Real Coffee with Scott Adams - Episode 840 Scott Adams： Conversation With Naval Ravikant About Coronavirus

00:00:01.000 Hey everybody, this is Scott Adams. Welcome to Coffee with Scott Adams. This is a very

00:00:05.060 special one with my guest, Naval Ravikant, founder of AngelList, legendary investor,

00:00:11.660 but more importantly, lately, one of the clearest thinkers in the United States, maybe the world.

00:00:17.520 I refer to Naval all the time as the smartest person I know with the most impressive talent

00:00:23.400 stack. But, you know, it's a dangerous time. And after we do the simultaneous sip, which

00:00:29.140 I'm hoping Naval, you'll join me with. Let's do the simultaneous sip. We don't need a preamble.

00:00:36.140 Go. Oh my God. So, we got this. I will say, given your stellar introduction,

00:00:47.180 I do have to point out that Scott is a recluse and doesn't know very many people. So, that

00:00:51.940 definitely helps. If I ever meet somebody smarter, you're going to get demoted from smartest person

00:00:57.240 I know. All right. So, you know, this coronavirus is, of course, the big story. And the government's

00:01:04.860 doing a pretty good job of telling us what to do. You know, wash your hands, don't sneeze on grandma,

00:01:10.360 don't go to China. But they're not doing a good job of telling us how to think, how to think about it,

00:01:16.120 how to feel about it. And that's what you are perfect for. Tell us what we should think about

00:01:21.760 this coronavirus. How afraid should we be? How should we frame this for the most productive

00:01:28.000 approach to it? I think, essentially, the coronavirus is going to push us to do things

00:01:34.360 that we should probably already be doing as a society. Firstly, we do need to practice higher

00:01:39.680 and higher levels of hygiene in this highly interconnected world. Who doesn't want to be

00:01:43.840 cleaner all the time? Everybody I've ever met wants to be cleaner. Everybody admires people who are cleaner

00:01:49.040 than them. Everybody likes going to places that are super clean. Everybody, when they first go to

00:01:53.360 Japan, has this reaction of, oh, my God, look how clean they are. And it's never looking down on them.

00:01:58.120 It's always looking up at them. So I think as a society, it will make us more hygiene conscious,

00:02:02.920 which will help us just reduce spreads of the common cold and the basic flu. So I think in that sense,

00:02:09.580 it is very helpful. Secondly, I think it'll move us more towards the future faster. Robotics,

00:02:15.120 automation, telepresence, VR, remote work, all those things that are coming anyway. I mean,

00:02:21.200 let's face it, most of white collar jobs are just LARPing, right? You're just running around

00:02:24.960 pretending like you're doing work in meetings. And I think this will expose a lot of that.

00:02:29.000 The actual productivity in most white collar jobs is in a small creative portion, which this will

00:02:35.000 emphasize. And it'll force us to sort of make that solve the collective action problem of moving to

00:02:40.420 those tools. And then I think it'll also cause us to do basic preparedness for viruses and bacteria

00:02:48.360 that we need as a society, because synthetic biology technology is getting easier and easier

00:02:52.940 and spreading more and more. So it's only a matter of time before we see engineered viruses and

00:02:57.560 bioweapons. And so as a society, if we're better prepared for that, it's good.

00:03:01.760 I saw your tweet in which you refer to it as essentially a series of wars that we, the big

00:03:10.960 creatures of earth, the humans are going to have with the small creatures, the viruses.

00:03:16.920 Yeah, this has always been true. If you look at humans, we've been the apex predators on planet

00:03:22.000 earth for a long time. Ever since we discovered fire or tools, we've basically taken over and killed

00:03:27.760 everything else, right? As soon as humans invented spears, axes, and fire, that was it. We won.

00:03:32.980 And every other species got driven into extinction or domestication to the point now where the lowest

00:03:38.140 ranking human outranks the highest ranking animal. Like the top dog in the world is lower status than

00:03:45.600 the lowest human. You would put that animal down if it attacked that human. So we've conclusively won

00:03:50.480 against all the big things. So our remaining natural predators, and actually they're not quite

00:03:55.080 predators that consider us their habitat, are bacteria and viruses. And that's a very broad

00:03:59.740 generalization. It's like saying plants and mushrooms or fungi. So obviously there are good

00:04:04.400 bacteria and even good viruses that we use that are symbiotic, but for every symbiote in the animal

00:04:10.500 kingdom, there's six parasites or so. That's the rough ratio that I've heard. So bacteria and viruses

00:04:16.820 are our last major remaining enemies, with one exception, mosquitoes. And mosquitoes are actually

00:04:22.820 caused damage to us by carrying bacteria and viruses, by injecting us with pathogens. They're

00:04:27.320 just flying needles, right? That's the way to think about them. So bacteria and viruses compete with

00:04:32.420 us. And there's this hypothesis called the Red Queen hypothesis. It's named after Alice in Wonderland,

00:04:37.100 where the Red Queen and her guards are running really fast, but they're all kind of running in place

00:04:41.680 against each other because the ground keeps moving. So the idea there is that bacteria and viruses

00:04:46.560 evolve to compete with us and infest us. And we evolve in such a way to get away from them.

00:04:53.320 And so we use sexual selection, which is Scott Adams goes and find Christina Basham. And this goes

00:04:58.200 through a long selection cycle. And then your genes mix with her genes. And then your children,

00:05:02.980 which I hope you will have, you know, can use whichever genes are best adapted to this environment

00:05:07.280 to resist the next generation of viruses. And viruses are mutating. They're not intelligently

00:05:13.660 selecting other viruses to mate with. They're not sexual. They're asexual. But they're just

00:05:18.600 replicating mindlessly and mutating. So they're much less likely to pick the right gene. But they're

00:05:24.440 so short lived that they're getting many, many, many more mutations. And if you look at the amount

00:05:29.260 of genetic variation that a bacteria or virus will get over 20 years, it's roughly similar to what a

00:05:35.260 human will get over 20 years. But a human will do it by wandering around their entire life and find the

00:05:39.980 proper mate to mix their genes with. The bacteria or virus will do it just by massive amounts of

00:05:44.360 replication. So there has always been this race going on, this Red Queen style race between bacteria

00:05:50.120 and viruses and us. And we fight through genetic selection and mate selection, and they fight

00:05:55.980 through mutation. And now, because of the huge interconnectedness we have, humans living in urban

00:06:02.440 environments, traveling around airplanes, you know, shaking hands and doing a lot of business with each

00:06:08.460 other, we're spreading these bacteria, bacteria and viruses much faster. We also have a much larger

00:06:13.140 population. So now you have seven or eight billion hosts within which a bacteria can mutate, as opposed

00:06:18.540 to just a few hundred thousand hosts 100,000 years ago. So we need to use technology to combat that to

00:06:25.620 offset that. And we're going to use things like vaccines, therapeutics, handwashing, hygiene, antibiotics,

00:06:33.200 social distancing, etc, etc, to resist that. So that's kind of my general thesis.

00:06:37.420 Do you think it's reasonable, I've seen a few people hypothesize that because of how we're

00:06:43.100 changing our lifestyles to protect ourselves from all this stuff, that we might actually end up saving

00:06:48.940 lives, even if the coronavirus is pretty bad, we could end up ahead? Is that possible?

00:06:56.100 Yeah, there's some data around that out of Hong Kong that's showing that social distancing is working.

00:07:01.180 Hong Kong was hit very badly by SARS. And so they reacted very quickly and vocally to what just happened in

00:07:06.580 China. And basically, people just stayed indoors and forget about what the government orders and what

00:07:10.980 the government doesn't. I think the government's ability to actually do things is very limited in

00:07:14.860 these cases, and people have to save themselves in a decentralized manner. And people in Hong Kong

00:07:21.080 just stayed indoors and wore masks, and they washed their hands, and they kept their distance from each

00:07:25.000 other. And you can see in the data that not only did coronavirus stop spreading or get contained,

00:07:29.800 but everything went down. So the influenza went down, and common colds went down, and other viruses went down.

00:07:35.880 So it works. I mean, viruses have very specific methods in how they spread. And a human being is a much

00:07:44.840 smarter entity than any given virus. So if each one of us is taking care of ourselves, the problem takes care of

00:07:50.480 itself. So let's talk about some of the news, you know, it's tough to peer into this fog of war, and know

00:07:59.120 what's true. So China is saying that they've got a, at least maybe they've turned the corner, and the new

00:08:06.480 cases are less than than they had been. Do you think that's real? Do you think China's given us the straight

00:08:12.800 scoop? I mean, they acted pretty aggressively, could be true.

00:08:16.480 Actually, I do believe them. And it's not that I believe them, because I think the government there

00:08:21.440 is a paragon of transparency and virtue. I think it's because they don't gain much by lying. If they

00:08:27.120 if they lie, and if the thing's not under control, and everybody starts going back to business as

00:08:31.040 usual, people can start dropping that again. And that's going to be a disaster for them economically.

00:08:35.200 Of course, but they have lied up till now. Pretty much everybody tries to suppress it when they

00:08:40.560 thought that it was just rumor mongering. They're also China is more decentralized. And I think people

00:08:45.040 give it credit for a lot of what goes on the local level, you know, it takes time to filter up to the

00:08:49.600 big bosses level. It's a very large country. It's not a it's not a single unified monolith. So I think

00:08:55.280 they were definitely not the most competent in their initial handling of it. But I don't think that

00:09:00.960 they're overtly explicitly lying. I think the bigger danger with China is that as they return to business

00:09:06.560 as usual, it starts spreading again. But there are countervailing factors like it's going to get warmer,

00:09:11.120 and people on average are just going to be a lot more careful. Even if they say go back to work

00:09:14.880 to everybody tomorrow, they're all going to be wearing masks still, they're all going to be

00:09:18.240 washing their hands all the time. They're not going to be hugging each other. They're not going to be

00:09:21.840 within close quarters of each other. And my guess is that public events and buffets and church

00:09:26.960 attendant gatherings and so on will still suffer from low attendance. And the cruise, the cruise ship

00:09:31.360 industry is dead never to return. Unfortunately, I think you're right about that. I had a plumber come over

00:09:36.960 yesterday. And I tried for the first time, the non handshake greeting, you put out his hand and I

00:09:43.680 did that, you know, Coronavirus, sorry, you know, nothing personal, sort of testing it out to see,

00:09:50.080 does it work socially. And it was a little bit awkward, but not enough that I'm not going to do

00:09:55.520 it again. So the easiest, the easiest way to handle that one is this is something I've been doing for

00:09:59.280 months now, which is I just tell people, I'm just getting over a cold. And they just back off. So it's

00:10:04.640 basically, it's not you, it's me. That excuse would never work better than today.

00:10:10.080 Exactly. So that would be my advice to people. You can say I'm getting over a cold.

00:10:14.080 I've got a little chest tightness here. Exactly. Keep your distance. Now, there was an article I

00:10:21.760 just read about the cruise ship, which for all the wrong reasons, it turned out to be the best

00:10:27.120 laboratory. Because you had people in a closed setting, you could really know who these people are,

00:10:32.560 and then you could look at the result. And one of the outcomes of that is that nobody under 70

00:10:40.720 has died out of over 700 people infected on that ship. So that's impressive. But also,

00:10:48.640 they did not get care that quickly, and they were not identified that quickly. So if you assume that

00:10:54.960 only the older people were even affected, and now that we know that's where the real risk is,

00:11:01.280 we could really put a, you know, sort of a wall around our oldsters, isn't it possible that even if

00:11:07.760 this virus is 10 times more viral, that because the people dying from it can be easily identified

00:11:15.440 and walled off, isn't there at least some hope that now that we're no longer caught off guard,

00:11:22.960 we could drive down the death rate to ordinary flu levels, which is plenty bad, but not-

00:11:28.800 Yeah, I don't think it goes down to ordinary flu levels. This thing is much worse than the ordinary flu.

00:11:33.040 For one thing, it's far more virulent. You know, the R0, the spread factor is multiples of what is

00:11:38.480 the flu. The flu is like a 1.28. This is like a 3.0.

00:11:41.520 But that's what the virus itself can do. But if you factor in our response to it,

00:11:50.880 we would effectively lower it.

00:11:52.960 That's true. I think we can effectively lower it. But I think it's going to require a level of

00:11:57.040 self-quarantine and hygiene that the American population is currently not engaged in. At

00:12:01.840 least in San Francisco, 99% is business as usual. And if it's going to spread anywhere,

00:12:06.800 it's in San Francisco because you're in a cold, urban environment that's directly interconnected

00:12:11.120 to Asia. So I walk around the street, nobody's wearing masks. Everyone's still going to events

00:12:17.520 and gatherings. People are still shaking hands and high-fiving. So we do not have anywhere near

00:12:22.400 the level of self-control that I think would be required to actually lower the spread factor.

00:12:27.760 Secondly, this thing does kill people in their 20s and 30s and 40s. It's just statistically a lot less

00:12:32.160 likely. But it has a high comorbidity rate. So if you have an existing condition, which could actually

00:12:37.760 just be a flu or cold, it can go haywire on you. So 20-somethings and 30-somethings have died from

00:12:43.840 this. It's just in the under-10 category that we've hardly seen anything. The children seem to be very

00:12:49.360 immune to it. Well, what's interesting about the cruise ship is that there were enough people

00:12:53.920 that we should have seen 30-year-olds dying if people who had good modern care were going to die.

00:13:02.640 And none of them did. That's pretty telling. Yeah, the counter-argument is also who has good modern

00:13:08.240 care because the current ICU system, the intensive care unit system is built on an assumption of a

00:13:13.920 very small number of beds being needed at any given time. So if this thing really does land 20% of

00:13:19.120 people in the intensive care unit, like some estimates say, then it'll easily overwhelm the

00:13:24.640 hospital system. And you will end up with higher morbidity rates. So a lot of it is about spreading

00:13:30.720 it out, spreading out the illness. Like if we just all take care of ourselves and summer arrives,

00:13:36.480 then hopefully the sick don't arrive all at the hospital all at once. But there's already evidence

00:13:42.160 that that's happening. In South Korea, the hospitals are full. And South Korea is extremely well

00:13:47.440 run and managed in this regard. So I don't think we're out of the woods here. I think we're actually

00:13:52.800 just entering the time period in the US where we're going to have to take some measures, maybe

00:13:59.040 not as extreme as China, but we're going to have to start doing social distancing to protect ourselves.

00:14:04.320 And I'm hoping that the warm weather will save us, frankly, because nobody knows with this particular

00:14:10.720 virus and the flu does spread in warmer weathers. But in general, the warmer the climate,

00:14:16.000 the more humid the climate, the lower the spread factor, because these are airborne viruses that

00:14:20.320 like cool and dry and don't like hot and humid. Now, here's an interesting, maybe just completely

00:14:25.920 coincidental, and you can help me sort this out. The places with the biggest problems, coincidentally,

00:14:32.320 have the worst air pollution. So even people don't realize, but Italy has the worst air pollution in

00:14:38.720 Europe. South Korea is a mess. And here's the weird part. Cruise ships, I just read an article that said

00:14:45.680 the air on the deck of a cruise ship, not even below deck, on the deck of the cruise ship, the air

00:14:52.160 quality was worse than Tehran. Now, so I've asked people, could that be a correlation? And there are

00:14:59.680 actually a number of different ways that it could be. One is that it decreases the sun shines, and there's a

00:15:05.200 vitamin D hypothesis that, you know, if you're low, you're more susceptible. One is that the pollution

00:15:11.920 just lowers your resistance in general. What my own hypothesis is that maybe the virus actually

00:15:20.480 becomes more easily airborne if it hitches a ride. Apparently, that's a real thing. A virus can hitch

00:15:27.040 ride on dust. So, and then, you know, but you have the other correlations that are heavy smoking areas

00:15:35.200 and high density, etc. I think high density is actually the Occam's razor one. Asian cities are

00:15:40.720 much higher density than Western cities. Even in Italy broke out in the Turin Marathon at first.

00:15:46.720 You know, Quam, you have huge amounts of travelers and pilgrimages coming in and sitting in like large

00:15:52.560 gatherings. So I think just high density of people is the most obvious thing. If there's a large group

00:15:58.720 of people gathering indoors, that's the perfect spot for a virus. If you have a small number of

00:16:05.040 people spread out on a tropical beach, that virus is not going to get a foothold. So I think there's

00:16:10.000 some common sense that we're just evolved as humans to realize this. Here's a very simple way to think

00:16:15.040 about how embedded this is in human society and culture. Colds tend to occur during cold weather,

00:16:23.120 and the people in cultures where they have a lot of cold weather tend to have cold behavior

00:16:28.720 and cold attitudes. Why do you use that word cold to remember to an illness, to remember to refer to,

00:16:35.200 to refer to an illness, to refer to a weather, and we use to refer to a set of behavior patterns,

00:16:40.080 cultural behavior patterns. We use the same word for all three things. That right there should clue you in

00:16:45.360 on where these things replicate. And this is knowledge that's embedded in the English language and goes

00:16:50.480 back thousands of years. So if you look at the so-called cold cultures, like Northern European

00:16:55.360 cultures and Eastern European cultures, they're not bear hugging you. They're not singing and chanting

00:17:01.120 and holding hands together. They're generally sitting far apart. They're very suspicious of each

00:17:08.000 other. You know, they're not engaging in large gatherings. And they're generally, and when it can, and these

00:17:15.200 cultures also have long traditions of, for example, sauna use and hot springs, because they're trying to

00:17:21.120 induce artificial fevers in their body. They also tend to favor, you know, tend to worship being in the

00:17:27.360 outdoors and being in nature. If you go into kind of warmer weather cultures, like for example, India,

00:17:34.160 the ones that are evolved in hot and humid environments, what they have to worry about

00:17:38.000 are waterborne diseases. So they're constantly boiling their water or they're spicing their food

00:17:42.960 because they're trying to kill the waterborne diseases. Whereas in cold weather cultures, you're

00:17:47.680 trying to fight airborne diseases. So I think you just need to have a cold personality and go to a warm

00:17:52.960 climate if you want to avoid colds. Well, I'm looking at the big implications because it seems

00:17:58.640 to me that we have a pretty good formula for how to keep grandma safe. You know, grandma, you know,

00:18:04.720 don't talk to anybody who's been to the concert. Let's take you out to the country. You know,

00:18:09.520 he'd just keep you away from people. I have a away from little kids. Well, we don't know right now

00:18:15.200 if little kids are spreaders or not. Little kids do get it. They tend not to get very sick from it.

00:18:21.680 The question is how much viral shedding and spreading do they do? If they do do a lot,

00:18:26.240 then the obvious vector would be that it spreads in schools. The kids are largely asymptomatic or

00:18:30.800 unhurt. They bring it home. Grandma's living at the house and she gets sick. So that is a vector

00:18:35.120 that we have to test. If I had to predict, I would say schools will shut maybe for a month,

00:18:40.560 whatever's the right amount. I don't think there's any chance it won't happen in this country. Do you?

00:18:46.640 Don't you think schools are going to shut for maybe a month? I think schools have to shut,

00:18:50.400 and I think large public gatherings have to be canceled. And I think large public gatherings

00:18:54.320 are going to be canceled not because the people organizing them want to cancel them. There's too

00:18:59.360 much money at stake. For example, South by Southwest and the Olympics, it's just that nobody's going to

00:19:03.680 show up. People are going to clue in. All it's going to take is a few people dropping dead and then

00:19:07.920 everybody will run for the hills. The harder part is school cancellation because schools aren't really

00:19:13.680 about education. Let's face it. Schools are an extended form of daycare and socialization.

00:19:18.320 So if you cancel schools, then you have a daycare problem for adults.

00:19:22.640 You know, well, I'm going to be the voice of optimism on this because I think the country

00:19:29.120 needs to hear that we're capable and we're strong. If this were just one person who had a daycare

00:19:37.120 problem, that's a problem. But if the whole world has a daycare problem, I'll watch your kids.

00:19:44.160 Yeah. Yeah. It takes a village to raise a child. And if we do collective child watching,

00:19:48.640 then it gets pretty easy. Right. So we have a whole host of problems

00:19:53.520 that would be caused by this that I believe are probably relatively solvable. Let me talk about

00:19:57.680 another one. Just to finish that off, I think that this is a huge boon for the homeschooling movement.

00:20:02.240 This is your moment. Yeah. I mean, it could change civilization quite permanently and

00:20:07.840 forever and maybe for a good... I've said for a long time that where homeschooling is going is a

00:20:12.720 virtual reality. Yeah. I've got my little virtual reality set over here. You spend five minutes in

00:20:18.720 that and then you say to yourself, okay, would I rather learn history by reading a book or would

00:20:24.960 I rather stand in the middle of Napoleon's battle? Right. There's just no question where it's all going.

00:20:34.320 So businesses. Now, one of the big fears is that the economy will get crushed worldwide,

00:20:40.960 big depression, et cetera. And I'm a optimist on this. Obviously, there'll be a big disruption.

00:20:47.280 So there's no question about that. But how bad it becomes, I'm going to add this context.

00:20:54.080 And I could do this because I'm the creator of Dilbert. You could take 20% of any workforce

00:21:00.160 and remove them from reality and nothing would happen. I think it's more than 20, but yeah.

00:21:05.280 Yeah. Nothing would happen. And the reason I know that is not just experience, but it's called summer.

00:21:12.720 Right. It's called Christmas. You know, we routinely have 20% of people.

00:21:18.000 You also see this when people go on strikes or there's a government shutdown, you're like...

00:21:23.840 When I worked for the phone company, the local phone company, I was a salaried employee. And when the

00:21:29.520 non-salaried people went on strike, which happened a few times, we so-called managers or salaried

00:21:35.760 people would have to fill in. So there's a very small number of salaried people compared to all

00:21:40.320 the union people. Didn't make any difference. You know, 20% of us did the job of 80. We just didn't

00:21:48.160 do the big projects and the long-term stuff, put that on hold for a month and it was fine.

00:21:52.080 And if you buy the creative destruction argument, we're going to go through a shift and the new

00:21:56.640 industries that we shift to are actually going to be better for the economy longer term. So,

00:22:01.600 you know, going to remote work may end being more efficient. You may be able to hold more

00:22:05.680 jobs as a remote worker because you just get the job done instead of having to do FaceTime at the

00:22:09.440 office. Even there was some concern that Uber and Lyft would take a big hit because who wants to get in

00:22:14.400 the car with a stranger, but it turns out that may be better than getting in a subway or a bus.

00:22:19.760 So people switch away into other models of doing things. I think people are fundamentally

00:22:25.200 creative and innovative and consumptive and they don't stop doing that. They just change how they

00:22:30.560 do it and what they do it around. Like this is going to be a huge boon for Netflix and Slack and

00:22:34.640 companies like that, which rely on people staying indoors. Zoom is going to do great. Here we are on

00:22:39.600 Zoom. I was thinking this morning how I could invest and make money on this and I had to talk

00:22:45.440 myself out of thinking about that. You're already kind of invested in that by living in the Bay Area

00:22:50.720 and kind of being in tech companies in various ways. Yeah. Also, your viewership should go up.

00:23:01.040 That's something you could track. Yeah. Maybe we induce a panic and then everybody comes to our

00:23:06.080 Twitter in person. Never mind. I call that marketing.

00:23:09.920 Yeah. Marketing. Do you think, and I know that there's no way to know this, but just

00:23:15.280 based on your broad understanding of the world, do you think there's a genetic

00:23:20.080 element to who's susceptible to the coronavirus? It doesn't have to be an ethnic.

00:23:25.840 No, no, there probably is. But I think there's probably, so it binds to this thing in the lungs

00:23:32.400 called the ACE2 receptors, which is overexpressed in Asians and in males. On the other hand,

00:23:38.320 it does seem to be killing Iranians and Italians and so on as well. So I don't think that that's

00:23:42.880 going to necessarily mean that it's focused in one part of the population, but definitely

00:23:48.480 people who evolved or grew up or came through generations of people who lived next to animals

00:23:54.720 have higher resistance to diseases like flu and smallpox than people who didn't. And you can see

00:24:01.680 the clear evidence of that. And when the conquistadors first got to South America or the colonizers got to

00:24:08.400 North America, you know, they basically almost accidentally killed all the native populations,

00:24:13.840 maybe deliberately, maybe accidentally, but by spreading flu and smallpox. But those are flus and

00:24:18.960 diseases that they themselves were immune to because they and their ancestors had been exposed to them

00:24:23.840 because they had grown up in cold climates where you bring the animals indoors during the winter.

00:24:28.560 And so you grow up next to animals and all the animal born diseases. And as opposed to Native

00:24:33.520 Americans who are running around outdoors and didn't have this concept of living indoors with

00:24:37.120 cattle or domesticated animals. So there's definitely a genetic component to it. And there's a historical

00:24:43.840 component to it. But we're not going to be able to suss that out without massively genome sequencing

00:24:48.720 everybody and drawing large scale patterns.

00:24:50.560 Well, I'm, I'm almost wondering if you could just take the cruise ship or,

00:24:55.600 you know, some group like that and just sequence them and

00:24:59.760 sequencing is cheap. We could probably start doing it. We could probably start sequencing all the patients

00:25:05.360 and then seeing what level they end up at and then using that to figure out who to put in the front lines

00:25:10.800 of healthcare or not. This is an idea floated by Balaji Srinivasan recently, a mutual friend of ours, who's

00:25:16.320 really declared what he calls World War V, World War virus, World War V. It's pretty clever.

00:25:22.640 And it's going full scale on this thing. But he basically made that point, which is you should,

00:25:27.280 we should be doing the sequencing and testing to figuring out which healthcare workers should be

00:25:31.120 front of the line and which ones should be back of the line.

00:25:33.520 I saw an article the other day that, um, the, um, the Neanderthal gene, you know, or however much DNA

00:25:42.800 we got from them might, um, might have something to do with your susceptible susceptibility to some,

00:25:48.720 you know, common, common colds and viruses and stuff. So it's going to be something like that,

00:25:54.160 whether it's. Yeah. I don't know if you, I don't know if there's a single Neanderthal gene. I'm always

00:25:58.480 suspicious of those kinds of correlation. They're too neat, right? Like they make for good headlines.

00:26:03.200 Um, you know, I'm sure there's a baboon gene and there's a squirrel gene in you somewhere,

00:26:07.920 right? Okay. Now have you, have you done your 23 and me or something like that to see if you have

00:26:13.040 any, I've got a little bit. I've got a little bit. I didn't do it for two reasons. Uh, one is those

00:26:17.680 things are incredibly non-actionable. Like they don't actually tell you what to make it any different

00:26:22.640 short of like, don't marry somebody else who's missing the exact same gene. And that's very unlikely.

00:26:27.440 In my case, I'm not going to change my spouse based on that. Um, and the second reason I didn't do

00:26:32.160 those is because, uh, the privacy around them right now is very suspect. They will use that

00:26:37.040 to arrest your second cousin who turns out was a serial killer, um, or was near a murder scene or

00:26:42.320 what have you. So I just don't want my kids, I don't want to get sequenced and sell out my kids' genes

00:26:46.640 in the process. What kind of criminals are you raising there? We'll find out. Yeah. Hopefully smart ones.

00:26:53.520 Yeah. You know, I, I think the whole privacy boat has, uh, that left a long time ago. I mean,

00:27:00.240 I just, you're, you're correct in, uh, in that physical privacy is gone. Uh, there are cameras

00:27:05.840 everywhere and sure. Yeah. Eventually there'll be gene surveillance networks everywhere. So I think

00:27:10.560 physical privacy is dead, but I think digital privacy will be alive and well through encryption.

00:27:15.360 That'll be a very different kind of underground privacy, but well, not for you and me, but you

00:27:20.880 know, the first pseudonymous internet trolls privacy is still around. Yeah, that's right. You know, for,

00:27:27.680 for you and I, we have this weird, uh, future feeling where we know what it's like to not have privacy

00:27:33.680 the way that regular people who don't operate in the public already have. And for me, I don't know,

00:27:40.560 do you ever have any, you're, you roughly have a similar situation to me, which is people will

00:27:46.240 recognize you, especially in the Bay area. Is it ever a problem? Uh, it's inconvenient at times,

00:27:52.480 but I brought it on myself. So it's not, it's not really a problem. I mean, fame, minor fame,

00:27:58.000 being like a B list or a C list celebrity has some slight advantages. Um, but it also has significant

00:28:03.680 disadvantages. Like, you know, it's hard for me to travel to a lawless country anonymously.

00:28:07.680 Uh, so, uh, so there are, there are parts of the world where I just won't go to anymore.

00:28:13.360 Um, overall, I would say for me, the harms outweigh the benefits, but I might just be saying

00:28:20.400 that like, if you took my fame away tomorrow, I might be screaming for it back. It's, it's very

00:28:24.720 hard to say. I don't think, I don't think I'm self-aware enough to know. I would say there's more

00:28:29.440 good than bad. You know, the good is it makes me feel good. Every once in a while, somebody approaches

00:28:34.640 me in the grocery store and I'm usually happy to see them. So yeah, I think I would rather be

00:28:39.120 rich and anonymous than poor and famous, but a lot of times rich and famous go together,

00:28:45.200 poor and anonymous go together. So if I had to choose between those two, yeah, of course I'll

00:28:49.120 take rich and famous over poor and anonymous all day long. So let me, let me ask you, um,

00:28:54.400 this is sort of a psychological question, but it has to do with the coronavirus. Are you doing anything

00:29:00.080 to prepare? Because I think, I think people want to feel that they're doing something

00:29:05.440 and actually doing this, doing this, what we're doing right now is part of what I felt I could do.

00:29:10.800 Like, I feel like I want to help. Yeah. I'm doing something for things for myself to stay healthy,

00:29:15.760 et cetera. Are you doing anything? Yeah. Look, I'm an obsessive, slightly paranoid,

00:29:21.360 heavily paranoid person by nature. So I'm definitely washing my hands till they're dry as raw.

00:29:27.200 Um, there's hand sanitizer everywhere in the house. We even have ingredients to make our own.

00:29:32.000 We do have food stockpiled for a couple of weeks. Um, I have masks, I have gloves, I have all that

00:29:38.720 stuff. Uh, what about, uh, what about sleep and exercise? Cause those are pretty important.

00:29:45.280 Yeah. I've already had a pretty good sleep exercise regimen and it's kind of late to change that. I'm

00:29:49.520 probably taking a lot more vitamin C and a vitamin D than I used to. Uh, I'm not going to the gym. I'm

00:29:54.560 working out outdoors. I'm not going to large public gatherings. Um, I'm working remotely, uh, whenever

00:30:00.400 possible. If there is an uncontrolled outbreak in the Bay area, in other words, if we know that

00:30:05.760 community spread is happening and there are thousands of cases, and I give that actually

00:30:08.960 a pretty reasonable chance because we just haven't been testing. Then we will go into a, a quarantine

00:30:14.960 style lockdown. Like my friends in China were doing where we just stay in the house. We go out only to get

00:30:20.080 food. We spray it down with alcohol, you know, the boxes before we bring it in. And we're just

00:30:25.280 very careful about who we let in and out of the house. I am actually particularly susceptible to

00:30:30.160 getting colds because I'm involved for an equatorial climate. And whenever I'm living in the Bay area,

00:30:35.440 which has a lot of fog and no sunshine, I'm always getting colds and respiratory illnesses.

00:30:40.000 Uh, I'm less worried for my wife and who's younger and, uh, not, uh, of Indian origin. And my kids

00:30:45.920 were just young and not as affected by coronavirus. I'm very worried for my mom. So I basically locked

00:30:50.720 her down her house and I'm sending her deliveries from Amazon. Um, but I'm on the more paranoid side

00:30:55.600 and I have more flexibility than most people. Uh, but I do think that it's, it's worth just watching

00:31:00.880 the stats. And if it looks like there's an uncontrolled outbreak in your area, then you want to be ahead

00:31:05.600 of that game and not behind. I do think having two weeks of food and probably not, you probably don't

00:31:11.200 need water, but food, toilet paper, kind of all the necessities, prescription medicines. That's

00:31:15.520 just common sense. Uh, despite what they say, you should have a mask. Uh, you should just, it's that

00:31:20.720 you need to know how to use it. So go on YouTube and watch the videos on how to use the mask. It's,

00:31:25.040 it's a little disingenuous to say, you don't need a mask, masks are useless. And then saying,

00:31:29.520 please save masks for the healthcare workers. Like both of those things cannot be true.

00:31:34.720 Thank you for saying that. I've been arguing this on Twitter for, for a week.

00:31:38.240 And if nothing else, you wear a mask to protect others in case you have it. So like, I, I would

00:31:43.120 feel more comfortable in a social gathering if everybody else is wearing masks. And so I would

00:31:47.040 do my part by wearing a mask. And you see this in places like China and Hong Kong, where they will

00:31:52.000 not let you enter a store if you're not wearing a mask because you're not doing your bit to protect

00:31:56.960 others. Um, so I think all of those kinds of measures, it's smart to start doing that. And also it

00:32:04.320 takes time to learn how to do these things. These are not like you flip a switch in the next day.

00:32:08.880 You certainly know everything about hygiene and protection and distancing and so on. So I'm

00:32:15.120 viewing this as a dry run. I'm getting my family prepared and ready. And frankly, it's something to

00:32:19.920 do with your time. Right. Uh, and then if the, if it actually arrives, then we're ready for it.

00:32:25.440 Uh, I've, I've been taking a daily walks in the sunshine. I definitely do that. Do, you know,

00:32:32.480 do 45 minutes or an hour and, and I'm doing lighter exercise because if I, if I wear myself out,

00:32:38.960 then I'm actually more susceptible. So I, and I find that when I do my walk, it's such a small,

00:32:44.560 small thing I can do to, you know, make a very small difference in my protection, but I'm doing

00:32:49.840 something. So psychologically I'm now part of the solution instead of a victim and it's a whole

00:32:56.480 different mindset. And I feel like, yeah, bring it on. I, you know, coronavirus or not, I'm going

00:33:02.160 to be ready. I'm going to be as strong as possible. If it happens, it happens. I'm ready.

00:33:07.200 Yeah. I don't think vitamin D supplementation will make up for actual sunlight falling on your skin. So

00:33:12.000 getting sun is really good. Uh, and that's where I'm hoping that the curve will naturally bend as warmer

00:33:18.480 weather arrives. Uh, and when that happens, people are more outdoors. They're less likely to be in

00:33:23.040 indoor gatherings. Uh, the sun itself kills viruses, your vitamin D levels, your immune system stronger,

00:33:28.560 all of those things play in our favor. But what that concerns me is that a vaccine is still at least

00:33:34.560 12 to 18 months away, possibly a longer time, because we've never successfully developed a vaccine

00:33:39.760 for any of the existing six other coronaviruses. So, uh, because a vaccine is pretty far away,

00:33:47.600 we're going to have at least one more wave. And the second wave will start building, let's say around,

00:33:52.160 let's say the weather is a factor and that helps suppress it. Then the second wave starts building in

00:33:56.400 October, November, instead of January, February. And it starts with infected base of hundreds of

00:34:01.600 thousands of people, instead of a few dozen people in the middle of Wuhan. So the second wave could be a

00:34:07.440 lot larger. And in past pandemics, that's usually turned out to be the case.

00:34:10.800 This time, at least we have the advantage that our response will be faster.

00:34:15.680 Our response will be faster. And there'll already be some people in the environment who

00:34:19.600 have limited immunity from previous or similar infections. In fact, one of the pieces of potential

00:34:24.640 good news here is that usually these viruses hit kids pretty hard, but in this case, they're not at

00:34:30.000 all. And so why is that? And the current best hypothesis is that about a quarter of the common colds

00:34:36.080 caused today are actually caused by four circulating coronaviruses that also got released and are

00:34:41.520 endemic in the population. But those four coronaviruses don't hurt you anywhere near the

00:34:46.400 same level. They just cause symptoms of a common cold. And so the theory goes that kids have been getting

00:34:52.000 these at school and so that they already have some natural immunity built up to this one. And if that

00:34:57.840 turns out to be true, that means you could use data and dead virus from those four viruses to help build

00:35:05.040 the vaccine. Well, that would be good news. That would be. It's still pretty unlikely though.

00:35:13.200 Well, I think that the supply lines will stay open because we could lose a lot of workers and we're

00:35:19.040 going to, you know, once you reach that crossover line where the risk of the flu is not as high as

00:35:26.560 the risk of a global economic meltdown. And I think you get to that point really quickly,

00:35:33.360 because an economic meltdown is going to kill far more people than- Yeah, the panic could be worse

00:35:37.600 than the disease for sure. I mean, like, even if you go to a worst case Wuhan style scenario for the

00:35:43.600 whole world, right? Let's say, let's say what happened in Wuhan happens to the entire planet,

00:35:48.160 right? Okay. So unfortunately, you know, a lot of people die, but it's still not enough to like seriously

00:35:54.800 impact like everybody. It's like, you know, 98, 99% of people are still mostly fine. Even the people

00:36:01.120 who end up hospitalized or don't get hospital care, some of them get very sick and die, but

00:36:06.400 the productive capacity economy doesn't really go down. It just have to shift into an indoor remote

00:36:10.960 work kind of economy until we build up enough immunity and vaccines. You're probably not going

00:36:15.680 to have riots in the streets because there's a killer virus. You don't want to gather in the streets,

00:36:20.080 right? It's kind of the opposite of a zombie apocalypse, right? Or in that sense, it is like

00:36:24.640 a zombie apocalypse. Everybody runs and hides, except the zombies are not 98% out there. It's like

00:36:30.640 0.1% and they're dropping dead. They're not like coming out to eat you. So I don't see those kinds of

00:36:37.280 worst case scenarios outside of panics. And the panic is probably not a physical panic. It's more

00:36:42.880 of an economic panic. See, this is exactly why I wanted to talk to you because there are some people

00:36:49.360 who think we're in bad shape and the panic itself can be worse. But if I had to bet my own personal

00:36:58.880 money on it, I would say it's going to be painful and we're going to be okay. Yeah, I think it could be

00:37:05.440 somewhere between relatively painless to very painful, but I think we're fine long-term regardless.

00:37:11.120 I think a year and a half from now, it's a blip. And even stock markets are very forward-looking

00:37:16.560 instruments. You know, stock markets have discounted what's going on, what's going to happen

00:37:19.920 the next 30 years and discount back. So I think the stock market will also be fine. In fact, it's

00:37:26.960 mostly already recovered or at least partially recovered. Well, I think that's a perfect place to

00:37:33.280 stop this conversation. And I hope that was useful to anybody watching this. And thank you.

00:37:41.280 for spending the time. Absolutely. Hope this was useful. It was fun. Thanks, Scott.

00:37:46.560 Thank you.

Real Coffee with Scott Adams - March 05, 2020

Episode 840 Scott Adams： Conversation With Naval Ravikant About Coronavirus

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