Real Coffee with Scott Adams - Episode 1363 Scott Adams： UFO's Debunked, Jim Acosta Criticizes Fake News, National Debt Mystery, and Virtual People

00:00:00.000 Hey, everybody. Come on in. Come on in. It's time. It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams.

00:00:07.620 And this is how you get your day off to the best possible start.

00:00:12.040 Yeah, I hope some of you are prepared, because all you need is a cup or mugger, a glass of tagger,

00:00:16.440 a chalice of style, a canteen jugger, a flask of a vessel of any kind, fill it with your favorite

00:00:19.740 liquid. I like coffee. And join me, even you, Norway. I see you.

00:00:26.280 Join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes

00:00:30.840 everything better. Watch it. It's happening now. Go.

00:00:39.260 Hello, Ohio. Yes, people all over the world streaming in to become part of the best thing that's

00:00:46.540 happening. It's the best thing. Everything else is bad. Now, I do believe that we are deeply into

00:00:52.740 the beginning of the Golden Age. How do I know we're in the Golden Age? Look at the news.

00:01:01.660 Look at the news. There isn't any. There isn't any news. There's no war that just started.

00:01:11.080 There's no new pandemic, but the old one we seem to have a handle on now, just stamping it out.

00:01:17.840 And we kind of ran out of news. And, you know, maybe you don't notice this so much,

00:01:25.440 but it's my job to wake up way before you do and to look at the news and then talk about it.

00:01:32.080 And there's not much news. Now, I don't know how much of this is entirely because

00:01:38.540 the news industry has just decided that there's no news.

00:01:46.700 But I don't know what's going on here. But let's talk about what is happening.

00:01:50.420 So just see if you can find out any... Do you feel there's any shift in what the big stories are?

00:01:58.580 All right. Think about whatever was the big story one year ago, whatever that is. All right.

00:02:05.720 Something, something, Trump, pandemic, or something. All right. Now, here's some of the big headlines today.

00:02:12.340 Okay. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service got a shock when somebody caught a sturgeon that was 6'10",

00:02:23.340 so almost 7 feet long, and 240 pounds. It might have been over 100 years old.

00:02:30.520 So there you go. There was a fish. It was really big. There's your headline. Really, really big fish.

00:02:39.800 Now, the alternate headline could have been, since they tagged it and then released it,

00:02:47.540 that humans were so bored that they tortured a giant fish and then threw it back in the water,

00:02:55.680 but they tagged it so that the next person who catches it and tortures it will know that it

00:03:01.780 had been done before. So it's tagged. So that's good. So I'm trying to remember if I talked about this

00:03:08.220 yesterday, in the comments, that this is one of those pitfalls that people who do what I do fall into.

00:03:17.380 You can't remember if you thought about talking about something or did you talk about it.

00:03:23.100 And it has to do with the fake UFO sightings. You've probably all seen the video

00:03:29.640 of what you think is the most credible UFO sighting of all time.

00:03:37.420 And you know what it looks like, right? It's some kind of a video from some pilots who were flying,

00:03:44.500 and they locked into this object below them, and it was defying physics, and it was flying really fast,

00:03:51.820 and they were all excited, like, whoa, whoa, whoa, what is this? What is this thing? Do you remember that?

00:03:58.080 And finally, after decades of UFO sightings that were not credible, finally we got one where even

00:04:06.360 the military said, oh yeah, this is real. This video is real. And there we saw a little smudge

00:04:14.540 that looked to be defying gravity and defying physics. How many of you believe that was an alien

00:04:22.400 spacecraft or some advanced human-made spacecraft? How many of you thought that little smudge was

00:04:30.300 actually a UFO? All right. I hope you remember that on day one I said to myself, I don't know what

00:04:39.840 that is, but that's no spacecraft. I might be the first person you heard publicly, you know,

00:04:47.860 privately. I'm sure lots of people said it. But publicly, I think I'm the first person you heard

00:04:53.620 to say, that's not a spaceship. Whatever it is, it's not that. So I saw a debunk on YouTube

00:05:01.240 that I tweeted out yesterday. You can see it in my Twitter feed yesterday. And would you see it pulled

00:05:07.720 apart by somebody who knows what they're talking about? It's actually kind of hilarious. Somebody

00:05:14.020 says the pilots must be lying? Not necessarily. Because in order to know that that object was

00:05:21.480 actually a bird, that's the answer. It was a bird. And here's how you know it was a bird.

00:05:31.100 First of all, there's one angle when you, if you blow it up, you can see it pulsating because it's,

00:05:37.300 it's just a, it's an infrared video. So it's only seeing the heat and the heat is just the torso

00:05:43.680 of the bird. But you can see it go whoop, whoop, whoop, exactly about the, the, the, the same pace

00:05:50.540 that you'd be flapping your wings. So basically it's a bird flapping its wings. They can do the math

00:05:57.720 and the geometry based on the information in the video, which tells you the angle of the plane,

00:06:03.180 the direction, the, the, the altitude of the plane and all this stuff. If you do all the math,

00:06:09.060 you find out that the object is this big, which you can just do from the math that's presented in

00:06:15.960 the video itself. Because around the video, it's got all the details of, you know, direction and

00:06:21.700 speed and altitude and all that. So you just take the information that's right in the video,

00:06:25.980 do the math. And it comes out to be about this big and is flying at just about the height

00:06:32.480 that you would expect a bird. So it flaps its wings. It's the size of a bird and it's where

00:06:41.000 birds fly. Okay. Somebody says it's the wrong video. I'm sorry. I'm sorry to debunk this for you

00:06:51.460 because I know you want to believe this. There was a real picture of a, of a UFO, but now it looks

00:06:57.400 like it was just a bird and it was about a foot long. And that's it. That's the whole, that's the

00:07:02.560 whole story. Now, all that part about the bird defying, um, defying physics, was that the part that

00:07:10.340 convinced you? Because all the experts said, there's no way this object could have go like this and

00:07:15.460 then like that, then like that. Well, it turns out that's all perfectly explained by the speed of the

00:07:21.760 aircraft that videoed it. So, uh, I don't know if I could do a good example of it, but let's say,

00:07:29.160 let's say this pen was your line of sight from the plane and the plane is really moving really fast.

00:07:36.400 And then the camera, let's say this is the camera actually. And then the camera as it's moving is moving

00:07:42.140 to keep tracking of the object. So it's not just the plane that's moving, but the bird is moving

00:07:49.040 and the camera is moving. And when you put all of those three things together and then you isolate

00:07:55.160 on just the object, it looks like the object is moving like crazy, but it's really an artifact of

00:08:01.260 the camera and the plane moving that makes the other thing look like it's moving, but it's just

00:08:05.960 an illusion. So I can't explain it as well as the video. And I forget the name of the person who did

00:08:11.720 the debunk, but it's completely convincing that that's not real. In other news, the Dilbert NFT,

00:08:19.040 the digital collectible version of a, of the only naughty Dilbert comic sold for $13,300 and the

00:08:27.180 non-naughty version sold for $5,000. Now here's something you might not know about digital collectibles

00:08:35.120 because you say to yourself, Scott, weren't you expecting to make more than $13,300? Well,

00:08:42.100 I didn't really know what to expect. I was just, you know, playing around to see what would happen.

00:08:47.560 But here's the part you don't know. Every time this digital collectible is resold, so now,

00:08:54.520 now somebody won the bid and they will be the owner or it's already happened, I think. And then they can

00:09:00.240 resell it. Every time they resell it, one of the things that a digital collectible can do that a

00:09:06.920 regular piece of art, for example, cannot do is that the original creator gets a cut every time it's

00:09:15.700 resold. So for infinity, no matter how many times it's sold and resold, I get a cut forever. And that's

00:09:25.480 a big advantage over physical art. They can't do that. Have I told you that the big problem with

00:09:32.820 the difference between conservatives and liberals is that conservatives put human motivation as a

00:09:42.280 prime variable in all of their systems and liberals act like it isn't even a thing. It's not even a

00:09:49.240 variable at all. You don't even need to consider it. Here's another example. I'll keep giving you

00:09:54.080 examples until this becomes really obvious to you. So Minneapolis has become a murderous hellhole. 0.64

00:10:02.680 They have the second most homicides this year that they've had since 1995. And in 1995, when they had

00:10:10.700 that many homicides, they were actually nicknamed, the city was nicknamed Murderopolis. That's how bad it

00:10:17.360 was. It was named after all the murders. Now, which worldview predicted that murders would go through

00:10:26.540 the roof? Was it the liberals who said, hey, let's defund the police, and that should help us out? Or was

00:10:34.140 it the conservatives who said, if you keep putting pressure on police, police will pull back and crime

00:10:43.180 will go through the roof? Which worldview correctly predicted that the way things were going would be

00:10:50.800 a giant increase in crime? Duh. The worldview that considers human motivation. Every time. Is it ever

00:11:01.320 wrong? As long as human motivation is the core of why one would be predicting one way versus the other,

00:11:09.360 the ones who consider human motivation are going to be right almost all the time. Now, I'm not saying

00:11:17.680 that every conservative opinion is right and every liberal one is wrong. Nothing like that. I just mean

00:11:23.280 when it's limited to something that has as a main variable human motivation, the conservatives are going

00:11:30.440 to get that one every time just because they consider it. The people who simply ignore the biggest

00:11:38.840 variable are not really going to be good at predicting. Surprise. And so, yes, so there's murder through the

00:11:49.180 roof in Minneapolis exactly like you think it would be. Big question we all have is how long are we going

00:11:56.120 to wear masks? I think I told you my prediction that mid to late summer, I think masking will largely go

00:12:05.300 away. And it doesn't matter if the government wants it to go away or not. I think by mid summer, at least

00:12:11.760 in the United States, let's just say the United States as our model here, I think the public will

00:12:17.900 reach a breaking point faster than the government will make a decision. So in other words, I don't think

00:12:24.340 the government is actually in charge of this one. So let me say that again. The decision of how long

00:12:31.600 Americans wear masks is no longer a government decision. It was. And I think people quite wisely

00:12:40.260 and reasonably listen to their government in an emergency. Because what else are you going to do,

00:12:45.980 right? I mean, even if the government is wrong, it's still your best bet most of the time if it's an

00:12:51.800 emergency. But time goes by and the public gets educated. We know what vaccinations are. We look

00:12:58.380 at the odds. We assess our personal situation. And one thing that's maybe, I don't know how unique it

00:13:07.080 is, but it's certainly a property of the United States, is that when it comes down to it, you know,

00:13:13.540 in the long run, the people run the country. The citizens run the United States. We don't like to.

00:13:22.460 You know, if you gave us a choice, hey, you citizen, would you like to spend a little more time running

00:13:27.560 the country, you know, in addition to running your own life? Most people would say, no, no, no,

00:13:34.120 thank you. I'll just run my life. Let the government run the government. The exception comes

00:13:41.780 when the government can't do the job. There are some weird kinds of situations. There are not that

00:13:49.040 many of them, really, in which the government is the wrong person to do the job, wrong entity. And

00:13:55.200 the people are the right entity. And that's this. This is exactly that situation. Your government

00:14:01.020 wants to reduce risk to zero. Your government doesn't want anybody to die. Your government

00:14:10.880 wants to take no risks with your life. Do you have a problem with that? You shouldn't. You don't want

00:14:20.060 your government to take more risks with your life than you do. All right? You know, there's an average

00:14:27.840 going on here, so it's not every person has the same risk profile. But you don't want your government

00:14:33.520 to say, yeah, take a risk. Go ahead. I know you don't want to, but yeah, we're going to make you

00:14:39.520 take a little extra risk. No. Your perfect situation is your government is trying to prevent you from

00:14:46.360 getting killed. And you, the free citizen of the United States, is saying, I like that you care.

00:14:52.980 You know, that's cool. I'm glad we voted you people in. It's good that you're trying to prevent me from

00:15:00.900 getting killed. And now, we're going to go a different way. Because the government doesn't get to make

00:15:07.920 all your decisions. They don't. If enough Americans, enough citizens, wherever you are, if they simply

00:15:14.860 decide to ignore their government, that's the end of it. That's the end of it. And I, and my, my opinion

00:15:23.020 is that the citizens of the United States, on average, somewhere around mid-summer, mid to late

00:15:31.180 summer, are going to say, we're done. You could imagine situations in which everybody wears a mask

00:15:37.820 onto an airplane, the airplane takes off, and then everybody in the airplane takes their mask off and 1.00

00:15:43.860 says, fuck you. What's, what is the airline going to do? Go back and land? What are they going to do? 1.00

00:15:52.940 Are they going to go land and say, oops, you took your masks off. We're going to write you all up.

00:15:59.480 Yeah, maybe the first time. Maybe, maybe the first one. What happens if it happens two times?

00:16:06.540 The second time, everybody wears a mask, plane takes off, everybody takes off their mask at the same time.

00:16:12.480 What's the second airliner do? Land, because they have to. They might have requirements that they

00:16:19.180 have to. It would take about two or three airlines taking you off and landing before the whole rule

00:16:27.300 would just go away, right? So the point is that the government doesn't run your life. It only runs

00:16:33.020 it when it's credible and when it looks like it's doing something that's at least defensible,

00:16:38.000 even if you don't agree with it. And we would reach the point where it's just not defensible.

00:16:44.200 I think mid to late summer as things are going. So when the TSA says that they're going to extend

00:16:49.500 face mask wearing until September, September 13, weirdly specific, I think that's actually

00:16:59.660 pretty reasonable. I think the TSA is actually making a good decision here because they're going,

00:17:06.100 I would say they're going at least a month further than I think it needs to go. And that's just about

00:17:12.900 perfect because they can always pull back, right? They can always say, oh, we're going to make it

00:17:17.940 sooner, but they don't want to make it later. That's disappointing everybody. So I think they

00:17:22.680 gamed this just about right, I would say. We'll see. Let's check our predictions, everybody.

00:17:30.000 How many times have I told you that if your worldview predicts the future,

00:17:33.780 well, you might have a good worldview. Here's a prediction that I made that I heard exactly

00:17:40.200 zero other people making sometime about last year. Now do my fact check for me because I'm going to

00:17:48.040 make a very big claim. And if it's wrong, call me out. All right. So in the comments, call me out

00:17:54.600 if this is incorrect. I might be the only person a year ago who told you that if you're judging the

00:18:01.980 United States performance on coronavirus, that you're a little bit premature. Because one thing

00:18:09.060 that the United States is good at is adjusting. We are some adjusting mofos. We will start ugly

00:18:18.220 and then adjust. And if you're judging us by how we started, you've missed the whole show.

00:18:25.140 Americans don't start great. We start, which is one of our greatest qualities. If you said,

00:18:34.080 what's like a really good quality of Americans? You know, if you could make some average statement

00:18:39.880 about Americans. A great quality about Americans is that we run toward trouble. We run toward trouble 0.59

00:18:47.120 to fix it. We don't wait around. We are very action oriented. We just do stuff. The other thing

00:18:58.540 that Americans do is we don't agree with each other. And we don't take shit. And we don't just 0.99

00:19:05.140 take everybody's orders just because they gave us orders. We don't believe our government just

00:19:10.920 because it told us something. We're very, very independent and very, very skeptical.

00:19:20.440 What does that create on day one of a pandemic? A clusterfuck, right? You take a bunch of super 0.92

00:19:28.360 independent, skeptical, action oriented people, and you throw them into the first days of the pandemic. 0.98

00:19:35.460 And it's going to be the biggest clusterfuck in the world. We're just going to be fighting,

00:19:40.660 disagreeing, skepticizing. That's not a word, is it? Is it? Skepticizing? It should be.

00:19:45.960 It should be a word. But give us six months. Give us six months. Give the United States nine months.

00:19:57.760 And then let's check the score again against all you people who put on your masks and marched in line.

00:20:04.300 How's that working out? The United States is really good at starting ugly and figuring it out.

00:20:12.900 It's what we do. And so on day one, when we started ugly and other countries seem to be 0.51

00:20:18.440 maybe locking down more effectively. I'm not even sure if it made a difference.

00:20:23.500 Maybe masking more effectively. Did it even make a difference? I don't know. Because we're still a

00:20:29.680 little bit blind about why things happened the way they did. We still don't exactly know.

00:20:34.800 So the United States is now clearly better than Germany, France, Sweden, to pick three. So of our

00:20:43.840 peer countries who are sort of in the same boat on day one, we are now kicking their asses. And I told 0.99

00:20:51.340 you that that was going to happen. So my worldview says we start ugly and then we win. Because that's

00:20:57.960 what we do. We just do that. I don't know why. I mean, maybe it's something about the DNA of the

00:21:04.660 country, but it's pretty consistent. Look at climate change. Now, many of you are still on the side of

00:21:12.240 climate change is not real or whatever. I know my audience. So a lot of you are doubting the planet is

00:21:19.100 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

00:21:25.980 certainly part of it. At least I believe that to be true. And but probably the how bad it will be is

00:21:33.100 overstated because of this, this very thing, that day one, it's a clusterfuck. But then we work it out. And 0.98

00:21:42.100 that looks like that's what's happening with climate change as well. We're all skeptics. We don't believe

00:21:47.020 it. We think the government's trying to, you know, turn into one world government. We think every

00:21:52.820 possible problem with the data. And we're not wrong on day one. But once once we get a handle on things,

00:22:00.920 you know, you're going to watch nuclear power and you're going to watch, you're going to watch a lot

00:22:05.520 of things come together in the last innings. So that's my belief about climate change is just like

00:22:10.480 the pandemic. We will start ugly. And by the final innings, we'll look great. That's called the golden

00:22:18.460 age. What's the biggest mystery in the world right now? I would say the biggest mystery in the world

00:22:27.160 is why no one serious is talking about the national debt. What's going on? Do you understand?

00:22:36.760 Because I really don't. I have some hypotheses I'll talk about. But why was it that the Tea Party

00:22:44.800 and, you know, all serious people, even on the left, were saying, we can't run up debt forever.

00:22:51.360 We'll all be poor. We're spending money we don't have. But now, when the problem was tiny,

00:22:58.260 we treated it like it was an enormous problem. But now that the problem is, objectively speaking,

00:23:04.400 enormous, we're treating it like a small problem. We don't even talk about it. Why is there even

00:23:10.760 anything else being discussed on the news? Because if anything we thought was true about debt

00:23:17.480 was actually true, then we're doomed. And that would be a big story, right? We're all doomed.

00:23:26.660 You'd think that'd be in the news. But take the other position. What if, when we thought it was a big

00:23:32.600 problem, even though it was far smaller, what if it was never a problem? And what if it's still not

00:23:40.060 a problem? Because national debt doesn't work the way personal debt does. You don't have to, you don't

00:23:47.280 have to pay it off exactly. You can sort of inflate it away, just wait forever until it seems less

00:23:53.600 less because of inflation. So what's going on? Do you think that there's some kind of common

00:24:01.020 conspiracy idea among the leaders who control the media to simply downplay a problem that's going

00:24:09.120 to kill us all and destroy the country? Is that possible? Or how about this hypothesis I saw today

00:24:17.440 on MSNBC? You know, MSNBC is the racism filter channel. You take any story, and they'll turn it

00:24:25.860 into a racism story. It's like, some boulders came loose and caused a rock slide in Montana.

00:24:33.580 Turn on MSNBC. Racism causes rock slide in Montana. So they're sort of the racism filter channel.

00:24:40.420 And they say that the Tea Party was never about the debt. What? Now this is a hypothesis. They're not

00:24:50.440 presenting it as fact. It's an opinion. And the opinion is, maybe the Tea Party people were just

00:24:56.160 racists. But they didn't want to say, hey, we're all just racists. So instead of complaining about

00:25:03.380 Obama being a black president, they complained about the debt. Because that doesn't sound racist. 0.52

00:25:10.420 Does that sound like what was really happening? Or does that sound like MSNBC's crazy racism filter

00:25:19.180 that turns every ordinary story about anything into racism? Yeah, I'm saying LOLs. This is actually

00:25:28.340 laughably stupid opinion, but not on MSNBC. On MSNBC, this looks like a normal, like, yeah, 1.00

00:25:36.200 that's a pretty good opinion there. Says, we complained about it under Clinton too, right? Yes.

00:25:44.960 I don't know a time when conservatives were not complaining about the debt. Until now.

00:25:50.540 Because, you know, you still hear it. You still hear people tweeting, blah, blah, debt. There are still

00:25:58.900 pundits on the news who say, blah, blah, we're running up our debt. But we act as though, it's like a

00:26:06.540 hangnail. The way we're acting has no correlation to what the thing is. And the thing is, crushing debt,

00:26:16.900 which according to everything we've always known, should just destroy the United States.

00:26:23.640 But it's just not even a concern. What's going on? Seriously, I don't know what's going on.

00:26:30.460 So there are a few possibilities. One is that it was never a problem. And we just figured out that

00:26:35.320 national debt doesn't act like regular debt. And so we shouldn't treat it that way. Maybe. Maybe.

00:26:41.460 It could be that we've learned that if you're the strongest economy in the world, you just don't

00:26:46.760 have to worry about it. If you have the best economy and the biggest military,

00:26:51.680 maybe what we think about paying back debt just doesn't mean the same thing. Maybe we think it's

00:26:59.080 China's problem because they own a lot of the debt. I don't know. But I worry that the real play here

00:27:04.900 is that it's a massive income distribution that the Republicans haven't quite figured out yet.

00:27:11.940 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

00:27:30.680 doesn't pay any taxes today? Do they suddenly make a whole bunch of money magically and now they can

00:27:35.820 help pay off the debt? No. No. It's going to be rich people, right? So I believe the debt is just a

00:27:44.120 massive tax on people like me. So I believe that whatever I thought was my, you know, accumulated

00:27:50.780 net worth is probably maybe 25% of that. So probably 75% of my net wealth will be in one way or another

00:28:01.500 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

00:28:15.420 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 0.90

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 0.99

00:29:18.440 intentionally. And he called Fox News a bullshit factory. And what he was talking about is a story 0.99

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. 0.98

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 1.00

00:30:11.920 bullshit factory. But once the news becomes news about the news, you're in the golden age. 1.00

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. 0.99

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, 0.99

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 0.99

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 1.00

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 0.56

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 0.94

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, 0.98

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 0.67

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 0.97

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 0.99

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

00:51:02.160 now and I will talk to you.

Real Coffee with Scott Adams - May 02, 2021

Episode 1363 Scott Adams： UFO's Debunked, Jim Acosta Criticizes Fake News, National Debt Mystery, and Virtual People

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript