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March 17, 2020 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
30:21
Episode 854 Scott Adams: Special Crisis Periscope Because What Else Have I Got To Do?
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Hey everybody!
I know a lot of you are probably watching the Bernie Sanders live stream of music right now.
Which I gotta say, Bernie, thank you.
Excellent job. So Bernie, I guess, instead of his rally, got some bands and got Neil Young to sing live on Periscope.
And he was promoting Bernie, and I think he's somewhere remotely.
But the rest of us, we just get to listen to really good music.
I don't know if you tuned in to any of that, but it was great.
So congratulations, Bernie.
Great job during the virus.
Creative and good for the public.
I appreciate it. Somebody says, not now, Tucker's on.
Sorry. You've got Tucker recorded.
Or you can watch me record it.
It works both ways. So, keep me company while I set up my desk.
That's why I'm here.
I am literally here to keep you company.
We are going to have a paucity of entertainment.
Less people step up, and according to the Bernie Sanders livestream, it looks like people are.
I'll try to do the same.
I tweeted earlier that I predict there will be a bunch of outdoor drive-in theaters popping up.
Because it's really easy to do.
You can buy a little projector for yourself, put it on a wall, all you need is a screen of some sort, some kind of flat surface.
And a place to park. So, how hard would it be for somebody to just turn a parking lot into a drive-in movie?
Couldn't you do it? Now, I think what you'd need to do is you'd have to get the sound into the car, but that seems doable.
Must be an app that can stream a...how hard would that be?
Stream the movie into your car and then play it.
You know, optionally you can play it through your speakers.
Then everybody during the coronavirus crisis can just drive up in the car, watch a movie.
If you do it in your neighborhood, you might have to use the bathroom at home.
I guess bathroom would be a problem.
But you're going to see a lot of creativity.
Anyway, here's what I've been thinking about.
Because I find my role during the crisis is to make people feel more relaxed.
Because once you've done everything you can do, everything the government tells you to do, well your job after that is to relax.
That's actually your job.
Because you need to stay healthy.
You need to keep your immune system up.
You don't need any stress.
So do what you need to do, but then it's your job to relax.
For health reasons and for the benefit of the country.
So, let me tell you some things to help you relax.
That's what we're going to do here today.
The first thing you need to know is that while there have been some publicized missteps in the beginning of this thing, the country is really stepping up.
Really, really stepping up.
Very impressive. And let me give you one concrete example of that.
When I had the suggestion of allowing doctors to practice across state lines, that idea ended up in the hands of the president's chief of staff, I think in an hour.
I think it took one hour for just an ordinary good idea that doctors should temporarily at least be able to practice across state lines.
It took an hour.
One hour. That idea was literally in the hands of Mark Meadows, or in his brain.
He said it sounded like something you wanted to look into.
And then I got a confirmation back in one hour.
Now, that's not the only time that's happened.
It's kind of a clean example.
But for whatever accident of history, I ended up being sort of a filter and curator of some ideas that people are sending up.
And they don't know who to talk to.
In some cases, they don't know who to connect to, and I just happen to be able to do that.
So, the stuff you're not seeing is working really well.
The people who are restocking the shelves, etc., they're working hard.
There's a lot of good stuff happening and more coming.
So I want to talk about some of the thinking past the sale here a little bit.
Sooner or later we're going to get a handle on this thing.
We're going to get control of it like we always do.
If you bet against humanity, well, you're on the wrong side.
It's a bad bet. We're good at this stuff and this is nowhere near something that's going to take us down.
Nowhere near. This is an annoyance That has some weird, unintended benefits.
Now, I'm not losing sight of the hard times ahead, but it doesn't hurt to just take your mind off of that for a while.
And here are a few things that I could identify that seem to me likely to be better in the future because of the virus.
Now, you could, you know, quibble with some of them, but we'll have a run through.
The first thing that's going to be better is science.
Maybe not every branch of science, but because of this crisis, suddenly a whole bunch of people who would not have met each other, met.
That's a big deal. When you take all these geniuses in the world, really the smartest people in this field, and you say, now you don't have a choice, you're working together.
You're going to cross-pollinate, you're going to share ideas, and you're still going to know each other when it's done.
This is huge. I mean, it's enormous, but also kind of invisible, because the benefits are down the line, and you'll never really know what one came out of it.
But when you put this many of the brightest people in the world together on the same problem, they don't stay, you know, they don't lose touch.
That becomes a permanent, like part of a, you know, society's brain, if you will, that just, you know, just got organized by this problem.
So in a sense, This virus is like, you know, any blow to the body, let's say your muscles, if you overwork them, well, they break down and then they build back stronger.
And you see, I think you'll see that with science.
You're also seeing participant in government.
I didn't know what to call it, but the example that I used before, where average citizens are just saying, I could build a factory, you know, I could get that done.
I mean, maybe not with my hands and my own hands, but I could make that happen.
People saying, I can solve this problem.
I can help this person.
You know, I can find somebody who needs something.
So, we've created this, and the internet helps tremendously to this, we've created a participant kind of a government where that distinction between what's the government and what is the people has somewhat, you know, got a little murky, right?
Because is Fauci the government or is he a scientist?
Are all the scientists the government?
Are they private?
What about all the people who are working with the government?
It's like the government and the public just became this single creature.
And maybe some of the good parts we'll keep, specifically the part about bubbling up good ideas.
I think this process is going to identify new leaders.
Now, it's the presidential season, but I'm not talking about that.
I'm simply talking about the fact that...
Let me use this example.
If you were in a crowded cafe and there was an explosion outside and you thought it was bad, whatever it is, most of the people in the cafe are going to get up and run because they should.
But in that cafe there will be three people who stand up and walk directly toward the danger.
Because there's something about humans That we breed heroes.
Not all of us, obviously.
And if those three people ended up needing more help, people who were not heroes would just become heroes.
Almost spontaneously.
We're sort of like chameleons like that.
We run when running away makes sense, but then when it doesn't, Ordinary people just become heroes.
You're seeing it every day. It's happening all over the world.
So we're going to identify new leaders.
I don't know what that means.
I don't know if any of them will become permanent leaders, but you'll know who they were.
You will know who they were.
Our pandemic defense is getting a real good test, except, unfortunately, it's a real thing.
Will it be better?
After this is done, absolutely.
Was this the biggest problem we'll ever have with a pandemic?
Probably not. So, having the one that doesn't kill you and tells you, oh for sure, there might be one later that does, that allows us to strengthen our defense.
When this is over, we will be the strongest we've ever been as a civilization.
Because we'll have this.
And right now it's one of our biggest vulnerabilities as a species, if you will.
Home delivery, of course, will just go through the roof.
I heard Amazon is looking to hire 100,000 more people.
Safeway apparently is hiring like crazy.
That's my local grocery store.
And I had no problem at all door dashing.
Now, I don't know if that'll change, but I'm ordering food from local restaurants because that may be the change that's coming.
The change that's coming might be that restaurants become more like kitchens and maybe the costs go down with volume and stuff.
And at least for a while, we'll keep them alive with ordering from them.
And that also takes the burden off of your emergency supplies.
Because the restaurants are well stocked.
They have more than they can sell right now.
So buy from your local restaurant.
Save the beans and rice, just in case.
I don't think you're going to need them.
I'll talk about that in a minute.
I think our hygiene as a people is permanently improved.
I think we are permanently a more hygienic species after this.
Because we're building habits.
It's in our heads.
It's in our training. Good hygiene.
How many lives will that save?
Well, it will save more.
I can confidently predict this.
That we will save more lives with all the hygiene reflexes that people are developing than we will lose with the coronavirus.
We will come out ahead.
It just won't be right away.
Fitness, a lot of people are taking the advice to use this excuse to get healthy.
Nobody's going to argue with you Especially if you're an older or less over 50, but they're not going to argue with anybody when you say, I have to take a walk.
I have to go for a run.
I've got to lift some weights. Yeah, at home.
I wouldn't go to the gym.
But you're going to learn to do it at home.
Try walking. So I did a little experiment.
Stress is kind of high with everybody.
So yesterday, I did not take a long walk.
It's the first time in a long time.
And I got to tell you, my mental state was far more, let's say, brittle than it was on all the days that I walked.
So then the next day I walked and I just said, all right, now do a little internal survey.
And by the way, I recommend this.
You should always do a little audit of your mental state after you've done a physical thing.
Especially exercise and especially eating any particular type of food.
Just see how you feel for a few hours after.
And I can tell you that after a long walk, it wasn't exhausting.
It was just a nice, good long walk.
I came back and my mental state was excellent.
Slept like a baby.
It was great. So if you don't do anything else, you should take a walk every day.
Really. All right.
Are prepping skills going to be much better?
If there's any other future time that something comes up, wow, are we going to be better at this?
I'm not saying that that's a good thing, that we have another tragedy, of course, but we'll be ready for it, so that's good.
What about the online school?
I think we'll move faster to online.
I think the UBI situation, in my opinion, The UBI idea of, at least temporarily during the crisis, giving people who need it, I don't know, maybe everybody, but people who need it at least $1,000 a month, maybe more, who knows?
But something like that.
I would almost guarantee that's going to happen.
That's as close to definitely happening as just about anything I could think of.
And the reason that I'm going to say it's close to definitely going to happen is that it looks like it might be necessary.
And here's why you know it's going to happen.
Rich people want it to.
Right? And that's the problem.
Basically, rich people are going to say, yes, UBI, let's crank it out.
I don't think you'll get disagreement.
This is not a Democrat thing.
This is not a Republican thing.
And if all the rich people agree, which they never had agreed on UBI before, I mean, it had been a polarizing kind of a topic that was growing in popularity, but at the moment, to save the people who literally can't buy food, you're not going to find a rich person who says no to that.
And if you do, steal their food.
You have my permission.
Not really. Not really.
Naval says what is stupid, the UBI? I don't think he's talking about the UBI for an emergency situation.
So I don't know that we'll ever move to UBI permanently, some kind of a thousand dollar a month situation no matter what you do, but we will test it.
Wouldn't that be good to have a test?
I think our healthcare system will be forever better because of all the things we learned.
I think there are lots of regulations that will never come back because once they were gone people didn't miss them.
I think the risk to our supply chain, which at the moment I think is actually kind of low.
If I had to put money on it, then I guess I have.
I guess I have put money on it because I still have my money in the stock market.
The supply chain is something we do well.
And food will come back first.
You're never going to have a problem with energy.
I don't see any chance of that.
You'll have water.
You'll have all the basics. The garbage will get picked up, I imagine.
And we'll go on.
So I think everything is heading in the direction of under control.
Somebody says, where does the money come from?
Well, it would drive up the debt.
But the reason I said that it's important that rich people agreed to it, I just realized I had my headphones on.
I'm probably talking too loud.
Somebody says, you're making me feel terrible.
Why? What have I said that makes you feel terrible?
So the debt will go up no matter what.
That's just a given. But we can figure a way out of this.
All right. Yeah, Trump tweeted that this virus is the Chinese virus.
So that just happened. I got a mixed opinion on that.
And it goes like this.
In ordinary times, I wouldn't have any problem with the president doing his usual provocative stuff.
And, you know, he knows how to do it.
He knows how to provoke. And then people would say, ah, you racist.
Stop calling it a Chinese virus.
And then he would say, but that's where it started.
It has nothing to do with racism.
And then he would get all the attention.
And, you know, it looks like a play that he's played lots of times before.
But it doesn't feel right in a crisis, does it?
It feels small.
So I wish he hadn't done it.
I think it was a mistake. I've never said he's made more communication mistakes than this week.
But I also think that The experts are doing a great job, and the country is doing a great job.
And I think the president did what he needed to do, just communication.
He's just not ahead in the communication this week.
It's like he's a little tone deaf or something.
But here's the softening of that.
The president might be preparing us for decoupling.
Well, let me say it a different way.
The President is preparing us for decoupling.
And if calling it a Chinese virus makes you feel worse about China, and it makes it a little easier to decouple and bring our supply chain back, well, okay.
You know, I'm going to give them a pass.
So I can have two opinions on this, and I think that they can live together.
One opinion is, didn't like it.
Wasn't the right time.
Under normal circumstances, sure, have some fun with it.
But right now, not the right time.
However, we are in crisis mode and nitpicking the president's words is sort of beneath all of us.
But you asked the question. I'm just trying to be conversational here.
I think you've got to let that stuff go.
For now. Whether it's the president, whether it's somebody else, whether it's your most hated pundit on TV, just gotta let the little stuff go, just for a while.
You can get back to chewing each other to death whenever we're back to normal.
But the president is preparing us for decoupling.
If that's what he had in mind when he was framing it that way, I'd say, hmm, yeah, okay, I can see that.
It's just, you know, maybe not the perfect time.
All right. It is a Chinese virus.
Say what it is. Name your enemy to effectively fight.
Well, I don't think there's any chance that it's an intentional, you know, any kind of bioweapon.
So, I think we need to leave that behind.
Do we all agree?
For a long time I was I was open to the question of, gosh, where did this come from?
I'm still open to the question, it could have come out of some kind of a laboratory.
But I reject the idea that it was designed and deliberately released.
So I don't think it's designed and I don't think it was deliberately released.
But I might have come out of some lab that had a lot of samples of one thing or another.
That's entirely possible. Assuming you're right, what about stocks?
What about gold? I will give you no recommendation about gold.
Gold is something I've never understood beyond the fact that it's a psychological phenomenon.
So I don't give advice on things which I don't consider an investment.
And gold can act as a hedge.
There's no doubt about it.
In some circumstances, but not necessarily reliably.
And I wouldn't call it an investment, so I won't give you advice on it.
But stocks. I also don't give advice on stocks except generic.
So I'm not going to tell you buy this stock, buy this, buy that.
It does seem to be that there's some kind of realignment happening in the world.
I have a broad index.
I would expect a third of my stocks to really suck for a long time.
But did I mention that Amazon is hiring a thousand people?
So there are other companies that will grow like crazy.
And it will at least partially offset some of the ones that are going to shrink.
So this is just a general statement, not advice.
Diversified portfolios have never lost.
Never. If you're going to bet on something, bet on something that's never lost.
What's the record?
How long is this unbroken record of a diversified portfolio?
Portfolio, never losing.
Now when I say never, I mean over any 10-year period.
In any given year, you could have a year like this.
But if you just hold on, you would be in an asset class.
Since the beginning of the asset class, I'm not a historian enough to know when was the first stock issued.
But never. Never.
Nobody's ever lost money in the stock market if they were willing to hold it, you know, 10 years or whatever.
Now, I think this is going to be far less than a 10-year problem because your 10-year slumps in the economy have more of a reason.
You know, there's something about the world that's not quite working, whereas that's not the case.
The moment this virus is under control, All of our assets, all of our people, boom, we just slot them back in and start cranking it.
So I've said this before, but whenever the recovery starts, and that's the part, you know, I'm not going to make a prediction about that, but whatever happens, the recovery is going to be freaking awesome.
It will be a recovery like nobody's ever seen.
So there will be records set on the upside, at least percentage-wise.
I don't know how long it will take to get To get back to where we were, but there will be records set.
It'll happen pretty quickly.
It'll probably happen about the time you start seeing good news about the virus rate going down.
That's probably premature.
And I say that only because we expect the flu has a good chance of having a double hump.
Gets bad, might get better in the summer, might not.
And then might get worse in the winter, might not.
A lot of unknowns. Will this event inspire better cinema scripts?
Well, let me put it this way.
So I've been telling you that we're on the cusp of the Golden Age.
And then this happens. And so you say to yourself, well, Scott, I guess you got this one wrong.
You're way wrong.
This doesn't seem so golden to me.
But it feels like a movie, and we just hit the third act.
If you watch any drama movie, actually any movie, the third act is that thing that's sort of closer to the end than the beginning, in which the hero of the story, is in an impossible situation and the audience can't even imagine how it could be solved.
It's like unimaginable there's any solution.
That's the third act.
That's where we are.
And just because you can't imagine it doesn't mean it won't get solved because we're not the ones who know how this stuff works.
Luckily the experts do imagine it and they have a better idea of where it's going.
But it does feel Weirdly like a movie script and we're right in the middle of the third act.
And how does the third act go?
Always the same way.
Always the same way. The hero wins.
That's how it works. So if you think this is a simulation that we're in and that it's following movie script form, which it seems to do by coincidence or design, I don't know, probably coincidence.
But you'll see it often.
Yeah, somebody says, hopefully not the fourth act.
Inflection point.
Chose fake or real, weakness or strength.
Yeah, I didn't understand that.
Yeah, the video conferencing companies are going crazy.
Somebody says, will you admit you were wrong when we don't see many deaths like China and Italy?
Why would I? Is there something you don't understand about my opinion?
That that question made sense?
Because I'm not one who said, we're all doomed.
The danger is if you don't act.
But we're acting.
And the panic of, my God, millions could die, is what causes people to act.
There's no conflict between anything I've said And either a good result or a bad result.
Because I don't have a prediction on the outcome, except that it will be better than you're probably thinking it will be, and faster.
Somebody in the comments says, have you heard of this coronavirus thing?
Somebody says, I'm in Hawaii, should I worry less?
Well, you probably can worry less just because you're in Hawaii.
I'd go to the beach if I were you.
The beauty of Hawaii is that it's not very crowded anywhere.
At least it would be easy to avoid anything that's crowded.
So you're better than most people, certainly.
Somebody says, I am sensing more recovery talk in the last day.
You know, if I had to guess, I think things will get better in terms of store shelves.
The store shelf thing is such a big psychological mind effort that if you go into a store and you can't buy something, that really plays with your head.
And I think we're well on the way to that being not even a problem.
In a few days that won't be a thing we talk about anymore, I'm pretty sure.
Because the supply chains are really mature, really efficient, and it's really just a matter of standing in front of the production machines a little bit longer and shipping a little faster.
So I'm seeing a lot of people saying what somebody is saying in the comments.
I just was having this conversation.
A lot of people think they have it.
It's pretty common.
But a lot of people Are wrong.
So we don't know.
but I guess we'll learn it.
Yeah, freelancers laid off by best clients.
You know, everybody who has the ability to keep people employed, they have a responsibility to do it at this point.
Certainly that's what I'm doing.
So somebody says, Trump took the bait on will there be a recession question, should he have avoided it?
I didn't see how he handled it, but I think it would be crazy to assume there won't be one, because isn't it already happening?
It's sort of like it's raining outside and somebody asks you, hey, is it going to rain today?
And you're looking out the window and you're saying, yeah, I'm looking out the window.
So I'm not sure what the technical definition of a recession is, But, you know, we're going to have several months of suboptimal economic stuff.
No way to avoid it.
Somebody says, teens can make a ton of money delivering.
Yeah. You know, and that's one of the best ideas.
I did an order from DoorDash last night and they have, I think I mentioned this, they have an option for contact, for no contact delivery.
You could just specify it in the thing.
And people will just leave it at your door and they text you and say, hey, it's at your door.
Trump should stop commenting on the stock market.
Well, I think the president has to talk about the financial markets.
So I think he has to.
I'm not sure he's nailing it, at least on that topic.
You know, I don't know how many quarters of negative growth, because there's going to be a whole lot of pent-up demand.
But there will be, you know, there may be some businesses that take longer to come back online, and restaurants might be among them.
So yeah, I can see why it could last two quarters.
But certainly by the second quarter, it's going to be humming along.
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