Real Coffee with Scott Adams - Episode 957 Scott Adams： Let Me Tell You About the Psychedelic Mushroom I Accidentally Ingested Called CNN

00:00:00.000 d

00:00:10.000 well it's a very special evening edition of no coffee with scott adams because it's it's the

00:00:17.720 evening who drinks coffee at night this guy yeah caught you off guard today to have a

00:00:27.780 a beverage, do you? A bong or a joint, it's fine. Whatever. Beer. It's good. It's evening.

00:00:34.620 You can. We're not all working tonight. But I am. I never sleep. But you should. It's

00:00:41.420 good for you. Join me now for the bonus simultaneous sip. It's happening now.

00:00:51.900 Ah. Delightful.

00:00:57.780 So, let's see. You know, one of the things that we do not give enough credit for, and

00:01:08.200 sometimes, every now and then, I think we should pause and show our respect for the healthcare

00:01:15.300 workers. Specifically, not only are the healthcare frontline workers handling the biggest pandemic

00:01:21.840 in 100 years, at great personal risk. But on top of the pandemic, they're also handling an epidemic of

00:01:30.580 people who are ingesting disinfectant. And man, are they doing a good job. Because I don't know about

00:01:39.820 you, but I haven't even heard one problem with that yet. Have you? Because I know there's a lot of it

00:01:46.840 going on, because the press told me it was a pretty big problem. And the fact that you're not hearing

00:01:53.260 much about it, just, well, I'm led to believe that our healthcare workers are handling not only the

00:01:59.720 coronavirus. Wow. But they've, they've reduced this epidemic of disinfectant drinking to, you don't

00:02:09.400 even hear about it anymore. It's like, it's like it's not even in the news. I mean, you can't get

00:02:14.940 better than that. So slow clap for the frontline, healthcare workers who make it seem like the 1.00

00:02:24.460 epidemic of drinking disinfectant wasn't even real. I mean, seems like it. But we know it was.

00:02:33.820 So I made the mistake of turning on CNN tonight.

00:02:36.780 Right. And it's really hard to do this next part without stopping to pause every few seconds and

00:02:47.280 saying, I'm not making this up. So if I could maybe just say once in the beginning, that anything I say

00:02:55.100 for a while, until I tell you otherwise, I swear to God, I didn't make it up. It's actual real.

00:03:02.080 So I turned on CNN, just for the laughs. Honest to God, that's why. All right, not a joke. Man,

00:03:15.080 was I not disappointed. The experience was like being on mushrooms. And I've talked about, you know,

00:03:22.780 this one time I'd ever done mushrooms when I was 21, I guess. And the thing I took away from that

00:03:30.240 experience, the mushrooms, was that you could experience a whole different world, but everything

00:03:35.420 still worked. You know, everything looked different and new and wonderful and bizarre. And, you know,

00:03:42.820 you'd never seen anything before. You know, you'd look at a chair and it was like you'd see, you're

00:03:48.040 seeing it for the first time. You'd be like, you'd be amazed by it. But at the same time, you knew what

00:03:53.160 it was. Oh, it's a chair. You sit on it. You knew how to work it. So it was like everything in your

00:03:58.440 world changed. And yet somehow you still knew how to work it. It was the weirdest experience.

00:04:04.480 But turning on CNN and seeing an alternate universe is just absolutely mind-blowing. It

00:04:11.760 was actually, for a while I felt like, and this again, remember I told you, I'm not making this up.

00:04:19.540 So what follows is not an exaggeration. It felt like an almost psychedelic experience

00:04:27.100 because I got to feel a whole different reality and I spent enough time in it that I started to

00:04:35.000 feel like what it must be like to be a full-time inhabitant of that movie. Let me give you a taste

00:04:42.380 taste of what I learned in 10 minutes of CNN. This was an Anderson Cooper show.

00:04:52.780 That the coronavirus is unstoppable, but the president stopped it wrong. I mean, that's a

00:04:58.940 little hyperbole, but there's some version of that, that there's nothing we know how to do

00:05:03.520 in any possible way that could stop this thing. And the president is at fault for not stopping it.

00:05:10.880 And I'm listening to this and I'm saying, do you not know that those don't go together?

00:05:17.960 That if it can't be stopped, it's also got to be true that you couldn't have stopped it wrong

00:05:25.200 because of the can't be stopped part. Have you noticed, I think to myself, that every country is

00:05:33.800 doing something completely different and getting largely the same result? Has anybody brought that up?

00:05:40.860 No matter what any country does, we don't know why some things worked and some don't. There are

00:05:47.600 some that are actually getting a better result, but we can't identify any one thing or a combination

00:05:53.320 of things with any kind of reliability that would tell you why it worked. It could be that none of the

00:06:00.340 things the government is doing makes any difference. It could be entirely social. It could be entirely

00:06:06.840 density. It could be entirely how many foreign travelers there are. It could be entirely where

00:06:12.380 you are on the timeline of getting it or already had it. We don't know anything about this thing.

00:06:18.700 But the thing we do know is we don't know how to stop it, not even a little bit. 0.96

00:06:22.220 So in the other universe of CNN, it's an unstoppable problem that the president is a big old dope

00:06:32.800 because he didn't stop it. I guess. You know, of course, I'm putting my own words to it, but that's

00:06:41.040 the sense you get from watching it. He had some woman who was an expert on pandemics and he asked

00:06:49.440 her sort of what the best case scenario was. So here's an expert on pandemics and here's her best

00:06:55.800 case scenario. So remember, the context is that the Trump administration has done bad things. They

00:07:02.440 haven't handled it right, right? That's the permanent context. The Trump administration,

00:07:07.440 totally incompetent. So it would be reasonable to say, well, if everything they've done is wrong, 0.79

00:07:15.600 what would it look like to do it all right? And so they have, they give their pandemic expert a chance

00:07:22.200 to give them the best case scenario. If you did everything right, give us the rosy picture. What

00:07:28.560 would it look like to be competent? And she said this, that we'd develop a coronavirus vaccine by

00:07:38.480 year end and it would be the really good kind, the kind that doesn't even need to be refrigerated.

00:07:42.380 And we would get 20 million people signed up to be like an army that would scour the world and

00:07:48.440 we'd produce tons and tons of this vaccine that works and we've got it in record time. And the 20

00:07:55.400 million people would go across the world, they would find every villager in every remote city,

00:08:00.240 they'd give them a vaccine, bam. And then she said, but that's kind of impossible.

00:08:11.480 Because you know why? It's impossible. There's no way that's going to happen by the end of the year.

00:08:18.340 And if it did, by the end of the year, we're going to be pretty close to herd immunity, whether we like

00:08:25.280 it or not. It's not our plan. But by the end of the year, by the time we've scoured the planet with

00:08:31.160 our 20 million people, what year is that? Is that even 2021? 2022? So the best alternative

00:08:39.000 to all these mess ups that this dumb old orange, stupid monster of a science denying 1.00

00:08:47.740 orange thing, all of those mistakes are not nearly as good as the alternative, which was 0.99

00:08:57.600 clearly explained, which is magic. Magic. Because there's no other solution. That's the best

00:09:06.520 case scenario is literally something that can't happen. Do they even know how to compare things?

00:09:13.320 That's not comparing things. When you compare things, you're supposed to compare it to something

00:09:17.820 that could happen. If you compare it to things that can't happen, you're doing it wrong.

00:09:27.480 For example, if somebody said, hey, Bob, what are your career aspirations? And Bob said, well,

00:09:34.880 I'm going to go to law school, I get good grades, go study art, try to be a lawyer. Not bad.

00:09:41.200 What's your other alternative, Bob? Well, other alternative is I'll sprout wings out of my ass 1.00

00:09:48.920 and fly to Mars. Bob, that's not actually an alternative. Because what that has going, 0.99

00:09:57.120 working against it is the impossibility of it. Because you're not going to sprout wings out your 0.83

00:10:03.880 ass and fly to Mars. So really, you haven't offered me an alternative. You've just told me an impossible 1.00

00:10:11.140 thing. So you're doing it wrong. That was a terrible example. But you know what I'm, you know where I'm

00:10:17.600 coming from? Oh, I'm not done yet. Then Anderson Cooper spreads the idea that the president disbanded

00:10:26.280 the crisis task force. Wait for this. You have to hear this. Anderson Cooper speculated because he

00:10:36.800 did say that he can't know what somebody is thinking. And then he went on to tell us what

00:10:42.780 somebody is thinking. But at least he admitted that it can't be done before he did it. That's

00:10:47.640 progress. And he said that, he's speculating anyway, that the president disbanded the coronavirus

00:10:54.440 task force because, wait for it, he was embarrassed for getting called out for suggesting that maybe

00:11:03.200 people should ingest disinfectant to cure the coronavirus. Which, as you know, but apparently

00:11:11.220 the viewers of CNN don't know, never happened. He puts it out there like it happened. That didn't

00:11:20.500 happen. The president was talking about light as a disinfectant. There is a real product in testing

00:11:26.460 right now that injects, literally injects, the disinfectant, the light, into the lungs. They don't

00:11:33.980 know if it works yet, but it's based on solid science. There are real, you know, serious companies

00:11:39.400 doing it. It's not shady people. So, but on CNN, there's still, days after it's been the most widely

00:11:49.840 debunked story in the face of debunked stories, they're still, they're still reporting it like

00:11:54.460 it's fact. And I asked myself, because I really don't know the answer to this, do their viewers

00:12:00.360 really think that happened? I mean, imagine living in the world where you think that the leader of

00:12:08.720 your country may have tossed out the idea of drinking bleach. And just think about that. Think

00:12:15.320 about you wake up in the morning and you're like, oh, oh, oh, you start screaming because you know you 0.75

00:12:22.720 woke up into a world in which your leader is an orange monster who's encouraging people to drink 0.99

00:12:29.540 poison and die. That's actually what you think you woke up into, an actual world like that. And why 0.98

00:12:36.300 would you think that? Because it's on the news. It's actually on the news. But of course, it didn't

00:12:42.680 happen. So, all right, but there's more. There's also the magical thinking that the president should

00:12:51.460 have done something sooner. All right, that's, that's going to be the main attack on the president

00:12:56.960 is he didn't take it seriously sooner. But of course, the reason he didn't take it seriously

00:13:02.040 is that the experts were advising him, and they had not yet turned up the heat. So he was doing

00:13:08.460 everything that his critics asked of him, which is he was, he was very clearly, quickly, and

00:13:16.000 unambiguously following expert advice. It just happened to be wrong. So you'd think they would

00:13:23.600 mention that. You'd think that would be part of the story that, yeah, maybe he was a little slow on

00:13:29.980 this based on our perfect hindsight. But are all of the reviewers so dumb that they don't know that 0.99

00:13:38.060 we only know it now? We didn't know it then. If it was so obvious then, tell Tony Fauci because he 1.00

00:13:45.680 didn't know. Apparently he didn't know. Now, of course, China is, you know, to blame for giving 0.98

00:13:50.880 us bad information. So there are perfectly good reasons for it. But on CNN, those perfectly good

00:13:57.320 reasons, which are China lied, Fauci was fooled, Fauci gave Trump bad advice based on bad data from

00:14:05.480 China. Trump followed the bad advice. That's the story. But over, over on, over on CNN, he just started

00:14:14.340 late. That is so different. That is not even the same universe. Yeah, he was just, yeah, he was dumb.

00:14:22.740 He just started late. And their viewers watch that. They go, yeah, big old dumb orange monster told us 0.99

00:14:29.080 to drink bleach and he didn't take a pandemic seriously. My God, I, I'm so afraid of what's 0.99

00:14:35.580 going to happen. I need Joe Biden. Stat. They, they also talked about disbanding the task force

00:14:44.060 as if that's crazy. Now, here's where having some experience in different domains really serves you

00:14:52.160 well. And I'm going to guess that there may be some, you know, experience lacking in the people who

00:14:59.040 were on the, on the, that episode. And here's how this works. When the government disbands the task

00:15:07.880 force, that is not the same as not working on the problem. You'd think that they would explain that

00:15:16.100 anybody who's had any experience in a big organization knows that it is very common to,

00:15:21.940 you know, build, build a task force. It does its work. And then, you know, when it gets past the

00:15:27.840 critical period as we, as we have in a sense, because we now have enough supplies, we have enough

00:15:33.760 ventilators, we have a blueprint of a plan, you know, everything that can be done by the federal

00:15:39.500 government sort of been done, which is that they backstop the states to the point where the states

00:15:45.840 really want to do their own thing. The citizens of those states want the state to make the decision.

00:15:51.340 They don't want the federal government to make it. And, and the president said, well, who gets, who's

00:15:57.420 the best? And here's the beautiful part. We can't tell the difference between genius and stupidity.

00:16:05.220 We really can't. You know, we think we can, but we can't. It looks identical because both a genius 1.00

00:16:11.640 and a stupid person will do something that doesn't make any sense to you. So if you don't understand 1.00

00:16:18.240 why somebody is doing something, just keep in mind, there might be two reasons, not one.

00:16:23.580 One is that they're smarter than you, right? This might, this might be an example of that. So the

00:16:30.620 way CNN is reporting it is that the president's just sort of trying to put the responsibility of

00:16:36.780 who dies on the states so that he can get reelected. Because people are going to die no matter what.

00:16:43.380 But if the president says, all right, it's up to the states, then the responsibility is on the states,

00:16:48.160 and it's a political move. And so the president is cleverly moving responsibility for killing people

00:16:53.920 off to other people. Now, is that what's happening? Yeah. Yeah. That's one of the variables.

00:17:03.540 But of course, it's CNN. So they can only handle one variable at a time. So is there anything that

00:17:09.580 a president does that's not political, you know, a few months before the election? No, come on.

00:17:15.520 Everything has a political dimension. But is that the reason that you turn it to the states

00:17:23.180 around now? I think he said at the end of the month. No. The reason that you turn it over the

00:17:28.660 states is genius. It's genius. Here's why. What have I, and by the way, this won't be the first time

00:17:38.300 I've said this. So if you remember some of my earlier periscopes, I was making a big deal about the

00:17:43.440 fact that the federal government is the wrong instrument for making the decision. Because it

00:17:50.180 is a life and death decision. And you put your president in this position, and he should not make

00:17:56.420 the decision. And the position is this, Mr. President, do you want the poor people to die,

00:18:02.980 the sick people, or the old people? Because whichever way you go is going to move, is move the emphasis. 0.95

00:18:10.120 There's a lot of overlap in those groups, obviously. But the emphasis of who dies is going to be largely

00:18:15.940 determined by whether you're favoring the economy or the absolute avoidance and health aspects of the

00:18:23.340 virus. So the president did what the Constitution understands he should do, push responsibility down

00:18:35.300 whenever it's practical. More importantly, if it's a life and death decision, which these are,

00:18:41.380 that also needs to be pushed down to the closest level of authority that's closest to the individual.

00:18:50.780 Because if you're going to make life and death decisions about me,

00:18:54.880 I would much rather have somebody who lives in my house make the decision.

00:18:58.920 And if that's not possible, I want one of my closest neighbors to make the decision.

00:19:03.960 If that's not possible, somebody in my town. If that's not possible, my county. If that's not

00:19:11.000 possible, my state. If that's not possible, all right, last choice is the federal government.

00:19:17.380 But if it's life and death, and it might kill me, or it might kill my grandmother, and somebody's

00:19:23.820 going to decide, do you go? Or is it grandma? I want that decision pushed down to the lowest level.

00:19:29.680 And I've been saying this, right? You know, I know I always get blamed for defending the president,

00:19:34.540 no matter what he does. But you can fact check this, that I've been saying it for a while,

00:19:39.960 the presidency is the wrong place. Let me also tie this to something I've said consistently for a

00:19:45.340 while, too. On the question of abortion, I've said that the only person who shouldn't be in favor of

00:19:53.180 abortion under any circumstances, no matter what party they're in, is whoever is the president.

00:19:59.800 And the reason is that the president should be the only person in the country who will never kill

00:20:05.040 an American, period. Now, maybe, you know, the death sentence for federal offenses and the military

00:20:13.200 are sort of separate things. But you want your president to say, if that's a gray area, I'm out.

00:20:19.040 But if it's a gray area about who lives and dies in the United States of the innocent citizens,

00:20:26.200 or the arguably innocent citizens, when you're talking about a fetus, different opinions,

00:20:31.620 you don't want the president on that conversation. That's the only person in the whole country who

00:20:37.780 should say, I'm out. I'm out. You know, drive that down to the lowest level, because it's life and

00:20:43.940 death. Now, if you can get away with the Supreme Court handling it, that's cool. But in any case,

00:20:48.800 the president should get out of that decision. And he should get out of the life and death

00:20:52.680 decisions for the coronavirus. And by disbanding the task force, the guidelines are in place.

00:20:59.740 I think the public can very much look at the guidelines from the federal government.

00:21:04.400 They can look at what their state did in variance to those guidelines. And then they can look at the

00:21:09.540 other states. They can make up their own mind. I mean, I'm not sure we'll ever be able to,

00:21:14.660 you know, know for sure who did the good job. There are just too many variables involved.

00:21:18.540 But we'll be able to look at it. And if you ask me, this is really exactly the right time to disband

00:21:25.540 the task force. I believe we have, we got tons of information. How much of it was accurate?

00:21:33.420 Right? The task force gave us probably, you know, more inaccurate information than accurate,

00:21:41.100 if I'm being fair. Now, that's not necessarily their fault, because there was no accurate information

00:21:47.980 to be had. So they were passing along the best they could with the best intentions. But the result was

00:21:53.960 that we were not better informed. You know, were you better informed because they told you that

00:21:59.380 masks don't work? And I mean, I don't have to go through the list, right? You're not really better

00:22:03.800 informed. And so I think we've been, we've all been educated up to the level that we don't need

00:22:11.420 the task force anymore. So I would agree, that's the right time to get rid of it. I'm totally on with

00:22:16.860 that decision. But here's the funniest part of that Anderson Cooper episode. He had a guy who was the,

00:22:25.320 he had been the former CDC emergency preparation person. Okay, this is really important what his job was.

00:22:34.220 In a, I think in a prior administration, he had been in charge of emergency preparation at the CDC.

00:22:42.020 And Anderson Cooper had him on to talk about what the CDC is doing, right or wrong at the moment.

00:22:52.100 And do you know what he did not ask him?

00:22:56.400 You're in charge of the CDC emergency preparation.

00:23:03.040 Why didn't you prepare?

00:23:04.560 Because shouldn't we have been all prepared by now? Because you were the head of emergency

00:23:12.780 preparation? And maybe there's a good reason. There might be actually a good reason why we're

00:23:20.300 not prepared. And Anderson Cooper was interviewing the guy who was in charge of preparing. Now,

00:23:27.460 one of the questions you might ask would be, hey, guy who used to be in charge of preparing,

00:23:32.920 I'm just curious, why didn't you do some preparing? Could you answer that question? That question was not

00:23:43.200 asked. Because, because the narrative of the show is that Trump is, you know, orange man bad. So I guess

00:23:52.000 that didn't come up. All right. So much happened since this morning. It's interesting. Here's a question

00:23:59.700 for you. I was listening to Dr. Carlson's show, and he was talking about going through the whole timeline of all the

00:24:08.400 bad things that China did to conceal how bad the coronavirus was. And then worse than that, they not only 0.94

00:24:16.060 concealed it, but they, well, they, they concealed it. And then they bought a bunch of PPE, PPE for

00:24:25.000 themselves, meaning that they got a bunch of masks and they, you know, started buying stuff so they'd

00:24:30.860 have enough. And then by the time the rest of the world found out that it's actually a pandemic,

00:24:36.060 and we would try to buy ventilators and masks, there wouldn't be any, because China would have them 0.96

00:24:40.720 all. Now, let me ask you this. This is going to be a real mind effort. All right. You ready for

00:24:50.200 this? I know you can handle it, but only because those of you have been watching my periscopes long

00:24:55.460 enough, you can handle a challenging thought without retreating to your bias. I, I'm trusting you to do

00:25:02.520 this. All right. You're China. You're President Xi. Your experts come to you and say, we got a problem.

00:25:09.820 We let down the coronavirus. It looks like it might destroy much of the world. Could be hundreds of

00:25:17.540 millions dead. We don't even know how bad this thing is, but I'll tell you what, we're going to run out of

00:25:23.100 medical supplies really fast. What do we do? Now, you're President Xi. You have two ways to go. One is

00:25:31.820 complete transparency. You say, immediately tell your peers in the scientific community,

00:25:37.800 immediately alert the UN and the World Health Organization, and tell them that we have created,

00:25:42.880 accidentally, but we've created this massive problem, and you all need to get ready.

00:25:48.440 What would happen? Well, what would happen is China would not have nearly as much access to

00:25:55.420 medical supplies, right? But if they don't tell the world, then they can hoard the supplies.

00:26:03.400 Let me ask you this. Which one did their population want them to do? If the people in China had been a 0.98

00:26:12.540 democracy, and they could vote on that question, which of course wasn't possible, but if they could have

00:26:18.700 voted, would they have said, you know, it was an accident, and it's every country for itself.

00:26:27.620 We have the advantage that we found out first, because we created the accident, but it was an

00:26:33.260 accident. And it's every country for themselves. And by the way, this could be so bad that if we take

00:26:42.220 care of ourselves well enough, we will be the leading country in the world when this is done,

00:26:47.720 because this might take out the United States. What would you do if you were President Xi?

00:26:56.440 Moreover, what would you do if you were any resident of China, and your choices were telling the world

00:27:04.140 and your own population, you know, dies on the streets for lack of medical attention, and the right

00:27:10.120 proper, you know, protective gear, your entire country is destroyed, your economy goes to hell,

00:27:15.920 there's cannibalism on the streets, or you make it somebody else's problem. Because after all,

00:27:24.160 what is the motto of the United States? The motto of the United States is not, let's treat everybody

00:27:31.120 equally. Nope. The motto of the United States is, make America great again. America first.

00:27:37.780 What would we do if it was the United States? What would President Trump do in the exact same

00:27:47.580 situation, but in the United States? If somebody came to President Trump and said,

00:27:53.380 we messed up, this virus got out, this is totally our fault. But if you tell the rest of the world,

00:28:00.600 10 million Americans are going to die. If we put it off and make it their problem, there might be 100

00:28:09.380 million people who die in other countries. But we might be able to save 10 million here. And we're

00:28:14.900 not even positive about that. I mean, we're kind of guessing, but it feels like that. And they say that

00:28:20.300 to President Trump, what's he do? Would President Trump stay true to his often stated philosophy of

00:28:30.660 America first? Because if he did, he'd do the same thing China did. Or would he say, this is bigger than 0.82

00:28:37.180 all of that? This is just bigger than all of that. Now, I don't think that President Trump would have

00:28:42.740 even had the option, because we don't stop freedom of speech. So if it happened in our country,

00:28:48.040 our scientists would just talk to the other scientists, that would be it. So it wouldn't even be a

00:28:53.200 question of the president being involved in a decision. The information would just flow out like it does

00:28:58.640 from the United States. So I just put that out there to say, nobody is harder on China than I am. As most

00:29:08.700 of you know, they killed my stepson with their fentanyl in 2018. At least I blame them, at least

00:29:15.640 partially, partially. Of course, he's to blame primarily. And I hate them more than anybody hates

00:29:22.760 them. Trust me. When I look at this, and I say, this is a real one off. I don't know if any other

00:29:31.080 country would have acted differently. I don't know. Do you? Do you know if any other country would have

00:29:38.280 acted differently? Because I don't know. Now, I don't think that that matters in terms of how we

00:29:43.680 treat them, because they did make their choice. And part of that choice is that they would have to

00:29:49.600 accept the blowback. In other words, they made a decision with full knowledge, I assume, right?

00:29:56.620 They had to have full knowledge that there was a high likelihood this would all come out,

00:30:00.940 and they would have, you know, possibly devastating long-term effects. But maybe it was just a better

00:30:06.820 bet. Maybe it was. If their economy opens up sooner than ours and does better and faster than ours,

00:30:13.920 it was a good bet. So, I don't know. Those are the things I'm thinking.

00:30:20.560 So, did you see the story about the British scientist expert who recommended quarantine for

00:30:32.220 everybody and lockdown for everybody and then found out that his married mistress was coming 0.57

00:30:37.700 to his house during the lockdown and then going back to her family? Like, oh my God. I don't have

00:30:45.940 anything to add to that story. But if you haven't seen it, just go read the story for entertainment

00:30:50.660 purposes, because it's just jaw-droppingly awful. All right, here's the funniest thing that happened,

00:30:56.520 which is that President Trump finally decided to give a nickname to Kellyanne Conway's husband.

00:31:04.160 Now, before we laugh about this, let me explain something about humor for the few people who don't

00:31:12.520 know. Now, I've often said that one-third of the public actually doesn't have a sense of humor.

00:31:17.740 But even the people who do have a sense of humor, they're, you know, varying degrees. And there's

00:31:22.760 a nuance that I don't know if everybody appreciates. And it goes like this. If an ordinary person

00:31:31.000 had made a deep insult about Kellyanne Conway's husband, what's his name? George? George Conway.

00:31:36.780 And had made that comment about his physicality, you know, any part of, you know, what he looks like

00:31:44.900 or whatever, that wouldn't be funny. Even if the actual insult was kind of clever, I don't think I

00:31:51.140 would be amused by that. Because this is random person saying an ugly thing about somebody who,

00:31:57.380 you know, maybe isn't the best looking. That's not fair. Like, I'm not cool with that at all.

00:32:03.380 But, when the most powerful person on the planet calls George Conway, who is, you know, of course,

00:32:13.740 the president's biggest critic, probably. When the president of the United States, the most powerful

00:32:18.680 person in the world, calls George Conway, moon face? Well, that's just funny. I'm sorry. That's just

00:32:29.260 funny. That's just plain funny. Now, I get that not everybody thinks that's funny. But the part of it

00:32:37.140 you have to understand is that it's the president's position that makes it funny. Because that's the

00:32:42.880 thing that makes it out of sync, right? If an ordinary troll says an ordinary insult to even a

00:32:51.260 famous person, you don't even register it. It just doesn't mean anything. Because it's completely

00:32:57.780 within the expected universe. So, remember, I was teaching you the, I think I was teaching you,

00:33:04.840 about humor, and how if you can create a situation that makes sense, but it doesn't make sense,

00:33:11.660 then people's laugh reflex will be triggered. So, you want to create situations that have a humor

00:33:19.300 logic to them, but they don't actually make sense. And then the brain will try to make them make sense,

00:33:24.220 but it can't, because it doesn't make sense. And then you'll laugh. It's sort of like a being

00:33:28.700 tickled. It's like a reflex. Well, if an ordinary person insults another person, there's nothing

00:33:35.280 unordinary about that, and your brain just processes that. Oh, troll, insults, victim, bam, no laugh. But, 0.92

00:33:44.140 if the most juvenile and yet super clever, which also doesn't make sense, that it could be juvenile

00:33:52.880 and super clever, because it's both. So, that's the first thing that shouldn't fit together. It's

00:33:59.560 like, wait a minute, that's juvenile, but it's also like ridiculously genius. But it's also juvenile,

00:34:08.420 juvenile, but a juvenile can't be a genius. And so, that's the first thing that hits your humor reflexes.

00:34:16.280 You can't reconcile that it really is kind of genius. It's just juvenile at the same time. And

00:34:22.160 then you can't reconcile why any of those two things would ever come out of a sitting president's

00:34:27.900 thumbs. And then you just go, I can't even understand this. And then you just start laughing,

00:34:33.960 because it's all things that don't belong in the same place. Now, the president, you know,

00:34:39.140 I've often said that he's, he's unable to be uninteresting. I don't know if he even knows how

00:34:45.220 to be uninteresting. His just normal, normal mode is always interesting. And part of the way he does

00:34:53.120 that is that he makes things, he puts things together that your brain doesn't want to put together.

00:35:00.120 Like, you can't quite make sense of it, but you sort of know what he's talking about. And he does

00:35:05.340 it so often that you lose sight of it as a technique, that he's continually putting not quite logical

00:35:13.000 things together, and your brain is trying to keep up, and it's trying to cement them together as he's

00:35:17.460 going. And while you're struggling with the last one, he's already on to the next one. It's like, oh,

00:35:22.880 but how will Mexico pay for the wall? I don't even know how that works. And then he's on to the next

00:35:29.760 topic. And so if you know, it's part of the show, you can really just enjoy it the way many of you do

00:35:38.420 the way I do. I mean, and it's just from an entertainment perspective, it's just amazing.

00:35:45.240 Right? But if you think he's evil, and he's up to up to bad news, you just think he's a double guy

00:35:50.820 rambling. So you missed the show. Did you notice that the idea of closing the streets in front of

00:36:01.300 restaurants actually is catching on? So you probably heard me mention it, you probably heard

00:36:06.340 Greg Duffield mention it on The Five. I think he mentioned it like three different times on The Five.

00:36:11.500 Probably other people have had the idea as well. And the idea is that since you need space,

00:36:15.860 and it's always healthier to be outdoors with this virus situation, that where you have a density of

00:36:21.760 restaurants, you know, if you have several of them on a sort of main street, as long as you have,

00:36:26.720 you know, surrounding streets, so you can go around, just close the street. Now, in my town,

00:36:31.540 we have that exact situation. We've got a tiny little downtown, but it's mostly restaurants,

00:36:37.640 or a lot of restaurants, not mostly, a lot of restaurants. And they fairly frequently close the

00:36:43.300 street for, like, street fairs and events and stuff. So it's sort of built for that. It's just

00:36:47.420 perfect. So I sent that idea. I guess there's a restaurant in Tampa doing it. There's some other

00:36:52.600 people playing with it. And it's just the obvious solution. So I sent that idea to, you know, one of

00:36:59.600 the best restaurant guys in my town to see if he can make that happen. Let's see. What else we got

00:37:08.440 going on here? Oh, speaking of Greg, so the president tweets this, just like out of the blue.

00:37:19.320 You know, I told you the other day that the president tweeted me, like, three times in a row

00:37:24.820 the other day. And you wake up to the president tweeting you, and it just doesn't even feel like

00:37:30.140 reality anymore. You feel like you're in some kind of weird other world again. It's like doing

00:37:36.060 mushrooms again. And so imagine, you know, you're Greg, and he just, you know, he just,

00:37:41.700 he just, you know, wakes up like it's any other day, you know, goes to work, does his thing.

00:37:48.200 And then somebody says, uh, do you see what the president tweeted? What? You didn't see? What?

00:37:56.640 Did you see what the president tweeted about you? What? Now, I don't know if it went down like that,

00:38:02.660 but maybe he did. Anyway, this is what the president tweets. He goes, wow, congratulations

00:38:08.640 to Greg Gutfeld, a one-time Trump hater who has come all the way home, which is hilarious.

00:38:14.860 His ratings easily beat no talent Stephen Colbert, nice guy Jimmy Fallon, which is just a wonderfully

00:38:21.540 dismissive insult, nice guy Jimmy Fallon, and wacko last placer Jimmy Kimmel. Greg built his show

00:38:28.740 from scratch and did a great job in doing so. And I love that last line. Oh, that last line is just

00:38:36.820 that, you know, the dagger, you can feel the dagger going in just because, you know, that Greg beat all

00:38:43.760 of these people. And he's a, you know, he says good things about Trump now and then. So, you know,

00:38:49.780 Trump's just putting the dagger in and the dagger is like, it's an inch in. And then he gets to this

00:38:55.280 last line and, you know, and you can feel like, oh, that hurts quite a bit. That dagger is about

00:39:00.740 an inch in. And then the president says, Greg built his show from scratch.

00:39:07.840 Oh, just stop and think about that. You know, all these other three guys who didn't get as good

00:39:17.080 at ratings as Greg Gutfeld gets on the Gutfeld show, Greg Gutfeld show. Every one of them just

00:39:23.940 inherited a show that had such a long time audience that they couldn't have ruined it if

00:39:29.680 they tried. Think about the difference between just inheriting somebody's chair, which is largely

00:39:36.840 what the other three did, and convincing, wait for this, convincing a conservative news network

00:39:46.400 to run a humor, irreverent show at night. Like, how do you even do that? Even obviously,

00:39:55.400 you know, red eye gave him some, some traction on that. But so the guys on, you know, two top rated

00:40:03.360 shows for their time, time range, you know, the, the five and Greg Gutfeld show. But I just love

00:40:09.900 the way the president threw these other guys onto the bus and then backed over them and then ran over

00:40:15.300 them and backed over them again. But when you throw in that last part, it's like, he built

00:40:20.000 it from scratch from nothing. He built it from nothing. That's a whole different level.

00:40:28.800 All right. Ben Shapiro tweeted the, probably the best description of what's going on right

00:40:39.500 now. So you should take a look at that tweet thread. I tweeted it. I tweeted it so you can find

00:40:44.460 in my, toward the top of my Twitter feed. And he makes the following point, which I agree

00:40:52.340 with. I have one small disagreement, which I'll mention. And that is that what Ben Shapiro points

00:40:59.840 out is that we don't have a plan and we sort of didn't notice it. Meaning that our original

00:41:06.540 plan made sense. We were going to try to spare the hospitals from overcapacity by bending the

00:41:13.360 curve. And we were going to do that with social distancing. Mission accomplished, I'd say,

00:41:19.460 wouldn't you? So that plan seems to have been successful. But now we're at the phase where

00:41:28.960 that plan is doing its thing. And as Ben asks, and, and then what? Like, what's, what's the

00:41:38.720 next thing? Now, I, obviously they're going to try to open up businesses slowly and cautiously

00:41:43.520 and all that. But are we, why are we just opening them all? Are we, are we holding out for a

00:41:52.160 therapeutic? Are we holding out for a vaccine that's never going to happen? Are we, what

00:41:59.540 exactly is the long range plan? Because if the plan is that we have to basically just live with

00:42:07.780 it, which means getting it, uh, if there's herd immunity, would that be great if there's not herd

00:42:14.400 immunity? Well, that's what it is, but we don't really have an option anymore. You know, I've said

00:42:20.560 people are already criticizing the president for, um, not starting soon enough and, you know,

00:42:26.100 and maybe being too fast to end it. So he gets, you know, he gets blamed for both sides. Um,

00:42:33.080 but I'm not so sure, uh, anybody knew, you know, what was the right thing to do. All right. So here's

00:42:41.520 the point. We, we have to recognize that there is no plan to get rid of it, right? There's, there's

00:42:49.280 nobody even suggesting that something could happen for it to go away. Certainly not before

00:42:55.460 hundreds of thousands of Americans die from it. But we, there's some reason we're not saying that.

00:43:02.760 Why can't we just say that? And Ben was making this point as well, that we should be able to

00:43:07.760 expressly say, this is what we're going to do. We're just going to live with it because we don't

00:43:13.700 really think there's anything that's going to change within the planning horizon. And if we don't

00:43:19.860 get back to work, it could be too late. So, um, so I, I think his point of view is good. Now,

00:43:28.360 the one thing he said that I'll, I'll, I'll slightly quibble with is that he said, if you don't have a

00:43:33.380 timeline, you know, an estimated time of when you're going to do what, then you don't have a plan.

00:43:39.340 I would disagree with that because I think in the context of a, uh, ever changing situation where

00:43:46.180 your data is different every day, that having a plan almost doesn't make sense. We're really more

00:43:52.720 in a situation where we're responding rapidly, which I would call a plan. So we certainly have

00:43:59.200 a plan of, uh, rapidly responding to what we learn as we learn it. If we developed a therapeutic that

00:44:05.640 works, we would rapidly implement it. If we learn that genetics make a difference, we would rapidly

00:44:10.860 implement it. So, I mean, that is the plan, but it doesn't require a timeline because nobody knows

00:44:17.100 when this vaccine might or might not happen, when some therapeutic will work or not.

00:44:24.960 So I wouldn't worry about the timeline part of it, but it is true that there's something like,

00:44:30.140 uh, a lack of a plan. Now, part of it is people don't want to say that they want to kill old people,

00:44:37.680 unhealthy people, minorities, and poor people. And who does, right? Who wants to say in public, 1.00

00:44:46.420 you know, if it's up to me, I'll save this group and kill this group. Well, I'll go first. 0.98

00:44:53.700 How about I go first? So here's your choice, Scott. You've got to have a policy that would favor

00:44:59.540 favor or not favor any of these groups, the elderly, the people with comorbidities and the

00:45:10.280 poor. Now there's an overlap, of course, but if you do something that helps people financially,

00:45:17.700 you know, helps the poor, you're probably going to kill a lot of old people. The people with 1.00

00:45:23.480 comorbidities, you know, they probably have bad luck no matter what you do. And so, Scott, who do

00:45:30.840 you want to kill? Old people or poor people, many of whom especially are African Americans who have 1.00

00:45:39.160 a special risk apparently with the coronavirus. Who are you going to kill? Old people or African 1.00

00:45:45.220 Americans? Go ahead, Scott. Say it. Say it in public. Who are you going to kill? Are you willing 1.00

00:45:50.980 to say that in public? That you would kill old people or you would kill African Americans and 1.00

00:45:56.220 poor people? Go ahead. Say it. Okay. Old people. That's my choice. I choose old people. 1.00

00:46:06.820 If you can say that too, or even if you can say the opposite, but if you can say it out loud,

00:46:13.280 you get to sit at the adult table. You could be right. You could be wrong. I would only ask you to

00:46:20.240 have good intentions. You could be selfish. That's totally allowed. You could say, you know,

00:46:25.740 this is good for me. Yeah, I don't care about other people. This is the way I want to go. It's

00:46:31.680 just good for me. If you can do that and say it out loud, you too get to sit at the adult table

00:46:37.140 because you can be selfish as an adult. You're allowed. Our system allows you to vote for who you

00:46:43.020 think is going to help you. That's built into the system perfectly fine. But if you can't say it,

00:46:50.740 you got to stay at the kid's table. And then you just pretend like there's magical solutions and

00:46:56.360 magical vaccines and you don't have to make trade-offs. That's the kid's table. Go sit there.

00:47:04.360 So I said it out loud. I would say if the poor and the African American community first, to the 1.00

00:47:12.260 extent that your policies can have an emphasis, I'm not even sure if that's possible. But if it can,

00:47:19.020 that's the way I'd go. So in other words, I would go back to work a little bit faster

00:47:22.900 than maybe some others. Not so fast that it's crazy. And really, I said before, I said this morning,

00:47:30.160 that if it turns out that you had to wait another three weeks in California, that's what it looks

00:47:36.720 like. Another three weeks. Three weeks probably isn't the difference between living and dying. It's

00:47:43.580 probably not the difference between your company failing. Everybody's saying so. But keep in mind,

00:47:49.520 they're all economically ignorant. Let me tell you why things are not as bad as maybe you think in terms 0.97

00:47:55.380 of the companies that are going out of business. You're going to hear all these stories from the

00:48:00.020 financially ignorant portion of the press, which is almost everybody, saying that all these

00:48:06.820 restaurants are going out of business and closing, etc. What they won't tell you is what is the 0.70

00:48:12.760 landlord going to do? What do they do with a building that used to be rented and now it's still a

00:48:23.060 restaurant, but they own it? What are they going to do? Well, the smartest thing the landlord could do

00:48:29.320 is make a deal with the owner, the restaurant owner, and say, look, you didn't pay me for three

00:48:35.840 weeks. You're totally underwater, but so is everybody. So is everybody. Can you come back?

00:48:44.200 And the best thing for me is you come back, because that's the best thing for the landlord.

00:48:50.760 And that will always be left out by the financially illiterate. That all these companies that are

00:48:56.180 declaring bankruptcy and closing and saying they'll never open up again? That's not exactly true.

00:49:03.280 Quite a few of those that think they're closed for good are going to come back to a world in which

00:49:08.760 people are way more flexible than they imagined. They're going to have banks that say, you know,

00:49:15.040 you're bankrupt. I'll still give you a loan. Imagine that. Imagine a world where you're going

00:49:21.600 to be able to walk into a bank and say, I'm bankrupt last week. Will you give me a business

00:49:28.160 loan? And the bank will look at you and say, were you in business three months ago in a successful

00:49:34.320 restaurant? Yes, I was. And then, you know, restaurants actually are hard to finance. So maybe a restaurant's

00:49:41.700 the worst example, because it's going to be hard for them to get a loan. But it's always hard for

00:49:46.420 restaurants to get funding. But for an ordinary business, the bank is going to say, I'm not sure

00:49:53.060 I care that you're bankrupt. I care that, you know, it's a real business and you can pay the bills.

00:49:59.460 But everybody who came in this week is bankrupt. It's like, it's universal now. So I think that you

00:50:05.300 would hear a lot of fake bad news that people will imagine as if somebody went out of business

00:50:11.780 in a world where everybody else didn't. But in a world where massive numbers of people went out of

00:50:17.940 business, the options are very constrained. And the most obvious best option for almost everybody

00:50:25.400 is to get really flexible and put those people who are out of business back in business as quickly

00:50:31.620 as possible. So I think they could be and a business and then back in business faster than

00:50:36.900 you think, just because it's the easiest way to go for everybody. All right, those are the things I

00:50:42.180 want to talk about. Somebody says another three weeks is ridiculous. Well, it might be ridiculous 0.94

00:50:49.700 scientifically, but I don't think it would be ridiculous in terms of death. You know, I don't think

00:50:57.140 anybody will die from poverty in three weeks. And I don't think it will be a measurable difference.

00:51:06.980 All right.

00:51:10.940 Texas woman put in jail for cutting hair. Oh, that's the other thing I want to say. When this

00:51:16.180 is all over, when when all the restrictions are off and everybody can move freely. I want us all to

00:51:23.060 share our stories of massive cheating during the lockdown. I know you got your stories. I know you

00:51:30.820 do. I see you. You're smiling. You're smiling. Because I know that you snuck somewhere. You saw

00:51:39.140 somebody. You know you did. You let some people come over to your house. You know you did. I see

00:51:45.940 you're smiling. You. Yep. You. Yep. Busted. So when this is all over and you don't feel the

00:51:53.860 red, hot, searing pain of other people's judgment upon you, I want to hear your funny stories of the

00:52:02.100 things you got away with. Because somebody says slept with neighbor, which I'm sure is true. Because I

00:52:10.660 think there are going to be a lot of stories about people who maybe, let's just say, did not obey

00:52:18.660 their government if they didn't feel that their government's rules were, let's say, perfectly

00:52:25.060 crafted. People who may have massively cheated on this social isolation thing just because they

00:52:34.500 thought their government didn't have the moral authority, the technical expertise, or the

00:52:40.180 management risk management ability to decide for them. And so they decided for themselves and just

00:52:47.860 figured out how to beat the system. I'm not recommending it. I'm just saying it'll be very

00:52:51.700 funny when we share the stories. Not that I have one. I've been totally good. I know you haven't.

00:52:59.860 I'm not going to read that comment. All right, that's enough for now. Have a great night of sleep.

00:53:05.060 And have a great night. Tomorrow is going to be way better than today. I promise. You just wait and see.

Real Coffee with Scott Adams - May 06, 2020

Episode 957 Scott Adams： Let Me Tell You About the Psychedelic Mushroom I Accidentally Ingested Called CNN

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