Real Coffee with Scott Adams - Episode 906 Scott Adams： Simultaneous Sip Doesn't Happen on its Own. Get in Here.

00:00:00.800 Bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum 1.00

00:00:09.000 Hey everybody, come on in here. We got stuff to talk about. If you caught me earlier this

00:00:15.320 morning at around, I don't know, 4am my time, you probably think this is a bonus. That it

00:00:26.240 is. I did not do the simultaneous sip. I was just testing my microphone situation, and

00:00:33.800 the test was successful. Yay. But this is the real thing. Yes. I've combined the simultaneous

00:00:42.300 swaddle with the simultaneous sip. This is a first. Now I don't want to blow your minds,

00:00:49.700 but these two things can happen together. So for the first time ever, a world premiere,

00:00:57.800 the most important thing that will ever happen this year, the simultaneous swaddle sip. Yeah,

00:01:05.080 it's coming at you. And what do you need besides a blanket? Well, it would be good if you had a

00:01:11.260 cup or a mug or a glass of tank or chalice or sign a canteen jug or flask or a vessel of any

00:01:15.440 kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled

00:01:21.140 pleasure of the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better, including 0.99

00:01:25.260 the damn pandemic. It's called the simultaneous swaddle sip. And it happens now. Go. 0.98

00:01:33.260 And just as I suspected, twice as good. Swaddling good, sipping good, put them together. I think

00:01:50.860 you see where I'm going. All right. So I feel great empathy for different groups of people during

00:02:00.960 this time of crisis. But I have a great deal of sadness and sorrow for this group.

00:02:09.140 They're called Democrats. You've probably heard of them. And the Democrats are having an especially

00:02:13.500 tough time because until Trump makes a decision about how to open up the economy, they don't know

00:02:22.500 what to disagree with. So they're all poised to oppose the president. But the longer he goes without

00:02:31.080 saying which way he's going to go, the longer they have to go without knowing what they're opposing.

00:02:38.040 So what do they do in the meantime? Because they can't they can't offer an opinion. That would be the

00:02:44.900 most dangerous thing. Imagine you're a Democrat. And your number one thing in the world is beating

00:02:51.760 Donald Trump. That's all that matters. And and you don't know what he's going to do. You only know

00:02:59.280 that when it happens, you have to be on the other side. But between now and the time it happens, you

00:03:03.780 have to have an opinion because a lot of us are on social media. We're pundits. So somebody asks your

00:03:09.760 opinion and they say, should we go back to work? Let's say May 1st or should we stay locked down for a

00:03:15.780 while? What are you going to do? If you're a Democrat this week, any Democrat, a pundit,

00:03:24.520 politician, and somebody says, tell us what you would do. How would you do it? They can't give you

00:03:31.220 an opinion. Because if they do, there's probably a 50% chance that it's going to go in the other

00:03:38.360 direction. If they say open it up, Trump might say, how about a few more weeks of keeping it closed

00:03:43.920 and vice versa. And all of those Democrats don't want to take a 50% chance of being on on film,

00:03:52.500 you know, on video, not film, but on video, saying that the president should do exactly what he ends

00:03:58.580 up doing. Think about that. What if Joe Biden comes out and says, you know, I've talked to my own

00:04:04.800 experts and I think we should open up May 15th. Let's say Joe Biden says that in advance. A week

00:04:14.300 goes by and then President Trump says, I've talked to my task force. It turns out that May 15th is a

00:04:20.740 good day. So I'm going to open up everything on May 15th. Well, what does Joe Biden do? He just said

00:04:26.900 that's the right decision. But yeah, I know May 1st is the date, but LA is already talking about

00:04:33.880 extending it. So I'll give you a little prediction. Probably is not going to be May 1st everywhere.

00:04:41.520 So I think you're going to see some big places pushing out a few more weeks like LA is my guess.

00:04:49.100 But yeah, the Democrats are completely silenced, except for weird questions about how the Surgeon

00:04:57.120 General refers to his own grandparents. You get that? One of the biggest criticisms of the president's

00:05:05.460 coronavirus task forces, like the best they could come up with, because remember, until they can commit

00:05:12.320 to an opinion of their own, there's not much to criticize. You kind of have to say you would go the

00:05:18.380 other way in order to say he's going the wrong way. So the best they could come up with is they send

00:05:25.760 Alcindor, the woman, to accuse the Surgeon General of using the wrong language when referring to his own

00:05:35.020 grandparents. That was it? That was the sharpest criticism of the administration,

00:05:42.700 is that an African-American surgeon general referred to his own grandparents in the way that they lovingly

00:05:51.880 refer to their own grandparents and his family, and that became a national headline, because it was all

00:05:57.280 they had. So that should tell you something about the slaughter meter, shouldn't it?

00:06:02.080 I'm very amused to watch what I call the growing wokeness and the red-pilling of people on this whole

00:06:13.440 prediction model question. You know, the idea that there is such a thing that people believed a little

00:06:20.320 while ago, say last week, people believed that you could do something with math and your algorithms

00:06:26.760 and your spreadsheets, your formulas and your variables. If you did it just right, the alchemy

00:06:33.620 would work out so that you could actually predict the future. Until a week ago, people thought that was

00:06:40.760 actually a real thing, that there were people with spreadsheets and formulas and math who could

00:06:48.780 actually, and I'm not joking, predict the future. Most of the world believed that that was the world they

00:06:57.400 were living in. They thought they lived in a reality where there were such wizards, you know, in little

00:07:02.780 windowless rooms somewhere, we don't know who they are, but the wizards have done their math and their magic,

00:07:08.640 and they can actually see the future. Now, I know nobody claimed that they can see the future perfectly.

00:07:15.080 I'm not claiming that. But the whole point of the models, right, what you thought last week,

00:07:22.800 didn't you think that last week the models were more likely true than not, at least statistically,

00:07:28.040 and they would give you at least a statistical glimpse into the future? You thought that, right?

00:07:33.720 What do you think this week? This week, this week you probably think the models are just 0.97

00:07:41.180 things that experts make up to persuade you, because models are just things that experts use to persuade

00:07:48.680 you. The models are used to persuade you what the experts believe is true. In most cases, they

00:07:55.780 actually believe it's true, but they don't have a good way to explain it and to convince people to act

00:08:00.680 on it. So they build the model. But the model is not truth. The model is just complete BS. It's just

00:08:06.820 marketing. And then people think that the model actually produced information, when in fact the

00:08:13.000 model produces no information. It is simply a reflection of what the experts are trying to

00:08:18.280 persuade. So watching people like, I'll use Brit Hume as my example. The reason I use him as my

00:08:26.560 example is because I have a lot of respect for him. So that makes it more interesting. Because it's

00:08:33.160 not very interesting if people that you know are idiots, were wrong last week. And you know, 1.00

00:08:38.920 now they're trying to figure out why they were wrong last week. That's not interesting. You know,

00:08:42.560 dumb people being dumb is not a story. But when you see somebody as experienced and smart and 0.99

00:08:47.740 accomplished as Brit Hume, who certainly sees the whole field, or so you would think. And I feel as

00:08:54.040 if just watching his tweets and his reactions to the models and Fauci and stuff, I feel like I'm watching

00:09:00.900 him getting red-pilled in real time. Like he's understanding that the experts were not intending

00:09:09.620 to tell the truth. In other words, they were intending that the model would scare you,

00:09:17.520 because that's how they could get the compliance that they legitimately thought they needed.

00:09:21.900 So I believe everybody involved is doing their level best to produce a good result. Nobody in the story

00:09:27.480 has bad intentions. Nobody in the story is not smart. Everybody in the story is smart. Smart,

00:09:35.560 very accomplished professionals. You know, Brit Hume in the news business, Fauci in the medical

00:09:40.960 business. But watching people realize that the models were never intended to tell you the future,

00:09:50.260 they were only intended to persuade, is really a big mind effort, if you know what I mean.

00:09:55.860 And a lot of people are waking up into a new reality, in which they realize that the so-called experts

00:10:02.420 certainly know more than we do. I'm not saying you should ignore experts. But you can't trust them

00:10:09.700 to give it to you straight when that doesn't work. So in a perfect world, the experts would say,

00:10:19.100 here's what we know. Here's what we don't know. Here's why we have a strong consensus in this

00:10:25.600 direction. But this is all we know. We don't know more than we know. Here's what we know. And here's

00:10:31.660 our recommendation. If they did that, I think the scientists know it wouldn't work. Because it

00:10:38.540 wouldn't be persuasive. It wouldn't scare anybody. People would look at it and say, well, you don't know.

00:10:43.340 You just said, you just told this expert you know some stuff, but you're not sure. And there's a whole

00:10:51.540 bunch of stuff you admit you don't know. And lots of variables that are just assumptions. So am I

00:10:57.940 going to act on that? Am I going to act on your big bunch of guesses? You know, probably not.

00:11:04.180 So instead, they put it in the form of a model. And then people look at the model and they say,

00:11:10.300 well, I wouldn't necessarily trust these scientists, their opinions. But hey, the model is a model. I

00:11:15.760 mean, now it's just evidence. Now it's just objective. Now it's just a fact. Look at this

00:11:20.360 graph. And of course, it's not objective. It's not a fact. It's just the experts finding a way to

00:11:27.540 communicate that works. So I asked this question just before I came on, one minute before I came

00:11:35.920 on. And I wanted to see in the answers if anybody answered it. And the question was this. I said,

00:11:44.080 does there exist this kind of American anywhere in the country? And of 327 million Americans,

00:11:51.540 is there any one of us who would fit the following description this week? Okay? Does this person

00:11:59.120 exist? Someone who believes that the coronavirus models were bogus, but they believe that the

00:12:06.660 climate science models are credible. Does such a person exist this week? Now, if that sounds like an

00:12:14.500 opinion, I'm not trying to make it that way. I'm trying to make it, I'm not giving you an opinion on

00:12:20.900 climate science or coronavirus. I'm just saying that if you were of one kind of mind,

00:12:26.700 which is that models don't work, wouldn't you apply that to both situations, given that they're

00:12:33.540 both highly complicated, lots of assumptions, etc. So I think that the most consistent kind of person

00:12:44.300 is someone who believes the coronavirus models were good or good enough, but also believes that the

00:12:50.520 climate models are good or good enough directionally. And I'm just curious if there are people out there

00:12:57.260 who have split the difference and said, yeah, models can be terrible, and this one's bad, but well,

00:13:03.100 this one's still pretty good. Do they exist? I think there'll be fewer and fewer of them.

00:13:11.200 I'm seeing a question that says, is Mark Cuban on the task force? I do not know. I do not know.

00:13:17.160 The composition of the task force is going to be really interesting, isn't it? The president said

00:13:23.100 something like he wasn't even sure what party they belonged to, because he indicated he was

00:13:29.400 thinking in bipartisan terms for the committee, but I wonder if it actually ends up that way,

00:13:34.840 because Republicans are going to be more likely to search out and ask other Republicans. But it would

00:13:41.880 be good if he had some Democrats on there. I think that would be the smart way to go.

00:13:47.640 So here's my big question for the week, or maybe the month. And I want to see if any of you have

00:13:54.720 some visibility on this, or maybe you could tweet it at me afterwards. And the question is this.

00:14:00.460 There seem to be, in a general sense, two ways to reopen the economy. One of the ways is to do it by

00:14:08.940 geography and say, this is not a hotspot. So this zip code can open up. And you could imagine that

00:14:16.980 there would be obvious logical reasons why that makes sense. But another way to go, and of course,

00:14:23.700 it might be a mixture of the two, but another way to go just to keep them straight in your head

00:14:27.600 is you would reopen the economy to people who were low individual risk. So it wouldn't matter where they

00:14:34.900 were. It would only matter if they individually had a risk of dying if they caught it. So that could

00:14:41.420 include people who are recovered, people who are young, people who don't have, you know, complications

00:14:46.560 of other health problems, that sort of thing. And the question I asked is if you had to have a plan

00:14:51.900 that, let's say, was biased in one of those directions, because it's probably going to be a

00:14:56.240 combination, right? My guess is there'll be something about geography, but there'll also be

00:15:01.380 something about individuals, right? It's going to be a little of both. But if you had to emphasize

00:15:07.640 one over the other, which one would get you the greatest statistical effectiveness while also

00:15:14.620 opening the economy? I'm going to look at your comments here for a moment, because, yeah, so

00:15:21.080 everybody who says do both, that's not the comment I'm looking for, because I know it will be a

00:15:27.080 combination of both. I'm asking about weight. Yeah, stop saying both, please. We all know it's

00:15:35.480 both, some amount of both. But the, is it primarily, okay, it looks like people are just going to say

00:15:42.420 both in the comments, because nobody wants to make a decision here today. So, and did I hear somebody

00:15:51.680 in the comments who's saying, I favor individual, but is that the same as saying it would be the most

00:15:57.800 effective? You know, you might have a personal preference, because it gets you back to work

00:16:01.700 faster. But define effective. I would say effective would be the best balance of economic recovery

00:16:10.920 with low death rate, but you would have to make that decision yourself. So I'm not going to give you a

00:16:16.400 standard for that. Just what's your sense of it? Because the thing that has me stymied is it usually

00:16:26.000 risks, or at least a little bit obvious, you know, from 30,000 feet. Usually you can look at two choices

00:16:33.980 and know which one's the risky one. But in this case, I actually don't have a guess. If somebody says

00:16:42.200 they missed the question, so I'll ask it again. If we reopen the economy, would it be smarter to focus

00:16:47.240 on geographies that don't have a problem? Or would it be smarter to focus on individuals,

00:16:52.840 no matter where you are? And if you're a low risk individual, go back to work, knowing in advance

00:16:58.940 that it will be a combination of both. But you could have an emphasis on one, you know, it could be mostly

00:17:04.800 about geography with a little bit of individual stuff, or vice versa. Somebody says regional is

00:17:12.920 most effective. Now, I don't know why. If it's been studied, then I think I would accept that answer.

00:17:22.100 But just stating that one would be more effective than the other, without a reason is not convincing me.

00:17:27.900 Because I'm trying to, I'm trying to game it out in my head, I think you're doing the same thing

00:17:33.660 right now, which is you're, you're literally creating a little picture in your mind of like

00:17:38.500 a zip code. And then you're seeing, you know, people coming in and out, which is, of course,

00:17:43.400 you're ruining the integrity of the zip code that had no problems until people started coming in and

00:17:49.020 out. So if they go back to work, don't they just get the same infection rate eventually as New 0.99

00:17:57.020 York and everybody else? And it's just a matter of time, right? So actually, I'm starting to form

00:18:04.820 an opinion, very preliminary. And it goes like this. If you do it by geography, but you don't limit

00:18:11.260 travel, you are guaranteed to bring the virus in, into a situation in which nobody's in lockdown.

00:18:19.700 So the risk of spread is basically guaranteed. And if you've also not limited the high risk

00:18:26.640 individuals, if you haven't made any difference about anything else, you should expect that you

00:18:32.740 would reach something like 60% infection eventually, because that's what it takes to

00:18:41.220 get to herd immunity, I guess. So that's one model. But compare that to the model where

00:18:48.420 you still have mass infections, because you're sending the people who are safe back to work,

00:18:54.100 except the mass infections would be almost entirely on people who have a very low chance

00:19:00.680 of dying from it. So if you send the people who are individually most likely to survive,

00:19:07.780 they can get you close to herd infection or herd immunity, which, by the way, is now even questioned.

00:19:15.460 We're not even sure we have herd immunity, but still operating on that assumption.

00:19:18.880 So I'm going to say that your best play would be to send as many young people out to get infected 1.00

00:19:27.680 as you possibly could, and then try to get them to herd immunity with the fewest number of deaths

00:19:34.080 as you possibly could. That's my current opinion. Because if you just do it by zip code, there's too

00:19:39.540 much leakage from other places. And then they have exactly the setup that causes Italy,

00:19:45.420 which is you're not doing any social distancing, at least not the aggressive kind.

00:19:52.540 So, all right, that's my preliminary opinion. But I would like to hear experts, because I don't feel

00:19:57.980 like I could settle on that as a strong one. Somebody says geography with strict borders. I thought

00:20:04.520 about that. And it depends how you would define strict. You would, of course, have to let supplies

00:20:11.700 and, you know, goods and service, well, goods mostly across the border. You could probably limit

00:20:17.880 services if you had to. It would be really inconvenient. But people could get, you know,

00:20:25.100 their service within the boundaries if they had to, or they might just make some adjustments.

00:20:30.460 Yeah, I could see that. All right.

00:20:33.020 Here's one of the big question marks in my mind. I, of course, have a special place in my heart for

00:20:41.080 the restaurant business. I used to own a couple of restaurants. Didn't work out for me, which is no

00:20:47.680 surprise, by the way. I like to hasten to tell people that when I opened my restaurants, I did it

00:20:54.860 when I was rich enough that it didn't matter to me financially if they made it or not. Now, they didn't

00:21:00.080 make it, but it was, it's not like I was surprised or anything. However, it was an immensely rich

00:21:06.400 experience, which I would probably do again if I had the choice. And I learned just a ton. It was,

00:21:13.720 you know, good for the town. I hired, you know, I employed a lot of people during that time. So I'm

00:21:18.760 glad I did it. But, so I have a little bit of insight into that business that you wouldn't necessarily

00:21:24.120 have if you had only been a customer, not an owner. And here's what I think might happen because

00:21:30.960 of this coronavirus situation. Certainly in the next year, I don't see how restaurants could be

00:21:37.760 profitable. And most of them would go out of business, the independents especially. And the 0.97

00:21:44.300 reason is that most independent restaurants have to operate pretty close to 100% capacity to even have

00:21:51.520 a chance of profits. So if you take your average, you know, neighborhood independently owned restaurant

00:21:58.140 and you take 10% of their profits away, they're, they're already negative. That's probably all it

00:22:05.780 needs to take, I don't know, 75% of restaurants into negative territory because it's not a big margin

00:22:11.020 business. So my guess is that for the next year, there isn't really any reasonable way that the

00:22:19.900 smaller restaurants could possibly stay in business for that long, you know, doing things the way

00:22:27.240 they've always done it, which is trying to pack the room and it may not even be illegal. So here's

00:22:32.000 what I'm thinking. I'm imagining the ways that restaurants could quickly refigure, reconfigure to

00:22:37.900 become a different kind of business without spending a lot of money, something that would immediately

00:22:43.580 boost their income and maybe give them a chance. And just, here's some brainstorming ideas.

00:22:49.900 One idea is to rent tables in the restaurant for work at home people who just want to go someplace

00:22:59.280 that's not their own house. Now, if you work at home every day, you already know where I'm going

00:23:05.300 with this, right? If you work at home and you got kids there and you got, you know, you got a spouse

00:23:11.940 there, grandparents, you got dogs running around, you got people delivering stuff. It's kind of hard to

00:23:18.560 get any work done in your own house sometimes. So I know a lot of people who would be willing to rent

00:23:23.980 a table in a restaurant, let's say during the afternoon hours, let's say 2 p.m. to 5 p.m.

00:23:32.740 and let's say the morning from 7 a.m. to 11 a.m. and you can just rent a table. Now, you can stay there

00:23:42.400 and get some food to go or eat your lunch there also, or you could eat your lunch and then just

00:23:47.140 stay and rent the table for a few hours. You just bring your laptop and you just do your work, but

00:23:51.320 you don't make any phone calls. So that's one model. It basically combines what Starbucks already

00:23:58.400 does successfully, which is essentially they rent you tables, but they don't directly charge it.

00:24:04.080 They sort of embarrass you to buy Starbucks products. And if you buy their products, well,

00:24:11.720 then you sort of have indirectly you rented a table that you can sit at and use your laptop.

00:24:18.320 The president's already talking about making meals tax deductible for businesses. I think that'd be

00:24:25.240 a big change and great. Here's another change. Since we're all getting, a lot of us are getting

00:24:31.040 hooked on takeout and delivery, but the problem with takeout and delivery is the same analogous to

00:24:38.020 the problem of online school. I complain about online education because all they did is take a camera

00:24:46.040 and point it at somebody who knows how to teach. And that's not even close to where online education

00:24:52.660 could be if you had the right team and you did it right. Likewise, with restaurants, what restaurants

00:25:04.200 did for takeout, and especially during the crisis, is they took the items that are on their menu

00:25:09.540 at the prices that they're listed on the menu, added on top of it the delivery fee, which is usually the

00:25:16.980 fee that the delivery company does. And then basically they just took the same business model

00:25:23.140 and said, well, how about if we bring it to your house? Now, that's okay. You know, it meets a lot

00:25:29.500 of needs. And if you have a high income, it's a good alternative. But if restaurants are trying to

00:25:35.900 succeed, like in this new environment, one way they might go is to become a meal replacement business,

00:25:43.280 maybe in addition to the high-end stuff. But you can imagine them changing their business

00:25:50.100 into almost an exclusively meal replacement business, in which they maybe are not, you know,

00:25:59.200 doing the high-end steaks, but every night they have three or four choices that a family of four

00:26:05.100 would want to eat. And then they price it so that it doesn't, you know, it's not outrageous. So a lot of

00:26:13.140 that has to do with the pricing. So I think they could make a meal replacement model, which they

00:26:18.400 do not have now. Right now it's a restaurant model that they deliver to your house, which is

00:26:23.420 not the best of both worlds. That could be redesigned. I also imagine that you could turn

00:26:30.840 regular restaurants into drive-throughs or drive-ups, or like the old days where you went to a diner in

00:26:39.380 your car and the server, you know, rolled up on roller skates to the door of your car. So I, there's a

00:26:46.860 business in my town that sells ice cream. It's called the, the dairy. And it's been there forever.

00:26:53.780 And it's an institution in my town and it's a drive-up. So basically you, you get in line in your car

00:27:00.280 and the usually teenagers come out and they ask you what you want, you know, in line. So that by the

00:27:06.580 time you get up to the front of the line, they're almost ready and they just hand it to you and you

00:27:10.900 pay. So it's very efficient, but here's what's interesting. The business was not really designed

00:27:16.740 as a drive-through business. I think it just sort of evolved that way because, um, and, and then they

00:27:23.020 started changing the street. So there was so much business for this one ice cream place that the town

00:27:29.540 started putting cones out and sort of making it easier for a long line to form. And so I could easily

00:27:35.640 imagine that some restaurants would transform their parking lot into the restaurant. So you

00:27:42.440 could drive up in your car, order from your car. Maybe there's a movie or something playing in the

00:27:49.280 parking lot and you got people on roller skates or not bringing your food up, but they're, they're

00:27:55.620 trying to keep a distance, right? Or maybe they don't even bring the food up. Maybe they just, you know,

00:28:00.720 leave it on the table with a number and you go and get it yourself. Whatever's the least

00:28:04.560 contact. I also think that maybe movies will just go out of business because I'm not sure that going

00:28:13.460 to the movies even makes sense anymore. In my opinion, going to the movies was sort of the default

00:28:20.400 plan. If you didn't have anything fun to do, I mean, in the old days, going to the movies was

00:28:25.640 actually an event that you liked doing. But today with our attention spans being so small and movies

00:28:31.520 being so bad and the alternatives on our phone from Twitter to YouTube being so good that actually

00:28:38.700 going to a movie and sitting there in suboptimal conditions, it's just not as good. And I feel like

00:28:49.040 the pandemic might just end movies as a business and just move it to your house and your phone.

00:28:55.740 All right. I am fascinated by the fact that this Russia collusion coup situation has gigantic

00:29:07.420 breaking news right in the middle of the crisis and nobody cares. Like I'm going to talk about it

00:29:14.440 and even I can't find a way to care about it, even as important as it is because of the alternatives.

00:29:19.300 And so I guess John Solomon confirmed on Sean Hannity's radio that there are multiple grand

00:29:27.600 jury subpoenas going out on behalf of Attorney General John Durham. And we're also learning that

00:29:35.540 the FBI knew that the FISA applications were bogus and that the investigation was bogus and they did it

00:29:44.080 anyway. So now a lot of stuff is unredacted and we're learning more. We saw an unredacted thing

00:29:51.200 with George Papadopoulos in which whoever was the intelligence operative was trying to get him to

00:29:57.960 admit some kind of crime. And he was doing whatever is the opposite of admitting a crime. He said, no,

00:30:03.740 nobody do that. That's illegal and stuff. And he sounded like he meant it because he didn't know that

00:30:08.020 he was being, he didn't know that he was talking to an operative and he was talking, it looked like he was

00:30:13.560 just talking frankly. And it's pretty clear he didn't know about anything that was out of

00:30:18.960 ordinary. He didn't know anything. I mean, it's pretty clear when you see the conversation. And

00:30:24.640 now we know that. And now we can sort of go back and rewrite our own personal histories of whatever

00:30:32.380 we thought about this situation before. Because I started out skeptical. I started out skeptical that

00:30:40.220 there was some kind of organized coup attempt. I'm still not sure what organized means. As in,

00:30:47.680 I don't know if they had a leader. I don't know, you know, I don't know if they had meetings. I don't

00:30:53.340 know if they were all aware of the other people in the plot. I'm not saying that that's demonstrated.

00:30:59.140 But it's pretty clear that a lot of people had the same somewhat spontaneous notion that if they

00:31:05.740 could degrade the president in any way, it would be good for their team. So my guess is there was a

00:31:12.140 little bit of colluding. You know, certainly there were individuals talking to each other about what

00:31:16.600 they could do or would do. But I don't know how organized it was. I mean, was it organized down to

00:31:23.660 the point of trying to put their own person in charge? Or was it somewhat autonomous? People just

00:31:30.780 knew they didn't like the president, that they didn't care. Maybe they didn't care who replaced

00:31:35.080 him as long as it was a Democrat? Because that's a different coup. You know, one kind of coup says,

00:31:40.860 I'm going to get rid of the person who's there, but I'm going to put in a specific person who's my

00:31:45.300 person. That's a coup. The other one is just sort of people acting out their own personal trauma.

00:31:53.820 You know, just deciding, oh, I can do this. And I feel bad about the president. So I'll do this

00:31:59.280 small thing I can do. And I'll hope other people are doing things. And oh, I see the news is doing

00:32:03.860 their thing. And now I see the other Democrats are doing their thing. Oh, looks like we're all doing

00:32:09.480 this thing now. I feel like it might have been more like that. We'll find out.

00:32:19.620 Here's, so there's the big debate I'm seeing is about the police state, you know, or the things

00:32:26.300 we're doing for the coronavirus. Is it pushing us too far into 1984 and Big Brother and dictatorship

00:32:33.700 and police state? And these are all things to not joke about, and they're all serious. But some of

00:32:39.460 the examples are, you know, churches are being forced to not hold services together. License plates

00:32:46.800 are being recorded of anybody who does, so they can be followed up with later. One town, the sidewalks

00:32:53.840 have been designated for which direction. So you can get in trouble if you're on the wrong sidewalk,

00:32:59.080 walking the wrong way. You can get in trouble if you're surfing by yourself, sitting on the beach

00:33:04.560 all by yourself. So there are all these things that, you know, you can get dragged off a bus for not

00:33:10.260 wearing a mask, depending on your city. And then there's the talk of some kind of identification

00:33:17.060 documents if you can prove you have antibodies. Now, of course, a lot of the, you know, freedom

00:33:24.180 people, which is most people, but a lot of the conservatives I'm seeing are saying, you know, 0.96

00:33:31.380 damn it, you know, it's gone too far. We're giving up our freedom, our freedoms for this, 0.94

00:33:37.780 and it's not worth it. I have no respect for any of those opinions. None. I have no respect for that.

00:33:45.080 So all the people who say, you can't be closing the churches and telling us where to surf and the

00:33:51.460 beach and giving us IDs and all that. I have no respect for the people whose opinion is, we can't do

00:33:58.780 that because it's bad for freedom. Unless they believe all those things and they can put a number on it.

00:34:07.700 If you can put a number on it, then it's actually an opinion. Otherwise, it's just bitching, right? 0.97

00:34:13.300 If you can say to me, look, I think that the state should not put all these restrictions on us.

00:34:20.340 I think we should be allowed to live our lives. The people who are in more danger, they know they

00:34:24.640 are, they can hide. The rest of us, why don't we reopen the economy? That's a good opinion if

00:34:30.560 you can put a number of deaths on it that you're willing to accept for your preferred plan. Without

00:34:37.760 that, without that, you're just bitching. Yeah, nobody should even listen to you whatsoever. 1.00

00:34:43.820 So if all you're complaining about is somebody wasn't allowed to go to church, wasn't allowed

00:34:48.120 to surf, whatever, I have no respect for your opinion. None. Unless you can tell me how many

00:34:56.280 people you're willing to kill to reserve that right. And then I might agree with you or I might 0.79

00:35:01.560 disagree, but I would fully respect an opinion that had a number on it. Here's the worst thought

00:35:13.140 you're going to have. I don't think it's bad, but you might take it that way. I think in order to get

00:35:20.040 past the coronavirus situation, we're going to have to make one of the hardest choices a free country

00:35:26.140 ever made. And it goes like this. We can have privacy or we can have freedom, but we can't have

00:35:36.740 both anymore. And here's a specific example. Freedom would be the freedom to, you know, go to work,

00:35:44.660 go where you want, go to the beach, go to church. So that's the freedom I'm talking about. The freedom

00:35:49.040 of where you go and what you do. In order to have that in the age of coronavirus, you would almost

00:35:57.400 have to give up your privacy because I don't see any way we could ever get there unless some people

00:36:05.200 are willing to have contact tracing. Let's say you have their phones monitored where they are so you

00:36:10.180 know who touches, who gets in contact with somebody else. Maybe something like the ID cards, you know,

00:36:17.540 it could be digital. It doesn't have to be a physical document or a card. You have any wallet.

00:36:23.460 But I think probably the very minimum we're going to need to do is to give up our privacy about who's

00:36:29.600 been tested, what the result is, and where they've been in terms of contacting other people. Short of

00:36:37.040 doing those things, I honestly don't see any way past it. I don't. Because even if you had testing,

00:36:44.000 you still sort of need to know who's tested and who isn't, right? Don't you feel like you have to

00:36:51.980 have some records of who got tested and who didn't? So there's your privacy there. People will know if

00:36:57.840 you didn't get tested, probably. Now, I don't know if they're even collecting that information, but I

00:37:02.360 don't think we can get to the other side without giving up freedom. Now, here's the good news.

00:37:11.120 This is something Eric Weinstein was saying, talking about going to Mars. And one of his points,

00:37:16.680 I hope I'm presenting it accurately. There's always that risk I'm not. But one of his points was that

00:37:23.060 as humans become more godlike in our powers, in other words, one person will have the power to

00:37:30.400 build a nuclear weapon and destroy half of the country. So as individuals get more and more

00:37:36.320 powerful, which is just a given, right? We'll have our drones and our weapons of mass destruction,

00:37:41.020 and then you'll be able to buy a coronavirus on the dark net. So people will get more and more

00:37:47.060 dangerous. And the only way to protect against that, Eric Weinstein was saying, well, some of us

00:37:52.180 are just going to have to leave the planet and go to Mars. But I don't know how that solves it.

00:37:56.940 Because how do you get only good people on Mars? I mean, eventually some terrorists are going to

00:38:03.180 end up on Mars too. So I don't think you can escape it. I believe that the only way we'll be able to

00:38:09.620 live together, as each of us individually gain godlike powers, is to give up privacy. In other words,

00:38:19.620 the system is going to need to identify people who are developing the plan so they can stop them

00:38:27.440 before they do it. Otherwise, we just won't be able to live on the same planet. You know, if there's

00:38:33.360 only half of one percent of us who are crazy and willing to kill the rest of us, that's the end of the 0.95

00:38:41.340 planet. Because that half of one percent will have the complete capability to ruin the rest of the 0.99

00:38:46.440 planet. We'll have the motivation, the ability to do it, and nothing can stop them except a complete

00:38:55.780 loss of privacy so that you can see it developing. So this is the toughest thing we will ever have to

00:39:02.700 do since maybe the American Revolution. We will actually have to explicitly decide to give up one of

00:39:10.640 our most cherished rights, privacy. But here's the good news. I think we can figure out how to do it

00:39:19.420 without the big downside risk. Now, of course, as soon as you give up privacy, and I don't know if

00:39:26.580 somebody said this in the comments yet, but I would expect it. The moment you give up privacy,

00:39:31.780 smart people will say, well, that's just the beginning of the end. Because once you give up privacy,

00:39:37.920 the government knows too much about you, and then tyranny can happen and dictatorships because

00:39:43.800 they have too much control over you because they know too much about you. Now, I have empathy for

00:39:49.780 that position, but I think we can cleverly get past that with this insight. As long as the government

00:39:59.260 also doesn't have privacy, you'll be fine. The worst situation is if the government, let's say the people

00:40:05.780 running the government, they have all of their privacy and they can operate behind closed doors

00:40:11.080 and you don't know what's happening, but you've lost all of yours. That's the worst possible situation

00:40:17.680 because that's pretty much begging for a dictator at that point, right? But suppose our transparency of

00:40:24.940 a government is complete, whatever that means. So I'm talking conceptually now. So if the government

00:40:30.540 has a meeting, you find out what they talked about. If somebody decides to find out your name

00:40:39.020 in a government database, maybe the system is designed so you get a message and it says,

00:40:46.600 huh, the governor just looked at your name on this list. And then you could say, hey, I'm going to

00:40:51.220 tweet about this. Why is the governor looking at my name on a list? What's that got to do with

00:40:57.160 anything? Now, I'm just trying to make up examples so they're bad ones. But the point is, if we the

00:41:02.820 public could see everything that our leaders were doing, which we can't now, so it would require much

00:41:08.980 more transparency, then we would not be in so much risk that they would abuse our lack of privacy.

00:41:17.960 Now, I think also you could game the system to protect privacy while getting still some of the

00:41:23.060 benefits. For example, Apple and Google have this announcement where they're going to make it

00:41:30.400 possible for you to have an app that would track who came in contact with whom because your Bluetooth

00:41:36.160 would be on and your Bluetooth would recognize each other when you came close. So if you get the

00:41:41.660 virus and you get tested and you have it, some app and algorithm can find the people you were with

00:41:49.840 and send them a message and say, you know, be careful or whatever, whatever the advice is.

00:41:56.320 Now, it would be easy to write this system so that no human being was ever directly alerted to who was

00:42:03.960 involved. In other words, the programmers could create the system and then just let it run and nobody

00:42:10.240 would actually see who is getting the texts. So, you know, you could have some anonymity built into the

00:42:17.180 process, but as all of you will quickly note, that doesn't really protect you because the

00:42:24.560 programmers can find out who you are. They wrote the software. They can find out who you are and the

00:42:30.180 government can tell the programmers to find out who you are. So, really, the government has full access

00:42:35.680 to finding out anything they want about you, but they already have that. The government can already

00:42:42.860 find out anything they want about you. You only think it's different. So my point is, if we can

00:42:48.540 build some tools that you would think would give up some of your privacy, as long as the government

00:42:55.060 was also more transparent than it is now, we could make it work and we could protect your anonymity

00:43:00.540 except for maybe the programmers, but then if you have enough visibility, even they can't do anything

00:43:08.360 bad with it because everybody's watching. So that's the basic idea. I think that's where we're going.

00:43:15.820 Utopian thinking.

00:43:19.020 Is it? I would say utopian thinking would be if you believe that people would act upon their good

00:43:27.560 nature and good impulses. So I would think an impractical utopian opinion would be, oh, people will

00:43:34.720 share. People will not be selfish. Once people have all they need, they won't steal. But I don't

00:43:43.240 believe any of that. So what I just described, I think, is the opposite of utopian because it makes

00:43:51.720 the worst assumptions about human nature. If your system is going to survive, it needs to make the

00:43:58.940 worst assumptions about people and still work. Let me give you two examples. Democracy. Democracy works,

00:44:08.460 and a democratic republic, they work, even though all the individuals voting are, I'm sorry, even though all 1.00

00:44:16.200 the individuals voting are mostly idiots. And still it works, right? So you can make the worst assumption about 1.00

00:44:24.940 the citizens. But you can still see that a system well designed cancels out the idiots. And you still 1.00

00:44:33.300 get something that all the idiots say, well, it looks good. I voted. I feel good about this, even 1.00

00:44:38.180 though my person didn't win. Likewise with capitalism. Capitalism makes the worst assumptions about human

00:44:45.040 beings, that we're selfish and that we will do anything to screw somebody else as long as we can get

00:44:49.940 away with it. And then they built a system called capitalism. We all act selfishly, and it makes us

00:44:56.620 rich. So that's a good system. So likewise, with this privacy question, you would have, whatever you

00:45:04.260 did, you would have to design it so the worst impulses of human beings is built into the system, and it

00:45:10.460 still works. So whoever said, I'm thinking like a utopian, you would be right if I'd ever made any

00:45:17.660 assumption about people doing the right thing. But I always aggressively make the opposite assumption

00:45:23.140 that we're all evil and selfish, unless somebody's watching. So that's why I add the transparency,

00:45:30.920 because the government would be evil and selfish if you weren't watching. All right.

00:45:36.820 Saying things could be more efficient is not utopian. Correct. Correct. Yeah, we're a constitutional

00:45:48.320 republic with democratic principles. I'll give you that. Scott is famous, so he's already a non-private

00:45:55.980 person with nothing to lose. Well, first of all, I respect that comment, because it echoes some things

00:46:02.360 I've said before, that I've effectively lived in your future, which is that I've lived in a world for

00:46:09.540 decades in which I don't have privacy the way other people do. Meaning that I assume hackers are trying

00:46:18.320 harder to get my stuff. I assume that people in the government, people in social media have snooped in

00:46:24.540 my messages. I mean, I just assume. All right. Do you assume that, would you assume that any big

00:46:32.880 social media network has looked at your actual messages, your private messages? Would you ever

00:46:38.760 assume that? Probably not, right? Because they wouldn't care. So you have the privacy of nobody caring.

00:46:45.720 But I do assume that everybody who's a famous person probably has had their private messages looked

00:46:53.640 over by programmers and developers and other people like that. So I've always assumed that I

00:46:59.680 don't have privacy the way other people do, just because there's more interest in violating it. And

00:47:04.320 of course, it's possible. You know, the people who program the systems have every ability to look at

00:47:09.380 all the information, of course. But the specific type of privacy I was talking about, even I still have,

00:47:17.360 which is the privacy of movement without being tracked. So the specific privacy I was

00:47:23.620 talking about is, you know, losing my privacy of who I talked to and where I was. And I'm saying

00:47:31.520 that I would give that up, too. Because at the moment, I have the same privacy you do. Nobody,

00:47:35.680 you know, nobody knows where I drove my car yesterday. Only I know. But I would give that up.

00:47:42.300 If it meant it's the only way to go back to work.

00:47:44.560 Are you saying the nanny state is inevitable with advanced technology? I would call I wouldn't I don't

00:47:54.380 want to use your term, because there's something different about what I think. What I think is that

00:48:00.680 the system that'll work is not the nanny state, where the government is sort of the nanny, and you're

00:48:07.780 like the children, but rather something more like a standoff. No, mutually assured destruction is what

00:48:14.200 I call it. So instead of saying it's a nanny state, I would say what I favor is mutually assured

00:48:20.160 destruction, which is, hey, politician, you have you have the physical ability to violate my privacy.

00:48:28.260 But if you do, you're going to lose your job. Because I'm going to know about it. We have we have so

00:48:34.880 much transparency, I'm going to know about it. So if you violate my privacy for no good reason,

00:48:40.880 you lost your job. So the system that I think would work would be mutually assured destruction.

00:48:46.880 Now, nothing's perfect. So could you design a system in which there's just no way anybody

00:48:53.180 could violate your privacy without getting caught? No, probably not. But I'll bet you can get most of

00:48:58.660 it. You know, I'll bet you could do a real good job. You know, nothing's perfect.

00:49:02.480 And if you can't design it, then then I'd probably vote with you that you don't want to give up your

00:49:08.940 privacy. I wouldn't give up privacy unless we had that extra transparency. Okay.

00:49:18.120 The death rate for healthy people is much closer to flu-like. Why would they lose freedoms? I feel

00:49:25.540 like you haven't been paying attention. Can somebody in the comments answer this question before I have to?

00:49:31.500 Why would the people who are not at risk any more than regular flu, the people who are healthy and

00:49:39.160 young and let's say female, why should they be prevented from going out when their risk is no 0.88

00:49:45.680 greater than it is for other stuff? Now, actually, it is greater, but you know, you could argue it's in

00:49:51.600 that range. Does anybody want to give the answer? Because I'm frustrated that it's not obvious.

00:50:01.140 All right. So it might take a while because there's some time lag. Let me give you the answer.

00:50:04.980 The answer is that all you people who do not have a risk of dying, not much risk, the young people, 0.97

00:50:11.640 the idea is that you'll go out and get infected and take it home and kill grandma.

00:50:15.120 So it really isn't about you. So if you were the only person who existed and only your personal 0.94

00:50:23.160 risk mattered, yeah, go back to work. In fact, if the only thing that mattered was you,

00:50:29.340 why would we be doing any of this? The odds of you dying are pretty darn low, right? The entire

00:50:35.580 purpose is to protect people you don't even know, whose names you'll never know. Now, if you say,

00:50:42.940 I don't want to do that, you know, the cost benefit doesn't work, that well, you could make

00:50:47.220 that argument. But don't make the argument that individuals can just manage their individual risk.

00:50:54.920 We don't live in that world. Your risk could kill me. And we have a pretty long history of saying

00:51:03.880 that you can have your freedom unless it kills me. Yeah, you can smoke your cigarettes unless it's

00:51:10.980 around me. You can drive without a license, unless it's on the road that I'm on, you know, a public

00:51:19.260 road. So, you know, all of our rights are balanced against other people's costs and benefits as well.

00:51:30.060 And how could you change that? I mean, that's not the way it changes. So anybody who thinks that this

00:51:34.060 situation will be the one situation in the world in which only your individual risk will matter,

00:51:40.960 you need to wake up. You don't live in that world. You don't live in a world where only your individual

00:51:47.320 risk will be the determinant of what the policy is. It's always about what you do and how it affects

00:51:53.040 other people. It couldn't be any other way. There would be no point in having a government.

00:51:57.060 There's no point in having a government if everybody can just do what's in their personal

00:52:01.860 best interest. That's the whole point. All right. This comment says, I am stuck on this.

00:52:12.440 If we do this for 100,000 to 200,000 lives, why not for 80,000 or 50,000?

00:52:18.260 Good question. Here's my answer. Almost everybody who is thinking wrong about this makes the same

00:52:27.400 mistake, which is to compare the mitigated low number with the unmitigated number of regular flu.

00:52:38.640 So the unmitigated number of regular flu could get up to, you know, 50,000 or 80,000, right?

00:52:44.580 Okay. And we as a society have decided, yeah, if that's how many people you lose, 50,000 to 80,000 a

00:52:54.280 year, we think we should leave the economy open for that. So the questioner asked, well, if it's

00:53:00.460 only 50,000 to 80,000 and we keep it open for the regular flu, and it looks like it might only be 60,000

00:53:06.800 for this one, why wouldn't we keep it open for this? Because they're not the same. One is with full

00:53:12.780 mitigation. One is with no mitigation. You're comparing a rock to a giraffe.

00:53:23.280 If you're stuck on that, you haven't been paying attention to anything. The most important thing

00:53:30.320 you have to understand is that if we did not mitigate the coronavirus, it's not going to be

00:53:36.240 100,000 deaths. It's going to be a million. It's going to be a million. Now ask yourself,

00:53:44.220 how powerful is the shelter in place, the social isolation? How much does it work?

00:53:51.860 Well, according to the models, the difference between what we're doing to mitigate and not

00:53:58.160 is the difference between a million people dying and something closer to 100,000. Maybe it'll even be

00:54:04.460 lower. So it's about a 10 to 1 or a 20 to 1 death rate between mitigating and not mitigating. Is that

00:54:11.380 not clear? All right. What if the flu is at 200,000? If the regular flu was at 200,000, then we would

00:54:25.760 certainly have a conversation about closing the, I hate that phrase, having a conversation. We would be

00:54:31.180 debating whether we should do something about it. But you are also still missing the point.

00:54:38.880 If the regular flu had the risk of killing a million, we would treat it just like this one.

00:54:45.580 So maybe I can summarize it this way. For every risk that has a risk of killing a million people,

00:54:52.100 we always treat that risk the same way, as very serious. And if a risk might kill 50,000-ish,

00:54:59.220 it has been our way to let it go. 50,000 people die in cars or less. So you can think of lots of

00:55:07.720 things in which sub-50,000 people die. But you can't think of too many things that kill a million

00:55:14.760 people. Oh, smoking, actually. Smoking is kind of a special case because it's grandfathered in and

00:55:20.760 were, and people are literally hooked on it. Somebody says, I will never trust the rulers. Well,

00:55:30.780 that's a good. Somebody says, exasperated, Scott, is most amusing. Well, could I be more exasperated

00:55:40.720 than intelligent people comparing a fully mitigated flu with one that's not? I mean,

00:55:51.260 if I see that comparison one more time, I think my head is going to explode. Because that's really,

00:55:56.880 that's the most basic thing you have to understand. If you don't understand that we can only have the

00:56:04.720 60,000 or 100,000 deaths with aggressive mitigation. If you don't understand that,

00:56:10.340 and that the real number to compare to the flu is a million, and I think that's low, by the way.

00:56:16.620 As some smart people are starting to say, we don't really have a plan that doesn't kill

00:56:22.380 2% of our population times 0.6. Let's say herd immunity happens around 0.7. 70% of the public

00:56:33.740 has it. You can get herd immunity, according to Dr. Oz, 65 to 70%. So let's say 70.

00:56:41.460 So even if we slowly go back and manage our risks, we're probably going to get to 60% of 320,

00:56:52.160 27 million times 2% people are going to die. They just won't die all in three months. So we might

00:56:59.600 be able to spread out the hospital impact, which would be important, which would be a thing. But

00:57:06.920 when you talk about going back to work, unless you've got the testing in place, or DNA testing,

00:57:14.120 or therapeutics, or vaccines, or something, unless you have those things, you're kind of talking about

00:57:20.100 killing a million people, just spreading it out. So we'll see what happens. Anyway, that's all I 0.85

00:57:26.040 got for today. Well, no, I'll have more today. Tonight. I'll have more tonight. Somebody says,

00:57:31.540 what about fentanyl? Fentanyl's not legal as a recreational drug, so that's already illegal.

00:57:38.140 All right. I'll talk to you tonight. You know when.

Real Coffee with Scott Adams - April 11, 2020

Episode 906 Scott Adams： Simultaneous Sip Doesn't Happen on its Own. Get in Here.

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