Episode 852 Scott Adams： Afternoon #WuFlu Chat
Episode Stats
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Summary
Scott Adams talks about the Wuhan Flu and why you should not be worried about running out of food and other supplies. Plus, he gives some tips on how to deal with the stress of a major crisis.
Transcript
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Bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum
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Hey everybody, come on in. It's time for a special afternoon woo-flu chat with Scott Adams.
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Now I do this partly because I love you, partly because sports got cancelled, and what are you going to do?
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How many of you are sitting at home thinking, what are we going to do for the next, however long this is?
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Now, I was going to skip the simultaneous sip, but I can tell you need it.
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I don't have any coffee with me, so we will be substituting the delicious aqua.
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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.
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All you need is a cup or a mug, a glass, a tank or a chalice or a cyan, a canteen, a jug or a glass, a vessel of any kind.
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And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine hit of the day, actually the second dopamine hit of the day.
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The thing that's going to make everything a little bit better, still, it's a simultaneous sip.
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Well, I think it's up to me to give you the good news.
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You've been watching the bad news on all those other channels.
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And I'll have some tips for you to manage your stress here in a moment.
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At some point, I might have to hypnotize you directly.
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You might want a little hypnosis for stress relief or even just entertainment.
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I bet I could use this time to develop like a class on persuasion or something.
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And then you'd have something that was, you know, dependable.
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It'll be like every time, every day at this time, we'll talk about a lesson or something.
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Looks like we're all going to have a little extra time on our hands starting today.
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First, a little update from my area of the world.
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Our grocery stores are pretty wiped out at this point.
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And what's interesting about where I live is I live in the same town as the executives
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and the headquarters for Safeway, the biggest supermarket.
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Now, if I had to guess, I think I'm in the, just by luck,
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I'm in one of the safest places in the world in terms of being sure there'll be stuff on the shelves.
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Because I think Safeway will make sure its own executives are somewhere near the beginning of the pile.
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But here's the thing that you need to know if you're worried about running out of stuff.
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Because if you see people, you know, hoarding and you haven't hoarded enough,
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you might say, oh, no, it's the end of the world, but it isn't.
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And if you compare it to anything, you're going to get the wrong answer.
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The only thing you should compare the Wuhan flu to is itself.
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So here's why you should not worry in the long run.
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In the short run, there's going to be some hiccups and you'll get scared
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because there's, I don't know, not enough of this or that.
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But grocery stores make a lot of different kinds of food.
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And if I had to guess, I don't think that, well, I do have to guess.
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We're really good at making stuff and putting it where it belongs.
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And we can still do all of that with, you know, 20% of the people hiding
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and the other 80% of the people working, but staying six feet away from the other people.
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Let's say there's a loud explosion in your block and you think it's a, whatever,
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You watch, and there's some number of human beings who run toward it every time,
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Human beings, most of us will run away from danger, you know,
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depending if we have the capability to do anything and what we know and who we are, etc.
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But we are, we are a species that is full of people who are way braver than I am,
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Let's call them in the context of this, you know, this coronavirus thing.
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People who do not possess, you know, some special superpower,
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but they're going to be taking more risks than the rest of us.
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There are some people who will step into the breach and say,
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you know, I could get killed, but I'm going to do it anyway.
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I'd love to say someday that I could be one of those people,
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So for every, you know, idiot who's overhoarding toilet paper,
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we have just as many people who will say, you know,
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hey, if you can't deliver bread in that truck, hand me the keys.
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If there's a truck that can't get to a supermarket,
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If there's something in the field that needs to get picked,
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do you think we can't find some people to pick it?
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Yeah, they might need to stay away from each other and wash their hands and stuff.
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If it needs to be stocked on the shelves of Safeway,
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and, you know, the person who does the stocking is sick that day,
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and really it's true from the paper of goods and every other part of that,
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Meaning each individual little slice of it, it's pretty easy.
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So if you get sick, I could do your job probably tomorrow.
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Carrying, driving, cash register, I could do that.
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and therefore you're not going to run out of food
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So the people who are maybe losing their income
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have a, you know, a bigger short-term problem than the rest of us.
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But they will also be surrounded by people who did not lose their income
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and for whom, you know, feeding one extra mouth is not a big deal.
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So, Wallet, you know, I would never advise you not to take precautions
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because you should just be ready for any kind of emergency.
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I think the thing you should worry least about while also preparing,
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I'm not talking you out of preparing, I hope you don't hear that,
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preparing is good, if for no other reason than it has stimulated the economy.
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Do you know how much the grocery store and, you know,
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maybe even, you know, other businesses like Costco and drugstores and everything,
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do you know how much they got stimulated this month?
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There's a good chance that you won't be able to go into the lobby of a bank,
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you know, without certain precautions or something, but it'll get done.
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You know, most of that stuff is telephone stuff anyway.
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I imagine that there'll be people standing outside with, you know, cleansers
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or they'll tell you to use your elbow or a pencil to push the buttons or something.
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But, no, I don't think there's really any real risk of running out of banks,
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both the liquid kind and the gas your stove runs on.
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I don't think there's any chance of those things being impacted in any long-term way.
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So, on any given day, you might be inconvenienced, but you'll be fine.
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So, what's different about this, and if you're saying to yourself,
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yeah, Scott, but I see pictures of emergencies in other countries
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Well, what's different about this is that we're not running out of anything.
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We actually have so much extra in terms of extra labor, you know,
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So, we mostly need to make sure that the people who are not getting a paycheck
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And I would say, again, and I'll probably do this on the next day or so,
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but I'm planning to just buy gift certificates at all the local restaurants, you know,
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So, all it does is, you know, shift your spending,
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because the moment I can go back to restaurants,
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You know, I guess I'm pent-up traveling and some pent-up buying
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When the economy comes back, it's going to come back faster than you expect.
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So, whatever you thought was the long-term implication,
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if you were to take the average of all the experts, put me at the fastest.
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You know, I would be the public figure saying that once we get a handle on the virus,
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which we don't have yet, but once we get it, the recovery is going to be, frankly, astounding.
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Scott, do you think we have a diplomacy opportunity with Iran?
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And that's very low on my list of things to worry about this week.
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I think they're just going to deal with their problems.
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We'll deal with ours, and then we'll get back to things.
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All of you who are adults are having a problem right now telling your kids
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that their time with their friends is going to be shut off.
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and the A-B testing determined that there was one thing I said
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the government says you've got to stay six feet away from your friends,
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It's not a law per se, but I don't want to say it's a law.
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I just say the government says you need to stay six feet away from your friends.
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Now, let me explain why that works and everything else doesn't.
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So the point is you'll get negotiated to death.
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But if you say the government says you have to stay six feet apart,
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That's not a, well, is three friends better than four friends?
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Well, as soon as you get into anything that can be negotiated,
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you're going to end up negotiating, and you shouldn't.
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If you say, yeah, we just got to stay six feet apart.
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Because the kids wouldn't want to play with their friends if they had to stay six feet apart anyway.
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This virus thing affects every part of our human experience.
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And one of the things it affects the most is our psychology.
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So the way we think about things just got changed.
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And we don't know exactly how that will play out.
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But let me tell you, I'll just give you a small example.
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How good are you going to feel when this is over?
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Now, I don't know if it'll be over like, you know, there'll be one day where they say,
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Probably it will phase back to normal slowly the way it sort of, you know,
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Like, you're going to appreciate your normal life like you have never appreciated it before.
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Because, man, do we take for granted everything, really.
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It's not your fault that you take for granted, you know, that things work around you.
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you're supposed to stop paying attention to the things that are not a problem.
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You wouldn't be able to live your life if you put as much attention on the things that are not a problem
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But, man, is it going to feel good when it's over?
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I'll give you an example, two examples, actually.
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There was one time way back in my past when I couldn't eat for, I don't know, a week or something
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And the first time I had a solid meal, after not eating regular food for a week,
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you cannot believe, people, you cannot believe how good that food felt.
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Likewise, some of you know I had a problem where I lost my ability to speak for a few years.
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Because when it came back, you have no idea how happy I am and continually grateful all day long.
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I'm grateful all day long that that old problem was solved, and I don't have that anymore.
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So it's going to feel good, and it's going to be a very connected feeling
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because you're all going to feel good at the same time.
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But, all right, so here's some other good news coming.
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And it all has to do with the same point, that our psychology just changed.
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So 15 billion years, yeah, 15 billion years have transpired since the Big Bang,
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And we have never, ever had all the smartest people on the planet, the galaxy if you like,
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the smartest people in the galaxy, focused on the same problem at the same time.
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You know, you could go back to, well, what about the Manhattan Project?
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Because in the Manhattan Project, communication was kind of bad,
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and we just had to use the scientists that we had who happened to be here.
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But on this problem, the entire world, the smartest, most capable people,
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And they're working hard, and they're putting in the serious time and effort.
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Do you ever wonder what your dog or your cat thinks of you?
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and it knows that you can do some things that they can't do.
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But on the other end, the dog and the cat can do some things you can't do.
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So I don't know if your dog or your cat recognize how smart you are.
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Because it's a curious thing that if you're the smart one in the room,
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But the dumb one can't tell how smart the smart one is.
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Because you can only understand things up to the level of your own intelligence.
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If somebody's above that, you don't know how much more above that they are,
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So they could be twice as smart, 10% smarter, and it's all just confusing to you.
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this is sort of how you and I are looking at the geniuses,
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Sloan, Kettering, basically everywhere that you've got geniuses,
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Now, our government is not really staffed with the same level of genius,
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if you need somebody to finish driving that bread truck to the supermarket,
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And we have politicians who are closer to the everyday hero type of person than the genius,
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but you need to know what worked and what didn't.
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blaming each other for doing things wrong is sort of not the right vibe,
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for an emergency because our president does not operate in our government at the moment.
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it doesn't operate as some kind of independent machine that's off there making decisions.
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That machine is wholly dependent on the public and the experts feeding it what works.
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here's the point where you would lose confidence.
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And then he used his lack of expertise to override us.
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We've heard it even from political enemies of the president,
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We haven't seen anything quite like this recently.
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but we've never had this kind of capability focused on it.
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So you've got your financial experts jumping into the,
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if I feel as these little tweaks to the economy are primarily for our
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every time the government tweaks some little thing or the Fed tweaks some
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I'm part of a big enterprise here where the right people are making the
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I don't know that it makes any difference economically,
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except that the economy is a psychology machine.
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Because that translates into people acting rationally in a way that capitalism
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Here are some things that may end up way better after this crisis passes.
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do you think education in person will ever be the same?
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Because if you get enough people to try enough online education,
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And the other thing you're going to get is a lot of people being exposed to
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Maybe I want to make this online education thing better.
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Maybe that's the industry that's going to be growing like crazy.
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So online education might have gotten this huge,
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I think you're going to see a bunch of inventions come out of this.
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Because you always need to invent stuff to get an edge on the enemy.
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but I think radar was invented for war purposes.
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And these inventions might be the type that really make a difference.
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I mentioned this thing called the far UV light.
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Meaning there's a type of light with a certain frequency.
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And allegedly it can knock viruses out of the air,
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basically and kill them on surfaces and things.
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I don't know if that's true or if it works well enough or it only works in some
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that maybe you just wouldn't have been invented so quickly before.
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anybody who's got an idea for something that would help in a pandemic,
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So you're going to see a bunch of businesses jump up about this.
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You're going to see the door dashing world take off.
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I've said for a long time that restaurants will probably,
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sort of transmogrify into takeout or delivery only.
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So I think some restaurants are going to survive by being super proactive in takeout,
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as long as they can get their kitchen staff there.
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and convenience and availability of home delivery of warm food.
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The other thing is people are designing all kinds of systems to live better.
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I've told you my system for decreasing any unnecessary stress is,
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exercise and staying busy and having a purpose and all that stuff.
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and I'm hearing it already have already implemented systems for the,
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So your system might not include taking walks every day like mine,
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probably will find some kind of system for exercise and eating and fitness,
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I guess the federal government said it would be okay for doctors to practice
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But apparently there's still state restrictions.
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50 different entities have to say yes before you've got full practicing cross state boundaries.
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that might be some good stuff coming out of that.
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I told you that South Korea has these portable CT machines.
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they can actually test people with a portable machine.
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the messaging from people is going up pretty bit,
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The other thing that might change is immigration.
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people may have a different opinion of it after this,
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we should let people come across our open border.
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but it's another thing when you've just put in your emergency supply of food and people are still coming across the border.
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You're going to think of it differently because there's nothing to stop people from walking up and taking your food.
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So I think the psychology of an open border may be dead now.