All Episodes
April 17, 2020 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:05:20
Episode 918 Scott Adams: I Evaluate the Economic Reopening Strategies so You Don't Have to

My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a Content: Dr. Phil and coronavirus Keeping hospitals empty and waiting, waiting...waiting? Democrats eating their own lately $20 Hydroxychloroquine versus $1,000 Remdesivir Naval's observation about coronavirus under age of 45 --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scott-adams00/support

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hey, good morning!
You came to the right place.
Good for you. So far your day is going well.
Uh oh, I got an itch.
Don't touch your face.
Use the official face scratching tool.
That's what we've learned.
Well, I think it's time for the simultaneous sip.
Yeah, it's time. And all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass of tank or chalice or a sty, a canteen jug or a flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better.
It's called the simultaneous sip, but it happens right now.
Go! Hey, Tom from Stockton.
Good to see you.
So, here's the question that I ask.
So we've got these hot spots in the country with the virus, but we've got other places where they're laying off staff because the hospitals are empty.
They don't have much to do.
So here's a basic question that I wonder about.
Why do we assume it's better to keep those hospitals at the lowest possible level of activity, as opposed to an alternative, which is to allow those places to go back to work until the hospitals start to get impacted, and then maybe you could pull back a little.
Let's say you get to 25% capacity, and you know that it could very easily hit 75% in a week.
Well, then you pull back.
Maybe do something a little differently.
But here's the bigger question.
I feel as if we are a country full of people who are not good at evaluating things.
And it might kill us all.
And by evidence of this, I give you Dr.
Phil. So Dr.
Phil is getting some heat because he went on TV and Passionately compared automobile and other types of normal deaths to how many people have died or are predicted to die with full mitigation from the coronavirus.
Now, how smart is Dr.
Phil? I think he's very smart, right?
Wouldn't you say, if you had to measure his IQ, obviously he's successful in his career.
Very, very smart, talented guy.
But what the heck is up with that?
I've told you before in my best-selling book, Loser Think, that you can be really smart in one field and be blind to how other fields look at problems.
And this is a clear case where Dr.
Phil, a brilliant, accomplished guy, Is blind to how somebody should look at this problem.
It's just, obviously, it's just not an experience he has some, you know, contact with.
And the way he should be doing, of course, is to looking at the problems without mitigation versus, you know, with mitigation if he wants to compare it to other problems.
So we'd really be looking at a one or two million people dying compared to 35,000 dying in cars.
Now you could still say, hey, it's still worth the risk, but that's a different argument.
Dr. Phil is a perfect example of people who don't know what they don't know.
Because he said that pretty confidently and pretty passionately in public.
So you know that in his mind that made sense.
Doesn't make any sense.
It's the analysis of a sixth grader, basically.
It's not even comparing the right things.
And again, no insult intended to Dr.
Phil. It is most typical that people have experience within their domain and don't have experience in other domains.
It's the reason I wrote the book, because it's the most typical situation.
But we need to be careful About who we listen to.
Because not everybody is qualified to compare things and make important decisions.
I'll give you some more examples of this as we go.
So, in my question about the hospitals in the areas that are not yet impacted, here's my question.
Given that we have nothing that looks like a cure, Either now or anytime within our planning zone.
And it looks like even if we get a vaccine, a vaccine might be 18 months away, far past the point where the economy would have been destroyed if we waited.
And if we wait, that's a certain disaster.
Because that's just too long to have the economy down.
And if we wait and then we get there, all we have is a vaccine.
Vaccines don't really stop infections.
It just sort of slows it down.
So whether you have a vaccine or you don't have a vaccine, chances are you really have to get to herd immunity, and there's some question whether that's even a thing because there's evidence of people getting reinfected, or You just say, it looks like this is how we live now.
So if you think that the question of whether we have herd immunity or not should determine whether we go back to work, you're not good at analyzing.
So that's not a difference of opinion or priorities.
That's just not being good at analyzing a thing.
Because in all cases, most of the country gets infected, no matter what you do.
So if we have something that can give you immunity, that would be great.
But if we don't, if you can't get immunity, it's the same strategy that makes sense.
You just have to live with it.
Because it is what it is.
The alternative of closing the economy forever, or even 18 months, that's not a real option.
That's not a real option.
Because sure, it would keep some number of people alive in the short run, but the devastation of the economic meltdown would be far greater.
So, let us not destroy the entire planet because other people are not good at analyzing things.
And so that brings me to my other question.
Suppose, this is more of just a thought experiment.
Suppose that the president's policy group for reopening the economy had, now this is just a thought experiment because this is not describing reality, but suppose he forms this advisory group and has the following professionals on it.
Now let's assume that each of these professionals is the best kind of their type.
So none of them are dumb.
They're all really good at what they do, but they have their experiences in their domain.
So who should be the one among all the experts?
Because you need lots of different experts with their opinions.
It looks like it's going to be a big crowd.
I don't know what good an advisory group is if every Republican except Mitt Romney is on it.
Isn't there a problem with your advisory group got a little too big?
Well, that's a separate problem.
But, back to my thought experiment.
Let's say these are the job experts.
So let's say you had a doctor, a scientist, an engineer, politician, lawyer, CEO, economist, entrepreneur, psychologist, and a theologian.
And, of course, they'd all be good to give their inputs.
But who would be the best one to synthesize all of their different expertise and put it into some coherent model?
Which job is best for that?
Some of you are way ahead of me.
Yeah, the correct answer is engineer.
Now, of course, this is an opinion, and of course, it's a thought experiment in which, unrealistically, all of the people in my list are very highly qualified, which in the real world is never the case, right?
So in the real world, if your best person is any one of these jobs, yeah, you still want to get the best person, right?
But If you could imagine that they were similarly talented, I would go with either the engineer and some people said CEO. Now, I'll give you partial credit for CEO, but there are a lot of CEOs who are also technically oriented.
So if your CEO is Elon Musk...
All right. If your CEO is Elon Musk, okay.
I would let him make a decision because he's an engineer and an entrepreneur and a CEO and, you know, we know he's smart and seems to have the right instincts.
So, yeah, somebody like him would be great.
So I doubt that the committee is going to be as well organized as, you know, in our minds we think would be a perfect situation.
So it's just going to be sort of a mess of competing opinions, and I don't know how they come up with a coherent opinion out of all that.
But I look into the mess, and I see, am I wrong about this?
Am I incorrect that he...
The advisory committee includes just a ton of politicians, mostly Republican.
That's true, right?
Because I don't know how you could ever come up with a decision with a large group of people of that type.
Honestly, it doesn't seem like it's designed to get you a recommendation.
It doesn't look like that.
It looks like it's designed just to sort of give cover for whatever they decide to do.
But I don't know how they can come up with a coherent, agreed-upon proposal out of all those people.
Now, here's what gives me some confidence.
So my understanding is that among the people in the working group are Mark Benioff.
Somebody has to fact-check me on this, but I think Mark Benioff Mark Benioff is one of the people on the advisory group.
He's not like other people.
I've spent a little bit of time with him, and I've got to say, when you spend time with famous or accomplished people, usually you walk away thinking, oh, they're kind of normal.
They might be smarter or whatever, but they're kind of normal people.
Mark Benioff is not normal.
And I mean that in a good way.
There's no negative to that at all.
Whatever's going on with Mark Benioff, you just spend a little bit of time with him and you walk away thinking, okay, that's not normal.
Whatever's going on over there, you don't see that a lot, whatever that is.
And I got to tell you that whatever that is, is really good stuff.
Because he does have a mix of the technical, the CEO, he's an enlightened being.
You know, he's just got a bigger view of what's important.
So having a Mark Benioff in a group makes me feel a lot more comfortable.
Likewise in the group is Mark Cuban.
Mark Cuban in the group makes me feel more comfortable.
Because, you know, he too has been in a situation where he's a CEO of a technical organization.
He has business management, entrepreneurial, has made decisions in complex environments, has the best interests in the country in mind.
It's great. It's great.
So, I don't feel good about the number of people involved, especially the politicians, but I feel very good about That there are some specific personalities in the group that I hope will come to dominate the conversation.
Peter Navarro.
Yes, Peter Navarro.
I don't know a ton about him, but my understanding is he's got a good, broad background and would be good at integrating stuff.
So Peter Navarro is somebody who gives me a lot of confidence.
So what we can hope is that the people with the most capability within that gigantic working group All we can hope is that the other people in the groups recognize who's the most capable among them.
And I'd be looking at a Benioff.
I'd be looking at a Mark Cuban.
I'm sure there are several others who could be arguably in that class.
I don't know them all. But I sure hope the smartest people are making the most decisions.
Let's hope that's true. That's weird.
My notes are all out of order.
So you're going to get the out of order presentation today.
Okay. So Democrats are eating their own like crazy lately.
Have you noticed that? So David Brooks wrote an article in the New York Times called The Age of Coddling is Over.
The essence of it being that the millennials have been too coddled and this would be their first big...
Big challenge. And as you might imagine, millennials did not appreciate that argument.
And so they went after David Brooks pretty heavily, at least on social media.
So David Brooks, you know, typically associated with the left, he gets attacked by his own people.
Then Fox News puts on Dr.
Oz. And, of course, that makes him a target.
So Dr. Oz is being attacked because he said something about sending schoolchildren back first because it wouldn't change the overall death rate that much because they don't get the coronavirus too badly.
And, of course, everybody said, you monster, Dr.
Oz, why do you want to kill children?
So Dr. Oz, of course, you imagined him more associated with Oprah, so you imagined him more on the left.
So because Dr.
Oz said that, and Dr.
Phil said, He went on and honestly just embarrassed himself by not knowing how to compare things in public.
So that, of course, brought the pressure back on Oprah, because Oprah is blamed for making Dr.
Oz and Dr. Phil famous.
And, of course, Bill Maher is getting attacked.
Anytime he goes just a little bit off the reservation and says anything objective, he gets totally attacked.
And I saw Andrew Sullivan on the list.
I don't know what he said that makes people dislike him.
But if you watch, the left are just eating themselves alive.
Now I saw on...
Social media, somebody said, commented to me and said, can you believe that we live in such a politicized world?
Can you believe that even the coronavirus got politicized and people are just taking sides by what political party they're in?
To which I said, I don't see that.
I don't see that at all.
Now, it could be true, but do you see that?
Because let me tell you what I see.
I see the distinction between the division.
There's definitely a division. But the division I see is almost by experience, or I don't want to say IQ, but sort of experience.
Let's say experience.
The people who are the best at analyzing things seem to be all on the same page.
The people who are really not good at analyzing things seem to be on their own page.
So there's definitely a split.
There's a division in the country.
But I don't think it's by politics.
You know, certainly people are attacking politically.
Like, oh, the left attacks the right no matter what they say.
The right attacks the left no matter what they say.
But if you were to take anybody on the left or the right and say, let's talk just privately.
Let's get off of social media for a moment.
Nobody's looking.
Let's just talk privately.
And I think that you would find that the only division is people who are good at making decisions, largely on the same page, People are not good at making decisions.
They're largely on the different page.
So that's what I see.
That's what I see. I don't see this as a political division, except, you know, we're sniping at each other.
But when it comes down to the decisions, that doesn't look political to me.
It really doesn't. But I also could be very wrong about that.
So Scott Gottlieb, who is an M.D. and was, what was he, the prior head of the FDA, I think?
And he's saying that the remdesivir trials, at least the early information, might be already strong enough to suggest it should be used for compassionate use.
Which means that anybody who is in bad shape would be able to get it, even though it's not going through all the correct approvals.
I don't know. Now, how many of you made this prediction early on?
Prediction. Hydroxychloroquine only costs you $20 to get better.
Remdesivir costs you about $1,000 to get better.
Early on, how many of you said, I'll bet I know which way this is going to go.
It looks like it's going that way, honestly.
Again, we're only based on the anecdotal information.
But as I've said before, I think if the hydroxychloroquine worked as well as we wish it did, I feel like we'd know that by now, as opposed to having only anecdotal information.
I feel like we'd know it.
And we don't. So, could be that remdesivir is the real thing and hydroxychloroquine is not.
But why did we all know it was going to go this way?
Like, that's got to bother you, right?
Did the simulation...
Did the simulation just broadcast this months in advance?
Hello, I'm the simulation.
You know how this is going to go, right?
You got the one that's practically free, the one that enriches the pharmaceutical companies.
We're going to do some scientific trials.
Guess how it's going to come out.
Now, maybe, maybe it's entirely legitimate.
Maybe. It could be.
I mean, it could be legitimate.
But do you trust it?
I don't know. We live in a world in which I don't know if you can trust anything anymore.
And when something so conveniently goes in the direction that every cynic in the world said, watch this.
Watch this. Let me call this two months in advance.
It's going to be the expensive one.
Right? Why did we all know that?
You know? It could be it's true.
But I don't know. All right.
China apparently has a commercial on television, which I saw a clip of, that has to be seen to be believed.
I'll describe it, but go look at my Twitter feed.
You have to see it.
And it's part of the larger picture, which is the anti-China sentiment.
It's just going through the roof.
And I don't think it's going to reverse.
It looks like a one-way trip toward decoupling.
How many of you thought I was crazy two years ago talking constantly about decoupling from China?
And you said to yourself, well, you can talk all you want.
I know your stepson died and you feel bad about it, but I'll tell you what's not going to happen.
We're not going to stop doing business with China.
Come on, Scott. You can do your little hashtags all day long.
Hashtag decouple.
But we're not going to actually decouple from our largest trading partner superpower in the world.
Well, except that we are.
Except that we are.
That's certainly not because of anything I persuaded, but the simulation offered it up, and I've got to admit, I didn't see this coming.
So, anyway, the ad I was talking about, there's a commercial in which And I'm not making this up.
There's a young Chinese woman who's doing some laundry, and it looks like she's in some kind of a place where, I don't know, there's a house painter or something comes by, and the house painter is an African-American.
Well, he's not African-American because he's in China.
He is a black man in China.
Now, apparently there are some number of black residents of China.
I don't know how many. It can't be a lot.
So the black man comes around the corner and he's got some paint on him because he's a house painter apparently.
And he starts, you know, leering at the woman and she acts like maybe she's into it and he gets close and it looks like maybe the guy's going to kiss her.
And then she shoves a laundry, one of those laundry pods, into his mouth, grabs him by the back of the neck and Miraculously shoves him entirely into the washing machine.
His legs and everything go into the washing machine.
She shuts the top of the washing machine, sits on it, and the washing machine goes, as you're imagining the black guy is now being murdered.
But, hey, it's good news.
After the end of the commercial, she gets off the machine, opens it up, and she takes out of the machine a Chinese guy who's really handsome.
He's not black.
Do you believe that? That's like a commercial in China that she washed the black off a guy and turned him into, according to the commercial, a better guy because he wasn't a black guy anymore?
Seriously? This is the country we want to do business with?
Now, it's not like it's brand new news that China is racist, but what is the news is that the American public is We're engaging with this topic more and decoupling's on the way.
Tom Cotton is tweeting about China somehow is using some kind of paperwork approval problem to hold up medical goods that are bound for the United States.
So there's stuff in China that's ready to go, but there's some kind of paperwork to hold up in China.
It's time to decouple, right?
Do you think China Can't authorize a plane to take off with some medical supplies to the United States?
These are not our friends.
They're not our friends.
Whatever's going on over there, not good.
Decouple. I've got a proposition I'm thinking about.
And it's spurred by two things.
There was a story about some student, I believe, asked President Obama if he would give a graduation speech.
I don't know if it was like a digital one just for this guy's college, whoever asked for it, or if he was asking for a digital commencement address for all graduates.
I don't remember which one it was, but it gave me this idea.
So I had been scheduled to...
To go record a commencement address, a digital one.
And I didn't do it.
So because of the coronavirus, why am I... I'm having a blank.
For some reason, I'm just having a Joe Biden moment here.
I'll think of the...
I'll think of who I was doing it for in a moment.
Prager, PragerU.
So Prager University had asked me to do a video with a commencement address, basically, based on one of my books.
And I wrote it, but I had some health problems that limited me from travel, and then the coronavirus thing pops up.
So anyway, that got postponed forever, because who knows when anything like that could happen.
It's not going to happen this year for sure.
But I've already written the commencement address.
I don't believe that PragerU would be upset if I went ahead and just recorded it because it would be next year before I could record it for the next season.
Everything's different by then.
So I'm thinking of doing a graduation address for the country.
Anyway, I'll just put that out there.
I'm thinking about it. Update on Chris Cuomo of CNN. So, unfortunately, his wife got the coronavirus, too.
And, oh, my God, what a terrible situation, because now neither of the parents can essentially take care of the kids, at least because of the separation issues.
And they can't even be with each other, because even though they both have the coronavirus, it's not entirely clear that that makes you safe from each other.
So they're playing it smart.
But Chris Cuomo was...
He likened it to Lord of the Flies because the children are in charge.
And I guess his 17-year-old basically is being the parent.
And let me say this about that.
And it kind of ties back to the David Brooks comment.
Since when did a 17-year-old...
Since when is a 17-year-old not capable of taking care of a family?
You know, if this were little...
Little House on the Prairie?
A 17-year-old would have three kids of her own by now.
So I'm not too worried about 17-year-olds handling a household for a while.
If it were my own 17-year-old, I'd be far more worried about it, I suppose.
But let me extend this point.
I feel as though the very young have not been asked to step up In our society too often.
And when we do ask them, they do.
For example, there are lots of young people who join the military.
Do the young people who join the military step up?
Yeah, of course they do. The process just turns them into whatever the process turns them into.
But most of society does not require them to step up like that until later in life.
But if we asked, I think they could.
Here's what I'm getting at.
One of the strategies we could use to reopen the economy is to let very young people do jobs that normally we wouldn't.
In other words, just give a lot more responsibility to 16-year-olds, 17-year-olds.
Let's say this summer there's businesses that need to open up.
But a lot of their employees are over, let's say, 50 or 60, and it's not yet safe to come back to work.
How many of those jobs that are done by a 45-year-old, let's say working on an assembly line, how many of those jobs could not be done by a 16- or 17-year-old who's just filling in for the summer?
They wouldn't be doing the hard jobs, but the manual stuff, work a forklift.
Is there a 16-year-old who couldn't work a forklift?
It wouldn't be as good as the 35-year-old, but I'll bet we could get pretty far.
Would it be the worst thing in the world if the server at your restaurant is 14?
Not really. I mean, it's illegal for them to serve alcohol and stuff, so there's some problems with that.
But in the old days, people that age were stepping up all the time.
So there's at least some possibility that we have a resource that's underutilized that might be part of the larger solution.
Who knows? The story on CNN about some people in the isolation are doing what's called quarantine-ing.
Teaming. As in they form a little team of friends.
I guess this is mostly single people.
And they just live together.
Because if they're going to be quarantined, they don't want to be quarantined alone.
So several friends who already know they get along just say, we'll just quarantine.
We'll all just stay at your house.
Now I suppose they could go between homes as long as they're the only ones who associate with each other.
And I thought, not a bad idea.
But this made me think of an idea that I think is a bad idea, but I want to run it by you.
I want to run it by you.
And it's based on the idea that if you wanted to inexpensively and quickly test to see how many people were infected in an area, One of the ways you could do it is take all the blood samples and just throw them into one sample and then test them, say, ten at a time instead of one sample at a time.
Because most of the time, depending on what you're looking for, most of the time you'll get negatives on all ten tests because you're looking for something that isn't that common.
So it's a little easier just to say, all right, We'll throw them all in a batch, test all ten, and then if you find a hit, you've kept a little of your sample left, and they say, oh, which one of these ten?
But most of the time, you don't have to.
So most of the time, you just test the pool.
There's nothing in it. You say, okay, everybody we put in the pool is cleared.
So taking that concept, and I think this doesn't work, but I'm having trouble thinking it through, so maybe you can help me.
Could we form...
Clusters of quarantined people, either around, let's say, around a workplace, and then if anybody in that workplace gets it, then maybe they're already quarantined.
Basically, it's a quarantined cluster.
So that if you have a cluster with nobody who has it, that whole cluster can interact with each other and can't give it to each other.
Now, if you've got leakage, and I think this is a hole in my problem, There's a hole in my idea.
If there's any leakage, then of course the whole cluster can get infected.
So I'll just ask the question, is there any scenario in which you could just put people in clusters, keep them just in clusters, and then if one cluster gets a hit, then you quarantine that person or that cluster, or you do your testing on everybody else in the cluster.
I'm just wondering if mathematically, There's any way that that could give you some advantage?
Israelis did the best testing, somebody says.
One family? Well, we already do it with families, right?
So the families are already a cluster.
So could you extend the idea and say, all right, This family's been quarantined really well, and this one's been quarantined really well, and these two get together, or they get along.
Can these two have as much contact as they want, as long as they just keep it to the two families?
Now again, everything is imperfect and there's always leakage, so of course there would still be infection getting through.
But could you slow it down, and would there be any advantage?
Just questions.
In other words, let's put it in concrete terms.
If somebody said you can reopen this business, but the only way you can do it safely is if the people who are the workers only interact with other worker families.
In other words, you could see anybody who's a family of the same business, but then, of course, you've got two workers in the family.
Doesn't work. Okay.
I think I talked myself out of it.
China raised its death estimate for Wuhan by 50% suddenly on Friday.
You know that joke about the cats on the roof?
I think China, of course, knows how much trouble they're in with the international community.
So they're trying to just slowly edge up that estimate so it isn't as obviously ridiculous.
Let's just edge it up a little bit.
And then next week, you know, hey, we found a few more.
Let me just edge it up a little bit so that maybe they can try to close the degree of that embarrassment that will cost them, essentially, their civilization.
So you can see them sort of moving in that direction.
All right. Now, did I already talk about this or did I think about it?
One of the hard things about doing this much talking in public is that sometimes you just can't tell, did I just talk about this?
Or did I think about it so much in the last 10 hours that I think I just talked about it?
So I actually don't know.
So I'm going to talk about it again.
In my opinion, If we are to wait 12 to 18 months for a vaccination, first of all, the vaccination is not likely to be like a kill shot.
It just takes a little edge off.
So the vaccination is not likely to just sort of work, and if you have the vaccination, you're safe, because it doesn't really work that way with flu-type viruses, even if this is not exactly one of those.
So I don't think we have reason to believe that a Make you safe.
I feel as if a vaccine would make some people safe under some conditions, which would be typical to vaccines.
Now, vaccines that do work, things like mumps and measles and chickenpox and stuff, those are more protecting everybody, but I don't see that happening with the viruses, the flus.
I don't see us having vaccinations that just wipe it out.
So, given that Waiting for the vaccine is a bad strategy.
How would you compare these two risks?
So risk one is that we go back to work, but everybody's smart about it.
So the people at greatest risk protect themselves the most, and we just do the best we can, but we go back to work.
What is the risk of catastrophe under that scenario?
And I'll say catastrophe is Is that the outcome of that destroys, let's say, the economy and a million lives.
So you lose both your economy and a million lives, and maybe your healthcare too.
So let's call that catastrophe.
And let's compare that to staying closed down as long as possible, which could be months and months, to get as close as we can to the vaccination, which probably is not a be-all end-all.
Let's rank those two risks.
I'll give you my opinion first.
My opinion is if we play for the vaccination, in other words, that's our big play, it's like hoping the vaccination is just what we have to stall as long as you can to get closer to the vaccination.
I believe that would be a 100% chance of global economic meltdown.
Now, these are just opinions, because there's no way to really model this stuff in a way anybody would believe, right?
It's just my feel of things, my experience, etc.
Doesn't mean it's right. That's just where my head's at, is that if we wait for the vaccine, it's ensured destruction.
If we were to go back to work, let's say earlier than the experts want, but we do it as carefully and as smartly as possible, We reconfigure things, do everything we can do.
I think the risk of destruction, let's say of catastrophe, where you lose your economy and you lose a million people too.
And by the way, in both scenarios, you're going to lose a million people.
Just one is slower.
So you're going to lose a million people either way.
I think the risk of catastrophe, if we go back to work soon, is 50%.
That's my guess. If we go back soon, which most people would consider too soon, I think there's a 50% chance of total catastrophe.
I think if we play it for waiting as long as we can to get close to a vaccination, my feeling of it is that's closer to 100% catastrophe.
So the adult decision is to take the 50% chance of catastrophe.
That's my opinion. Now, as you know, the children in the conversation will say, Dr.
Oz or Scott Adams, you ghoul.
I've actually been called a ghoul this week several times.
You ghoul. How can you be so happy about all these deaths?
Well, nobody's happy about it.
You ghoul. How can you say it's okay to go back to work when you know it means more people dying?
How would you feel if it were somebody you knew?
These are all stupid questions of children.
Adults just have to make the tough decision.
Just before I signed on, somebody on Twitter challenged me this way in the comments.
Somebody said, Scott, if you personally had to decide which 300,000 people were going to die and it was on you, And you had to personally decide, would you be okay with that, Scott?
Would you be okay if you have to decide who personally dies?
To which I said, yes.
Yes, I would.
If the assumption is it's still the best path, they're all bad, but on one of the paths, 300,000 people have to die, and somebody has to decide.
Yes, I will do that. I will unambiguously and without hesitation decide which 300,000 people die.
Now when I'm done, somebody's going to kill me right away, right?
Because I will have decided somebody dies.
So my life expectancy would be about 10 minutes after I made the decision.
But I would still do it in a heartbeat.
So I would be dead at the end of it, but I would have saved humanity By being the adult in the room who said, you know, there's no right answer.
Here's the best I can do.
I'm going to be dead too.
I'm going to be just as dead as these 300,000 people, but I'm going to do the best I can for those of you who will remain.
So that's the setup.
So yes, yes, I take that job with no hesitation.
I take that job with no hesitation.
Somebody says, yes, you first.
Well, how do I go first?
Until I've done the job.
Now, if you're saying, go first, as in, once I've decided who the 300,000 are, then I'm immediately killed, that's exactly what I'm talking about.
I would be immediately killed as soon as I made the list, well before any of those people were dead.
I'd be the first one dead.
That would be guaranteed.
If you get to decide, well, unless you live with 100% security forever, of course you'd be dead.
And yes, and yes, if I would be dead immediately, the first one of the 300,000, I'd take the job with no hesitation.
No hesitation. It's an easy trade-off.
If you wouldn't do that, you're a ghoul.
I say a ghoul.
All right. Let's see.
What else we got going here?
Who has done the modeling between these two opinions?
I saw in the comments, somebody was reminding me to talk about Naval Ravikant's solution, well, his proposition that he put in a tweet.
It looked like this.
If you just send to work the people under 45 who don't have health conditions, or bad health conditions, If you just did that, you would end up with a death rate for coronavirus that wouldn't be too different than the normal flu death rate.
So why not start today?
Say if you're under 45 and you don't have any health condition, go back to work.
Everybody else, keep hiding.
Stay out of the trouble.
Now, of course, the young people coming back would be bringing some disease back to older people.
You couldn't stop that.
But the older people would have some control.
I mean, you know, they could do a lot.
And we could probably get better and better and better at protecting them.
You know, however good you are on day one, you're going to be a lot better at protecting people on, you know, day 90, right?
We get better at everything.
So here's my question.
Who is capable of, or who has done, and who would believe it anyway, who has modeled those different scenarios?
Let's call it the Naval model, where everybody under 45 who's healthy just goes back to work today, or soonish.
You know, you could argue that there's a modified version of that.
If we're really close to having an answer on, you know, one of the therapeutics, or we're really close to knowing if convalescent plasmas works, you know, if somehow we had a vaccine that looks like we could have it in a month, you know, if we have something that really, really could matter, and if you just wait a little bit longer, you'll know the answer, well, that would be an argument for risk management saying, well, let's at least wait for this stuff.
That's only a few weeks.
Can you just wait for this stuff?
You could have that conversation.
But generally speaking, let's just compare sending the healthy under-45s to work today-ish, today-ish, versus the current plan, which is all the governors are going to decide and it's going to take months and whatever.
Without saying that I prefer one of those models over the other, who can tell me that we have studied them?
Right? Do you believe that anybody's modeled those two things?
And more importantly, do you believe anybody could?
Do you believe anybody could model the difference between those two things?
Because there's so many unknowns, right?
You don't really know how it's going to turn out.
I would say it can't be modeled.
In other words, you could never reliably know if the Naval under 45 and healthy plan goes to work now is the best one, or this patchwork Governors decide, every situation is different, etc.
How do you know which one of those is better?
Here is my decision-making process in the face of unknowns.
So if you don't know which one's better, but you have two paths and they're very different, how do you decide without the right information?
You still have to decide.
You don't get to not decide.
You have to decide.
And you couldn't possibly have the right information.
But you still have to decide.
What do you do? Number one, you ask yourself which one has a catastrophic downside.
And it turns out they both have a catastrophic downside.
Sort of in different ways, and it's sort of hard to calculate.
So if you can't tell which one has the best upside, and you can't tell which one is the most catastrophic, but...
You can tell which one opens the economy sooner.
That's it, right? Isn't that the end of the analysis?
I would add to that that you also have the option of pulling back if it doesn't work.
Right? So those are the things you would look to.
Given that there's great uncertainty, two paths, you cannot tell, you cannot model which one is better.
It can't be done. And if you cling to the childlike fairy tale that experts can model the future, you just shouldn't be part of the conversation.
It can't be modeled.
So if you have two plans that can't be modeled, one of them keeps the economy closed to a potential catastrophe, one of them opens it up, at least partially right away, And we could pull back if we need to.
Which of those two plans make sense?
Don't ask Dr.
Phil. He's not equipped for this.
Brilliant guy. By the way, I love Dr.
Phil. Brilliant guy.
You could criticize specific things he's done, and I have too.
But overall, he's a positive force, successful, smart guy who's good for the world.
I don't mean to mock Dr.
Phil. He's far more good than negative.
But it is just a fact, as we observe him talking about this topic, he doesn't have He doesn't have those analytical skills.
It's a special kind of thing.
Now, let me put it this way.
You've got a choice.
Let's say Dr. Fauci comes out.
I'll just give you this example.
Dr. Fauci comes out and says, well, he did.
He's obviously backing the president's plan of the three phases and letting the governors make individual decisions.
So you've got a Dr.
Fauci says this is the way to go, but it can't be modeled how it turns out.
It can't be. Let's say you've got a Naval Ravikant who has a different skill set.
Brilliant guy who has succeeded in lots of different fields and specifically has shown success over and over again of being able to integrate lots of different highly technical opinions and possibilities into businesses.
Because he's done just that, both in his investments and in building up his own company and companies.
So, let me give you another example.
If you're not as familiar with Naval, let's replace that with Elon Musk.
Let's say, I don't know if this is the case, but let's say Elon Musk agreed with Naval and said, yeah, this is the plan I would do.
And Dr. Fauci says, no, I would do it this way.
Which one? Which one would you prefer, given that it can't be known?
You just can't know.
You have to pick, but you can't.
Oh, there's a good answer. There's a good answer.
Somebody in the comments just said one word.
Freedom. That is a good analysis.
If you can't tell the difference which one is good, you pick freedom.
Now, the kicker to it The freedom option also gives you a little bit of ability to pull back.
If you wait a year, it's just going to be too late.
There might not be anything left if you wait a year.
But if you start now and say, all right, let's send these young people back to work.
Let's see what happens. Hospitals start to get impacted.
You pull back a little bit.
Make an adjustment. But let me just say this.
If you would pick Dr.
Fauci's recommendation... Over an Elon Musk, a Naval Ravikant, I'll throw Mark Cuban in there.
If you would pick Dr.
Fauci's recommendation over whatever Mark Cuban comes up with, are you good with that?
Are you good with that? I'll tell you, if it comes down, if we get to a point where Mark Cuban is saying, look, this is the way to go, and Fauci is saying, no, look, this is the way to go, whose side are you going to be on?
For me, it's a slam dunk.
Because I know Mark Cuban is going to listen to the...
I'm just using him as a stand-in, as an irrational player.
You know Mark Cuban is going to listen to all the medical advice and risk and reward.
But he's also going to have the bigger context, and he's a more skilled decision-maker, I would say.
I would say that any of the people I mentioned who are not Dr.
Fauci are world-class, proven decision-makers...
In the context of not having all the information.
There you go. All right.
And there's some people who would still go with Dr.
Fauci. I would argue that anybody who has that opinion probably doesn't have a great breadth of experience.
You could be brilliant and nice, so it's not an insult.
I'm just saying that people with a breadth of experience are far more likely to say, yeah, I'm going to go with, you know, Elon or Naval or Mark Cuban, because you know they've integrated all the risk management into the decision, you can't be so sure about a doctor.
Let me give you a little insight.
When I was a banker, I was a lending officer for a while, and I was in the headquarters, and I had to approve loans from the lenders in the field, so I was allegedly an expert.
And they would send me their loan applications from the branches, and I specialized in professionals, meaning, in this case, doctors and dentists and stuff.
Would you say that doctors...
Are good credit risks?
Probably you would, right?
Because a doctor has almost a guaranteed good income.
And they're very smart.
So if you've got somebody who's very smart, and they have a guaranteed high income, that's a pretty good credit risk, right?
To give them a loan to start a practice.
Doesn't work out that way.
It turns out that doctors are bad at credit risks as a group.
Because they tend to be real good at the doctoring stuff, and they tend to be almost childlike at the economic stuff.
It's such a pattern, a consistent pattern, and of course it's not true of every doctor, right?
I'm just saying as a generality.
That my bank, where I worked, we actually had them segmented in their own class for special evaluation.
By me, I was one of the two people who evaluated their loans, and the filter that we would put on it is, okay, if this were anybody else, this would look like a good loan, but it's a doctor, so it's not.
You would automatically say, sorry, doctors are just not as good a loan.
Now, one of the things we would do for dentists in particular is we would require them to have insurance insurance.
We would calculate the suicide risk with dentists, but you wouldn't calculate that risk when you made a loan to somebody who was just a business person in general.
Because business people in general have some risk of suicide, but dentists have an unusually high one, or at least that used to be the case.
So... Anyway, the point is that in my experience, which actually is pretty extensive, in which I've seen doctors operate outside their domain.
So I've seen doctors do doctor stuff and they're great at it, you know, in general.
But I've also seen them try to navigate economics and business.
And it doesn't work out.
It's very consistent.
So I'd rather have a brilliant engineer take the input from a doctor and then Integrated into a larger decision, then I would like to see a doctor try to understand what the engineer is saying and have the doctor integrate that into a larger decision.
That's probably the wrong way to go.
How much do we know about conglescent blood plasma treatment?
Apparently there are a number of trials.
I think one is approved and a number of them are submitted for approval.
But how long does it take to do that?
How long does it take to do a convalescent blood plasma trial?
Because are we really worried about side effects?
So here's my question to any experts who might be on here, if there's any doctors watching this.
Would you do the same kind of trial with blood plasma?
So this is taking the antibodies out of the blood of people who have already had it and recovered.
If you're putting that into somebody else, do we already know from enough work in that kind of area, do we already know that there's no special risk?
Do we know that? Because if we know that, so that's the question for the experts, if we know there's no special health risk of trying it, then the only thing we need to know is if it's working.
And given that the entire virus only lasts, you know, two weeks, From the moment you start the trial, shouldn't it be only two weeks before you know you have something?
And it all depends on that question of, do you also have to monitor it for a longer period to find out if there are any weird side effects or interactions that you know about?
So, that's my question to the experts.
Is there any medical risk There's always some, but is there a medical risk that's big enough that you would even care to test it?
Is it beyond even worrying about testing it?
I don't know. Yeah, so let's get an answer to that.
Because it does seem to me that the blood plasma thing might be one of the good wild cards that could be ramped up.
But given the uncertainty of whether there is even any such thing as What would you call it?
Immunity? I guess I'm not smart enough to finish this sentence, so somebody needs to help me.
If somebody gets the blood plasma treatment, so they've got some antibodies, there's some suspicion that antibodies don't protect you because people who have antibodies are, in fact, getting reinfected.
We don't know at what rate or if those are special conditions yet, but it's certainly a big, big, big, big, big red flag That lots of people, lots meaning over dozens at this point, have been identified as definitely getting the virus again.
But one must ask yourself, did the people who got infected the second time have a bad problem, or did they simply become carriers?
We don't know that, do we?
So the people who got reinfected, did any of them end up in the ICU? Or did all of them say, well, I barely, I didn't even know I had it.
My antibodies were so good, I got reinfected.
And sure, I got a little reinfection in there, but that'll be gone in a week because my antibodies are all charged up.
We don't know the answer to that.
So, therefore, we cannot guess whether that treatment will have a big impact or not.
All right. Did you see that Mike Cernovich has been tweeting about Amazon kicked his documentary Hoaxed off of Amazon's platform?
And since that happened, I believe he's still on iTunes.
I think that's where you can get it.
But you can Google it and find it.
It's called Hoaxed.
I'm in it. And apparently it has risen to become the second best selling documentary.
Here's the good part.
It's the second part of the sentence that's the fun part.
Mike Cernovich's documentary, Hoaxed, is now the second best-selling documentary of all time.
Of all time.
It's the second best-selling documentary of all time.
And Amazon kicked it off its platform.
Now, that probably helped, right?
Because it helped him get a little publicity.
Obviously, Mike knows how to navigate publicity better than most people in the world.
And so he's capitalized on that to crank it up to the number two best-selling documentary of all time.
Now, what does this tell you?
Well, first thing it tells you is that the number of people who watch documentaries in general is probably not a gigantic number, right?
The biggest documentary is going to be small compared to a movie.
It also tells me that he's in striking distance for number one.
And if I can ask you one favor...
I don't usually ask you favors, right?
So this is a favor.
It's not a recommendation.
It's just a favor.
Buy it.
Because let's see if we can push it into number one.
So my experience has been, being the second best all-time of something...
It's terrific for, you know, bragging rights and you can make more money and all that.
But the difference between being number two and being number one, it's a galaxy of difference.
Now, I learned that when I had a book.
My first number one best-selling book sat at number two for weeks and didn't really make much of a ripple in the universe.
The day it went to number one, the heavens opened and my whole life changed.
So going from two to one...
In any category like this, it's not just one unit.
It's the difference between the heavens open and the heavens don't.
Now, given that Amazon kicked this off their platform, and they did it without offering even a reason.
And it's a good thing they didn't offer a reason because there wasn't one.
I mean, I've seen it. Lots of people have seen it.
Obviously, it's the number two best-selling documentary of all time.
So a lot of people have seen it.
How many of the people who have seen it would say there's something in there that should cause anybody, anybody of any type, to think it should not be viewed by the public?
There's nothing in there.
There's nothing in it That even comes close to crossing the line.
There's no line that gets crossed.
And I'm not even, I'm not being generous.
There's just nothing in there that should be considered controversial at all.
Somebody says how to buy, I think it's on iTunes, but if you Google it, or just, you could just ask Mike, or just go to his, I'm sure if you went to his Twitter feed or his webpage, there must be links.
So here's what I'm asking for you, and it's a favor.
This is just a favor.
If you got a few extra bucks, see if you can push it up to number one.
Because I feel like just putting a thumb in Amazon's eye over this, it's got to be worth a few bucks, right?
Be part of something, push it up to number one.
And many of you have heard my review of it.
It is exceptional.
I mean, there's a reason it's the number two documentary.
It's exceptional. It really is special.
And if you watch it, I'll give you this watching advice.
You have to watch it all the way through, and you have to do it in one sitting.
Because it's designed so cleverly as a full experience.
You don't want to watch ten minutes and come back and do the rest, etc.
You want to watch it as one entity with one sitting, and it'll just blow the top of your head off.
Go do that. See if you can push it up to number one.
Alright, that's about all I have to say, except I would like to change the word when we talk about minimizing infections.
I would like to change that word to managing.
Because I don't know. Somebody's saying you can rent it on Google Play for $3.99.
So, I don't know, but that's what somebody says in the comments.
I would like to say that we should manage the infection, not minimize it.
Because minimize it tells you to keep the economy closed forever.
Managing it tells you that there's a balance.
And words matter, because our brains get tuned by their choice of words.
So it seems like a small thing, but I don't know if it is.
It might be a bigger thing than you think.
If every time we think about infections, we replace the word minimized, With managed, it gets our mindset closer to understanding that there's a balance and that the number of people who die can be on either side of that seesaw.
All right. There's a new model from the University of Washington saying 68,000 deaths, but I'm a little confused because at one point we had 60,000.
Was that a different model? And there's some thought that it would come down even Even less.
We'll see. Alright.
I think that's all I got for today.
Thank you. Thank you to those of you who are doing that.
I can't think of anything that would make me happier in a small way than to see Amazon kick that off the platform and it become the number one best-selling documentary of all time.
Anything short of that is just not going to be pleasing to the simulation.
The simulation requires this to be number one.
You know it does.
You know it does.
You know the simulation requires that movie, Hoaxed, to be number one.
Just because it's too perfect.
Number two just suggests where it's heading.
But number one, The simulation requires it.
Alright, it's called Hoaxed.
Go take a look. Somebody says Hoaxed just became number one on iTunes.
I think that's number one for current sales, which it should be.
But if it stays number one on current sales, it won't be long before it's number one of all time.
Let's see if we can make that happen.
Alright, I'll talk to you tonight.
Export Selection