Real Coffee with Scott Adams - Episode 1386 Scott Adams： LeBron Kills His Fans With Leadership, CNN Psychics Know How Audits Turn Out, Musk on Crypto

00:00:00.000 Hey everybody, come on in. It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams, the very best of all times.

00:00:08.600 If you made a list of all your times, this would be right at the top. Everything else,

00:00:14.440 way less important. If you get this part right, the rest of your day, perfect. I guarantee it.

00:00:22.400 And all you need is a cup or mug or a glass of tankard shells or sign a canteen jug or a flask,

00:00:26.780 a vessel of any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid I like, coffee. And join me now for the

00:00:33.960 unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that goes like this. It's called

00:00:41.180 the simultaneous sip. Go. Now, if you've tried the simultaneous sip without going

00:00:53.420 at the end, you're missing the best part. When you have sex, scream. When you have the

00:01:02.460 simultaneous sip, go. Makes it all better. You think I'm kidding, but I'm not. It does make it

00:01:11.320 better. Now, how about this? Turns out that Moderna's vaccination, at least in a test,

00:01:17.820 was shown to be 100% effective in adolescents aged 12 to 17. 100%. That is very close, very close

00:01:28.900 to the exact number of people who don't get the virus between the age of 12 and 17

00:01:34.740 or don't get any serious problem with it. Now, that doesn't mean you shouldn't get vaccinated,

00:01:42.860 but this is pretty close to what you would expect, isn't it? You'd kind of expect that

00:01:49.660 if the vaccine works and children are unlikely to get it in the first place, you put the two

00:01:56.880 together and it looks pretty good. So that's all good news. So LeBron James was asked in an interview

00:02:05.720 if he got vaccinated. Now, you know, LeBron is a role model. He has spoken out on a number of topics,

00:02:15.360 the George Floyd stuff, notably. But LeBron is sort of, I don't know if he's reluctant, but he's a

00:02:22.960 role model, whether he likes it or not. He's a role model. So what do you make of somebody who's a role

00:02:31.480 model? And certainly could influence people. All right. There are small role models, and then

00:02:39.100 there are big role models. I would think LeBron is a big role model, and he could actually make a

00:02:44.760 difference. So he decided to not say in public whether he had been vaccinated. Now, do you think

00:02:52.960 he said he would, you know, do you think that he didn't answer the question because he is vaccinated

00:02:59.760 or because he's not? What's your guess? I feel like he is. I saw a CNN host, I guess,

00:03:13.000 guessing that if he wouldn't say that he was vaccinated, it probably means he isn't.

00:03:17.860 But I don't think that his team would let him play unless he were. That's what I think.

00:03:27.940 I think that he is vaccinated, and he doesn't want to say it. So that's my guess. Someday we might find

00:03:34.480 out. Here's another one of these cases where you can, we'll probably know. I think at some point,

00:03:42.080 we'll probably know if he got the vaccination. And compare your prediction to mine. So my prediction

00:03:49.920 is he doesn't want to tell people he did get it. And if your prediction is that he doesn't want to

00:03:56.640 say it because he didn't get it, I don't know. I would check that prediction because I feel as if the

00:04:03.620 organization that pays him would probably require it or at least push really hard. And we might have

00:04:11.940 heard about that if there was some pushing going on. So I'm guessing he got it. However,

00:04:18.360 I feel it's cowardly and despicable not to tell the public what he did. Now, I get that he's not a

00:04:26.120 doctor. So you shouldn't be taking medical advice from LeBron or from me. But he does know his

00:04:34.760 actions influence people. So if he has any confidence whatsoever in his own decision,

00:04:40.200 I feel as if he should tell the public. That was the decision I made. Because with the people who

00:04:50.200 choose to watch me and follow me here, I probably have a little bit more influence than just some

00:04:56.880 random person, right? Let me ask this in the comments. Is there anybody here who was influenced

00:05:04.260 to either get the vaccination or not get it by anything I did? Let's see if influence makes a

00:05:11.840 difference. How many people in the comments made a decision? I see a yes. Now, most of you should be

00:05:20.420 no, right? Most of you are just, of course, not influenced by that sort of thing. But see if you

00:05:25.920 see any yeses go by. So far, 95%, 99% no's. But it's not the number of no's that we're looking for.

00:05:34.700 We're seeing if there are any yeses. Because persuasion is more like a, you know, you move

00:05:40.300 two percent. You know, maybe if you're really good, you move five percent. I see two yeses. So three yeses so

00:05:47.680 far. Let's see if I see any more. Yes, another one. Mostly no's. Mostly no's. 99% no's. Framed helpfully.

00:06:00.760 So maybe a little bit. There's a yes. All right. So about what I thought. So somewhere in another

00:06:09.640 yes. So we're seeing that somewhere in maybe the two percent, five percent range, five percent at the

00:06:15.300 most. But so you can see for yourself. All right. I don't have to guess. Rick says I influenced him

00:06:25.320 on marrying hot women. Well, I'm glad I could do that for you. Oh, let's see some more yeses coming 0.98

00:06:31.980 in. All right. So you can see for yourself, if you're watching the comments, that there are real

00:06:36.440 human beings who really made life decisions based in part on what I did. That's a pretty heady

00:06:46.980 responsibility. And if LeBron said to himself, you know, I don't want to be the one who killed anybody.

00:06:55.320 So I'm just not going to say, oh, I don't know if that's crazy. You know, it's not crazy to want to

00:07:02.720 be not a doctor and don't influence people on medical stuff. But at the same time, LeBron has

00:07:09.220 the same problem, an ethical problem, I would say, moral or ethical, whichever one you want to use.

00:07:14.480 I think that everybody who's a public figure, you know, and I am in a smaller scale than LeBron,

00:07:21.600 of course. But I feel like we have a responsibility to tell you what we decided.

00:07:28.460 Do you agree or disagree with that? Do you think it would have been better if I'd just been quiet

00:07:32.880 about it? Because I don't. I feel like you should see what public figures did, and then listen to our

00:07:41.700 argument. Now, I don't think you should look at one public figure and make a decision based on one

00:07:47.000 person. But, you know, we're all trying to do our best here, right? You know, we've got our medical

00:07:53.360 advice. Sometimes you trust it. Sometimes you don't. But doesn't it help to talk to a friend?

00:08:01.040 Doesn't it help to see a public figure go through the thinking? I feel like it does. You know,

00:08:07.140 it's definitely a double edged sword. But I feel that LeBron took more of a cowardly approach. I feel

00:08:15.820 like he should step up. But it could be that he, you know, like other people think, maybe he didn't

00:08:22.940 get the vaccination and doesn't want to discourage others, you know, feeling it's just a personal

00:08:27.720 decision. Maybe. So I'm not going to say I should condemn him for this. I chose differently. I feel

00:08:35.840 there was a risk he's avoiding. And if he wants to avoid that risk, that's not dumb. Might be a

00:08:45.580 little cowardly, but it's not dumb. I choose to take the risk. And if anybody dies because of anything I

00:08:54.480 did, well, I'm sorry about that. I really am. And I'm doing my best. Well, like, that's all I can do,

00:09:03.660 right? I'm doing my honest best to not get anybody killed because they heard any advice from me.

00:09:10.900 But, you know, there's a risk there. Well, the George Floyd anniversary, you hate to call it that,

00:09:19.840 don't you? Anniversary. There should be a different word for something that happens on an annual basis

00:09:25.980 that's just purely bad. You know, anniversary sounds like, oh, it's your wedding anniversary. It's a good

00:09:31.920 thing. But this is the bad kind of anniversary. And Politico reports that Biden wanted to use the

00:09:40.140 anniversary as sort of a deadline for Congress to pass a police reform bill. And here's the part that

00:09:46.660 just blew my head apart. Politico goes on and says, but with no bill in sight, he has instead, blah, blah,

00:09:54.460 blah. Are you kidding me? One year after the George Floyd event and the tragedy, and there's not even a

00:10:05.460 bill in sight? Meaning that there's nobody even working on a police reform anything? Now, could it be that

00:10:15.640 it's just because the federal government maybe isn't the right body to do that? Maybe it's a state

00:10:20.020 thing? I don't know. Biden was expecting something. So apparently the president of the United States

00:10:27.020 thinks it's the federal government's job. And he got nothing? Are you telling me that all the people

00:10:35.660 in Congress, all the Republicans and all the Democrats, they couldn't come up with one idea,

00:10:42.540 just one idea, just one idea for making things better in this domain? Nothing. Are you fucking

00:10:51.040 kidding me? This whole thing is just a fake, fake, fake fucking story. It's a fake fucking story

00:10:59.760 because if this problem were even a little bit real, there would be all kinds of suggestions for

00:11:05.540 fucking fixing it. This is the tell. The tell is that a year later, there's not a good fucking

00:11:14.460 idea. It wasn't a real problem to begin with. Now, it's a real tragedy. Anybody getting killed,

00:11:22.640 it's a tragedy. And that's a problem per se. But if nobody had a better idea, I mean, I feel like

00:11:31.960 that's important to know, right? Nobody had a better idea. Now, I'm seeing in the comments,

00:11:36.760 and thank you for reminding me, that Tim Scott did have at one point what looked like very productive

00:11:43.540 suggestions. He got shot down, ironically, shouldn't use that phrase. But it didn't go anywhere because

00:11:51.800 he's a Republican, is my understanding. Is that your understanding? That the Tim Scott police reform

00:11:58.000 bill didn't go anywhere because Tim Scott is not a Democrat? That's probably the only reason, right?

00:12:05.360 So if Congress isn't even serious about this, should you be? Really? I mean, I feel like if Congress

00:12:14.800 doesn't even treat it like it's a real problem, they are treating it like it's not real, like it doesn't

00:12:21.220 even exist. Because if it were real, and it existed, there would at least be suggestions for what to do.

00:12:30.680 Just some suggestions. All right. Here's my suggestion, which of course will never be implemented,

00:12:41.500 because it might work, which is teaching life strategy in school. Life strategy. Now, schools teach you

00:12:50.460 skills, you know, like how to read, blah, blah, blah, although they don't do it very well, apparently,

00:12:54.820 in the inner cities. But there should be a federal required course on life strategies. Life strategies.

00:13:07.320 Now, it should be bigger than just what do you do if the police stop you, but it should be in there,

00:13:12.740 right? If you're going to have like a, let's say, a semester-long class on how to have a strategy

00:13:20.100 for a good life, depending where you live, and depending on your ethnicity especially,

00:13:27.000 you should have a little bit of a module about how to not get your ass killed by the police.

00:13:32.720 Because I don't think it's that hard. I really don't. I'm sorry. If it seems like it's hard to you,

00:13:40.240 you know, I'm sorry that you feel that way. But it's not hard. It's just not hard to not get killed

00:13:46.140 by the police. You have to really try to get killed by the police. And I think we know exactly

00:13:51.680 how to do it, which is resisting arrest. So I think that's something the federal government can

00:13:58.760 do. And who would object to that? Who would object to that? They would, right? If Democrats came up

00:14:06.400 with a plan to teach life strategy, which would include stay off drugs, you know, go to school,

00:14:12.840 get good grades. And by the way, if you're young and black and poor, and you do those things,

00:14:19.880 get good grades, stay out of jail, and, you know, stay off drugs. You do those three things,

00:14:26.500 and you're black, what does your future look like? Golden. It's golden. It's like a freeway to success. 0.68

00:14:37.160 There's nothing in the way if you do those three things. And also, don't resist arrest,

00:14:43.160 so you'll get yourself killed. So if the federal government came up with a plan that says, hey,

00:14:49.020 we can't fix the police directly. Maybe the states need to do what they need to do there.

00:14:53.660 But we can certainly make sure that the students are not just crushed by bad teaching and useless

00:15:00.480 instruction. You can make sure of that. Just make sure that there's a module there. You know,

00:15:06.200 if you can put 16, 19 training in there, and you can put critical race theory in things,

00:15:11.700 and those things are what I would call anti-strategy. And anti-strategy is something

00:15:18.620 they teach you in school that will make your life worse. It'll just make your life worse.

00:15:25.060 And I think looking at the rearview mirror does that. I'll say more about that.

00:15:31.960 Actually, let me say more about that right now. If you wanted to destroy black America, 1.00

00:15:42.100 how would you do it? Let's say you were China, or you were some nemesis of the United States, 1.00

00:15:49.100 and you wanted to destroy black America, because that would largely take a big bite out of destroying

00:15:56.620 America in general. If you were evil, and you wanted to do that, one good way would be to advocate

00:16:03.720 teaching critical race theory and the 1619 Project. Now, the point of the 1619 Project,

00:16:14.200 the point of critical race theory, well, the 1619 Project in particular, is to make sure that people

00:16:21.280 understand the true brutality of our history without, you know, whitewashing it, basically,

00:16:29.760 ironically. Now, I don't have any objection whatsoever with an honest accounting of history.

00:16:38.740 I feel like that's a good idea, to have the clearest, most accurate view of history,

00:16:44.800 brutal though it may be. And I do think that it's perfectly valid to make a really big deal about the,

00:16:51.260 the role of racism and slavery in the country. Good to know. Good to teach. But there's a

00:17:00.840 difference between being honest and being accurate, and being strategic. They're different. If you're

00:17:08.560 doing one, it might hurt your ability to do the other. And if your top priority is the, is to make

00:17:16.360 sure people really get it drilled into their head, how slavery and systemic racism are the main,

00:17:22.120 main variables of success in this country, that becomes your strategy by default. You know, if you

00:17:30.520 fill your head with one thing, whatever that one thing is, you're, you're going to be motivated by that

00:17:36.060 one thing. It doesn't matter what the thing is. If you take as your main strategy for success,

00:17:43.700 dwelling on the past, has that ever worked? Can you think of examples where somebody was successful

00:17:51.960 because they dwelled on the past? Just one example. Oh yeah, there was that, that successful

00:17:59.820 entrepreneur whose success is entirely based on dwelling on how bad things were. Well, definitely

00:18:07.460 there are entrepreneurs who use their, their pain to succeed, but I don't see any, anything like that

00:18:13.620 happening with the 1619 project. What's missing is the part where they say, we're going to teach you

00:18:19.760 this, and then the actions that you'll take because of this are now these productive ones.

00:18:25.560 Because that's what you want to do, right? You're trying to create students that are productive

00:18:31.480 members of society. So what do they do differently because of the 1619 project? What? Complain? Feel

00:18:40.360 that they're victims? What, what productive thing do you do because of it? Now compare that with

00:18:46.000 strategy, where somebody says, here's the deal. White people have a bunch of advantages. Black people,

00:18:55.560 have a bunch of their own advantages which are different. Among them, every fortune 500 company

00:19:02.060 wants to hire you. Just stay in school and stay in a jail and stay off drugs. Just do those three 1.00

00:19:07.820 things. Every fortune 500 company wants you and they want you bad because they need, they need

00:19:14.160 diversity. They need it. Like it's not even what they want. They freaking need it. It's a requirement to

00:19:22.280 hire you. You know, you will be so mentored that you'll be sick of it if you're black. You just have 1.00

00:19:30.220 to do those three things. Now, if they had a life class that taught that, what would you do differently

00:19:36.140 because of that? Well, those three things. Stay off drugs, stay in school, you know, stay out of jail.

00:19:43.280 Okay. Yeah, science. There's a comment on science here that I won't read. All right.

00:19:57.940 Now, here's the, here's the persuasion that I think BLM and the critical race theory in 1619

00:20:06.140 should do instead of what they're doing. Now, the genius of what they are doing, Black Lives Matter,

00:20:13.080 et cetera, is that to criticize any of it makes you a racist. Even if you said to yourself, well,

00:20:19.460 I like the general thrust of all these things. I like Black Lives Matter. I like critical race theory.

00:20:26.080 I like the 1619 project for just, you know, informing people. You know, I like all that. But

00:20:34.060 what, what's it persuading? I'll tell you what it would persuade me if I were black. Now, I'm not 0.96

00:20:42.060 black. Well, I identify as black. But if somebody told me that my group mattered, how would you take

00:20:53.740 that? Let's just turn this on you. Let's whatever you are. All right. Let's say for those of you who are

00:21:00.960 not black, let's say you have a, I don't know, Irish background. Suppose I said to you, Irish people

00:21:07.840 matter. How do you take that? I take that as the most losing strategy I've ever heard. Do you know

00:21:18.540 what is the lowest thing you should shoot for? To matter. That's the lowest bar you can aim for.

00:21:26.740 So, yes, David says we should give politicians a bonus based on lifting the black communities.

00:21:41.940 If you could, if you could measure that. That wouldn't be a bad idea, although it might be racist.

00:21:47.640 It might actually work out. But I don't think you could get past the racist part of that.

00:21:54.360 So here's my persuasion advice to Black Lives Matter. If you say that Black Lives Matter, 0.97

00:21:59.780 you have taken the very lowest standard. Oh, you just matter. Does that inspire you?

00:22:07.480 Do you feel like, ah, I'm going to go out there. I'm going to matter. That's nothing. You should be

00:22:16.660 shooting for thriving. You should be shooting for killing it. You should be shooting for exceeding

00:22:23.800 expectations, beating the average, beating everybody else you're competing on, you know, reaching for the

00:22:30.360 stars. You're reaching for mattering, mattering. The lowest level of success is that you just exist and

00:22:41.180 matter. That's it. So number one, shoot higher, like much higher, way higher. You should, you should be

00:22:53.860 like, like, inspirational. The whole approach is that it's a bunch of, a bunch of losers who are

00:23:02.180 wallowing in their loserhood and are trying to achieve the minimum level of a human being that you

00:23:09.260 don't want to kill them. That's it. Like the minimum value that people don't want to kill you just for

00:23:16.080 existing. Good Lord. It could not be worse in terms of persuasion. Here's a, here's a

00:23:24.320 persuasive counter to that. It's, and this is a variant of the high ground maneuver. Now the high ground

00:23:31.020 maneuver, I talk about it a lot, but the more examples you see that the more useful it'll be for you. The

00:23:37.320 high ground is when you say something that in the context of people debating and being on different

00:23:43.320 sides, you can find something that both sides just have to agree with. It's just the one thought

00:23:49.780 that's above them all. And here's my suggestion for that. The high ground is that looking backwards

00:23:56.740 rarely leads anyone forward. Looking backwards rarely leads anyone forward. Do you feel that? That's the

00:24:08.860 high ground. The moment I said it, you said to yourself, shit, that's true. I can't think of an

00:24:15.780 example that's where that's not true. Is that always true? I think it is. I think it's always true

00:24:24.540 because the cards that you have to play, let's say you're playing poker. Does it matter what your old

00:24:31.800 cards were? I mean, the old cards might've been a story about you being very unlucky and you lost a lot

00:24:38.440 of poker hands before that, but it's your current hand that matters. It's only your current hand that

00:24:45.800 will win the pot. You can't win a pot with a hand you used to have. So looking at it obsessively in your

00:24:53.220 rear view mirror doesn't make you a better poker player. What does make you a good poker player is

00:24:58.780 learning the rules, learning the odds, learning essentially what would be a life strategy applied

00:25:04.360 to poker? Just learning, learning how stuff works. That would be really useful. So looking backwards

00:25:13.660 rarely leads anyone forward. Everybody would agree with that the moment they hear it and they're like,

00:25:18.280 oh shoot, that's true. And I would say to thrive in the future, teach success strategies, not victimhood.

00:25:26.220 Now victimhood has advantages. It's not like it doesn't have any advantages. Here's one of the

00:25:34.820 advantages of victimhood. It's good for the leaders because that's how they get to be leaders. They talk

00:25:42.400 about all the victimhood and then they get to be the leaders. It's not good for the people they're

00:25:47.460 leading. It's not even a little bit good. Now I suppose if the leaders could use all this victimhood

00:25:54.440 to get some special laws or something, that'd be pretty good. But here's the problem. Where are we on

00:26:02.600 the long arc toward justice and equality? That arc, you have to look at what place you are on it to

00:26:11.480 decide what your strategy is in any given place. If this were the 60s, complaining about victimhood,

00:26:18.760 very good strategy. Because the victimhood is just so gigantic and so everywhere that you need to

00:26:25.660 complain about it. Nobody's going to fix it unless you complain, right? But once you get to this phase

00:26:32.460 of the arc toward equality and the difference between everybody is a little bit smaller,

00:26:38.560 the strategy has to change. And once you get to the smaller differences and really where the

00:26:50.060 individual differences overwhelm, the individual differences between any two people completely

00:26:56.740 overwhelm any racial disparities, right? I mean, these two are not even close. Nobody,

00:27:03.860 I don't know, have you even ever in your life seen a qualified black person turned down for a job

00:27:13.420 in favor of a less qualified white person? Have you ever seen that? I've been in a lot of hiring and

00:27:21.580 corporate situations. I've never even seen it once. I've never seen it once. Individual equality is just

00:27:27.800 overwhelming any racial stuff in 2021. I mean, by a mile. It's not even close. So complaining made

00:27:35.300 and victimhood as a frame made complete sense in the 60s. It was a good strategy. It's just it's a

00:27:42.240 terrible strategy now, except for the leaders. So the leaders no longer represent the people they're

00:27:49.000 leading. And that's a big problem right now. All right. Let's see what else is going on.

00:27:58.860 CNN has apparently hired some psychics, and they're reading the news from the future.

00:28:05.240 And so one of the things, here's a headline on an opinion piece in CNN today. It says,

00:28:10.520 Arizona and Georgia audits move forward as Republicans continue to push election fraud lies.

00:28:19.000 Wait a minute. Do I not understand what an audit is? Because in my simplistic view of the world,

00:28:28.760 I thought an audit was where you find out things that you didn't know already. Am I wrong? Because CNN

00:28:39.640 seems to indicate that an audit is a thing you do to find out what you already knew before the audit.

00:28:49.000 And I'm not sure that makes sense. And I wonder how many viewers of CNN say to themselves,

00:28:58.760 yeah, we don't need to wait for the result of the audit, because it's being reported there on CNN,

00:29:04.360 that there's nothing to see.

00:29:05.440 Now, I'm not predicting that we will find anything that's some massive fraud. I don't know that anything

00:29:13.820 will be found in these audits. And I don't really have a prediction about it. You know, my prediction

00:29:19.840 about election integrity is that our system has to get hacked. We just don't know when it happens.

00:29:26.560 It's either already happened, or it will definitely happen in the future. But we don't know where we

00:29:32.740 are in the timeline. Maybe the audit will kick that up. Who knows? But here are some words they could

00:29:38.020 have used that I feel would have been fair enough. Instead of calling it election fraud lies, the part

00:29:45.940 we don't know about until the audit's over, could have said it was unfounded. You know, you could argue

00:29:51.160 whether it was founded or unfounded. But I think unfounded would be a good opinion word. You could

00:29:57.080 say it's unproven. It's unproven. I think even people who think it's there would say that's true.

00:30:03.760 You could say it's baseless. You could argue whether it's baseless or not enough base to prove it.

00:30:11.940 But at least that would be within the opinion realm, right? Unfounded, unproven, baseless,

00:30:17.760 all good opinion words. I would accept any of them. But election fraud lies? How do they know

00:30:25.000 how it's going to turn out? And we just accept this uncritically, as if CNN knows how an audit will

00:30:32.420 turn out. The whole point of the audit is that you don't know how it turns out. All right.

00:30:41.160 Elon Musk had the funniest tweet I've seen on cryptocurrencies. And there have been a lot

00:30:47.060 of funny tweets in that category. A Twitter user named David Lee tweeted at Musk and said,

00:30:53.940 curious, what are your thoughts on Ethereum 2.0, Cardano, Solano, Polkadot, IOTA, and others that

00:31:03.020 are trying to scale with low fees? Now, if you're not in the cryptocurrency world, the only thing you

00:31:09.680 need to know to understand this is that cryptocurrency is really complicated, meaning that there's a whole

00:31:16.160 bunch of different cryptocurrencies. They all have their own characteristics and rules, etc. And so

00:31:23.040 understanding all of the different ones and what makes one maybe a better choice for the future,

00:31:28.520 which one is extendable, which one could scale better, all those things make it an incredibly

00:31:34.740 complicated thing that crypto geeks like to argue about forever.

00:31:39.960 Sure. So what does the biggest geek in the world, Elon Musk, and I say that with affection,

00:31:48.840 so what does he say when David Lee mentions all these cryptos and then asks this question? He goes,

00:31:55.520 what makes you choose Doge over them? Now, Doge is a cryptocurrency that was started as a joke,

00:32:03.100 as I understand it, and it has a little dog as its character, and there were memes involving

00:32:11.880 the crypto until so many people bought it that it's become sort of a serious thing that started

00:32:18.220 as a joke. So David Lee says, you know, what about all these cryptos, blah, blah, blah, what makes you

00:32:23.640 choose Doge over them? And here's Elon Musk, one of the smartest people in the world, who's going to

00:32:29.640 tell you everything you need about cryptocurrency. Are you ready? I will now teach you, courtesy of

00:32:36.100 Elon Musk, all the important things you know, but you need to know about which cryptocurrency to buy.

00:32:42.980 Okay, here it is. He said, Doge has dogs and memes, whereas the others do not.

00:32:50.540 That is the best answer you'll ever hear on cryptocurrencies. Now, the point of it is that

00:33:01.800 it's all irrational, right? The moment you try to act as if any of this is rational, it's like,

00:33:08.540 oh, the reasons Bitcoin will go up are X, Y, and Z. The reasons Ethereum is good is because,

00:33:14.880 you know, you know, you can have dApps and whatever. And Elon Musk just rips a hole in all of that

00:33:21.120 bullshit, just says, no, Doge has dogs and memes, whereas the others do not. That is literally all you

00:33:29.460 need to know about cryptocurrency. Everything else is a detail that you didn't need to know.

00:33:35.060 So, there's that. There's still some questions about Trump obstructing justice in the Russia

00:33:45.220 investigation. I can't believe this story is still out there. And it's obvious that, you know,

00:33:51.560 Biden is starting to struggle a little bit, as new presidents do after a few months of honeymoon,

00:33:57.040 not quite getting his legislation through, etc. And I guess the news just needs to kick Trump around

00:34:03.520 a little bit more. So, there's calls for unredacting some parts of Bill Barr's memo about

00:34:11.240 obstruction of justice, blah, blah. And it's a boring story. And if nothing else gets unredacted,

00:34:18.180 we'll never hear about it again. All right, here's a fake news alert. Or is it?

00:34:25.560 Black Lives Matter, one of the organization's Twitter feeds, tweeted that they indicated support

00:34:35.440 for the Palestinians during the mix-up between Hamas and Israel. Now, apparently Fox News and

00:34:44.120 the Daily Wire reported that as Black Lives Matter was supporting Hamas. But Hamas, of course, 0.89

00:34:51.500 is the political military terrorist part that is just a component of the Palestinians. It's just one 0.62

00:35:00.400 component. And so, the fake news part of it is it was not Hamas that Black Lives Matter mentioned,

00:35:08.340 but rather the Palestinian people. And they had some solidarity with them, said the tweet.

00:35:15.080 Now, the news today is that Fox News and the Daily Wire, I guess, are being accused of fake news because

00:35:23.280 what they should have reported is that Black Lives Matter supports the Palestinian people

00:35:29.100 in sort of a general human-to-human kind of a way, and not Hamas. So, does that sound about right to

00:35:38.960 you? Everything good there? That clarification? Hey, Richard. Richard Thomas has a comment. He says,

00:35:53.060 Scott's a Trump shill at heart. Well, Richard, can I call you Dick? I think I can call you a Dick.

00:35:59.880 Am I a Trump shill at heart? Is that what I want for myself? In my heart of hearts, is shilling for the

00:36:11.740 ex-president the thing I really want to do? Well, I'm going to put you in timeout, Dick. Try to make a comment

00:36:23.820 that has some, oh, I don't know, content or entertainment. Otherwise, you're just a narcissist

00:36:30.900 and you are condemned. All right. So, here's my take on the Black Lives Matter tweet supporting the 0.97

00:36:39.760 Palestinians. Where is the part of the tweet where they were supporting the Israeli citizens? Because 0.99

00:36:47.280 if I understand correctly, Black Lives Matter is trying to avoid the, you know, the political part and

00:36:53.220 just support the people. But were there not missiles and or bombs heading in both directions?

00:37:01.480 Were not the Palestinian people definitely in danger and under attack? They were. But were not

00:37:07.420 the Israeli public also under attack at the exact same time? Yes, they were. So, when Black Lives Matter 0.80

00:37:15.940 says we support some of those people, but not these other people who are all very much joined as part of

00:37:27.560 one story, what is the reasonable interpretation of that? The reasonable interpretation of that is

00:37:36.860 they're either anti-Semitic or they were supporting Hamas. Can you come up with another interpretation?

00:37:45.940 I can't think of another interpretation. It's either anti-Semitic or they are actually supporting Hamas

00:37:53.100 because they're not mentioning the Israeli victims. And I don't know how you ignore that, right?

00:38:01.460 It was missiles and bombs at both people's public at the same time.

00:38:07.700 How do you have empathy for only half of them? Ridiculous. So, this is a rare case of a news story that got fact-checked

00:38:20.880 as fake news, but you can also fact-check the fact-check as a fake fact-check, which reverses the fake news

00:38:27.600 back to real news. And that's as clear as cryptocurrency.

00:38:34.760 All right.

00:38:37.900 Here was an interesting exchange of tweets. Ed Markey in Congress, he was putting some shade on Republicans.

00:38:46.640 He's a Democrat. He's a Democrat. And he said, by a tweet, you cannot negotiate a climate bill with climate deniers.

00:38:54.240 Representative Dan Crenshaw objected to that and tweeted, you aren't, you liar.

00:39:00.120 Now, I like this. I love that Crenshaw starts with, you liar. Because that's all this is.

00:39:12.640 This is literally a public lie. And I just like that a politician who just says it's just a lie.

00:39:20.080 You know, no beating around the bush. And he says, we aren't denying climate change.

00:39:24.320 We're just pointing out that your solutions will hurt people and do nothing to prevent climate change.

00:39:29.400 Now, some of you are already saying at this point, is that true?

00:39:35.800 Is it true what Dan Crenshaw says, that Republicans are not denying climate change being human-caused?

00:39:44.440 Michael Schellenberger weighed in and said, Michael says,

00:39:49.120 I testified before Congress on climate change and energy six times since January 2020.

00:39:55.280 And not a single time did I hear any member of Congress deny either the reality of climate change nor humankind's contribution to it.

00:40:06.760 Now, Michael followed up with another tweet saying that he's not saying there are no deniers in Congress.

00:40:13.560 But he's pointing out if they are there, they're kind of quiet.

00:40:16.160 Yet, because he's been deeply involved in direct conversations, and just nobody brought it up.

00:40:23.680 Nobody brought it up.

00:40:25.600 Did you know that?

00:40:29.560 I'm getting tipped for blocking a dick.

00:40:34.140 And that's the way it should be.

00:40:35.700 So, I have some curiosity about this myself.

00:40:41.200 Now, I do believe that there are climate change deniers in the Republican Party.

00:40:46.400 But is it true that there are so few of them that they're sort of irrelevant?

00:40:52.920 You know, does that check out?

00:40:55.280 Because I'm trying to think who in the Republican Party, at least lately, let's say in the last, I don't know, two years,

00:41:05.380 can you think of a Republican, I think Representative Green might have said something, Marjorie Taylor Greene,

00:41:12.980 but can you think of other Republicans who are saying out loud that there's no human-caused climate change?

00:41:20.640 Are there people doing that still?

00:41:22.660 Well, now, I know a lot of you are climate deniers, or climate change deniers,

00:41:29.460 specifically the human part of it being dangerous.

00:41:33.180 Just to reinforce, my view is that humans are changing the climate,

00:41:40.580 and that it probably is a really big problem, but not one that we're incapable of fixing.

00:41:47.620 So, I believe we're capable of fixing the problems, but I think it's real.

00:41:51.340 I just don't know how big it is or how well we can predict it, but it looks real enough to me.

00:41:59.140 And I could be wrong about that, right?

00:42:01.240 So, I'll leave open the possibility that when I interpret science,

00:42:06.520 that there's a whole lot of guessing going on, so I could be totally wrong.

00:42:09.460 In a humorous little bit of news, there was a hit piece in the Daily Beast by a, quote, journalist named Will Sommer.

00:42:24.340 And in the Daily Beast, he talks about how Patrick Byrne, founder of Overstock.com,

00:42:32.920 how Patrick Byrne got kicked off of Twitter for talking about election irregularities,

00:42:38.540 but found a home on the Locals platform.

00:42:42.720 Full disclosure, I am a small investor in the Locals platform,

00:42:47.180 and I also have a community there, a subscription service community,

00:42:51.180 where I put my stuff that I can't put on Twitter.

00:42:54.140 And Patrick Byrne went there as well.

00:42:56.380 And he got criticized for going there and, you know,

00:43:00.500 having a place where he could have free speech about his topic, which is the election.

00:43:06.660 And Dave Rubin responded to this hit piece by noting that Patrick Byrne

00:43:11.760 is already making over a million dollars a year on Locals.

00:43:16.120 So, he has enough subscriptions at $5 a pop

00:43:19.440 that his current run rate is over a million dollars a year.

00:43:23.900 So, Patrick Byrne got canceled by Twitter,

00:43:29.360 goes and does exactly the same thing on Locals,

00:43:33.620 and he's going to make over a million dollars this year.

00:43:36.880 Now, he's pretty rich, I understand,

00:43:38.640 so I'm not sure a million dollars makes a difference to him.

00:43:41.500 But, how much do you love that?

00:43:45.160 How much do you love the fact he got canceled into making a million dollars?

00:43:49.080 Full disclosure again,

00:43:54.380 my community on Locals is quite robust.

00:43:59.520 And I'm actually shocked at how well this is working.

00:44:05.780 In terms of if you're worried about your content

00:44:09.180 not being appropriate for the general public

00:44:13.500 because you're going to get canceled,

00:44:14.660 you could make a shit ton of money

00:44:18.380 either on Substack, which is another place people are going,

00:44:22.660 or Locals, subscription service.

00:44:25.760 So, you can see why Twitter is working so hard

00:44:27.860 to come up with a subscription service.

00:44:29.920 I'm not sure why they haven't yet.

00:44:31.800 But you can see that the future is this kind of model.

00:44:36.960 Because the public is willing to pay for content that they like.

00:44:40.760 What the public doesn't like

00:44:43.340 is somebody else telling them what they can see.

00:44:46.060 The public does not like to be told what they can see

00:44:48.880 and what they can't see.

00:44:50.320 But they don't mind paying for it.

00:44:52.740 At least enough of them to make it a...

00:44:55.120 It's not just a good business model.

00:44:57.400 It's freaking amazing.

00:44:59.000 It's the best thing I've ever seen.

00:45:00.900 To give you an idea

00:45:02.280 of how well this subscription service works

00:45:06.180 compared to YouTube.

00:45:08.220 So, I have, at this point,

00:45:11.100 over 100,000 subscribers on YouTube.

00:45:13.980 And it's monetized.

00:45:15.360 There's ads on it and everything.

00:45:17.060 But the YouTube revenue is just...

00:45:18.620 It's just a fraction

00:45:20.060 of what you can do on a subscription service.

00:45:22.640 It's not even close.

00:45:24.920 How much is Locals?

00:45:26.260 My community, I charge $7 per month.

00:45:30.220 Or there's a special going on now

00:45:32.020 that you can get two free months

00:45:34.540 if you buy a year subscription.

00:45:36.400 So, that's a new offer.

00:45:38.820 Each of the locals' communities

00:45:40.500 charges whatever they want.

00:45:42.600 So, that's the beauty of that.

00:45:44.160 They can just charge what they want.

00:45:46.220 I picked $7 because it's a lucky number.

00:45:48.900 There's no other reason.

00:45:50.640 I just thought, oh, $7.

00:45:52.640 I think Patrick Byrne is $5 a month.

00:45:57.320 And that worked out.

00:45:58.260 If you went to college,

00:46:03.080 you paid to hear somebody speak.

00:46:04.600 Yeah, I guess you did.

00:46:07.260 The locals' coin.

00:46:08.920 Yes, the locals' coin is another way

00:46:10.740 that people get compensated on locals.

00:46:13.420 So, they have their own coin,

00:46:15.640 token sort of thing.

00:46:17.260 But will I do it in a hot tub?

00:46:20.340 I might.

00:46:23.680 Yes, you get to choose your price.

00:46:25.400 That is correct.

00:46:26.120 Somebody asked me.

00:46:28.040 It's $7 a month for one person.

00:46:30.620 That's correct.

00:46:31.680 Yeah, we might look at some models

00:46:35.280 where you can buy a group of people.

00:46:37.180 But you do find that...

00:46:39.440 Well, let me make the case

00:46:43.020 for why $7 a month

00:46:45.060 is not as bad as you think.

00:46:47.440 I have a subscription service to HBO Max.

00:46:53.040 I've watched no content on it this month

00:46:55.560 that I cared about.

00:46:57.000 I have a subscription to Disney Plus

00:46:59.840 or whatever it is,

00:47:00.520 the streaming service.

00:47:03.140 After I watched all of the Mandalorian series,

00:47:06.660 there wasn't a single thing on there

00:47:08.480 that I wanted to watch ever again.

00:47:10.440 I'm still paying for it.

00:47:12.140 I have Netflix.

00:47:15.120 About once every three or four months,

00:47:18.380 I find something on Netflix

00:47:19.700 that's worth watching.

00:47:22.500 I have a subscription to Hulu

00:47:25.760 that I've watched one thing on ever.

00:47:33.000 It has lots of stuff.

00:47:34.180 I'm just not interested in it

00:47:35.400 or I've already seen it.

00:47:37.380 So with my content,

00:47:39.740 you get new content,

00:47:41.540 45 minutes to an hour or so,

00:47:44.920 plus a lot of postings

00:47:46.380 and a lot of micro lessons.

00:47:48.940 So the proposition that I offer

00:47:50.940 for my subscribers

00:47:52.020 is that for $7 a month,

00:47:54.700 I will deliver to you

00:47:55.960 thousands of dollars worth of value,

00:47:59.380 meaning that if I had offered it

00:48:02.680 for thousands of dollars,

00:48:03.880 people would buy it.

00:48:04.700 Maybe you wouldn't,

00:48:06.600 but people would.

00:48:07.620 It would be worth thousands of dollars.

00:48:09.560 So I'm teaching success strategies.

00:48:13.800 And so far,

00:48:14.980 the people who follow me on Locals would say,

00:48:17.420 and if there are any of them here,

00:48:18.620 you can weigh in.

00:48:20.220 Actually, let's do that.

00:48:21.140 I think there are enough people here

00:48:23.220 who follow me on Locals

00:48:24.600 that also are on this live stream right now.

00:48:28.300 How many of you who follow me on Locals

00:48:30.420 are getting $7 worth of value per month

00:48:33.260 in terms of your total,

00:48:36.360 your life value?

00:48:38.220 So I'm not just giving you some entertainment

00:48:41.020 for an hour.

00:48:42.060 I'm trying to change people's lives.

00:48:44.280 Look at the comments.

00:48:45.380 Look at all the yeses.

00:48:48.120 It's just a solid wall of yes right there.

00:48:52.620 All right?

00:48:53.240 So that's what I'm offering.

00:48:54.640 I'm offering that if you don't get

00:48:56.960 thousands of dollars worth of value

00:49:00.200 every month, every month,

00:49:03.260 every single month for $7,

00:49:05.100 then it wasn't worth it to you.

00:49:07.320 But look at the number of people

00:49:08.360 who are getting thousands of dollars of value

00:49:10.820 for $7 every month.

00:49:15.760 And one comment says,

00:49:17.180 wish you interacted more

00:49:18.160 with people's Locals posts.

00:49:20.040 Well, you know, I do read most of them,

00:49:21.400 and I do a lot of liking on them,

00:49:22.780 but it's hard to comment

00:49:24.400 on hundreds and hundreds of stuff.

00:49:27.580 Yeah.

00:49:28.300 I mean, look at the comments.

00:49:30.000 It's overwhelming.

00:49:31.860 It's just a solid wall of yes.

00:49:33.920 And so that's the point.

00:49:37.160 Now, how many of you would say

00:49:39.420 that you got thousands of dollars of value

00:49:41.420 and of watching CNN this year?

00:49:44.940 Or watching whatever your favorite news channel is?

00:49:47.560 Did you get thousands of dollars worth of value

00:49:49.480 every month from any other streaming service?

00:49:53.980 Probably not.

00:49:55.500 The people who are watching Patrick Byrne

00:49:57.400 are getting information about the election

00:50:00.880 from Patrick

00:50:02.220 that they're not seeing on any other source.

00:50:06.680 If you could find out

00:50:07.840 something you really cared about,

00:50:09.900 in this case, the election,

00:50:11.460 and you can see things

00:50:12.640 that you weren't seeing anywhere else,

00:50:13.980 and you really care about it,

00:50:15.100 is it worth $5 a month?

00:50:16.960 Yeah.

00:50:17.800 Yeah.

00:50:18.220 For a lot of people, it is.

00:50:19.380 I think he has over 19,000 people

00:50:22.300 want exactly that.

00:50:24.920 So, Locals is just terrific

00:50:28.720 for these specific cases

00:50:31.440 where people just want more of something specific.

00:50:37.440 Thank you, Derek.

00:50:38.360 All right.

00:50:40.940 That's all for now.

00:50:42.320 Oh, I also run my Robots Read News comic,

00:50:46.260 which is my extra naughty comic.

00:50:49.220 You may have seen a few of them on Twitter,

00:50:50.860 but most of them are behind the subscription wall

00:50:54.200 because they're a little bit too edgy

00:50:56.660 to allow it to the public.

00:50:59.340 And by the way,

00:51:00.260 you want to know something cool?

00:51:02.160 This is the coolest thing.

00:51:03.860 And you would only get this

00:51:06.360 in a subscription service, right?

00:51:08.620 Because people want to be there.

00:51:09.940 They subscribe.

00:51:11.240 But I'll often post something,

00:51:13.920 and I'll ask people not to share it

00:51:15.900 outside of Locals,

00:51:17.100 because they could.

00:51:17.840 You know, just screenshot it and tweet it.

00:51:20.020 It would be easy.

00:51:21.300 I don't think anybody has.

00:51:23.560 I don't think even on one occasion

00:51:25.920 I've asked people not to share something,

00:51:28.980 I don't think it ever left Locals, not once.

00:51:31.920 And I didn't even expect that.

00:51:33.180 You know, I figured I was taking a risk.

00:51:35.460 And I'm sure at some point it'll happen.

00:51:38.260 But I could not be more amazed

00:51:40.840 that there are, I don't know,

00:51:43.180 6,600 people looking at my edgy stuff

00:51:47.140 that would get me canceled in the real world,

00:51:50.440 and they're not tweeting it,

00:51:53.700 just because I asked them.

00:51:55.500 That's all.

00:51:55.960 I just asked them to, and they didn't do it.

00:51:57.820 I'm blown away by that, by the way.

00:51:59.540 I'm just blown away that that's even a possibility,

00:52:01.740 that that could be happening.

00:52:04.720 Challenge accepted.

00:52:06.640 I'm sure some trolls will come in

00:52:08.520 and do just all of that.

00:52:10.160 But if you want to pay $7 a month to do that,

00:52:13.300 go ahead.

00:52:14.600 And thank you for all the good comments,

00:52:16.940 and I'll talk to you tomorrow.

00:52:18.440 I'm look at it all.

00:52:21.260 Thema.

00:52:23.420 I'm looking at it.

00:52:23.740 Yeah.

00:52:24.340 I'm watching.

00:52:26.800 There we go.

00:52:28.960 Here we go.

00:52:31.760 Here we go.

00:52:33.780 Let it go.

00:52:34.340 Let it go.

00:52:36.300 Here we go.

00:52:37.060 Here it go.

00:52:37.360 We go.

00:52:38.080 Let it go.

00:52:38.640 We go.

Real Coffee with Scott Adams - May 25, 2021

Episode 1386 Scott Adams： LeBron Kills His Fans With Leadership, CNN Psychics Know How Audits Turn Out, Musk on Crypto

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