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March 10, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
56:51
Episode 444 Scott Adams: Sports Are Broken, Trump’s Best Week Ever, Moderate Bernie
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Bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum Come on in here Gather around.
Grab your cups, your mugs, your chalice, your steins.
Grab your thermos, fill it with your favorite liquid.
It's time for a little bit of coffee with Scott Adams.
And if you have your container, and if you've filled it with your favorite liquid, I like coffee, it's time to join me now for the simultaneous sip, the best part of the day.
Ah! Bliss.
So... Have you noticed that the news just sort of stopped recently?
That's been happening more often.
There'll be a bunch of news, and then you wake up in the morning and you check CNN, you check Fox News, and there's no news.
Just all the news stopped.
Isn't it weird that all the news stopped?
Think about All of the things that people were afraid about this president when he got elected.
Take your mind back to...
Travel with me in your mind back to 2016.
What did people think was going to be happening about now?
I think what people expected to be happening in 2019, back when Trump got elected, is I believe the...
I believe the oceans were going to rise and take on our coasts.
I think the economy was going to be in a depression.
We should be in a full nuclear war by now.
Race war, of course.
And I don't think any of our allies would be talking to us and ISIS would be landing on the beach in the Northeast.
Did any of that happen?
Seems to me that there's nothing better for President Trump than no news.
Because everything's going well.
The news is all about stuff that goes wrong.
Today in the news there's a tragedy with an aircraft.
But the world is full of accidents.
We care about airplanes because they happen all at once.
But, you know, in the time that we were talking about the poor souls who perished on that one airplane, five times that many people died in automobile accidents.
So the world is actually looking pretty good.
You know, give or take tragedies that are sprinkled around.
But I want to talk to you about the fine people hoax.
Now, for anybody who's new to this, a lot of the world believes that the President of the United States called neo-Nazis fine people.
At Charlottesville. That, of course, never happened.
It's a hoax. He was referring to the people on both sides of the Confederate statue issue more generally as fine people on both sides of that question.
But then the news said, oh, you must be talking about the people marching with tiki tortures and saying anti-Semitic things.
Did you just call them fine people?
Which he clarified he did not.
But they still report it like he did.
Even though he clarified he did not, and even though it was obvious he did not, because who would?
So here's the fun part.
I have been practicing in public, seeing if I could deprogram people who have been, you know, let's say programmed into the cult of believing the fine people hoax.
And I don't know if some of you have watched what happens when people bring up the fine people on social media anywhere around my account.
And then pretty soon people are joining me and piling in to correct that hoax.
And I've been trying specific methods to deprogram someone from that belief.
And here's why this one's fun.
There are a lot of things that you can't prove conclusively is a hoax.
For example, I could tell you that I believe that chemtrails are not real.
I could tell you that I believe Q is not real.
But to find a proof that something is not real...
It is nearly impossible.
It's very rare. But in this one case, with the fine people, we have the actual transcript.
And then we also have some common sense, although common sense is largely an illusion.
But let me tell you the process I've been using to deprogram people, and specifically about a conversation I had with David Pakman.
David Pakman is host of the David Pakman Show.
He's had me on his show a couple of times.
He's very anti-Trump.
And he brought up the fine people hoax as if it were real on his Twitter.
And then a number of people pointed me at it and they were already telling him it wasn't real.
But let me show you an exchange because I want to point something out.
If you've been following me for a while, You know that I like to highlight whenever somebody gets tipped into cognitive dissonance.
Because there are some tells.
There are some things that people do that are kind of easy to spot once you know them.
And my favorite one is the word salad tell.
Now, word salad means that people are using words and they're forming sentences.
And the sentences make sense, at least in the way that verbs and nouns and stuff fit together.
But if you read it, it just is nonsense.
So if somebody starts out with a rational argument, as David Pakman did, you know, hey, he said this.
I heard it myself.
That's a rational thing to say, even though it's wrong.
And then he's presented with the counter-argument.
Now the first response to the counter-argument is, no, that can't be right.
So anybody's first response is, it can't be right that it's been reported as fact that he called neo-Nazis fine people, and it's all over.
CNN reports it, MSNBC, it's in most of the media.
It can't be reported as fact in all those places without actually being a fact, right?
So the first time you tell somebody it's not a fact, their reflex is, well, that can't be right.
I mean, that's nonsense.
Everybody knows this is a fact.
We all lived through it.
We all saw it.
It's reported in all the media.
And then you point them to the actual quote.
And it's pretty obvious it's not a fact.
And if it's not immediately obvious, I follow up with this.
So this is what I said in a tweet after a couple of exchanges with David Pakman.
I said, you think the President of the United States intentionally praised neo-Nazis in front of the world and figured that would go well?
So I put it in the form of a question.
This is more powerful in question form.
So I'm asking him to state directly his belief that he thinks the President of the United States intentionally, in public, praised neo-Nazis and thought that would go okay.
Because that's what he's claiming.
So I'm asking him to say it directly.
And then I go on and say, and Israel didn't notice.
So his belief, I'm trying to make him say directly, is that the President of the United States intentionally praised neo-Nazis who were marching, saying anti-Semitic things, that he intentionally praised them in public, thought that would be fine, and then also has to explain why Israel didn't notice.
Didn't notice? It was the biggest news story in the country, and they don't have a problem with it?
How come they can't see it?
How do you explain that?
So I said, and that's not a credible position compared to the obvious context.
So I said that that position, believing that that actually happened and Israel didn't notice, I said that position is not credible compared to the obvious interpretation, which is that he was talking about fine people on both sides of the statute question.
Now having said this, what is somebody going to do?
What would David Pakman's response be when I've said, say directly that you believe the President of the United States has said this in public and thought that would turn out okay, and you also believe that Israel didn't notice or decided not to make a fuss about it.
Say those things if that's what you believe.
What do you think David Pakman's response was?
I will read it to you.
He said any understanding of the propaganda model and of how consent and dissent are manufactured in a geopolitical world would more than explain those apparent incongruencies.
Merely pointing out that Trump's daughter is Jewish is a very myopic argument.
Do you see it? Yeah.
Now, I'm going to read it again, because the first time you heard it, you were probably waiting for it to make sense.
So, you know, the sentence starts and you go, okay, let's see where it's going.
All right, I think I see where it's going.
Wait, are you done talking?
Because it didn't go anywhere.
It's word salad. Let me read it again so you can get the full deliciousness of it.
Let me give you mine and then his, so you can see the juxtaposition.
My kill shot, in terms of the argument, is you think the President of the United States intentionally praised neo-Nazis in front of the world and figured that would go well?
And then I said, and Israel didn't notice?
Now, those are pretty solid points put in the form of a question.
Now, if you ask a question of that directly, do you think the president did this?
And do you think that your interpretation is that Israel was okay with it?
Confirm that. Is that true or false?
Instead of confirming it, or even denying it, His answer was, any understanding of the propaganda model and of how consent and dissent are manufactured in a geopolitical world would more than explain those apparent incongruencies.
Merely pointing out that Trump's daughter is Jewish is a very myopic argument.
That's the end of the argument, right?
As soon as one person goes into word salad...
There's nothing else to say.
I don't need to continue the argument because it's already over.
Now, I just tweeted this morning to him to invite him on the Periscope to see if we could come to some kind of final understanding on just this minor question.
I don't know if he'll want to do that.
Notice how effective that was.
In my experience, and you could...
Maybe some people who follow me on Twitter can confirm this.
Some of you have gone through the cycle just like this.
You've used the same arguments.
I've seen them. And you've argued with people who thought fine people really happened.
Haven't you noticed that when you do it, the person either changes the subject...
Or ends up with word salad.
Have you all noticed that?
Try it yourself.
Try it in your personal life.
Once you've explained what the real context is, that it's about people on both sides of the statute question, and then go with the, do you believe the president intentionally said this in public and thought it would go well, And that Israel was okay with it and didn't notice.
Didn't seem to have any problem with it.
Was that what you believe?
Because nobody's going to say, I do believe that.
And if they do, their brain is going to explode.
All right, that's enough on that.
Here's a question. I see some of you prompting me that Candace's and Hog Newsome's, that interview went down or got, that was, I guess, released, yes, today?
Must be released today.
So I haven't watched that yet, but I will.
And here's a question to you.
What happened to Black Lives Matter?
Do Black Lives...
Has everybody agreed that we're all good now on that?
Black Lives Matter now?
What... Why don't we see them anymore?
Yeah, this is another one of those, the dog that didn't bark.
Have there been no high-level police shootings of the type that Black Lives Matter mostly concentrates on?
Didn't they just sort of disappear?
So it looks to me like Black Lives Matter just sort of disappeared.
And I don't know why.
Could it be that there is no longer this feeling about this president?
Is it possible that people see good things happening on criminal justice, on employment, they see strong border stuff?
Which, by the way, if you were not aware of this, the African American community is not big on letting people come in to compete for jobs.
You know, the African American community kind of likes a border.
They like a border, on average.
So, it feels to me like Black Lives Matter just sort of went away.
How about Antifa?
Do you remember that Antifa big gathering this weekend?
Neither do I. Are they starting to peter out?
I think they are.
Have you seen a march with the pink pussy hats lately?
Not lately. Maybe it's because it's winter.
That could explain a lot, actually.
It could be that it's just winter.
Things slow down a little bit.
Nobody wants to be outdoors.
But it feels to me like the president is entering a really good period.
His approval is up.
Not as high as you might want it to be, but it's up.
What about the NFL protests?
NFL protests stopped, didn't they?
They all just stopped. So it seems to me that a lot of the, let's say, symbolic resistance has petered out.
We don't see much from Antifa.
We don't see Black Lives Matter at all.
They just sort of disappeared.
We don't see the NFL kneeling.
Why? What changed?
Well, I think what changed is the longer you go without the president doing something that confirms their deepest, worst suspicions, the more it doesn't seem realistic.
Somebody said the Super Bowl ended.
But they weren't kneeling anyway.
So, yes, people are saying the funding dried up.
That's possible. So, now, on top of the fact that the protests seem to have died down in this country, for whatever reason, have you noticed also that the president has not created any new outrages lately?
Now, he comes up with some good nicknames.
He called Ann Coulter wacky on Twitter.
He called Bernie crazy.
He called somebody else something else.
But have you noticed that President Trump is staying within the lane?
It's his lane, meaning that he's got the nicknames and he'll still give you his opinion, etc.
But he's not really leaving the lane, is he?
He's not saying things that are taken out of context.
I guess all the insider books have been debunked.
People are getting tired of the anonymous source.
It's just stopped working. Have you noticed that the anonymous source stuff just stopped working?
And then there was the Russia collusion that just stopped.
The obstruction of justice looks like that's going to be nothing because you can't obstruct an investigation.
Well, you can't.
Since the Mueller thing is not a justice job, it's a different animal.
You can't really obstruct it, I don't think, from a legal perspective.
So the president has now this, you know, there are these 80-some, 81 requests for just looking for stuff.
Now, correct me if I'm wrong.
If you're the Dems and you struck out on collusion...
And you're going to strike out on the other stuff that we know about.
And you send out 81 requests for people and entities, and you're basically ruining these people.
So I don't know if you know about Michael Caputo, a Republican consultant type, who has just refused.
He got hit with one of the requests, and he just said, I'm out, because I'm not going to ruin my family with legal expenses.
For a witch hunt. So he just sent him out.
I'm not complying.
Now, I hope all 81 do the same.
Because it would be a tragedy if he were the only one who said no, and then he gets some kind of penalty for that.
It would be a tragedy on top of a tragedy.
I'm hoping that other people take the same stand, which is...
This is enough.
This is just so nakedly political that it doesn't help the country, it doesn't help anybody.
It's just all bad.
Now, it seems to me that Jerry Nadler, who I like to call old nads, old nads has, in my opinion, overreached.
Because I think even if you're an anti-Trumper and you're watching him, you're watching old nads and his 81 people he wants to talk to just in case, don't you know that that's illegitimate?
Even the people who wish that they could find something on Trump, even the people who wish Trump would leave office, even the people who are sure that maybe there must be something bad there, if you look hard enough, you'll find something, even the people who think there's something there and they wish Trump would go, even they know this is too far.
Don't you think? Don't you think that they hold simultaneously, you know, well, I hope it works, but I have to admit, This is way beyond.
This is way beyond the pale.
I think people have both feelings.
I don't think anybody's thinking, I won't say anybody, but I think the majority are not thinking this is legitimate, even the people who are anti-Trump.
They could probably feel it.
And so it feels to me that the old NADs empty the clip, throw everything at the monster technique is probably going to hurt the Dems because it reduces them to What would be the word?
Nitpickers? It reduces them to basically...
You know, in the Philippines there's this thing called Smoky Mountain.
Have you ever heard of that? Smoky Mountain is literally a mountain of garbage.
And people are so poor that there are poor people climbing through the garbage on Smoky Mountain looking for any food or anything.
And it feels like old Nads is just on Smoky Mountain looking for, there must be something in here about Trump.
We could find something.
And it's all becoming weak and pathetic, and it makes them look like...
Yeah, I feel like there's an analogy here that would be funny.
Something about they're literally looking for the fleas.
You know, they miss the dog.
They're looking for the fleas instead of the dog, I guess, at this point.
Something like that. I'll work on that analogy.
Anyway... So I checked the news today to see what they're hammering on Trump for.
Because you know there's going to be something, right?
You can't open up. It's impossible to look at the news on CNN and now see some Trump bashing.
So here was the worst Trump bashing.
He signed Bibles.
That's it. The worst thing they could come up with about Trump this week...
Is that he signed Bibles for people when he visited the disaster zone.
So first of all, he visited the disaster zone.
So that's, you know, that's a good look for any president.
And second of all, he was signing a Bible.
Do you know what people hear when they hear that story?
Now, apparently, you know, people are saying that's bad for them because you didn't write the Bible.
You know, you're not God.
Why are you signing the Bible?
But when you hear the story, all you hear is, Trump, Bible.
It's all good. It's just all good.
The worst thing they could say about him is a good story.
He signed the Bible. All right.
There's a story now about North Korea is fixing up one of its missile rocket launching facilities.
And so people are looking for why this means President Trump is failing in his negotiations.
Now, the first place I saw this report was NBC. And I don't know if you have the same feeling I do, but Glenn Greenwald has completely ruined me on NBC. So if NBC News breaks a story and it's bad for Trump, the first thing I say is, oh, it's CIA. It's just a BS story from NBC. My first thought is that it's not true.
Before I even look at the details of the story, I swear to God, and I don't have this feeling about CNN. So as much as I mock CNN, if there's a breaking news on CNN, I usually think it's probably true.
Everybody's got their fake news problems, but if CNN breaks the story, I think, well, it's probably true.
When NBC breaks a story, I have the opposite feeling.
As soon as I see NBC on it, that's the first thing I look for.
Where does it come from? I see the NBC and I go, oh, bullshit.
There's just something that somebody's making up.
Could it be an ambiguous story from a satellite?
Could it be an anonymous source?
You know, typical NBC story.
So, this story says they're fixing up this facility that apparently could launch ICBM missiles for testing, but it also could be a rocket for satellites.
Now, I'm not too up on what North Korea did with satellites, but I think they would be allowed to launch a rocket for a satellite.
I don't know that that's prohibited.
But in any case, it makes sense that they're fixing up that facility, even if it's just for negotiating purposes.
Even if they're just trying to hint to Trump, well, you know, you haven't given us what we want, maybe we'll just fix up this missile facility.
We won't necessarily be launching a missile, but let's just fix up this facility.
So in the context of the negotiation, No big deal.
Probably is exactly what they should be doing to create a little doubt in our minds so that we'll be a little more flexible.
Now, have you noticed that Bernie Sanders looks moderate lately?
And I'm wondering how that's going to play out.
Because Sanders looks moderate compared to the AOCs and the further left group.
And it feels to me like...
That's an important story.
Because the Bernie proposals went from crazy far too left to somewhere in the middle.
We didn't change.
Well, I guess we did change mentally.
He didn't change.
And now he moved from the far left to sort of the middle just because other people got left of him and it makes him look more moderate than he would have looked before.
And we're also getting used to the ideas.
The more you think about stuff, even if you don't like it, the more normal it becomes just because you're thinking about it a lot.
So the first time you ever heard free college, your hair caught on fire and you thought, we can't afford that, that'll never work, blah, blah.
By the millionth time you hear free college, you start thinking to yourself, well, maybe there's a way.
Maybe we can get there somehow.
So I like to use the...
The catchphrase that capitalism delivers what socialism promises.
And if Trump takes some version of that as his slogan, socialism is just going to be wiped out.
Socialism can't stand up to that framing.
So if Trump adopts as a Aspirational goal that people should have good health care and they should be able to afford college and have a good wage.
He can say, I embrace every one of your goals.
I have a way to get as close as possible.
Somebody says that's a PragerU quote.
I haven't heard it from PragerU, but I would not be surprised if they have a similar thought.
And maybe I saw it there and I don't remember.
But the idea of it is strong, that capitalism delivers what socialism promises.
I wouldn't just say capitalism delivers, and then period, socialism promises.
That's weaker Than to say, capitalism delivers what socialism promises.
It's the what socialism promises that's the...
The powerful part is that you're talking about the same end state.
The same end state is everybody's happy with their health care, everybody's happy with their college, everybody's got a good wage.
That's the end state. Everybody agrees on that.
It's just capitalism delivers what socialism promises.
Please consider moving your mic away from your throat.
Away from my throat?
I think what I might need to do is put a topper on my microphone because it's a little too sensitive.
I've been hearing that comment.
Now... Alright.
So, I want to talk about sports.
And how sports are broken.
And I'm going to come to this through the side door.
I've been having... A fun conversation with people on the question of trans athletes, specifically people born men who become or make the transition, I guess, to identify as women and then play women's sports.
And people who are conservative mostly say, damn you, Scott, how can you support what they would call men, but I would call women, because they've identified and they've transformed as much as they can.
And they say, that's not fair, because there's such a difference in their skill level, it ruins the sports.
Well, let's dig into that a little bit.
Number one, what if women tried to play professional football?
Well, I think professional football is a sport that should stop anyway because of the head injuries.
Likewise, I think that professional boxing and cage fighting, what do you call that?
Ultimate fighting?
What's that called? I think those things are unnecessary sports.
I have no problem if somebody wants to do it and somebody else wants to watch it.
But these are completely unnecessary sports.
So do you care if...
And there's not much of a women's football league anyway.
Now let's say that somebody born a man transitions to identify as female and then goes into a cage fight with a woman.
Why would the woman take that match?
Oh, MMA, sorry.
Yes, that's what I was looking for.
So let's say some biologically born man transitions to a woman and then wants to fight with only women.
Well, the women have an option of fighting.
They could just say, no, we choose not to.
And then capitalism takes care of it.
There's no fight. Nobody takes the fight.
That's the end of it. Now let's take badminton.
Is it a problem if a biologically born man who transitions to a woman enters the women's badminton league?
Probably not.
I don't know. Probably doesn't make much difference.
How about ping pong?
Probably not.
Doesn't make much difference. How about bowling?
Probably doesn't make much difference.
How about soccer?
In theory, a male should have some advantages, on average, over the average female.
Would it ruin soccer?
Well, in my experience, I've played far more, I think this is true, I've played a lot more co-ed soccer than I have played all men on the field.
And soccer is my favorite sport.
And I would say that co-ed soccer is actually way more fun.
Now, if you were doing it competitive and it was professional, well, you've got different standards there.
But why do we need that?
So the next thing I'm going to say is that schools that push this high-level competition for the kids are more bad than good.
In other words, so people say to me, well, what about high school and college?
You know, you can't have, you know, somebody who's such a strong player be on a women's team.
It would ruin the sport.
To which I say, maybe it needs to be ruined.
Maybe we should not be driving kids all over the state every weekend to play sports at some high level when it gives them basically no benefits for the rest of their life.
Sports are great, but let's compare these two things.
If you said, hey, we're going to have these teams.
They're co-ed. You've got to have at least a few women on every team.
We'll have these friendly league.
We'll all have a good time.
Compared to, you're going to be on the competitive team.
You're going to work every weekend.
You're going to be up till midnight by the time you practice and then do your homework.
And then every weekend, the whole family has to drive you around the state to go to your highly competitive match because you're in the elite league.
You're one of the good kids.
I don't know that those kids have a better life.
I don't know that anybody's better off from that.
It's a big burden. It's a big expense.
It's not fair to the kids who don't have enough wherewithal, enough income to do these higher league stuff.
Basically, it should just go away.
Now, here's the other thing.
Sports in high school, less so in college, but sports in high school are primarily about humiliating the people who are bad at sports.
Let me say that again. Sports in high school, the primary thing that's happening is the humiliation of the people who are not good at sports.
Because for every team that has some really good players on it, most people are not them.
Most people are just being embarrassed that they were not born as good athletes.
So you have a situation that for the benefit of the few elite athletes who really do enjoy the whole thing, and there are certainly some people who can, you know, love the competition, you know, they thrive in it, they learn what it's like to be a winner and sometimes losing, they get better character. All those things are true for about 5% of the kids.
The other 95% are just continually reminded that they're not as good as those 5%, as something that isn't that important.
So we first of all take sports and we blow it up like it's important, because it's fun, but it's not really important.
We blow it up like it's really important, and then we say, these few stars are the good ones.
Oh man, they're great.
This 5%, they're great at sports.
So that we can humiliate the 95%.
We just were not born with the interest, the muscle structure, the hand-eye coordination to do that stuff.
So it's the cruelest, most unproductive, People get injured for no good reason, etc.
I think the whole sports world needs to be retooled, especially in high school.
Now, let's take sports themselves.
I would say tennis is a completely broken sport.
Tennis started out as a great idea.
Two people hitting this ball back and forth.
But then the equipment got better and better.
And as the quality of the racket improved, the speed of the serve got so fast that mostly tennis is watching somebody serve and they either hit an ace they can't return or they double fault.
So the serve, which started out to be just a way to get the ball in play, turned into the thing that ruins the sport because the rackets got so good and people got so good at hitting it fast that it just ruins the sport.
So you should get rid of the serve.
And by the way, there is a tennis game where you do get rid of the serve.
Somebody starts the ball, and you have to hit it.
By the third hit, the ball is live, but you just start it from your hand.
So tennis is broken because the equipment got too good, and then the serve just ruins the whole game.
Take basketball. Is it fair that short people play basketball and tall people play basketball too?
How is that fair? Basketball should be in your own height.
There should be no such thing as somebody who's under six foot playing on the same field with somebody who's over six foot.
You should constrain basketball by height.
You just shouldn't have different heights in the same field.
In soccer, it should be co-ed and get rid of the...
and you should make the goals bigger.
Imagine taking soccer and just making the goals wider so that the end score is, you know, 12 to 15.
How much not fun is it You know what would be fun is to have a goal for soccer that's a big goal where the keeper is, and then there's a shorter extension that's maybe only three feet tall.
So you've got a few ways to score, and the keeper can't cover it all, but the other players could.
Now take baseball.
Baseball is barely a sport.
Baseball, if you like baseball, you probably like the atmosphere, you like the statistics, you like it sort of as a hobby.
But as a sport, it no longer keeps up with the modern sense of attention span.
So, how many...
How many biologically born men who transition to women are ruining women's professional Major League Baseball?
It's sort of like not a problem, is it?
So sports are largely ruined.
What's another sport? Football should just go away, because all it is is a way to injure the brains of children and adults.
Let's take golf.
Alright, golf. Golf is broken because the clubs are different lengths.
Do you know how much easier it would be to play golf if your clubs were always the same length so you never had to figure out where the distance from you to the ball is?
Golf is a stupid idea.
And it's got all these rules that make it less fun than it should be.
Yes, high-level competition is great for a small number of people.
And for the rest, it's just a way to feel bad.
So then some people who said to me when I said, well, why can't you have, you know, transgender competing in the women's in the women's divisions?
And people said to me, well, if you're in favor of that, if you're in favor of that, are you in favor of athletes using performance-enhancing drugs?
How about that, Scott? Huh?
If you're in favor of transgenders, wouldn't you also be in favor of performance-enhancing drugs, Scott?
Yeah. To which I say, yes, of course I am.
I'm very much in favor of performance-enhancing drugs, so long as everybody's on the same rules.
Right now we have a situation where people use them, cheating, and other people don't want to cheat, so they don't use them.
Have you seen the muscle structure of some of your famous top tennis players?
Try to tell me that the top tennis players, both male and female, are not taking performance-enhancing drugs.
Maybe. Maybe they have sudden muscle growth in their 30s.
Maybe. Maybe they got a better trainer.
Maybe when they turned 34, they finally discovered how to work out efficiently and their muscles started growing quickly.
Maybe. I don't think so.
To me, it seems that most of the major sports, many of the stars are juiced, and so you should either say everybody can do it or nobody can do it, here are the risks, here are the benefits.
So when you ask me, am I okay with professional athletes taking performance-enhancing drugs, I say, you mean the current situation?
That's the current situation.
Now, if you don't play tennis, it's a little less obvious how bad it is.
But you can...
It's easier to identify people who have gone on and off steroids or some kind of performance-enhancing stuff.
All right. Question...
I was considering giving a drum lesson on Periscope one of these days.
Now, I'm taking drum lessons, so I'm just a total beginner, but I'm taking online drum lessons.
And the reason I would do it would be not so much to teach you how to play drums, but to show you an 80-20 rule.
And the 80-20 rule is that I believe I can teach you 80% of what you need to know to play the drums in 20 minutes.
That's not what the 80-20 rule is, but for my purposes it is.
So would anybody be interested?
People who do not play the drums.
Would anybody be interested in a 20-minute special periscope in which I teach you in 20 minutes 80% of everything you'll ever need to know about playing the drums?
Not that you ever need to play the drums, just as interest to see if I could do it, see if I could fit it in 20 minutes.
So I just want to get a sense of interest.
Would that be something that people would watch?
What I would want to...
The thing that I would want to demonstrate by teaching you drums, even if you don't care about the drums, Is that the state of online training is very primitive, and I'll show you a demonstration of how good it could be by modeling some of the things that I think are coming.
So the basic setup is this.
Online training is just an extension of in-person training, usually, where you just film or video somebody who's just a human doing the same thing they would have done if they were in person.
But I think there is a huge untapped potential to have those online trainers be the best trainers in the world.
Because if the best trainer in the world is teaching you something, you're probably better off I'm seeing that there's a little delay in your comments, so I'm seeing all the yeses coming through.
Is hypnosis involved?
No. Oh, okay.
A lot of interest. One of these afternoons I'll do that.
So it won't be a morning thing.
I'll take you to my drum set.
And in 20 minutes, I'll teach you 80% of everything.
Now, here's the lesson before I do it that I would propose showing you.
So one of it is, part of the lesson is to actually learn something about the drums.
But moreover, the bigger picture is I want to show you how effectively you could learn something if it's done a certain way.
So it's the certain way I want to demonstrate.
So I want to show you how effective an online training course could be if it's done the way I'm going to do it.
So it's a little test.
I think it will be effective, but we'll do this in a day or two.
All right. I see that there's at least one person who has signed up to ask a question.
I'm going to test something now in which I'm going to pull my microphone and...
Can you hear me now?
I may have lost sound.
I may have lost sound.
So I'm going to invite somebody.
Let's say Perry.
And I want to see if you can hear me and Good guest.
Hello guest, Perry.
Perry, are you there?
Hi. Hey Scott. Hi.
This is a little bit of a technology test because I pulled my microphone and I want to see if in guest mode you and I have a similar volume level because that was a problem before when I had the microphone on.
So I'll wait for the audience to tell us if your volume and my volume are similar now.
But did you have a question?
Well, it came up last night.
I wanted to ask you your perspective on how Someone like Jim Carrey got to where he was.
And then in the past, like, Trump era, how he, like, came undone, basically.
Well... Let me say this.
You probably have seen a number of Jim Carrey's artworks, which he does disturbing looking art, tends to be anti-Republican.
The first thing I want to say about that is, as an artist, every time I see one of his works, I say to myself, Damn, that's really good.
You know, I gotta say, he is a legitimate artist.
Yeah, seriously. On top of being, you know, his other skills.
So, first of all, total respect for his pure artistic ability.
Part of what I like about his art is that it projects his inner insanity.
In other words, you see a picture and it's about a subject, but you're also seeing a picture that's telling you about the artist.
In the same way that, let's say, Van Gogh.
You see Van Gogh's art, he looks a little crazy.
But that's what you like about it, because you get to see a world through somebody else's eyes.
You get to see the world through the artist's eyes.
And Jim Carrey does that too.
But unfortunately, his vision is sort of dark and dangerous and a little bit crazy.
Well, how crazy is he really?
Because go back and look at some of the YouTube videos of him in the 90s.
And he is a...
An excellent persuader, like now that I have your lens on the world.
He's like beyond Trump skills, like he's insanely good.
Well, yes.
The one thing I wouldn't take away from him is that he seems very smart, you know, in his own way.
He may have a narrow channel of what he knows about.
He may not be It seems pretty smart.
So I'm not sure that I have a smart answer for that in terms of what it is.
But I would note that he probably is taken in by the same influences that take in the rest of the country.
You know, he probably believes that the president said there are fine people who are neo-Nazis.
He probably believes that's true.
Maybe, yeah. The news said it was true.
Is it possible to be so good that you go off, like, you're beyond the pale, so you just go up to a god level, and he just, like...
Went off into a black hole.
He's just too good.
I think maybe what we're seeing is something like honesty.
Because nobody's accusing Jim Carrey of lying about anything, right?
These seem to be his honest opinions of things.
And I think maybe he's just at a point in his career where he's opening the door a little bit wider.
You're just seeing a little bit more of The troubled mind that has created so many good things that entertain us.
It's no surprise that performers and artists are a little bit crazy.
I don't know if science can confirm that or not.
Like, a lot of them are a little bit crazy.
And maybe that the craziness and the creativity seem to be related because if your mind is unbounded and you're allowing yourself to think anything's possible, it can make you crazy.
So I think being an artist and being crazy are pretty darn related.
If you don't mind, one last question.
Just a really random Scott Adams question.
Do you think it's possible that you could...
In your context, like, coax yourself to have your sense of smell back.
Like, do you think you could trick your brain persuasively to regain your sense of smell?
If I were in the 20% of the public Who can experience what hypnotists call the phenomenon, which means that you can see and sense and touch things as if they're real when they're not.
In other words, you could see an elephant standing in the room.
Most people could never be hypnotized to that level.
Some people can. If I were in that group, In theory, you could hypnotize me to imagine I'm smelling things just because I remember the smells.
So I could smell a rose, and I would have the impression of smelling it, but it would be an illusion.
So in theory, if I were in that category, which I'm not, that could happen.
But I couldn't rewire my brain to gain that function if there's something physically wrong, which I assume is the case.
There's an air gap there somewhere.
But thank you for the question.
Yeah, thanks for your time.
You're the best. Thanks.
Let me see who else is on here.
I'm going to take Virus Joe.
Let's see what Virus Joe has to say.
Okay.
Hey, Joe.
Hi. You got a question?
Yes, I do. I always watch you every day.
I'm glad I get to talk to you for once.
And that's an amazing thing.
Have a simultaneous sip with you.
But my question was, again, that your persuasion and your mindset has definitely changed my life.
And I've said before to you as well, too, I really appreciate it.
Thank you for that, adopting the non-loser philosophy on life.
And I was wondering if there was any other...
I guess any other philosophy that you would say helps?
I've heard you talk about a lot of other ones, but that maybe aren't in your books or aren't as highlighted as much in your books that are as powerful as that can be?
Well, that's a perfect setup to tell you that I just started my first draft for my upcoming book.
It's called Loser Think. And the idea there is that there are a number of unproductive ways people think.
Which is different from being dumb and different from being uneducated, which are their own separate problems.
But there are smart people who have not been exposed to the various ways that people think in different disciplines.
For example, you could be really good as an artist and be very smart and good at what you do, but if you have not been exposed to the economist's view of what a sunk cost is, It wouldn't be obvious to you how to deal with the sunk cost.
So the general answer is that by exposing people to the most basic thinking processes across different fields, you'll become a better thinker and that should have all kinds of benefits.
So I'll teach you how to do that in the upcoming book that will come out in October.
But beyond that, you'd have to look at every individual situation.
Awesome. Well, I look forward to it.
Thank you very much. One last question real quick.
Are you ever going to work for Trump in his campaign?
I can't see that as a possibility.
Honestly, if I were the Trump campaign, I would invite me to help.
That's what I'd do. I would too.
But given that I give away every good idea I have on that topic for free, you know, if he's also good at making deals, why would he pay me for something he's getting for free?
True. I think I have a value as doing what I'm doing.
So I think I'll probably stick to what I'm doing.
Thank you very much.
Thank you. Have a good day.
And I'll see you later.
All right. Take care. Bye.
Alright, what time is it?
I'm going to take one more question from...
I prefer people who have a profile picture.
Dale! Hey, how are you?
Ah, nice to see you again.
Anyway, I just wanted to give you a quick comment.
You sounded better on sound balance when you were using your microphone than when you unplugged it.
So the sound was more even with the guest when I had the microphone in?
That is correct. Okay.
Thank you. Good to know.
And that was your only comment, I assume?
That was it. Just thought I'd give you a quick one.
All right. Thank you. Appreciate it.
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