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May 21, 2020 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
36:47
Episode 987 Scott Adams: Queen of Dragons McEnany, Manufactured News, Trump's Performance, Hydroxychloroquine, Flynn
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Hey everybody, come on in.
It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams without the coffee with a twist.
This time it's Scott Adams without the coffee with the coffee.
Didn't see that coming, did you?
No, you gotta be quick.
Sorry I jumped the gun on the simultaneous sip, but we'll catch you in the morning.
Well, we've got all kinds of good stuff happening.
From now on, I determine that we will only be having good news.
Sure, you could have some bad news between now and Election Day.
But mostly, let's have good news.
And let's talk about all the good news.
We'll talk about that in a moment.
But we're going to work through some of the best stories.
Number one, there's a prediction outfit.
It must be in England.
I don't know where they are, but they're called Oxford Economics.
And they have run a model.
Yes, a prediction model.
Now, I don't have to tell you that prediction models are pretty darn accurate, aren't they?
I guess we've learned that.
So they've got a prediction model that says Joe Biden is going to beat Trump in the election by, quote, historic margins.
And it's all owing to the fact that their model shows that when the economy is bad, and obviously it's taken a hit, that's bad for the incumbent, and so their model spits out an historic win by Biden.
This might raise some questions in your mind.
You might say to yourself, a model, you say.
Is it an elegant and rational model built by geniuses with all the right intentions?
Could be. It could be.
Or is it possible that this model has a few small flaws?
One flaw would be, I don't know which field you input that the candidate's brain has turned to sawdust.
Is that a box you check before you run the model?
So the brain of the challenger, still functional, excellent, rotting into sawdust while he decomposes in his basement.
I'll bet that's not even an option on the model.
I mean, I'm guessing.
Likewise, I wonder if their model that shows economic hardships takes into account the rarest of situations where you're pretty sure it's temporary and it wasn't anybody's fault.
Do you think that any historical model of what people thought about the economy under normal times and what they thought about the leadership under normal times, do you think any of that's going to apply to this situation?
I don't even think Democrats really think Trump is to blame for the bad economy.
Are they that dumb?
I'd like to think Democrats are not that dumb, right?
They can see with their own eyes and stuff that the entire world just got crushed about equally.
So you could quibble about this or that.
The president should have done more with testing or whatever.
But the plain fact is, all the countries are doing about the same.
It doesn't matter.
It seems to not matter what you do.
All right. So, that was a very valuable prediction model there.
I don't know how long it'll be before people just laugh when they hear there's a prediction model.
You know, if somebody says, I got a model and it's predicting, you should just stop them.
Stop. Stop.
Don't finish the sentence.
You're just embarrassing yourself.
Because as soon as you said, I have a prediction model, I didn't really need to hear the end of the sentence because we've been down that road a little bit.
Many of you asked me to look into Peter Schiff's opinion about all the printing of money and borrowing and such.
Because I made the provocative statement That there don't seem to be any economists who are saying it's a bad idea just to print yourself a few trillion dollars.
And in fact, I can't think of any reason you shouldn't.
So I'm not even criticizing.
I'm saying, I feel like there should be a problem with this.
Right? Don't you pay for it later?
Somehow? Because...
Prices? Inflation?
Debt? Something?
Something? How do you just manufacture trillions of dollars and then go about your day and say, well, that worked out pretty well.
I'm glad there was no bounce back from that.
So Peter Schiff seems to be maybe the most prominent voice arguing that we're all doomed by doing exactly this.
Manufacturing money out of nothing.
Creating debt, etc.
But you click on his profile, and one of his URLs is something about gold.
So he's a gold guy.
And he's got, I think, a book.
So his entire brand is basically dedicated to his prediction that we're doomed.
So he's betting on his prediction, essentially, because presumably he has hedged himself with gold and he'll be the one who's right if it happens.
Now, suppose it doesn't happen.
Suppose we don't get that.
Well, Peter Schiff gets to live his good life.
He probably has a good income from whatever he's done before, and he gets to enjoy the good economy with everybody else, if it goes that way.
But what if he's right?
Well, then he becomes one of the few people who wins if he's set himself upright to win when the market goes down.
And I imagine he's betting on his own prediction, right?
So, here's the thing.
And I'll say this a million times until it's so ingrained in you that I don't have to say it every time.
Which is, people can be credible and still wrong, and they can be not credible at all But they can still get lucky.
They can still be right.
Or they can just be right.
You just didn't know if they were right.
So when I talk about credibility, that's different from knowing if somebody is right or wrong, because that's unknowable.
Nobody knows the future.
Peter Schiff, I think you should view him as not credible.
Number one, obviously, If lots of people were saying what he was saying, then that would add to his credibility.
So look for that. Look for other people to be saying exactly what he's saying, except look for people who don't have any kind of gain.
It's not their brand.
It's not their reputation.
They don't have a book. They're not invested in gold in a big way.
Something like that. So if other people joined him in the opinion, that would bolster his credibility.
But again, we don't know if he's right.
At the moment, I would say that the way he's positioned himself publicly, so this is not based on any insight into his mind, you know, I don't know what he's thinking or anything like that, but based on how he's positioned himself, he should not be deemed as credible on this exact question, because he's got too much of a bet on it.
All right? Which doesn't mean he's wrong.
It just means you shouldn't bet on him based on reputation.
So the White House Press Secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, had another good day.
She makes highlight clips every day, it seems like.
Today was especially good because, of course, she was ready for the question, you know, what about the president and hydroxychloroquine?
Now, of course, the whole point of the question is to create news out of nothing.
Because the whole hydroxychloroquine story is nothing.
It literally is nothing.
It's one patient talked to his doctor and got different advice than maybe you would have, but it's pretty reasonable.
That's it. That's the whole story.
Somebody talked to his doctor, different advice than maybe you would have gotten, but it's also a different situation.
That's it. That's the whole story.
So they have to try to Manufacture that into something.
So if they can get the White House spokesperson to misspeak, to say something that's a little ambiguous, you can craft that into something.
Make a little news out of that.
But it turns out that Kayleigh McEnany was not having any of that.
So she started out with a just real solid answer that this drug has been used for other things and tested for years.
Doctors have been prescribing it, you know, well-known safety profile.
Good, solid answer.
And then, you know, and then she said that you should only be done with your doctor.
And that was really good because, you know, she was emphasizing that the president did it in consultation with a doctor.
That's the only way to do it.
You know, don't be running out and trying to score your own, you know, aftermarket advice.
Drugs or anything like that.
That's me saying that, not her.
But very responsible, solid, hit the important notes without too much, you know, extra detail.
And I thought she was done.
And I don't know if I'm remembering this the way I want to remember it, but, you know, she's got this thing where she's got her notebook.
And when she turns the page, you know you're in trouble.
She looks down and is like...
And then she gets that little smile.
And then you know you're in trouble.
I don't know if she did it this time.
I'd have to play it back. But I hope she did.
Like, I hope it becomes a trademark.
Like, I want to know that just before she pounces, she always looks up at the person who asked the question.
And then without looking down at the page, just goes...
Because she already knows what page it's on.
See, it's better if she already knows what page it's on so she doesn't have to look down.
It's just... And then...
So anyway, the second part of the question that she unloads on, she goes, just before I came in here, I just found out that Chris Cuomo had taken the dangerous version, the predecessor of hydroxychloroquine called quinine, Which is so dangerous it's not even allowed, I guess.
It's like banned substances or something.
So it's like three generations more dangerous than hydroxychloroquine, so much so that because hydroxychloroquine exists, quinine is not even allowed.
Now, I don't know if that's true.
I'd need a little bit more confirmation that we actually know that Chris Cuomo took quinine.
How would we even know that, right?
But does it matter?
Okay, it doesn't matter. Because the way she delivered it was just perfect.
She just said, I just found out that Chris Cuomo was doing the dangerous version of that.
And you're just looking at the screen and you're just saying, oh, really?
That's just perfect.
That's just perfect.
Quinine is in tonic water.
So I think it's fair to say we may not know the whole story.
But in terms of a White House spokesperson response to that question, not bad.
I give that an A+. So have you done any thinking about what's going to replace the handshake?
I spend way too much time thinking about this because we've sort of evolved socially that the handshake is that exclamation, it's the punctuation at the end of a meeting.
It's like, yeah, good to see you.
Have a good day. So you know you're done.
We really do need something to replace it.
I don't think we can just take out the handshake and just go about our life because everything will be awkward.
You need something that says, Alright, you and I have both agreed that this is now the conclusion of our meeting.
So shake hands and walk away, but it's not a handshake.
I know you're going to say fist bumps and elbow hits and stuff like that, but I feel like we can do better.
Nah, not the high five, because you don't want the touching.
So how about the salute?
How about a bow?
Or, you know, you get the little prayer hands, you know, like, ah, you know, the belly bump, the head nod, the kiss.
The kiss would make it worse.
Somebody says they'll be doing the slight bow, the two-finger salute wave.
Yeah, the two-finger salute wave.
That's funny. A lot of people saying bowing and the head nod.
I don't know. All of those things feel not final enough.
Like a handshake is physical.
So it's like... Like you know that you've ended a meeting when you shake hands.
Alright, well work on that and get back to me.
What is up with Howard Stern?
I guess he's continuing to say that he hates Trump supporters.
Not just Trump, but he hates Trump supporters.
And, you know, obviously Howard Stern is smart enough to know what is just good for publicity and what is not and what is real and what is not.
So I can't tell if he's just doing this to be provocative.
Can you tell? Now, there might be some truth to it in the sense that there are a certain segment of Trump supporters that he actually doesn't like.
I mean, that wouldn't be unusual.
But... I feel like he's just being provocative, so we shouldn't pay it too much heed.
So let me give you an example of what good thinking looks like, and then I'll give you an example of what bad thinking looks like.
The good thinking comes from Nate Silver, who once again...
His Twitter feed is like solid gold.
If you're not following Nate Silver, and if you have maybe some political thing because he thought Hillary was going to win the election or something, you should release on all that stuff.
If you've got any bias against him for politics, you really ought to follow him.
Because it's just the best written tweets with the most useful content about how to understand your world.
So I had another one today.
He says, in general, critiques of governmental responses to coronavirus don't do enough to account for the fact that there are a lot of unknowns surrounding the virus, and optimal policy is likely to be different when there are a lot of unknowns.
Do you know anybody else who said that?
I did. So some version of that.
But then he goes on. He goes, that is, you probably want a policy that is nimble.
You need to collect data quickly and be ready to adapt to it.
Multifaceted. There inevitably has to be some element of trial and error as you learn about what works and what doesn't.
Now, you may recognize this as being very similar, sort of like a shadow cousin of things I've been saying.
And my version of this goes like this.
That I agree in advance not to blame anybody for getting this wrong, so long as they're quickly adapting to mistakes.
So it's a version of what he's saying, which is, this is not like a known problem, where if it were a known problem, you'd say, oh, did they use the known solution?
And then you could say yes or no, and then you'd know if somebody did a good job.
But with an unknown kind of a problem with lots of variables, and there's more we don't know than we do, as Nate suggests, and as I have a number of times, the best you can do is do something.
That's it. The best you can do is to do something.
And you hope that you've got enough people doing enough different things, and you're watching each other, that if somebody gets lucky and does the right thing, not because they were smart, but because people were just doing different things.
They didn't know what to do. And then you quickly adapt and say, oh, oh, masks.
That looks like it works.
Oh, testing. Let's test the way they're testing.
So I will extend this to make good on a promise I made you two months ago, maybe?
And the promise was this, that I was going to hold blameless any of the leaders who made wrong decisions.
Because it just wasn't a situation in which making a right decision was even an option except by luck.
A few cases, maybe not.
And I'm going to prove that by telling you that I don't think that I'm going to...
This is my personal view, right?
You will get to make up your own mind.
My personal view is I'm not going to hold Andrew Cuomo, governor of New York, responsible, just my opinion.
This is just personal.
You can disagree.
I'm not going to fight you on it.
Just my personal view, just philosophically, morally, and ethically, we're asking these leaders to make suicide political decisions on our behalf.
That's what we're asking them to do, right?
So, do I think that every decision that Governor Cuomo made In hindsight, was the right one.
No, that's not how it works.
We don't get to do that.
Hindsight's not fair. They're all making decisions.
They're doing their best. They're making suicide political decisions.
For you! Right?
For you! There's nothing in it for these guys.
These are really dangerous waters they're in.
And they jumped right in.
No governor said I quit.
Which governor walked away?
None. None.
Fifty governors went right toward the fire.
So you've got to give them a little bit of ethical flexibility, from your own perspective, meaning that sometimes they're going to make the wrong decisions.
And I just don't think under the crisis situation, where there was so much guessing, That you should judge them for anything except the way they corrected.
That's it. So I'm going to hold Andrew Cuomo as blameless as I will hold all of the other leaders, including the president, including all the other governors, because nobody knew the right thing to do.
Period. That's it.
Alright, so Nate Silver represents what a smart person sounds like when they talk about judging the performance of the leaders.
Let's talk about somebody else's view on the same topic.
This is somebody named S.E. Kupp over at CNN. And let me read again Nate's sentence so that you have the contrast.
So I'll reread Nate's smart sentence and then S.E. Kupp's statement.
So Nate said, In general, critiques of governmental responses to coronavirus don't do enough to account for the fact that there are lots of unknowns surrounding the virus.
And optimal policies like to be different.
Well, here's what S.E. Cup says.
The president has, by any metric, bungled the coronavirus response.
By any metric, he's bungled it?
Any metric? So if I had a metric to suggest, S.E. Cup says, doesn't even matter what it is, any metric, it's going to be a bungle.
So let's run through a few, okay?
Let's run through a few metrics.
How did the President of the United States do compared to the leaders of other countries?
Don't know. Doesn't look that different to me.
Because we don't know what's different about the United States, etc.
So if you were to use the metric of comparing him to other leaders, is he better or worse?
Don't know. So there's a metric that you would not say he's doing unambiguously Worse, has he, by any metric, bungled?
Well, if he has bungled, he's bungled about the same as every leader on Earth, because they're sort of all the same.
How about the economy?
Well, I would say that the stock market is the indicator that tells you the most about where you're going.
You know, we know where we are, and everybody's in bad shape where we are.
But the stock market is a forward indicator.
What does the stock market say about President Trump?
The stock market says President Trump is going to beat this thing all the way back to a good economy.
That's what it says.
It's priced for recovery.
So, if you were to divide the situation into two parts, there's the economic part and all that that implies, including life and death, and then there's more purely medical part about, you know, do we have enough ventilators and real medical stuff.
On the economic part, I would say the metric that captures the most is the stock market.
Now that doesn't mean everybody's in the stock market.
I'm not saying everybody benefits when the stock market goes up.
I'm just saying as a metric for measuring what the smartest people who have money think is going to happen with the economy, They're giving it an A, right?
I mean, this market is priced for near perfection.
That's sort of finance talk, meaning that it's an expensive market for how much the earnings are at the moment.
So you're really expecting something really good to happen in the next year, or else this stock market price doesn't make any sense.
So, half of all the things you could care about The economy, in all that implies, is strong.
I would say that metric is about as strong as it could possibly be, given the circumstance.
Let's see, other metrics.
How about number of ventilators?
Pass-fail. The number of ventilators is a pass-fail.
You either have enough, or you don't, and you fail.
That's a metric. The president got him enough.
On the PPE, individual places had trouble, but in general we got enough.
So on the PPE, we got enough.
How about people starving to death?
Has anybody starved to death in the United States?
None, right?
Zero. Now that probably has more to do with the states, but the federal government backstops the states.
Pass-fail.
Zero people starved to death.
That's a pass. During a crisis this bad, that's a pretty big deal.
How about flattening the curve?
Did the United States flatten the curve?
It looks like we did.
I don't know what numbers SC Cup is looking at.
We probably agree on testing not being enough, and the President is sort of overselling where we were on testing.
He sort of oversells everything, so I discounted that as being necessarily an important anything, because he's always going to oversell everything.
But you know that, so it doesn't even seem dishonest, because he'll tell you, I'm going to oversell everything.
I mean, if he asked him, he'd tell you directly, yeah, I'm overselling that.
That's what I do. I think, or something like that.
Now, I saw a piece from Carlos Quintanilla, if I remember his name right.
And I didn't see a link to it, so I need a fact check on this.
But apparently J.P. Morgan has, quote,"...a devastating piece arguing that infection rates have declined, not increased, in states where lockdowns have ended." Even when they allow for the fact that there's a time lag, apparently even allowing for that, things are going opposite of what you would expect.
Now, I'm not so sure this is true, but it's provocative.
It also reminds us that every time we think we can count something accurately, we can't count anything accurately.
So... Those of you who are getting happy in the comments, I can see that you're celebrating the news.
I don't know that this is true.
I would be a little suspicious of this because it doesn't quite match with my expectations for what that's worth.
Alright, here's a fun little fact.
Now keep in mind that in the age of the coronavirus, literally every story you hear from every source lacks credibility.
Can we agree on that?
There's no such thing as a study that you can trust, a report you can trust, an anecdotal story you can trust.
There's nothing you can trust.
So in the spirit of knowing there's absolutely no story you can trust, let me tell you the story.
Apparently over in India, 10,000 Mumbai policemen were offered hydroxychloroquine to take prophylactyl Of the 10,000, about 4,500 of them did a good job of taking it.
And the rest of them refused.
So they had 4,500 police officers, and many of them were apparently around enough coronavirus that there were, in fact, infections.
And here's the result. Of the group that took the hydroxychloroquine, there were zero deaths.
Zero. On the group that decided not to take the hydroxychloroquine, nine deaths.
And those who got the virus in the group that had the hydroxychloroquine had, quote, mild attacks.
Now, this is, of course, an anecdotal report and also not necessarily a source that you should say is 100% credible.
Somebody's asking about zinc and it was not mentioned.
So I don't know if the fact that it's not mentioned means they didn't use it.
So that's an open question.
But I wouldn't expect good results without it.
And again, even that's not credible.
So we don't know if the zinc really makes a difference.
I know I ordered some.
I know I got my zinc supplements coming in the mail.
But that doesn't mean it works.
So here's what I love about this.
I don't know that this is true, and if it is true, it's not a scientific study.
I suppose you could say still the odds of the hydroxychloroquine not making a difference.
If all they did is count the numbers right, if all they did was have a good idea who actually took the hydroxychloroquine and they also counted the number of infections and deaths correctly, probably statistically, It's pretty darn unlikely that all of the deaths would be in one group.
Nine of them? Nine to zero?
Can somebody do the odds on that?
Here, do the odds on this.
There's somebody here who's good at it.
So you had two groups.
One of them is 4,500 people, and they had zero deaths.
And that was the group that took the hydroxychloroquine.
The other group was 5,500, so a larger group, and they had nine deaths.
So in the comments, let's see how fast you can do the statistics on that.
What are the odds that that would just, if it's true?
You know, who knows if it even happened.
But what would be the odds of it coming out nine to zero, just randomly?
If anybody can do that, I'll be watching the comments.
Here's a comment that came in to me from Timothy Piper.
It's a really good observation and it's going to make you wonder why you didn't already see it on TV. Somebody says.01.
Are you sure about that?
Here's the observation.
The reason that Flynn was tagged as maybe working with Russia too much is that he had too much communication With Kislyak.
Somebody else is saying 17%.
It looks like most of you are bad at statistics, or...
I can't tell if you're just guessing.
Your numbers are all over the place.
Somebody says 1 in 20.
It's not 1 in 20.
I don't know what it is, but it's definitely a lot more than 1 in 20, or a lot less than that.
Alright, looks like nobody here can do statistics, so we'll put that on hold.
So here was the idea.
If Flynn was talking to Kislyak more than normal, does that mean he's a Russian spy?
Now, of course, that was the suspicion that Comey allegedly had.
Allegedly, he was concerned that there was too much talking with the Russians.
But what Tim Piper pointed out is that this was an unusual administration.
Normally, an administration incoming is a bunch of people who've been around forever, and the Russians would know them.
The Russians work in Washington, D.C. quite a bit.
So anybody who's a standard politician on either party, they've been around a while, well, the Russians already know them.
But suppose the Trump administration comes in, and they basically know one guy, Flynn.
But they need to get up to speed But they only know one guy.
That's it. They just know the one guy.
Because all the Trump people are just like, you know, came from Mars, so the Russians didn't already know him.
So, would it surprise you, if the Russians being, of course, concerned about, you know, relationships and all the different dealings with the United States, would it surprise you, since they only knew one guy, that they might talk to him a lot?
You know, as soon as you hear that, you say to yourself, well, that makes sense.
Yeah, the Trump administration didn't have, you know, they just didn't have much knowledge about them.
So if they could find one guy who'd take a phone call, he'd probably get a lot of calls.
Isn't that the most routine, obvious explanation for what probably happened?
I mean, we weren't there, but that's the most likely explanation, is that they just didn't know a lot of people, so they called them a lot.
Alright. What about Manafort?
What about him? I see you're all still trying to work out the math on that.
I guess that was harder than I thought it was.
I don't know why you're asking about Manafort, because that's just sort of a different situation.
Christian.
Did you hear that Michael Cohen will be serving the rest of his time at home?
So basically, Michael Cohen gets convicted and sentenced to jail, but because of the coronavirus, his jail sentence turned into exactly the same jail sentence that you and I have, which is, you've got to stay home.
That's it. So basically, I'm being penalized the same as Michael Cohen.
Somebody says, you hypnotize us every day.
It's crazy. It is crazy.
It's totally crazy. Somebody says, I don't think you framed the math question well.
Well, I wasn't framing it.
I was just telling you the only numbers I have.
Two groups of people.
Nine died. None died in the other.
other.
That's all I know.
So if that's enough to work with it, go nuts.
All right.
So I think it's going to be all good news from now on.
You're going to hear about therapies and therapeutics, and you're going to hear about curves getting bent, you're going to hear about people going back to work, and you're going to be hearing a lot of good stuff.
And I told you that the home prices where I live didn't go down at all.
So the real estate prices where I live, no change.
The houses are selling above asking price.
Still, as of this week, they're selling above asking price.
Amazing. And apparently it's just easier for the real estate agents because they don't have to show houses now.
They can just say, look at this video, because I'm not going to show it to you until you're really serious.
So the real estate brokers are working less and making more money, I think.
At least in some cases.
Then you're also seeing, I think California said it might do something a little faster.
There's that. And you heard about the cruise ships are already being overbooked.
So, of all things, if you were going to pick one indicator that made you feel optimistic, this is the one.
Cruise ships for 2021 Are overbooked.
Cruise ships. Cruise ships are overbooked.
Anybody who's betting against this economy coming back quickly, I think you're really at a risky bet.
Because people are ready to rumble.
And look at the stock market.
The stock market is basically...
I mean, it's close enough to where it was when things were good that I think people will act like they still have money.
They do, as long as the stock market stays up.
You have to disprove the null hypothesis.
Well, that seems like a general statement.
But I'll take that advice.
I have to do that.
Alright, that's all I got for now.
And, yeah, most of the cruise ship stuff is rebooking.
People who didn't want to, I don't know, give away their ticket forever or something.
But still. But still.
Alright, that's all for now, and I will talk to you in the morning.
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