On today's episode of Coffee with Scott Adams, Scott talks about a kidnapping plot against the governor of Michigan, why the Nobel Peace Prize should be given to the World Food Program, and why the Supreme Court should have originalists on the committee.
00:04:07.140And the reporting says that the people involved in the kidnapping were Antifa and right-wingers.
00:04:16.220What are the odds that Antifa and right-wingers were working together on a plot?
00:04:22.860I'm going to go out on a limb and say the odds of that actually being true, that Antifa and right-wingers were working together, the odds of that being true are approximately zero.
00:04:37.840If it is true, that should be a little tap on the shoulder if you're a governor.
00:04:45.360If you're the governor, if you're the governor and you find that Antifa and the right-wingers have decided to get together and kidnap you, maybe the problem's on your side.
00:04:55.460Because how bad a job could you do that you could make Antifa and right-wingers want to kidnap you?
00:06:21.780Because if any administration packs the court, one of two things will happen.
00:06:26.980Either they will control the government forever, because everything that they try to get away with, the court will back them up, because they packed the court.
00:06:35.840So it could be the end of the republic.
00:06:37.760I would say that's at least a 30% chance if you pack the court.
00:06:42.140And by the way, the Trump campaign should put some odds on this, because if you just say court packing ruins the republic or doesn't, if you make it binary, it's definitely going to ruin the republic, or it's definitely not.
00:07:00.680Well, it's more likely not, because we're actually pretty good at adjusting to just about anything.
00:07:07.280But I'd say there's a solid 30% chance it would destroy the entire country.
00:07:14.600So one way to look at it is, you don't know what's going to happen, but there's a pretty healthy chance that that one act of government would destroy the entire republic.
00:07:28.420And I think that you could make that case pretty convincingly.
00:07:31.740And I don't think the Trump administration has made that case, or the campaign has not made that case.
00:07:45.840Somebody probably needs to make whatever is the simple picture of what happens if you pack the court.
00:07:53.160And if you see it in a picture, and maybe it's a meme or something, that might help, because I feel as if you took a poll of the citizens of the United States and said,
00:08:06.860how important do you think this court packing is?
00:08:10.040On a scale of 1 to 10, where does that live in terms of importance?
00:08:14.560Well, I think people would only answer the question based on whether they wanted Democrats or Republicans to have control.
00:08:23.320I don't think they would answer the question in terms of it being good or bad for the country in the long run.
00:08:30.120And that's because they're not educated to think of it in terms of risk management.
00:08:34.880So if you turn that into a risk management question, and you put a solid 30% odds that it will ruin the entire country,
00:08:42.240and I feel like that's conservative, there's at least a 30% chance that packing the court would be the end of democracy in this country,
00:10:52.420I think he's, you know, he's approaching national treasure, you know, status as being a, you know, an unusually valuable citizen of the country.
00:17:31.600So all the smart people tell us, and they're probably right about this, that how the country thinks about the coronavirus leadership in this country will determine the election and determine the fate of the United States.
00:17:45.800So you would all agree on that, right, that it's probably true that how people think of the coronavirus leadership will determine the fate of the United States, because it will determine the presidency and maybe Congress, too.
00:18:02.180Well, if the data is wrong in a meaningful way, not in a slight way, but in a meaningful way, we would be making the most important decision in the history of the United States, or at least in recent years in the history of the United States, and we would be using the wrong data to do it.
00:19:54.800It's just sort of a skill, an instinct, an intuition you develop where you can just look at stuff and you can pick out the air.
00:20:02.140Well, I did that job for a number of years after having that experience.
00:20:07.740And I started to develop that same skill to the point where it's a running thing that I talk about with Christina all the time, where she'll ask me to estimate the cost of something that I don't know anything about.
00:20:22.860And I can estimate it with weird accuracy.
00:20:26.860So she'll say something like, I'll just make this one up.
00:20:29.900How much would it cost to send a camel to Mars?
00:20:34.200Which I'm guessing nobody's ever estimated that cost.
00:20:37.400And I'll sit there and I'll think, ah, camel.
00:20:40.520Camel to Mars, that's about, well, if you start from scratch and you don't use the assets of NASA, let's say a 10-year project, send a camel to Mars.
00:20:52.000I think that's about $23 to $25 billion.
00:20:55.940And then someday somebody sends a camel to Mars and it costs $24 billion.
00:21:00.580It's just this weird ability that you develop.
00:23:56.180All of those other effects put together, even if you can imagine that they were all valid and they all changed the numbers, might move at 40%, right?
00:24:07.080So everything that we've talked about, that we know of, that we can see, we can, we can verify is true, altogether, it might make our number 40% wrong.
00:24:18.680And that's not even in the general zip code of the universe of the solar system of how wrong the number is.
00:25:02.400Now, a lot of you think it's because the way we code it, there's a financial incentive in the hospital, and that's the big difference.
00:25:08.780But if you look into that financial incentive, the extra money you get for coding a coronavirus basically pays the extra cost of taking care of a coronavirus patient.
00:25:20.060Because you can't take care of other patients.
00:25:23.280You have to decrease your hospital usage.
00:25:26.600So basically, it's not that you would get a windfall from treating coronavirus patients.
00:25:43.300But I did hear this explanation that in Germany, for example, and let's use that as a proxy for other countries, that in Germany, which is doing wildly better than the United States, it's not even in the same ballpark, right?
00:25:57.560That if you have cancer and you have coronavirus and you die, Germany calls it a cancer death and the United States calls it a coronavirus death.
00:26:11.140And by the way, if that's true, I need a fact check on that.
00:26:14.580But if it's true that Germany would count the underlying condition as opposed to the thing you just got this week, if that's true and we do it the other way, that would explain the entire difference, I think.
00:26:33.760But if that's all that's going on and we're going to make a decision about our leaders based on data that is wronged by a factor of 10 to 20, we need to fix that.
00:26:48.760And I think that might be the best hypothesis.
00:26:52.980But if that's not the case, if it turns out that the way we record it is backwards from the way other places do it, if that's the only story, I'd be surprised.
00:27:04.140I think there might even be something bigger.
00:27:08.700Somebody says, if that's true, it's mind boggling.
00:31:09.620When I looked at the death rate by coronavirus,
00:31:14.420I noticed that we track the death rate per million is accumulative.
00:31:21.900Isn't that exactly the wrong way to measure the death rate per million?
00:31:26.700Shouldn't we have, you know, one number that is the, you know, from the beginning of time, the death rate?
00:31:33.660But shouldn't there be another number that's the death rate per million, say, in the last 30 days?
00:31:40.000Because whatever you're doing lately is likely to be really different from what you did in the beginning.
00:31:45.760So could you not have a situation where you were really bad in the beginning, but you're doing great now and vice versa?
00:31:52.400So that missing data feels like the only one that matters.
00:31:56.860In fact, if you said to me, Scott, we're going to only be able to measure one thing.
00:32:03.000So you tell us what you need to be measured to handle the coronavirus thing.
00:32:09.740And I would say, well, the only thing I care about, the only data that would be meaningful to me to see how we're doing is the death rate per million for the last 30 days and then keep a rolling 30 days.
00:32:24.120It's the only thing that's not available, right?
00:32:28.560I mean, I guess somebody could calculate it, but it's not the number one thing that's reported.
00:32:34.200And I'm thinking, that's the only thing I care about.
00:32:37.240The total number of people is misleading because of different populations.
00:32:42.120And the cumulative is misleading because you might have gotten a bad start or a good start.
00:32:47.180But it doesn't tell you what's happening lately.
00:32:49.700So is it a coincidence that the only useful information is not reported?
00:32:56.800Is there nobody who reports data who doesn't know what I just told you?