Real Coffee with Scott Adams - April 11, 2020


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


Episode Stats

Length

57 minutes

Words per Minute

158.78407

Word Count

9,162

Sentence Count

567

Misogynist Sentences

3

Hate Speech Sentences

7


Summary

In this episode, I talk about the Democratic Party, the economy, and why they don t know what to do until they can actually have an opinion of their own. Also, I do a world premiere of the most important thing that will ever happen this year, the simultaneous swaddle sip.


Transcript

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
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
00:01:25.260 the damn pandemic. It's called the simultaneous swaddle sip. And it happens now. Go.
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
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,
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
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
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
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
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,
00:33:31.380 damn it, you know, it's gone too far. We're giving up our freedom, our freedoms for this,
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?
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.
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
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
00:38:41.340 planet. Because that half of one percent will have the complete capability to ruin the rest of the
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
00:44:16.200 the individuals voting are mostly idiots. And still it works, right? So you can make the worst assumption about
00:44:24.940 the citizens. But you can still see that a system well designed cancels out the idiots. And you still
00:44:33.300 get something that all the idiots say, well, it looks good. I voted. I feel good about this, even
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
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,
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
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
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.