Episode 1235 Scott Adams： My Nobel Prize, China's Octopus Strategy, Those Stimulus Checks
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 22 minutes
Words per Minute
153.56189
Summary
In this episode of Coffee with Scott Adams, Scott Adams talks about how he got his start as a writer, why he thinks passion is BS, and why you should just do what makes you happy and make money and be proud of it.
Transcript
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Bum, bum, bum, bum. Hey, everybody. Come on in. Come on in. It's time. It's time for
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Coffee with Scott Adams. While we still have a little bit left in this year, you want to
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get all the goodness out of it you can. Squeeze it. Squeeze it. Squeeze the goodness out of
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2020, what little bit there was, and then savor it. That's right. Squeeze it out and
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savor it. That's the advice for today. And all you need to enjoy today, to its
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maximum extent, is a cup or a mug or a glass, tank or chalice or stein, a canteen jug or
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flask, a vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee. And
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join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine to the day thing that
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makes everything better. It's called the simultaneous sip. It happens now. Go.
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Oh, yes. Here's a little thing for you that you didn't know. Did you know that on Dilbert.com,
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where every Dilbert comic that's ever been published is available for free, that you can search by
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keywords. So if you wanted to find all the comics about a certain topic, 4G, 5G, passion, whatever,
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you can just do a search. The comic will come up if you want to use it for a presentation.
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Any professional use, you just click a button and you can license it for that. So in case you were
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looking to spice up any presentations, are people doing presentations now? Is anybody doing PowerPoint,
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slides, because of all the remote work? Do they work as well on Zoom? I don't know. I wonder if the
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whole PowerPoint thing is down. I've told you before, one of the things I like to do, and I will
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always be somewhat misunderstood for this, the story of my life to be misunderstood.
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Well, I know, yes, I know you can do screen sharing on Zoom. I'm just wondering if it's as common to do
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slideshows on Zoom as it would be in person. So I like to trace influence wherever I can. So if I
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think I might have influenced something, I like to see, was that really me or were there other people
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influencing in other ways? And so the interesting case of this, I've dug down a little bit more,
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is the question of calling out passion as BS. Now, I did a little googling and the history of it's
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kind of interesting. So let me tell you. So in 2013, my book had failed almost everything and
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still wouldn't be came out. And one of the chapters was passion is BS. And I was telling people that
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if they succeed, if they succeed, and something works out really well, they'll probably get pretty
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passionate about it. So instead of searching for your passion, just do something that you know will
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work and makes you money and makes you proud, and you'll find your passion that way. Now, in 2012, so that
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was my book in 2013, which was based on a blog post I'd written sometime earlier. In 2012, a year before
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that, sometime around the time I wrote my first blog post on it, Cal Newport's book came out so good
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they can't ignore you. And I haven't read the book. So I can tell you with certainty that I wasn't
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influenced by reading the book because I haven't read it. But I'm told that it's very similar. And that
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would have come out prior to my book, about the same time as the blog post, but he would have written
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the book, probably 2011 or so before the blog post. But even before that, so that was 2012. But even
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before that, Mike Rowe, back in, there's a 2009 and somebody said a 2004 reference to it as well. But let's
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say, mid or early 2000s, 2009, at least, but maybe 2004. He had talked about bringing your passion with
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you instead of pursuing your passion, his point being that there are lots of dirty jobs, as he liked
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to call it with his TV show. And that all of these jobs, you know, have, you know, they have a use,
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they're important, they have to get done. And that it's better to just be good at something.
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And the way he expressed it was to bring your passion with you. Now, that's a little different
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than what I was saying. Because I was saying that, you know, you can't just bring your passion with you.
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Because that's not much difference, different than saying follow your passion. Because if you could
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be passionate about anything, that'd be pretty terrific. But how do you do that?
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How do you just be passionate, and then just bring it with you? So I think the Mike Rowe thing,
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while Mike Rowe is a national treasure, I'm a big, big fan of everything that Mike Rowe does,
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I would say that the prescription of bring your passion with you is a little closer to the BS
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than it is something you could use. In other words, if I told you, hey, just bring your passion
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with you, what would you actually do? Right? If it doesn't change what you would do,
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it's not really telling you something useful. So I don't know how you'd bring your passion with you
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unless you were just naturally passionate about everything. So I think it's a better advice
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to say that you just, if you just do something well, that eventually you're going to be happy
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about the outcome. Whether you're passionate or not is an argument, but you'll be happy about your
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life. Going back further, I found the first Dilber comic I could find using that same search thing I
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talked about on Dilber.com. In 1998, I was mocking, in the comic strip Dilber, I was mocking passion.
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So in 1998, I was calling out passion for BS. That's the first, the first printed place that
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I've seen it. In 97 or so, the Dilber Principle came out. My book was a big bestseller. And it talked
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about all the business practices being BS. So in the 90s, I kind of owned that argument that passion
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and a lot of the other management buzzwords were BS. By the 2000s, it was turning into books and
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sort of becoming a thing that people were saying. And by 2013, I kind of put a bow on it. So you can
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see that this influence stuff is nearly impossible to trace accurately. Meaning that, could it be
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that all the people mentioned from Scott Galloway was talking about this concept the other day?
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Could it be that all of us sort of got to the same point independently? And the answer is, well,
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you can't really be independent of the Dilber comic in the 90s. If you're old enough to remember the
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90s, if you live through the 90s, it was hard to miss the Dilber comic. All right, if you're born today,
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you might miss it. It's not as big a deal. But in the 90s, it was on all the magazine covers. And it
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was, you know, it was just the biggest thing. So certainly, everybody was aware that I was calling
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out passion and the other buzzwords for BS. But that doesn't mean I influenced anybody.
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There's an idea called the zeitgeist, which is the idea that for some mysterious reason,
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and the mysterious part doesn't mean magic. The mysterious part probably just means we don't know
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why, as opposed to magic. And the mysterious part is there, it does seem that there are some kinds of
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ideas that spring up in different parts of the world and in different people at the same time.
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So apparently, that's a thing. Now, is it a coincidence? Is it just a coincidence that people
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will have similar ideas at the same time? Probably, in some cases, it's just nothing but a coincidence.
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Other times, probably lots of people are having the same idea, but you only notice a few of them.
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And then you say, oh, just two people had this idea, but there might have been millions of them,
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you just didn't notice them. But I would think that maybe the bigger effect
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here is that sometimes you're just ready for things. Do you know what I mean? If something has
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been going a certain way for a while, people are going to be ready for whatever is the opposite of
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that message. So there's something about just the totality of the signals that we're all getting,
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and many of us getting the same signals, because we watch, for the most part, the same popular media
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in some form. So I think there is something that suggests certain ideas by the atmosphere.
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Like there's just stuff happening that makes you think of an idea, but it makes other people think
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of it at the same time. So I remind myself of this whenever I think I have an original idea.
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The odds of it actually being original are really low. Now, I've told you before
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that the value of a good idea is, tell me, in the comments, what is the economic value,
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let's just say economic value, of a great idea? A great idea. Like a really, really great idea.
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Whether it's a business idea or something that could be commercialized, what is the value of it?
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Yeah, zero, right. So you've been trained well. The value of a great idea is zero. It's all about
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implementation. You would do better implementing a pretty good idea, or just a solid idea, than you
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would doing a bad job implementing a great idea. And by the way, nobody really knows what great ideas
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are until they happen. Usually it's after the fact. You know for sure they were great.
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So anyway, there's a Hilaria story. Hilaria. Have you been watching the story about
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Alec Baldwin's wife? Her name is Hilaria. And apparently she was born Hillary. So her given
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name was Hillary, but I guess her family called her Hilaria. And I don't know what's true in this
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story. So I'm not going to allege that one version of this is truer than the other. I'll just tell
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you the story. So somebody is calling out Alec Baldwin's wife for being some kind of a fraud.
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And again, this is not me saying it. I don't know what's true and what's not in this story.
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But the allegation is that early on, she would pretend to have a Spanish accent and that she was
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Spanish by birth and that she had some kind of, she came here from Spain or something. Turns out
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that's not so true. Number one, she's not Spanish. Number two, didn't grow up in Spain. Number three,
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when she says her parents live in Spain or Mallorca, I think, they moved there later. So it had nothing to
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do with her growing up. She grew up in Massachusetts. So she was a white girl named Hillary who grew up in
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Massachusetts. And there's some videos of her early before she was as well known as she is now as Alec
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Baldwin's wife, in which she was actually talking in a Spanish accent. But then there's more modern videos
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of her no accent. And she's tried to explain it a little bit. And Alec Baldwin has sort of told people
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to leave her alone. And in my opinion, this is the smallest story in the world. I wish Hilaria well,
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and I wish her kids well. I wish, I even wish Alec Baldwin well, even though he's sort of annoying in
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terms of the Trump stuff sometimes. So I don't wish anybody bad. And I don't think this is important.
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And I also don't think it's any of our business, really. Whether or not she put on a little bit of
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artifice is interesting. It's interesting. And it's funny. But it's not important in any way. So we
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shouldn't take it as important. But I would just put this in a larger story that it feels as if
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everybody who is either a Trump supporter or a Trump critic is meeting a bad end. Does it feel
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like that? It doesn't matter which side you're on. If you're well known as either a Trump critic or a
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Trump supporter, I feel as if you've got a target on your back. And there's going to be some bad luck
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that comes your way, which might not be an accident, right? Because there'll be people who want to get
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you. That's how they get you. And I keep wondering, is this ahead for me? Or has it already happened?
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I'm not sure. Why is it that people are there? They're dropping like flies, no matter which side
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they're on. And I've got to feel like I must have been targeted so many times, just as any prominent
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Trump supporter has been. And I wonder, have they tried to take me down and it didn't work?
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Or did they not try? What do you think? Do you feel that the, I don't know who is they in this case,
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just random people who might want to take people down for being on the other side?
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Do you feel that anybody tried to take me down?
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There were lots and lots of, you know, hit, hit articles and bad tweets and stuff. But I don't
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know if, I don't know if anybody took a good try at that. That might be ahead of me. So if I get
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taken out, if so, if somebody takes me out, don't be surprised. Have you noticed there's a lot of the
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news is about Jake Tapper this week, because he said some things about Kayleigh McEnany, not telling the
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truth, etc.? Does it seem to you, and this will be a case of me doing some mind reading and speculation, it's not
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something I could know. But does it seem to you like the hosts of CNN are jealous that they're not the stars? I feel
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like they feel bad that they only get to talk about the news, as opposed to being the star of the news. Do you get
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that feeling? Again, it would just be our own imaginations. We don't know what's in anybody's heads.
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But it just feels like when you're watching it. Are you jealous that you're not the star of the show?
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You don't like just being the narrator, right? Kind of want to be part of the show, which would be
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normal. If I if I had that job, I'd want to be part of the show. I'm sure I'd feel exactly the same way.
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But it's also good for your career if you're if you have a higher profile. So there's also a
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functional reason to do it. What do you think of the odds that Joe Biden will get the Nobel Peace
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Prize? Seems pretty high, doesn't it? It doesn't matter what he does, he's gonna get it. Well,
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let me share with you a little prize I got back in 1997. This is called the Reuben Award. R-E-U-B-E-N,
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named after Rube Goldberg, who was a famous cartoonist of the past. And Rube Goldberg,
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whose name is on the trophy. So this is the top award in cartooning. So this would be like the
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Academy Award, but for a cartoonist. Now for years, when I was a new cartoonist, I dreamed,
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I dreamed of someday, someday, I will win the award for top cartoonist. And then one day,
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I won the award for top cartoonist. I in the year I won that for top cartoonist. I also won the top
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award for top comic strip. So I won the top of my specific field, but also the number one
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in the whole field of cartooning. So it was the biggest, the biggest award you could possibly get.
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Let me tell you how I felt. Nothing. Nothing. I thought that if I would win this frickin' award,
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it would make me feel good for the rest of my life, or something like that. I thought that winning
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this thing would feel just so satisfying. Like, ah, finally, I've achieved this goal.
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The moment you win it, and it happens instantly. It really does happen instantly. The moment you win
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this thing, it doesn't mean anything. All of its value just goes out of it. And then you realize
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that winning this award was some people sitting around who said, who's going to win it this year?
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Well, who have we picked in prior years? Well, we don't want to give it to those same people again.
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This literally happened. Literally, they didn't want to give it to the same people who keep winning
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it, because then Calvin and Hobbes and Bill Watterson would just win it year after year.
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Because at the time, you know, when I won this award, Calvin and Hobbes was, you know, still
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in its heyday. Do you think any cartoonist would have won an award if all it mattered is who's the
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best cartoonist? Because it would have been, yeah, it would have been a Gary Larson. It would have been
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Bill Watterson for just straight cartooning. But because they wanted to give the award to other
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people, they decided it was my year. And it was just some people sitting around saying, well, if we
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give the award to this guy, he's got a big name, so we'll attract people to the award ceremony. And what
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we really want is a good award ceremony. So the entire thing, the entire thing had no meaning. It was
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just something that they did to promote their own event. And I got dragged into it by being a high
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profile at the time. Now, similarly, similarly, prior to making a big with cartooning and with Dilbert,
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I thought that if I ever achieved a certain dollar amount of net worth, I would, I would be the
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happiest guy. Like all my life, I really, really wanted to make a lot of money. And I didn't know
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how, but I knew I did not want to be average income-wise. I wanted to have a lot of money.
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And from my earliest memories, I always had been aiming at exactly that. And then one day,
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after I got a big publishing contract, I got a check in the mail. I won't tell you how big it was,
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but it was national news at the time. There were headlines about it. And it was a big publishing
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deal because Dilbert was pretty hot and made a lot of news articles. And I got that check. Now,
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of course, keep in mind, this is over 20 years ago. So a check that's really, really big and 20 years
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ago doesn't look the same today. But it was a really, really big check. And it was big enough
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that I said to myself, I don't, I never have to worry about money again. It was actually big enough.
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No, it wasn't, no, it wasn't 25 million. That would have been nice. But it was big enough that
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I knew that if I didn't want to, I didn't really even have to work again. I mean, I wouldn't have
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lived in, I would not have been able to live in splendor for the rest of my life, but I wouldn't have
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had to work if I didn't want to. And when I had achieved that goal, even the specific dollar amount,
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that's the thing, I had a specific dollar amount, and I hit it. And it happened sort of all at once.
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The moment it happened, how did I feel? Achieving the biggest, the biggest goal of my whole life.
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How did I feel when I achieved it? Depressed. Instantly, instantly depressed. And one of the worst
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bouts of depression I've ever experienced, actually. Now, I don't have depression, clinical
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depression, except that a few weeks of every year, something's going wrong. So I seem to have a
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periodic, you know, every now and then, a few weeks are pretty bad. But I don't have anything like
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clinical depression. I'm nowhere near that category. But this is the most depressed I've ever felt.
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And it was after I'd achieved my biggest goal. Why? Because that was my organizing principle for my
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whole life. Every decision I'd made, in terms of career-wise, was all aimed at this one thing.
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And then I got it. The purpose of my life disappeared. I was like the dog that chased the car and caught it.
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Well, now what the hell do I do? I was completely lost. My whole life, I had to reinvent it, basically.
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And the way I chose to do it was following, I think, instinct, in a sense. And I believe that we're all designed
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the following way. That first, you have to take care of yourself. Let's say you're in mortal danger, right?
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Your first priority is live. You know, I got to get out of this danger. So you're not thinking about
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helping other people, right? If you're in mortal danger, you just got to get out of it. But once
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you've taken care of yourself, you can start thinking about maybe your family, people close to
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you, taking care of them. As things get better for you, maybe you take care of them. You say, well,
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what can I do for the town? What can I do for the country? What can I do for the world?
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And so I found myself just being drawn down that funnel, almost like I didn't have a choice.
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Because once I had literally achieved everything I wanted, because I should have had higher goals,
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I suppose, but I got what I wanted. And I immediately found myself biologically drawn toward making my
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impact more external. In other words, instead of getting stuff for myself, I was done. I needed to just
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biologically, I felt the impulse to help other people. Now, I'd like to think that what I experience is
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universal or close to it, that anybody who would be in my experience would start thinking externally, because
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I hope we're all wired that way. I just hope that's natural. And so I started to look for ways to find
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my, let's say, find my satisfaction and meaning by being useful to other people. And the second,
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one of the things that happened there is I got married and tried to be useful in the context of a
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family. Because if you can, you know, make one family work, that's a pretty big accomplishment,
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right? If everybody could make one family work, it'd be a great world. But during that time when I was
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making the one family work as best I could, I didn't have as much energy for the external world. And once I
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did, once I was divorced and things there were, let's say, not, I couldn't affect them as much.
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Uh, I literally felt lost again, because it was the second time I'd lost my entire meaning of life.
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So at first I'd been chasing wealth and then I got it. And then I wanted to have something like
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a meaningful, you know, family life. And then once that ended, not, not in a good way, it was divorce.
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But once it ended, I had once again lost my meaning. And I remember the thing, I remember actually
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the day that I got it back. And again, I think that it's biological. I don't think, I don't think
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this was a mental process. I think my biology was, you know, pulling me along just the way it would
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pull me along to take care of a family. Once that wasn't there, it pulled me along. And I actually,
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I, um, made a promise to myself and to the world. And I realized that at that point, I no longer
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belonged to myself, if that makes any sense. I belonged to the world. Because any benefit that
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I could produce was probably going to end up external because it was, you know, I didn't
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have the internal reason anymore. And when I made that decision to realize that what I'm going to do
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for the rest of my time is figure out some way to help other people in whatever way makes sense for
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my, my particular skills, I found meaning again. And so when I do this, or when I write the books,
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it's a lot of work. You know, it's not easy in a sense, but it has so much meaning that it's
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pleasurable in its own way. So I don't know why I brought that up, but it seemed important for some
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reason. So, oh, I was triggered by the fact that Trump is being mocked with some fake news, New York
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Magazine, is doing this fake news story that claims that President Trump is telling his dumb
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supporters that he won two Nobel Prizes, when in fact he was, he was nominated twice, but has not
00:26:58.840
won a prize. Now it's fake news because while he did once speak of it, let's say unclearly, he obviously
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knows he didn't win the prize. I don't think he's trying to convince his supporters he really won the
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prize. But being nominated twice, that's a pretty big deal. I'd be bragging if I'd been nominated
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twice. So it's just fake news. Let's talk about China. The more we learn about China, the more
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distressing it is. And I have to give it to China. Their long-term strategy is really, really good.
00:27:36.860
really good. And it goes like this. I think they've referred to it by some other term, like a,
00:27:45.540
like, what is it? Universal war or something. But the idea is that everything the country does is in
00:27:52.340
the context of trying to dominate other countries. So it's like a permanent war footing, but it's not
00:27:59.720
just military, it's economic, it's influence, it's cyber, it's everything they can do. And when you
00:28:07.500
see all the ways that they've succeeded in this, and you see that they have a, you know, they have a
00:28:12.140
hundreds of years span, like they're planning hundreds of years in advance. Yeah, one belt,
00:28:18.800
one road. What's the Belt and Road Initiative, somebody's saying. But when you see how much influence
00:28:27.440
they already have, it is shocking. And here's the main thing you need to know. Money and military
00:28:37.100
are now basically the same thing. Now, they're used differently, and they have their different
00:28:42.620
purposes, etc. But the more money you have, the more your economy is strong, the stronger you are
00:28:51.180
to defend yourself and also to dominate other countries. And what China has going for it is that
00:28:56.020
its natural size should get it to the point where the Chinese government has more money than anybody
00:29:03.640
else. Now, at the moment, the United States collectively probably has more money and resources
00:29:09.980
than than anybody else who can control, you know, one pot of anything. But eventually, there's no way
00:29:16.880
around the fact that China is just so big, that if they just grow naturally, and we grow naturally,
00:29:23.500
they're going to be bigger, and it's not going to take long. And already, they have so much money
00:29:29.460
that they can corrupt every every element of society. Let me ask you this. If I had more business
00:29:38.120
in China, I think I've got a few clients over there for English speaking newspapers, nothing important.
00:29:44.680
They don't do much licensing or books. But imagine if you would that I'll just pick a number. Imagine if
00:29:51.660
25% of my income came from China. And that wouldn't be unusual for a lot of businesses, right? So they
00:30:01.180
might either have manufacturing there, or they might want to have a big market there, or they already do,
00:30:07.200
etc. But imagine me doing exactly what I'm doing now talking on live stream, but 25% of my income
00:30:15.880
comes from China. Do I say the same things? Nope. No. No. Because even I would be really reluctant
00:30:26.300
to give up 25% of my income just to make a point on one topic. Now, I hate China more than most of you.
00:30:36.400
You know, my stepson died from fentanyl and other stuff. And so I blame China for that. So I've got a
00:30:42.880
personal beef with China. But I don't think I would be going after them nearly as hard
00:30:49.940
if I had an actual, you know, meaningful financial interest. I just wouldn't. Now,
00:30:57.580
wouldn't I love to tell you that I'm the kind of guy, hey, people, I'm the kind of guy that would do
00:31:03.760
any, you know, I'll do what's right. I won't be influenced by money. But that's not the real world.
00:31:09.040
The real world, even if you already have money, you're influenced by money. Even if you don't need
00:31:14.900
any more money, you're still influenced by money. It would be great if we could turn that off, but we
00:31:20.440
really can't. And you're not even always aware of it, right? Because you're making millions of choices
00:31:26.180
a minute about what to do and what not to do. And it would be really easy for me to not mention
00:31:31.800
that China is the biggest threat to the United States, and that they do clearly intend to destroy
00:31:38.980
us. Now, let me say that as clearly as possible. China's intention, as far as I can tell, is to
00:31:46.600
destroy the United States in the long, long run, meaning that to dominate us and to make the United
00:31:53.300
States unimportant compared to China's influence in the world. And it looks like they're on a path to do
00:31:59.500
that. It would be hard to imagine that they would not succeed, because they have a gigantic advantage.
00:32:07.540
Their economy is just so gigantic. So if we don't find a way to make more money than them,
00:32:14.640
or to shut them out from our technology development, we are absolutely screwed. Maybe not in my lifetime,
00:32:23.240
but if you're 30 years old, definitely in your lifetime, you would be Chinese. You want to hear a
00:32:28.980
scary thought? I thought of this yesterday. Imagine if you would, China somehow got like actual control
00:32:36.140
of the United States. You could argue that they have a lot of control because they have money and
00:32:41.660
every politician basically is bought by China, except Trump, as far as I can tell. Trump might
00:32:47.480
be the only politician who's not bought off by China. And so we're seeing this happen now,
00:32:56.300
right in front of us, China taking over the world. And if we don't treat it like we're right in the
00:33:03.660
middle of an actual war, we don't have a chance. So anyway, the thing I realized is that if China
00:33:09.860
could control the United States today, they would kill me. Actually, literally, physically,
00:33:18.140
no joke, no hyperbole, no exaggeration whatsoever. If they already controlled the United States,
00:33:26.300
they would kill me on week one. You might be okay, because you haven't spoken up. But I've spoken
00:33:33.020
up. I'm dead. I'm physically dead on week one, if China controls the United States.
00:33:41.240
Um, so that's how much control they have. And, uh, the beauty of their strategy is the very much
00:33:51.660
like the, uh, alleged, but not proven election fraud, which is only alleged. And there's no court
00:34:01.420
proven proof. Are you hearing that? I'm saying that so I don't get censored. Uh, obviously the
00:34:07.880
situation of the election, uh, uh, invites massive fraud. So if massive fraud had been invited by the
00:34:16.260
system because it was easy and it was profitable and you could certainly get away with it and it
00:34:20.700
didn't happen and it didn't happen, I wouldn't, I don't know how to understand that world, but let's
00:34:27.120
say, let's agree there's no court proof that it happened. It's just sort of impossible to imagine it
00:34:32.640
didn't happen, right? Um, I don't even know where I was going with this point. Uh, we're talking about,
00:34:39.980
uh, China. Oh, so the China strategy is like the alleged election fraud strategy. If the election
00:34:50.300
fraud happened, if it did, in all likelihoods, it happened in small ways in a lot of places so that
00:34:58.500
if you found any one place that happened, it wouldn't be enough to change the election. So the
00:35:03.460
court would say, yeah, that's fraud, but you know, the part you found was small, so we can't do anything
00:35:09.440
about it. So it looks like China has packetized their war as well, because if China did like a
00:35:17.620
massive push on any one thing, that'd be a problem, right? Suppose they put all of their energy into cyber
00:35:25.020
war. Well, that would be an actual war. And we'd say, what are you doing? There's, there's like this
00:35:31.580
gigantic cyber war. It's all already pretty big, but I imagine it could be bigger. So we would treat
00:35:37.260
that as like war. But what if it's a little bit of cyber war? Maybe you could say it's a lot, but it's
00:35:43.660
not over the line where we have to start bombing them. And there's a little bit of bribing, but not so
00:35:50.720
much, we're going to stop trading with them. There's a little bit of cheating on the trade,
00:35:56.200
but not so much that nobody wants to stop trading with them. There's a little bit of influence by,
00:36:03.080
let's say, buying a lot of shares of media properties in the United States. Do you know
00:36:07.440
how much of our media properties are owned by China? A lot. But if you only looked at that by itself,
00:36:14.620
you'd say, yeah, that's a problem. But by itself, it's not such a big problem. So this,
00:36:22.240
this packetized war, where they're attacking us literally on every front where you can be attacked,
00:36:29.100
they're sending us fentanyl. Imagine if they sent us more fentanyl. So the amount they're sending now
00:36:36.080
is killing what, 50,000 Americans a year. Imagine if they upped that to 2 million. Well, then it's war.
00:36:43.180
That's actual war. That's actual war. If 2 million people a year were being killed in this country from
00:36:48.800
their fentanyl, we would actually militarily respond. But 50,000 a year, they found our sweet spot.
00:36:57.400
Just enough to hurt. Not enough that you want a nuclear war. Right? Because right now it's only,
00:37:06.180
well, my stepson died, but maybe yours didn't. If your kid didn't die, it's not your biggest problem.
00:37:15.560
Right? I mean, the reason I have such an attitude about it is my kid died. You would too. And so
00:37:23.060
they have this brilliant strategy of packetizing all of their evil. So it's just small enough
00:37:30.200
that you don't nuke their fucking bastard asses. It's brilliant. It's brilliant. Now, I'd like to
00:37:41.200
think that the United States is giving as good as it's getting. I don't know that that's the case.
00:37:45.960
Because we hear about what China does. We don't hear what we do to China. But I'd like to think it's
00:37:50.900
a lot. And if it's not, it ought to be. Let's talk about this, the checks. So President Trump
00:37:59.920
is doing something politically clever, which is he's pushing for the larger dollar amount for the
00:38:06.680
direct checks to individuals. And when I say he's doing the smart thing, let me explain to you
00:38:13.620
politics. It's very complicated. If you're going to promise the public a dollar amount, a check,
00:38:20.080
always go for the big one. I know that's hard to understand, because politics is complicated.
00:38:28.800
But let me say it again. If you have a choice, always go for the big one. That will never be
00:38:36.220
wrong. Politically, it'll never be wrong. So Trump has exactly the right political instinct that the
00:38:42.360
$2,000 right is the right number for him to be remembered by, not the $600 thing. That looks like
00:38:49.260
just a failure and not even trying. Now, but what is the counter argument? Let's go to CNN and read
00:38:57.240
the counter argument for why $2,000 checks should not be given. Because you know, if President Trump
00:39:04.700
wants it, they're going to want to argue the other side. So what is the argument against the $2,000?
00:39:13.860
Well, let me check CNN. No argument. There's no argument against it on CNN.
00:39:23.160
Let's flip over to Fox News. Fox News, do you have an argument against the $2,000 checks? Yes. Yes,
00:39:32.720
they do. They have a Republican on and the Republican says, why would we be giving $2,000 checks to rich
00:39:40.280
people who didn't lose their jobs? To which I said, what? We were going to give the $2,000 check to just
00:39:49.180
everybody? If you're an adult, you get $2,000. If you're a couple, you get $4,000. And I thought to
00:39:55.900
myself, you're kidding, right? That's not really the plan, is it? Because I had assumed, maybe
00:40:03.520
incorrectly, it sounds, I had assumed that they had some kind of a needs test. I don't know how you'd do
00:40:10.160
it. Because if you did it based on last year's income tax, that doesn't match the fact that you
00:40:15.900
lost your job this year. So how would you exactly document in a massive, fast way that you deserve it
00:40:23.980
and I don't? And I guess that's the problem, right? Maybe the, somebody says $75,000 a year.
00:40:31.780
I don't, can you fact check that? Because the Republican senator's name, I don't remember,
00:40:37.700
who was on talking about it, acted as if there was no income check. Now what he did say, so maybe I'm,
00:40:45.140
I'm going to modify in real time here, because based on your comments, I'm thinking that what he meant
00:40:51.160
was, check me if this, if I'm wrong, what he meant then was that if you made $75,000 or whatever,
00:41:00.340
but you hadn't lost your job, maybe you shouldn't get to $2,000. So is the, is the problem just that
00:41:07.900
if you still had a job, why are you getting $2,000 when there are people who don't even have any job,
00:41:13.640
right? Somebody says limited based on AGI. Yep, we didn't get it. Well, but you're not talking about
00:41:24.220
the current checks, right? I know the old, the last, the last version had a needs check. Anyway,
00:41:30.780
so do a fact check with me on that. But let me add this. If it's true that people who
00:41:37.080
are over that amount were to get a check, let's say for convenience, the government just said,
00:41:44.640
and I'm assuming this is not the case, right? But assume they said this, we'll just give a $2,000
00:41:51.420
check to every adult. Could you depend on people who were well off to re-gift that same $2,000
00:42:00.540
to something local that needed it? In other words, if, if I got a $2,000 check
00:42:06.220
and the president or somebody else said, look, we don't have time to decide if you needed the check,
00:42:14.480
but do us a favor, be a patriot. If your income is about the same as it was before the pandemic,
00:42:21.520
take your check and figure out the best way to apply it locally. Whatever that is,
00:42:27.500
might be the food bank, might be something else. Could you depend on wealthy people to do that?
00:42:33.620
Well, not all of them, of course. Some wealthy people will just be busy or they'll just cash the
00:42:38.740
check or whatever. But I would think that the vast majority would say, yeah, I don't deserve this money.
00:42:47.080
You know, that wasn't the purpose. I'll be happy to find a way to give my $2,000 to the community in
00:42:53.080
the best way. I feel as if 80% would do it. At least above a certain income, 80% would do it.
00:43:01.400
You know, if you're at, if you're at $76,000 a year, or let's say you're 75 and you get the check,
00:43:09.320
or you're 76 and you get the check, you know, that's an arbitrary cutoff.
00:43:15.960
All right. So I guess I don't know enough about that, but my point stands that the news is not
00:43:20.500
reporting this well enough that we even understand the topic. But I guess Bernie Sanders is pushing
00:43:25.520
for the $2,000 at the same time as, as the same time as Trump is. So Trump and Bernie Sanders on
00:43:33.720
the same side with this $2,000 stuff, which I favor completely. How many of you, here's,
00:43:43.140
here's a weird random question. So yesterday I had an experience. I won't, I won't describe the
00:43:51.000
details in which a major part of my assumption of reality, let's say my personal reality was
00:44:00.600
challenged, meaning that I found out I was completely wrong on something so basic to my understanding of
00:44:09.020
my life, that it just blew me away. But here's the funny thing. It's not even the first time this month that
00:44:17.680
that's happened. I've had my entire understanding of, of reality, or at least my place in it,
00:44:25.340
completely scrambled. I feel like five times this year, like I've never seen before, just really,
00:44:35.480
really basic assumptions about reality. And, and my place in it specifically, just blown away.
00:44:43.780
Have any of you had this experience that you've lost, you've lost more of your illusions this year
00:44:50.880
than any other time? And where's the slaughter meter? You know, the, so part of my annoying reality
00:45:01.060
now is that all the people who believe that there was a fair election are coming over to mock me for
00:45:06.760
predicting that Trump won. I'm not going to, I'm not going to concede that Trump got less votes.
00:45:15.020
I mean, in terms of the electoral college thing, I'm not going to concede that he got, he got less
00:45:20.580
votes. I will concede that there was an election. I will concede that there was an official process.
00:45:27.140
I conceded early on by congratulating Biden when the networks were calling it. I'm certainly on board
00:45:35.800
with the fact that the process is going to march forward, whatever. But don't ask me to accept
00:45:41.840
that that election was valid. And, and, and let me, let me go stronger. If you're trying to force me to
00:45:49.780
say that election was valid when it obviously wasn't. Obviously. Put the mirror, put some earmuffs
00:45:57.580
on the kids if you would like to hear some cursing. Would you like to hear some cursing? Little holiday
00:46:02.960
cursing? Put the earmuffs on the kids. Here it comes. If you're telling me I can't say out loud in public
00:46:12.260
that the election was obviously fraudulent, my, my statement based on the fact that the setup
00:46:18.800
of how the election is designed guarantees massive fraud. It can't go any other way just because it's
00:46:25.520
possible. If it weren't possible, then I'd say maybe it didn't happen. And if there were no profit
00:46:31.440
for doing it, in other words, there's no upside, I'd say, well, yeah, it's possible, but nobody's going
00:46:36.440
to do it because there's no point to it. But if it's both possible, and there's a gigantic upside.
00:46:43.060
Yeah, of course it happened. Massively. Don't know if it changed the result. Don't know if it's
00:46:51.640
always changed the result. There's lots of stuff we don't know. But stop fucking pretending it was a
00:46:58.540
fair election. We all know it was a fucking fraudulent election. We do know we don't live
00:47:06.420
in anything like a republic, or anything like a democracy. We don't. That is a fucking lie. And
00:47:14.080
don't you tell me that I can't say in public that the election was completely bogus. Now,
00:47:23.980
certainly bogus in the sense that it doesn't have credibility with much of the public, and I'm in that
00:47:29.920
category. But if you ask me, why didn't the courts find all that proof, to which I say, you're just on
00:47:39.220
the wrong topic. If you get on the right topic, maybe we can talk. The topic is that by its design,
00:47:46.880
there had to be fraud. That's it. I'm done. If you want to talk about what somebody else, who is not me,
00:47:53.160
did or did not do in some court case that had nothing to do with my point, knock yourself out.
00:47:59.960
But I'm not part of that conversation. All right. So there's that.
00:48:09.480
What do you think is going to happen in Georgia? I keep, I was wondering why there weren't as many
00:48:14.260
predictions. But even CNN in an opinion piece say they think that Republicans will win. Do you believe
00:48:20.640
that? I mean, I don't, I don't have a reason to believe it or disbelieve it. But if you believe
00:48:25.840
that fraud is possible and profitable, and it's easy to get away with, I'm not sure that Georgia is
00:48:32.260
going to go our, well, your way, if you're Republican. I've got a feeling that the cheaters are really
00:48:42.000
making a tough decision in the coming week or so, don't you think? So suppose you were, hypothetically,
00:48:48.440
suppose you were a trickster and you were planning to steal the election in Georgia. You were planning
00:48:55.100
to do it. You know how. You're all set up. You can do it. You know you can do it. But you know
00:49:03.220
everyone's watching. Everyone's watching this one. So if you were going to try some voter fraud,
00:49:10.240
would you do it on this one? It's an interesting question because the stakes are sky high. So given
00:49:20.180
that the stakes are so high, that suggests yes. Given that it's possible, even with as much scrutiny on
00:49:27.860
it as there will be, also suggests it's going to happen. So the two conditions for massive fraud are,
00:49:34.560
is it possible? And, you know, meaning you can get away with it, or you have an expectation you can
00:49:41.640
get away with it, even if you did get caught. And that there are lots of people involved, so there's
00:49:47.180
always somebody bad, willing to do bad stuff. And that there's a big upside.
00:49:50.660
My prediction is there should be massive fraud. There should be. Because all the conditions to have it
00:50:03.560
exist, and all of the conditions to stop it do not exist. There's nothing in place that I'm aware of that
00:50:11.500
would stop it. Because if we could stop it, we would have stopped it in the national election. If we knew how to
00:50:17.380
stop any of this, it wouldn't be happening. So while I understand the idea that Republicans usually come
00:50:25.760
out stronger in these kinds of elections, and so the history, you know, suggests that the Republicans
00:50:32.260
should win, we might be in a position where they'll just steal it. And there won't be a damn thing you can
00:50:40.960
do about it. Because they'll packetize it, just like China, just like the national election. They'll make
00:50:46.620
sure that whatever you find individually will be small. So no change. So I don't know if I'm even going to talk
00:51:02.180
about that. Here's a thing I found out the other day. Did you know that your testosterone level is related to
00:51:13.360
your confidence? Did you know that? You probably did, right? But it's true for both male and female.
00:51:20.140
That might be the part you didn't know. So your testosterone level, even if you're female,
00:51:26.560
can affect your sex drive and your confidence, etc. Did you know that in a woman's monthly cycle
00:51:33.660
that there is one week in which her testosterone is lowest? Did you know that? Yeah, it's the week
00:51:41.220
before the actual period starts. So in the PMS period, women have lower testosterone. And I think
00:51:49.920
you can just Google it. That's fairly well demonstrated. And if it's true that testosterone
00:51:57.000
is connected to confidence, and I feel like that's well demonstrated, you should expect that women during
00:52:03.940
that week would experience less confidence. Now, here's something I was going to put on
00:52:12.020
Locals, the subscription service. And I might shorten this and put it on there. But it's what I call the
00:52:20.180
observer effect. And the reason I'm giving a name to something that you all understand, that an observer
00:52:27.660
can be wrong. That's not really a shocking statement. But when you give something a name,
00:52:32.880
you give it extra power. For example, naming Trump derangement syndrome, or TDS, allowed you to talk
00:52:40.880
about it and gave power to that concept. Here's some others where just naming it gives it power.
00:52:46.380
The Dunning-Kruger effect. Until the Dunning-Kruger effect had that name, it was harder to talk about it.
00:52:53.540
It wasn't as powerful. But as soon as you put a name on it, oh, we all know what that is. Now the
00:52:58.400
power of that thing can increase as people understand it and talk about it. And naming it gave
00:53:03.500
you power. The Gelman-Amnesia effect, the Peter principle, the Dilber principle. So any of these
00:53:08.580
things which were concepts that got a name, the name gave them power. And so I'm trying to give power
00:53:14.900
to this thing I call the observer problem. I'll give you some examples. And the first thing that
00:53:22.040
happened when I tweeted about this, here's what I tweeted, and then I'll tell you what the response
00:53:25.920
was. I said, how many of you will hallucinate an opinion for me today, because you're bad at mind
00:53:31.080
reading, and then criticize that hallucination like it is my fault? I call it the observer problem.
00:53:37.500
Predictably, and I could have told you this would happen in advance, people went into the comments and
00:53:41.960
said, oh, yeah, that's just the straw man thing. You're just you're just renaming the straw man.
00:53:48.440
No. No, I'm not. I can see why you think it's similar. The straw man, in my opinion, you won't see this in
00:53:59.240
the definition, but in the wild, and in my opinion, the straw man is somewhat intentional. Or at the very
00:54:05.600
least, the person doing it doesn't care if they're being accurate. So a straw man is where, you know, you make
00:54:12.400
an argument, and then somebody changes your argument into something weird, so that they can criticize
00:54:18.060
it. So they're not really criticizing the real argument. They're criticizing what's called a
00:54:22.720
straw man, or a fake version of your argument that's weak and hollow. So that exists. And of course, that's
00:54:29.840
called being a straw man. But the observer problem, I would say, is different. And the difference is that
00:54:35.980
the observer doesn't know that the problem is on their end. The person doing a straw man either knows
00:54:43.560
it intentionally, or they kind of suspect it. You know what I mean? You know, it's not like they
00:54:49.300
necessarily know it consciously, but they kind of know it. But the observer effect is they actually are
00:54:56.200
just hallucinating. They actually think something happened that didn't happen. And then they're arguing
00:55:00.900
their hallucination. And I think that calling it the observer effect, you're going to see it in a
00:55:08.720
bunch of contexts. Now, I'm going to tie together this thing about the testosterone and confidence.
00:55:13.880
All right. It goes like this. Follow along with this reasoning. If you are a cocky, overconfident
00:55:21.480
person, and you run into another cocky, overconfident person, how do you get along? Pretty well.
00:55:29.580
Pretty well. And I say that as a cocky, overconfident person. Whenever I meet somebody who is like me,
00:55:38.940
overconfident, I get along marvelously. Because they don't scare me. They're familiar. I go,
00:55:47.020
oh, that's me. Hey, look at me over there. That guy's just like me. Suppose you have low confidence,
00:55:54.380
very low confidence. And you meet somebody else who has low confidence. How do you get along?
00:56:00.260
Probably pretty well. I've got low confidence. You've got low confidence. Hey, we're not threatening
00:56:05.380
to each other. We get along. But what happens if somebody with low confidence, whether temporarily
00:56:12.520
because it's just where they are in their life or their normal biological cycles, it doesn't have to be
00:56:19.020
anything to do with your monthly cycle. You could just have low confidence. What happens when a low
00:56:24.860
confidence person comes into contact with a cocky, high confidence person? Let's see where I'm going.
00:56:34.040
To the person with low confidence, a person with high confidence looks not just like somebody who's got
00:56:41.360
an advantage. They look disgusting. They look sickening. They look like it makes your skin crawl.
00:56:52.220
And that's the observer problem. The observer is looking at somebody, let's say in this case,
00:56:58.460
it's not somebody who is so grandiose and they're thinking that they actually are a full narcissist with
00:57:04.720
bad impacts. Let's just say it's somebody like me who intentionally picks a point of confidence above
00:57:11.780
my actual ability as I see it because I want it to be there. The most functional place you can put
00:57:19.280
your confidence is above your actual abilities. Not much above, but above them as you understand them.
00:57:26.160
Because the problem is you might underestimate your own abilities.
00:57:29.060
So to avoid the problem of underestimating your own ability, you intentionally, if you're smart,
00:57:36.320
and this is what I recommend, you try to pin yourself to a level of confidence above what you
00:57:43.180
believe is realistic. Because you're usually wrong about what you can do. Let me give you an example.
00:57:50.360
When I tried to become a professional cartoonist with no experience of being a cartoonist at all,
00:57:56.020
I was putting my confidence well above anything that was rational about where my skill was.
00:58:04.520
Completely irrational. Also intentional. I was intentionally shooting above where I believed
00:58:11.020
I could hit because I also believed I had an illusion about what my potential was. And I was trying to
00:58:17.780
find a system that would overcome my own illusion about my low quality of ability.
00:58:24.480
And so I quite intentionally peg my confidence well above what feels like I can do because I don't
00:58:33.520
know. And this periscope or yeah, this live stream is a good example. And I've told you this story.
00:58:39.560
When I first started doing the live stream, before I had my sinus surgery, my voice was terrible. I had
00:58:45.340
voice problems before. I'm nasally not good at this. I don't have a good physical look. I'd be better on
00:58:52.600
radio. There are a million things wrong with it. But because I peg my confidence above what is
00:59:00.260
obviously my ability, I sometimes can hit it and just surprise myself. And the number of times that
00:59:09.580
you do hit the level that you don't think was even really realistic is amazing.
00:59:14.920
Have you seen my wife? Have you seen my wife? I could end the conversation with, have you seen my
00:59:22.740
wife? All right. A perfect example of if I had not pinned my confidence well above what any kind of
00:59:32.600
common sense says works, I would have missed the marriage that I'm in, for example. So I would say that
00:59:42.180
it's always a good, it's a good, uh, good technique to put your confidence above your actual belief of
00:59:48.080
your ability. It's just good technique. That's all. But the problem is that when the observer is
00:59:54.620
watching somebody like me just use technique to, to put my confidence above where it belongs, I am
01:00:02.440
disgusting and narcissistic and just like a, an abomination because our confidence levels are
01:00:12.800
mismatched. Now that's the observer problem. The problem lies entirely in the observer in this
01:00:19.260
example. Did I have a problem? No, I actually had a good technique and a solution and one that has been
01:00:26.120
a driving force to all of my happiness and success. So I don't have a mental problem. I have a success
01:00:34.920
technique that works over and over and over again. But the observer says the problem's on my end.
01:00:43.900
But the problem obviously is just the observer can't handle the differences in the, in the confidence.
01:00:49.260
It's just disgusting if you don't have it. Now, the day that that observer does something amazing or
01:00:55.980
something's turned around and their confidence comes up to something more equivalent to my
01:01:01.380
artificial confidence, how are they going to look at me now? Not the same, not the same, but I didn't
01:01:08.680
change. Nothing about me changed. It was only the observer changed. And I would say that this is
01:01:14.280
probably, you know, uh, this observer problem crosses pretty much everything, personal, professional,
01:01:21.700
political. You see the observer problem just everywhere. So, uh, well, thank you. Some of
01:01:30.000
you are just too nice, but in the comments, somebody says, I happen to be happily married, but my wife
01:01:37.420
isn't. So somebody here saying more wallet size than a confident size. Well, you know, I don't separate
01:01:45.260
that. Uh, I don't, I can't remember if I've said this in public before, but when people say, Hey,
01:01:52.520
somebody likes you just cause your, your money or whatever, it would be one thing if I had inherited
01:01:57.580
my money, but if you've earned your money, uh, I think I'll, uh, borrow something. I think Naval said
01:02:05.620
this once or some version of this. If I lost all of my money today, do you know how long it would
01:02:12.080
take me to get it back one year, right? You couldn't separate me from my money. You could
01:02:19.380
take it all the way and I would just go get it back because that's who I am. You can't change who
01:02:25.500
I am by taking my money away. That's just temporary. I'll just go get some more because I know how to do
01:02:31.180
that. I built a talent stack that's designed for making money. I can make a ton of money if you took
01:02:38.400
it all the way tomorrow. I just, and it wouldn't even necessarily be cartooning or something. I
01:02:42.360
would just do something else. Uh, so for those who say your money is attractive, I say, well,
01:02:49.920
in relationships, do you know the number one cause of breakups and fights? The number one cause of
01:02:57.280
breakups and fights is money. So if you can take that variable out of the equation, you're more
01:03:05.120
attractive. So suppose you said, uh, Scott, you're great, except you're, uh, let's say you're an
01:03:11.200
addict or you're an alcoholic. Would you ever say, but Scott, you know, we'll separate that and we'll,
01:03:19.900
we'll evaluate you without that. No, if you're an alcoholic, that's kind of pretty basic to who you
01:03:27.640
are in the same way that being able to make money, it's pretty basic to who I am. That's just built
01:03:34.800
into my DNA, apparently. Plus technique. Um, uh, dumping the first spouse after getting rich is a
01:03:47.340
common theme. Well, I was rich, uh, before I had my first spouse too. So I got rich first. Um,
01:03:54.780
haters will always hate. I don't see, uh, I don't know that that's the case. I don't know that haters
01:04:06.540
will always hate. I think what I'm adding to that is that there's a reason some people have an observer
01:04:13.100
problem that they're disgusted by something else. And it has nothing to do with the something else that
01:04:18.500
has to do with where they are. So that's what I'm adding. If I'm adding anything. Um,
01:04:27.260
somebody says, Google my net worth. Uh, let me tell you that, uh, here's all you need to know
01:04:33.640
about that. If you Google my net worth, it says $75 million. Forbes made that estimate. They made that
01:04:40.440
estimate 25 years ago and haven't changed it. So do you think that my net worth stayed the same for
01:04:50.020
20 years? So that's all you need to know about it, right? So if you're asking me if that number is
01:04:56.040
accurate, just ask yourself that. Do you think it didn't change in 20 years? I've done a few things.
01:05:03.520
So either the number was never real or it didn't stay real for long, right? It's either either by
01:05:12.740
now it's doubled or I did dumb things and cut it in half or it was never right to begin with. So now
01:05:18.260
you should put zero credibility in estimates of other people's net wealth. Ask yourself, how would
01:05:24.780
they, how would they know? How would some publication know my net worth? Right? Is there any way that
01:05:33.980
they could do that? There's no possible way they could do that. It's all private. They couldn't
01:05:38.760
possibly know. What if I had, uh, you know, put a million dollars into Uber, you know, when it was
01:05:45.300
first came out? Well, my net worth would be hundreds of millions of dollars. Who would know that besides me?
01:05:51.020
Nobody. Nobody. I did not actually do that. I wish I had. Um, so no, don't believe any of those
01:05:59.180
numbers. Those are ridiculous. Where does my money go? Uh, most of it I've given away, frankly.
01:06:06.960
I've given away, when I say given it away, I mean intelligently in, in ways that make sense,
01:06:12.420
including to X's and stuff. That's, that's giving it away in a sense. Um,
01:06:17.620
so my, my plan was always to die poor, but then I got married again and I'll probably have to modify
01:06:28.580
that. So yeah, I do own Tesla stock. I'll admit that. Um, I will tell you that when the pandemic
01:06:39.380
happened, um, I'm, I'm not a good investor. I actually have lots of background in that,
01:06:44.440
but if you were to look at my track record, you wouldn't be impressed. So I'm never going to try
01:06:48.900
to sell you on the fact that I'm good at investing. All right. So, so start with, you know, understand
01:06:54.580
my humility, but every now and then there's a stock, uh, there's an investing concept that's closer to a
01:07:05.060
guaranteed profit than really investing. And that happened during the pandemic. So when the pandemic
01:07:11.640
happened and the entire stock market took a dump, I grabbed every piece of cash that I could get my
01:07:18.380
hand on and put it into the stock market at the bottom. Now, was that gambling? Because it was a
01:07:26.800
pretty big move and you know, um, I didn't know the future. It's like nobody can know the future.
01:07:34.320
Here's why that was not a gamble. If the pandemic had driven the, um, economy so far down that we,
01:07:42.680
it was a, I don't know, the economy failed and the country failed, well, it wouldn't matter what you
01:07:47.200
had your money in. So if the whole country was going to just fail, just wouldn't matter.
01:07:53.320
But if, if the pandemic was going to be temporary, which was the smart bet, everybody figured it was
01:07:59.500
temporary. We didn't know how long, but temporary that all, that the ones that did not go out of
01:08:04.640
business would probably accelerate. So buying, uh, Amazon stock at the bottom of the pandemic
01:08:11.920
wasn't really a bet, was it? I think it's up, uh, 70 or 80%. No, I think 60% since I bought it.
01:08:23.220
So buying, uh, buying Amazon at the bottom wasn't really a gamble. Likewise, I bought, uh,
01:08:30.500
Twitter and, uh, Tesla and, uh, Microsoft and, uh, a few others tech companies. And each of them are
01:08:39.300
up, you know, 80%, 200%, 60%. Now I didn't put my whole net worth into this, just cash that I had
01:08:48.080
not anywhere else. So here's the point. It wasn't exactly a bet. I just happened to have some cash
01:08:57.880
laying around that I could do that. And there really wasn't a risk at worst. I would have broken
01:09:03.580
even, I think in the long run, but by and large, it was likely to go up. Somebody says zoom zoom would
01:09:10.240
have been an amazing investment. If you were willing to take the chance, I would not have because there
01:09:15.300
was a risk that could go on. I just go into business. Zoom could have gone out of business
01:09:20.360
because of a specific China connection, but it didn't. Uh, Bitcoin. Um, so I am often asked to
01:09:30.120
talk about Bitcoin and I resist because I don't believe anybody knows anything about Bitcoin
01:09:37.860
in terms of where it's going. Now, smart people say that it will progress forever and, you know,
01:09:45.780
it'll just get more important, but I don't know that that could be known. Uh, I, I hear and understand
01:09:51.880
the smart people who say that the math is good and, you know, as, as long as, as long as there's not
01:09:59.040
some new surprise, it should just keep on going. And I don't disagree with that, but I don't find a
01:10:07.140
reason to agree with it. So I would tell you this, Bitcoin falls into the category of things
01:10:13.020
you probably ought to have in a diversified portfolio. If you don't have a diversified
01:10:18.780
portfolio, then you're just gambling. And I don't give any advice on gambling. The only advice I like
01:10:24.180
to give on investing is to diversify because that's the one thing you can be sure of makes sense.
01:10:29.580
Um, somebody says Twitter has neutered Scott by killing live periscopes. Well, actually I have
01:10:39.580
also used diversification in my platforms. So YouTube is growing at the same time that periscope will
01:10:46.820
disappear at some point. So we should be fine. And also the locals platform, that subscription,
01:10:53.300
will have a live stream sometime in, I hope in the next several months. Did I see Elon Musk's tweet
01:11:03.020
about Bitcoin? No, I did not. So locals doesn't have live video yet, but they're, they're working
01:11:09.160
on that. We'll have that pretty soon. All right. Um, yeah, I mean, I think it would be smart to own
01:11:18.820
some Bitcoin. I don't think it would be smart to put all your money in Bitcoin. You could win that
01:11:26.420
way. Some people have, but it'd be a gamble, not an investment. Um, periscope apparently didn't make
01:11:33.620
it in terms of, uh, uh, paying for itself. Uh, yes, I am on rumble as well. So you put the books up
01:11:45.280
one more shelf. You can never be happy. All right. Do Twitch. You know, I'm thinking about
01:11:51.860
doing Twitch, but, uh, don't know too much about it. I don't know that that's where I'd find an
01:11:57.800
audience. Twitch is a younger, right? The audience for Twitch would be, would skew much younger. So I
01:12:04.080
think that would not necessarily be my audience. I might do that though. Yeah, I'm on parlor, but I
01:12:09.120
don't use it much. All right. That's all I got for now. And I will talk to you later.
01:12:20.440
big on games. Don't be ageist. I'm just saying that, uh, the younger people, the younger my
01:12:29.020
audience is, the less likely they're going to be my audience. Um, too many platforms. Yeah. That's
01:12:39.060
why we need a God mode that can, that can publish to all platforms.
01:12:44.760
Penn Jillette is on Twitch. Huh? Interesting. Um, all right. You know, I, I think, um,
01:12:54.540
I could, uh, get on Twitch if I could fix my technology issues. Uh, doesn't the observer
01:13:01.940
problem rely on mind reading? I'm asked. Uh, well, it's usually the observer doing the mind
01:13:07.880
reading. That's, that's yes. Depends on that. Just get another iPad. Possibly. Uh, the Gavin
01:13:18.740
Newsom recall. You know, I have lots of, uh, complaints about California, but I'm not completely
01:13:27.580
convinced that they're caused by Gavin Newsom. I guess I don't follow state politics enough to
01:13:34.120
have a good, uh, opinion on that. Um, Paul, are you asking me about Q? I don't have anything to say
01:13:41.600
about Q. Um, wouldn't your opportunity to vote rigs apply to Republicans as well? Yes, it would.
01:13:49.820
Yes, it would. So whether or not Republicans were trying to rig elections, um, well, let's put it this
01:13:58.420
way. You should assume both sides are doing it, but there is a difference in who controls the big
01:14:03.920
cities in swing, swing districts. So if the Republicans were also cheating, they would have
01:14:10.340
been cheating in the wrong places because they don't control the same places as the Democrats.
01:14:14.480
So Paul, why are you sending me a Q with two little eyeballs over and over and over again? If I see
01:14:21.920
it again, I'm going to block it because I don't know what you're trying to send, but you could use
01:14:27.080
your words and just say a whole sentence and stuff. But if you just keep, uh, if you just keep tweeting
01:14:35.380
that same thing, I'm going to block you. All right. Any predictions for January 6th? Not exactly.
01:14:44.480
Oh, I think I missed the question I want to answer there. Why do you continuously talk about your
01:14:50.660
accolades and money? Uh, well, Blake, this is the observer problem and it's on you. What is your problem
01:14:58.600
with it? What is your problem with me adding context to make the story make sense? What, why does it bother
01:15:08.420
you if I talk about myself accurately? And that accurate account includes the fact that I'm a rich
01:15:17.840
and famous cartoonist? Do you think that I need to tell you over and over again for my own benefit?
01:15:23.300
Do you think that's what's happening? Or do you think that to understand the story better,
01:15:28.480
that context is just an honest part of the story? Blake, you are experiencing the observer problem.
01:15:35.040
Probably you have low confidence. And when you're in, you're exposed to somebody who has
01:15:41.520
unnaturally high confidence, it feels wrong and disgusting to you. And so you're probably
01:15:48.480
experiencing exactly what I was talking about. Um, and I also don't think that it feels honest
01:15:59.360
when you act humble, uh, in a way that's obviously acting, right? You know, I have lots of reasons to
01:16:06.500
be humble about lots of stuff I'm not good at, but being humble about things that are observable
01:16:11.980
is just sort of dumb. You know, does, does Michael Jordan act humble about being able to dunk?
01:16:21.340
I hope not. I think he could just talk about it objectively and say, yeah, you know,
01:16:26.740
that was a pretty good dunker. Uh, I feel like he could say that, um, somebody says, I have low
01:16:36.140
confidence by nature. How can I boost it? I'll tell you, actually, I have a solid advice for that.
01:16:42.580
The way to get better confidence is to do something well. You don't have to do everything well. You just
01:16:49.980
have to be able to hold on to the fact that there are things you can do well. So as soon as you can do
01:16:55.740
things well, then it turns your frame from I'm bad at things or I have no confidence into there are
01:17:02.440
things I try and I do well. And then there are things that I'm not working on or I'm not trying
01:17:07.900
or I don't care about. And I'm not so, not so good on those. Once you realize that the difference
01:17:13.500
between the things you're good at and the things you're not good at is your effort,
01:17:17.380
then there's nothing to feel bad about. You either put effort into something because you wanted to
01:17:24.400
or you didn't. And there's nothing about you in this and this. So just get good at something.
01:17:31.440
Here's the other thing I recommend. Also be bad at something. Be bad at something. Learn how to be bad
01:17:38.540
at things in public. Because if you can't do something poorly in front of other people and
01:17:43.940
survive it, you're going to be in bad shape. It's just like a superpower to learn how to do things
01:17:50.860
that embarrass you and just survive it. Am I getting the shot? My strategy for the shot is I will wait
01:17:59.900
for the last minute. So I'll have as much information as I could gather by then and then I'll make the
01:18:07.900
decision. But if I don't hear anything negative, I will, yes. Heisenberg uncertainty. Does it apply to me?
01:18:19.800
I don't quite understand the analogy. Accepting yourself. I don't know if I
01:18:29.200
buy into the advice that you should accept yourself the way you are. I feel that that's giving you
01:18:36.620
permission to be lazy. I would rather that nobody accept themselves the way they are.
01:18:43.840
You don't have to dislike yourself. That's going too far. But I wouldn't accept the way you are as
01:18:51.800
being good enough because I think you can raise your game a little bit. We all can. So you should be
01:18:58.480
perpetually unsatisfied with where you are if you want to get better. Look into OBS. I have used OBS.
01:19:05.760
It's garbage. Too complicated and too buggy. Yeah, being yourself is bad advice if you're a loser.
01:19:17.980
What do you think about getting the vaccine and still needing to wear a mask?
01:19:21.200
The mask thing has to be viewed as persuasion as well as medical. If you see it as only one or the
01:19:31.140
other, then it doesn't make sense. If you understand that you couldn't have a practical policy where you
01:19:37.880
only wear masks if you need to, you understand that's not possible, right? If it were possible
01:19:44.480
that only the people who needed to wear masks for medical reasons, let's say only people who
01:19:51.140
would not have the vaccine or not had the virus already and recovered. But the trouble is you can't
01:19:58.400
tell. And the moment you say, well, some people can have masks and some can't, who is going to wear a
01:20:04.800
mask to the store? Right? That's the end of it. There is no solution in which some people wear masks and
01:20:12.240
some don't. It's either all or none, unfortunately, because of the way people are built. We wouldn't
01:20:17.680
have any possibility of people managing their own symptoms and saying, well, I think my dry cough is
01:20:27.040
because it was dusty. Right? People would do that. They'd say, I kind of do want to get on that flight
01:20:34.180
to Hawaii. So I'm going to call my cough an allergy. Yeah, it's an allergy. You just couldn't do it.
01:20:42.940
Everybody's got to wear a mask if masks work. If masks work for anybody in any situation, everybody's got to
01:20:50.380
wear them. Nothing else would make sense. What if the vaccine doesn't work because of a mutation? I think that
01:20:59.060
that will not be a problem because the mutations are not the kind that are big enough that the
01:21:04.120
vaccination would not still hit the parts it needs to hit. Am I aware that small investors have a
01:21:12.220
structural advantage? Yes, I am. Because large investors need to make large investments. So that
01:21:18.560
limits the number of things that they can choose from. So yes, small investors have some advantage if
01:21:24.540
they can pick from more opportunities. Makeup stocks are down because of masks. So here's an
01:21:34.400
investment that I didn't buy because I do think they have some risk of going out of business entirely.
01:21:40.260
But Ulta, U-L-T-A. So they've got a lot of storefronts. They sell makeup. They're a big deal.
01:21:45.560
But I thought, huh, as soon as the pandemic's over, that's going to go crazy. But as somebody said,
01:21:50.940
makeup probably is a lot less now because of the masks. I think that's real. But as soon as you're
01:21:57.220
not wearing a mask and as soon as you could go shopping again, Ulta is going to be in real good
01:22:02.660
shape if they survive. So that's the part that makes it not really an investment. Buying a single
01:22:09.460
stock is not an investment, people. That's a gamble every time because you don't know what one stock's
01:22:15.140
going to do. Nobody does. You have to buy a bunch so that some do well, some don't. That's a good
01:22:20.420
strategy. All right. Too much about that. And now I will talk to you tomorrow. Bye for now.