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June 5, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
55:58
Episode 555 Scott Adams: MAGA Hats, How to Get RICH From News Bubbles, Digital Babies, Insult News
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What a day, what a day.
It's a beautiful, beautiful pre-summer day.
And I know I'm in a good mood.
I'll bet you are.
And there's so much to talk about.
So much to talk about.
Most of it's good news.
I'd say at least 80% of it.
It's all good news. That's why you come here.
You come here for the dopamine and the good news.
My goal for the coming year is to increase your dopamine as well as your knowledge.
But to do that, first we must do something far more important.
We must enjoy a simultaneous sip.
And it doesn't matter if you've got a cup or a mug or a glass.
It doesn't matter if you've got a chalice, a stein or a tankard.
You could have a thermos.
You could have a flask.
You could have a vessel.
But if you have one of those things, fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure that I call the simultaneous sip.
Ah, sublime.
All right. First of all, if you have not seen Joe Rogan's podcast, it's a new one, with Naval Ravikant.
Stop everything you're doing and put that on your list.
And I don't say that about a lot of things, but this is one of those things where you should just trust me.
Put it on your list.
Don't not watch it.
I refer to Naval as the smartest person in the world.
Now, you could argue there might be people in the world who have higher IQs.
I wouldn't know. But what is interesting about Naval is that he has used his vast intelligence to think about stuff and research stuff and learn things and make connections that you haven't yet made.
And he has the added advantage that he can explain it to you in the simplest form so that you can acquire the benefits of his vast intellectual pursuits very easily.
So he's the smartest person in the world, Because he's accessible.
It doesn't help to be the smartest person in the world and not be able to tell anybody anything.
Nobody can understand what you're talking about.
Compare, for example, to Nassim Taleb.
Probably very smart.
I wouldn't know because I don't understand anything he says.
So, is he smart?
Well, I'm willing to believe that Nassim Taleb is a brilliant guy.
Because I don't understand a thing he says.
He's not an accessible intellectual.
So his knowledge, whatever it is, is sort of stranded in his head.
There's no bridge to my brain.
I can't get any of that in me.
But when Naval talks, it goes directly in.
He's got that gift, and you don't want to miss that.
So just look for Joe Rogan's latest podcast.
I have tweeted as well.
Let's talk about the Uyghurs in China.
This is a really...
This is a really tough topic.
The Uyghurs are the Muslim minority who are, I guess they're not ethnically Chinese.
Is that true? I don't know what they are ethnically, but they have allegedly, and I think the evidence is pretty strong that it's true, they've been rounded up and put in concentration camps to the tune of two million of them.
Almost, I think entirely, I'm saying almost, but I think entirely, because of their religious beliefs.
Now, none of us can be happy about that, but there's something that has to be said about this.
The Chinese are treating Islam like a health problem.
If you think about it, they're literally using quarantine to try to eradicate an idea, you know, the idea of their religion, as if it's a virus.
And I've said before that music, for example, I call a drug because it goes into your head and it operates on your brain and it changes your mood and even can change your actions.
So to think that music is not a drug I think is a It's a mistake.
You should think of it that way in addition to all the other ways you think of it.
But you should always think of music as a drug because it's reprogramming your mind.
Religion, too, is like a drug because it goes into somebody's minds and it actually forms their thoughts and determines their actions.
So like music, like video games, like a lot of other things, it's something that enters your body like a virus, like a drug.
And once it's in your body, it sort of takes over your thinking to some degree, sort of like you've been taken over by some kind of an alien virus.
Now, if you say, well, the virus that I got is the virus of, let's say, Buddhism.
Chances are, if you had that Buddhism virus, and here I'm calling the virus just the idea of Buddhism, the way people think, you probably would not be dangerous.
Would you agree? No, I'm not saying that's a universal truth, but if you got the Buddhist mental virus, and you became a Buddhist, you probably wouldn't be very dangerous to a country, to anybody else.
If you got the Christian virus, Would you be dangerous?
Maybe. Depends where you are, what period of time, how radical your variety of Christianity is.
But, you know, 99% of it or some vast majority of it would not be dangerous.
So most of the modern, you know, 2019 Christian idea virus is benign.
It might be good for the person who has it.
It won't necessarily catch on to other people, unless it happens to be a strain of the virus, that people are actively promoting it and trying to convert other people, in which case it would catch on.
But the new people who got it would not necessarily be dangerous.
So they would be catching an idea, like a virus, that would change them, but not necessarily in a way that would Affect the country, the tribe, the family.
Now take Islam.
90-whatever percent of Islamic ideas can enter people, and they don't make any difference at all.
They just become good citizens.
They're good Muslims. They love their God.
They love their neighbors. They love their families.
They fit in in their community.
So most people would be, let's say, immune to To any bad effects from the virus.
But Islam is not one thing.
There's the peaceful form of it, which everybody says.
I think pretty much everybody would agree, that's great.
Let's have more of that peaceful form of Muslim or of Islam.
It's all good. But there's another strain in which if you try to leave the religion, you're killed.
Actually killed for just changing your mind about the religion.
That's pretty dangerous.
And there's another, you know, pocket of Islam in which they want to conquer the world and dominate and turn people who are not Islamic into sex slaves and that sort of thing.
Behead the infidels, whatever.
Now China is taking a very inhumane, cold-hearted There's no way you can defend it approach to the Uyghur community.
It seems that what they're doing is treating it like a health problem, meaning that they're quarantining it, and they're literally trying to eradicate it in the host, meaning the people.
They're trying to re-educate them.
You know, there are reports of torture and every other kind of bad thing that happens in a concentration camp.
And they're treating it like it's a virus outbreak, that they don't want to spread to the rest of China.
Now, here's the problem.
There are a lot of problems with this.
First of all, it reminds us, of course, of the Holocaust.
But I try to say this every time the Holocaust comes up.
If you're comparing something to the Holocaust, you probably shouldn't.
There are some things that just don't compare exactly to anything.
The Holocaust doesn't really compare to anything.
It's its own thing. Right?
American slavery Doesn't really compare to anything else.
It's sort of its own thing. So using those analogies tend to derail any conversation.
But we are certainly reminded of those things by looking at these concentration camps.
Now, what's fundamentally different, but most people would say not that much less evil, is that it seems that the intention of the Chinese concentration camps has more to do with trying to protect the country from what they see as this idea virus of Islam.
And that doesn't make it better.
It just makes it different.
So let's forget the Holocaust because it's just different.
We can't learn too much from it except that people are evil and they can do horrible things more than you can even imagine they can do.
So, China can't be, let's see, can't be forgiven, but they are taking an approach which has to be acknowledged as not like anything you've ever seen before.
I don't know that there's any analogy to trying to quarantine and then eliminate an idea of virus, which is what they would call it.
You know, if you're Islamic, you would just call it your religion.
And that would be a fair thing to call it.
But from the Chinese point of view, they actually have sort of a health outbreak that could cause people to be radicalized in ways that would be damaging to China.
Apparently, the Uyghurs, unfortunately for them, live in a...
Their land, their territory, has strategic value that's very, very high.
If they didn't live in a place with high strategic value, Probably they wouldn't have nearly as much problem.
Now the other thing you have to keep in mind is that China is an atheist country, and I believe that they try to deprogram every other kind of religion.
Is that not true? I'll need a fact check on that.
Is modern China...
In 2009, can you be an out-of-the-closet practicing Catholic?
Is that something you can do?
Could you be a member of any cult, any religion?
Probably not. So the first question you have to ask yourself is, are the Uyghurs being treated in a way that every other Chinese person is not being treated?
And the answer is, I don't know.
I don't know.
Because if the average Chinese person who is ethnically Chinese and not a Uyghur, if they tried to form a church and go to church and teach the Bible, what would happen to them?
I think they would be immediately stopped.
But I need somebody to validate that that's true.
Now if that's true, you have to use that frame to look at what's happening to the Uyghurs.
Under that frame, as horrible as this is, they would be treated exactly the way every other Chinese person would be treated.
Every other Chinese person is saying, I'm going to stay away from this religion because it's going to get me some big problems in my daily life.
The Uyghurs are apparently saying, I'm going to keep my religion No matter how bad this is for me.
But I don't know that they're being treated differently.
That doesn't make it right.
I'm certainly not forgiving anything China does, and I think you could make the argument that because of the Uyghur situation, we shouldn't trade with them at all.
You could make a pretty compelling moral, ethical, and even practical argument that we should shut down China entirely.
Not cause a war.
Not cause trouble.
Just say, you are so...
We disavow you so strongly that how can we trade with you?
It's so bad that we can't even do business with you.
There is such a thing.
You could be so bad that you can't do business with somebody.
And are we there?
Are we at that point where we just can't do business with them?
That's an important question.
I understand the State Department just issued a strong statement, which is what's making me bring this up.
So the administration just issued a statement condemning in very strong language, very directly, the Chinese treatment of the Uyghurs.
And so let's keep an eye on that.
Let's keep an eye on that.
All right. Joe Biden's The energy plan apparently had some plagiarism in it.
So apparently he borrowed from some non-profits who talked about what to do with climate change and energy and all that.
Apparently they lifted approximately some language and put it in this.
Now of course this brings up Joe Biden's plagiarism from I don't know however many decades ago where he had a speech where he plagiarized some other famous person.
But I'm going to say, if that's the biggest problem you have with Biden, is that a staff member borrowed some language from something that they agreed with, that's the smallest problem in the world.
So I'm going to say that it's of no importance.
But I've noticed that as people talk about Biden's plan, The most important story is that he seems full-throated about nuclear.
He's calling out nuclear and especially he seems to be referring to the smaller plants, the Generation 4 that need some extra development.
He seems to be calling out exactly the right plan.
As far as I can tell, he's right on point.
But it also agrees very much with the president's plan.
So the Biden's breakthrough climate change green energy plan, I'd like to see it compared to President Trump's plan, which It's nonexistent in the sense that he hasn't packaged up anything that looks like a climate or energy plan.
There are plenty of things the energy department is doing that are great.
They're doing a lot of things to promote nuclear, to promote development, to make it easier to iterate.
So the administration is doing great things in this energy field, but they haven't packaged it up in anything like a plan the way Biden has.
And so I fault Trump's administration for that.
All right. I was stopped in the grocery store yesterday.
I was just at my local supermarket picking up some groceries with Christina, and a young gentleman came over and asked if I was Scott Adams.
And I said, yes, I am. And he said he was a fan of the podcast, or whatever this is, the Periscopes and YouTubes.
And he recognized me from that, and he asked if he could have my autograph On his mega hat, which he had in the car.
So he asked me if he could go to the car and get his mega hat and come in and get my autograph.
What do you think I said?
No. No.
Now, I would have no problem signing anything for anybody if it's just a signature.
But I'm not going to stand in public, especially where I live, and sign a Make America Great Again hat in front of other people.
Now keep in mind that my neighborhood is quite diverse.
So the staff and the shoppers in my store, it was the full melting pot.
And the last thing in the world I'm going to do is stand in public and sign a MAGA hat.
I'm not going to do that.
So I hope I was polite.
I hope he took it in a polite way because I was...
I love the fact that he asked for the autograph.
I'll never be tired of that because I don't do anything I do in my career to not be noticed and not be appreciated.
So I love the fact that he asked for it, but I wish I could have complied.
Now, this brings me to my next point.
When 2020 comes along, Is the MAGA hat still going to be the same thing it was for 2016?
Here's my suggestion.
I don't think it should be.
I think the best thing that Trump supporters could do would be to lose the hat or to replace it with a 2020 version that's invulnerable.
I would like to suggest a slogan for a 2020 Trump supporting hat That's a replacement, an improvement.
Are you ready for it?
It's one word.
Jobs. That's it.
Jobs. Here's the beauty of it.
You have the entire anti-Trump world all stirred up to hate whatever Trump supporters do, especially if they're wearing a hat.
If you're wearing a hat that says jobs, you're first of all calling attention to the most powerful thing that the president did, but it's better than that.
It's directly and specifically and intentionally good for people at the low end of the economic situation.
It is specifically good for the very people who think the hat is a sign of evil.
It would change the focus from something that sounds, hey, make America great again.
Are you telling me you want to bring it back to some white supremacist sort of thing?
And you can't.
That is unsolvable in 2020.
You cannot fix MAGA in 2020.
It has been hugely successful to get Trump elected.
I would say it's I think you could argue that Make America Great Again, the way Trump did it with the hats and everything else, probably one of the all-time greatest branding jobs in history.
Maybe Nike, just do it, is up there.
But really, maybe Trump's is better.
So it did its work.
Make America Great Again did its work.
It's time to retire it.
Jobs... is unambiguously positive.
Everybody likes jobs.
Jobs are unambiguously good for the lower end of the economic class, specifically good for people who are, you know, every ethnic group, men, women, every gender, is just good.
Now, what else does Jobs have for it?
Well, it reminds you of Steve Jobs, which makes you think of Apple and people like Apple, so that the word has the most positive connotation you've ever seen.
It's got a religious connotation, you know, job.
And here's the best part.
Jobs is one half of two of my favorite things.
If you add another word in front of that, you get all kinds of fun activities.
I'm not going to mention them. So it's one of those words that makes you think of everything from money to sex to religion to Apple Computer.
It makes you think of all good things.
And... It does fit Trump.
Trump has been saying jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs.
Put it on a hat.
It's an accomplishment as well as an ambition.
Because there's no such thing as being done with jobs.
Jobs is something you can improve forever.
Somebody's suggesting jobs, not mobs.
That made sense when there were more mobs.
Because there definitely was a mob period in the last, you know, a year ago there were some mobs.
If we don't see more mobs, then I would just go with jobs.
Because the mobs kind of went away.
Why did the mobs go away?
Jobs. The reason there aren't as many mobs...
It's because there are more jobs.
All right. So that's my suggestion.
I am nowhere nearly as good at this sort of thing as your president is, so I would expect that whatever he comes up with for his new 2020 slogan will be as good as that or stronger.
So look for that.
But I definitely, definitely, and I'm very confident about this next statement, Don't use MAGA again in 2020.
Complete mistake.
So if you're paying attention, for those of you who would like to see me make a prediction and or criticize the president, if the president uses Make America Great Again and the same hats for 2020, I'm going to say that's a stone-cold mistake.
That's just a flat-out unforced error.
If he retires it, as in like you retire a jersey, you know how sports teams, when one of their great players retires, they retire the number and the jersey.
I think the president needs to retire the slogan.
It worked. It got up elected.
It made, I think, great things happen.
Let's honor it. Alright, something else happening.
If you haven't seen the perpetual diamond illusion, you've got to see it.
It's another one of those things.
It's a visual illusion, but it's one of those things that reminds you that you don't have any idea what reality really is.
Because you can see reality changing right in front of you, but reality is not changing.
That's what makes it a good illusion.
You feel like it's moving, but it's not.
If you haven't seen it, you can see it in my Twitter feed.
I think if you Google Perpetual Diamond Illusion, it will pop right up.
We'll see. There's a funny Trump campaign ad, not from Trump.
Somebody else made it. I don't know who made it, but it's where he's walking across scenery, and the scenery keeps changing to all these good things he's done.
It's really, really well done.
So I tweeted it this morning.
Take a look at that. That's a real good example of making you feel something.
Without all the critical thinking.
It makes you feel something all the way through and never gets boring, even though, you know, it's a few minutes long.
It's really well done. Next topic.
It seems that Netflix is doing a miniseries on the Central Park Five situation.
There's a coincidence, right?
Total coincidence that Netflix, who is doing a deal with Obama and I forget who Hillary's doing a deal with, but so Netflix obviously loves Obama, and what a coincidence.
Literally the worst thing that could come up during an election year just happens to be coincidentally the miniseries that Netflix wants to focus on.
Now do you think, they hired Susan Rice, Netflix did, somebody was saying in the comments.
Now do you think it's a complete coincidence that this new hoax, the Central Park 5 hoax, which by the way, it's all a hoax, when somebody says, what about that bad Trump who said the Central Park 5 should be executed when they were innocent?
He never mentioned race.
He mentioned crime.
He said then exactly what he says now.
If you kill people, maybe you should be executed.
It's no different.
But of course it will be couched as it's a big old racist thing when in fact that's all a hoax.
Now this comes on top of the Chernobyl thing.
What was the one thing that could make the whole climate change advantage that the people on the left had, what's the one thing that could make their entire advantage go away?
Focusing on nuclear.
Because nuclear is the only path, whether you believe climate change is a problem or if you don't, it's exactly the same path.
You should do the new technologies of nuclear that have been proven very safe, and you should do them as fast as possible.
Either way, because you need the energy even if you don't need to clean up the environment.
But you don't even need to decide.
We don't have to settle who's right about these climate predictions.
No decision needed.
It's the same path that you should do it just as hard either way.
Now Biden, of course, has now endorsed that.
So the people on the left, if they want to protect their idea that climate change has to be solved a certain way, what is the very best way they can do it?
Make a documentary and scare the pants off people.
Talk about Chernobyl too much.
So when you look at the Central Park Five miniseries on Netflix that leans left, and you look at HBO, which leans left, their Chernobyl special, should you see any of this as coincidence?
Maybe. I mean, maybe they've been planned for 10 years.
I wouldn't rule it out.
But they also got green-lighted at a very interesting time.
So it might be not necessarily the creators that decided to do it.
It could be whoever gave it the green light.
It's like, whoa, I didn't like this before, but this is a pretty good project for 2020.
So we don't know the details.
But I think we're entering a period where the way elections will be...
Maybe influenced is by art.
It seems to me that art is starting to replace political discussion because it's so influential.
I'm not going to watch Chernobyl because I don't want it to influence me.
Do you get that?
I mean, there's a reason I don't vote because I don't want to be influenced to join a team.
I also will intentionally not watch Chernobyl because it's meant to scare me.
And I want to make decisions without that influence.
I will probably, not probably, I'm sure I will intentionally not watch the Central Five miniseries, unless I have to watch it to debunk it, and I think I probably have to.
So I take that back.
I'll probably watch it just to debunk it.
So that's different.
I've noticed that CNN has, they seem to be pioneering a new form of journalism.
Which I will tentatively label the triumph, the insult dog news.
If you read CNN, they have opinion pieces, and their opinion pieces often will be so reason-free...
That you can read them for a long time and see a lot of insults before you get to anything like a fact or a reason.
Let me read one sentence from one of their articles up there that is a triumph the insult dog type of news.
It has nothing to do with the actual triumph the insult dog.
I'm just using that as an analogy.
So this is from an actual article on CNN. Quote...
Just how ignorant, middling, and amoral is Kushner?
The Axios interview offers some startling clues.
Among them is that he manages to spin his utter incompetence as a good thing.
Where are the reasons?
That's just a whole bunch of insults with no facts.
I mean, it must be referring to something they're thinking about.
But you can read the entire argument, the article, and it's nothing but triumph the insult dog until the end.
And you get to the end and you're like, uh, what are the reasons?
The reasons are blah, blah, he's dumb?
That's not a reason.
Give me something he did that's dumb.
Yeah, so he's ignorant, middling, and amoral.
So show me the evidence that would support amoral, middling, or ignorant?
I don't see it, and it's not offered.
But CNN has just turned into insult porn.
It's like, if the insults feel good because they're insulting somebody you don't like, well, it's a little bit of a buzz you get from that.
Here's another topic.
Are babies as necessary in the digital age?
Are they necessary?
Now, when I say, are babies necessary, why is there a reason anybody has a child?
Now, if you ask somebody, why do you have a child, they'll give you reasons.
But wouldn't you agree it's a biological imperative?
In other words, whatever reason we give for having babies...
It's probably subsidiary to the fact that we would have babies no matter what.
We are human beings.
We have an impulse to reproduce because we evolved to be reproducers.
If we didn't reproduce, there wouldn't be more of us.
But what is the basis of the biological need to reproduce?
And I have a hypothesis that I would like to share with you.
That the biological basis for reproduction is our ego, the sense that we are important.
Hypothetically, I don't have any genetic children, but hypothetically, if I wanted to have a baby of my own, with my own DNA, why?
Why would that be preferred over adopting or over just paying my taxes so other people's babies can be supported?
Why? Well, I think it's because we humans believe there's something special about us that needs to extend past our lifetime.
In other words, we feel there's something that has to be of us that needs to go on so that we don't feel that we die, that our ego, our importance, our self can carry on.
The way to do that in the past, historically, has been by putting your DNA, which is essentially a database, Your DNA is a little database, and you put that little database in your children, and then they go forward and have children, and the database changes over time, but it's still something that sprang from you.
It's important. Now, fast forward to 2019.
Fast forward. Today, do you need to create a database of your DNA so that you will live on?
Well, I don't because I have a digital record.
I have books and comics and I have podcasts and periscopes.
I've got photos.
I've got every form of me is captured.
There is a full and permanent digital database of who I am that will kind of live forever.
And it will live both in the impacts I have on other people as well as it will be stored and people can watch it a thousand years from now.
So, you may have noticed that in civilized countries where there's a lot of technology, the reproduction rate is way down.
So it's becoming a problem that civilized countries are having fewer babies.
Now, there are lots of reasons for it.
Some of them are, well, a lot of them are economic.
But I would like to suggest that whenever somebody gives a logical reason for why people either are having babies or not having babies, that these are rationalizations.
They can be true, like true facts, and they may be the way that we're internalizing them, as in, hey, the economy's bad, I can't afford to move out, I can't get out of my apartment, I'm living at home, I'm certainly not going to have a baby.
Maybe that's all it is.
Perhaps that's all it is.
But I would suggest that people are not that rational and that there may be something more basic that is keeping us from reproducing.
And that answer is social media.
If you have social media, you're creating a record that is your database of you that will live forever-ish.
And maybe...
Your biological need to reproduce is being suppressed by the fact that you are reproducing.
You're sending your ego out into the world.
Just something to think about.
I wouldn't die by that hypothesis.
I wouldn't bet my life on it.
Something to think about. I've noticed that there's a big change going on.
I wonder if you noticed it.
When I got my smartphone, it was great and it did a bunch of things, but it was slow and the Wi-Fi never worked and the screen was small.
But as the smartphone simply evolved, it reached the part where it is now.
And that place is that if I have my phone, Which is an amazing device that can reach all kinds of places and people.
And I have my battery that can give me, you know, hours of time and I never worry about running out of battery time.
And I've got unlimited usage, which I do on my plan.
And I've got super fast Wi-Fi in my house, which I do.
That television has become unnecessary, especially if I'm wearing my ear pods or headphones.
Have you felt the same thing, that when you have those things, headphones, smartphone, battery backup, or at least you're not too far from power, and unlimited usage, isn't it true that television is unnecessary?
In fact, television is so unnecessary that if I were to build a home today from scratch, I might not put a television room in there.
When I built my house ten years ago, I thought, hey, I'm going to do what rich people do.
I'm going to put a little home theater in my house.
Do you know what is the least used room in my house?
The theater. Nobody in 2019 wants to sit in a row of seats and watch one screen that's the same screen that everybody else is watching at the same time.
Sitting in a room and he can't leave the room.
Nobody wants to do that.
Do you know what I want to do? I want to put on an episode of, you know, The Five or Tucker Carlson or, you know, Joe Rogan or something.
I want to put that on, put my phone in my pocket, put my headphones on and go for a walk.
Go for a walk. Because I'm walking and watching television, and I'm watching exactly what I want, and nobody's bothering me, etc.
So I'm thinking that television, as a thing, is going to shrink quickly.
So as people... Catch up to where the people with money are.
I mean, the reason that I can do these things is that I have money.
I can buy a phone.
I can buy a really good battery.
I can get unlimited usage.
I've got a good Wi-Fi. But those things will become accessible to more and more people over time.
And I think television is on its way out.
Somebody said I should get a real drum kit.
I have a real drum kit.
I have an acoustic drum kit in the house, and I've got electronic in the garage.
Let's talk about...
Here's something I've thought about.
You know the problem of not having fathers?
You hear about it a lot.
Now, I've pushed back on that because I think that it's...
It unfairly says that a single mom is somehow missing something because there's not a father.
And I think that on average, adding fathers to it is probably a good thing, but that a single mom with resources can do a great job with a kid, and I don't think that we should poo-poo that.
But, given that there are so many people who haven't had fathers, For various reasons, they're broken families, the father left, or the father just wasn't good at being a father.
It feels to me that there are a number of people who are finding fathers online.
And you know where I'm heading in this.
When you watch, as I mentioned earlier, Naval Ravikant, if you watch him on Joe Rogan's podcast, what you're seeing are two fathers.
And I think to a large extent, that's at least half of the appeal.
There are people who never had a father talking to them the way a father teaches a son especially.
And one of the things that Joe Rogan said that was fascinating is that over 90% of his audience is male.
Naval said the same thing.
He started a podcast and over 90% of it is male.
My periscopes are over, I think, over 90% male.
So my content also is 90% male.
Jordan Peterson, as people are prompting me here, I was going to mention him next.
Jordan Peterson is the father you didn't have.
He's sort of the father you wish you had.
Ed Latimer is, again, you're way ahead of me.
He's on my list. Ed Latimer, Jordan Peterson, Naval Ravikant, And to some extent, me.
Because I was looking at my stats for my YouTube usage, people watching me on YouTube, and I was surprised to find that I have a very strong demographic in the 20s and 30s, all men.
A very strong following in the 20s and 30s, which is unusual for my age.
Generally, people watch things that are sort of youngish and close to who they are.
You expect old people are going to watch older people doing stuff.
Young people are going to watch younger people doing stuff.
But there's a very clear trend of younger men who are absorbing this content from online fathers.
And I think that's kind of what's happening here.
That men have been lost.
Feeling that there's something missing in their experience.
When I grew up, my father was a, I would say, a weak male.
He didn't talk much, didn't have much ambition.
He just sort of went to work and worked hard and had two jobs.
Now, I ask myself, watching my father being a very dedicated You know, family guy who worked so hard, he had two jobs and just took care of business.
Didn't complain much. Did that have any effect on me?
Well, probably. I mean, there's a genetic aspect.
But I think by example, I learned hard work.
So to me, having two jobs or three jobs, which is exactly what I have now.
I mean, I'm a cartoonist.
I'm writing books. I'm doing these things and a lot of other things.
So there are things you absorb from a father if you're male that you're just not going to absorb in the same way or with the same impact or quite as compatibly if you're watching even the best female role model in the world.
Because a female role model is going to have some of the things you need but maybe not the same things that a male role model would give you.
So I think you're seeing the outsourcing of fatherhood.
And I quite intentionally took this role because my book, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, was written for my 14-year-old stepson.
I wrote it with him in mind.
It's always a good idea to write a book with a specific audience in mind, and I like to think of a specific person.
So when I'm writing the book, I'll think, okay, who is this for?
I'll think of a person who represents the class of people I want to go to, because I know that one person.
It's often a family member.
So I write to my brother's sense of humor.
And I was writing that book to my stepson.
Now, unfortunately, my stepson passed away this year from fentanyl.
Fentanyl overdose. So he did not get the benefit of this book.
He had just reached the age where he was asking about it and starting to read it, which crushes me.
But there are other people who are doing this sort of thing, Jordan Peterson being the most obvious case of it.
So think about that.
Think that there is a virtual fatherhood digital presence that's happening.
And I think it's important.
Because if you look at, say, the inner city, for example, there's just tons of people who don't have any kind of a father, but now if they have a phone...
They can find one.
So a lot of people are finding a father figure, and a lot of people have told me that in so many words that I'm filling that place for them.
All right. I want to talk about how to compensate for social media bias.
And then I'm going to tell you how to get rich off of it.
Are you ready for this? So first, how to compensate for any social media bias, and then I'm going to tell you how to get rich off it.
Because you can get rich whenever there's some kind of imperfection or imbalance in the world.
And there's an imbalance in our world right now.
I'll tell you how to exploit it, which will be good for me, by the way.
So what I'm going to tell you is good for me, but it could be good for you too.
Suppose you had a piece of software that sits above your various social media platforms, and you add to them the alternates.
So you've got your social media platforms, your Twitters and your YouTubes and your Facebooks, your Instagrams, etc., But then there are the new ones such as Parler and Gab and Minds, and who knows how successful they'll be, but let's add them to the list right now.
Then imagine you have a piece of software that sits on top of them and is the only thing that posts to them.
So you've set this piece of software up so it has the permissions, so you can post once and it will post to whichever platforms you want.
From that moment, You could post as much quantity to the alternate platforms as you do to the primary platforms.
Somebody's saying it exists but not in the form that's usable and easy to use.
Well, that's the same thing.
But imagine it also has this.
So the first thing is you would create diversification.
So you would create a diversified portfolio of social media platforms such that if you get kicked off of one, you have the others.
That's what diversification gives you.
So the first thing I would recommend to all of you is to diversify.
You should diversify your platforms, even if you don't use the lesser platforms.
Put an account on it, do some posts, see if you can gather some people.
Because if you get kicked off of one, you want to have the other one on the hot standby.
Hot standby is important, right?
Then, you want to have your software that sits above those platforms monitoring them for follows and unfollows under the same names.
So in other words, you want to use your same screen name that you use for Twitter if you get on an alternate platform.
So I am Scott Adams Says on Twitter.
If I had thought of this earlier, I would have been Scott Adams Says on all of my platforms.
I didn't do that, but I should have.
Then, here's the thing.
You want to be able to track anything that doesn't make sense across platforms, because this would be your test.
Four, the algorithm's biased against you.
So, for example, if you started to build up enough of an audience on the alternate platforms, you could post to Twitter and the alternate Twitter, whether it's Parler or Gab or whatever else, do it both, and then see what happens.
What happens if it takes off on one platform and goes down on the other?
Huh? You would notice it.
You wouldn't necessarily notice it if you were using one platform.
Because if you only use one platform, you just know what happened.
You don't know why. But if you've got two platforms, and one goes up and goes viral, and the other one doesn't, that's a red flag.
The next thing you can do is track your unfollows.
What happens if people were using the same names, or a lot of them, not everybody has to use the same name on every platform, you'd only need enough of them.
So if you found that your software above saw that you got unfollowed by somebody on Twitter, you could go over to Parler and see if that same person has unfollowed you.
Because if they haven't, why not?
Because if you're unfollowing somebody on one platform, Wouldn't you unfollow them on the other?
Well, of course, you might be lazy, or you might not be using the other platforms, so there could be a reason you just didn't get around to it.
It was just an extra step, you didn't want to do it.
But if everybody was using the top-level software, then if you wanted to unfollow somebody, you could unfollow them from all the platforms at the same time.
So if you get enough people using the high-level posting and monitoring software, because it's not just the posting, it's the checking.
It's the checking against platforms so that anything that looks mischievous on one can be detected because it's not happening on the others.
That's the magic sauce.
Now the only way to get there, checkup, somebody's calling it, maybe so.
Now the only way to get there is if people take the concept of diversification seriously.
If you're investing, diversification is good.
In most of life, diversification is a smart thing.
We don't do it in social media and we see the cost of it.
So I would say you should go any way to keep alive these startups that are potential competitors to the big platforms.
So whether it's Parler or Gab or Mines, whatever it is, and other ones will come along, you don't necessarily have to move all your action there.
Twitter does what these others can't do and maybe will never do.
So I'm not going to move my traffic off of Twitter.
It's still going to be my dominant platform.
But I'm going to make sure I've got a YouTube channel and I opened a Parler account so I've got some place to go fairly quickly if things turn sour on one of my platforms.
So that's what I suggest.
Now, I'm going to tell you how to get rich.
Taking advantage of the news silos.
So you have a situation here where half of the country hears one kind of news on the left, the other country hears the other half, and there's not much crosstalk.
How could you get rich taking advantage of that imperfection in the way people process stuff?
I'm going to suggest something that is 100% self-serving.
So if you can't get past that, you probably want to sign off now.
This is good for me, but it's good for a lot of people.
And that is, if you understand how cryptocurrencies work, you know that what makes them go up in value is simply that a lot of people want to buy them.
So if a lot of people want any cryptocurrency, it will go up in value, whether it's Bitcoin or anything else.
My startup, WenHub, It has a cryptocurrency that has a utility, meaning that it could go up for two reasons.
One reason it goes up is just a lot of people buy it.
That's all it would take, just supply and demand, because there's a limited number.
The other way is if people use the OneHub product, because that creates an internal demand, which also makes the value go up.
Now, what is it that you people know that everybody on the left doesn't know?
They don't know what OneHub is.
They've never heard of it. I'll bet there are very few people on the left who have ever heard that it exists, because they don't listen to me, and they have no idea.
But people on the right, because you've been listening to me, are very aware of it, or at least people have seen my content.
Whoever owns these cryptocurrencies first gets in on the bottom.
If enough of you do it, you can bid it up until Everybody notices it.
So if the value of the when went up from, it's trading under five cents, it's bouncing around between two and five cents right now, which is typical for cryptocurrency.
But the volume is starting to build.
There's far more trading in it on hotbit.io.
That's an exchange. So there are two places you could get it.
One is go to wenhub.com, and all you need is a credit card, and you can just buy it right on the site.
Second way you can get it is to go to an exchange.
I would recommend hotbit.io, but on there you'd need to have some Bitcoin or some Ether to trade.
So if you're experienced with crypto, you'd go to an exchange.
That's the cheaper way to get it.
If you're not experienced and you just want to own some, you can still get it cheap at wenhub.com.
If enough of you buy it, it is a self-fulfilling investment.
So you can actually control how well it does by your actions and whether you buy it.
So if people following this bought a lot of it, it would become noticeable to everyone.
And as soon as it became noticeable to everyone and it had some momentum behind it, then you would see people on the left buying it just because it's going up.
People buy stuff because it's getting action and it's going up.
That would allow you to get rich by taking advantage of the silo of news.
Because you can get in before they get in.
By the time they get in, you've already made your money.
You've doubled or tripled your money.
Now, you should never take advice on anything financial from cartoonists.
The probable outcome of any purchase of any crypto asset Bitcoin or anything else is zero.
You probably will not make money on any crypto investment.
The when is probably safer than 98% of crypto just because it's a utility token and it has a real product behind it.
But otherwise, crypto is a very, very risky thing.
Don't do it because I said so.
The only time you should ever buy any crypto stuff is if you can afford it.
You can afford to lose all of it.
So this is the best way to think of it.
If you would be very sad, like it would really bother you to lose 100% of your money, don't do it.
But if you would say, well, I'm investing in a lot of different things.
I'm diversifying. I like where this is going.
I could put X small dollars into it, and if I lost it, well, you know, that's no big deal.
Somebody says it all sounds shady.
The entire cryptocurrency market is more fraud than real.
There's some of it that people are doing legitimately fraud.
We are. We're all lawyered up.
It's a real product. It's a real company.
It's a solid offering.
But be careful with anything like that.
Let's talk about one of the things.
CVS has introducing some concept stores with what they call health hubs.
I don't know exactly what that is, but I like it.
So CVS, which has locations everywhere, puts some kind of a health care You know, facilities in their stores, that's a real big deal.
And it's one of, you know, part of the tapestry of things that will lower health care costs and make it more available in the future.
I think I've talked about everything I want to talk about today, just looking at my list.
If you want to see this on YouTube as a playback, just Google Real Coffee with Scott Adams.
It'll pop right up. And if you watch it on YouTube, I will be very happy.
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