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April 17, 2020 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
47:25
Episode 917 Scott Adams: Let's Talk About That Trump Reopening Plan
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Oh yeah, Oh yeah, it's time for the evening edition of Coffee with Scott Adams featuring no coffee.
Now normally at this time you would see me swaddled in my soft blanket, but the time for swaddling is transitioning to a different time.
Yes, yes, there was a time when working on our fear and figuring out how to get through this and understanding it all was the thing to do.
But I declare that the swaddling time is over.
We are now in a post-swaddle world.
You don't need your blanket anymore.
You don't need to worry about your nerves.
You don't need to worry about your stress.
We're going to go on offense now.
It's time. Now, I don't mean necessarily tomorrow, but it's time to reorient our mindset.
This will become more clear to you as I go through my fascinating presentation of today's events.
Alright, so first of all, I broke my own social isolation today.
Again, One trusts the government as long as the government is doing what seems credible to you.
I'm pretty forgiving about mistakes if they fix them.
But I'm not entirely pleased with what the government is doing in terms of guidelines.
And so I've decided to loosen up my own guidelines.
So I'm not doing anything crazy.
But let's just say it really felt good to loosen my social isolation.
That's all I'm going to tell you about that.
So my day is going well.
Anyway, let's talk about the president's guidelines.
You probably all saw the news.
The president came out with these three phases.
And the approach that the president is taking is kind of brilliant.
Kind of brilliant. There's a bad side here.
So I'll start with the good news.
So the good news is, and I've said this before, I believe that the federal government, and specifically the president, should always come down on the side of preserving the most life, even if it's irrational.
Because I think the number one person in the country should never be in a position to decide who lives and dies in the country.
Now, if it's war, of course he's going to decide who lives and dies in other countries.
But you don't want the top person in the country to make those decisions about who lives and dies.
Instead, you want that to be pushed down.
So, for example, I like the fact that the states get to make most of the decisions about abortion.
They get to make decisions about the death penalty.
So the states get to make a lot of decisions that really do determine who lives and who dies.
And that's the better place for them.
So if you looked at the President and Fauci and Dr.
Birx, their recommendation today, it didn't really look like a practical recommendation.
I don't know if you had that feeling.
It looked like, I don't want to say political, because if you do something that you should do, I'm not sure that you should call that political, but you know what I mean.
So what they did is, it looked to me that the plan is the most compatible with the, let's say, the medical dominant opinion.
Meaning that when I looked at those guidelines, it seemed to me that if there were economists in the room and doctors in the room when they came up with that, it feels like the doctors had more say.
Did it feel like that to you?
Did it feel like the federal government's rules were really biased toward keeping the most people alive?
Because it really...
It puts a pretty high hurdle on a lot of these states to open up.
So the federal government putting a high hurdle on the states, but not requiring it, interestingly.
This is where the magic is.
So the federal government says, this is what we prefer, but it's a little impractical, and of course every state needs to adjust for their situation.
And here's why.
I don't think anybody knows, no expert, no modeler, no doctor, no virologist, I don't believe anybody knows the right time to start up.
I believe there's sort of an expert hunch, best guess.
Now, of course, it's informed by as much data as they can collect, but do you think that they can collect enough data that that alone would tell them when is the exact right time to do anything?
Not really. Not really.
There's no such thing as that kind of data or that kind of model.
I think that the medical professionals who, of course, Probably would prefer erring, you know, by training, by personality, would prefer erring on the side of protecting the most life, even if it's a little expensive, and maybe even if the lives that are lost later because of the economic issues, well, maybe they don't have names and it's not so obvious why they died.
So you would expect that whatever came from the federal government, if they do it right, would feel a little impractical because it's weighing It's biased a little too much towards saving life, because that's exactly where the federal government should be.
So the magic is that the states, who really are the more appropriate deciders of life and death in their state, that's the most credible place to do it.
Now the federal government has given them that space.
So that part?
Brilliant. I don't think that you could improve on that, specifically the idea of pushing that responsibility down.
That's just perfect.
No, I don't have the coronavirus.
I just swallowed some spit.
So the real way to judge this is by whatever the states do.
So if the states go ahead and do dumb things, it doesn't matter what the federal government said, assuming they don't stop them from doing their dumb things.
And there's nothing that the federal government is doing that would stop the states from doing smart things.
So the states do have the right kind of flexibility.
But here's the problem.
I hope the states don't take the same model as the federal government, because it seems like the federal government It has sort of a geographic bent.
You know, sort of like, okay, you're a state.
Figure out what your state is going to do.
We don't know yet if the state will make finer decisions within the state.
Presumably they'll make a difference between, let's say, LA and a rural area.
But will they make decisions about individuals?
That's the part that's missing.
Right? Because the federal government just says if you can get your What is it?
Something about the stabilizing for two weeks or dropping your severity for two weeks, then you can go to the next level.
But until you've got two weeks of dropping it, you can't do it.
And here's the problem with that.
Are you telling me that a 25-year-old going back to work is going to blow your whole deal?
Because a 25-year-old might get sick, but probably they're not going to die.
And so wouldn't it be smarter to, you know, once you've got your geographic decisions, you know, that the states make their own decisions, wouldn't it be smarter to also have an individual filter that comes after that, in which you decide, okay, even though we're not quite in phase one, you can certainly go to work.
So make decisions based on individuals.
Here's an approach that comes from Naval.
So if I can find it.
So he points out, I'll try to summarize it.
You could pick an age and say people, his example is people below the age of 45.
So you could pick that age to make the death rate that we anticipate equal to the regular flu.
So for example, if you said only people under 45, and I think he means people without any complicating health conditions otherwise, if they go back to work, there will be extra deaths, but it will be almost exactly the same as the regular flu.
So if that's what society can tolerate, the regular flu, then maybe send back young enough people so that that's the result you get.
So I like that idea.
According to Naval's back-of-the-envelope calculations, you would get a lot more illnesses, but if you're sending young people in, you wouldn't get that many more deaths, and that's going to be the far more impactful thing.
So I would say that the federal government did a real good job of Determining the field, but everything will depend on the states.
If the states take a similar approach where they just say, okay, you know, if you're in a high-risk category, stay home.
If you're not, and they don't sort it any better than that, that might be a problem.
So we'll see what the states come up with.
I'll withhold my judgment.
So, I don't know what to believe on this.
So today there are all these stories about remdesivir that Gilead makes, is anecdotally showing great results in these studies that don't have a control.
So the studies have now been written up and they don't have a control, which means that they're not reliable in the way that we want things to be reliable.
But there's all kinds of press that, hey, this $1,000, a treatment drug, that you can only take in the hospital by IV, and it's $1,000, that this is the thing, and it saved all these people, etc.
Do you believe any of that?
Do you believe any of that?
And somebody funny on Twitter said, oh, so it looks like...
It looks like hydroxychloroquine is for Republicans and remdesivir is for Democrats.
And it kind of looks like that.
It kind of looks like half of the country wants remdesivir to be the thing and half the country wants hydroxychloroquine to be the thing because there's a political implication.
Nobody wants, at least the Democrats, don't want Trump to be right.
So they don't want hydroxychloroquine to be the one.
And I don't know.
So here's my personal opinion, is that it doesn't work.
So I'm leaning kind of heavily toward neither remdesivir nor hydroxychloroquine work.
And I use the same thinking in both cases.
We would not be at this point without knowing...
If it worked really dramatically, if it really made a difference, we'd know it by now.
And I don't think we do.
So if it worked as well as you would want it to work to be a game-changing drug, I think you'd see it even without the tests, even without the trials.
And you'd have people saying it.
So I'm 60-40 that neither of them worked.
60% that neither of them work.
But there are apparently dozens of things being tested, so maybe one of those works.
I got a bunch of trolls coming in who were getting really angry and hurling the F-bombs at me and telling me that they want to Urinate on my grave.
Just a sort of normal day on Twitter.
And just for fun, I started clicking on their profiles to see what jobs they have.
And it is so freaky how often they are artists.
The artists are the ones who can't understand that whatever decision we make about going back to work, somebody dies.
They act as though if you pick a direction, which is what they were complaining about, I was saying that people are ready to go back to work because people, not me specifically, but that people seem to be willing to take a few hundred thousand deaths to get back to work.
And how does anybody not understand That no matter what you do, whether you kill people by crushing the economy or you kill people by the flu, we only have a choice of killing people.
And they came in and acted like I was the devil because I suggested one of the two paths, both of which kill people.
And we don't even know which one kills more.
If we did, it would be obvious, right?
If we all knew which was the one that kills the fewest people, what debate would there be?
So, and most of the artists were writers, authors, a lot of sci-fi writers.
It's so consistent that it's really worth noting, because it tells you what a good experience will get you.
And if you don't have it, well...
All right. So, Andrew Cuomo has tapped Consultants McKinsey, To develop what they're calling a Trump-proof economic reopening plan.
Now, most of this week people have been telling me that I'm talking about things that are not my area of expertise.
And indeed, it's true.
Not my area of expertise.
The amount I know about virology would fill a very small nothing.
But, when it comes to the question...
Should New York City hire McKinsey consultants to help them come up with a plan?
Well, now you're in my wheelhouse.
You're in my wheelhouse now.
And let me tell you my experience with McKinsey consultants.
It might have been Bain. It was one of them.
So the big management consultants are very similar.
So at the moment...
I think it was McKinsey, but we also worked with Bain, so it was one of them.
But they have a similarity, so you could replace either name and the story would still work.
So I was working at Pacific Bell, and we had some big strategic decision to make, and our management decided to hire one of these big consulting companies.
Now, the way that works is the consulting company sends in a high-level partner, And that high-level partner sits with our management, and the management thinks to themselves at the end of the meeting, wow, this consultant person is really, really smart. And do you know why they think that?
It's true. Those consultant people are just like super smart.
So they're recruited out of the top schools, and they can work around the clock, and they're almost like superhuman.
So it is true that the people who come out of these consultant companies, they're not like you and I, honestly.
They are really, really smart.
So that part's just true.
But here's the fun part.
So Pacific Bell says, yes, we will hire you.
Damn, I've never even seen anybody as smart as you.
Just the ideas that you threw out in the room here are so good.
It's like, whoa, you are worth a few million dollars.
So we hire them.
And then the smartest person, the consultant partner says, and I'll send my team in.
To work with you.
There are four of them.
And they'll be coming in and they'll actually work in your office.
So they'll have desks in your office and phones just like employees.
They'll just be embedded and they'll just work.
And then I say, wait a minute, wait a minute.
What's happening here?
Didn't we just hire you because you, the person who's the principal in the company, is so darn smart?
Well, yes, that's true.
And did you just tell me you're not going to be here?
Instead, you're going to send some people who just got out of college to tell us how to run our business we've been running for 30 years?
Is that why you just proposed?
Yeah, yeah, but they're really smart.
Okay, okay. They're really smart, but let me just clarify this.
They don't know anything about our business, right?
They have never been in telecommunication?
Is that true? Don't worry.
We have a process. So they'll just follow the process.
It's our patented process.
And it can solve pretty much any situation.
So they don't really need to be experts because you'll tell them how to fill in their process.
To which I say, yeah, you know, but...
I think we could figure out a process.
We could look at the costs and the benefits.
We know how to do spreadsheets.
We know how to predict things. It turns out we have all of those same skills.
Why are we hiring somebody for millions of dollars who's sending somebody who is not even the guy we wanted to hire, who are going to learn the business from us and then tell us what to do?
And by the way, do you know what recommendation comes out of it?
Do you? Let me tell you, the recommendation that comes out of these young experts is whatever the staff wants it to be.
Because the staff is training them and teaching them what they need to know to fill their models.
So the staff has an opinion.
So we just make sure that all the data that the consultants get just happens to conform to our opinion.
Do you think the consultants would know if there was something you didn't tell them?
Probably not. They're not experts in the business.
So if you only tell them half of what they need to know to bias them toward whatever it is you think should have been done anyway, they're not going to know the difference.
They only know what you tell them.
So they make complicated spreadsheets and charts and gigantic reports and especially graphs.
And they present them. And then you learn the whole real reason why any of this is done.
Because in the end, all that's happened is the consultants have recommended exactly what the staff would have recommended if you just asked them.
And you find out that your boss is just covering his butt because if he took his own staff's recommendation and it was bad, that would be his fault.
But if he spends millions of dollars on a top management firm who puts together this killer presentation and then takes the presentation to your boss, you don't even have to do it.
You don't even have to sell your own boss.
You don't have to convince your own boss because that's what the consultant does.
You just say, hey boss, you've got a few minutes.
My consultant is going to give you this really complicated presentation.
You're not going to understand most of it.
Really, you're not going to understand any of it.
But you'll understand the summary, and you'll think that we're really smart, and we must have gotten something for our money.
And it's a good way to cover your butt, because even if it goes wrong, you can say, smart consultants.
Anyway, Cuomo hiring these consultants should be seen as primarily a covering-your-butt move.
The consultants will come up with whatever the people paying the bills want them to come up with.
Here's what the consultants are not going to come up with.
The opposite of what the people who pay the bills want them to come up with.
You can bank on that.
So they're not adding value, except to convince people that it wasn't Andrew Cuomo who made the decision by simply pulling it out of his ass.
But he's going to pull it out of his ass, collectively.
I mean, he won't make the decision in a vacuum.
But the people closest to it, the politicians, are going to have to make a decision without data, because we don't have all the data we need to really be certain.
So he'll do what he can, and his consultants will cover for him.
Now, if you've noticed, our leaders have created a perfect situation.
President Trump has experts, which you can see he's closely following their advice.
So if it's wrong, who do you blame?
Well, you sort of blame the experts, right?
So President Trump has a scapegoat.
Now, the experts also have come up with this framework, but they say, but the real work has to be done at the states.
So the experts also have set up a scapegoat, which is the governors.
Because the president can say, listen to the experts.
The experts can say the governors didn't implement it correctly, so everybody's got a scapegoat.
And then the governors, if they're smart, will find other scapegoats, as in Andrew Cuomo, which is the consultants.
So the president will blame the experts.
The experts will blame the governors.
The governors now have consultants.
They can blame the consultants.
And who will the consultants blame?
China. They'll blame China.
Because China gave us bad data and our models could have been better or whatever.
Now at this point, maybe they don't use any Chinese data, but the consultants are going to have to find somebody to blame.
They're at the bottom of the thing there.
They'll probably blame bad implementation.
I'm starting to think that Marco Rubio would be the perfect choice for what I'll call the secretary of decoupling from China.
So Rubio is doing some interviews, and here's what I like about him.
I like that he's in the same party as Trump, which means he could be nominated for something reasonably.
And he's appropriately tough on China and seems to have a good grasp of the whole thing.
So don't we need somebody at that level...
To get things going.
Because we might end up doing what Japan is doing, which is paying companies to move stuff back.
But with China, we've got, you know, bigger problems.
You've got all the, you know, everything from the Uyghurs to the telecommunications, they're stealing stuff, the IP. It's a big, big, complicated thing.
And you could argue it would be one of, if not the biggest economic variable of our future.
So just put that in the back of your mind.
Maybe Marco Rubio needs a promotion.
It would be one of the biggest jobs of all time, I would think.
All right. Let's talk some more about, because I know you want to, a follow-up on Bill Gates.
So, as you know, I'm having this ongoing debate on the internet about whether Bill Gates has done a whole variety of horrible things, which he is accused of by conspiracy theorists, or it's all just made up.
Now, of course, I'm on the other side of it.
It's all obviously just made up.
I mean, you just look at it, you go, that didn't happen.
And so, of course, I've gone through the list of all the reasons that Bill Gates is not the devil.
I'll just give you one example so you can see how it goes.
People said, hey, Bill Gates supports the World Health Organization and they're evil as we know.
To which I say, so does the United States.
And does the United States want exactly what Bill Gates wants from the World Health Organization?
Yeah, of course. Both of them want different leadership, but we both know that if it had good leadership, it would probably be a really good thing.
So is there really any difference between Trump And Bill Gates when it comes to the World Health Organization?
Nope. There's no difference.
Trump is holding the funding as leverage and to negotiate.
Bill Gates just has a different job.
But somebody has to hold them to be accountable.
You don't think that Bill Gates wants the World Health Organization to not be accountable, right?
So it's just bad thinking and weird conspiracy theory to think that Bill Gates is a bad guy because he supports a functional World Health Organization.
It should be understood that he wants competent management, as do we all.
So you can see from that example, that's just one, where you can sort of take all these weird accusations and go, yeah, but you're just thinking about it wrong.
And it kind of came down to this.
He spent a lot of time with Jeffrey Epstein.
So it turns out, you know, maybe after all these complaints of his horrible things he's done, allegedly, it might come down to, well, but we got a picture of him standing next to Jeffrey Epstein.
How do you explain that? And I don't explain what, you know, whatever Bill Gates is thinking or why he did what he did.
Nobody can do that. But I'll give you some context.
I reject anybody who says you can't hang out with and talk to anybody you want, anytime you want, for any reason you want.
And that's the way I live my life.
If you were to judge me by the people that I've spent significant time with, well, you would want the death penalty for me.
Moreover, if I could judge other people by the same standard, I would want the death penalty for half of the people I know.
Because we've all spent significant time with some bad people.
And sometimes we knew it and sometimes we didn't.
But I don't think there's an exception.
Is there any of you who haven't spent time with somebody who's done some really bad stuff and you knew it?
Or you suspected it, maybe you didn't approve, but you kind of thought about it?
Let's try to be a little bit adult.
People spend time with all kinds of people.
And the thing that bugs me about that is that when you see that Gates was hanging around with Epstein, the thing that everybody says is, well, doesn't that mean that something about Epstein, either his lifestyle or whatever, was sort of bleeding off onto Gates?
Like, does the badness of Epstein sort of just stain Gates?
To which I say, why does it have to work that way?
Where's the thinking behind the assumption that influence works one way?
Why wouldn't it be true that Bill Gates was making Epstein a better person?
Because if Bill Gates was hanging around with Epstein to get money from Epstein for charity, and apparently that is what they were talking about, right?
They were talking to get money for charity.
So if Bill Gates was hanging around with somebody who was super sketchy, like as sketchy as you could possibly be, but he thought that maybe he could get a charity going and it would help the world, do you care?
Now, it's up to the legal system to take care of, you know, your...
You're Jeffrey Epstein's.
And it's not really Bill Gates' job.
If somebody, you know, serves their time, even if you don't think it was the right sentence, it's not really our job to make them serve time again, right?
If the legal system lets somebody out, I'm just not going to be the one to say, now I can't talk to you because you should have served the longer term.
I don't know. So here's my, I'll give you my personal rule.
Of course, these are all personal decisions.
I've said this many times, but I will declare it as many times as I need to.
I declare my complete and total right to associate with...
Lost your respect.
Don't worry, I'll block you.
I maintain the complete right to associate with anybody good or bad under the theory that associating with me would make them better people.
Because do you think that if I hang around with a bad person, that that person's going to make me bad?
Or do you think that hanging around with me, maybe they'd pick up some things that would make them better?
Do you really want No good people to associate with bad people, according to you, whoever is good and bad.
So, you can do whatever you want, and I certainly understand the point.
It's not like I don't understand the point of doing something that boosts or supports bad people.
But keep in mind, when it was brought up to Bill Gates that Working with this person for, I'm sure, what Gates thought was some productive reason in the charity world.
Because that's what's reported, right?
It's reported that the reason they were talking is about Epstein raising funds from other people.
Apparently he had good ways to do that, etc.
And I think Bill Gates just said, your personal life is your personal life.
I'm not here about that.
And I'm always going to be okay with that.
Now, you don't have to like Bill Gates.
That's fine. But I would at least like you to think about it clearly.
If you think about it clearly and still decide you don't like him, well, that's fine.
You're certainly welcome to that opinion.
But I think I can help you at least clear up what's ridiculous conspiracy theory and what is a reasonable thing.
So somebody in the comments says that Bill Gates apologized.
But he's generally socially stupid.
Let me take offense at that.
I don't really take offense at things, so I'm taking offense on behalf of someone else.
Have you seen the Netflix special about Bill Gates?
One of the things that I would say is fairly obvious, and I don't know if he would deny this, and I'm not a medical doctor, but I'll just give you my opinion.
It does appear that he's somewhere on the spectrum, in the Asperger's kind of a way.
And the tells for that would be ability to deeply focus and really be able to dive down on a topic In a way, ordinary people can't.
And that's exactly who Bill Gates is.
He carries this big, you know, bag of books around on topics from, you know, biology and, you know, physics and stuff, things that you and I wouldn't want to spend too much time reading.
But he can. And he can just go off in the woods with his bag of books and do these deep dives.
But... Do you think that his social, let's say, awareness is the same as everybody else's?
I don't think so.
I feel like maybe that's just not the area where his brain is optimized.
So could it be that he literally just had a blind spot for how it would look to other people?
And I think maybe.
Maybe. He might have just had a blind spot.
But anyway, we haven't heard his side of the story, so we don't know.
Wish you'd speak about your views au courant.
I don't know what you mean.
I mean, I know what the sentence says, but I don't know which views you're talking about.
So somebody is sarcastically saying, I have nothing like my friends.
I don't know if it's sarcastic or not.
Am I on the spectrum?
Well, many people have suggested that I am.
Apparently I have enough tells that it's at least a hypothesis.
My personal opinion is probably not, but I would doubt it if some expert told me I was.
What about Texas oil production limits?
I don't know about that story, actually.
Yeah, no more food coming tonight for me.
The virus from the lab was obvious, yeah.
At some point it became obvious.
They mind-read me.
Sometimes they do.
Did you break isolation today?
only with Christina.
Yeah, I'm not going to do anything crazy, but I've decided to take more control of my personal situation and my personal risk.
I think.
MSNBC wants Biden to activate a shadow government to counter Trump.
Did you see the latest clip of Joe Biden not being able to get out of sentence?
He was sitting there with his wife, Jill, on camera, and I asked myself, Why is his wife on camera with him?
Because she wasn't talking.
It was like she was just sitting there to be supportive or something.
And it made me feel like she was more tempting him.
Do you know what I'm talking about?
It felt like maybe his wife was there just to take him off camera or nudge him or something if it needed to be done.
I don't know. Um...
Turkey uses hydroxychloroquine and has the death rate.
Has what death rate?
Is it good or bad? Have you heard of a memory hole?
I've heard of it. Pelosi admitted to strategy of smear to get press to report to use press as proof.
Well, okay. I don't know what that's about.
Any thoughts on Roger Stone not getting a second trial?
Well, doesn't that open up the possibility of a pardon?
Or whatever you call it.
Yeah, pardon. So it would not surprise me to see that Roger Stone might get pardoned if there's no more legal process to run out.
I'd kind of expect it would happen.
I'd be surprised if it didn't.
Do you agree with Bill Gates that we need to depopulate?
Really? Do you think that Bill Gates said we want to reduce the population of Earth?
Now, I don't have to go Google that to know that didn't happen.
Bill Gates, with no research, I'll do no research whatsoever, and I'll state with complete confidence that only a jerk like me can have in this situation.
Bill Gates never said anything about depopulating the Earth.
Let me say that with complete confidence.
With no research whatsoever.
Now this is an example of what I talk about when I say there are some things that you don't have to research.
You don't have to research whether that was a true thing.
You just can look at it.
Same way you look at Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.
Some things are just obviously not true.
And it's obviously not true that Bill Gates is promoting depopulating the world.
Do you really believe that?
All right. Odds on hydroxychloroquine?
I said that earlier. I think both the remdesivir and the hydroxychloroquine, I give them...
Well, actually, I think I... I accidentally misspoke earlier in this periscope.
So let me say it this way.
I think there's a 60% chance that neither of them work.
Does that work the same if it's a 60% chance for each of them?
I think it's the same, right?
I think there's a 40% chance, if you looked at either of them individually, that they'd work in some big way.
Somebody says he did look it up.
No. You did not say that.
You did not say that.
I'm not going to look it up.
You're not going to trick me into looking up Santa Claus.
I'm sorry. Comments on Jedi contracts snafu with Amazon.
I don't know what that's about.
Gates supports Roundup GMO mass immune injections.
And? You'd have to make a point before I could comment on it.
Do you blame cable TV news for the seething division in America today?
I don't know if it's a combination of social media and TV news, but certainly it's the media landscape which is causing the division, for sure.
Is your sense of zeitgeist confirmation biases?
It could be. That's how confirmation bias works.
If anybody tells you that their opinion is not confirmation bias, it just means they don't understand what confirmation bias is.
If you're the one who has it, you're the only one who can't tell if it's confirmation bias.
Otherwise, it wouldn't be confirmation bias.
If you could tell the difference, it wouldn't be a thing.
DoD ordered a bunch of remdesivir.
Yeah, it makes sense that people would maybe stock up on it just in case.
Yeah, it's like when Bill Poulter tried to give away his own money and all the haters came out.
What's that all about?
So a rich guy literally just tries to give his money away to lots of different people with no strings attached.
And he's treated as the devil.
There's no good deed that goes unpunished.
God's Debris Part 2?
There is a part two. There is a sequel to God's Debris.
It's called The Religion War.
Are you and Morning Joe buddies?
No, you know what? I did one appearance on Morning Joe, and it happened to be the one morning he didn't come to work.
I saw him in the hallway from a distance, but for whatever reason he wasn't on camera that day.
He had something going on.
But Mika was there.
Somebody says, it's a 36% chance that neither will work if each has a 60%.
Okay, good. Thank you for that clarification.
Oh, I'm going to make a very non-standard prediction.
Are you ready? You like my contrarian predictions?
Because if I make a contrarian prediction and it's wrong, I look really stupid.
But if I get it right, I look like the smartest guy ever.
So here's the most contrarian prediction that you're going to have.
I predict... That the number of suicides will be lower than normal.
Now, all the experts are saying higher, right?
And apparently there are lots more calls to suicide lines.
And the real reasons, the argument that there will be more of them, It's pretty compelling.
And then there's also the correlation with unemployment.
If the unemployment goes up, it's like an extra 5,000 suicides for every point or something like that.
So the argument that suicides will go up is solid gold.
Wouldn't you agree? I mean, all of your common sense says it's going to go up.
If there's anything that would make suicides go up, it would be this.
Right? So that's why my prediction is contrarian, and it goes like this.
This crisis gave everybody meaning.
Meaning that if you weren't happy with your life, sometimes it's because you don't have a purpose.
So there were a lot of people who just realized, oh, if I do this now, my grandmother has two problems instead of one.
If I do this now, I don't know if my family can eat.
Otherwise, maybe it wouldn't have been so big.
And the other thing is that people are going to be with people in small spaces.
I think you need a certain amount of privacy to do suicide, and maybe people are just going to be a little too on each other's stuff for a while.
So there's something about the psychology of this First of all, the thing about unemployment causing more suicide, we've never had a situation where the unemployment was presumed to be not your fault.
So that's the first thing.
Do you kill yourself if something happens to you that appears to be temporary and not your fault?
Because you don't really blame yourself.
You don't think I'm a loser because the same thing happened to everybody.
So there's something about the The largeness of the situation that I think will make people more connected to the world.
I was telling you the other day that I feel connected to everybody in a way that I don't normally if I'm just going about my business.
Because everything that we're going to do to get out of this affects all of us at about the same time in very similar ways.
So if you feel connected to the world, Are you as likely to kill yourself?
Probably not. I think that people's situation will change, and they will go into a re-evaluation mode, which is, they're going to say, yeah, everything was terrible, but there's a lot of stuff happening that makes me wonder...
If something might be different.
Maybe I'm not looking at this straight line of just more of this thing that made me want to kill myself.
Maybe instead I'm looking at the whole box that's been shaken.
Maybe I just want to see where it goes.
Just want to see where it goes.
Curiosity, I've often said, is the most underrated motivation.
Here's a little trick for you.
You want to have a trick for a really bad day?
Instead of saying, oh, it's a bad day coming up.
I hope it's a good day, but it's probably going to be a bad day.
And stress and stress and stress.
And you're worried that some bad news will come and it might go this way and it might go that.
You know, just the normal thing.
The normal thing that all of us feel all the time.
Instead, move your brain into curiosity mode and say this.
It's like a movie. Or it's like a simulation and you're in a video game.
And just ask yourself, given all that's happening right now, What is going to happen?
And just activate your curiosity and say to yourself, you know, I kind of really need to know what's going to happen.
If I were watching this as a movie, I'd want to know.
How does it end? And so I find that I can actually do a brain hack.
You should try this at home.
It works pretty well.
You can do a brain hack where you change your frame of reference from, oh no, oh no, it's all bad news and 100 miles of bad news coming, to, I wonder what's going to happen.
I wonder how this is going to turn out.
And it just occupies a different part of your brain and uses a little different process, you know, a different chemistry.
And sometimes it's just enough of a switch that can get you off whatever was bugging you the other way.
So try that. It's a good little trick.
Suicides often occur when things are objectively improving, but not fast enough.
Somebody sounds like they've researched this.
So that's my prediction.
My prediction is fewer suicides than a normal year during this time.
Complete opposite of what all the experts would say is true.
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