Episode 1363 Scott Adams： UFO's Debunked, Jim Acosta Criticizes Fake News, National Debt Mystery, and Virtual People
Episode Stats
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Summary
Scott Adams talks about UFO sightings, a giant fish caught by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the "Most Credible UFO Sighting of All Time." Plus, a conspiracy theory about a UFO sighting that defies physics.
Transcript
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Hey, everybody. Come on in. Come on in. It's time. It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams.
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And this is how you get your day off to the best possible start.
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Yeah, I hope some of you are prepared, because all you need is a cup or mugger, a glass of tagger,
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a chalice of style, a canteen jugger, a flask of a vessel of any kind, fill it with your favorite
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liquid. I like coffee. And join me, even you, Norway. I see you.
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Join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes
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everything better. Watch it. It's happening now. Go.
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Hello, Ohio. Yes, people all over the world streaming in to become part of the best thing that's
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happening. It's the best thing. Everything else is bad. Now, I do believe that we are deeply into
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the beginning of the Golden Age. How do I know we're in the Golden Age? Look at the news.
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Look at the news. There isn't any. There isn't any news. There's no war that just started.
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There's no new pandemic, but the old one we seem to have a handle on now, just stamping it out.
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And we kind of ran out of news. And, you know, maybe you don't notice this so much,
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but it's my job to wake up way before you do and to look at the news and then talk about it.
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And there's not much news. Now, I don't know how much of this is entirely because
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the news industry has just decided that there's no news.
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But I don't know what's going on here. But let's talk about what is happening.
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So just see if you can find out any... Do you feel there's any shift in what the big stories are?
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All right. Think about whatever was the big story one year ago, whatever that is. All right.
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Something, something, Trump, pandemic, or something. All right. Now, here's some of the big headlines today.
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Okay. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service got a shock when somebody caught a sturgeon that was 6'10",
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so almost 7 feet long, and 240 pounds. It might have been over 100 years old.
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So there you go. There was a fish. It was really big. There's your headline. Really, really big fish.
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Now, the alternate headline could have been, since they tagged it and then released it,
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that humans were so bored that they tortured a giant fish and then threw it back in the water,
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but they tagged it so that the next person who catches it and tortures it will know that it
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had been done before. So it's tagged. So that's good. So I'm trying to remember if I talked about this
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yesterday, in the comments, that this is one of those pitfalls that people who do what I do fall into.
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You can't remember if you thought about talking about something or did you talk about it.
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And it has to do with the fake UFO sightings. You've probably all seen the video
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of what you think is the most credible UFO sighting of all time.
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And you know what it looks like, right? It's some kind of a video from some pilots who were flying,
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and they locked into this object below them, and it was defying physics, and it was flying really fast,
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and they were all excited, like, whoa, whoa, whoa, what is this? What is this thing? Do you remember that?
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And finally, after decades of UFO sightings that were not credible, finally we got one where even
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the military said, oh yeah, this is real. This video is real. And there we saw a little smudge
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that looked to be defying gravity and defying physics. How many of you believe that was an alien
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spacecraft or some advanced human-made spacecraft? How many of you thought that little smudge was
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actually a UFO? All right. I hope you remember that on day one I said to myself, I don't know what
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that is, but that's no spacecraft. I might be the first person you heard publicly, you know,
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privately. I'm sure lots of people said it. But publicly, I think I'm the first person you heard
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to say, that's not a spaceship. Whatever it is, it's not that. So I saw a debunk on YouTube
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that I tweeted out yesterday. You can see it in my Twitter feed yesterday. And would you see it pulled
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apart by somebody who knows what they're talking about? It's actually kind of hilarious. Somebody
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says the pilots must be lying? Not necessarily. Because in order to know that that object was
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actually a bird, that's the answer. It was a bird. And here's how you know it was a bird.
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First of all, there's one angle when you, if you blow it up, you can see it pulsating because it's,
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it's just a, it's an infrared video. So it's only seeing the heat and the heat is just the torso
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of the bird. But you can see it go whoop, whoop, whoop, exactly about the, the, the, the same pace
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that you'd be flapping your wings. So basically it's a bird flapping its wings. They can do the math
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and the geometry based on the information in the video, which tells you the angle of the plane,
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the direction, the, the, the altitude of the plane and all this stuff. If you do all the math,
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you find out that the object is this big, which you can just do from the math that's presented in
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the video itself. Because around the video, it's got all the details of, you know, direction and
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speed and altitude and all that. So you just take the information that's right in the video,
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do the math. And it comes out to be about this big and is flying at just about the height
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that you would expect a bird. So it flaps its wings. It's the size of a bird and it's where
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birds fly. Okay. Somebody says it's the wrong video. I'm sorry. I'm sorry to debunk this for you
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because I know you want to believe this. There was a real picture of a, of a UFO, but now it looks
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like it was just a bird and it was about a foot long. And that's it. That's the whole, that's the
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whole story. Now, all that part about the bird defying, um, defying physics, was that the part that
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convinced you? Because all the experts said, there's no way this object could have go like this and
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then like that, then like that. Well, it turns out that's all perfectly explained by the speed of the
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aircraft that videoed it. So, uh, I don't know if I could do a good example of it, but let's say,
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let's say this pen was your line of sight from the plane and the plane is really moving really fast.
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And then the camera, let's say this is the camera actually. And then the camera as it's moving is moving
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to keep tracking of the object. So it's not just the plane that's moving, but the bird is moving
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and the camera is moving. And when you put all of those three things together and then you isolate
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on just the object, it looks like the object is moving like crazy, but it's really an artifact of
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the camera and the plane moving that makes the other thing look like it's moving, but it's just
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an illusion. So I can't explain it as well as the video. And I forget the name of the person who did
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the debunk, but it's completely convincing that that's not real. In other news, the Dilbert NFT,
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the digital collectible version of a, of the only naughty Dilbert comic sold for $13,300 and the
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non-naughty version sold for $5,000. Now here's something you might not know about digital collectibles
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because you say to yourself, Scott, weren't you expecting to make more than $13,300? Well,
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I didn't really know what to expect. I was just, you know, playing around to see what would happen.
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But here's the part you don't know. Every time this digital collectible is resold, so now,
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now somebody won the bid and they will be the owner or it's already happened, I think. And then they can
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resell it. Every time they resell it, one of the things that a digital collectible can do that a
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regular piece of art, for example, cannot do is that the original creator gets a cut every time it's
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resold. So for infinity, no matter how many times it's sold and resold, I get a cut forever. And that's
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a big advantage over physical art. They can't do that. Have I told you that the big problem with
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the difference between conservatives and liberals is that conservatives put human motivation as a
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prime variable in all of their systems and liberals act like it isn't even a thing. It's not even a
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variable at all. You don't even need to consider it. Here's another example. I'll keep giving you
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examples until this becomes really obvious to you. So Minneapolis has become a murderous hellhole.
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They have the second most homicides this year that they've had since 1995. And in 1995, when they had
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that many homicides, they were actually nicknamed, the city was nicknamed Murderopolis. That's how bad it
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was. It was named after all the murders. Now, which worldview predicted that murders would go through
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the roof? Was it the liberals who said, hey, let's defund the police, and that should help us out? Or was
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it the conservatives who said, if you keep putting pressure on police, police will pull back and crime
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will go through the roof? Which worldview correctly predicted that the way things were going would be
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a giant increase in crime? Duh. The worldview that considers human motivation. Every time. Is it ever
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wrong? As long as human motivation is the core of why one would be predicting one way versus the other,
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the ones who consider human motivation are going to be right almost all the time. Now, I'm not saying
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that every conservative opinion is right and every liberal one is wrong. Nothing like that. I just mean
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when it's limited to something that has as a main variable human motivation, the conservatives are going
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to get that one every time just because they consider it. The people who simply ignore the biggest
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variable are not really going to be good at predicting. Surprise. And so, yes, so there's murder through the
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roof in Minneapolis exactly like you think it would be. Big question we all have is how long are we going
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to wear masks? I think I told you my prediction that mid to late summer, I think masking will largely go
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away. And it doesn't matter if the government wants it to go away or not. I think by mid summer, at least
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in the United States, let's just say the United States as our model here, I think the public will
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reach a breaking point faster than the government will make a decision. So in other words, I don't think
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the government is actually in charge of this one. So let me say that again. The decision of how long
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Americans wear masks is no longer a government decision. It was. And I think people quite wisely
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and reasonably listen to their government in an emergency. Because what else are you going to do,
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right? I mean, even if the government is wrong, it's still your best bet most of the time if it's an
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emergency. But time goes by and the public gets educated. We know what vaccinations are. We look
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at the odds. We assess our personal situation. And one thing that's maybe, I don't know how unique it
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is, but it's certainly a property of the United States, is that when it comes down to it, you know,
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in the long run, the people run the country. The citizens run the United States. We don't like to.
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You know, if you gave us a choice, hey, you citizen, would you like to spend a little more time running
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the country, you know, in addition to running your own life? Most people would say, no, no, no,
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thank you. I'll just run my life. Let the government run the government. The exception comes
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when the government can't do the job. There are some weird kinds of situations. There are not that
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many of them, really, in which the government is the wrong person to do the job, wrong entity. And
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the people are the right entity. And that's this. This is exactly that situation. Your government
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wants to reduce risk to zero. Your government doesn't want anybody to die. Your government
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wants to take no risks with your life. Do you have a problem with that? You shouldn't. You don't want
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your government to take more risks with your life than you do. All right? You know, there's an average
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going on here, so it's not every person has the same risk profile. But you don't want your government
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to say, yeah, take a risk. Go ahead. I know you don't want to, but yeah, we're going to make you
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take a little extra risk. No. Your perfect situation is your government is trying to prevent you from
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getting killed. And you, the free citizen of the United States, is saying, I like that you care.
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You know, that's cool. I'm glad we voted you people in. It's good that you're trying to prevent me from
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getting killed. And now, we're going to go a different way. Because the government doesn't get to make
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all your decisions. They don't. If enough Americans, enough citizens, wherever you are, if they simply
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decide to ignore their government, that's the end of it. That's the end of it. And I, and my, my opinion
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is that the citizens of the United States, on average, somewhere around mid-summer, mid to late
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summer, are going to say, we're done. You could imagine situations in which everybody wears a mask
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onto an airplane, the airplane takes off, and then everybody in the airplane takes their mask off and
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says, fuck you. What's, what is the airline going to do? Go back and land? What are they going to do?
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Are they going to go land and say, oops, you took your masks off. We're going to write you all up.
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Yeah, maybe the first time. Maybe, maybe the first one. What happens if it happens two times?
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The second time, everybody wears a mask, plane takes off, everybody takes off their mask at the same time.
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What's the second airliner do? Land, because they have to. They might have requirements that they
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have to. It would take about two or three airlines taking you off and landing before the whole rule
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would just go away, right? So the point is that the government doesn't run your life. It only runs
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it when it's credible and when it looks like it's doing something that's at least defensible,
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even if you don't agree with it. And we would reach the point where it's just not defensible.
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I think mid to late summer as things are going. So when the TSA says that they're going to extend
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face mask wearing until September, September 13, weirdly specific, I think that's actually
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pretty reasonable. I think the TSA is actually making a good decision here because they're going,
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I would say they're going at least a month further than I think it needs to go. And that's just about
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perfect because they can always pull back, right? They can always say, oh, we're going to make it
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sooner, but they don't want to make it later. That's disappointing everybody. So I think they
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gamed this just about right, I would say. We'll see. Let's check our predictions, everybody.
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How many times have I told you that if your worldview predicts the future,
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well, you might have a good worldview. Here's a prediction that I made that I heard exactly
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zero other people making sometime about last year. Now do my fact check for me because I'm going to
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make a very big claim. And if it's wrong, call me out. All right. So in the comments, call me out
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if this is incorrect. I might be the only person a year ago who told you that if you're judging the
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United States performance on coronavirus, that you're a little bit premature. Because one thing
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that the United States is good at is adjusting. We are some adjusting mofos. We will start ugly
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and then adjust. And if you're judging us by how we started, you've missed the whole show.
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Americans don't start great. We start, which is one of our greatest qualities. If you said,
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what's like a really good quality of Americans? You know, if you could make some average statement
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about Americans. A great quality about Americans is that we run toward trouble. We run toward trouble
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to fix it. We don't wait around. We are very action oriented. We just do stuff. The other thing
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that Americans do is we don't agree with each other. And we don't take shit. And we don't just
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take everybody's orders just because they gave us orders. We don't believe our government just
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because it told us something. We're very, very independent and very, very skeptical.
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What does that create on day one of a pandemic? A clusterfuck, right? You take a bunch of super
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independent, skeptical, action oriented people, and you throw them into the first days of the pandemic.
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And it's going to be the biggest clusterfuck in the world. We're just going to be fighting,
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disagreeing, skepticizing. That's not a word, is it? Is it? Skepticizing? It should be.
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It should be a word. But give us six months. Give us six months. Give the United States nine months.
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And then let's check the score again against all you people who put on your masks and marched in line.
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How's that working out? The United States is really good at starting ugly and figuring it out.
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It's what we do. And so on day one, when we started ugly and other countries seem to be
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maybe locking down more effectively. I'm not even sure if it made a difference.
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Maybe masking more effectively. Did it even make a difference? I don't know. Because we're still a
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little bit blind about why things happened the way they did. We still don't exactly know.
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So the United States is now clearly better than Germany, France, Sweden, to pick three. So of our
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peer countries who are sort of in the same boat on day one, we are now kicking their asses. And I told
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you that that was going to happen. So my worldview says we start ugly and then we win. Because that's
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what we do. We just do that. I don't know why. I mean, maybe it's something about the DNA of the
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country, but it's pretty consistent. Look at climate change. Now, many of you are still on the side of
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climate change is not real or whatever. I know my audience. So a lot of you are doubting the planet is
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even warming up. And if it is, if it's even bad. I'm on the side of it's certainly warming up. Humans are
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certainly part of it. At least I believe that to be true. And but probably the how bad it will be is
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overstated because of this, this very thing, that day one, it's a clusterfuck. But then we work it out. And
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that looks like that's what's happening with climate change as well. We're all skeptics. We don't believe
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it. We think the government's trying to, you know, turn into one world government. We think every
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possible problem with the data. And we're not wrong on day one. But once once we get a handle on things,
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you know, you're going to watch nuclear power and you're going to watch, you're going to watch a lot
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of things come together in the last innings. So that's my belief about climate change is just like
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the pandemic. We will start ugly. And by the final innings, we'll look great. That's called the golden
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age. What's the biggest mystery in the world right now? I would say the biggest mystery in the world
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is why no one serious is talking about the national debt. What's going on? Do you understand?
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Because I really don't. I have some hypotheses I'll talk about. But why was it that the Tea Party
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and, you know, all serious people, even on the left, were saying, we can't run up debt forever.
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We'll all be poor. We're spending money we don't have. But now, when the problem was tiny,
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we treated it like it was an enormous problem. But now that the problem is, objectively speaking,
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enormous, we're treating it like a small problem. We don't even talk about it. Why is there even
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anything else being discussed on the news? Because if anything we thought was true about debt
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was actually true, then we're doomed. And that would be a big story, right? We're all doomed.
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You'd think that'd be in the news. But take the other position. What if, when we thought it was a big
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problem, even though it was far smaller, what if it was never a problem? And what if it's still not
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a problem? Because national debt doesn't work the way personal debt does. You don't have to, you don't
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have to pay it off exactly. You can sort of inflate it away, just wait forever until it seems less
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less because of inflation. So what's going on? Do you think that there's some kind of common
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conspiracy idea among the leaders who control the media to simply downplay a problem that's going
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to kill us all and destroy the country? Is that possible? Or how about this hypothesis I saw today
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on MSNBC? You know, MSNBC is the racism filter channel. You take any story, and they'll turn it
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into a racism story. It's like, some boulders came loose and caused a rock slide in Montana.
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Turn on MSNBC. Racism causes rock slide in Montana. So they're sort of the racism filter channel.
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And they say that the Tea Party was never about the debt. What? Now this is a hypothesis. They're not
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presenting it as fact. It's an opinion. And the opinion is, maybe the Tea Party people were just
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racists. But they didn't want to say, hey, we're all just racists. So instead of complaining about
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Obama being a black president, they complained about the debt. Because that doesn't sound racist.
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Does that sound like what was really happening? Or does that sound like MSNBC's crazy racism filter
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that turns every ordinary story about anything into racism? Yeah, I'm saying LOLs. This is actually
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laughably stupid opinion, but not on MSNBC. On MSNBC, this looks like a normal, like, yeah,
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that's a pretty good opinion there. Says, we complained about it under Clinton too, right? Yes.
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I don't know a time when conservatives were not complaining about the debt. Until now.
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Because, you know, you still hear it. You still hear people tweeting, blah, blah, debt. There are still
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pundits on the news who say, blah, blah, we're running up our debt. But we act as though, it's like a
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hangnail. The way we're acting has no correlation to what the thing is. And the thing is, crushing debt,
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which according to everything we've always known, should just destroy the United States.
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But it's just not even a concern. What's going on? Seriously, I don't know what's going on.
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So there are a few possibilities. One is that it was never a problem. And we just figured out that
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national debt doesn't act like regular debt. And so we shouldn't treat it that way. Maybe. Maybe.
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It could be that we've learned that if you're the strongest economy in the world, you just don't
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have to worry about it. If you have the best economy and the biggest military,
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maybe what we think about paying back debt just doesn't mean the same thing. Maybe we think it's
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China's problem because they own a lot of the debt. I don't know. But I worry that the real play here
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is that it's a massive income distribution that the Republicans haven't quite figured out yet.
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Meaning that who's going to pay off the debt? So right now, is it something like half of the
00:27:19.380
country pays no taxes, right? I don't know what the exact number is. Something like half the country
00:27:24.460
or more pays no federal taxes. So who's going to pay off the debt? Is it the half of the country that
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doesn't pay any taxes today? Do they suddenly make a whole bunch of money magically and now they can
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help pay off the debt? No. No. It's going to be rich people, right? So I believe the debt is just a
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massive tax on people like me. So I believe that whatever I thought was my, you know, accumulated
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net worth is probably maybe 25% of that. So probably 75% of my net wealth will be in one way or another
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reduced to pay this debt. And I don't really get a vote on it. It just is sort of a backdoor way for
00:28:08.500
this to happen. So I think that's what's happening. But also I think here's, and here's the last
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hypothesis. The problem is so big that our brains can't handle it. That's not a bad hypothesis because
00:28:24.700
that's what it feels like. It doesn't mean it's true. But it feels like people are stunned by it.
00:28:32.860
Meaning that the problem is so big and we're so doomed that we just act like it's not there.
00:28:39.780
You know, sort of like a meteor was plunging toward the earth. Imagine if you will, we saw a meteor coming
00:28:45.260
toward the earth and we knew it was going to destroy the world. What would you do? You might wake up and
00:28:51.780
just do the same thing you did yesterday, even though it's a waste of time because you're going
00:28:56.140
to all be dead in a week. But I'll bet people would just go to work because they wouldn't know what to
00:29:01.240
do. You'd just be stunned by the bigness of it. Maybe that's happening. Don't know. All right.
00:29:10.240
One of the funniest stories in the news is Jim Acosta apparently used the word bullshit on the air
00:29:18.440
intentionally. And he called Fox News a bullshit factory. And what he was talking about is a story
00:29:24.840
about Fox News reporting in a number of ways that Biden's plan for the climate would require you to
00:29:33.420
have no more than one hamburger per month, which turned out to be fake news. Now, is Jim Acosta wrong
00:29:39.980
that in this case, Fox News was a bullshit factory on that story? No, he was not wrong.
00:29:50.220
And man, am I mad at Tom Arnold for making me retweet his tweet about Jim Acosta. But he's right.
00:29:58.100
He just happens to also be the author of or one of the authors of the fine people hoax. So Jim Acosta
00:30:04.380
certainly works for a bullshit factory, who is in this particular case, accurately criticizing another
00:30:11.920
bullshit factory. But once the news becomes news about the news, you're in the golden age.
00:30:19.740
If you turn on the news, and a lot of your news is just the news people talking about the news people,
00:30:25.520
do you know how much chatter there is now about Substack? A lot of the news is people in the news
00:30:32.100
criticizing Substack, which is a part of the news that criticizes the news. It's just the news
00:30:38.520
talking about itself now. Here's another prediction I made back when the election, the last election
00:30:47.520
happened. And it looked like the Congress was going to be sort of, you know, close to even on a lot of
00:30:54.220
questions. And I told you that Joe Manchin, a Democrat, would be the most powerful person in the
00:30:59.920
country. Because he's the only one smart enough to know that if you sometimes vote against your party,
00:31:06.340
you get to run the country. And I told you that Joe Manchin would probably be smart enough to figure
00:31:13.280
out that he could be in charge of the country without being elected president and without,
00:31:18.340
you know, without anything, just by being the one person who's willing to go on either side.
00:31:24.220
And sure enough, Joe Manchin proved it again by opposing statehood for the District of Columbia,
00:31:32.000
which effectively kills it. So did anybody's vote matter except for Joe Manchin? He's the only vote
00:31:42.920
that mattered. Nobody else mattered. There was one person who made the decision about the D.C.
00:31:49.940
becoming a state. Just one person. Joe Manchin. Just like, yeah, and Romney, of course, got booed in
00:31:59.700
Utah at a GOP event. Imagine being Romney and being booed at a Republican event. That's not so good.
00:32:10.820
But yeah, I guess that gives Romney a lot of power too. Although it doesn't look like Romney is using his
00:32:16.080
power, let's say for the country. When I look at Joe Manchin's decision, and I don't know a ton about Joe
00:32:25.700
Manchin, but it does seem to me that when he crosses party boundaries, it looks different than when Romney
00:32:35.400
does it. Because Romney looks a little bit like he's anti-Trump, which doesn't really help me. But Joe Manchin
00:32:43.080
looks like he was just looking at what's good for the country. And he figured that the Constitution
00:32:47.960
required a constitutional amendment. That's just an adult decision. So good job. Adult decision.
00:32:57.080
Elon Musk, as you know, will be hosting Saturday Night Live. And again, this is telling you the state
00:33:02.320
of the world, this is news. News is what, you know, Bill Maher says on his TV show, or what Elon Musk is
00:33:11.640
going to host on TV. That's the news. I mean, we're running out of bad news, folks. So Elon asked in a
00:33:22.160
tweet what kind of skits he should consider. And there were some funny ones, funny ones suggested.
00:33:31.960
I suggested that he should do a skit where he was interviewing applicants to go live on Mars,
00:33:37.440
given that recently he said that a lot of people would die in the overall effect, in the overall
00:33:43.980
project of getting people to populate Mars, people would inevitably die, which is a fair statement. But it
00:33:50.660
would be funny in that context. But then somebody added on Twitter, interviewing people to go to Mars,
00:33:56.540
but they get rejected for being too woke. Now that would be pretty funny. Imagine rejecting people who
00:34:03.780
want to go to Mars, because they're too woke, and you don't want any of that shit on Mars.
00:34:10.160
Somebody else suggested that Elon do a skit in which he's on the Joe Rogan show, as he famously was,
00:34:17.840
but that he starts out with like a drink or a joint. And as the interview goes on,
00:34:23.720
he goes to harder and harder drugs. That would be pretty funny. I don't know if they could put that
00:34:27.980
on the air. Anyway, if that's what we're talking about, we're in good shape.
00:34:35.620
Have you ever noticed that most criticism is illegitimate? Meaning that people start with,
00:34:41.900
I hate somebody, and then they criticize them for some unrelated thing. That most of what you think
00:34:49.180
is a criticism of somebody's performance is nothing like that. It's somebody from the other team
00:34:56.120
who doesn't like them for some unrelated reason, who is just criticizing them.
00:35:01.040
Here's an example in my case. I made a comment about something in the news. It doesn't even matter
00:35:07.380
for this point. And somebody named Elizabeth Spears tweeted this about my comment on Twitter.
00:35:14.960
And she said about me, she said, if this guy's on your side, you may want to examine your decision
00:35:20.040
making. So instead of responding to the criticism, which I used to do, I said to myself, huh, because
00:35:29.960
the criticism is just stupid and empty. I thought, well, who is this person? And I look it up in her
00:35:35.420
profile. And she's the editorial co-founder of Gawker. So the editorial co-founder of Gawker,
00:35:45.080
a publication that was so illegitimate, it couldn't even stay in business. They literally got sued out
00:35:51.160
of business for making up bullshit. And well, actually sued out of business in this case for
00:35:56.260
the Hulk Hogan stuff showing that video, etc. And other bad business. And of course,
00:36:04.800
Gawker is also famous for writing fake news about me. I, yeah, Peter Thiel took him out. And
00:36:12.900
so Gawker is the least credible, and now defunct, publication in the history of non-credible
00:36:21.520
publications. But if you didn't know that, if you didn't know who she was, that she was a member of
00:36:28.400
one of the deepest evils of our time, you would just think she had a comment about me. And you
00:36:34.780
would think to yourself, oh, what's wrong with that cartoonist? There must be something wrong with him.
00:36:40.020
Somebody, somebody with a blue check is, is criticizing him. So you always need to do that
00:36:46.740
now. You can just ignore the criticism and just look at what team they're on. And that's the whole story.
00:36:52.180
The criticisms are completely disconnected from the actual object of the criticism.
00:36:59.940
And I don't know, maybe that was always the case.
00:37:04.340
Here's another great story on a day when nothing seems to be going wrong too much.
00:37:09.120
Oh, by the way, there's a story about North Korea giving a little verbal pushback on Biden,
00:37:15.780
because Biden said some insulting things. So Kim Jong-un is sending out some insults back.
00:37:22.180
But are you worried about North Korea? Like right now? Just where you are right now? Your current
00:37:30.900
thinking? Is North Korea in your top 10? Top 20? It's not. It's not at all. No. Trump fixed that.
00:37:44.020
Now, again, check your predictions. Who told you on day one-ish of Trump and Kim Jong-un becoming
00:37:54.260
friends and visiting? Who told you that he solved the problem? He didn't just make a first step.
00:38:01.740
He actually solved it. Because if North Korea doesn't care about us,
00:38:06.500
that's sort of the end of it, right? So I think Trump actually permanently solved North Korea.
00:38:16.500
He simply said, by the way, we don't care about you in any kind of aggressive way. There's no way
00:38:22.920
we'd want to invade North Korea. We just don't care. Let's be friends. And I think that's still
00:38:30.140
working. Yeah, there's a risk that Biden will ruin that. But I'm going to give Biden a compliment
00:38:36.440
because I don't think we should live in a world in which you can't compliment somebody for doing
00:38:42.080
something right, even if you hate some other thing they're doing. I do think Biden has enough adult,
00:38:49.300
smart people around him that he won't break North Korea. He does have to start out by a little bit of
00:38:56.660
push, which he did, you know, a little bit of verbal, you know, we'll go this far, but not that far
00:39:02.920
sort of thing. I think he's handling it about right. If he doesn't break it, Trump fixed it,
00:39:08.500
and maybe he fixed it forever. There's a story about a virtual creator on Twitch, the streaming
00:39:15.860
platform. And virtual means that it's an animated character. But the person who's behind it,
00:39:23.000
the character is called Miko, M-I-K-O. The person behind it goes by the name The Technician.
00:39:31.860
I love the fact that it's just a person, but the person has a brand called The Technician.
00:39:39.060
If that's not perfect, I don't know what is, right?
00:39:44.240
So The Technician, I guess, was fired or quit for some tech job,
00:39:50.300
and figured out how to put together the assets that would include a motion capture suit. So the
00:39:58.340
actual human wears a motion capture suit, and that turns the animated thing into a moving thing that
00:40:04.000
mimics her and sounds like her. And it started out really slow, but she put tons of work into it,
00:40:10.940
and now it's making a lot of money, I guess. And she was once a solo operation,
00:40:16.180
but now she has an engineer, an environmental model artist, a character artist, an animator,
00:40:21.780
a rigger to help her with development, and now it's like a little operation.
00:40:27.700
Now, I think that this is actually the model for what education will become.
00:40:32.440
Remember I've told you that everything you see on video is like the Model T Ford version of what
00:40:40.740
video education and video entertainment will become. Because the first decades of video
00:40:49.740
was pretty much, at least if you don't count movies and TV, it was pretty much a person and a video.
00:40:58.460
And that's it, just a person getting videoed talking. And if that's what education stays,
00:41:04.000
it won't be very impressive. But if you see that you can build a team of experts who have different,
00:41:09.420
you know, different talents, you can build a product which just goes through the roof.
00:41:16.860
So education is going to go this way too. There'll be teams of people with different skills making
00:41:21.440
educational content, which is for the most part not the case right now. And here's what I wanted
00:41:28.140
to say about this. There's a part of the story where this, it's a woman, this woman who started all
00:41:34.100
this, would get up at two in the morning to start development. And then she would stream from like
00:41:39.920
noon to 6pm or whatever. So here's somebody who was getting up at two in the morning to make this
00:41:46.600
work. Maybe that's the story, right? And Roly Poly on Twitter sent this to me with the observation
00:41:55.920
that this isn't somebody who got lucky. This is somebody who created a situation for luck to find
00:42:02.800
her. And then it did. And what I mean is she, she went through her own actions and decisions and
00:42:10.240
energy. She created enough opportunity for some luck to find her. And then it did. All right. So I wanted
00:42:20.160
to tell you a story that really goes to this and I'll connect them in a moment. But years ago, I was
00:42:26.040
on vacation with another family. So it was a family vacation in my last life. And the husband from the
00:42:36.260
other family was unusually fit. And when I say unusually fit, I mean like walked off the cover of a fitness
00:42:45.180
magazine fit, like just ripped kind of fitness. And of course, I always looked at him and thought to
00:42:51.700
myself, God, is that, is that genetic? Like I know he worked out a lot. But I couldn't imagine that
00:42:59.360
working out a lot would get me to look any version of why he looked. And I had this eye opening
00:43:06.120
encounter. So I went to the gym once while we're on vacation. And he was there at the same time.
00:43:11.800
So I start out, I start my workout and I look over and I notice he's working arms and his arms were
00:43:19.200
unusually, unusually fit. And he's working arms. And then I go from my legs and I do my back and my
00:43:26.500
arms and, and I finished my entire workout. So now that I'm done with my workout, I figure, well,
00:43:32.480
I'll say a few words to him before I leave the gym because we've been in different parts, but we're
00:43:36.720
friends. And so, so I started chatting with him and I said, well, you know, I'm going to leave now.
00:43:42.620
And then the entire time I did my entire exercise, every part of my body, including cardio, he had
00:43:50.240
been working on his arms. Like, cause I checked him out every once in a while to see if he had any
00:43:54.980
tricks. He was still working on arms. After I said I'm leaving, I'm completely done with my workout.
00:44:01.420
So he's standing there and he goes, ah, what will I do next? What should I do next? And
00:44:07.320
then he goes, I think I'll do arms. And my fricking head fell off because it's one of those moments
00:44:17.040
when you realize, when you see somebody who's getting better results, there's a reason. The
00:44:24.580
reason he got better results is they put in 10 times more work. Now I thought to myself, wow,
00:44:33.640
if I doubled my workout, I'll bet I could, you know, maybe get, get in the same kind of condition
00:44:40.980
he is. I'll double my workout. I think I could do that because I'm pretty dedicated. I'm going to
00:44:46.800
work twice as hard. Wouldn't have even been close to get what he has or had, I assume he still has.
00:44:56.860
He just worked 10 times harder. He just spent all of his time on his arms. Yeah. So since then I
00:45:04.760
learned his tricks. He's also the one who taught me about using smaller weights. I'm seeing in the
00:45:09.460
comments a lot of you saying steroids, steroids, but actually no, I knew him well enough to know that
00:45:14.420
if he had been doing any kind of supplements, I would know it. So he was, you know, we were close
00:45:19.940
enough that that wouldn't have been a mystery to be in any way, but he wasn't, it was just hard work.
00:45:25.400
That's it. So when you see this, tying it back to Miko, the technician and her streaming success,
00:45:33.460
she got up at 2 a.m. every day, worked on her skill stack and then worked on her job and then fell
00:45:42.300
asleep probably exhausted. Was she lucky? Or did she put in so much effort that luck was going to
00:45:52.860
find her? Looks like she put in so much effort and did it right. She had a skill stack effort as well
00:46:01.140
as just brute force, took a chance, took a risk, did everything right, and it worked. Every once in
00:46:08.160
a while, when you see somebody do everything right and that it works, that gives you a lot of hope for
00:46:15.440
yourself, doesn't it? You just have to do what you know to do. There was nothing that she did here
00:46:22.380
that made a big difference. Somebody's saying that my friend probably ate a lot of protein,
00:46:28.060
and I think that is true. I do think he did protein supplements. I don't believe anybody ever built
00:46:33.780
impressive muscles without protein supplements. This is my belief, that I don't think it's ever
00:46:40.680
been done. If you don't supplement with protein, doing weights almost doesn't matter. It's actually
00:46:50.000
that big a difference. Yeah, you should still do it even if you're not supplementing. But if you want
00:46:55.760
to actually grow muscles, you can't do it without supplements, in my opinion.
00:47:05.020
Somebody says maybe she sleeps from 6 p.m. to 2 a.m. Not that complicated. I don't believe there's
00:47:10.680
any case of somebody who wakes up at 2 a.m. who isn't a super hard worker and also has learned that
00:47:18.540
that's when you can work without being disturbed. Because you've got to be really serious to want to
00:47:24.760
be awake hours before the rest of the world. You've got to be pretty serious, and I was.
00:47:30.440
If you looked at the effort I put in to make Dilbert work, some of you know this story. For the first 10
00:47:36.320
years of Dilbert, I worked every day from 4 a.m. to usually finishing nine at night, and I never took
00:47:45.640
a day off. And I worked on Christmas, I worked on Thanksgiving, at least in the mornings. And so if
00:47:51.820
anybody looks at my success, anybody looks at my success, and they say, man, a lot of people tried
00:47:56.620
to become cartoonists, but you know, you succeeded. I guess you got pretty lucky. Everybody who worked
00:48:03.040
as hard as me was as lucky as me. Now, I know you don't want to believe that, but it's hard to find
00:48:11.240
an exception. The people who worked as hard as I worked, but also paying attention to the talent stack,
00:48:18.060
like the technician did. She built a whole, you know, technical talent stack from how to do
00:48:25.440
animation to, you know, everything. The streaming, you know, just tons of talents. If you do those
00:48:31.640
two things, get up earlier than everybody else gets up, work seven days a week for 10 years,
00:48:37.860
and build your talent stack, you know, logically so that they all work together, you think you're
00:48:43.600
not going to succeed? You will. Probably closer to every time. So that is your inspirational message
00:48:52.020
for today. And yes, somebody said in the comments, and I think that's a fair point, that dedication
00:49:01.220
and willingness to work hard are probably genetic. I don't know what percentage, but it feels more like
00:49:09.500
something I was born with than something I acquired over time. But I don't know if you can know how
00:49:16.080
much you were born with if it hasn't been activated by your, you know, your actual actions. Yeah,
00:49:22.860
some people do have the ability to put off pleasure for a greater gain. I think maybe you're just born
00:49:31.640
with that. Somebody says, what actually does this technician actually do? Well, what I'm talking
00:49:38.520
about is the technician creates a character called Miko that appears on the Twitch network. But what
00:49:46.440
she did before that was she worked in animation and some some other job. Somebody saying, oh, this is
00:49:55.260
Susan has a good comment here. She goes, my siblings and I all had great work ethic, but two of us were
00:50:01.380
more into lifelong learning. Now, Susan, which of your two siblings did the best? You all had good
00:50:08.920
work ethic, but two of you were into lifelong learning. I can tell you which ones did the best.
00:50:15.920
All right. Also having a strong mother and father. Yeah, I think that does make a difference.
00:50:26.020
Adam Carolla, somebody says Adam Carolla would argue it's not genetic. I would have to hear that
00:50:30.860
argument because I'm not going to take it. I'm not going to take your word for it that that's his
00:50:34.700
opinion. My own opinion has been misrepresented so many times that when I hear a comment of that
00:50:40.640
nature, that somebody else disagrees with whatever, I think I'd have to see it from him to take that as
00:50:47.480
something I need to respond to. You don't have to put a pleasure. You can take pleasure from your
00:50:54.380
obsession. Well, if you're lucky, but it's hard, it's hard to be that lucky. All right, that's all I got for