April 21, 2020 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
29:48
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| Oh Come on in here It's time for the evening relaxation. | |
| It's like a slippery, delightful slide in which you slide into a good night's sleep. | |
| Yep, I am that uninteresting tonight. | |
| You'll be drifting off to sleep. | |
| So good. | |
| I have to show you this scene over here. | |
| Hold on. View. | |
| That's Boo the cat standing behind my circle light. | |
| Hey Boo! She knows we're watching her. | |
| Alright. For those of you who are... | |
| That was the least of... | |
| Least useful thing that ever happened. | |
| Alright, let's talk about some things that happened. | |
| First of all, let me check in. | |
| Can I get a fact check? | |
| How long has it been since we saw signs of life from Joe Biden? | |
| Can somebody give me a read on that? | |
| Because I don't think he was around today, right? | |
| And is that three days in a row? | |
| Can somebody give me a fact check on that? | |
| Has anybody seen Biden on video or even on a phone call in the last three days? | |
| Because if not, I think it's already the end of the road. | |
| That would be my guess. | |
| If it's true that it's been three days without seeing him, then he's already decided or he's in the process of deciding to get out of the race. | |
| Thursday, somebody says, the last time we saw them. | |
| All right, well, I'll keep looking at your comments in case somebody saw something. | |
| Here's something I've been trying to figure out. | |
| Does all of this business with the coronavirus... | |
| Okay, most people say three days, yeah. | |
| Does the business with the coronavirus make it more likely or less likely that we'll have a Green New Deal? | |
| Do you think it'll be more likely or less likely? | |
| I think AOC had a tweet today that was celebrating the collapse of oil prices. | |
| Let's say it was an inelegant tweet that I believe she got rid of it. | |
| But I'm trying to figure out What happens to the Green New Deal if all the demand for oil goes away, there's no commuting? | |
| Is it possible that the coronavirus solved climate change? | |
| That's not impossible, right? | |
| Because I don't know if you've looked down at the streets, if you've left your house or anything, but there's not much traffic happening right now. | |
| And you know what? | |
| All the traffic that is happening... | |
| Is essential. And here's a big question I'm wondering. | |
| I'm wondering if people will just decide that they didn't need all the stuff they had before. | |
| And here's the theory behind that. | |
| Have you ever heard the theory of baseline happiness? | |
| It's the idea that you're sort of set in how happy you can be, even if conditions in your life get really good, you don't get much happier. | |
| And if things are really bad, yeah, you do get sad if things are really bad, but it doesn't last that long. | |
| You know, a year later or whatever, after, let's say, a death in the family or something, you tend to drift back to whatever happiness level is your baseline. | |
| And we all have a different baseline. | |
| So I'm wondering if people are discovering that they've been in lockdown long enough That even though nobody would choose it, probably nobody would choose it except introverts. | |
| It's pretty good times for introverts. | |
| I have to admit, being an introvert, I'm getting through this a lot better than most of you. | |
| But I'm wondering if people will realize that their happiness level didn't change as much as they assumed it would. | |
| Because if I said to you, I'm going to take away all of your freedoms... | |
| And you'll have to just stay in the house. | |
| And, you know, you'll have to worry about everything. | |
| You'd say to yourself, well, there's no way I'm going to be as happy. | |
| And if I asked you, you'd probably say you're less happy because you have more stress and uncertainty. | |
| And those things are real. | |
| But I'll bet you there's way less of a change than anybody would have predicted. | |
| I'll bet that a lot of people are just getting through it just fine. | |
| Now, the people who are literally worrying about eating are not getting through a fine, but I'll bet you a lot of people are. | |
| I would like to give a shout-out to the task force for satisfying my need for good explanations of where we are on Now, as you know, I've just been railing and railing about the task force not giving us useful information because it's out of context. | |
| They were just giving us random numbers and stuff. | |
| 10,000 ventilators, 15,000 masks. | |
| We couldn't tell, is that enough? | |
| Is that too much? Then we ended up with triple the number of ventilators, partly because the projections were overcooked, but partly I think also because we didn't have good visibility of who could do what and how fast and what we would need and all that. | |
| But if I had to give a grade to the administration for ventilators, let's say we're just separating the report card from And we say, you know, ventilators. | |
| I think I'd give them an A-plus for ventilators. | |
| Because given that the requirements of the government were pretty much, in my opinion, the requirements were at all costs, don't let anybody die because they didn't have a ventilator. | |
| And if that means making too many of them, I think that was the choice that we made. | |
| So the fact that we made too many and we have to give it away, I think you just have to say that's a home run because they started making them in the context of thinking they might actually need them. | |
| If we have too many, well, that's good news. | |
| So I'd give them an A-plus on ventilators. | |
| Actually very impressive. | |
| It also looks like we're not going to run out of anything else, as far as I can tell. | |
| So... That looks pretty good, too. | |
| Looks like we won't run out of anything. | |
| But I was always unhappy with not knowing it as it happened. | |
| Now, the testing facilities are the other big wildcard. | |
| And I felt that until today, we were not getting any information that was useful in terms of the public saying, oh, it looks like we'll get out of this in a month or a week or whatever. | |
| It seemed like we needed to know where we were on testing because that was the base of it all. | |
| But the task force did a great job today and they brought out some young guy, Brad, somebody who just nailed it. | |
| The whole time he was talking I kept thinking, where have you been hiding this guy? | |
| This guy was perfect. He seemed to have a complete command of where we were with test kits and supplies and stuff. | |
| And then the other folks, I don't remember all their names, but the generals and the admirals and stuff. | |
| And I thought they did a really good job of breaking it down, what's where. | |
| And it took a while to get the distinction that Sometimes they were talking about the test facility, and sometimes they were talking about the physical supplies that you need to put a sample in and send it to the lab. | |
| So it looks like we were in better shape. | |
| We're in good shape in terms of test facilities and machines, and they seem to be everywhere you would need them, all over the states. | |
| And we're in less good shape, or at least have been, on the supplies. | |
| The swabs and stuff. | |
| But it looks like, you know, if you believe the task force report, it looks like we're very, very quickly going to get a good handle on that. | |
| But the bottom line, which the president and the task force said, is that the states already have enough to do testing to get to phase one. | |
| And that seems like the minimum requirement. | |
| If you have enough to get to phase one, And that's what we're all shooting for. | |
| It's not perfect. You know, we'd all like to have way more tests. | |
| But it turns out, even if you had, I forget who said this, but it sounded smart, that even if you had way, way more tests, you would still be so far away from having enough tests to just test everybody that you really couldn't get there. | |
| And if you did test everybody, how often do you have to retest? | |
| You know, so somebody was pointing out that you really can't get so many tests that you just like nail it down because you've tested the crap out of it. | |
| That's sort of an impractical goal. | |
| I don't know if that's true, but somebody smart said that. | |
| But rather, you go for whatever's the weakest, you know, biggest leverage, the best leverage. | |
| And I guess I believe this. | |
| Is testing the people who are in the same environment with people who are infected. | |
| So first responders and nursing home people. | |
| Then somehow that's going to be the best targeted use of the tests. | |
| I hope that's enough. | |
| But I would say this was the best... | |
| I think the best task force... | |
| Report, and in my opinion, showed a great deal of competence. | |
| Now, my favorite part about it was when, I think it was CNN, the correspondent, asked the question of Mike Pence and said, hey, if you say that the states have all the testing that they need, why did the governor of Maryland have to go to South Korea to try to buy supplies? | |
| And Now, the first thing you need to know is that the supplies they were buying were the part that wasn't short supply. | |
| It was only the testing facilities that are quite generously everywhere and have lots of capacity. | |
| So the governor was talking about supplies that they got from South Korea, and so CNN asked that question, and Pence says, can you put up the Maryland map? | |
| And within seconds... | |
| There's this big visual aid of all the testing centers in Maryland. | |
| And if you weren't following along and you didn't know that the question was more about the supplies than it was the testing facilities, it looked like Pence just totally dunked on her. | |
| And then he sort of changed the subject and she didn't follow up. | |
| I don't know if she didn't understand that he wasn't really answering her question directly. | |
| But in any event, It looks like even Maryland got some supplies, so I think everybody's okay. | |
| So there's that. | |
| But I guess I was impressed because you don't see somebody using a PowerPoint slide deck that effectively, where somebody asks a question and you just slap this map up there and you're like, next question, even though it didn't really answer a question. | |
| All right. What's up with oil prices, huh? | |
| What is up with oil prices? | |
| I don't even know how to understand oil prices. | |
| Obviously it's very temporary because almost immediately the supply will change. | |
| So I would assume it'll drift back up. | |
| But, man, what are the odds that you're in the airline business And fuel goes to so cheap that it would be the best time to be in the airline business, except, oops, can't be in the airline business either. | |
| So here's a... | |
| I don't want to ask that question. | |
| Oh, so Ken Burns, PBS is releasing a whole bunch of Ken Burns films for teachers and students to... | |
| To use for the online history courses. | |
| Which is like the best idea ever. | |
| Because this is really where online education is going. | |
| It's going to be like a Hollywood production. | |
| So that when you're watching it at home, it's way better than being in a class. | |
| And listening to a boring teacher. | |
| And listening or watching the Ken Burns history movies are really good. | |
| I mean, that's... That's a pretty solid way to teach history, if you ask me. | |
| So I think you're going to see free college. | |
| There will be free college, but it will be online college. | |
| All right, so here's a question for you. | |
| I know just enough about economics to be confused about stuff. | |
| Why is everybody saying Kim Jong-un... | |
| Has some issues. Is there some news about Kim Jong-un that I'm missing? | |
| Because I just looked at the news before I turned it on. | |
| I didn't see anything about that. Alright, so here's the question. | |
| If the 20% of the people who are unemployed, in rough terms, are probably, or for the most part, they're the people at the lower end of the economic spectrum. | |
| And there's still a lot of cubicle dwellers and millionaires Oh, wow, people are reporting that Kim Jong-un is actually... | |
| So that's really a thing. | |
| Unless this is the greatest prank ever because you're all saying the same thing. | |
| All right, let me check it in real time. | |
| I literally just... | |
| Oh, whoa. | |
| Grave danger after surgery. | |
| What do we know about that? | |
| You all know more than I do about that. | |
| So there was a speculation because he wasn't in public, and it's tightly controlled, so we don't know. | |
| So it's basically rumors. | |
| Which doesn't mean it's not true, but how does anybody know? | |
| All right, so he had a cane, he had a cyst removed from his ankles, and somebody says it's easy to be wrong on this one said. | |
| Yeah. So some experts said it's easy to be wrong on this one. | |
| So I wouldn't bet on Kim Jong-un being brain dead. | |
| But we'll see. | |
| We'll see. Anyway, here's the thought experiment. | |
| If the people who mostly are unemployed were also the ones who unfortunately were the lowest end of the economic system... | |
| How much money do we still have in the system should we get back to work in a month or so? | |
| How much money would we still have to start stimulating demand? | |
| So if you assume that there was 20% unemployment, so let's just say that 20% of the public really is just flat broke. | |
| And they'd be lucky to get back on their feet and just sort of break even. | |
| But they're not going to be generating any kind of demand by buying a lot of extra stuff. | |
| So the people who lost... | |
| Here's where I'm going with this. The people who lost their jobs, while it's a big, scary, horrible number and a tragedy by any description, it also is not a large part of the total amount of money in the country that drives demand. | |
| Is it? So this is sort of a statement slash question because I'm a little uncertain if I'm missing something big. | |
| But, you know, we talk endlessly about the top 1% owning most of the wealth. | |
| And let's say the top 20% owns 80% of the wealth. | |
| I don't know. What are the exact numbers? | |
| Top 30%. Pick a number. | |
| The point will be the same. | |
| And the point is this. | |
| At the top, the people who had all the wealth, even if their wealth is compressed by a third, I think that roughly is what will happen to me. | |
| So I think my net worth is probably down by a third. | |
| But probably not enough to radically change my normal consumer level. | |
| I'm going to get as many haircuts and probably go out to dinner the same amount. | |
| So the point is, if the people at the top, even though they don't, They had a great contraction in their wealth, just like everybody else. | |
| They still have plenty left. | |
| So as soon as they can buy things, do they not have a lot of money to go buy things? | |
| If it's true that the people at the top always had all the money anyway. | |
| So here's the question. | |
| When we assume that the economy might turn into a depression, You could break that down to specific problems like credit and being able to eat, right? | |
| I mean, the thing that will be broken when we get back, I don't think it will be just demand. | |
| Because I think demand might come back faster than you think because the people with money still have some. | |
| At least they have enough to drive demand, I would think. | |
| But the big problem is that so many people are going to be behind in bills and mispayments. | |
| But I think we can solve that. | |
| It seems to me that we would be able to Fairly cleverly solve the credit problem, either by making exceptions or saying, hey, everybody who went through this, just push all of your bills ahead three months, and if that causes some company to go bankrupt, we'll backstop them for a while. | |
| There's probably some clever ways we can work through it. | |
| But I am expecting that we might come out of it way better. | |
| Way better than the most optimistic predictions. | |
| And I think it could be because of that. | |
| Because nothing's broken. | |
| Now here's the other thing that I think could not be modeled. | |
| So when the prediction models are figuring out how bad things are going to be, here's something that can't be modeled. | |
| The effectiveness of our communications in 2020. | |
| In 2020, anybody who knows anything... | |
| That's important to help on the pandemic. | |
| If it's known anywhere, it's pretty much immediately known everywhere because good ideas spread pretty quickly. | |
| And so we have a, because of our good communication, we have a society that is super self-healing. | |
| So you could take almost anything and throw it into this big ball of civilization, and it could break just... | |
| Crazy. Just break stuff. | |
| Break your whole economy. | |
| Destroy buildings and everything. | |
| But as long as the humans still could communicate, our ability to use that communication to quickly adapt and make plans and move resources and stuff is somewhat breathtaking. | |
| So I think our recovery doesn't account for How well we communicate, and that it creates almost a super being with self-healing powers, and how much money there's still left, and the people who will drive demand like they probably usually do, because the people who didn't have money weren't driving a lot of demand. | |
| All right. I tweeted an article by an MD, Peter Attia, A-T-T-I-A, if you want to look for him. | |
| He's PeterAttiaMD.com. | |
| It was a really good article and I'll try to capture the gist of it. | |
| He was trying to figure out if there's some way we could tell now or ever whether what we experienced was that the models were all wrong Or that we were super effective in mitigating? | |
| Like, why is it that the models were so wrong? | |
| Because we were so good, or the models were so wrong? | |
| Or is it a little bit of both? | |
| And if so, which is the dominant part? | |
| Real important to know that, right? | |
| I mean, we really, really want to know that. | |
| And he suggests that we can actually know that someday. | |
| Because when we can test enough, and we're not there yet, but I think we'll reasonably get there, Maybe, you know, two months or something. | |
| We should be able to figure out how many asymptomatic people there are. | |
| So once you have a good... | |
| So, wow, Kim Jong-un is brain dead according to NBC. All right, well, I'll check that out as soon as this is over. | |
| I don't think anybody knows what that means, right? | |
| But I wouldn't rule out coronavirus... | |
| I wouldn't rule that out. Well, I wonder who's in charge. | |
| This could be really interesting. | |
| All right. Not in a good way. | |
| I don't think it'll be war, but it's going to be interesting times. | |
| Anyway, Peter Atiyah says that we will actually be able to test, and we will actually have an answer. | |
| So isn't that interesting? | |
| Somebody says, Katie Turr deleted her tweet. | |
| Does that mean we're not sure? | |
| CNN is... I'm looking at your comments. | |
| CNN is reporting Kim Jong-un is in critical. | |
| All right. So I guess the thing we can know for sure is we don't know, right? | |
| Sister... A botched medical procedure, you say? | |
| A botched... | |
| I wonder if it was botched. | |
| How botched was it? | |
| Anyway, so we will someday know the answer whether we overreacted because of the models or we were just really super effective. | |
| Well, now I just want to go look into that because that looks like that's going to be the big story. | |
| So we're up to 41,000 deaths in the United States from the coronavirus. | |
| The model had been lowered to 60,000. | |
| I don't see how we're going to stop at 60. | |
| Do you believe that we're... | |
| So we have 41,000 and the model was lowered down to 60. | |
| Do you think we're going to go from 41,000 already and that by the end of the year we're still going to be below 60? | |
| Or even at 60? | |
| Does that seem reasonable to you? | |
| Now I get... | |
| That you're going to level off and stuff. | |
| But aren't we just sort of pushing those deaths into the future? | |
| I don't really get how we would expect. | |
| I'm no expert virology modeler. | |
| I'm no modeler. | |
| But it seems to be almost impossible that we wouldn't shoot past that 60,000 number Because we'll be going back to work, and of course there'll be flare-ups. | |
| I mean, I think we're actually going to hit 100, right, at our current rate. | |
| I would think that going back to work would put you over 100,000 easily. | |
| I would think. That would still make the models wrong, I think, but I think that's where it's going. | |
| All right. I said if 100,000 people die, Trump loses re-election. | |
| Well... Whenever I make a prediction about the election, you should always hear a voice in your head that says, unless something changes, and then the second voice says right after that, and something will change because it always does. | |
| So any predictions are sort of absurd because too much is going to change between now and then. | |
| But... I believe that because people would feel so happy if it were under 100,000, that that would pretty much guarantee election. | |
| If it's over 100,000, it's going to kind of look like Trump and the governors were right to treat this as a serious problem. | |
| So there are lots of ways that Trump can win in this. | |
| Because if it turns out to kill more people than, I hate to put that in political terms, but if it turns out to be worse than the people who were not worried thought, they're going to say, oh, I guess Trump was right all along. | |
| It was pretty bad. So I think the worse it is, up to a point, actually helps him. | |
| Let me put numbers on this. | |
| If I had to say, let's say it capped at a 150,000 just for a conversation. | |
| That's not a prediction. | |
| But let's say at the end of the year or by election day there were 150,000 dead. | |
| One of the things that that would tell you is that it was just as bad as you thought because we wouldn't even be done. | |
| That would tell you that by the end of the year maybe it's at 200 or something. | |
| So I think Trump would actually look better Even if death count is higher, up to a point. | |
| Because then people would say, okay, he was being pretty tough on this. | |
| Yeah, he seemed a little too optimistic at first, but now we know that it wasn't a hoax. | |
| Now, what if it goes the other way? | |
| What if this $41,000, just like we're so good at it, it just goes and stops below $60,000? | |
| We hope it does. | |
| What if it does? Will people say, yay, President Trump, you really nailed it? | |
| You did the best that you could possibly do? | |
| Probably not. | |
| Because even if we've got these other tests to find out did the mitigation work or were the models wrong or was it both, even with that, If there's a small number who are dead, people are going to say it was all a hoax and you closed the economy for nothing, even though that doesn't make sense, because we don't know what would have happened if we hadn't done it. | |
| It could go either way. All right, I think we can go check on Kim Jong-un. | |
| I would... I would... | |
| You know, I'll tell you... | |
| Somebody's asking me if I'm stoned. | |
| No, not at the moment, as a matter of fact. | |
| I'm tired, but I'm not stoned. | |
| I've got a feeling Joe Biden might have an announcement this week. | |
| I would say every day that goes by that you don't see him in public makes it more of a certainty that What we don't know is if there's been any decision about who would replace him or even how they would handle that. | |
| I mean, you know, there was a report that Biden was starting to pick his cabinet picks. | |
| No, not his cabinet. There was a report that Biden was trying to pick his transition team for when he won. | |
| And I thought to myself, I don't think that's happening. | |
| I don't think Joe Biden is picking a transition team for when he wins. | |
| I don't think that's happening. | |
| Maybe, but I don't think so. | |
| All right, well, I will see you in the morning. |
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