Episode 974 Scott Adams： Comparing the Experts to Average Idiots, Who is Performing Better, Unmasking
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Summary
The experts in the headlines are doing their best to figure out what's going on in the world, but they're not being as good at it as we would like them to be at it. Today's episode is all about what the experts are doing, and how they're doing it.
Transcript
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Hey, there you are. I'm glad you could make it. Come on in. Gather around. We've got lots to talk
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about today. It's going to be a good one. One of the best. One of the best coffees with Scott Adams
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of all time. By the way, I found out somebody noticed yesterday that apparently I have an
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IMDB page. So I'm an official show. I've made it. I've made it to IMDB. I've made something of
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myself. Well, if you'd like to make something of yourself, I know how to start. The best way
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is with a little thing called the simultaneous sip, and it doesn't take much. All it takes is
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a cup or a mug or a glass or a tank or a chalice or a stein, a canteen jug or a flasca, a vessel of
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any kind. Fill it with your favorite liquid. I'm partial to coffee. And join me now for the
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unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better,
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I feel my convalescent blood serum improving by the moment. Yes, yesterday I did my periscope from
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the parking lot of the veterinarian's place. Snickers is resting.
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She's on restrictions. She's not allowed to jump up on the furniture. So she just tweaked
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her back a little bit. She gets a sports injury.
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She's a very active dog. So I've been through this before. She should be fine. I've got her
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unpaid meds. Anyway, yesterday I was talking about what we need is a website where you could
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put in your own personal risks. You know, what's your age, your BMI and all that stuff. And it would
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tell you your risk of getting coronavirus and your risk of dying. And it turns out that exists. So
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somebody built exactly that website. I don't know how long it's been up, but I just tweeted it before
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I got on. So if you want to find it, you can find it at the top of my Twitter feed. So I don't know
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if it's accurate. I'm not vouching for it, but it's interesting. And I would recommend just giving
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you a look. Maybe it'll tell you something. So the theme of today's Periscope
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is the experts. Somebody's asking me how old Snickers is. Snickers is about 12. And that's
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around the life expectancy for this breed, unfortunately. So Snickers is a senior citizen.
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But anyway, the theme today is going to be the experts. So we'll see how the experts are doing.
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Make sure the experts are being experts. So all I did was take headlines out of the news.
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So I didn't do any research. All I did was just look at the headlines. All right. So here's what the
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experts are doing in the headlines. CNN has a story about a famed French serial killer expert,
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Stéphane Bourgogne. So he was a big expert. I guess he had built a reputation as the country's
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foremost expert in serial killers, writing more than 75 books and producing dozens of documentaries.
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stories. But turns out it was all fake. He wasn't so much an expert on serial killers as he was an
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expert at plagiarizing experts on serial killers. It turns out that the foremost expert on serial
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killers in France wasn't even an expert. He was actually a con man. That's all right. That's your
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first report of experts. All right. So, so far, expert not looking too good. You know, we're going
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to be doing a little, obviously a little cherry picking here. So I'm not going to, I'm not going
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to pretend this is an unbiased presentation. I've told you before, but I'm going to say it again,
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that one of the most interesting accounts to follow during this era where everybody's obsessing
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about data and, you know, what are the odds and everything. You got to follow Nate Silver. If
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you're not following Nate Silver, you're just missing just one of the best commentary as he's
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watching the, the common idiots try to figure out data because he actually does this for a living
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and he's good at it. And he has to watch as all the people who are bad at it and don't know they're
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bad at it. Try to be good at it while being bad at it. Imagine being him. Now, when I look at this
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stuff with my, you know, tiny little bit of visibility of that world, even I can say, I'm not
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so sure. I mean, I'm just skeptical. I look at it and go, I don't know, could be right. I'm not sure
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I'm going to believe it. A lot of things are wrong. So I have sort of the lowest level of skeptical
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detectors when it comes to data presentations, right? I just sort of generally don't like,
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generally don't trust them because most of them are fake, but I don't have any special insight into
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them usually, but Nate usually does. So just a perfect example. And this is just for one day,
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right? Imagine he's doing this every single day and he's picking out this news story about a surge of
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cases in Orange County. So there's a story about a surge of cases. So what do you make of that?
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What do you make of it? It's out of control, right? These Orange County people, they're not
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quarantining. They're not locking down. They're protesting. No wonder it's out of control in
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Orange County. And then Nate Silver tweets, you know why there's maybe been a surge of cases in
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Orange County, California, as this story focuses on? Because they're doing a ton more testing than
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before. The whole story is just garbage. And he just takes it out with one tweet. Yeah. They don't
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mention they're doing more testing. What experts are we supposed to listen to? I mean, here's some
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expert reporters for a big publication. Was it, I forget who it was, LA Times maybe? And they must have
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been collecting information from experts. So the expert reporter expertly collects the information
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from the experts who collect the data. And then they read a story. And what's the public to make of
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it? Well, wouldn't you believe it? Because experts, right? And then Nate Silver, also an expert, looks at
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it and says, uh, the thing you left out was the only important thing. The only thing that mattered,
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you know, in terms of understanding the full context, the only thing that mattered was what
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effect did the testing have on kicking up new results. And that's not even in the story. My God.
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All right. Experts so far, uh, two out of three doing poorly. Nate Silver, uh, he gets an A for the week.
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Here's some more experts in the news business. CNN, um, I think that now that I've tuned you to it,
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you're probably seeing this everywhere. You've noticed how much CNN does mind reading, right?
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Where they pretend that a story is their opinion of someone else's internal thoughts. And they sell this
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as news all the time. And every, you know, it's usually in the opinion context, not in the, not in the
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harder news. But the fact that it's on, that it's even on an opinion, that it's even on a news site is, is
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mind-boggling. So here's one. Uh, this is from Stephen Collinson, who's, he's sort of the, and I, and I'm not
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kidding. I read his content to laugh. So he's trying to be a serious critic of the president,
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but he has to produce so much critical content every week because apparently that's his job.
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So no matter what the president is doing, Stephen Collinson is going to write a critical piece.
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And if there's not actual data to look at to say, well, this is wrong, he goes after the president's
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internal state. So the title is Trump's rebuke of Fauci encapsulates rejection of science.
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It encapsulates his rejection of science, which is really sort of talking about his mental state,
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right? Do we, do we think that president Trump in his, you know, internal mental cognition rejects
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science? Have you ever heard of anybody who rejected science? That's not even a thing. Who
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rejects science? People reject individual parts and then they give their reasons. Sometimes they're
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right. Sometimes they're wrong. But in your whole life, has anybody ever rejected science? That is so
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not even a thing. And it's a headline. Yeah, it's just part of his rejecting science, which has never
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existed, can't exist, would never exist in the real world. And then it goes on to say the president's
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downplaying of the nation's top expert, meaning Fauci, shows that he has always been battling the
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pandemic that he wants to fight rather than the one that exists. So they have to put this in terms of
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what the president internally wants. What? How does this guy, who's probably never even met the
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president, know what the president is currently internally wanting? And apparently he currently
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internally wants it to be a different kind of pandemic. That's quite the insight. Do you know who
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else privately and privately on their own mind, do you know who else wants this pandemic to be a less
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bad one? Me? Is there anybody else who would want this to be less bad than it is? I'm feeling confident
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that many of you also, like the president who's being criticized here, would want the pandemic
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to be different than it is. So, which is different from saying he's doing the wrong stuff.
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You know, if they said he's doing the wrong stuff, then they could show their reasons why.
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But they're free from the, from showing that he's doing the wrong stuff because they can just say
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that he's thinking about it wrong. Yeah, he's thinking about it all wrong. As if you know what's in his
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head. And you look in there and he's not liking science in there. You know, you saw him bragging about
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his, was it his uncle, who's a famous, famous scientist or a very successful scientist anyway.
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Some Trump, I mean, Trump clearly, clearly respects science. I mean, he's been taking all of the
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scientific recommendations. And then when it gets to the school closing one, that's not just a
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scientific recommendation. That's also a public recommendation. All right, let's see some more of
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the, the experts. So this, a user on Twitter, Calumet K, don't know who he is. And I did a thought
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experiment tweet. I was talking about whether we were doing a good job understanding overweight people
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and the special risks they have. So that was my tweet. And I was wondering aloud whether we were
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looking at it right. And Calumet says to me on Twitter, coronaviruses have been with us for
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decades. Look more closely at the data instead of thought experiments and exercise and science
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fictions. He says to me, so I replied that that was 2019 thinking. In 2020, have we not noticed that
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the data that the data that we need is unavailable and the data that we have is unreliable. So if you're
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telling me that we should use the data, don't you also have a responsibility to, let's say, judge
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whether the data exists and is credibly accurate? Because if you leave out the fact that it doesn't
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exist, and if it does, the stuff we've seen, is not credible, don't lecture me about not using the
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data to make my decisions. If you can give me some data that is useful and reliable, do you think I
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wouldn't use it? Is there anybody who thinks that presented with credible and useful information, I would
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say, you know, I choose not to use this. I think I'd rather guess. No, I would not do that. And so there's,
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there are people who seem to imagine that other people are doing something like that. It's a weird
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world. Anyway. So here's my favorite. So this is my actual tweet that caused a little trouble. And I'll tell
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you how this went. And my tweet was, how many Americans have died from coronavirus who are under
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60? And also, here's the key part of the tweet, had a healthy body weight, whatever you wanted to find
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healthy as low BMI, I guess. And I said, I have a strong feeling that political correctness is
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preventing us from understanding our individual risks, which could in turn keep the economy closed and
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ruin civilization. So I was sort of thinking aloud, as one does on Twitter, that maybe the big issue is
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that we just can't be told. Can I, can I be, I'm going to be impolite for a moment. Okay. I'll need
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your permission to be impolite just for a moment. It's easier to communicate if we just make that
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agreement. Um, I am very much against fat shaming. So if what you hear next sounds like fat shaming,
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let me say as clearly as possible, that's not what I'm doing. No, I'm not cool with that at all. I do
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think, you know, maybe society has some benefits in encouraging people to live a healthier health
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lifestyle, but it's not my thing, right? I'm not going to tell you what to eat. Like that's, that's just
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your personal decision. You know, I wish it didn't cost me more in healthcare probably does,
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but it's still your personal decision. That's the country we live in. All right. So that's my
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statement. Now, having said that, let me speak plainly in the vernacular of regular people.
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Is this a fat problem? Again, no disrespect meant to anybody, but is it a fat problem? Because
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I told you yesterday, CNN showed a family that tragically all three of them, you know, died
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and CNN showed their photos and said, you know, they had no underlying conditions. And I looked at
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the photos and said, I see underlying conditions there. There is obviously, obviously a weight issue
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with the family. Again, I'm not criticizing. It's tragic what happened. We're not minimizing the
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tragedy whatsoever. And I'm not saying they brought it on themselves, nothing like that. I'm just
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saying, can't we talk honestly? They're showing us the picture and, and basically lying to us while
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they're showing the picture. No, no underlying conditions. And all the experts are telling us
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that's an underlying condition. So I'm actually wondering, have we ever seen, um, we, I think we have
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seen statistics of obese patients and how they have a higher mortality. Is that, that that's correct,
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right? You've seen data about obesity, but have you seen data that would take the entire weight
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spectrum into account? In other words, if you're, let's say you're carrying 20 extra pounds as an adult,
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are you a little bit more at risk? Because I don't really know. Do you have to get all the way to
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obesity before it's, you sort of fall off a ledge and then you're into the dangerous territory?
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Or is it sort of, you know, scaled? Like is, is every extra pound outside of the ideal BMI?
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Does it give you a little bit of risk and then it, and it gets much higher, the higher your weight is?
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Don't know. But I do know that nobody's telling us that.
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I do know that. Somebody says, are Chinese people obese on average? I would say probably not. Probably
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not. But they also seem to have it under control, don't they? So I don't know what's going on in
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China. And this gets back to the fact that all of our data is bad. So my first instinct was to say to
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you when somebody said, yeah, but what about China? To say, well, that's a perfect example.
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They don't have a big weight problem, and they got it under control. But as soon as I said that,
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I said to myself, do I really know that? I mean, I think I know that they don't have a giant weight
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problem, but I don't know how under control it is. I don't really know what's happening in China.
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But on the surface, it looks like that's compatible. All right. So I made the statement
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out loud about maybe weight is the thing. And then I got the following criticism from a Dr. Angela
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Rasmussen, who is a virologist. I can say she is a virologist because I know that that is the correct
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pronoun because she put it in her profile. So she's a she slash her. So Dr. Angela Rasmussen says to me
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on Twitter, maybe you should compare. I'm sorry. No, she said to me on Twitter.
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I swear I wrote it down. She said to me on Twitter. Oh, damn it. Oh, well, I just tried for 20
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minutes this morning to copy a piece of text into my notes. And every time Twitter had a bug and it
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didn't work. But the essence of it is that she mocked me for doing doing a thought experiment when I
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should be listening to the experts. So she mocked me for being a cartoonist and saying something about
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health in public. And I feel as though the public is getting a little testy. Have you noticed people
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getting a little crabby? Maybe a little quick to respond. And Dr. Angela Rasmussen caught me in one of
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those moods in which I was not in the mood to be criticized. And I may have gone at her a little
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bit hard. And I did. And I did this. So after she said that you shouldn't listen to a cartoonist,
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I tweeted back and said, maybe you should compare my public health recommendations to the coronavirus
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experts so far, dipshit. I'm winning by a landslide. Your team is looking like twice eating shit lately.
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So the funny part about it was that this expert happened to pick the only cartoonist
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who has a public track record of consistently being right when all of the public experts are wrong.
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Now, if you're new to the Periscope, that sounds like a ridiculous claim. If you've been watching
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for a while, I've gone through the list a number of times. First one to call for the closing of travel
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from China, well before the president. First one to say the masks, the mask story is bullshit. They're
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all lying to you. First one, you know, probably one of the first ones to say hydroxychloroquine might
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not work, but it's certainly not going to be a bad risk management for people. And sure enough,
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lots of countries are doing it. I mean, you could go right down the list. And either I didn't have an
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opinion or it was correct and the professionals were wrong. I don't think I've been wrong yet,
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at least on anything that I asserted as true. So weirdly and humorously, the expert decides to
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dump on me on Twitter and finds out I'm literally the only non-expert who has consistently trounced
00:21:06.600
the experts in this very field just recently in the last two months. So speaking of Krabby,
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I saw a tweet on Twitter that just made me laugh because it reminded me of my own response I just
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told you about. So a troll goes after Emily Campagna, Campagna, Campagna, Campagna, Campagna. I can never
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pronounce her last name. So you know her from Fox News. She's often on The Five and other Fox News
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shows. And this guy, Tim, on Twitter says, I don't know why he was even going after her, but he goes,
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your world is criminal justice? He goes, please, you work for Fox Opinion. So Emily tweets back to him
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this. Actually, Tim, I'm in my 13th year of practice. Criminal defense and a former GS-14 rank
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as an acting director in a top 10 federal agency. I've spent more hours in prisons and within the
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systems than you can imagine. So why don't you sit the fuck down and let the adults talk?
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I think it's funnier because you don't expect her, you didn't expect that the F word to come out of
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her, but it was sort of perfect. I've been laughing about that all morning. So every time somebody tries
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to dunk on somebody, they haven't done their homework. All right. Let's talk about Flynn.
00:22:37.480
So Trump is cleverly politically selling this as like the biggest deal in the world. People should
00:22:45.680
go to prison for 50 years talking about the Obama administration unmasking of Flynn. And, you know,
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that being part of the whole Russia collusion hoax, et cetera. So Trump and the Republicans are making
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it a story that the Obama administration spied on a political opponent, meaning the Trump campaign.
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And that is literally what happened, meaning that they literally spied on a political opponent.
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Like that statement is beyond any, is beyond question. What is in question is if that's the
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reason they did it, which of course is their defense. So there's no question of what happened,
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at least the broad strokes, that there was unmasking, these people unmasked them, it happened
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then, et cetera. But they still would say, no, no, we had a different reason. It wasn't about spying on
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the campaign. It was about making sure there wasn't any Russia problems. So the president
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cleverly, because he's the biggest voice in politics and he can make the story sort of, you know, move in
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whatever direction he pushes it. He's cleverly and appropriately, I would say appropriately within
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the context of politics, pushing it to be the biggest thing in the world. And the beauty of this
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is almost breathtaking. Because what he's doing and what, you know, Rand Paul was doing yesterday
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is they're turning this into the exact mirror image of all the things that they were falsely
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accused of, which was the Ukrainian phone call and, you know, interfere using the power of the
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government to go after a political opponent. In the case of Ukraine, it was using the politics
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to investigate Biden's Ukrainian stuff. So now that the facts have come out on the unmasking,
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Trump and the Republicans quite cleverly and inaccurately, I think, I mean, it would be as
00:24:50.200
fair as what they were saying. It's just the complete reversal. Now, the beauty of this is that at the
00:24:57.120
same time that the Democrats have to argue that this is not a correct framing of what happened,
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that things happen for different reasons. It's exactly what Trump was saying. Trump was saying,
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well, the reason we looked into it is it was a national security concern. Ukraine, Burisma, Biden,
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national security concern. Yes, yes, it was also, you know, it would have been how convenient that
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they're also my political enemy. But that's not the reason I did it. And likewise,
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the Democrats are going to say, yeah, yeah, yeah, we did spy on a political campaign, but
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that wasn't the reason we did it. The reason we did it was all these important political,
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geopolitical considerations. It's exactly the same. If you don't, if you're not appreciating the beauty
00:25:50.360
of that symmetry, I don't know. I don't know how you could miss it. Sometimes the fake news,
00:25:59.080
just in its randomness, just every now and then will line up with this sort of perfect irony or
00:26:06.420
perfect coincidence or perfect story. And this is just so perfect. It's the exact mirror of what he
00:26:13.740
got impeached for exactly as he's going into election. This couldn't be any better politically.
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And as I, and here's the other part of it. So I was wondering why they, why we have released
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the names of the people who asked for the unmasking, but yet we're still waiting for the backup documents
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that each of them had to fill out to say why they had asked for the unmasking. Have you asked yourself
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why you didn't see them at the same time? Why did you see the list of people who asked for the
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unmasking, but we're still waiting for the documents in which those same people said, this is why I want
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to see it? Well, I don't know. It could be just the most normal administrative bureaucratic thing.
00:27:00.560
It could be that one department had this information and they were done. Other ones taking longer.
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It could be that one department has both, but one of them takes longer to vet. Somebody had some
00:27:10.440
questions, held it up a little bit, probably just normal reasons. But let me just suggest this
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possibility. Isn't it better to drip it out a little bit at a time? If you happen to be the
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Republicans, you're Grinnell, you're, let's say you're Trump, and you've got a bushel basket of
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little stuff and every one of these little releases is going to be a news cycle. Do you let it out all at
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once? No, you don't let it out all at once. Because when we saw the names, we got to be
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outraged. And when we see the, someday I assume we'll see the backup documents that said why they
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need access. And I think we're going to be all enraged again. So he's going to get two weeks, at least,
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of coverage for a story that would have been a one-week story if they just dumped it and the news
00:28:02.820
had to process it and get over it. So if you remember during the Russia collusion story and
00:28:09.700
also the Ukraine story, what was the phrase that CNN kept using? You're going to love this.
00:28:17.580
You know the phrase. It goes like this. Drip, drip, drip. How many times did you see CNN
00:28:29.540
say that all the news that was going to eventually get the president impeached? How many times did
00:28:37.340
you say it just keeps coming? Drip, drip, drip. And then the tables turned. And what is CNN saying now?
00:28:49.520
Well, because it looks like the Republicans are playing the drip strategy on them. It looks like
00:28:59.300
they're going to drip, drip, drip, and just drip the piss out of CNN and the Democrats. Now, I don't
00:29:05.760
know that that's an explicit strategy. I do know it should be. And I do know they're obviously smart
00:29:13.660
enough. It would be obvious enough. If I had to guess, if I had to guess, I think they're getting
00:29:20.480
a little bit of their drip, drip, drip right back, which amuses me on a level I can't even explain.
00:29:28.460
Like, first of all, the fact that they don't brag about it, because I don't think you're going to hear
00:29:34.000
anybody, Republicans, say, yeah, you know, we gave them the drip, drip, drip. But the fact that you can
00:29:39.660
see it happening, and you kind of suspect if you don't know it's happening, and watching them use
00:29:46.600
the same strategy that just tortured Republicans for three years, and just take the gun out of the
00:29:53.080
hand of the Democrats and use it against them, drip, drip, drip, motherfucker. It is beautiful to watch.
00:30:03.520
So meanwhile, the Democrats have to sort of build a little wall around their artificial reality,
00:30:08.620
their bubble reality. Andrea Mitchell took a good try on it. And one of the attempts that they're
00:30:15.460
going to make is that this unmasking stuff is so common, there's no story here. And it's so common
00:30:22.200
because it happens a lot, nine, 10,000 times a year. And it's so routine, totally routine, this
00:30:29.000
unmasking. And Andrea Mitchell tweeted, 10,000 unmaskings last year, 17,000 in 2018, necessary and
00:30:38.540
routine. Can people please stop trying to gaslight us? When you hear the word gaslight, that's your tell
00:30:47.180
for somebody building an artificial reality around there. Well, well, well, don't know what happened
00:30:54.240
there. A little hiccup. Periscope gave me a message that said I could just continue with the same
00:30:59.480
Periscope when it was uninterrupted. Looks like it worked. How about that? Anyway, so Andrea Mitchell
00:31:05.280
was building this bubble reality around their little world by saying that the accusations about all the
00:31:12.040
unmasking is just gaslighting. It's just gaslighting. But here's the trick that she's doing. If you didn't
00:31:17.440
catch the trick, it's a good one. It's a good trick. So she's framing it as normal routine
00:31:23.620
behavior. Therefore, there's nothing to see. But here's what she's cleverly doing that's a little
00:31:28.520
less obvious. What's less obvious is that she's ignoring the reason it was done. It is true that
00:31:37.320
it's routine to unmask, which is what she says. So she's just sticking with this one truth. It's
00:31:43.400
routine to unmask. We unmask, nothing to see. What she leaves out is the reason for the unmasking.
00:31:53.700
I see in the comments, somebody is enjoying my show more than more than usual. So good for you.
00:31:59.880
Keep it up. So that's her trick. She doesn't say the reason. Now, so the alleged reason is for
00:32:07.520
political reasons. Of course, they're going to say it's for national security. But that's how they're
00:32:12.640
going to build their artificial reality over at CNN. They'll call it gaslighting. They'll say it's
00:32:17.120
routine. And they will simply not answer the question of why it was done, which is the only
00:32:23.400
real question. So I've been trying to follow this story that the Flynn judge. So as you know,
00:32:33.340
I guess the prosecutor wants to drop the charges against Flynn for all the reasons that you know.
00:32:38.760
But the judge, this is Emmett Sullivan, issued, quote, an unusual order Wednesday. I'll say it's unusual.
00:32:48.140
Appointing a law firm partner to present arguments in opposition to the government's motion to dismiss.
00:32:55.660
So in other words, the prosecutor and the defense have both agreed that this should be
00:33:02.460
let go. And the judge, instead of doing the most normal thing in the world, is like,
00:33:11.060
OK, even the prosecutor doesn't want to prosecute? Well, OK, we're done here. He decides he's going to
00:33:17.780
create this process to retry the case, basically, without a jury. It'd basically just be this guy
00:33:26.200
retrying the case or something. I mean, not technically, but even the fact that there's
00:33:31.300
any new person coming in at this point. And I said to myself, well, I'm no lawyer. I'm no legal
00:33:38.660
expert. Don't know that much about the courts. Is this weird or is this not weird? And so I watched
00:33:46.180
the people who actually know what they're doing, you know, the Mike Cernoviches, people who have
00:33:50.240
legal backgrounds, etc. And I was kind of watching their guidance to see, is this normal? And as far
00:33:58.600
as I could tell, there is nothing normal about this. Am I right? It looks like he's just making
00:34:05.800
it up. It appears that justice has been completely, I don't know, distorted because this judge is just
00:34:15.580
finding a way to keep Flynn in jail. Is that the judge's job to try to find a way to keep innocent
00:34:21.500
people in jail? Dershowitz agrees with you. Yeah, it looks like it looks like this is a complete
00:34:28.480
bullshit thing that he just sort of made up to keep a guy in jail. Now, I don't know if it's any crime
00:34:35.700
itself, but we have all these weird situations lately. If you ask me, should Emmett Sullivan go to jail?
00:34:44.100
I'd say yes. I would say that based on what he just did to try to create a system out of nothing
00:34:50.520
to send an innocent person to jail while he's in a position of authority and trust is so bad
00:34:57.580
that if it were a crime, and I'm sure it's not, but if it were on the books as a crime,
00:35:04.360
I would say it should be a jailable offense. So he's doing something in full view of the public
00:35:09.740
that just by, you know, chance and the vagaries of history is not illegal. But it ought to be.
00:35:19.420
Shouldn't it? Shouldn't this be really illegal? Or at least banned or something. So to watch somebody
00:35:29.020
do something which I would say is as serious and as ethically empty as this, it should be a crime.
00:35:39.420
People should go to jail for something like this and there will be no penalty. People, you'll either
00:35:43.940
get away with it or it won't. No penalty. Now, the president, of course, has correctly and wisely
00:35:50.580
said that Flynn will be fined. So in other words, the president will back him up with a, I don't know,
00:35:55.860
a pardon or whatever you need to do there. But nobody wants to do that for political reasons,
00:36:00.320
but it's there. So Flynn will be fine. Did you see the story about Senator Richard Burr,
00:36:07.280
prominent Republican who sold a lot of his stock on February 13th while he was getting all these
00:36:13.560
confidential briefings about the coronavirus? And so he's in trouble because it looks like he
00:36:19.840
used his insider information about the coronavirus to save money by selling off his stocks.
00:36:28.340
And apparently his brother-in-law did the same thing, but Burr denies coordinating with him.
00:36:33.940
That part gets a little sticky. Now, here's the thing. If you see this story, you say to yourself,
00:36:39.980
well, that's a slam dunk. It's illegal to use your insider government information in this way.
00:36:46.800
He had insider government information. The dates line up. He traded right after he got the
00:36:52.740
information. Slam dunk, right? Boom. No problem, right? Wrong. This isn't even close to a crime,
00:37:02.780
in my opinion. I will now give you my legal opinion based on my absolutely no legal background.
00:37:10.720
And it goes like this. As long as there's also a perfectly legitimate reason for whatever you did,
00:37:18.080
you're not going to jail. Just in general. As long as there's also a legitimate reason,
00:37:26.060
you don't go to jail because people think you are using mentally the other reason.
00:37:30.740
They can only look at what you did. And if what you did had plenty of public reasons,
00:37:36.240
it doesn't matter if you also had some extra information because you still would have done
00:37:42.920
it. Why do I know that? Because on this very day that Senator Richard Burr was selling all of his
00:37:48.920
stocks, I too, without the benefit of any of his intelligence, was very close to selling all my
00:37:56.360
stocks. And it was because of public information. It was, what, three weeks after I'd, two or three
00:38:04.040
weeks after I'd called publicly for travel to be stopped from China, we knew what was happening
00:38:09.740
in Wuhan. It was obvious that it was going to, it was going to get out. It was already a big story.
00:38:16.360
So I was sitting here thinking, uh, I might want to sell all of my stocks. Now I didn't. I decided not
00:38:24.900
to. But Senator Richard Burr, or yeah, Richard Burr, I don't think he's going to go to jail. I think
00:38:33.260
he's got a lot of explaining to do, but it seems to me that, uh, as long as people like me were
00:38:39.880
looking at public information, which he also had access to, and that was enough to make the same
00:38:45.160
decision he made with the private information, I don't see him going to jail. His brother-in-law's
00:38:51.860
got some questions to answer though. I don't know about that. Um, so there's that. Paul Graham,
00:39:00.760
uh, famous investor, uh, started Y Combinator. He, he has a great Twitter feed. He has lots
00:39:08.040
of little, little good things. He was saying that he told his eight-year-old, this is the
00:39:13.340
advice to his eight-year-old. If you do creative work, try to avoid situations where people with
00:39:17.660
less ability than you can tell you what to do or edit your work. I thought, well, that's,
00:39:22.880
that's good advice. You don't want people with less ability telling you how to fix your creative
00:39:27.320
work. But I, I tweeted back that I call this boss diversification and it's a good advice for you.
00:39:33.780
If you have the option, you want to have as many bosses as you can get. Because if you have one
00:39:40.300
boss, your life is controlled by one person who might not be stable, might not even like you.
00:39:45.840
What could be worse than having the biggest part of your life determined by this one boss who might
00:39:51.360
not like you? So you want to go for what I call boss diversification, which usually means working
00:39:58.020
for yourself, which usually means having customers instead of a boss. Your customers become your boss
00:40:03.520
if you're an entrepreneur, but you got lots of them. So I can have several customers a day fire me and do
00:40:09.500
probably every single day. Somebody says, that's it. That thing you said today is the last day I'll ever
00:40:15.120
read Dilbert. So I get fired about seven times a day. That's just the ones I hear about. I don't know
00:40:20.820
how many times I don't hear about it, but it doesn't matter because as long as there are more people
00:40:25.080
becoming my boss, meaning my customers, they can fire me all day long. But what they can't do
00:40:30.480
is tell me how to change my work. All right. I would like to end on a, I don't know if this is a poem
00:40:41.640
or just good prose, but it's written by Gordana Birnat. Birnat, B-I-E-R-N-A-T. I wasn't familiar
00:40:51.380
with her. She's a blue check. So she's apparently done some things, a writer. And she wrote this
00:40:57.400
little, I don't know what it is. Is it like a poem without rhymes? You decide. So I just liked it so
00:41:04.540
much. I wanted to end today's Periscope on this thought. It kind of ties into the idea of the
00:41:11.720
simulation, ties into rethinking all of our priorities. It ties into rebooting because the
00:41:19.200
coronavirus allowed us to just sort of pull back and just look at everything. Look at who we are,
00:41:25.700
how we relate to our world, what we want, what our dreams, our ambitions, what's the meaning of life.
00:41:31.120
You know, all these things we're thinking of. And I thought Gordana summed it up well. So let me just
00:41:36.560
read it the way she wrote it on Twitter. Growing up, we somehow become consumers of things,
00:41:44.300
forgetting our original sole purpose as collectors of experiences. Know this, all you truly own is
00:41:53.340
yourself. Everything else is borrowed in the illusion of time and space. Be present.
00:42:01.120
And on that note, have a wonderful day and I will talk to you tonight.