Episode 1362 Scott Adams: Basecamp Gets Rid of its Worst Employees, Florida Bans Racism, Fake News

Hey, Tim, I will challenge you today. I'll challenge you hard. And if you'd like to be up for the challenge, well, I wouldn't want to do it under hydrated. That'd be dangerous. So all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass of tanker gels or stein to canteen during a flask of vessel of any kind, fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure. The dopamine to the day. The thing that makes everything better, much better. It's called the simultaneous sip. Have you heard of it? Yeah, it's. It's quite famous now. And it's gonna happen right now. Go. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. I feel us all coming together over that. Why can't we all get along and simultaneously sip? Well, talk about the news, and I'll tell you why. Turns out there's lots of reasons. All right, here's my question to you. Do we have a whole bunch of crises or do we just have one? You know, if I asked you what's. What are the problems in the world? You'd say, well, racism is pulling us apart. And you might say, climate change is either a disagreement or a problem. Whatever, whatever. You think you got people who don't want to get vaccinated. That might be a problem. You got fentanyl. And coming from China, we got lots of problems, right? Or do we only have one? Let me make a case. Tim, this is for you. You said to challenge you. You wanted to be challenged this morning. Here is your reframing challenge. Do we have lots of problems, or is our only problem the fake news? Here's my argument. The news tells us what to think. We used to think we made up our own opinions and we just gathered data from news sources. But now I think in 2021, we've all seen sort of, you know, risen a level in awareness, wouldn't you say? At least the people are paying attention. I would say that our awareness has gone up a level and now we know that our opinions are assigned to us. Well, not. Not you, of course. I mean, not me. I'm talking about everybody else in the world. But, you know, you and. And I are. We're immune. And if you think that, you don't get to go to the next level. But it does seem that all of these problems have the same sort of root cause, which is. Wait for it. If the situation were framed properly, we could solve it easily. But it's not framed properly because of the way the news business and the social media business work, their incentive is to keep us at each other's throats so they get more clicks. But if their incentive, hypothetically, and I don't know how you could ever make this true, but if they had the incentive to, let's say, bring this together and solve problems, could they do it? Well, let me give you some examples. If you don't know this, you're gonna have to do some research on your own to make sure that I'm not lying to you. But all of the smart people know that the only way you could get close to solving climate change, even if it's not a problem, you're still going to need massive amounts of clean power and not polluting the world, etc. So no matter what you think about climate change in terms of its risk, all the smart people in the world at this point are pretty sure we're going to need massive more nuclear energy. What is the, what is the media telling you about? That is the media saying, hey, it looks, that looks like even, even Joe Biden, lots of people on the right, pretty much everybody's on the same side from, from Bill Gates to who knows who, pretty much we're going to have to go massively hard at nuclear, not only so we can control space, because if we don't control space, eventually we're going to lose to whoever does. So where is the news and social media telling us all to get on the same side because we're sort of already there and put a lot of energy into the only thing that can save us if the climate is the problem, the experts say, and the only thing that can save us if space is going to be colonized, and it looks like it will be. So I would say that climate change is almost entirely a, a news and media problem because it's solvable if they could train us to think properly about the right solutions. How about racism? Do you think that what we perceive to be plus what actually is. So racism is not just perceptual, it's real plus perceptual. How would we feel about race and the race problems in this country if the news simply gave us facts without taking aside, without being a narrative? I don't think it would be nearly as big. My guess is that I don't know. 80% of at least how our emotions are whipped up about racism, at least 80% about how we feel about it in any given day is just the media. They've created this conflict, which is not in any way to say there's no racism I'm not on that team. I'm not on the team that's saying that America is not a racist country. It's clearly a racist country. I get what people are saying about the rules are the same. Yeah, the rules are the same. The Constitution is, Is completely even. But no, we. There are lots of problems with the country in terms of race. Now, when I talk. Let me. I have to divert a little bit because once I said that, I can't just leave it hanging. In my opinion, systemic racism exists primarily in the teachers unions. They're the ones who keep schools from competing. And if schools can't compete, they won't get better. We know that for sure. And if they don't get better and you're a, let's say you're a black kid and a. In a black area that doesn't have a good school, how are you ever going to. How are you ever going to get an even opportunity? You can't. I would call that systemic racism if you wanted to call it something else. It's still the same problem. Right. And it affects white people and black people, but maybe at different percentages. So that's what, that's the part that brings the race in. But I think we're a racist country in terms of the teachers unions and the fact that we're not moving against them. And if you look in the news, do you find the news pushing back against the teachers unions? Well, not the mainstream news. The mainstream news does not push back. But imagine if they did. Imagine if the news every day was, gosh, we've got a horrible problem and it's caused again by the teachers unions. Where's that news? Imagine if that had been the narrative. If that had been the narrative, probably the teachers unions power would have been diminished one way or another, and probably we would be a lot happier and heading in the right direction in terms of some of these, you know, structural, historical inequities. How about people not wanting to get vaccinated? So depending on your point of view, you might say, hey, more people should get vaccinated. Now, I'm going to give you. A little bit later, I'm going to give you the argument for getting vaccinated. Damn it, I'm going to have to do it now, aren't I? Because if I just say this, you all get mad. I can't. I can't just work this into my other point. So I'm going to have to diverge again. I was going to do this anyway. Here's an argument that this is on cnn, which was actually kind of, kind of useful. And they were trying to work out, they were trying to debunk the arguments against vaccinations. So let me, let me tell you how you should look at the vaccination question. And if you didn't know already, I plan to get vaccinated on Monday. And I want to tell you how that decision gets made. Now let me be really, really direct with you. I'm not telling you you should get vaccinated, and I'm not telling you you should not. You don't want to get that advice from me. Right? Wouldn't I be sort of the worst person in the world to give you medical advice? But I can give you advice on how to analyze things and how to calculate your risks. So let's just talk about that. So what are the components you should look at? And again, you're going to make your own decision, right? So nothing I say now should change the fact that you're in charge of your own decisions. That's it. It's your body. Do whatever you want. But here's how I would break it down. If I were you, I'd say to myself, what are the odds of getting Covid? And let's say, what would you say are your odds of getting Covid? Let's say vaccinations were to slow down and we don't get many more people vaccinated after maybe a month. What would be your odds of getting it if you were unvaccinated? I'm seeing people with really high numbers, like 100% and then other people saying 0.005. Now, how good are your news sources? If some people are saying there's 100% chance and some people are saying it's less than 1%. Are you watching the same news? How can you say 100% and some people say under 1%. Here's what I think it is. Now, you need to fact check my estimate. And I don't know if anybody can really make this estimate, but I'm going to go low because I think there will be enough people vaccinated that probably your odds are 20%. All right? So I'm going to use 20% just to show you how to do the calculation. If you later say, I think it's 40%, just recalculate it. Right? And if you think it's 1%, recalculate it. But I think you have a 20% chance of getting it if you don't get vaccinated. But we go back to Something like normal. Let's say that if masks go away and social distancing relaxes. Now again, so put in your own number there. But I'll use 20%. Just for example. If you had a 20% chance of getting it, what are the odds that once you got it, you're going to have a problem with it? Like what are the odds you're actually going to die? Well, it's like way less than 1%, right? So you only got a 20% chance you get it at all. Again, put your own estimate in there. And then if you get it, you got like 0.0, whatever chance that you're going to die. But you also have more like 15 or 20% chance, I think of long haul problems. Long haul problems are shortness of breath, fuzzy brain, chest pains, short. Yeah, shortness of breath, brain fog. That could last months. And a recent study found that 30% of the people who had Covid still had symptoms up to nine months after the infection. Are you confident that a disease that gives you continued symptoms nine months after you have it, are you confident that those all go away? Because it feels like they might not go away. And we're talking 30% of the people who have it. So if you're saying there's a 20% chance of getting it, if you don't get the vaccination and you think there's a.0001 tiny chance of dying, you're looking at the wrong number. Do you get that? If you're looking at your odds of dying from getting Covid, you're looking at the wrong number. That's not the one you should look at. The one you should look at is this. 30% of the people who get it have nine months of problems. We don't know if it ends after nine months. Right now there's an uncertainty here and maybe, you know, who knows, maybe we find out that the data is all whack and you know, these are coincidences or something. But I don't think so. I think we do know at this point that there are long term problems. So you take your 20% chance of getting it, you multiply it by a 30% chance of long haul problems. And whatever numbers you put in there, what is your net? It depends what numbers you use. But here's what I think it's going to net out to something like if you don't get vaccinated, something like a 5% chance of pretty long haul problems. If your chance of dying is, you know, 0.00, whatever it's small, especially if you're healthy. But your chance of long haul, maybe 5%. Now, what are your chances of having a complication from the vaccination itself? What are your odds in the comments I'd like to see you give me an estimate of what do you think are the odds that the vaccination itself would cause you either long term problems or death? Really, really small, certainly less than 5%. Now my 5% might be high too, but my, my sense of it, without doing the math and doing a deep dive, my sense of it is that your risk with the vaccination, given that, and by the way, I don't know if you knew this, but adverse side effects from vaccinations, according to one expert, show up within the first two weeks. Adverse effects are going to show up in two weeks or at least a month. Now we've been giving these vaccinations for so many months and the initial 40,000, whatever people who are tested now have many months. We have pretty good visibility and we're not seeing risks that are outside the realm you'd expect. So at this point I'd say the risk from getting the shot is well under 1%. The risk of not getting the shot, not in terms of death, but in long haul symptoms. Maybe this is my personal estimate, maybe 5%. All right. Now your numbers might differ, but only because you put in different assumptions, right? The way I'm thinking about it is the way you should think about it. If you're concentrating on death rate, you're thinking about the wrong thing because that really is so small. You could pretty much ignore it if you're healthy. But that's not the part you need to worry about. It's the long haul. All right, so getting back to my earlier point, let's say that some of you just learned this for the first time. By the way, is there anybody listening to this who just had their mind changed? Because I wasn't trying to change your mind, like I would do that differently. But did anybody's mind just change when I laid out the odds of getting it versus not getting it? Because I don't think that would have changed any minds. I'm looking at the comments, I'm seeing only no's. Oh, I saw one maybe, but I don't think that's going to be us. Yeah, it's all nos, right? I want yes, two yeses. Oh, weirdly, some yeses interesting, but overwhelmingly no. Now you should know, you should know that, you know, new data doesn't change anybody's minds. If you ever wanted to see the perfect example of that? Here it is. So anyway, if the news were telling you how to calculate your risks properly, I think maybe you would have different decisions. Imagine if you would, that you turned on your news and it said, look, here's our whiteboard and we'll tell you how to make the decision. Multiply a 20% chance of this times a 30% chance of this. Boom. There you go, there's your number. Then compare it to this. So the news, if it were trying to be useful, would tell you how to compare things. By the way, the Dilbert nft, the auction expires in like an hour or something. So I think it was $12,600 for the Dilbert NFT. Whoever sneaks in at the last minute is going to be the owner of that. And only a little bit time left. And it's the only Dilberg comic with the F word. In case you wondered. I need to say this again because I said it once, but I think it's important. I don't think the United States should ever raise taxes on anybody over 50. So that's my. It's a moral, ethical reason, because if you get to 50, after 50, you're really serious about your retirement and you should be. And you've played by a set of rules up to that point which sort of assumed that those rules would continue and that you would never. More taxes. I don't think it's fair or even moral or ethical to take somebody who lived their whole life under a set of rules and then you change the rules right when they're close to retirement. That just doesn't sit right with me. But if you told me, all right, Scott, you're 35. You know, you haven't made much money yet, but when you do, your tax rate will be higher than it used to be. It doesn't bother me as much, right, because I have my whole life to figure it out. But once you're approaching retirement age, that just doesn't seem right. And I think that the Republicans, if they're looking to negotiate anything on this, who knows how much negotiation even happens? But if Republicans at least said, we'll give you your tax increase if we have to know, as part of the negotiations, but you got to cut it off, you know, age 50, it's just not fair. I think they could get away with that. Maybe. So. Governor Ron DeSantis, apparently he's looking to ban race race based versions of Marxist ideology. It's what he's calling critical, critical race theory. But I like the way he's framing it. He's framing it that in Florida there will be no state sanctioned racism. So instead of saying that critical race theory is inaccurate or saying that critical race theory isn't useful or any of the other things that you could say about it, he just says it's racist. And our state doesn't do racist stuff. That's really good. Really good. So Ron DeSantis keeps surprising me because, you know, he has that sort of wonkish nerd kind of vibe to him. You know, whatever is the opposite of Trump. But he does perform, right? He performs. So what do you want? Do you want the sizzle or the steak? So good for him. Here's your fake news spottings of the day. I'm seeing reports that we heard that John Kerry told Iran's Foreign Minister Sharif about these 200 Israeli attacks that happened in Israel on Iranian proxies or assets or something. And the story is that Kerry told Sharif some secrets that Sharif didn't know. And we know Sharif didn't know it because we have a secret recording. Well, it was secretly released, a recording in which he said it directly. So Sharif said he heard it from Kerry for the first time. Now the update is that I guess part of the defense had been. It was public information and that had already been published and that Kerry was just repeating public information so there would be no secrets told. But new information shows that there was no public information. Is that true? I don't know. We're into murky fact checking territory here. However, I'm going to call this whole thing fake news because there is no chance that the Iranian military did not know about it. 200 attacks on Iranian resources. I'm pretty sure the military of Iran knew about it. This story is about Sharif being out of the decision making loop. It has nothing to do with any secrets. There's no way that Iranian military leaders were unaware of 200 attacks that didn't happen. And it's still being reported as if that's like a thing. It's ridiculous. All right, so that story is stupid. Here's the next probable fake news. This one is clever. Let's see if you fell for this one. So according to the New York Post, a source has told them that Saturday Night Live's boss, Lorne Michaels, in responding to the fact that Elon Musk is going to be the guest Host on the 8th, I guess that the performers have been told that they don't have to work that day if they don't want to. Wow. So that's the news. SNL performers don't have to work with Elon Musk when he appears. Wow. And some of them have made some statements that make them look like maybe they're not so happy about him. Do you think any of that's true? This whole story is. Every part of this story is. Now, I could be wrong and maybe I'll find out. But when you read the actual comments that the cast members made, they're completely non critical. No cast member at least reportedly. Who knows what anybody said privately. But there's no report of any cast member who actually said anything even mean about, about them. And nobody has asked not to work with him. It simply hasn't happened. But Lorne Michaels, apparently, maybe he was asked about it or something and just made a generic statement that nobody's ever forced to do anything. So this story is that Lorne Michaels doesn't force people to do stuff. That's the story. He doesn't force people to do stuff they don't want to do. And somehow that turned into there's a internal revolt about Elon Musk. There's no evidence of that. There's no, there's not a single bit of evidence that anybody is concerned or angry or disappointed. Mad, quitting, boycotting, nothing. There's nothing in the story to support any part of the story. Now could it be true? Sure. But there's no evidence for it whatsoever. It just looks like fake news to me. All right, did you hear the great story about the Basecamp CEO? So Basecamp is a software tools making company. They had about 56 employees, very successful company, and 20 of them, about a third of their employees just quit because among other things, the CEO put out a statement saying that they were not allowed to discuss politics on the the company platforms. And now that wasn't the only thing. So he had some other things. So in addition to not being, not being allowed to discuss politics internally, he would have, quote, no more paternalistic benefits. In other words, they had stuff like fitness benefits and wellness allowance, farmers market share, what, continuing education allowances. A lot of companies have that, but they decided to just give people cash instead. Now, do you think people quit because instead of giving them benefits that they may or may not use, he decided to give them way more money and then they could just buy it whatever they want. I don't think anybody quit about that, did they? I mean, we haven't heard, but I don't think so. So that just seemed like, you know, a change that people could probably live with the other Thing was, no more committees. He didn't want any more committees. Do you think anybody resigned because he said, we don't want more committees? Probably not. I don't think it was that. No more lingering or dwelling on past decisions. Did people quit about that? I don't know. Probably not. No more 360 degree reviews. I don't think anybody quit over that. I feel as if it was the political part that motivated people, but I can't tell for sure from the outside. So you have to be a little careful what you. You do and do not know in this. However, this looks to be one of the greatest management moves of all time. If this is what it looks like. And you have to be really careful. I mean, this story could be completely different in 24 hours. That this is the sort of story where, you know, maybe there's something missing. You have to be a little careful. But if it's true, this CEO and I guess maybe a co founder were in on it. They made all the decisions on this, and they may have gotten rid of their 20 worst employees. Now, as somebody on social media just said, what is it like when one of those 20 employees who quit Basecamp, and now everybody in the tech world has heard that story. It's a big story. What happens when they go for their next job? How does that interview go? And why did you leave your last job? Well, I left my last job because the CEO said that we were not allowed to discuss divisive, political things on company time and company assets. Would you hire that person? Would you hire anybody who quit over this? How in the world did they ever get hired? I mean, I suppose there are always enough people who can agree with anybody, but it seems like shooting yourself in the foot anyway. If I could buy stock in Basecamp, I'd be doing it today because I'm pretty sure he got rid of the 20 most grindingly annoying employees. You know, one third of all employees don't have a sense of humor. Have I ever mentioned that one third of employees are just horrible? It's probably closer to 2/3, but at least one third are really, really bad. And they're probably bad because of stuff like this inability to see priorities. Because what this did was it identified all the people who don't understand what's important, and they all left. I tell you, honestly, if. If I could buy stock of this company when they got rid of all their. Their annoying, unproductive employees, in my opinion, just my opinion, then I would. So this the story about Giuliani getting raided by the feds, and they got his electronic devices and stuff. I guess the law they're going after is the FARA law, the foreign registration of foreign agents. But I was reading Greg Jarrett's page, GregJarrett.com and he was explaining that Giuliani was working in an official capacity as a lawyer for the president, and he was doing his job as a lawyer exactly the way he should have to protect his client. That's not exactly lobbying. So. But, you know, there's more to it. There's some diplomat who was fired, etc. So I'm not sure where this is going. It's a little bit fog of war at the moment, but I'm really, really uncomfortable with our government having this much power and using it in this way. And I've got a feeling Giuliani did not break any laws, at least anything that he's being accused of that we know about. It just doesn't look like any law was broken or at least one law that's credible, that the FARO law is not really a credible law. All right, I know you hate it when I talk about masks, so I'm going to do just one quick thing about them, which is if you are trying to describe why you can't compare two different places on mask policy, I've been trying to do this and it gets complicated and people don't get it. So I'm going to try on a simplification. If somebody says to you, and it happens to me every single day, look at the people, look at the infections of this place, compare it to this other place somewhere else. These guys had mask mandates, but their infections went high. These ones did not have mask mandates and their infections went down. So therefore masks don't work. Okay? That comparison never works. It can't work, it never will work. And no matter how carefully you pick your two things to compare, you're not doing anything rational. There are too many variables involved. But I came up with a fast way to describe it in case you want to use this. If you're having an argument with somebody about this, the reason that you can't compare them is because the causation is bidirectional. So that's the whole thing. Causation works in two directions. In this situation, if causation only works in one direction, you could probably isolate it if you do, if you do things right. But when causation is working in two directions, I don't think they have a way to figure that out. Meaning that the reason that you have mask mandates is that infections are already out of control. So you should see more masks where the infections are greatest, especially if they're just picking up, you know, at the early phase. So you should see masks being required just before a large uptick in infections. But people are saying, wait, masks were required and then there was a big uptick in infections, so therefore they don't work. No, there was, there was reason to think there was a big uptick in infections. So there's a mask mandate. So it's a little bit in both directions. So anything that you compare isn't going to be able to sort that out. So that is all I have to say for today. I'm going to keep it short, and I will talk to you tomorrow.