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April 6, 2020 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
37:53
Episode 895 Scott Adams: Catch up on the Day and Learn Some Tricks for Relaxing
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It's time to get your swaddle on.
Getting mine on.
If I could find the long sides.
So much better.
Oh my goodness.
Get yourself a warm blanket.
It's the best.
So let's catch you up on what's happening.
In the last 12 hours?
Does all of this feel like Groundhog Day to you?
I don't know about you, but there's a certain sameness to every day now.
Because I feel like, I feel like I wake up, I do some cartooning, I do a periscope, and I talk about the same five things.
And then there's a press conference with the President and the Task Force, And they babble the same meaningless stuff that doesn't mean anything.
And you can't understand it in context.
You don't know if that's enough ventilators or not enough.
You really don't know anything.
But they sure talk a lot.
Then it's this time of night.
Then I do this again.
Then I'll be going to bed pretty soon.
And then I'm going to get up and I'm going to do exactly the same thing again.
It's starting to feel a little repetitive.
Am I dead?
Is this hell? Where I just wake up every day in a pandemic, but it never gets worse and it never gets better.
It's about the same yesterday.
Do you remember yesterday?
Today's like that, but a little bit different.
Anyway, but there are some small differences, and we will talk about them.
So there's a website that lets you estimate your chances of getting the coronavirus, and then if you get it, your odds of dying from it.
I'm not proud to say.
Then I thought, oh, I've got to find out if I'm going to die from the coronavirus.
So I just retweeted the site.
So if you want to find it for yourself, go to my Twitter feed.
It's near the top. And when you put in your particulars, you know, your gender and age and some lifestyle stuff, what your situation is, and this is what has spit out for me.
Tell me if you think this sounds reasonable.
It says, I have a 55% chance of catching the virus.
Now, I put in that I literally am completely alone.
Do I have a 55% chance of catching it all alone in my house?
Just because, what, I get mail?
You know, I order food?
That's pretty high.
So I'm not sure I believe I have a 55% chance.
But the next thing is, what are my odds of dying from it?
So again, I put in my particulars, and it said that if I get it, my odds of dying from it are 2.6%.
The equivalent of 1 in 38 people.
Or if you put it in betting odds, there's a 37 to 1 chance I won't die.
So if I get the coronavirus and you want to bet on me, if you want to do a dead pool, the odds apparently are 37 to 1 that I would survive.
Not bad. Not bad.
On the other hand, is there anything else that has that much of a chance of killing me?
By the end of the week?
Probably not. So, in news from the simulation, I think I'll make an ongoing segment that is just news from the simulation.
What I mean by that is the idea that we're a software simulation, and if we are, there might be some code reuse, meaning you would see some patterns that recur that seem like more than coincidence.
Of course, this is just for fun because they're just coincidences.
But I like to point them out because the alternative explanation that you live in the simulation and there's code reuse is just way more fun.
Here's an example.
According to the news, a tiger at the Bronx Zoo in New York City has tested positive for coronavirus in what may be the first confirmed case of an animal being infected.
Now, do you know what is scarier than a tiger?
You know, assuming that you're in the same room with a tiger.
Do you know what is scarier than that?
A tiger with coronavirus.
That's sort of two ways to kill you.
It's like, oh, good news!
You know, the zookeeper pulled you away before you were mauled totally by the tiger.
You just got some flesh wounds.
Well, now the bad news.
You got a little bit of coronavirus.
So, what are the odds that we're all going to be watching the Tiger King on Netflix?
It's like, you know, it's all the news and social media is like Tiger King, Tiger King, Tiger King.
And then the first animal...
They guess the coronavirus is a tiger.
Now, I don't have to tell you that there are many animals in the world.
You got your cats, you got your dogs, you got your birds.
I could go on, but I think you see the point.
There are many animals.
But there's only one animal that's sort of all in the headlines at the moment.
Well, I guess you could say bat, but bat would be the other one.
But that would be two on the nose.
It's like it comes from a bat, and then a bat gets it.
Yeah, that's no good.
But if the only animal that gets it first is a tiger, at the same time the tigers are on Netflix, okay, maybe it's a coincidence.
Or maybe we live in a simulation.
Just maybe. All right.
So, as I said, the press conference was, again, very inadequate in my mind.
And Jake Tapper had a good piece today on CNN, in which he was asking the President what the plan is.
And I thought, yeah, it's time to ask that question.
I think it wasn't time a little bit earlier.
So, you know, you have to allow that there's the fog of war and there's collecting data and we're learning things and testing things.
So you don't always have to have a plan to the end state in the early days because you're just finding your footing.
But I think we're just about at the point, especially because of the economic risk, where we sort of have to ask for that, don't we?
Don't you think this is the time to start saying, well, just in broad strokes, what's this sort of look like?
Because I don't quite understand the part where we go back to work in whenever it is, a month or two months or three months, whatever it is.
I don't get that part because doesn't it just come roaring back?
I mean, reasonable people have asked.
And is the only thing we're trying to do?
To slow it down so it doesn't overwhelm the hospitals.
That's it. So we're just sort of waiting and then we'll send out some more guinea pigs to get it.
But that's the plan.
Now it could be that just another week or so would really tell us a lot about the hydroxychloroquine in particular.
So there might be a good reason to wait.
But I think the public has a right to start demanding some answers.
And my big pet peeve Once again, another day goes by in which reporters are desperately trying to ask a question about the sufficiency of various supplies.
They're trying to ask the question in a way that they can get any kind of a useful answer.
And they really can't, can they?
You're noticing that, right?
So you're noticing that the reporters are saying, okay, but how many ventilators do you need?
And And how many do you have?
You know, they're getting pretty close to asking the right questions now.
And you're not getting anything like an indication of a shadow of a suggestion of an attempt to even answer the question.
I mean, it doesn't matter who's standing up there.
Nobody is taking a swing at that.
Why? Is it because we don't know?
That we're 10% of the way or 90% of the way?
We don't know. We can't even put a range on it and say, well, we don't know for sure.
We hope it's over 70%, but we're not going to take a chance.
If we have to go over 100%, we're going to do it and we're going to try really hard.
I mean, there are a million ways you could give a useful answer without precision.
But the fact that they can't even give a useful directional approximate, we hope it's in this range, kind of an answer.
They just spew out the same raw statistics.
4,000 ventilators, 6,000 gloves, took from a car and put it in a trunk.
We had somebody make some gowns.
There's 75,000 gowns.
That may be on a truck or possibly plane.
We don't know where they are.
But in separate news, there are also 70,000 gowns.
Oh wait, I'm just giving you the same statistics I gave yesterday in raw numbers because you can't tell the difference.
It sounds like action, but really it just means I don't know how many we have and how many we need.
So pretty, pretty disappointing, I gotta say.
Now, if there's some reason that we can't know that, shouldn't know that, can't be collected, it's impossible to know, really?
Well, you know, take your best shot at explaining it, but I don't think I'm going to believe whatever you tell me.
There is a very interesting hypothesis floating around.
It's brand new. Do you like your brand new hypotheses?
That's why you come here.
For the brand new hypotheses.
You don't want the old ones.
So, I will not present this with confidence.
So, there would be some things that you hear first on my periscopes that might turn out to be kind of important.
But there might be other things you hear that turn out to be nothing later.
So with the understanding that it could go either way, and I don't have an opinion on it, I'm just going to pass it along because it's so darn interesting.
So there's a growing body of anecdotal information, and I'll see if I can do my best to explain this, That the mechanism for why this virus is killing people, specifically the pneumonia lung part, maybe we're looking at it all wrong, meaning scientists and doctors.
And the argument for that is that the way the lungs look to the doctors who handle these things is exactly like high-altitude pulmonary edema.
I don't know the details, but it has something to do with damage to your lungs if you're at high altitude for too long.
So apparently doctors who know what that looks like, and there's a whole checklist of, okay, do the lungs look like this?
Blah, blah, blah. So there's a pretty long checklist to show that you have this high-altitude pulmonary edema, And at least on the internet, if you can believe random things on the internet, COVID-19 meets all of the checklist.
So that doesn't mean it is high-altitude pulmonary edema.
It means it has the same checklist.
So that raises a question.
Do we even understand what's going on here?
So the hypothesis goes like this.
And this is not mine.
I'm just passing it along.
That the damage from the virus is in the blood before the lungs.
So in other words, the blood becomes damaged to the point where it can't hold oxygen, and then it doesn't matter what your lungs are doing, because your blood can't hold the oxygen efficiently anymore.
So then the lungs go into some kind of bad state without the oxygen, I guess.
So, furthering this hypothesis...
is the fact that there's anecdotal but not yet clinically proven evidence that hydroxychloroquine, a malaria drug, might work.
And I'm told, again, I'm way out of my depths here, so you should discount everything I say now.
You should forget you were even here.
Say no more. If anybody asks you what you did recently, just say nothing.
I took a nap. I was not listening to a crazy hypothesis that doesn't have sufficient credibility yet.
But I will tell you that I'm hearing this from really smart people and from doctors.
So this is not a full crackpot theory.
So at least two people with MD behind their names have been saying this in public.
Hey, it looks like this high-altitude thing.
And it would also explain why the malaria drug works, because apparently malaria has that same quality, if I understand it right.
I need a big fact check on this, if anybody can help me.
The malaria affects the blood, not so much the lungs, And it might be exactly why the hydroxychloroquine appears to be working for the COVID-19 because it might be doing something protective with the blood.
The same way it protects the blood from the malaria is the hypothesis.
Now, what are the odds I would put on this?
Lowish. The only reason I would put the odds of this alternate explanation being fruitful is that there are an awful lot of experts looking at this thing.
So it would be weird to me and unexpected if we had gotten this far and somebody would have an aha moment of this magnitude.
Not impossible.
Do not rule it out whatsoever.
So I've seen nothing that would rule it out.
But I'm so unqualified that I can't rule it in or out.
But I would say it falls into the class of things which in general are unlikely.
Let's call it the Perry Mason moment.
For those of you old enough to remember an old TV show, Perry Mason.
The Perry Mason moment is he's in the courtroom, he's a famous lawyer trying the case, and he gets somebody who's in the audience to confess to the crime.
That's the Perry Mason moment.
Because it's the most unexpected outcome is that there's a defendant on trial and you're such a good lawyer that you get somebody in the audience to confess during the trial.
So it's like a Perry Mason thing that we would find out this late in the game and all of those experts would not have sniffed this out by now leads me to believe it's in the category of unlikely things.
But I've got to tell you that the people talking about it are smart people.
So you're going to have to weigh that.
Really smart people talking about it.
Really smart people. But it's in that category of things.
Quite often they're not true.
So keep an eye on that.
Let's see. What else have we got going on?
Boris Johnson apparently is pretty sick with the Coronavirus.
And that is terrible.
But it makes me ask this question.
And maybe in the comments you can tell me.
Has there been any celebrity, let's say famous person, so not a celebrity, just a famous person, has there been the first famous person to die of the coronavirus?
And I'm not saying this for sensationalist reason, there's going to be a An actual point to this.
Because I believe there have been relatives of famous people.
Am I right? Relatives of famous people.
And people who had some status but I've never heard of them.
In other words, somebody had been famous 90 years ago and stuff.
And here's the question.
How many famous people die every year of regular flu?
Of which we now all know there could be, you know, 50,000, 100,000, 150,000.
So does the regular flu kill celebrities every year?
Because that's a lot of people.
People are saying Joe Diffie.
And I think, oh, Joe Diffie, the country singer.
Did he die? Bill Withers.
Celebrity. He died.
Okay. So, now we still have the problem of if they had died of the regular flu, would it be reported as they died of the flu?
Probably not, right?
And if they had died of something just because it was time to die, but they also had a little coronavirus in them, They would be reported as dying of the coronavirus.
So here's just a question.
I'm not even sure I can make a point out of this yet.
I see the name John Prine go by, but I don't know who that is.
Ellis... Yeah, Marcellus.
Yeah, his father, right?
So there were some relatives and stuff.
But keep an eye on this.
If it turns out...
That you keep hearing of celebrities dying from this, but we never hear of celebrities dying from the regular flu, even though we know the regular flu, if you were just to compare the beginning of this one to a full flu that's going a full season, the full flu would have a much higher body count in its fullness than we have seen in this early stage of this one.
So it's just something to keep an eye on.
All right? Apparently, analysts at UBS say that the bookings for cruises next year, what do you guess is the booking rate for cruises next year?
So cruise ships, of course, are scarier because everybody's afraid of getting the coronavirus on a cruise ship.
But what do you think the bookings look like for 2021?
Way up or way down?
Turns out they're up sharply.
They're up 9% compared to last year.
So cruise bookings are up.
Now, the story goes on to say it might be just the people who rebooked.
You know, they're just optimists and they're like, we'll just give it a year, we'll just push it down a year.
So you probably got, you know, it could be only 9% really had the original idea.
In theory, just mathematically speaking.
It couldn't be only 9% new people and all the rest are just rebooks.
I doubt that's the case, but you get the point.
So, here's where I'm going with this.
When you're trying to figure out what will be the final economic outcome of this, let me give you a little economic lesson.
And it's a variety of things I've said before.
Let's say you are the cruise industry...
And you just got creamed this year.
I don't want to say decimated, because that only means 10%.
So you're the cruise industry, and you just got wiped out.
So all of 2020 is just nothing but hundreds of billions of dollars of losses.
But, let's say it's six months from now, or yeah, let's say it's the end of the year.
And the problem is behind us, sufficiently that people feel safe going on a cruise.
But your industry has been just destroyed.
You've got all this debt.
Can you get a loan to reopen your business?
And the answer is, if you've got bookings for the entire year, you probably can.
The only thing that would prevent you from reopening is that your customers went away.
If you're a good business before the problem, if you are already a good business, and the only thing that happened was you took on a whole bunch of new debt, well, the government might pay some of that, depending on your situation.
And some companies might go bankrupt.
But the assets would still exist.
And another company could say, well, you guys ran up a lot of debt and you can't pay it back, so sorry, you're bankrupt.
But we'll buy your ships, we'll buy your operation, and we'll just start our own company.
And all the customers are still there.
So with the new cruise industry that bought all these assets for practically nothing, the bank lost a lot of money.
But the cruise ship...
It has all the bookings for next year, and they've got a cheap boat.
Lots of cheap ships, I guess.
So, it seems to me that if you have this critical thing, which is that people have booked the business in advance, you can open up.
So, let's take this to its logical conclusion.
You've got restaurants that are just getting killed.
Very difficult for a restaurant to get credit or to get a loan.
But, suppose...
You used something like OpenTable or one of these online reservation systems, and they might have to tweak the system so you can make a reservation a year in advance.
What if all of us decided to save the restaurant industry?
And you can only do so much now because, you know, you can do what I just did before I got on, ordered some food for delivery.
You can get takeout.
But that's not enough.
I mean, you're lucky if they can limp to a point where something is better.
But what if there was an online system and all of us could go online and just book like once a week or whatever is our normal amount of eating out and just book all your local restaurants for the entire 2021?
So that when the restaurant goes to their bank and says, we got killed this year, but...
I've got a really good idea that we're going to have strong business next year, and if you want to know why, look at this.
I'm actually booked for every night in 2021.
Every night. With real people, with real names.
Now, I can't guarantee every one of them shows up, but the system will prompt them.
I think they'll still be in a mood to want to save the local restaurants.
Maybe you should give me a loan, because what's better than this?
This is better than my regular business.
I've never had this much business.
I've never been booked every day.
So there may be a way, because I keep telling you that economics is always a psychology experiment.
And part of the psychology is to get people to guarantee you business in pretty far future.
Because if you can credibly be guaranteed some future business, you can get a loan and you're back in business.
So there are a lot of things that are really different about this situation and starting back the economy that I think we've never seen before.
And everything that I feel about it suggests it's going to be way better than even good estimates are.
So call me a Call me a Super Bowl on human innovation and ingenuity.
When it's time to crank back the economy, you saw all the ingenuity that's going into dealing with the medical aspect of the coronavirus.
I mean, amazing amount of ingenuity, just tremendous.
We're going to have that same amount of ingenuity On the financial tinkering, on the economics, on the business models.
If it's not your thing, and you're not a business person, it may be scarier and look like there's not as much flexibility to do things.
But I think I could speak for most experienced business people and entrepreneurs.
You should check this, by the way.
I can't really speak for everybody, but I have a feeling that people who know the most about how to create a business, what a business model looks like, what are the requirements, how do you get credit, the basics of business.
I think the people who know the most about that are probably going to be among the most optimistic about how quickly we can get back.
And that has to do with the fact that the people with experience have greater visibility about where all the buttons and levers are.
So, you know, sometimes if you're experienced in something, you can smell the solution before you know what it is.
You know, let's say you're an experienced mechanic or engineer or even artist, anything.
Often you know where the solution is and you can just smell it.
But you can't describe why.
It's just something about your experience that says, yeah, there's something here.
I don't know what it is, but there's definitely something here.
And so my contention is that those of us with lots of business experience see this economy as having every potential still the moment it opens up.
We're going to have to re-engineer on the fly, get really clever, get really creative, Work really hard, be really disappointed, get back up, make it work again.
But it happens to be also the thing we do best.
What do Americans do better than figure it out?
If there was one thing you could say that defines Americans, and I know I'm talking to an international audience, but maybe you would agree to.
This could be just an American thing, I don't know.
But if you said, all right, tell me one thing that defines an American.
I'm not counting about loving the country and the Constitution and stuff.
Let's say that's all a given.
But what makes the character of an American?
What's the most defining feature?
We can figure stuff out.
That's our most defining feature.
Give us a problem, we'll figure it out.
Go to the moon? We'll figure it out.
Cure cancer? We're getting there.
It's not done, but we're getting there.
Build an electric car?
You name it.
You got a problem? Humans are really, really good at solving problems, even ones we've never seen.
So I think you're going to be really surprised in a positive way when things open back up that we will have a better recovery than...
90% of the world believes.
So put me in the 10% who are super optimists because I'm going to bet on people and I'm going to bet on the best of us.
So I'm not even betting on average people.
Because average people, if you can find your way back to your old job, that's probably good enough.
So most of us don't need to do anything heroic.
We just need to show up.
But like everything else, there are going to be those You know, that 1%, that 2%, maybe it's 10%.
But the best of us are going to figure out how to do it differently.
Because that's the whole thing, right?
You can't just go back to work like nothing happened.
You've got some problems to solve.
But they're well within the solvable range for the most clever among us who have the right intentions and everybody's really sort of got the same direction.
So, all good news.
I was asked to give you some tips on how to relax, which I'm going to do right now.
This is the portion in which I tell you how to enjoy your social isolation and how to bring down your Your feelings of anxiety should any arise.
It's tense times, I know.
Number one, you're going to have to take breaks from social media and the news.
You just have to.
Very important.
You don't have to take the whole afternoon off, because there's so much happening.
It really probably pays to dip in every now and then, just in case something important happens.
But you can take an hour off.
You could take two hours off.
So build that into every day.
Make sure you get a little alone time without the news of any kind.
Likewise, if your goal is removing tension and relaxing, and it should be your goal, and by the way, it should be your full-time job.
When I think what my job is for my life, in terms of the selfish part of what I do, not the things I might do for other people, but in terms of taking care of myself, I see my job as removing my stress.
That's like the main job.
And there are a hundred ways to do it, and many things I would do to get that done, including, you know, maybe completing my work on time.
But everything is really about my energy and my stress, energy and stress being related.
If you have too much stress, it hurts your energy, etc.
So you want to avoid anything that puts you in the wrong frame of mind.
So don't do tense movies.
Do comedies.
Don't do music that, you know, is headbanger music, even if it's your favorite music.
Just take a break from any music that's provocative or is trying to work you into some kind of emotional state that's not the one you want.
All right? Now, if you're going to listen to classical music, that's probably fine.
But anything that puts you in the wrong frame of mind, or even anything that reminds you of that past boyfriend or girlfriend, anything like that, just avoid it.
Because that's all just polluting your mind at a time when it's hard enough to keep it straight.
The other thing you should do is...
Obviously avoid caffeine after a certain part of the day.
Everybody's different, so by now you probably know your reaction.
But more than ever, if it's your habit to have a cup of coffee late in the afternoon, maybe rethink that just for now.
You know, go for decaf.
It's easy to get into habits and then not realize that your habit is no longer suited to the current situation.
So if your habit was, I drink coffee, you know, five o'clock at night, never bothered me before, but maybe today it does.
So just give a thought that you might want to change some of your habits to optimize for the situation.
So definitely get enough sleep.
That's the main thing. If you get enough sleep, everything's easier.
And you can solve problems easier.
Things don't bother you.
You feel better.
So your stress will just naturally be better if you get more sleep.
So that's just an obvious one.
I cannot emphasize enough the importance of light daily exercise, as in making sure that you literally get exercise every day.
There's such a difference in what that does to your stress level.
And again, Emphasis on the light.
If the reason you don't exercise is because you just don't like beating yourself up and you're not really that no-pain-no-gain kind of person, I'm not even talking about that.
I'm literally just talking about taking a nice leisurely walk as far as you want to go.
Whatever your body tells you is right.
So emphasis on the light part, just for stress reduction.
This is not about building muscles, not about losing weight.
At the moment, your top priority is just chilling out.
So optimize your exercise for that objective to chill out.
Light exercise, walks are great.
Next, I usually make it a point To take my lunch as me time.
And I've always done this.
This is a long time habit.
So a lot of people will say, I have so much to do, I'm going to eat, and at the same time, I'm going to be doing some work.
So I'll multitask.
I get that sometimes we have to do that.
But man, you should try as hard as you can not to.
Give yourself that 45 minutes, whatever it is, That's just you, your food, your beverage, and maybe something on your phone that's not reminding you of anything tense.
You're not doing emails necessarily.
You're texting a friend, watching a YouTube that's funny, that sort of thing.
But just leave the world behind for a little while.
I've given you lots of sleep tips about make sure that you use the bed just for sleeping and adult behavior.
But you also want to get your oxytocin up.
Oxytocin is the drug or the chemical that your body produces when you have close personal relationships that are good.
So if you're making love with somebody you love or you're hugging somebody, you're just canoodling with somebody in a close, intimate way.
So if there's somebody like that in your life, somebody that you can spoon, spoon it up.
So you should spoon for medicinal reasons.
If you're going to watch a TV show, watch a comedy.
Get in spooning position on the couch.
Now, if your partner is not watching this right now, you should go to them and say, Baby, I know we usually sit in different chairs, and I know, usually, that's fine.
But this is like getting...
Getting lost in a snowstorm, you might have to use your body warmth.
But it's not body warmth you need, it's the oxytocin.
It's that feeling of being close to somebody.
So your assignment tonight, be it in bed or be it in your couch, is to spoon it up.
Spoon it. And watch how you feel.
And watch your stress just melt away.
So those are your tips.
I might think of some more tips later.
But don't think too much about the bad news.
Think about the best possible outcomes.
Fill your mental shelf space with good thoughts so that the bad ones don't have room.
Just think of it as the shelf has to be filled because you can't think of nothing.
You could try, but it doesn't work.
So if there's going to be something on your mental shelf space, you be the author.
Put stuff on it until it's all full.
Keeps the bad thoughts out.
That's your trick for tonight.
I will talk to you in the morning, 10 a.m.
Eastern, 7 a.m.
Pacific, and we'll solve this pandemic then.
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