Episode 915 Scott Adams： If You Can't Bank it, Blanket! Come Feel Better.
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Summary
In this episode, I talk about what it's like to go back to work after a long break and how to deal with it. I also talk about how to get back into the swing of things and what to do when the going gets tough.
Transcript
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that's better do you know it's hard to put on a blanket when you're already
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sitting in a chair well now you do you come here to learn and learn you did
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well this is the part of the night where all of your worries and cares will be
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draining out of your body back into the earth where they belong don't push them
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down into your stomach and try to bury them with food I'm just kidding that
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works too but stick with me and by the end of this you're gonna feel so much
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better so much better it's just gonna be crazy so let us begin talking about all
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the things number one I hope that all of you are learning a new skill or working
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on your fitness or learning to cook or bonding with your partner is everybody
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here have you all made it a point to just at least pick one thing that's just
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gonna be better because it's the one thing you can control you can control
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if you learn something you can control if you try something etc and in times like
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this it's good to get our mind off of things and it's good to just try some
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stuff so one of the things I'm trying I'm trying lots of different stuff you're
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working on my drumming working on my weight training and stuff but I signed up
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for a cameo do you know what that is it's the it's the app where you can you can
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have me leave a message for somebody that's sort of a gift so it's like a 30
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second message from semi-famous B list celebrities like myself so you do the
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cameo app and you just find me there that's what you need to know I have I have a
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feeling that the zeitgeist is changing this is what I feel like the zeitgeist is
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changing meaning that the way that the country feels it's almost can't you feel
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like you're connected to the whole country right now in a way that you
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haven't quite felt before because I find that when I think about you know the big
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decision of how do you go back to to work and how do you go back to normal the
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risks and stuff I feel that because I can't make that decision without literally
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thinking of everyone else in the country like how do you do it because it's all
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connected right so you know anything you think of it's like well we could do it
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this way then you think oh well that would be really bad for restaurants or
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whoever so there's pretty much no way to guarantee that anything you do is going
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to be good for everybody so you just feel sort of connected because you're
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worrying about everybody you're wondering what you can do how you can help it's
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very connected feeling and because it's connected I feel like maybe you feel this
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too it's almost like you can feel the the pulse of the public you know in a way
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that you don't normally feel and let me tell you what I'm feeling and then maybe
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you can validate how that feels in your end there's something about one month
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that makes anything doable meaning if you say we only have to do something for one
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month people will complain but you can do anything for one month if it gets pushed
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out to six weeks you'll complain some more but you'll say to yourself ah it's only two
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more weeks if it gets pushed out to what would be the second month there's going to be some
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serious conversation and you know where we are right so so we're right in that point where
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the where the flexibility of the country has reached something like a limit now let me give
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you the good news if our leaders are doing everything just right it might be that the
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perfect place to you know start getting back to work is when it seems like it's too late
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you know to just take it right up to the red line you know you get into the red zone and just
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push it more into the red zone red zone sort of like captain kirk trying to do you know warp 12
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the ship wasn't built for warp 12 so it could be that we're heading right into the optimal best we
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could have done you just don't know and that's the big problem isn't nobody really knows it could
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be that we should have gone back to work three weeks ago which could be that the only thing that
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makes sense is to you know stay stay locked out for longer nobody really knows but i'll tell you
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some things we do know here are some things we know okay uh number one um i probably have the best
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situation of almost anybody you know in terms of you know getting through the uh social isolation
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because i'm in a really nice environment and it's where i would be anyway you know most of the time
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so i'm not i'm not suffering uh at all but i gotta tell you today i lost it a little bit
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so just you know those days where uh you're getting really mad at stuff and you're getting
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really mad at the people online and you say to yourself i don't know if i would have been this mad
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about what somebody said online and they make up excuses and i say to myself all right it's not
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that i'm getting too mad it's because it's so important you know people need to think right
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about the the crisis to get it right so i feel like no no i'm not overreacting i'm reacting just right
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because it really is important and somebody could get killed if we get it wrong so but i realize that's
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a rationalization i'm completely aware that i'm just pissed off and i'm starting to take it out on
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objects and you know on nothing right and here was my first revelation i'm a pretty chill guy
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and i'm i'm writing this out better than just about anybody really and if it got to me
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if it got to me i mean i was ready to stage a revolution today and honestly i don't know what
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it's like to be anybody else and i don't think anybody else does either right you don't know what
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it's like to be me i couldn't possibly know what it's like to be you but i do know this it's way
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worse it's way worse to be most of you because you're not in as good a situation so if it got to
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me today i got a real like just a glimmer of how bad this must be for other people and of course you
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knew it you know it's not like you didn't know it intellectually you know you hear it on the news
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it's obvious but to feel it is a different it's a whole different experience and this gets me to
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michigan what would you say is the most american state if you had to pick one you know out of all
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the states what's the most what's the one that just is the most american and i'm not saying that's
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good or bad you know you can leave your judgments at home but i think you'd agree that you know
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michigan is pretty high on the list right i don't know if it's number one but when you think of
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you know what makes america in the sort of traditional way right so sort of the you know
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salute the flag and eat the apple pie kind of way and watching michigan um stage a revolution
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today you most of you saw the news where they they got in their cars so they wouldn't be you know
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infecting each other too badly and they clogged up the streets around the capital to make a point
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and i thought to myself you know if the revolution is starting
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michigan why not michigan's pretty darn american and americans were flexible
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we're very flexible we're very flexible but we have a limit and what i'm saying is if i felt i was
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near the limit i can't even imagine how you feel you know some of you so um i think that we all we all
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buy into the idea that in an emergency it's better to have order and if you have at least a little bit
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of trust about the people at the top it's better in an emergency just to say okay it's an emergency
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just tell us what to do but as time goes by that authority gets you know pushed down so that the states
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have more control and they tell the cities and the cities do their things and maybe your neighborhood
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does something so that the control is being pushed down but ultimately as i like to say
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ultimately the public has all the control you know we have a government and then you know they have
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police and they have armies and stuff like that but they're not going to use them all right yeah if
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the public just said you know let's just pick our own date we'll just pick our own date and we we know
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the risk we watch tv we'll wear the mask we'll do the thing if some people don't want to
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we'll work it out maybe they'll be shunned maybe they just work in places where it doesn't matter
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maybe people take the risk we'll just work it out so ultimately i guess what i was feeling today
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is that that zeitgeist power shift in which the government is still in control but only barely
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do you feel that then i mean in a bad way you know i don't think the government is going to be
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overthrown i'm not talking about that i'm talking about just on this question of when we go back to
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work i think the public is ready to decide for the government because i don't think the government
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has a better plan than we do do you do you think the government can give you a more detailed plan
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that works for you and your family do you think they can you know prescribe that better than you
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could probably not right now i also uh read the uh the mood of the country that if a few hundred
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thousand people die because of this that's what it's going to be they it could happen fast it could
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happen slow but probably there's no way to get to the other side without that and i think the country
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is ready and it took you know if you had to say there's a silver lining it's it's really dark silver
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lining in this case but the the fear and the the real pain of this economic upheaval probably was
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necessary to get the citizens of the united states to say effectively what i was saying earlier today
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which is i'm in the higher risk group because of my age and asthma and i'm ready to take the chance
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so you know if i'm ready i don't think an 82 year old should be ready
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um but you know i'm close enough to the gray area that i'd take a chance because you know my actual
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odds of dying are really kind of small so i think people are ready um here's some good news
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can you believe that we have too many ventilators and and way too many that's pretty good and the only
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stats that i care about out of new york city because i think today the number of deaths went up
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but the only one that i'm really watching is the number of hospitalizations you know how many people
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are admitted to the hospital and that keeps dropping so lately day after day the number of people who went
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in the hospital at all is dropping and in terms of getting back to work that's got to be the most important
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one um so there's that uh i found out i keep seeing stuff all over twitter that i didn't understand so i dug
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into it a little bit and candace owens was saying this and also emerald robinson uh from newsmax
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they're both making comments about bill gates and his involvement in you know health care decisions
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and vaccinations and stuff and i didn't realize how much hatred there was for bill gates
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i had no idea so i i decided to you know sample a little of what is it that he did indeed candace called
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him a uh a vaccine criminal and i thought that's that's pretty that's pretty direct accusation what does
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that mean so i look at so i asked her and you know we messaged a few times and she sent me some links
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to show me the the sources that would um that would show that bill gates had done horrible things
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and i read them and i just didn't see it so i don't know i mean i read i read two sources that she sent me
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one was snopes saying that there was no evidence of the thing and so when i pointed out to candace that
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snopes this the source she sent me says there's no evidence of this charge against uh bill gates
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and candace said but they don't have any evidence that it isn't true essentially well i'm not sure that's
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the thing you know if there's a weird accusation it's not bill gates's job to prove it didn't happen
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somebody kind of has to you know if snopes says there's no evidence so that was one of them and the
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other one was i think it's true but it didn't seem to mean anything in terms of bill gates being a bad
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guy and it was this that um i guess there was some situation i don't know all the details but i'll give
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you the the broad strokes uh so i guess it's cheaper and easier to to test um test some meds and
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vaccinations in africa because in part everything's cheaper there but probably more than that they have
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relaxed standards for things so you know right away your your alarm is going off it's like wait a
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minute the pharmaceutical companies go to africa because they have relaxed standards i don't know
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what that means exactly and i don't know if those like relaxed standards are ones that matter because
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you could easily imagine that the united states has too many and you know maybe it's just it's just
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easier and maybe everybody has good intentions but let's talk about their intentions
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so there was some kind of uh something got tested i think bill bill gates invested in a company
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that did some testing of some vaccines and it looked like there were some pretty bad outcomes so
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some of the people in the trial in africa had bad outcomes like i don't know death and just really bad
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so here's the question is that bill gates fault that a company that he funded did a study
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and or did a trial and it ended up hurting some people because that's actually why you do the trial
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right that's the whole point of the trial is that you don't know if it'll hurt anybody and
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then it does and so you stop but then there was also something about a lot of the people who were in
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the trial seemed to be young and not really knowing they were in the trial so that was another another
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issue and but i think that almost certainly has more to do with their parents or guardians or
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whoever signed the paperwork because i guess some of the girls couldn't read or write and you know so
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so you know they didn't read any kind of agreement so that part is super sketchy but i don't know if
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that was bill gates's fault i mean it's kind of a stretch to connect those dots you could say that the
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thing is horrible and should never happen if if the facts are accurate uh there's something horrible
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there that needs to be fixed it never happened again probably but did bill gates know that the
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company he funded would hire somebody on the ground who would talk to a guardian who would not have the
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proper motivation maybe they should have but uh anyway africa is a tough country tough continent all
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right then there's uh you know the uh small business loans so all the small business loans are coming out and
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um i wanted to see what the paperwork looked like so i downloaded it and here's the here's the
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economic argument you have to have in order to apply for a loan which would turn into just free money you
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wouldn't have to pay it back if you can meet the requirements of using that money to retain your staff
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so it's meant to retain the staff i'm not i'm not sure if that's the sba part or something else but
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anyway so that's what the money's for and here's the only sentence that you have to satisfy
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to say that you need the money here's the exact sentence current economic uncertainty makes this
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loan request necessary to support the ongoing operations of the applicant so you only have to
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check the box you know then sign the document that says the your current economic uncertainty
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makes it necessary to get this to be sure that you can retain people and i'm thinking to myself
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that's pretty open-ended that is pretty open-ended
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i'm looking at all the uh anti uh anti bill gates people i'm i'm fairly certain that all
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the bill gates stuff well i don't know i can't say 100 but it's almost all so ridiculous
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that i don't even know if you need to research it it it's in the clearly ridiculous category of of
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things because you have to start with who is bill gates and yeah the only way you could believe any of
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this stuff is if you've never seen a you know a documentary you never read about him never read
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his biography never read his predictions so if you didn't know who bill gates was
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those would be pretty you know pretty reasonable conspiracy theories but if you know who he is
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they're all ridiculous all right are people gonna hate me for liking bill gates probably so here's a
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point where you can check your prediction awesomeness are you ready every once in a while the news will
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report something with enough certainty that you should stop and say okay now that we know what the
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situation is what did i predict it would be and you should make a note of it because you don't
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want to lose sight of the fact that you were right if you're right or that you're wrong because that
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will teach you if you're good at this or in what situations maybe you're good at it so that your
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powers get better so what we found out in the last i'd say two days is that
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um there's a lot of reporting that the the virus came from the lab in wuhan but was not intentional
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it was not a bioweapon probably just a natural virus that they study typically in those labs and got it
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and that china covered it up now who who among you said early on before we had i think it feels
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confirmed at this point the quality of the extent of the reporting the way the united states is talking
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about it the way china acted it looks like it's confirmed so how many of you thought that it was
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a bioweapon if you did i think you can mark that wrong at least according to the best reporting and
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according to the united states right now some of you may cling to that and say it's not 100 wrong yet
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but it's probably wrong now i predicted from early on that it wasn't a bioweapon so i think i got that
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part right um how many of you said it came from the wet market and not the lab because if you said that
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you were wrong i think i get partial credit because in the very earliest days i said yes yes yes i hear you
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that there's a lab nearby and yeah i get it that that's pretty suspicious but it's not outside of
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the kind of coincidence that happens all the time so it wasn't such a big coincidence assuming that there
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really were bats there which at the time we thought there were bats but turns out maybe there were no
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bats for sale at the wet market but when we thought there were bats in the wet market well it was pretty
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reasonable to think we have two hypotheses something got out of a lab you know very possible or something
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got out of that wet market and there were some you know wet bats there also very possible seemed very
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possible um so i was you know i was saying hey keep an open mind until you know we know a little bit more
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but as of um i don't know several days ago so before this latest round of reporting uh i had commented
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that when uh china reopened the the wet markets that that was china basically telling us that it wasn't the
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wet markets because they wouldn't have opened them if they thought that the world would be you know
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looking at them and oh my god those wet markets they would i don't think they would have just
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reopened the very thing that almost destroyed the world so it was kind of almost a public confession
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that it wasn't the wet markets because it's just it's hard too hard to imagine they would have just
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opened them up because it's not like they contribute that much to the economy overall so i had said that
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that was a signal that it definitely wasn't the wet markets so that left the obvious which was
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something accidental from the lab so i would say that i eventually eventually got pretty close to
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what it looks like is going to be the answer so check your predictions how many of you predicted that
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christina is texting me up the order will be here in 10 minutes so we have 10 minutes
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before my door dashes here so i wanted to talk to you about models because i've been explaining this
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on social media until my face is blue and this is the thing that people didn't understand until maybe
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this month so i used to do a lot of prediction models for a living back in my banking days and my phone
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company days that's what i did so i would you know do these complicated many variable models just on
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usually just on uh spreadsheets uh but had lots of variables and stuff so i learned firsthand that
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they're never accurate but sometimes you can find a range of your risk so this is the thing that people
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learn today if it's a complicated model which is different than something simple a simple model
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that could work if you have a really simple model that says oh every every year for the last 30 years
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we went up five percent so we predict next year we'll go up five percent i mean if it's really simple
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sure it might work but as soon as you get a bunch of variables such as we had with the coronavirus and
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here's the the fun part we didn't know any of the variables accurately and we knew we didn't know
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them accurately so we were guessing about the lethality the lethality we were guessing about
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which variables really you know made a difference we thought that smoking made it worse but maybe it
00:26:32.120
makes it better we thought it was something about i don't know humidity and density and something you
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know age and then maybe it wasn't maybe it's in the blood so we have these intense unknowns and then on
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top of that nobody really knew how well we would do social distancing nobody really knew how well it
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would work because it had never been done in this scale nobody nobody really knew how well the masks
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would work nobody really knew any of that so here was this complicated model with i don't know how many
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variables but had to be at least dozens maybe hundreds and here's the thing they didn't know any of them
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it's not as if they had a few assumptions but the rest of them were you know pretty good estimates
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they didn't know any of them and they knew they didn't know them because they knew that you know
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the information was evolving even as they watched so in the situation where you just are guessing on
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most of the variables because you can't really know them what are the odds that it's going to predict
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the future zero it can't do that that's not a thing if it hit the future it would only be an accident
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which could happen i mean it could accidentally predict the future but it couldn't do it
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intentionally it's not for that and you don't even use them for that they're only for these things they
00:27:52.520
can size your risk so you try a bunch of variables and you say well these variables are here oh that's
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not so bad let's try it again these variables are here that's not too bad let's try a little tweaking
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of the variables again oh my god if i tweak those variables this way it's the end of the world
00:28:12.200
i better run that again uh-oh there's a whole bunch of situations that are the end of the world
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you could just tweak different variables and get there so that's how you use a complicated model
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to size the risk it's not telling you what the risk is it's not predicting the risk you can't do that
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you can't predict the future with that many variables it's simply telling it's it's this big now here's
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the key part that everybody gets wrong if it's sizing it this big and it turns out that it's just
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beyond it was the model wrong no that's the part everybody gets wrong if it's just outside of that
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big range that it said it's going to be almost certainly in this range and it's just outside
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which sixty thousand deaths is really just outside of a hundred thousand if you're looking at a hundred
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thousand to a million or two that range that's actually a bullseye you know it's about as good
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as you can do and of course the models are used to persuade because the scientists the experts have
00:29:15.320
a hard time communicating so the because the complexity of what they know can't really be
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communicated so they need a simplified way to tell the people who are not experts here it is and here's
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how it usually goes in a in a exaggerated form the scientists will say all right here's this model
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but i have to tell you we have a lot of just estimates there's so many variables i mean it's you
00:29:43.640
know there's just no way to know what the actual answer is but it was somewhere in this general area
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we think this model sizes the risk so that's what the expert says and the expert tells let's say that
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you know a low level uh person in the government person in the government takes the takes the graph
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that came with all of that hedging and takes it to his boss or her boss and says we've got a problem
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here look at this graph it looks like it looks like you know some terrible is going to happen
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and all of the hedging will be gone by then because as soon as the graph gets into the wild all of
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the well we're guessing on this it could be this we ran a lot of models we had to throw 10 models out
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we think we feel pretty good about this it turns out that a complicated model is usually just the
00:30:35.320
expert opinion consensus hammered into a model so that they can communicate it but what they're
00:30:42.520
communicating is just the the bulk of all their testing and things that are hard to explain
00:30:49.000
the only way they can explain it and say look at this pretty picture hey hey look at this
00:30:52.840
see that graph goes up you see goes up that's all you need to know look graph goes up goes up
00:30:59.880
remember that i don't want to overwhelm you so when people got mad because they said hey
00:31:08.200
we thought those predictions were going to be accurate or at least far more accurate and now we're
00:31:15.000
disappointed and now all the experts are liars and idiots to which i say well you only had your
00:31:22.680
yourself to blame and now that you know that complex models of that type are not even intended to
00:31:30.600
predict the future they don't have that it's not even an option now that you know that you have
00:31:37.160
advanced to the next level so in this simulation game your challenge was to understand this and now that you do
00:31:46.760
you may advance to the next level experts with complicated graphs are trying to persuade you
00:31:55.320
now that doesn't mean they're wrong and it doesn't mean they're dishonest it only means the only way they
00:32:01.560
can communicate their awesome intelligence which could be right could be wrong but it's still awesome
00:32:07.160
intelligence the only way they can communicate it is by lying with a little graph if you know what i
00:32:14.360
mean it's the only way you can get from here to there so if you if you're if you feel like you want
00:32:20.200
to blame the experts for lying to you give them a little credit it's the only way they can communicate
00:32:28.840
with people who don't know what they know haven't seen what they've seen haven't haven't you know lived
00:32:35.560
and breathed the full you know scope of the thing so they can be pretty sure that there's a big problem
00:32:42.280
ahead but they might need a little bit of a lie a little bit of a graph that's a little too neat
00:32:49.800
to sell it to the public so once you know that you've got to the next level congratulations you've gone to the
00:32:55.400
the next level and by the time we get out of this coronavirus situation i expect you will have
00:33:02.680
advanced several levels up in awareness in the simulation congratulations and your reward will
00:33:11.320
be an extra good night's sleep tonight when you're drifting off you're going to remember my voice and
00:33:18.520
you're going to remember that i told you that it was going to be a really good night's sleep
00:33:23.480
and as soon as you think that you're going to think wow it's like i'm just sinking into the mattress
00:33:30.760
i'm just sinking into the pillow and you'll feel momentarily heavy and then you'll just