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May 19, 2020 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
35:35
Episode 983 Scott Adams: Talking About Hydroxychloroquine and Then I Teach You How to Get Lucky
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Hey everybody!
Come on in!
It's time for the evening edition called No Coffee with Scott Adams because it's much too late for that.
But it's not too late to have fun with the news.
Thank you for this gift, President Trump, for making a Monday that could have been boring.
Not boring at all.
Have I told you before that there's something about the Trump family, I think they all have it, it's sort of like some gene that they inherited, that they can't be uninteresting.
Have you noticed that?
It doesn't matter who it is.
It doesn't matter if it's Ivanka or Don Jr.
or the President.
They don't know how to leave a room Without making you remember something that makes your head shake.
It's like, well, I'm going to remember that for a while.
And of course the president gave us quite the gift today by casually mentioning that he's been using hydroxychloroquine and I think azithromycin and zinc as well.
Now, how do you think the media dealt with this new information?
Now you have to know he was laughing about it.
You have to know Trump thought it was funny.
Because it was. Here's what's funny about it.
Would you not agree with the following statement that the president has been just viciously criticized for having brought up these pills in the first place?
And that since then, there's been evidence of them not working or maybe being dangerous.
And so it's just all worse and worse and worse.
So just when you think Trump has decided to, you know, sort of surrender the point...
And I really thought he'd surrendered it.
I thought he was just going to say, well...
It seemed like a good idea at the time.
Maybe we know more now.
It hasn't really stood out as being a winning strategy yet.
So I kind of thought he was going to let it go.
But this isn't really the president who lets things go, is it?
One of the reasons that...
One of the reasons his supporters, I think, appreciate him is that he doesn't let anything go.
He's going to be still trying to build that wall when he's 110 and out of office.
I'm still going to build that wall.
I'm going to get that wall built.
So there's something about his tenacity that you just have to like, even if you don't like what he's trying to do.
And this is just the perfect example.
It's like, he's just not going to let this go.
So here's what's so fricking funny about it.
It's funny because don't you assume that the White House doctors, you know, I don't know if it's a staff, you know, there's one White House doctor, physician, but it's a whole staff probably.
And don't you think that it's assumed that whoever is treating the President of the United States medically Would be the cream of the crop.
Wouldn't you just assume?
Would be sort of the standard for good care.
Sort of the person you might even look to as a role model of how to do it right.
And the president gets the White House physician to give him the okay.
I think he said he wanted it, but he gave him the okay to take this drug Which automatically makes him right.
Now, I'm not saying that people will admit he's right.
But I'm sorry.
If you get the White House doctor to agree with you, you're right.
They're never going to give it to him.
They'll never give him the win.
But I'm here to tell you, He won.
He'll never get the trophy.
The scoreboard will not reflect that, but he won.
Now, let me explain what I mean by that, because the news is never going to give it to him, and this is how they're going to do it.
This question of the hydroxychloroquine is really four different types of decisions.
There's a scientific decision, a medical patient, and then a leadership decision.
And they've got different variables, and you would look at them in different ways for different reasons.
So let me go through these.
The scientific view, which is what CNN and the critics will focus on, is going to say, do we have controlled studies that show that it's safe enough and that it works?
And the answer is no.
No, we don't. So if the only thing that mattered was the scientific study, you'd say, no, we don't have those studies.
That's it. If that's the only question, if it's the only dimension you're looking at, no.
It does not have the required scientific backing.
Period. That's like end of the statement.
There is not, absolutely not, scientific backing of the type that you would want.
You know, the gold standard controlled experiments.
It doesn't exist. Fair enough.
True statement.
But the medical decision could be a little different.
A doctor is allowed to say, yeah, we don't have a controlled study for this way I'm thinking of using it, but I'm going to use my medical judgment and I'm going to say, I've got a hunch that this could work.
I don't know what else could work.
I don't have a better idea.
It feels like the logic makes sense and I think that the risk is very small.
So I'll give it a chance.
It's called off-label use.
That's not the same as this.
The scientific view is you don't know anything.
The medical view, sometimes, depends on the situation, might be, eh, it's worth a try.
Which is also different from the patient's choice.
Because the patient has yet another bunch of information.
And that information is what works for you.
What are your biases?
What are you afraid of? What are your priorities?
Let me give you an example.
When I famously had my voice problems where I couldn't speak for several years, the medical community, the scientists, the doctors, said, here's what you need to do, Scott.
Take a big needle and stick it through the front of your neck and let the doctor give you a shot that goes into the back of your neck, basically goes through the middle of the throat, If they can find it, because they're kind of guessing a little bit, but if they can find it, they'll jab that needle into your vocal cords, and they'll put a little Botox in there, and they'll freeze that thing, and you might be able to make some sounds that sound like talking.
Now, we'll have to do it probably every several weeks, and you'll have to once again have a needle through the front of your throat while you're awake, and we'll be manipulating it in there And we're not sure we'll get it every time.
Sometimes we'll miss.
So there'll be several months where it won't work.
And it will be a painful, excruciating, traumatic experience every time.
But that's our advice.
That's our advice.
What did I do?
I said, no thank you.
And I searched for a year for another excuse, or another excuse.
What Freudian slip was that?
Now, I searched for a year for another solution.
Ended up being a surgical solution, and you can hear me speak.
So, as a patient, I overruled the science and the medical community, and that worked out.
I'm not suggesting that always works out.
I'm just saying that sometimes the patient has extra Variables.
There's a risk they're willing to take.
There's a risk they're not willing to take.
And sometimes it's personal.
If you're the one in the chair with the needle going through your neck, you get to decide.
It's not all about the math if you get a needle in your neck.
So I'm just saying that these are different decisions and different things.
Now the leadership decision is the risk management decision.
That's the one where you say, you know, we really don't know.
We just don't know.
We don't know quite how dangerous it would be for coronavirus patients.
We don't know quite if it works.
But a leader still has to make a decision.
And remember, doing nothing is a decision.
The leader doesn't get to say, I'll take a bye on this, let me just take a pass.
You don't get to do that.
In an emergency, a decision not to do something is an active decision.
So the leader can't say, Well, show me the controlled studies.
They don't exist. The leader can ask the doctors, hey, what would you do?
25% of them would say, according to a study I just saw, 25% of them would say, yeah, I'd try it.
I'd try it. How about an individual?
Well, if you're the President of the United States, And maybe having you not incapacitated means more, could be even more important.
Well, maybe depending on your situation, you talk to your doctor, it just depends.
For some people it makes sense.
Let's say you were 25 years old.
And you're not around anybody who's likely to give it to you anyway.
And if you got it, it probably wouldn't kill you.
Would you take it?
Well, depends, but probably not.
Maybe if you're on the front lines, you might, but probably not.
But how about if you're a leader and you're just trying to help make risk management decisions with your experts on behalf of the country?
If you're making a risk management decision, the only way you can do it That makes sense.
Is to say, all right, what are the odds if I go this way?
What are the odds if I go this way?
So let's say it would be a decision tree.
Now, if no one has shown you the decision tree, they cannot tell you in any rational way that the president made a bad decision by simply talking about it and talking about it as a risk management decision.
Unless somebody's done the math where they've said, alright, if you take the hydroxychloroquine, we don't know if it would work, but let's say there's a 10% chance it might help you.
Is that 10% worth the, I don't know, is it one out of 100,000 who might die from it?
But those people are only taking it long term.
The number of people who are going to die from it from two weeks, we don't know because we don't have the studies, but Doctors and common sense tells you it's probably close to zero.
So would you take a 10% slight advantage, and again, that would be an assumption, not a fact, a 10% slight advantage, that if you got it, you'd already have the hydroxy and the zinc, that's the active part, you'd already have it in your body, so you'd get a sort of a jump on it, and maybe you'd recover faster.
Would that Potentially 10% chance and only a 10% chance if you get it, because otherwise it doesn't matter at all.
And there was a 99% chance you were just going to get better anyway.
Now if you're Trump, you're a certain age, so he doesn't have a 99% chance of getting better, but maybe a 97% chance.
So let's say Trump had a 3% chance of dying if he got it.
Let's say a 50% chance of getting it.
That would be on the high end, but, you know, he's around a lot of people.
I think 50% is pretty reasonable, actually, in his case.
So, 50% chance you'd get it.
Anyway, I don't have to do the math.
My point is, if no one else has done the math either, no one can tell you this is the wrong decision.
If they do the math, and they plug in their numbers, and they show it to you, you can multiply it yourself and say, okay, oh yeah, they multiplied this correctly.
That's a rational decision right there.
Now you could say, oh, but they made an assumption I wouldn't make.
So let's say you assumed there's at least a 10% chance hydroxychloroquine works, but let's say somebody else assumed it was a 1% chance.
You're both just guessing.
Those are just guesses.
So you could run it under all those scenarios and see if there's any scenario In which it isn't still better to take a chance.
It might be. I don't know.
Now, Trump has said he's gotten anecdotal observational reports and letters from people who said they think it works.
I'm very skeptical of those because, you know, 99% of people get better anyway.
So I just don't know that we really have anything.
But have you noticed what CNN is doing to try to make the president look dumb.
But of course, what they're really doing is making their own audience look dumb.
So here's what they're doing. They've decided to highlight a study on their page, CNN.com, in which hydroxychloroquine without zinc was studied, and it didn't help, and I think maybe it was a little dangerous or something.
Now, given that the entire hypothesis is that the point of the hydroxychloroquine is simply to help deliver the zinc, the zinc being actually the part that matters, if you test it without the part that matters, and then you run it on CNN as proof that the president is making a bad decision, you're just lying.
You're just lying.
Because they're saying, essentially, the president is making a bad decision Because an entirely different drug, because you take the zinc out, that's the active part of the combo, an entirely different drug was tested and it didn't work.
That's what CNN is telling their audience.
A different drug was tested and it didn't work, therefore the president's wrong about this other drug.
They're selling that to their audience.
I'll bet if you could look all day on the CNN comments, I don't know if they have comments, You wouldn't find anybody who reads CNN who noticed that sleight of hand to take the zinc count.
Now the other trick they do, and you know this one, right?
There's some study where they gave it only to critically ill people.
Again, nobody ever suggested that was the smart best use of it.
It was always assumed it was an early symptom drug.
So if it was tested on people who are likely going to die anyway, they're in the end stage, I'm not sure you've tested anything.
So those are the two tricks that the Trump critics are using.
They look at the wrong studies and act like it's the right studies and hope you can't tell the difference.
Now maybe they believe that those are studies, I don't know.
You know, these days you can't tell, are they just being stupid?
Or do they actually believe what they're saying?
It's hard to know. And they'll also talk about how the poor lupus patients will lose their supply if everybody starts hoarding them.
They'll talk about how you shouldn't take these drugs unless you're under a doctor's care.
Now, how many of you were going to take a prescription drug without a doctor's advice?
And if you did, and it didn't go well, well, maybe that's sort of on you.
If you're taking a prescription drug without a doctor's advice, I can see where that would be a problem, but I don't feel it would be a problem for me, because I don't think I'd do it.
I also saw people piling on social media to support the criticism of the president, and one doctor or alleged doctor on Twitter She said that she knows a lot of doctors, and she's never met one who takes hydroxychloroquine prophylactically.
So she knows a lot of doctors, and not one of them are doing that.
To which I say, I don't know a lot of doctors, but even I know doctors who are taking hydroxychloroquine.
I know them.
They've told me, personally.
I don't know, is this even a real doctor who's making this comment, or is it just a troll?
I can't tell. And then, of course, the CNN will never mention that a quarter of doctors think it's a good idea.
Can you imagine having an article and not mentioning that a quarter of doctors think it's a good idea?
That doesn't mean it's a good idea.
But imagine if you were doing a survey of doctors and you knew that it hasn't passed clinical trials for this use, could be dangerous in the extreme, meaning that you could have some bad outcomes for some number of people.
If you're a doctor and somebody asks you, under these conditions, would you prescribe it prophylactically before somebody has it?
Don't you think the doctors are going to be a little biased on that question?
Meaning that if they're answering a poll, I think they're going to more likely say, no, it's not proven.
Because that's the right answer, right?
Sometimes you know what answer the teacher is looking for.
Okay, is this a trick question?
Would I give somebody an unproven drug?
No, I wouldn't.
Because that just feels like the right answer, right?
Whether you're a doctor or not.
Unproven drug? Don't need to hear anymore.
Wouldn't give that to anybody.
But if they were actually going to serve on the front line themselves, would they make the same decision about treating themselves as they would answer a poll?
Because I feel like the poll answer is sort of telling the pollster what they want to hear a little bit.
I just worry that there's some bias built in there.
So I will say again that every day that goes by that we don't hear somebody say, oh my god, we've proven it, the hydroxychloroquine with the zinc makes a big difference.
Every day that goes by, there's less chance it does.
Because if it made a big difference, I think we'd notice by now, right?
There must be enough people using it around that we'd have a pretty good idea.
So the fact that it's still a little murky, like you feel like some people are saying it's working, but their studies are not quite studies, and then the people who say it's not working, they're not really even looking at the right thing.
So it's just all this big gray area.
But the longer it goes, you know, I started it around...
60% chance that the hydroxychloroquine would make some kind of important difference, back in the earliest days, based entirely on some early studies that looked positive, but they weren't really dependable kinds of studies.
As time went by, using my rule that the longer you go, the more likely you would have noticed if it worked.
Surely there have been studies by now.
So I would say, you know, my last number was 40% chance it makes a difference.
I might lower that a little bit, you know, because as time goes by you have to lower that estimate.
I'd be down to maybe 30%.
But a 30% chance it makes some difference is still a good risk management decision.
If you think it's not, show me the math.
Easy enough. You could change my mind.
Just by showing me the decision tree and multiply the odds of the various things happening, just show it to me.
It's a simple calculation.
You could change my mind in a minute.
It's one page. These are the odds.
Which one is bigger? I'll take the one that's the better odds.
Thank you. All right.
I'm going to teach you now a micro lesson.
Something you didn't know you needed, but man, do you need it.
It's a lesson on how to get lucky.
No, not that way.
Get your mind out of the gutter.
I mean how to have more luck in your life, just in general.
Do you think that you can cause luck to happen in your life?
The answer is no.
Not luck luck.
But you can manipulate your experience of luck in the ways I'm going to tell you.
And let me...
Let me give you a specific example.
There was a Dr.
Richard Wiseman who once studied luck and I think I've told you in prior times, he found out that nobody is actually lucky.
If you actually control the experiment, nobody can guess coin flips or anything like that.
But he did find that people who had a positive attitude and expected luck had a wider field of vision.
In other words, they simply Noticed opportunities that other people didn't notice.
So there is something about expecting luck to happen that can tune your brain to notice things that give you the experience of being luck.
Now there wasn't any actual luck in the story.
You just noticed things that you weren't noticing before.
So it's more like skill, but the way it will feel to you is like luck.
Because you'll think, I just noticed this thing and that's exactly what I needed exactly when I wanted it.
So the experience will feel like luck if you tune your brain to just notice more opportunities.
The other thing that you can do for luck is go where the energy is.
When I graduated from college in my small upstate New York town, so I went to college just a short drive from where I grew up, And it was a very small town.
There were maybe 2,000 people in the town.
Not much there to keep me there.
And so as soon as I graduated, I traded my car for a one-way ticket to California.
And my thinking was this.
There aren't many times when you can just start from scratch.
And getting out of college was one of those times.
I didn't have any special ties to anything.
So I said, where can I be the luckiest?
And so I went where there was most energy, the most action.
So I went to the Bay Area, because it was sort of a happening, growing, active place.
But then I went to the second filter.
I said, within the Bay Area, what is the most happening, energetic, I found the highest energy industry that I could get into in the highest energy place.
But I didn't say to myself, I have this specific thing that's going to happen.
I said, I'm just going to go where there's lots of stuff happening.
And then I'll have lots of choices.
I've had, indeed, lots and lots of opportunities to go in different directions.
It was Crocker National Bank before Wells Fargo swallowed it up.
And that's worked out great.
So let me show you the tips for luck In general.
Follow the energy. So you might have to change jobs.
You might have to move. But you can't really fight that.
If you're somewhere where nothing's happening, getting lucky where there's no energy is very unlikely.
It could happen. That's how luck works.
But you want to go where there's just more stuff happening so that there's more chance for things to collide.
You want to network.
You want to meet as many people?
If you are rigorous about meeting people and keeping in touch, then the opportunity for luck to find you happens again.
Because what if an opportunity comes to someone in your network?
So you've got this big network and it's like a dish that's picking up signals.
So now instead of being so lucky that somebody would have to know you personally if they had a job opportunity, You don't have to be that lucky anymore.
Now you can just be lucky enough that anybody you've met hears about this opportunity and says, oh, I know the perfect person for that.
So networking expands your filter, your envelope of luck.
Likewise, skill stacking, which I talk about all the time, If you put more things together, more skills, and you keep layering on top of each other, the things that you could potentially do just becomes geometrically larger.
So imagine that you're skill-stacked so that you personally can do lots of different things.
You can go in any direction.
Boom, boom, boom. There's a thousand things I can do.
Then you take that and you move.
Then you plop it right in the middle of the most energetic place.
And then you start networking.
There's no way this doesn't work.
This will work every time.
This is just math.
If you give yourself this many opportunities for luck to find you, luck's going to find you.
It might not be today.
It might take a week.
It might take a year. But if you're making enough variables moving around your world, some of them are going to stick.
Alright, experience helps too, because the more experience you have, the more opportunities you can notice, the more ways you can go.
Really, that's just part of this skill stack.
Then, there's the math of success.
I can tell you that in my life, I actually kept track of how many things I tried just in the economic realm, and how many worked.
And I did this a number of years ago.
I've failed at a number of things since then.
But my calculation was that about 30 or so things I'd tried, business-wise, including my corporate jobs, different inventions I tried to make, startups I tried to start, etc.
There were about 30 of them.
And this is prior to and also after Dilbert.
About 30 of them.
About three of them worked out well.
But those three, of course, paid for all the failures.
Now, Dilber was one of them.
I had best-selling books, some licensing.
I did a lot of public speaking at high rates, etc.
So there were a number of things that worked out amazingly well, but they were about 1 in 10.
So could I know in advance Which one of those 1 in 10 was going to work out?
No. Nobody's that smart.
Everybody would like to be that smart.
Nobody is. So the only thing you can do if you're trying to put yourself in a position for luck to find you is you need to keep trying stuff.
But try things that won't kill you and try And can leave you ahead.
So this is the idea of failing forward.
So every time you try something, make sure that it builds your talent stack, or it increases your network, or gives you experience, which is sort of the same, no matter what.
Because then, even as you're failing, it's like three failures, four failures, five failures.
You get to five failures and learn something from every one of those failures, the odds of the six when failing start dropping dramatically.
Because now you know what you're talking about a little bit.
Now you've got some skills.
Now you've seen a little bit of the world.
Now you're a little tougher.
Now you've made some friends.
So failing is how you succeed.
This is just part of the process.
try some long shots.
I always tried some things which could pay the rent.
You know, so I'd, of course, if there was a promotion at work, I'd try to get it.
You know, so I'd be doing all the normal stuff.
But I always had some long shots brewing.
And I still do that.
I've told you that.
Part of it is for my general mental health.
I like knowing that there's something in my world that even though it's a long shot, man, if this works, if this works, this would be amazing.
It could change the world.
So it makes you feel good, but every now and then, one comes through.
It might be the patent you got, the invention you made, the software you wrote, something like that.
My cat Boo is coming in to visit.
And then affirmations, I've talked about that.
I did a whole periscope on that.
You can search for that if you want to find out more.
But the part that's meaningful is tuning your mind.
That's what I was talking about.
When you're just more open to the positivity of your own potential.
And it doesn't seem to matter if you do affirmations.
This is what the researcher Dr.
Wiseman found. It didn't matter what you did.
To try to increase your optimism.
So the affirmations would work, or you could pray, or you could just feel good, or you could talk to yourself.
It didn't matter. You just had to convince yourself that you were a lucky person.
And so, Boo, I have decided to join the Periscope.
Don't rip off my...
All right. And now she can go on her way.
All right, that's...
Oh, could you hear the purr?
Now, tell me if I'm wrong.
Since the coronavirus happened, and everybody's doing their home video from home, don't you like it when the animals and the kids come in?
Is it just me? Because if I'm watching some famous network person and their kid photobombs them or the dog comes in or the cat or something, I like it better.
It just feels, I don't know, it just feels less stiff.
Regular TV, have you noticed that everything got really casual really quickly?
So you're watching these people who normally would have suits on and perfect lighting and makeup, and they're just there as their normal self, wearing their t-shirts in their basements with the camera on.
I like it better.
I honestly like it better.
So I don't think we lost much.
Anyway, can you give me some feedback?
Was the lesson on luck...
Useful to you.
I'll wait for a second for the comments to catch up.
And just so you know, Mike Surdovich does a good job of incorporating his environment in everything, everything from kids to just his life.
And I think it just makes it better.
Yeah, Dana Perino was ahead all along, right?
Alright, so...
Good, I'm just looking at your comments.
Appreciate it. I could sit in a room with a dozen cats.
I had an idea to start what I call the Cat Pateria.
It was a place where people who couldn't have their own cats But like cats, would go and they would just be crawling with happy cats.
And the customers would just come in and they would just rent time.
I don't even know if there could be food there because it might be unhygienic.
But they would just rent time to go hang out in an atmosphere where there are just cats all over the place.
And you could just bring in your book.
Maybe you bring in your own thermos or something.
Because I think it would be problematic with food service, animals and food service.
But if it's your own thermos, hey.
So you just come in, you just rent a chair, and there's just cats all over the place.
Cats like crazy. Yeah, see?
You would go. I believe that, was it Japan or someplace?
They actually made a place like that.
When did they start selling Trump pills on Fox News?
Can I do multiple affirmations?
You can do anything you want.
But I think that since the point is focus, ask yourself how many things you can focus on.
But I think two is fine.
Three might be pushing it.
And it's not because affirmations are magic.
It's because if focus is the active part of it, and I imagine it is, then you don't want to spread that out too much.
Alright, that's all I've got for today.
I will see you...
Wait, before I go, if you haven't checked out Locals, where I have a new comic strip called Robots Read News, you should check it out.
I can finally say all the things that I wish I could have said in newspapers and couldn't.
I can't tell you how much fun that is.
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