In this episode of No Causing, Scott Adams talks about his experience with a 60-day "lockdown" in which he learned a new skill every day for 60 days. He talks about the benefits of learning new skills, and why you should do the same.
00:02:55.700And I know most of you already do this.
00:02:58.280But all I'm going to add to what you already know to do is how extreme to do it.
00:03:06.360And one of the reasons that I took up the drums, especially later in life, is that I have absolutely no musical ability whatsoever.
00:03:13.920So, the first thing I could do by taking drums is I could fill in a blank spot in my social understanding of things, which is a little bit about how music works, which I never had any interest in before.
00:03:28.900Secondly, my fiancee, Christina, is a gifted musician, and he gives me something to talk about, and, you know, we can compare notes on musical things, and it's like a whole new topic of things to talk about.
00:03:43.260But actually, the biggest reason that I did this is to work on my dexterity, just, you know, my actual coordination, and to exercise a part of my brain that I'd never exercised before.
00:03:58.100So, this is another lifelong practice, that if there's a part of your brain that you don't use, just sort of excited a little bit.
00:04:06.940And so, this is completely outside of my talent zone, my experience zone, and that's part of what's appealing about it.
00:04:15.920So, it keeps me sharp, makes me learn a new thing, keeps me interested.
00:04:20.080And the other big benefit, and I talked about this with skill stacking, is that if you add two skills together, it's more than just twice as good to add that second skill.
00:04:34.260Because it sometimes makes you think of new connections that you wouldn't have thought of before.
00:04:39.880And one of the things I wanted to explore is the connection between music and persuasion.
00:04:46.080It should be no surprise to you that music can be persuasive, because it can literally change your mood, and it can do it in the moment.
00:04:58.800So, since music is persuasive, but if you don't, let's say, control it and manage it, it's persuasive randomly.
00:05:08.560Could you learn something by learning music that would have some crossover with persuasion?
00:05:14.060Now, these are exactly the kind of things you accidentally discover when you start layering skills on, which is, really?
00:05:21.800What does cooking have to do with mountain climbing, and then suddenly there actually is something in common?
00:05:27.700I can't think what that would be right now, but you get my point.
00:05:31.700So, here's the theory that I've been working on.
00:05:34.600And by the way, when I learn a new thing like this, unless I'm doing it for money, and I'm really serious about getting to that confidence quickly, I prefer to learn it as inefficiently as possible.
00:05:49.320And I know that sounds weird, but rather than get an instructor, obviously I could pay somebody to sit next to me, and I would get better faster.
00:06:37.800I'm finding that I think there's something about pattern and then disruption of pattern that is very related to persuasion.
00:06:50.820And I don't quite have a working theory on this, but it's something like this, that your brain is a pattern recognition machine.
00:07:01.420And so music has a very special hook to your brain because music is pattern.
00:07:06.720And if it were not pattern, you would not recognize it as music.
00:07:10.760So you've got a pattern recognizing machine, and then you've got this sort of input, which is the music.
00:07:16.740And I think, and I'm just working on this sort of very early hypothesis, it seems as though there's something about your brain recognizing there's a pattern and then having it violated and then wanting a pattern again.
00:07:34.100And just as you're wanting it, it comes back.
00:07:37.780So there's something about teasing you with repetition, mixing it up, and then teasing you back with repetition.
00:07:45.980So it's sort of like getting you in the groove, mix it up, get you back in the groove, mix it up.
00:11:22.140The thing that makes something funny, usually, there could be exceptions to this, but it's like the most, the closest to a universal rule of humor.
00:11:31.820It's something that almost makes sense, but doesn't.
00:11:36.920In other words, your brain wants it to make sense, but it knows it doesn't.
00:12:06.340And so, when you realize that it doesn't work, that's the left.
00:12:10.640I would argue, and I have before, that politics is largely replacing humor as an entertainment source.
00:12:19.380So, there used to be more humorous movies and TV shows, but they've largely been replaced by reality.
00:12:27.800But not every reality, not everything is funny.
00:12:31.700But the reason that Trump is so hilarious to some of us, those of us who can't, it's funny to those of us who are not afraid of him, basically.
00:12:44.200So, if you get that you're in on the joke, he's in on the joke, he knows other people know he's in on the joke, and the joke is on other people, if you get that, it's hilarious.
00:13:23.380It happens to be the husband of one of his closest advisors.
00:13:27.500And then your brain just goes, I don't know what I'm seeing.
00:13:30.400My brain can't make sense of the fact that he's trashing the husband of one of his closest long-time advisors, Kellyanne, and he's not supposed to be calling people moon face, and none of it makes sense.
00:17:30.060So he's basically said, yeah, I'll give you what you want, and then he has the complete option to change it, and he just told you he was going to.
00:17:42.020He framed it as like they were so popular, he used the word popular, that he brought them back, and I'm going to add this word, like an encore of a popular act.
00:17:55.940And I thought to myself, oh, my God, that's so good.
00:17:59.360They were so popular that he decided to bring them back for an encore.
00:18:06.820But wouldn't you admit that that simple framing of, no, I didn't make a mistake, you know, and correct me because everybody told me I was dumb, because that easily is what their frame would have been?
00:18:28.100All right, here is my better argument for why I think we should not rely on testing to save us, and it goes like this.
00:18:40.740And these are rules you've heard before from me, but now I'm going to apply them to the situations so you can see how they work.
00:18:46.900One is that whenever you have a situation where there's a huge upside potential gain, if somebody does something, let's say illegal or shady,
00:18:54.880there's a huge amount to gain, usually money, and there's lots of people involved that could all take advantage of this same opportunity,
00:19:03.820so you don't have to worry about, you know, maybe there's one honest person, because there's so many people that somebody's going to take advantage of it,
00:19:11.400because there's a big upside, and then here's the key, almost no chance of going to jail.
00:19:17.600When you have that situation, huge upside, lots of people involved, no chance of going to jail, you always have fraud.
00:19:25.460Not sometimes, not that one time, always.
00:20:35.220Well, then you still sold 10,000 units a month.
00:20:38.600You're still ahead, and you've probably got more attention because for a while they thought you were going to make 100,000.
00:20:44.360So you go, like, to the top of the list to get funded because you're bigger.
00:20:50.560The bigger ones would get more funding.
00:20:52.340So, of course, it's a 100% chance that there's massive fraud in what these companies told the government they could do because why wouldn't they?
00:21:15.780No way the government got good information from that group.
00:21:19.020Next, the public is largely confused by what the politicians and experts have been telling them about the tests.
00:21:26.960But they're confused because there are different kinds of tests used for different purposes.
00:21:33.420So it all ends up sounding like one big thing.
00:21:36.400And then when the president says stuff like all the states have sufficient testing to accomplish phase one, that sounds to you, your uncritical brain, it sounds like, okay, they've been working hard to get testing.
00:21:51.600And now the federal government is saying that there is enough testing for phase one.
00:21:57.060Well, why wouldn't there be enough testing pretty soon for phase two because it sounds like they've got things rolling now, right?
00:22:06.900And so probably we have either very close or maybe the tests we need to test our way out of this because we've heard that testing is the key, right?
00:22:32.220If you're going to try to test your way out of it as opposed to simply, you know, doing what you can in the hot spots, it's very different.
00:22:41.380Trying to test your way out of something is a lot of testing.
00:24:05.280And it's that, as any governor said, for example, if we just wait X number of weeks, whatever X is, by then we'll have all the testing we need to be able to really test everybody and then just test our way out of this thing.
00:24:23.040And do the contact tracing with the testing, of course.
00:24:26.840So has anybody said, and remember, there's 50 governors, all these experts, there's the president.
00:24:33.780There are a lot of people who should know how close we are to having enough tests to test our way out as opposed to just test a few people who come into the office, which is good enough for the phase one.
00:24:47.120The reason that nobody has said, you know, you idiots, if you just give us two more weeks, we'll have all the tests we need, is because nobody has any idea that that could possibly happen.
00:25:01.000We are not close to, let's say, the Bill Gates-described standard of being able to test so much that you can actually get on top of the virus and really basically just beat it.
00:25:19.040Now, none of us know what we don't know.
00:25:21.600So it could be that there might be some kind of company that's in a garage that's just invented something that will ramp up like crazy, maybe.
00:25:35.040So if you don't know that magic will happen, somebody suddenly appears and solves your problems, you can't really make it a plan.
00:25:42.360So Ben Shapiro had this very well-written tweet, I think I mentioned this before, I tweeted it, in which he was describing the fact that we have no articulated plan.
00:25:55.680Now, I would say we do have an articulated plan in the sense that when you don't articulate anything different, status quo is kind of the plan.
00:26:06.400So, yeah, and Ben used the literary term deus ex machina.
00:26:38.760So let's say, let's, let's say it's Greek.
00:26:40.640And they would write these Greek plays and the stories were poorly written so that they get to the end of the play and the hero had a problem that just couldn't be solved.
00:26:50.540And there was nothing that happened in the play so far that could sort of, you know, help that happen.
00:26:57.220So the device that they use, the writing device, so it looks like it's Latin, but maybe, maybe it was used by the Greeks, I don't know.
00:27:09.640So the, the mechanism that the writers used is this deus ex machina, which was basically God from the machine is what it means.
00:27:18.140And it, and basically it would just, some super character would just appear at the end who had nothing to do with the story up to that point and would just solve the problem.
00:27:30.140And, and so in, in modern day script writing, it would be considered a, an obvious writing mistake to require a deus ex machina at the end.
00:27:43.820Because that means you wrote it so poorly, you couldn't solve, solve the story without introducing a new character at the end, which is just lame, right?
00:28:21.660We will, doesn't seem to be any therapeutic that's going to blow us away because we would know about it.
00:28:26.940If there were any of the, I don't know, how many therapeutics are being tested, if any of them were like really good, we would totally know about it.
00:28:36.380And they would have already stopped the test and it would be a big news story.
00:28:40.740So you can be pretty sure that none of them are a whole lot.
00:28:45.140Maybe some of them reduce virus or something.
00:28:47.900You saw that remdesivir doesn't even change your, your death rate.
00:28:51.040But, I mean, that's not much of a therapeutic.
00:28:55.080So, anyway, I think that the plan at this point is that we will gingerly tiptoe in the next few weeks, see what happens.
00:29:39.160The app is making my hands moving so fast.
00:29:43.140Somebody said it's just a hoax anyway, right?
00:29:46.460Well, nobody ever said that coronavirus was a hoax except the people who thought it was like the virus, like the regular flu.
00:29:54.960I think every, is there anybody who still thinks it's only like the regular flu?
00:29:58.780Now that we know that the regular flu was never, never 50,000 or 80,000 a year, that that was just made up, that the actual real number of people who died from the flu, the regular flu, basically close to zero.
00:31:58.300But, you know, it's actually pretty good for the economy.
00:32:01.520And if over the next few months, the way it looks like it's going to go, is the president will be busy himself trying to ramp up the economy, he's really going to be in his sweet spot, if you think about it.
00:32:17.220Because I don't think anybody will blame him for ruining the economy.
00:32:21.760He's not going to take the hit for that.
00:32:23.220But people are going to say to themselves, who do I want to revive this thing?
00:32:29.440You know, if I'm going to do CPR in this economy, who do I want to do that?
00:32:33.740Do I want the guy who's done it before, who knows how to breathe energy into a thing?
00:32:39.880Or do I want the guy who needs CPR himself, if you know what I mean?
00:32:46.120Now, have any of you, yeah, it's the economy.
00:32:50.360So, if you just straight line this out, which is a huge mistake, right?
00:32:56.080If there's anything you would ever learn, that making a straight line prediction is just dumb because there are too many things that will change in a complicated situation.
00:33:05.220And so, the slaughter meter is a dumb measurement because it imagines nothing will change, but of course it will.
00:33:13.860Nobody saw the coronavirus coming, right?
00:33:15.920So, it isn't useful for prediction, but it's sort of a fun device to say if everything went like this, how would it end?
00:33:22.800And I would say that given that we're not going to want to play around with the economy, the voters are going to have a strong preference for the person they trusted the most.
00:33:32.600And they might put everything else off.
00:33:34.460I mean, I think the voters are going to say, you know, in a normal situation, I'd be caring about, you know, this, this, and this, and this, and this, and this.
00:33:45.460But at the moment, I really care about the economy, and if we don't get that fixed, all the other stuff is going to break.
00:33:52.740So, it's going to turn out to be basically a one-variable election.
00:33:57.680I'm exaggerating, but you know what I mean?
00:33:59.460I mean, it's going to come down to who can handle the economy best, and if Trump has goosed the stock market, you know, another, let's say another 10% by November, it's, it's just a, it's a base clearing home run.
00:34:15.140Because nobody is going to want to take a chance on ruining the economy when they just have a little taste of what that feels like.
00:34:23.060You know, their, their, their appetite for risk is going to be very low.
00:34:35.320Yeah, I, I've been trying to ignore, there's some pandemic thing people keep sending me, and I know it's stupid, so I don't want to look at it, but I know I'll have to, because everybody's going to ask me about it.
00:34:47.460Did I see the Duke U prediction for a quick recovery?
00:34:53.320I did not, but here's what's, here's what is so different about this situation.
00:35:02.620I called my local bike repair store, and I wanted to get a chain put on a bike, and bike stores, bike repair stores, are open because they're, they're essential, because it's transportation.
00:35:14.980And, uh, I thought I could take my bike in and maybe get a new chain on it, and it turns out that the wait, the wait time at my local bike repair is two months.
00:35:29.860And then I said, well, do you have any, you know, certain kind of bike I was interested in?
00:35:33.720And they, like, we, we have, like, no inventory.
00:35:37.000They sold all their damn bikes, and they've got a two-month waiting list for repairs.
00:35:41.920And how many other companies are in their situation?
00:35:47.100Because there must be a whole bunch of, uh, startups that made money, you know, they make, they make things for coronavirus testing or whatever.
00:35:55.600Uh, everybody makes paper products, a lot of the grocery business.
00:36:03.160So it's a weird kind of economic problem in which some number of people just did better, which I don't think that's ever happened before, right?
00:36:14.440If we ever had a severe economic downturn, including the Depression, in which something like half of the people made money, right?
00:36:25.500Because all the people who just got their regular paycheck, but they had to work at home or whatever, and that's a lot of people.
00:36:33.160You know, fortunately, it's a lot of people.
00:36:35.000They got their regular pay, and they didn't spend any money for three months.
00:36:38.860So there should be a lot of spending coming back online faster than we've ever seen it happen before.
00:36:45.340So I'm very much in the fast recovery, um, camp.
00:36:52.240Um, somebody in the comments says, uh, that, uh, Timmy says that he sells hot tubs and they're all sold out and waiting for, and waiting for the factory to make more.
00:37:59.860When I was studying to be a hypnotist, I was in early twenties, and there was somebody in the class who was also studying to be a hypnotist, who said that she was a psychic and that she did psychic readings and she could see the future.
00:38:16.960Now, of course, I'm a pretty skeptical guy.
00:38:19.960So, I thought, huh, yeah, you're a skeptic, you're a psychic, I'll bet you are.
00:38:28.040Now, why don't you come over, make some predictions, we'll see how you do.
00:38:32.900Now, my excuse was that my hypnosis professor, if you could call him that, had told us that one of the types of people you can identify that tend to be good subjects for hypnosis are people who claim to be psychics.
00:38:48.440Now, he said he didn't know why, it's just something you'd notice over time, that if somebody claimed to be a psychic, they could be hypnotized very deeply, very quickly.
00:39:00.460So, I said, hey, well, if, you know, the teacher says that works, you say you're a psychic, why don't you come over, I'll practice on you and I'll hypnotize you and bring your tarot cards.
00:39:10.740So, she brings her tarot cards over to my place.
00:39:14.420And I said, all right, let's do a little test.