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March 15, 2020 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
27:38
Episode 852 Scott Adams: Afternoon #WuFlu Chat

My new book LOSERTHINK, available now on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/rqmjc2a Content: An afternoon chat with Scott --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scott-adams00/support

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Hey everybody, come on in.
It's time for a special afternoon WooFlu chat with Scott Adams.
Now I do this partly because I love you, partly because sports got cancelled, and what are you going to do?
How many of you are sitting at home thinking, uh, what are we going to do for the next, however long this is?
We're a little bit bored.
Well, luckily. Luckily you have me.
Now, I was going to skip the simultaneous sip, but I can tell you need it.
You do. You need it.
I don't have any coffee with me, so we will be substituting the delicious aqua.
Aqua is some other language for water.
Latin? I don't know.
Doesn't matter, does it? Well, if you'd like to join me for the simultaneous sip, really, the second one of the day, this one's the bonus one.
This is just, you know, almost too much.
All you need is a cup or a mug or a glass or a tank or a chalice or sign or a canteen or a glass or a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid. I'm liking water at the moment.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine hit of the day, actually the second dopamine hit of the day, the thing that's going to make everything a little bit better still.
It's a simultaneous sip.
Go. Well, I think it's up to me to give you the good news.
You've been watching the bad news on all those other channels.
And I'll have some tips for you to manage your stress here in a moment.
At some point, I might have to hypnotize you directly.
Not every one of you.
You know, you can always turn it off.
But at some point, you might want that.
You might want a little hypnosis for stress relief or even just entertainment.
Oh, you know what I just thought?
I bet I could use this time to develop like a class on persuasion or something.
And then you'd have something that was, you know, dependable.
It'd be like, every time, every day at this time, we'll talk about a lesson or something.
Let me think about that. Looks like we're all going to have a little extra time on our hands, starting today.
First, a little update from my area of the world.
Our grocery stores are pretty wiped out at this point.
And what's interesting about where I live is I live in the same town as the executives and the headquarters for Safeway, the biggest supermarket.
Now, if I had to guess, I think I'm in the, just by luck, I'm in one of the safest places in the world.
In terms of being sure there'll be stuff on the shelves.
Because I think Safeway will make sure its own executives are somewhere near the beginning of the pile.
Here's the thing that you need to know if you're worried about running out of stuff.
Are you ready? Because if you see people hoarding and you haven't hoarded enough, You might say, oh no, it's the end of the world, but it isn't.
It is not.
It is not. Because this is a weird kind of crisis.
It's not like any others.
And if you compare it to anything, you're going to get the wrong answer.
The only thing you should compare the Wuhan flu to is itself.
Don't compare it to anything else.
So here's why you should not worry in the long run.
In the short run, there's going to be some hiccups and you'll get scared because there's, I don't know, not enough of this or that.
But grocery stores make a lot of different kinds of food.
And if I had to guess, I don't think that...
Well, I do have to guess...
We're really good at making stuff and putting it where it belongs.
And we can still do all of that with 20% of the people hiding and the other 80% of the people working but staying 6 feet away from the other people.
Here's what you need to know about people.
Let's say there's a loud explosion in your block and you think it's a terrorist attack or something.
Watch what happens to the crowd.
For every person who runs away thinking, ah, there's some unknown danger.
I run from unknown danger.
You watch and there's some number of human beings who run toward it.
Every time. Every single time.
Human beings, most of us will run away from danger.
You know, depending if we have the capability to do anything and what we know and who we are, etc.
But we are a species that is full of people who are way braver than I am, who will run directly at danger.
A lot of them.
It's not even rare.
Let's call them, in the context of this coronavirus thing, let's call them ordinary heroes.
People who do not possess some special superpower, but they're going to be taking more risks.
than the rest of us.
There are some people who will step into the breach and say, you know, I could get killed, but I'm going to do it anyway, because that's what we do.
People do that. I'd love to say someday that I could be one of those people, but the good news is there are plenty of them.
So for every idiot who's over hoarding toilet paper, We have just as many people who will say, you know, hey, if you can't deliver bread in that truck, hand me the keys.
Am I right? If there's a truck that can't get to a supermarket, you think nobody's going to step in?
Of course they will. If there's something in the field that needs to get picked, do you think we can't find some people to pick it?
Yeah, we can. Yeah, they might need to stay away from each other and wash their hands and stuff.
Well, yeah, they'll get picked. If it needs to be stocked on the shelves of Safeway, and the person who does the stocking is sick that day, is it going to get stocked?
Yeah, sure.
Because people are just going to step in.
The thing with the food supply chain, and really it's true from the paper of goods and every other part of that, is that it's all easy stuff.
Meaning each individual little slice of it is pretty easy.
So if you get sick, I could do your job probably tomorrow.
Carrying, driving, cash register, I could do that.
So you're not going to run into people and therefore you're not going to run into food as long as people have money to buy it.
So the people who are maybe losing their income We have a bigger short-term problem than the rest of us.
But they will also be surrounded by people who did not lose their income and for whom feeding one extra mouth is not a big deal.
So I would never advise you not to take precautions because you should just be ready for any kind of emergency.
I think the thing you should worry least about while also preparing, I'm not talking you out of preparing, I hope you don't hear that.
Preparing is good. If for no other reason than it has stimulated the economy.
Do you know how much the grocery store and maybe even other businesses like Costco and drugstores and everything, do you know how much they got stimulated this month?
Somebody asked about hard cash.
I think there's another good example.
The odds of the banks being closed Minimal.
There's a good chance that you won't be able to go into the lobby of a bank, you know, without certain precautions or something, but it'll get done.
You know, most of that stuff is telephone stuff anyway.
ATMs should probably work fine.
I imagine that there'll be people standing outside with, you know, cleansers or they'll tell you to use your elbow or a pencil to push the buttons or something.
That might be a good idea. But No, I don't think there's really any real risk of running out of banks, cash, food, electricity, gas, both the liquid kind and the gas your stove runs on.
I don't think there's any chance of those things being impacted in any long-term way.
So on any given day, you might be inconvenienced, but you'll be fine.
So what's different about this, and if you're saying to yourself, yeah, Scott, but I see pictures of emergencies in other countries and they don't recover that fast.
Well, what's different about this is that we're not running out of anything.
We actually have so much extra in terms of extra labor, you know, if we need it, And extra everything.
So we mostly need to make sure that the people who are not getting a paycheck get some kind of compensation.
And I would say again, and I'll probably do this on the next day or so, but I'm planning to just buy gift certificates at all the local restaurants.
And that's just a good idea.
And then later you can use it.
So all it does is shift your spending because the moment I can go back to restaurants, Man, am I going back to restaurants.
I guess I'm pent up traveling and some pent up buying and some pent up a lot of stuff.
So I'll say it again.
When the economy comes back, it's going to come back faster than you expect.
So whatever you thought was the long-term implication, if you were to take the average of all the experts, put me at the fastest.
I would be The public figure is saying that once we get a handle on the virus, which we don't have yet, but once we get it, the recovery is going to be frankly astounding.
I think it will be just breathtaking.
Scott, do you think we have a diplomacy opportunity with Iran?
Nope, I do not. And that's very low on my list of things to worry about this week.
But I don't think Iran is going to budge.
I think they're just going to deal with their problems.
We'll deal with ours and then we'll get back to things.
Here's what I found worked with kids.
All of you who are adults are having a problem right now telling your kids that their time with their friends is going to be shut off.
I did a little A-B testing and The A-B testing determined that there was one thing I said that seemed to be completely effective.
So here it is. The one thing I said was the government says you've got to stay six feet away from your friends.
Which is true. So it has the advantage of being true.
It's not a law per se, but I don't want to say it's a law.
I just say the government says you need to stay six feet away from your friends.
Now, let me explain why that works.
And everything else doesn't.
And it goes like this.
Hey, Mom or Dad, can I go to sleepover?
No. Can I just go over to one friend's house?
No. Can one friend come over here?
No. So the point is you'll get negotiated to death, but if you say the government says you have to stay six feet apart, that hits hard.
Because that's serious business.
That's not a, well, is three friends better than four friends?
Should I stick with two?
Should I phase it down to one?
As soon as you get into anything that can be negotiated, you're going to end up negotiating, and you shouldn't.
So try it at home, see if it works, and give me some feedback.
If you say, yeah, we've just got to stay six feet apart.
Because the kids wouldn't want to play with their friends if they had to stay six feet apart anyway.
There is some good news coming.
And it's pretty big.
It's pretty big.
This virus thing affects every part of our human experience.
And one of the things it affects the most is our psychology.
So the way we think about things just got changed.
And we don't know exactly how that will play out.
But let me tell you, I'll just give you a small example.
How good are you going to feel when this is over?
Now, I don't know if it'll be over like, you know, there'll be one day where they say, hey, everything's good.
Probably it will phase back to normal slowly the way it sort of, you know, phased into where it is.
But it's going to feel great.
And here's the other thing.
You're going to appreciate your normal life like you have never appreciated it before.
Because, man, do we take for granted Everything, really.
But it's not your fault.
It's not your fault that you take for granted, you know, that things work around you.
It's not your fault at all, because the way your brain is designed, you're supposed to stop paying attention to the things that are not a problem.
You wouldn't be able to live your life if you put as much attention on the things that are not a problem as the things that you need to solve.
So of course we take it for granted.
But man, is it going to feel good when it's over?
Like, seriously good, and it's going to last.
I'll give you an example, two examples actually.
There was one time way back in my past when I couldn't eat for, I don't know, a week or something because of some dental issues.
All I could have was, you know, gruel.
And the first time I had a solid meal after not eating regular food for a week, you cannot believe, people, you cannot believe how good that food felt.
Likewise, some of you know I had a problem where I lost my ability to speak for a few years.
When it came back, you have no idea how happy I am and continually grateful all day long.
I'm grateful all day long that that old problem was solved and I don't have that anymore.
So it's going to feel good and it's going to be a very connected feeling because you're all going to feel good at the same time.
So look forward to that. Alright, so here's some other good news coming.
And it all has to do with the same point, that our psychology just changed.
The psychology changed.
But we've never had a time in human history.
So 15 billion years have transpired since the Big Bang, give or take 2 or 3 billion.
And we have never, ever Had all the smartest people on the planet, the galaxy if you like, the smartest people in the galaxy, focused on the same problem at the same time.
There's nothing like this.
You know, you could go back to, well, what about the Manhattan Project?
Nope. Nope.
Because in the Manhattan Project, communication was kind of bad, and we just had to use the scientists that we had who happened to be here.
But on this problem, The entire world, the smartest, most capable people, are all immediately engaged.
And they're working hard, and they're putting in the serious time and effort.
Now, here's what you need to know.
Do you ever wonder what your dog or your cat thinks of you?
Because your dog or your cat looks at you and knows that you can do some things that they can't do.
But on the other hand, the dog and the cat can do some things you can't do.
So I don't know if your dog or your cat recognize how smart you are.
Because it's a curious thing that if you're the smart one in the room, you can tell how dumb the dumb one is.
But the dumb one can't tell how smart the smart one is.
Right? Because you can only understand things up to the level of your own intelligence.
If somebody's above that, You don't know how much more above that they are because it all doesn't make sense to you.
So they could be twice as smart, 10% smarter, and it's all just confusing to you.
Just like your dog looks at you, this is sort of how you and I are looking at the geniuses, literally geniuses, around the world.
MIT, you know, basically every, you know, Sloan, Kettering, basically everywhere that you've got geniuses, they're all working on this.
You got your Silicon Valley geniuses, you got people building apps, you got a lot.
Now, our government is not really staffed with the same level of genius, if we could be honest, but they don't need to be.
Because their job is to get us focused, moving in the right direction, close airports, get rid of regulations, stuff like that, and they're doing it well.
So there are two types of jobs in this crisis.
There's the everyday hero job, where anybody can do it.
You know, if you need somebody to finish driving that bread truck to the supermarket so we don't run out, I can do that.
Give me the keys. I can't invent a new vaccine, but luckily we have people who can.
Geniuses. And we have politicians who are closer to the everyday hero type of person than the genius, but they're doing their job too.
Do I care that they've made mistakes?
Not right now.
Not right now. Later, when this is all over, I'm going to be one of many people saying, hey, we better look at what we did here to see what we can learn.
Find out what went well and what didn't.
Not so much for blaming people, but you need to know what worked and what didn't.
So I'm all for that later.
At the moment, blaming each other for doing things wrong is sort of not the right vibe for an emergency.
Because our president does not operate in our government, at the moment anyway, in 2020, it doesn't operate as some kind of independent machine that's off there making decisions.
That's not what's happening. That machine is wholly dependent on the public and the experts feeding it what works.
And I have heard nobody say, and correct me if I'm wrong, that here's the point where you would lose confidence, and I don't think this has happened, where somebody very smart, or ideally more people than one, say, hey, we made this presentation to the president, We said, we think you should do X, and then he used his lack of expertise to override us.
If you hear that, you have a right to be worried.
If what you hear, and so far this is all we've heard, we've heard it even from political enemies of the president, that people are bringing him ideas, fully formed, that's the kind of idea you want, you know, a fully formed idea, and they say, can we do this?
And the president's saying, yes.
What help do you need? What can they do to make that happen better?
So everything's working quite, quite well.
The problem is gigantic.
I mean gigantic. We haven't seen anything quite like this recently.
So it's gigantic, but we've never had this kind of capability focused on it.
So what I would expect, somebody says the Fed got reached to 0%.
Well, there again. So you've got your financial experts jumping into the fight.
What can we do? And then they did it.
Now, I feel that these little tweaks to the economy are primarily for our psychology.
Every time the government tweaks some little thing, or the Fed tweaks some little thing, you say to yourself, Smart people are watching.
They're reacting. They're paying attention.
I'm part of a big enterprise here where the right people are making the right decisions.
So when I see the Fed cut its rates, I don't know that it makes any difference economically, except that the economy is a psychology machine.
And if you think it makes a difference, if you think it mattered, it did.
It did, because that translates into people acting rationally in a way that capitalism likes.
Here are some things that may end up way better after this crisis passes.
And other people have said this, but it's worth seeing them in a list.
Online education. Do you think education in person will ever be the same?
Because if you get enough people to try enough online education, you're going to get a lot of people saying, first of all, I kind of like this.
It's a little bit better. And the other thing you're going to get is a lot of people being exposed to it.
And then people say, you know, maybe I want to work on this.
Maybe I want to make this online education thing better.
Maybe that's the industry that's going to be growing like crazy.
Because I think it is.
So online education might...
Have gotten this huge, you know, unexpected boost.
I think you can see a bunch of inventions come out of this.
Whenever there's a war, people invent stuff, because you always need to invent stuff to get an edge on the enemy.
I don't know my history very well, but I think radar would be an example.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think radar was invented for war purposes, and look how useful it is.
We're going to see a bunch of inventions.
And these inventions might be the type that really make a difference.
Now, I mentioned this thing called the far UV light.
I don't know if that's real, meaning there's a type of light with a certain frequency.
It's not regular UV, it's far UV. And allegedly it can knock viruses out of the air, basically, and kill them on surfaces and things.
Now, I don't know if that's true.
Or if it works well enough or it only works in some cases or whatever.
But you're going to see stuff like that that maybe just wouldn't have been invented so quickly before.
Anybody who's got an idea for something that would help in a pandemic, well, they're going to get funded, right?
So you're going to see a bunch of businesses jump up about this.
You're going to see the door-dashing world take off.
I've said for a long time that Restaurants will probably, you've seen it a little bit already, sort of transmogrify into takeout or delivery only.
So I think some restaurants are going to survive by being...
Super proactive and take out as long as they can get their kitchen staff there.
So that might be a difference.
You might see the cost and convenience and availability of home delivery of warm food just go through the roof.
The other thing is people are designing all kinds of systems to live better.
I've told you my system for decreasing any unnecessary stress Is, you know, exercise and staying busy and having a purpose and all that stuff.
I won't go through the list.
You've already heard it. But I think a lot of people, and I'm hearing it already, have already implemented systems for their own world.
So your system might not include taking walks every day like mine, but you probably will find some kind of system for exercise and eating and fitness.
And they might stick. Healthcare will never be the same.
The president, I guess the federal government said it would be okay for doctors to practice across state lines for telemedicine for the length of the crisis, but apparently there's still state restrictions.
And I thought, oh wow.
I thought to myself, oh wow, state restrictions.
That means 50 different entities have to say yes before you've got full practicing across state boundaries.
I'm expecting that to get solved.
I hope it does.
And if that got solved, that would be gigantic.
That would affect the cost of healthcare in general.
So that might be some good stuff coming out of that.
I told you that South Korea has these portable CT machines.
So they can actually...
Test people with a portable machine.
So, why can't we have those?
I'm sure we will. Let me turn off my phone.
Have you noticed that the messaging from people is going up pretty much?
Yeah, grocery stores are also helping with delivery.
You'll see young people helping old people.
You can see all kinds of stuff. The other thing that might change is immigration.
And here's the psychology part of that.
Oh, actually, I'll be on Dr.
Drew's later. So I'll get off so you can watch him.
If Dr. Drew's on Periscope, I don't want to compete with that.
So let me just say that stay six feet apart.
And I think that immigration, people may have a different opinion of it after this.
Because it's one thing to say, yes, we should let people come across our open border.
You know, people on the left saying that.
But it's another thing when you've just put in your emergency supply of food and people are still coming across the border.
You're going to think of it differently.
Because there's nothing to stop people from walking up and taking your food.
And it's, you know, people are going to figure that out.
So I think the psychology of an open border Maybe dead now.
So I think open borders is a dead idea.
But I'm going to get off, and I think I'll watch Dr.
Drew's Periscope as well.
And join me later.
I think I'll be on at California time, 3.30ish.
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