of supplies.
We'll run out of maybe choices, but we're not going to run out of food.
And if people run out of money to buy the food, well, as I said on my earlier Periscope, nobody in my neighborhood is going to go hungry.
Because if anybody needs a meal in my neighborhood, I'll just buy them a meal.
And if 10 people need meals, I'll buy 10 people meals.
So I think the government and neighbors, etc., even if they don't get their checks on time, I think we'll eat.
I would predict, at least for people who are willing to leave their We're willing to talk to other people.
I worry there might be some elderly who just don't want to ask for help.
That would be the saddest.
But for the most part, there won't be starvation.
There will be some special cases where just terrible tragedies happen, but there will be special cases.
So the two big problems to get us back to work are demand and credit.
I would say that credit is solvable if the government of the United States is willing to back the banks and back the people, is willing to change some rules, maybe force the credit companies to not report any defaults that happen during this period.
So you can imagine that with the full weight of the government working on it, as long as the government of the United States exists with the biggest military in the world, We got credit.
So I think we have plenty of muscle to protect the banks and protect people who have credit problems.
I think we can work that out.
The demand problem won't be completely fixed by giving people their money, but it might help a little.
Let's talk about the interesting part.
Yeah, I'll get to the interesting part.
So, this is the way it's supposed to work, right?
So the government's going to print money.
They're not going to borrow. This is a very important distinction.
So the plan for these checks and for the rescuing the economy is to actually just magically just say, okay, we have more money now.
And the government just issues more money, basically.
It's not literally printed, but you know what I mean.
So, government issues more money.
They give it to the citizens.
I'll call it universal basic income for two months or whatever it ends up being.
And they take that money and they stimulate the economy and they buy things from the stores and then the stores have profits and they can pay taxes and it goes back in.
So that's pretty good. Now, but where does this two or three trillion dollars come from?
That's the interesting question.
Because how do you just say, hey, Hey, it's $3 trillion.
We just printed money. And now we have $3 trillion more.
So is that free?
So I asked this question of actual economists.
So I did a tweet and said, you know, economists, explain this to me.
Is there any downside? And if there's no downside...
So I'm seeing people asking in the comments.
So it's not going to be borrowing this time.
We do borrow, and the national debt has grown.
That's a separate problem.
This is not that.
This is actually just printing more money just because we can.
We control the printing presses.
The government issues the currency, so it just issues more.
So 3 trillion issued more.
Now, what's the first question you ask yourself?
Wait, we can do that?
If we can do that, why haven't we done that before?
And you can see in the comments the reasoning.
The reasoning is inflation.
So the reason that you don't just print money is because then there would be more money than there is stuff.
So where you used to have $100 floating around in the universe, this is oversimplified.
Let's say where you used to have $1,000, And let's say there was only one product in the world.
Well, the $1,000 would buy you that product.
But if you suddenly have $2,000, the person selling you the phone is going to think, you know, well, I bet they'd pay more than $1,000.
They have $2,000.
So I'll just try charging $2,000 and see what happens.
And of course they pay it because they're still paying everything they have for the phone.
So I'm doing a bad job of explaining it, but the point is, if you just increase the money but not the number of products and services, then you get inflation.
There's one exception, though.
There's only one exception where you could just print $3 trillion and it would just be free.
Do you know what the one exception is?
This. This is the one exception.
Because the demand is so low.
Who could raise prices today?
Now, let's not count the emergency equipment and the price gouging.
That's a very small part of the economy.
So not counting the price gouging, who's going to raise the price of their phone?
Nobody. I mean, they might want to.
How do they do that?
When you go back to work with your little UBI check, you go back to work and demand is low and nobody's getting paid as much, does the person who makes this battery pack, do they raise their price while all the demand is down?
No, they can't. The only time that you could potentially just print $3 trillion is right now.
There's no other time you could do it and it would be free.
Now, it is correct that if the economy just came raging back and it was a major success, you would have too much money in there too soon because demand would come raging back.
But I don't believe anybody thinks that that's going to happen in the next two years.
So if you could take the risk of inflation...
And push it off a few years until the economy comes up, you probably wouldn't even notice it by then.
So here's the greater point, which was explained to me by Joshua Ganz, who's a working professional economist.
I go to him on Twitter for my economics questions.
We don't always agree, but his take on things always are rational and make sense and are well-informed.
And here's how he explained it.
And I like this explanation.
It's just an alternate way of looking at the same thing.
That putting money into the system, just printing $3 trillion, would be bad if it caused an imbalance.
But if what it's doing is bringing balance back to the system, it could be, there's no way to know, free money.
We're in the only situation...
That I didn't even imagine we could ever be here, frankly.
There's no other situation that would leave all of our means of production perfectly in place, except for a virus.
That's it. Just a virus.
Even if it was an EMT, what is it, EMP? Even if it was that, it would destroy all the electronics and you couldn't just go back to work.
But the one and only situation...
Where all of your assets and everything are still in place, you just don't have any demand, is this.
This very exact, specific situation.
You want to hear the best part? So not only do we get to invent $3 trillion, which, by the way, it's not like it solves our problem.
There's a tough year ahead.
I don't want to sugarcoat it.
I'm just telling you that the good news...
To help you balance it against the stuff that genuinely is stuff you need to worry about.
The good news is that it does look like we can print $3 trillion just because we want it to.
And it's only because of this situation.
Now, what have I been telling you about Trump that makes him different from all other politicians?
What is the saying I say all the time about him?
That he does the one thing that nobody else does.
And what is that? Somebody's going to say it in the comments, but he finds free money.
Yeah, there it is. Money on the ground.
He walks by the table and he says, pile of money.
Seriously? Nobody?
Nobody? You all see this, right?
Am I the only one who sees this giant pile of money?
I guess I am.
Going once? Going twice?
Anybody? All right.
And he takes the big pile of money.
And he does it time after time.
Now, usually it's in the political sense.
You know, he says or does the thing that was easy.
I said this when he formed Space Force.
You know, some president was going to form Space Force.
It was going to be him, or the one after, or the one after that, whatever.
So it was free money.
Because whoever is the first one to do it is forever the one who formed Space Force.
So it was just an example of free money.
Of course, it was just smart to do that.
And let me say as clearly as I can, economics is complicated.
I have a degree in this stuff, and I had to ask an actual economist to check my thinking.
Now, he added a lot of texture that really helped my thinking, but the basic thing is that there can be A perfect situation in which you can just print $3 trillion.
And it might be this.
It might be this.
Now, you couldn't do it again, because once the economy is solid, you lose that opportunity.
Then it's just inflationary.
So, here's the good part.
You know, people are talking about the infrastructure bill.
And, you know, did you really want to borrow another trillion dollars to do infrastructure?
Guess what? It might be free.
Infrastructure might be free.
If you do it now. Because that would be part of the three trillion that's free money.
Because nobody can raise their prices while demand is so low.
So we might have gotten infrastructure for free.
Now, part of that infrastructure, I would think, and I'm sure we were thinking this way, but there'll be more emphasis on this, We saw the importance of working at home, and we saw how important online schooling was.
And importantly, we saw that there were a lot of people who didn't have access to digital products.
So what good is online school if you don't have a computer and you don't have Wi-Fi?
So certainly a big part of the infrastructure is going to be to get everybody the capability of online education.
And then, free college.
Because if you can make your online education industry work, which it doesn't really work well now, but it would be easy to do that, if you can make it work, then the president can say, you know, I don't know if we can afford to send everybody to college for free, but we can give you a government kick-ass certified college degree that you can work at on your leisure from home, and it'll be better than college, because it'll be made by the best...
Teachers and producers and editors and writers instead of just, you know, filming a guy who knows how to teach a class.
So we might get infrastructure for free.
It might build out the last of the digital miles.
That might make college free.
It might make, you know, regular school maybe modified, some a little of both.
And I also think that healthcare is going to change forever because of this.
And maybe in a positive way.
You know, I've told you before that If you have an entrepreneur in the room, The best thing you can do with your environment is shake it.
Just shake the box. And then the entrepreneur looks in the box and goes, I don't see anything.
Shake it again. Shake, shake, shake.
Oh, look at this.
These things just lined up.
I can make a business out of that.
And I talk about Trump does this all the time with politics.
If he doesn't like the argument the way it is, he'll just introduce something that just shakes it all up.
And in the midst of chaos, he's always the one-eyed king.
He's the one who attracts all the attention, gets all the quotes.
So if he can create some chaos and shake the box, he's the king.
It works over and over again.
Likewise with healthcare.
I think healthcare got a major shake-up it didn't want.
And not for any productive purpose, it was just like this major thing that happened and it got shaken.
And there are a lot of entrepreneurs in that space.
You know, the people who are spinning up these new tests.
I mean, that's serious, you know, solid gold, turbocharged entrepreneurship.
There are literally hundreds of companies that just sprung out of nowhere and suddenly are making tests and they're making devices and apps and stuff like this.
So I would think that the One of the results of this is major changes in healthcare, and the public will demand it.
The public will have a better sense of what works and what doesn't.
Boom. So, that's all the good news I have for you.
It's pretty good. I will tell you also that there are some good pieces of news coming down the Bike, some I know about, that I'm pretty confident about.
So I think we will get back to work.
Nobody's going to starve, and man, is it going to be good after we get it back and running.
So that's all for tonight.
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