Episode 898 Scott Adams: How Many Grandmas Would You End to Get Back to Work? Make Your Case

Hey, everybody, come on in. It's time for coffee with Scott Adams. This is the place, this is the time and 15 billion years of evolution in this universe, and it brought you all to this moment. Think about it. From the big bang all the way to this morning, everything had to happen exactly the way it did to get you in here for the simultaneous sip. Kind of amazing if you think about it. And if you'd like to enjoy the simultaneous sip, you don't need much. All it takes is a cup of maggora glasses, tanker, chalice or style, a canteen, sugar flask, a vessel of any kind, fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better, including the pandemic. It's called the simultaneous hip. Go. Mmm. Better than hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin and zinc all put together. Doesn't equal one cup of coffee. I have spoken. That is my medical opinion. Do not doubt my medical opinions. All right, so there's something called the Medical Supply Chain act being noodled about in Congress to get our medical supply chain back from China so that we don't find ourselves in this situation again. Can you believe we're even debating that? Is there anybody in Congress who, if you brought this act up for a vote today, is there anybody in Congress who would say, you know, I thought about it, and I really do think we should keep our most critical pharmaceutical products in China? Yeah, I think I'm going to back keeping it where we're in the most risk. Why don't they just pass that right now? Why does that take 30 minutes to debate? Is there anybody on the other side? Why do we even have a Congress to debate stuff like that? They should just say, does anybody. Any objections? No? Okay, we're going to go do this. So Jake Tapper got in a little. Well, I'm not going to say trouble, but he got. He did something provocative today because he retweeted Trump critic George Conway. And George Conway said that the president is 100% insane, which was in response to somebody else's tweet. So Jake Tapper retweeted George Conway saying that the president is 100% insane. And then people said, hey, Jake Tapper, you're taking sides. You can't agree with somebody who says the President's insane. And then Jake Tapper had to tweet back and explain to people how Twitter works. Now, I'm just going to take Jake's side completely. Sorry, I know you don't like it, but sometimes things are unambiguous. This is one of those unambiguous situations. A retweet doesn't mean you agree with it. Who started that rule? That's not a rule. There's no rule that says if you retweet someone else's opinion, therefore it means you endorse it or agree with it. Especially if you're a news person. If somebody makes news with their opinion, you can retweet that stuff. So the reason this bugs me is because it happens to me. I will often like a tweet that I don't agree with because I like that it happened, or I might want to look at it again, or I might want to call your attention to it. There's something noteworthy about it. It's worth looking at. So I'll just hit it with a heart, maybe, so it's easier to find later so other people can see it. Liking and retweeting things is not an endorsement, so you need to get rid of that thought from your head. So Jake was completely right about that. Let's see. How much do you love watching Trump treat the press the way the press treats Trump? Because everybody's complaining that the president is sort of inappropriately insulting and pushing back on the press and the press briefings. And I'm thinking to myself, I don't think so. I don't think he's pushing back in a way that's out of scale with what they're doing. I think he's just responding in kind. And it's just the first time you've ever seen it. You've never seen anybody who is being abused in public just abuse the abuser in public. Usually if somebody's being abused in public, they just sort of take it. The press will be asking all these gotcha questions, and the politician might act a little peeved, but they basically play along with the charade that any of this is good for the public and they answer the question. Trump just doesn't play along. When they ask a gotcha question, he attacks them personally. To which I say, is that unfair? If somebody goes into the, you know, the most important room in the United States at the moment, wherever the president is, I guess would be the most important room. And they waste the public's time by asking questions that only serve the business model of the press and don't help the public whatsoever. Not even potentially. There's no argument for it. I mean, all that conversation about is Trump making doctor advice when he talks about the hydroxychloroquine. That's nothing but a whole bunch of gotcha stuff. There's no content there because everybody knows the content. The content is as clearly as anybody can say it a hundred times. It's not proven. There is some optimism, and here are the reasons for being optimistic. There's not much downside. That's it. That's the whole story. And the press wastes the country's time to try to turn this into a story about how cleverly the question was asked to. To catch the President in an imperfect answer. Do you want to watch that? Is that why you turned on the tv to get information about the coronavirus crisis and instead of that, you're watching some reporter trying to make a star turn and make it about themselves in the clever way they ask the question so they can get some time in the news Tonight, I want to see the President absolutely eviscerate them in public, which is what he does. He just, in front of the whole public, he just tells the world that you're a piece of crap and you're wasting everybody's time. And if the second question is the same thing, the President will take the time to tell the second reporter, well, you know, you're also a piece of crap and you're wasting the public's time. You know, fix yourself. I could watch that all day long. You could line up 35 reporters and I'll have them ask the same stupid gotcha questions. And I would never get tired of the President saying, you're a stupid reporter asking a stupid gotcha question. Next. Well, you're a stupid reporter asking a stupid gotcha question too. Next. I mean, I would never get tired of it. I swear to God, I could watch it all day long. So good on the President for pushing back in what I think is proportionate way. There's a graph going around the Internet which everybody feels they need to forward to me, and it looks like a fake one to me. So I called it out as looking like a fake. And I'm going to see how good my instincts are. So what the graph shows is in prior years, what the. I guess the curve for pneumonia looked like. The number of people who get diagnosed with pneumonia. And every year it looked like it was going down from the year before. But this current year, when it got to about COVID season, according to the graph, it just fell off the table as if nobody was getting a pneumonia diagnosis. They were only getting coronavirus diagnoses. And the implication of the graph, which I believe is not real. I think it's a fake. Fake data, but we'll find out. That's the fun part is finding out. And the point of it is that it seems to indicate that the coronavirus is not so bad. And all people are doing is interpreting regular pneumonia as coronavirus because, you know, they're not doing a real check to find out why somebody died. And so the thinking is that the coronavirus is just over categorized, over counted. So here's the thing, here's what I think is sketchy about refers to a source, but it doesn't link to a source. If you see a graph that's that provocative and on the graph it says here's the link, but it's just described. It's not an actual link you can click and go look at and you can't even really easily type it in because it's like a long link URL, you wouldn't really type that in. So, yeah, I'm seeing other people say fake graph. So hint number one is it mentions a source, but it doesn't link to it. In 2020, if you mention a source and don't link to it, it's probably fake, right? Secondly, it's too on the nose. Have you ever heard that phrase? It's sort of a Hollywood script writer phrase. That's the first place I heard it, where you're writing the script and then you write something into the script that's just a little too perfect. It's like, oh, yeah, that's a pretty big coincidence. That doesn't look real at all. That's called being too on the nose. It's so perfect it can't be real. So when they show this graph and all the other lines are conforming really well, and then this one goes blah, blah, blah, and then it just drops straight down. That's a little too on the nose, right? That's a little too. Exactly what the message is trying to be. Now, that doesn't mean it's false. I mean that by itself because sometimes data is surprising, but you start putting it together, it's like, okay, it's a little too on the nose and it doesn't have a clickable link. I say fake. So I'm seeing different opinions here. Some of you think it's fake, some of you think it's real. Maybe somebody can give me an idea. The first person I saw, who I know to be credible from other comments, said he looked at the graph and then looked at the source. It's supposed to be from and it doesn't seem to match. But that was just, you know, the first person who commented. So beware of graphs with no clickable link. I would, I would think 75% of those are fake. Just in general, it doesn't mean that one is, but it might be. Once again, I put on my headphones and started Periscope without clicking the option for you to ask questions. So my plan for filling this hour with questions that you asked me live is once again ruined by the oddity of this user interface, which doesn't let me do things in the order that I think I want to do them the order that I want to do them as. I wanted to start it up and then invite people in, but apparently I have to invite people in and then start it up. But it's too late to go back now. So. How about those apples? A lot of stories on Facebook of survivors who took the hydroxychloroquine. So yeah, I just saw a story on Laura Ingram's show in which a democratic politicians said that the hydroxychloroquine probably saved her life. Here's a problem with every one of those stories. They're a thing called anecdotal. There's a reason that anecdotal has its own word, and it's not the same word as scientifically demonstrated or clinical trials. Anecdotal is never reliable. It can be true, but you can't rely on it. There's no information really being transmitted with anecdotal stuff, there's only the possibility of information. So anecdotal information can tell you where to look. It can tell you it might be a good idea to do a study on this, but by itself it doesn't tell you stuff. So just keep that in mind. I suppose everybody's saying the same thing, but you can't be reminded of that enough. So I put very low credibility in the individual reports of people who say I took the drug. And an hour later I was already feeling better. And by the way, I have heard those stories. I have very much heard the stories from. Even personally, I've heard at least one story of somebody who took it. And it seemed to turn things around so quickly that it was hard not to attribute it to the drug because the timing was just. It would have been a coincidence if things turned around at exactly that time. So I think there's a good chance. There's a good chance it works. I think India decided to open up and allow us to buy some from India because that's one of our biggest sources. I'm seeing ridiculous stories about how people are trying to make it look like President Trump has some kind of financial gain from pushing the hydroxychloroquine. Do you really need to, like, suppose it was true? When I saw those articles suggesting that the President had some financial gain in this, I couldn't even open them and look to see what the argument is, because on its surface, it's so ridiculous. You don't even have to read that article. Let me explain why that's so ridiculous. The idea is that the President is acting in a way that even without reading the article, I'm assuming this is what it's about. They're pushing this drug. Somehow he has some direct or indirect financial interest in the company, and really it's just a big old trick to pump up the value of this stock and somehow he'd gain from that, or his friends would or something. Here's how ridiculous this is. Have you noticed he's the President of the United States and he's got a big old company. The only thing that Trump can do that is good for him personally is to do a really good job for the country where everybody's watching. That's the end of the story. If you have to throw in, oh, he's really managing his job as President of the United States for this one little stock deal. You're so far from reality and understanding how the world works that you should not talk in public anymore. Because here's the deal. If Trump does a good job with this coronavirus, you know, the public decides, oh, you know, it wasn't perfect, but I think he got us through. He will get reelected. Being reelected is the best thing he could do for himself, his family, his family business. Just simply doing a good job for the country is where all of his gain lies. There is no situation where President Trump could find some way, some little angle that's good for him and his family personally and yet was somehow bad for the country. It just doesn't exist. It can't exist logically. You can't have a situation where you're watching this guy so closely and he could possibly find anything, find some clever way to enrich himself and his family at the expense of the country. That's not a thing. It would be a thing if we weren't watching. You know, I'm not saying that he would do it if we weren't watching. I'm saying that it could be a thing if a president were not being watched. You know, you could Imagine any leader could do nefarious things if nobody's watching, but we're all watching. You can't. You can't possibly come up with any reasonable scenario where the. Where the president directly screws 300x million people, but he makes, hey, I made a 20% gain on this one stock. It's so crazy. It's like. It's beyond crazy. It's 100% crazy, as George Conway would say. All right, here are the things we know. It does seem that worldwide, there's some kind of an elbow happening. There's some kind of a thing happening right now in which it looks like things are getting better, or at least things are getting worse less quickly, which looks like the beginning of things getting better. And I will remind you what I told you, that if it looks like you get a report that that hydroxychloroquine is working, you better own some stocks, because two days in a row, that's a lot of green. A lot of green. Amazon is up. Everything's up. Even poor little bitcoin is up. Wow. Things are up a lot. So yesterday, I think, was that day. You know, I warned you that you would not want to not own stocks on the day that somebody says, you know, this hydroxychloroquine looks like it's working. And sure enough, yesterday was that day. I mean, we've had lots of hints, but I feel like the weight of the hints didn't become significant until yesterday. Wouldn't you say. Wouldn't you say that yesterday was sort of the moment that the whole country started to say, maybe, yeah, maybe. Maybe it does work. Now, I think what we needed to see was more anecdotal stories because they're convincing, even though they're not scientifically valid. But on top of that, we needed to see that the curve was changing, because you wouldn't believe that the drug worked unless it was actually showing a change in the curve. And I think New York City is starting to demonstrate that. And I think the news in the coming weeks will be mostly about hospitals that are not over capacity. So I think that's it. I'm seeing many questions about what I think of Dr. Shiva's opinion on this, and I have not followed it, so I don't have an opinion on that. So you can stop asking, because I don't know his opinion. So here's the deal. I think we've entered the period where things are going to get better now. The big question is going to be how to get back to work. And. Sometimes I see comments that so disappoint me in the. I don't know. I'm just so disappointed because I consider myself relatively ungullable. Everybody's gullible a little bit. Everybody can be fooled, Everybody can be wrong. Everybody, you know, retweet something that turns out to be fake news, so nobody's immune to it. But I feel, you know, if you were to rank human capabilities, you know, everybody's somewhere on the. On the line. I feel like I'm relatively immune from believing the craziest stuff. And when I see people who still believe the craziest stuff, as in the comments, it just actually shocks me for a moment. And I think, wow, people will really believe just about anything, won't they? All right, So the big question in the coming week and more is, somebody says you're gullible to support Tapper. Well, you get the block. Now, I remind you that you can disagree with my opinions all you want, but whenever your comments are about my internal thought process, you'll always get blocked. Okay, Do I have to. It looks like I'm going to have to go do homework and listen to Dr. Shiva so that I can tell you my opinion, because I didn't say I don't like him. I said I haven't listened to his opinion on this topic. So if. Will you be happy if I go listen to his opinion? Is the reason that you want me to listen because you're not confident in it, or do you think. Or is it because you are confident in his opinion and you think I can extend it? Because I don't really understand your interest in me getting interested in him. I mean, his specific opinion on this topic. Is there some reason that. Well, all right, I'll look into it. Let me do it right now. Let me look up. Nah, it'll take too long. Forget it. So, anyway, I tweeted this question, this survey. I said, how many net lives would you accept as lost? You know, how many extra people would you be willing to see die in order to reopen the economy? And so my choices were. And of course, these polls are unscientific and everything, but they can give you maybe a directional sense of where people are leaning. And so I gave them the choices of up to 50,000 people extra dead to get back to work. Up to 100,000 or up to 200,000. I capped the survey at 200,000 because I don't think there's any chance it's going to go over that. Wouldn't you say? Is it fair to say at this point that the number of deaths from coronavirus are unlikely to be over 200,000 for this country. So I capped it at that. And the answers were interesting because they were clustered on the two extremes. So there were 32% who said only up to 50,000 extra deaths, but there were 48% who said up to 200. And then in the middle was the smallest group of 19% sent up to 100. So it seems that people. And I think I'll bet this would hold up. I think this would hold up. And what I'm saying is that people either say it's got to be as close to zero as possible or they say it almost doesn't matter. Those seem to be the views. I don't think people are going to be able to fine tune where it is in that range. So the people are going to say it's got to be as close to zero as possible. So give me the smallest number. And then other people are going to say the economy is so important that 200,000. Sure. A million. Yep. Yeah. I would let a million people die to not destroy the entire economy. Totally worth it. So given that nobody can really calculate the pluses and minuses of these, we're just going by our bias. Whether we think the economy will keep, kill more people, or the coronavirus, we don't really know. We just feel like we know or we've got a hunch or an instinct about it. They may or may not be good. So the reason this is important is that you need to get a sense of the mood of the country, because whatever the government comes up with, we need to buy into it. And the reason I'm making a big deal about the public's opinion is that the public needs to give our government coverage to make the right decision. At the moment, I think our system requires that our president continue to say things such as, I will accept zero deaths. Now, as a politician and a leader, that's really good. When Trump says, I will accept zero deaths are acceptable, for once, he's acting like a standard politician in the sense that there is no other right answer. If you're the leader of the country, which, by the way, I'm going to tie this into something. Regardless of what you think about abortion, so forget your own opinion. Regardless of what you think of abortion, whether you like it or hate it, would you not agree that the president of the United States should always be against it? Here's my argument. Because you want the president of the United States to say, in every case no matter what, if there's a gray area I'm in favor of maximizing saving American lives, that will restrict it to America because it's an American political question. Would you ever want a president? No matter. And again, regardless of your own views, so independent of what you think, would you ever be comfortable with a president who said, look, I think there is a case. It seems like a little gray area to a lot of people in the country or a big gray area to a lot of people in the country. But as your leader. Yeah. I think that this class of people, according to this number of the public who would consider the unborn real people, that, yeah. My opinion is that they can die. Now, regardless of whether you think abortion is a good idea or a bad idea, my opinion is that the leader of the country, the one who has the most impact in leadership, needs to always be on the side of maximum life, even if it's not practical. Now, I would still be okay with that leader saying, as your president, I have one view and it will never change. My view is that we should do everything we can to protect every life, every possible life, every gray area. Life, every life. If you're an American, I've got one job. Keep you safe, keep you alive, keep you happy. It's not up to me to decide if you're worthy of saving. As president, I will never weigh in on the question of whether this person or this person is worth saving their life. I will never engage in that because my job is to save you all. Now, it's also a practical world. Some decisions are tough. So this abortion question is going to be to the states. States you decide it, maybe even Supreme Court, you decide it. But because of my special job title as the person who protects everybody, I'm the only person in the country who won't give you an opinion on abortion. I won't give you my opinion because as president, I shouldn't have one. On life or death, it's just always life. If you, the state, want to make a different decision, I accept that. You know, the country needs to have rules. There's, you know, we have a democratic process, and if that's the way it goes, I'll support it. But as your president, never put me in a position where I'm deciding who lives and who dies. You don't want that president. And so again, you know, as a practical matter, you want your president to agree with you on abortion because it's more likely things will go your way. So I get that on a practical level, but on A moral, ethical level. I would never, ever, ever, ever want the number one leader of the country to ever decide who gets to live and who gets to die, or even who's a person. It just shouldn't be that person's decision ever. So that said, that to my point, that the public needs to tell Trump what we're comfortable with in the life or death situation. So some things need to come from the leader and sometimes the leader just needs to tell the country where we're going. And that's your best process. There are lots of cases, certainly with the commander in chief situation where you really, you just need the leader to just tell you which way you're marching and then if you're being smart about it, you follow the leader. Because that's just your best system in some situations. This is not one of them. This is a situation in which the leader is necessarily handicapped and you want him to be. You don't want to change that because again, you don't want your president to decide who's worthy of life and death. I do not want the leader, the number one leader of the country to stand in front of the world and say, you know, I think that I'm going to favor the people who want to get back to work and I'm going to let 50,000 grandmothers die. Shouldn't be his decision. It shouldn't be in his job description. Even though it has to be right, ultimately he has to make the decision. You can't change that. But I think we need to give him some cover. And this is not about Trump, it's just about whoever is president. The citizens need to give the leader some cover. And what I mean by that is that we need to really wrestle with this question of what we are willing to accept collectively as a risk to get back to work. So we as non politicians can say this and watch me say it right out loud. And I can only say this because I'm not president. If I were President, I'd just shut my mouth. But let me say it as a citizen, somewhere at around less than 50,000 extra deaths over the course of the year, I would be comfortable with the trade offs to get us back to work. So that's my number. I feel that if you want to give the President some cover, which allows the country to make rational decisions and allows the President to do what he needs to do, as opposed to being bound by what I consider the most sacred rule of the presidency is he doesn't get to decide who to kill. All right, so you need to take that away from him because he doesn't want it. I mean, I can't read his mind, but I don't imagine anybody would want to have that on their conscience, want that to be part of their decision. But we can take that away. We can fix that collectively. And it doesn't mean that we all have to agree. Right. So it's not even about the country getting on the same page. And then the president can do that, too. It's more about the. It's more about the public being adults. And here's what, I mean, here's the adult view. The adult view is some number of people are going to die either way. I think this will be the path with the least death and destruction. So I choose this. That's what an adult would say. Here's what a child would say. A child would say, oh, sure, the 50,000 deaths is fine, as long as it's not your family. Right. I just saw this on Twitter. That's a child's view. The child's view is, well, you think differently if it were your family member. That's just a child's view. I'm not even going to tell you what's wrong with it, except that it's not an adult opinion. So to the extent we can, let us see if we can shame the child opinions to the sidelines. The old. Well, you'd feel differently if it was your mother. Yeah, of course I would. That's not new information. But we're adults. We're going to make decisions. And it might be my family member who gets killed, who's in the 50,000, it might be yours. Nobody wants that. We still got to get back to work. So I put down my stake under 50,000 because I think we can do that. My guess is if you net it out, the lives that have been saved, and then you add in, maybe there's more domestic abuse, unfortunately. So if you do the full net of how many people died because of the bad, the economy taking a hit, if you netted it all up, 50,000 is where I'm comfortable. Not happy. Nobody's happy, right? About 50,000 people dying. But there is a point where you just say, all right, got to be adult. Time to make an adult choice. Time to grow up. Time to get on the team. Time to do what's good for the country. Time to take some sacrifice for the country. So I probably will bore you to death on this point. I just want it to be more a part of the conversation and not ignored because for the next few Days. I think what you're going to see is all the talking heads talking like children because it's a little too dangerous to be an adult in public right now because critics will jump on you. But what I'd like to see is in the next week, I want you to see if at least the public pundits and the opinion people, I want you to see if I can get them to shift a little bit from talking about the question of orange man bad, orange man good and stuff like that to we are going to have to make a decision about people dying. And let's see if we can even have that conversation. And, you know, are we even capable of talking about it in public? So I'd like to this week, I would like to see the public pundits be able to give a number and say, you know, there's no way around this. There's going to be a number on the number of people who die. There's going to be a number. So if you're not willing to say your number out loud, you shouldn't be in the conversation. Now, maybe this next week, people want to still be children and say, well, let's kill nobody. Well, I'm not going to do anything that would kill my grandma. Let's see if we can reduce that opinion and get people to, you know, if it means 50,000 or 100,000. This is where I'm comfortable. And it's not until all of us have at least given our number that the President is safe. Because if we've all given our number, then he can say, all right, given all this input, this is where the country is. This is, you know, the mood of the room. I can now pick from that palette of options that the country has given me. But what you don't want is your president out there naked. He's got a blank canvas and. And then he just puts his finger in the middle of the canvas and says, that's my number of people I'm going to kill to get the economy back up so I can get elected. That's what it's going to look like, right? It's going to look like the President decided to kill however many people so he could get reelected. That's how it's going to be spun. So if you want to take that, take that risk away from your leader so he can make a decision that makes sense for the country. Give a number, commit. You don't have to be right, but at least make it safe for other people to give a number. You got to make it safe. Here's a little persuasion rule that is sort of implied in what I'm saying, but I'm going to say it explicitly. People can get used to almost anything. People can get used to almost anything. So the first time you hear, hey, hey, Bob, you're gonna have to make a decision, are 100,000 people gonna die? You know, it's up to you. Do you want 100,000 people to die? Well, the first time you're presented with this decision where you put yourself in the president's shoes and you say, okay, am I gonna let 50,000 people die that might not have died in other situations? And the first time that you have to go through that thought process is jarring, and you're going to want to just change the subject, but you need to kind of get used to it, because it's not until we can comfortably say 50,000 or 100,000 out loud in public just to show we can even talk about the topic, just to show we're no longer shocked by it. We have to. We're going to have to acclimate ourselves to being able to talk about these big numbers just so psychologically we can get to the other side. So I'll be priming the pump for that. What else is happening that you care about besides Dr. Shiva? It was called Vietnam. That is a good analogy. You know, analogies don't win arguments, but they're often entertaining and sometimes they can educate. And the Vietnam example was perfect. Yeah, Vietnam was acceptable because we sort of inched our way into it. If we knew from the start, it's like, yeah, we're going to lose this many people. If we knew that on day one, the public would have said, I'm not down for that. But if you say, well, we lost 100 people today and 110 the next day, just sort of sneaks up on you. That was a good example. But you need to define how to get to that number. Okay, let me define it for the billionth time. I always define it as net, meaning that you look at what the normal number of deaths are every year, and then you look at this period this year, and if Normally we'd lose 40,000 people a month or whatever it is, and this month we lost 45,000, I'd say the net is 5. Now, I don't care how many of those are coronavirus, and I don't care how many is the reduced traffic accidents. It's just all in the number. Why would you ever look at any number that wasn't net? This is the part that if you have any training in doing financial analysis, it gets really annoying when people ask you if important numbers are included in the figure, because of course they are. They're important numbers. Of course they're included because they matter. So you don't need to ask me about. Here's what you don't ever need to do. If you can think of something that would be different about the death count either. More domestic abuse, more suicide, more death from economics. You know, whatever it is, it's in the number. So everything, just everything. You don't have to ask about the details. If you can calculate it, it's in there. How many business owners had a stroke? No one's counting that. Well, again, if you count just the total number of deaths this year compared to other years, probably they would be very similar. Meaning you're probably always within, I don't know, 5%. Any month. If you looked at any month in a normal year to the year before, it's probably about the same number of accidents, you know, 5% difference. So if you see a bigger difference than that during the coronavirus deaths, you could reasonably attribute it to this situation. Let's see. Just remember the lag. Yeah. The elderly are more susceptible and they tend to vote for Trump. True. Wouldn't you like to see a survey of people over 60? What if you asked. If you asked the people, you know, say, under 40, how many deaths would you be willing to accept? And I think what you'd find is a lot. I think you would find that the younger people resent the elderly quite a bit because they feel like the elderly had a good life and used everything up and left them nothing but debt in a smoldering world. It's a little bit of an exaggeration, but not too bad. Somebody asked, what about the surge? Do we need to wait until after that? Well, we do. We do need to wait. I'd say another week, we'll have a good idea what's happening. So we probably can't make a final decision for at least a week. And realistically, we wouldn't make it then either. We'd probably wait two weeks. But this is the point where we should start making the plans, because whether or not that surge is two weeks away or one week away, I'm not sure we can predict that stuff so well. But no matter when it comes, you need to get to the other side to make the final decision. But I feel like we can feel it coming in a way that we probably want to at least make the plan. Yeah. I think people over 60 might be more flexible than people assume because, you know, when you reach a certain age, especially if you're 80, I can imagine a lot of 80 year olds saying, hey, I had a good run, you know, if you ask me, do I want. If you ask the average 80 year old, here's the deal. We could give you an average of three more extra years of life, but it's three years in your 80s and you're probably in the nursing home anyway. So you get three more of those worst years of your life, the last three or four, you could save the country. So you get three years of crappy end of life or you can save the economy of the United States for your children and grandchildren. What does the 80 year old say to that? I've got a feeling that they would very strongly lean toward I had a good run, don't you think? I think if you ask the people who are most at risk, they would say, yeah, I'm scared and all that, but you know, if I have to choose, I'm going to choose the grandchildren. I had a good run. I don't need three extra years of this, whatever this is when you're 80. So I would not assume that the elderly need the kind of protection as a class, Obviously individuals will differ, but as a class, I don't know if they're asking for the protection that we're offering, given the trade off that it would hurt their grandchildren, etc. Somebody says you first. Yeah. Now people in their 70s, I would expect to have a different opinion because 70s are actually still pretty good years. I'm expecting that my 70s will be pretty good decade actually, as long as I stay healthy. Now the other thing is that if you're one of the older people who does not want to sacrifice your life, you do have the option of taking extreme steps. So you could do extreme social isolation and masking and stuff for another X months until you felt safe. So people who did not want to take the personal risk, they were willing to take the class risk of like, okay, old people are going to have a tough time, I'll take that risk, but I don't want to personally take the risk. They have that option too. They can reduce their own risk to practically nothing if they have the wherewithal to get social isolation. I guess that's not available to everybody. So let's figure that out. A young life is worth more than a lived life, says somebody. Well, I would say there's a lot of individual difference there. As a good general statement, sure. Somebody says the White House press secretary is gone. Is that news? Did that just happen? 70 year olds volunteered to clean up the mess of Fukushima. That does not surprise me. Let's see if there's any news about the press secretary. Coroners cast doubt on Official Coronavirus Death Tolls. CNN exclusive. Interesting, interesting. Let me just see what the headline is. Yeah, because nobody's really testing them to see if they died from the coronavirus. So apparently there's just a mess with the reporting. So that's why I come out to the. You have to look at just the total average deaths in the country year to year because I think that's the only thing that's going to tell us what's going on. Somebody says, I'm 61, not ready to go, still working in essential job. Well, you know, for the people who. It seems to me that. Let me ask you this. So to the person who is 61, who works an essential job and definitely doesn't want to die, which I certainly understand, would you feel more comfortable if they gave you the Z Pak hydroxychloroquine? If they gave it to you as a preventative for a few months during the worst of the coronavirus, would you feel comfortable going back to work? Assuming you did all your social isolating and your masking and stuff, Would that make you comfortable enough if you just knew that you had that drug in you? Now, my understanding is it doesn't prevent you from getting it. Maybe it does, but I don't think that's been demonstrated even anecdotally. The reason you would have it is that if you got the infection, it would already be in your system. So it would be the, you know, Fauci is 80, is he? Fauci isn't 80, is he? He's in great shape. If he's 80. Coroners want to know where are the bodies. Well, I don't think that there's any scandal of hiding bodies, is there? Didn't you just hear that? Wasn't it one of the parks in New York City was going to be dug up for temporary mass graves? Do we do that every year with a regular flu? Do we build mass temporary graves in Central Park? There's something going on here. You can die with the virus but not from the virus, says somebody. All right. Yeah. So people are saying yes, that they would feel comfortable going back. Now keep in mind that for every person who has an actual medical, like physical medical problem from the coronavirus, there are 25 people who have a mental problem from it. So the psychological problem of coronavirus is pretty big. You know, the risk of getting it, the worry and all that. So if the hydroxychloroquine did nothing except make you feel more comfortable, even if you weren't, it'd still totally be worth causes depression in the long run. I don't know what you're talking about. Fauci is 79. People are saying he must. Okay. He runs every day. It looks like he's in good shape. That's a good argument for being fit all of your life. If you look at Fauci, he certainly presents himself as a much younger man. And that would make sense if he runs every day. So I am seeing people saying that the White House spokesperson quit. I don't know about that. Shouldn't the homeless be getting the virus? Well, maybe we will need to bury all the ventilators. You know, if I had to guess, I think that a whole bunch of big American companies are going to be really pissed off that they started making ventilators that we didn't need. I feel like it's heading in that direction now. Of course, it makes more sense to be more prepared versus under prepared. So we should still be making those ventilators like crazy just in case. But so somebody says Stephanie Grisham is reported to be leaving. So maybe that's not. Maybe that's not confirmed. All right. Okay. I'm getting confirmations of the comments that Stephanie Grisham Steph down. That kind of makes sense, doesn't it? I don't even know what she looks like. The spokesperson for the President of the United States. I can't tell you what she looks like. I wouldn't recognize her, would you? And I think this president doesn't really need one of those. It seems like an almost or at least in terms of the public part where the spokesperson talks to the public. Don't really need that part. So I can see why she might want to move on. Says she's returning to the first lady staff. All right. She was reassigned to her previous post. Okay. Prisoners should get the Trump pills. Well, we should all get the Trump pills. Obviously there's not a supply of them. Wouldn't you like to have some visibility on the supply? So the president said we got X millions of pills from this source or this source. Is that enough? Is that a lot? What are they doing with them? Are they allocating them? Can prisoners get them? How about old people? What about people who don't show symptoms? So it's the most important variable in which we have no information at all. And if Stephanie Grisham had been pushing the task force to give good information, maybe that's why she got fired. So think about this. Nobody's complained about the communication of the task force more than I have. Is that true? Would you agree that nobody has had more sharper, deeper complaints about the quality of the communication from the task force than me? I've been the harshest about that. I think a total failure in communication, specifically not telling the public a little bit better idea of at least what they know. Even if they don't know things, they should tell us what they don't know and what they do know about the supply situation and, you know, the hydroxychloroquine and the ventilators and everything else. So I've been the harshest critic saying that the whole things are just a. Just a horrible. I don't want to use the word I was going to use, but would it be a surprise to me to watch a person who is a professional in charge of this kind of communication have some conflict with the people who are blowing it in public every day now? In my opinion, the task force is blowing it every day like they're failing. It's just an F in communicating with the public. I would say it's just a flat F day after day. F, F, F, F. It's always the same reason. It's not that the President isn't entertaining. It's not that he doesn't get good ratings. It's not that the public doesn't enjoy it. It's not that we don't learn things, because we do. And it educates us about, you know, socially isolated and all that. So there are lots of value to the task force presentations. I watch most of them, so I would say the value is very high. But the skill in terms of the primary message, which is inform the public of the useful information, that's just an F. So imagine you're the professional who's most identified with the messages coming out of the White House. You don't get to change how they do it because obviously they're not listening to her, wouldn't you say? I mean, I don't think anybody was listening to her opinion. So here she is watching the people who are doing the thing she's supposed to be in charge of, which is communicating, and they're failing every day and they're not listening to her advice because, you know, they're not. Right. I mean, you don't have to be in the room to know that. If she just resigned, it's because they weren't listening to her. Right. I don't think there was another reason. You know, it had to be that she was not being taken seriously. Her opinion on how to do this just wasn't winning the day, apparently. So, yeah, if I were her, I think I would have quit if I had to be in charge of communication and wouldn't have any influence on it. And then I had to watch the people who should be taking my advice go out there and fail. Just fail day after day after day and fail exactly the same way by not giving us any useful information in context. That would drive you crazy. How could you keep that job? So of course she should leave. All right, that's about all I got for today. I will try to. Somebody says, so it's not an F. Let me be clear. There's lots of value in the press conferences, so I'd like to see that. Lots of value. But in terms of communicating, the specific skill of communicating, which is a subset of the value of the press conference, just the communicating part is an F. Because they simply don't answer the important questions, nor do they even tell you they can't answer them, nor do they tell you they will answer them. Just completely avoiding all the important questions about supply and about getting back to work. All right, somebody says you're speaking from fear. Am I? I don't know. That gets you blocked. So for those of you who haven't figured out the pattern yet, you never get blocked for disagreeing with me. That's a hard rule. You can disagree all you want, but when you tell me what I'm thinking, you get blocked. Because I need. I want an audience that understands the difference between, you know, me knowing what I'm thinking, and I can be pretty accurate about that versus you knowing what I'm thinking. If you say in public your opinion of what I'm thinking, I'm just going to block you because I don't have time for people like that. In my world, that's the lowest level of understanding your world, imagining you can read somebody's mind. And on that note, I hope to see you later tonight. 10 and 10. That's East coast time. 7 and 7. If you're in California, and why wouldn't you be? California is actually doing an unusually good job. Now, isn't that weird? It's weird that California is being held up as one of the successful states, but I got a feeling it might be more to do with the fact that we Californians don't bunch up as much. You know, we don't get on subways. We don't have public transportation. I'm talking about Los Angeles in particular. Don't have public transportation. Don't have as many elevators. I've got a feeling that there's just something about the fact that Los Angeleans tend to drive their cars by themselves. They don't have passengers in their cars. So it's probably as much about lifestyle as it is about good management. But anyway, it's working out. All right. That's all for now. I'll talk to you later tonight. Stay safe.