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June 17, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
54:14
Episode 568 Scott Adams: Amazing Erik Finman, Gaslighting, Harvard Hypocrites, Trump Heights
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hey everybody come on in here it's time for coffee with Scott Adams I'm Scott Adams and if you're prepared and if you knew this was coming and if you have some kind of a cup or a glass or a mug you could have a stein a chalice or a tankard you might have a thermos or possibly a flask But what you should do is fill it with your favorite liquid so that you can enjoy the unparalleled pleasure of the simultaneous sip.
Yeah, your dopamine is about to take a ride to Mars.
Join me now for this simultaneous sip.
Dopamine everywhere.
Dopamine everywhere.
All right, good stuff.
In several minutes, we're going to have a special guest.
You're going to enjoy it. Eric Finman will be.
I see he's already joined, so in a bit, I'll invite him on.
So, Eric, hold tight.
While we build up our audience here, I'm going to talk about a few other things.
Number one. At the same time that the National Review, I think it was Kevin Williamson, was writing that brainwashing is not real, So one publication is writing a story that says brainwashing is not real.
The other part of the news is writing a story about a cult called NXIVM. Now, I understand they were a pretty effective cult, but they really need help with branding because if you're going to name your cult NXIVM, That's not even trying.
They need a little help on the naming stuff.
But anyway, the cult is in trouble because the leader, Renier, is accused of brainwashing all of his members in the cult.
It turns out that not only did he brainwash them to become sex slaves, but he also got them to agree to be branded.
Branded. With a hot poker, like a cow.
He convinced a whole bunch of women to hold still while a hot poker branded them.
And when they were done, they said, hey, this is great.
I'm glad I did that. Now, do you believe that brainwashing isn't real?
I don't think so.
I don't think so.
But at the same time that people are saying brainwashing is not real, there's yet another article in the Washington Post saying that Sarah Sanders was part of the, quote, gaslighting.
She did a bunch of gaslighting.
Gaslighting is not real.
Gaslighting is the thing that happened once in a movie.
It didn't even happen more than once in movies.
In the entire universe of reality, and then within reality, there's this smaller universe of, let's say, entertainment.
It's never happened in the larger reality.
Gaslighting has never happened.
And in the smaller reality of entertainment, it's only happened once, in one movie, one time.
That's it. It doesn't exist anywhere in the real world, and almost doesn't exist anywhere in the entertainment world.
Just once, one movie, one time.
And the Washington Post writes it like it's news.
It's like, well, you can see it.
Look at all this gaslighting.
Do you see that gaslighting over there?
There's a whole pile of gas.
What do you mean you can't see it?
There's a whole pile of it right over there.
Look at that. A giant pile of gaslighting.
You can't see it? You can't see anything there?
Because I'm pretty sure I see it.
Let me remind you of my filter on reality for trying to decide what is real and what is not real.
Filter number one. Is it reported the same on the two opposing sides?
Meaning, does Fox News say it's true and real?
At the same time, does CNN and MSNBC say that it's real?
No. Because you're not going to find a lot of people on Fox News telling you that the president was engaged in something called gaslighting.
Only one side reports it.
That filter... Almost certainly guarantees it's not real.
If both of them don't report it, it's not real.
If you have a hurricane, Fox reports it, CNN reports it, it's real.
You really had a hurricane.
If one of them reports that somebody was engaged in a secret plot to gaslight, which, by the way, the definition is someone trying to make you think you're crazy and thus drive you crazy, In other words, gaslighting is not just lying.
Gaslighting is not telling something that's not true.
Gaslighting, specifically, is to drive the person crazy and make them doubt all of their senses.
Never happened. Nobody's doing it.
Nobody's tried to do it.
It isn't a thing. Sarah Sanders hasn't done it.
So here's the other filter.
Prediction. If your view of the world predicts well...
You probably have a pretty good view of the world, or at least one that predicts well.
That's as well as you can do sometimes.
Sorry. And what predicts weather?
What is a better prediction?
I say brainwashing is real, and so my prediction would be that you should see lots of examples of it.
And sure enough, there's a headline about it.
This cult I just mentioned, this NXIVM, is literally brainwashing.
Likewise, you would expect that people would believe ridiculous untruths.
If brainwashing is real, there would be people who had been brainwashed to believe ridiculous things.
For example, I'll give you one on both sides.
For example, people believe that the president called neo-Nazis fine people in public while he was president.
Now, that only didn't happen, but it's so easy to prove it didn't happen, you can just read the transcript, look at the video.
So, my belief, my worldview says that brainwashing is real, and you should see lots of examples of it.
There's an example. You can verify yourself.
Here are people who say that he said this thing.
Here's the actual quote.
You can see it's not real. Truth.
Here's another one. When the people on the right, I won't name names, were saying that Hillary Clinton was giving away all of our valuable uranium resources, I said, well, that doesn't sound real to me.
It's not being reported on the other network as true.
And the idea was, there are two parts of that Uranium One story that I'm referring to.
One is that maybe the Clintons enriched themselves by being part of that approval process.
I'm not talking about that part.
I'm talking about the claim that we had given away 20% of our valuable national resources that had some kind of important strategic value, the plutonium.
Turns out today we learned that we've got 100 years of plutonium, and if we start putting Generation 4 nuclear power online, that 100 years of plutonium might go to thousands of years.
So we have so much plutonium, we don't know what to do with it.
So it was never true that Hillary Clinton was giving away 20% of our important asset that somehow we couldn't replace or we needed.
It just was never true. So that was brainwashing.
And my prediction is that people would believe it.
And they did. Now how about gaslighting?
If gaslighting is real, you would expect both networks to say it, which they don't, but you would also expect to find somebody somewhere, someday, who said that they were engaged in it.
Maybe not right away, but you would predict, okay, maybe in a few years there'll be some pollster, some expert, some advisor to the president who said, yeah, we sat in a room and we decided we're going to make people actually doubt their sanity.
We're going to say things so untrue that people will think they're actually crazy, and that's a part of our strategy.
You're never going to see that.
Nobody's ever going to write the tell-all book, and you know there are going to be tell-all books about private conversations and everything.
You're never going to see the tell-all book where somebody said, yeah, we were gaslighting.
That's what we planned to do.
That's what we tried to execute.
Michael Wilf doesn't say that.
All right. Let me bring in, let's see if Eric is ready.
Eric, I don't see you signed up as a guest yet.
So Eric, you must be on a mobile device.
It won't work on a laptop or a desktop.
You must be on a mobile device to join as a guest and look for the little icons that look like smiley faces at the bottom.
And when you've done that, there you are.
I'm going to bring you on now.
Eric Finman will be coming with us in a moment, should his Wi-Fi be working.
Looks like it's cranking a little bit there, so we might have to retry this if it doesn't come in.
Eric, if you can hear me, I can see the progress indicator going crazy, but nothing's happening.
All right, that didn't work.
Let's try again. Eric went off and got back on.
And now let's see if this works a second time.
There we go. Eric, can you hear me?
Yay. I have so many things I want to talk about with you, so I'm going to just jump in, okay?
Absolutely. It sounds wonderful.
Alright, so for those of you who don't know Eric, number one, you should.
He's a great follow on Instagram and Twitter, so you should do that.
I'll give you information on that in a bit.
But Eric, how old are you now, Eric?
I'm an old man. I just turned funny recently.
My God, he's 20 years old.
And your story...
Involved not wanting to finish school.
Can you give us the quick version of high school, Eric, and what happened in terms of your educational quest?
Can you give us a little background on that?
Absolutely. So, yeah, I mean, I grew up in Idaho in the middle of nowhere, and I went to, I always, I kind of tried going to schools, but I never really fit in in any schools, so I kind of I went to pretty much every school in North Idaho.
And then eventually, yeah, I made myself to kind of just the local public high school.
And it kind of wasn't a good experience.
I didn't really get good grades.
I think my GPA was like a 2.1.
And then I had one teacher, you know, just kind of said I should just drop out and work at McDonald's because that's all I ever amount to in life.
I'm seeing that in the comments people are asking you to speak a little louder because sometimes the guests come in a little at lower volume.
So you were in Idaho.
What do your parents do and what do they still do?
Yeah, so my family, they do a couple things.
They're very eccentric.
So my parents, they simultaneously, they run a business where on every Humvee in the U.S. military, they have this amplifier on it, which jams people from remotely blowing up mines under Humvees.
And then also kind of another technology which allows you to, you know, fly kind of a communications drone from San Francisco and the Middle East.
And then they also run a lot on the farm.
So pretty much your father is Tony Stark and your mother is Mrs.
Tony Stark? Exactly.
I guess they're both Tony Starks, aren't they?
They're both scientists or both engineers?
Exactly, yeah. They met getting their PhDs at Stanford.
Very, very good. So you've got these super smart, successful inventor-type parents, and you didn't like school, and there's a point where you took another path.
So give us that quick story.
Absolutely. So I did take that one teacher's advice to drop out, but I skipped the McDonald's part.
So yeah, I dropped out when I was 15, and at the time I got into Bitcoin in 2011 when I was about 12 years old.
With the help of my brother.
So when I was 15, I kind of amassed, you know, when Bitcoin was worth next to nothing, I amassed about $100,000 worth by the time I was 15.
So I dropped out, you know, and I decided to drop out.
and then I took my money and moved to Silicon Valley, to Palo Alto.
And then it was my dream to start a startup, and that's why I wanted to get – I actually tried to get good grades in school.
I tried really hard, but my kind of creativity and my brain wouldn't allow me to because I wasn't enjoying it.
So how old were you when you went to Silicon Valley with your $100,000 you made with Bitcoin?
Fifteen years old. Fifteen years old and you went without a parent?
No, no. Yeah, my mom was very worried, but it was cool.
I mean, I kind of roll with it, you know?
All right. So let me tell the audience what I know that they don't know yet.
So I know Eric.
We've had lunch a few times.
We've talked a bunch of times.
And the strangest thing about Eric, so this is something you're going to hear for the first time, Eric, is that You can't imagine how many people ask me to have lunch.
People are always saying, hey, let's get together to lunch.
It's an everyday thing.
If you're successful or you're in the public eye, it happens all the time.
And of course, I say no to basically everybody because I just don't have time to go to lunch with strangers.
Eric says, do you want to go to lunch?
And I said, okay. And I still don't know why.
I actually think about that all the time.
I think, why did I say yes to go to lunch?
I think it had something to do with the fact that you were young and doing things, and I thought it was going to be a good story.
But the other thing they don't know is that you're tall.
How tall are you? I'm 6'2".
So you're 6'2", and you were tall even as a teenager, right?
I mean, you're barely just not a teenager.
So Eric walks into the room, And just physically, you're like an adult.
And there's something about your mannerism or persona where people like to hang out with you.
You're just really fun to hang out with.
A new problem always.
Everybody loves me. And I've noticed this in your story.
There's a part where you met the Reddit co-founder.
Is that true? Yeah, I did.
When I was 15, my dream was to go to Stanford and start a startup when I graduated.
When I was 15, when I was down there, I ended up speaking at Stanford with him to Stanford students on how to start a business.
One of Eric's magic powers is that you've met an astonishing number of famous and rich people by the age of 20.
You were doing that as a teenager.
You were just calling up people who were famous.
Who's the most famous person that you've just contacted and said, hey, let's get together, and then you got together?
I don't know. I mean, Casey Neistat was one of them.
I remember all the YouTubers like Logan Paul, Jake Paul, Casey Neistat.
You know, I emailed the CEO of FedEx.
So we did this satellite project and we were actually shipping it using FedEx.
And then it had to get there by, we were like shipping it like a week before, but FedEx lost her package.
And then we emailed the FedEx CEO just out of the blue.
Because I just have such luck with cold messaging people.
He set an exact task force to find my satellite, and then he dictated a personal plane to fly my satellite from Scotland, LA. So I don't know.
I've met... I don't know.
I've met a lot of famous YouTubers, billionaires, influencers, rich people.
Right. I have this theory that there are some people who are magnets for other famous people, and you are clearly in that category.
But we've fast-forwarded over a couple of good things.
So tell us about your first startup, BoTangle.
Yeah, so, you know, I created it when I was 15, and it was an education startup, Botangle, and then it was a way where you could type in any subject you wanted to learn, and then find someone to teach you over video chat.
You know, you're familiar with that concept, Scott.
And then, yeah, and then I did that because I wanted to solve my own problem.
You know, when I was 15, I had all these teachers that hated me, said I'd be a failure.
And then, you know, I found actually I was using my own sites to solve my own problems.
And I kind of, I, you know, I was learning, rather than learning Spanish from somebody in North Idaho, probably the whitest state in the Union, I was learning Spanish, you know, from somebody in Ecuador, just using my own sites.
Rather than learning math from, again, somebody in North Idaho, I was learning math from somebody that was a grad student at Oxford and all that.
That experience with that startup is no doubt at least informed part of why you made a recommendation for the WEN, the cryptocurrency that my startup does, because we have the product that lets you talk to an expert.
So it was similar enough To what you had done that you recognized some value there.
Game recognizes game.
Game recognizes game.
So in full disclosure, you own some WEN, which are the cryptocurrency from my startup and we do know each other.
So just so the audience knows, full disclosure.
Now, you sold that and then you accepted for selling Boatangle, you accepted Bitcoin, right?
Yes, yes. I sold my company for Bitcoin at the time.
So this Bitcoin has worked out pretty, pretty well for you, wouldn't you say?
Not too bad. Yeah, not too bad.
Alright, so then I want you to answer this trivia question that you'll be the only one who can answer.
Who is the cartoon character that is the highest up in space right now?
Oh yes, Dilbert.
That is correct. So why don't you tell people why the Dilbert character is higher up in space than any other cartoon character right now and your role in that.
Tell us about that. Absolutely.
So, you know, I was bored and I wanted to launch a satellite.
So I got a really good group of, really good group, kind of an Avengers team of teenagers together and all that.
And then we kind of pitched to do this educational mission called ALANA, which NASA did.
So anyways, we pitched for that satellite and we won this whole NASA thing where they would cover completely the cost of all the multi-million dollar launch costs of the satellite and everything.
So it was amazing. We did many things on it.
We put a camera on there.
We wanted to do the first video game in space.
Another thing that we wanted to do on there, or did, Is do a time capsule.
So I emailed, I wanted to message, I wanted to really represent kind of the world.
This is like a 21st century Carl Sagan golden record, if you're familiar, where we wanted to kind of use, now that everybody has a phone, everybody has planes, like back when that was launched, it was in the 70s.
We wanted to kind of create something where we get all the artists, all the leaders, all the leaders of culture, all the leaders of politics, all just leaders, and then also normal people get one video from at least almost every country in the world, and we did that, and kind of put this all into one time capsule and launch it into space.
So, you know, you're one of, you know, a huge political influencer, And then, you know, you're very culturally relevant.
Like Dilbert is, you know, one of the big cultural, I think the most famous comic, you know, cultural comic, newspaper comic today.
So yeah, I got people like, you know, we got people like Eric Trump that contribute to the time capsule.
So I went to Trump Tower.
I got him a Make Space Great Internet.
We got Taylor Swift, which was really cool.
She sent us a message in her favorite music.
And then we got Scott Adams, the best one out of them all.
All right. So now you've launched the satellite and you have a new startup, which I'm very interested in.
Tell us about your new startup.
Absolutely. So, you know, I got into Bitcoin, you know, really young and really early.
And, you know, by the time I was 18, you know, I became the quote-unquote, you know, youngest Bitcoin millionaire in the world.
And then so I wanted to create something that kind of allowed other people to get into Bitcoin that was super easy because to me I think that was the biggest hurdle for people.
How many billions of dollars were lost because of people that had heard about Bitcoin but just didn't know to get into it or if they didn't know a site to get into it, it was just too hard.
So that's why we launched CoinBitsApp.com a couple weeks ago which basically you just sign up, connect your payment information and then you're investing in Bitcoin.
It's just that easy. So you just connect it to your bank and it, what does it do?
It rounds up? How does it?
Absolutely. So you connect your, so kind of the tagline we have for it is Bitcoin investing on autopilot.
We didn't want you checking it every day.
We wanted it so you could just connect your card, which is what we did.
And then every time you swipe, it rounds up to the nearest dollar and invest that much in Bitcoin for you.
So if you buy a buck 75 on french fries, it rounds up 25 cents.
And those really kind of things add up every time you use your card.
Let's talk about the word invest.
On my periscopes, I never use that word when I'm talking about cryptocurrency because I don't want to make it look like I'm recommending any kind of investment.
Crypto is hard to call an investment.
Bitcoin is sort of unique in the sense that it's obviously the leader among the cryptos.
Do you see it as an investment, as a diversification vehicle, primarily like you would buy gold or silver, or do you see it as something that's a growth vehicle?
How do you describe it so that you stay on the right side of the law with investment?
Yeah, I mean, I'd say to me I think of it as the digital gold.
So I think it's kind of however you feel about gold, I think there's a good way to feel about Bitcoin.
Digital gold. All right, I like that.
And you've been right about Bitcoin so far.
What is your prediction about the future of Bitcoin?
Absolutely. So I think we're going to reach $20,000 by the end of the year.
And I made that prediction when it was about $7,000-something.
What is it now? It went up to $9,300 yesterday.
$9,300 yesterday.
So it has been climbing pretty substantially.
And say the name of the app again so people can find it.
Yeah, the app is coinbitsapp.com.
So that's actually kind of one of the things that we're going to be doing.
We really want to kind of really promote Bitcoin and promote it within the community and promote it outside of the community.
And one of the things that we're going to be doing is, you know, Bitcoin is all about freedom, decentralization, very anti-Wall Street and all that.
So we're actually doing a march on Wall Street.
Which will be really, really cool.
A march on Wall Street to accomplish what?
Bringing attention to Bitcoin or to your app?
Yeah, the goal is to, you know, Wall Street people, they make fun of Bitcoin and make fun of blockchain when, in reality, we're going to be replacing their jobs in many ways.
You know, they're going to be the first that are going to get their jobs replaced by automation and all that.
So yeah, we're kind of making it like we're here and, you know, you're calling us scammers and fraudsters.
That's the most hypocritical thing coming from Wall Street people.
And we're here.
We're here to send a signal.
We're here that we're not going away.
Bitcoin and cryptocurrency and blockchain is here to stay.
Could you spell the name of the app people are asking?
So for some clarification here.
Absolutely. So the app is coinbitsapp.com.
It's spelled C-O-I-N as in coin, bits, B-I-T-S, and then app, A-P-P.com.
So coinbitsapp.com.
It's just basically like bitcoins reversed.
All right. Great.
And did you hear the story about Kyle Kashuv having his acceptance to Harvard reversed?
It's a brand new headline.
Wow. Yeah.
So thinking about your, let's say, non-standard approach to education, which has worked out great for you, he took the standard route, did everything right, got accepted at Harvard, and then they said, We found something you said when you were 16 years old, privately on a chat, privately on a chat, and we're rescinding your acceptance at Harvard.
He just found that out.
Three months ago, they accepted him.
He changed his whole life getting ready to go to Harvard.
And Harvard decided to ruin his life, basically, based on their decision.
So your non-standard process looks better and better because you essentially took control and you didn't have a boss and you didn't have anybody telling you what you could or could not do.
It allowed your creativity to go wherever it needed to go, and here you are.
So I'm not going to say that everybody should drop out of school.
You wouldn't say that either, would you?
Eric, would you say that people should finish school, or is it just sort of a personal situation?
It looks like we lost your audio, Eric.
Are you there? Okay.
We've lost audio with Eric, but I was getting ready to wind down, so I think we've said the main things we wanted to say.
So you should Google Eric, find his social media accounts.
It's Eric Finman.
You can see his name up there on the screen.
Just do a search for him, and it'll pop right up.
Eric, if you're trying to talk, I can't hear you.
Oh. We've got bad...
Yeah, the audio isn't quite good enough to go.
So I'm going to...
Eric's gone.
But so thank you, Eric.
That's all we wanted to talk about.
And so keep an eye on him.
He's the real deal.
So I was talking about Kyle Kashuv.
He was one of the survivors of the Parkland shooting.
And apparently because of what he said when he was 16 and somebody sent it to Harvard and said, hey, look at this.
The first thing I have to say is whoever sent that stuff to Harvard, somebody needs to find what college they got accepted at and maybe try to reverse that.
Wouldn't that be fair?
Wouldn't it be fair that whoever sent that information to Harvard, if we know who those people are and they were also accepted to some other college, I would think that other college would like to know about that.
I mean, if that's what we're doing, if that's fair, fair is fair.
And on my personal ranking of horribleness, I would say that saying something horrible in a private conversation is pretty low on my list of things to care about.
Getting somebody kicked out of Harvard after they've been accepted based on ratting out their conversations when they're 16...
That pins the freaking needle on my immorality level.
If you want to see immoral, that's the people who ratted this kid out.
That is the height of horrible, horrible, immoral, unethical, disreputable, disgusting, disgusting behavior.
Whoever you are, and probably more than one person, whoever you are, I freaking hate you.
Let me be as clear about that as possible.
I hate you. You are bad people.
Really, just horrible people.
Kyle is somebody who did some stuff that he wishes he hadn't done at 16.
They were words.
The context, and by the way, I haven't looked at the actual words.
I don't think it matters. But the context, as I understand it, With some people trying to be as outrageously bad as they could be in a private conversation.
Let me make a confession right here and now.
I have said things in private conversations.
I'm going to confess right now.
I've said things in private conversations to be funny.
To be funny. You have to keep this part.
Don't lose this part of the point.
To be funny. I've said the worst things that a human being can say in private to you know one other person sometimes more than one but in private to people who understand that I'm being funny and I'm saying things that would be beyond shocking if you heard them in any public situation things that people say in private that are horrible should not be judged outside of that context Because if you do,
like Harvard did, they judged what he said in private, which was meant to be sort of dark humor.
They judged it by the standard of a public statement, and that's why they got rid of him.
That is such a bad lesson.
It's immoral.
It's unethical. It's disgusting.
I'm talking about Harvard now.
So between Harvard, which is just disgusting on this, I mean, literally, it makes my skin crawl to think what they did to this kid.
But whoever ratted him out is a little bit worse, in my opinion.
They are people who...
They really need to get their act together.
So whoever ratted him out has a life that they need to repair because it's broken.
I don't know about Kyle Kashuv.
He says he's grown quite a bit and he wishes that he could be accepted for having grown from this bad behavior, which he admits to, to a better person.
I am always down for that.
If somebody says, I did this, I wish I hadn't, here's what I'm going to do in the future, I've grown, I'm a different person, I accept that every time.
The sooner it happens, the better, but I think he's soon enough.
I mean, his reaction seems soon enough.
Harvard, however, has a lot to explain, and for me, their reputation will never recover from this.
Harvard will never be the same university it was Because of this, it's so horribly, horribly wrong that I almost can't express how much just distaste I have for Harvard right now.
Let's talk about something else.
So, remember I told you that one of the ways to determine reality is whether your predictions...
Can come true.
So if your version of reality predicts well what's going to happen next, you probably have a pretty good version of reality.
My version of reality is that President Trump is not a gigantic racist in that I predict that there will be lots of evidence of that being true.
So you saw the, for example, you saw the prison reform, which didn't make sense if you imagined he was a giant racist.
You saw the latest thing where they're trying to create jobs for the people who have been released from prison.
So it's like phase two of prison reform.
Does that make sense?
If he were the big old racist, would that make sense?
It doesn't. But it's completely compatible with With my worldview, that he's not that person and he would love to fix things for all Americans, including African Americans, of course.
And here's the funniest part.
Israel's Prime Minister Netanyahu has announced a new settlement in the Golan Heights named after, quote, his great friend Donald Trump.
I believe it's called Trump Heights.
Israel just named a town after him.
Now, if your worldview is, hey, I think he backed the neo-Nazis who were chanting anti-Semitic things in Charlottesville, if you think that actually happened, how does that predict that Israel didn't notice any of that?
Somehow it was like the biggest story in the world, because the biggest story in the United States tends to be the biggest story in the world.
I'm a little biased there.
But are you telling me that Israel didn't notice that?
They're pretty good at noticing anti-Semitism.
I would say Israel might be the very best country at noticing anti-Semitism.
In fact, if you were to put Israel up against, oh, let's say, you know, Hungary or Austria or any other country, and you say, let's have a contest.
Let's see which one of you guys can spot anti-Semitism the best.
Well, I'm going to bet on Israel every time.
I'll bet Israel has a really good censor for spotting anti-Semitism.
And they don't see it.
Not only do they not see it in President Trump specifically I'm talking about, they don't see it.
They even named a town after him.
You don't do that if you think there's even a little bit, even a little bit of anti-Semitism.
So who could have predicted that?
Well, I didn't specifically predict that Israel would name a city after him, you know, a settlement.
So that would have been hard to predict.
But I did predict that you would see evidence that he's not any of these things that his enemies are saying.
Now, what's interesting about this is that...
The people who believe in gaslighting are essentially re-hypnotizing themselves and brainwashing themselves into this whole worldview that is completely at odds with observation.
All of our observations are violating everything they believe while being completely consistently true with everything that probably most of you and what I believe.
So watch that. Watch the consistency of predictions.
Let's talk about Goals versus systems.
I'm going to give you an example.
When my book came out, I had failed almost everything and still went big.
This was 2013 and the big theme in it was about using systems instead of goals.
That idea has changed really a lot because I don't know how often you've noticed Other articles and other books and other experts talking about systems being better than goals and also that your enthusiasm might not be as important as your talent stack.
So those are the ideas I introduced in this book.
You've seen other authors pretend that they had those ideas.
I'm not going to name names. There's one famous author who's written a best-selling book that's just copying my idea.
I won't name names. But I imagined when I wrote this in 2013 that it would have two lives.
The first life is when it comes out because it's a new book so it gets attention and people would buy it.
But I figured that there would be a second life that would happen several years after the first life.
And the second life would happen when people realized that this book had changed their lives and they would start talking about it.
And that's the phase we're in now.
If you see on Twitter, almost every day now somebody will tweet at me and say, you know, I bought this book in 2013 and it changed my life.
I got rich.
I got a promotion. I built my talent stack.
Or I lost weight.
And the most amazing part is the weight loss.
This is not a weight loss book.
It's not a weight loss book.
It has a little chapter in it on how to eat right as a system.
Really, it's in the context of how to make a system for every part of your life.
System for exercise, a system for eating, etc.
So one chapter in here.
It's changing people's lives.
So today on the internet, there's a great little tweet and a blog post from Keto Kelly.
So Kelly tells us she lost a hundred pounds.
She lost a hundred pounds after a lifetime of not really succeeding in the goal of losing weight.
She read my book, Had It Failed Almost Everything and Still Win Big.
You can just Google my name.
It'll pop up on Amazon. And she reports and wrote a blog post about how she figured out how to turn it into a system.
It turns out that the keto diet must have been the one that worked for her, but the point is not that this diet works.
The point is that she developed a system to churn through the options until she found something that worked for her.
So it wasn't about the specific system.
It was about her churning through all the alternatives until she found her system.
A hundred pounds.
She lost a hundred pounds reading a book that's not a diet book.
How many people have told me that they've lost Let's say over 50 pounds.
A lot. I get a lot of email from people who say, you know, and messages on social media, I lost 100 pounds.
I'm going to give you another example of a system over a goal.
You can see in the comments somebody's saying, Angela and Misha is saying, Totally life-changing.
That's great. Oh, they're talking about my story, not their own story.
All right. Yeah, you see a lot of people in the comments who have developed systems.
Let me tell you about one of my funny systems.
29 years ago, I joined a gym locally, and I moved a few times, but never far enough away that I didn't keep the same gym.
And they gave us these little cards that are our gym membership cards.
29 years ago, I said to myself, I'm going to lose this thing, and it's going to be real annoying.
So I don't want to lose my gym card, so I need a system.
And here's the system.
The system is this.
For 29 years, I said to myself, my gym card can only be in a few different places.
It can be in my wallet, it can be in my gym bag, or it can be on top of my dresser.
But it can never be anywhere else.
So if I find it somewhere, you know, if I, let's say, walk into a room and I don't want it in my pocket, I will not take it out of my pocket and put it on someplace that it doesn't belong.
29 years without losing my card.
How long is that? Let me cover my little number here.
I want you to look at what I looked like when I started this system.
Does that look like me today?
There it is. A little bit different, wouldn't you say?
A little bit different.
I had something called hair back then.
It was awesome.
I didn't have a lot of it, but I had hair.
29 years without losing this little piece of plastic because I had a system that works every time.
Phone. How many of you have broken your phone screen?
I've had a phone for a long time.
Do you know how many phones I've broken?
Zero. Zero phones.
I have never broken a phone.
Oh, I have a little crack on my phone, but that's the crack in the screen, so I have a protective screen that's cracked.
Do you know how many phones I've lost because I dropped them in water?
Zero. Zero phones.
I have never lost a phone because I dropped it in water.
Do you know why? I have a system.
This phone will never be over water.
That's my system. I have used my phone in a hot tub.
But unlike people who have lost their phones many times, if you use your phone in a hot tub, don't do this.
I'm sitting in a hot tub and directly below me is a bunch of water.
I will never do that.
If I use it in a hot tub, I leave it sitting flat down, like this, on the dry edge, and I type on it while it's sitting flat on the dry edge.
I will never pick up this phone over water.
I will never walk through shallow water holding it.
I will never stand in the water with it in my hand.
I will never get near water when it's in my pocket.
That's my system.
So zero problems.
Now, I have been responsible for paying for lots of phones, so stepkids, etc.
How many phones do stepchildren lose?
A lot. Luckily, I insure them, so that doesn't cost that much.
But everybody who doesn't use my system, they have lost multiple phones.
The average person has probably lost five phones.
And let me ask you this.
Tell me in the comments how many phones you've cracked or ruined with water in your whole life.
So cracked or ruined with water in your whole life.
Tell me, just give me your number in the comments.
So some of you, none.
So those of you who say none probably have a similar set of...
Oh, everybody's saying zero here.
Is it only the people I know who are bad at...
Seriously? All of you are at zero.
There's not one person who's ever had a cracked phone.
Only one person so far.
All right, this story is just all falling apart now.
I thought most of you were going to say, I've lost at least one phone.
All right, so all the smart people have a good system.
So I guess that story didn't turn out as well as I hoped it would.
I thought everybody here was going to say, well, I've lost two phones.
All right. Also, the very first thing I do when I get a phone is I put a cover on it, even if I don't like the cover.
Here's what dumb people do.
Well, I'm not going to say dumb.
I'll be nice about that.
How many people have you seen buy a brand new phone and then they look at the protective cases that are in the phone store and they say, no, the ones in the phone store are not as good as what I want.
I want to shop around a little bit and get a good protective case.
When I see that, my head starts to explode.
Because don't you know that the odds of you breaking your phone before you get to the car just went to about 1,000%?
Because if you put off buying the case, you're going to break your phone.
I mean, not every time, but certainly the simulation will make it happen.
Here's what I do. I buy a phone, I walk over to the phone case, and I buy a case.
And I put it on before I walk out of the store.
I don't even like that case.
If I need a new case later, I'll get one.
But I'm never going to walk out of a store without a case and a protective screen on my phone.
Ever. And if you do, you're not playing the odds right.
Alright. I was amused to see that AOC tweeted at Trump something about impeachment and She says, Mr.
President, you're from Queens, you may fool the rest of us, blah, blah, blah.
Just some stuff that a body should be impeached.
But the funny part of the story is that Trump tweeted back, and neither of these tweets are especially interesting.
What's interesting is that they're having an AOC to Trump conversation.
I think it's the first time.
Now when I say conversation, I mean they're addressing just each other.
I think it's the first time.
And Trump said, I think we have a very real risk of losing.
Oh, he's quoting AOC saying that Trump might win the re-election.
It doesn't matter what he said.
All right, so what either of them said is immaterial to my point and not very interesting.
But it's another confirmation that whatever AOC is doing is, number one, working.
Because who else is having a conversation with the President of the United States?
Kind of rare. I mean, he engages a lot of people.
But AOC just got promoted to the big show.
And the President has apparently identified her as important enough to be worthy of a specific response just to her.
So... Remember what I predicted when she first burst on the scene.
When AOC first came on the scene, I said, I'm going to predict that she's the real deal.
I'm going to predict that her persuasive power is something that's going to endure.
Now I see the little...
Puking emojis here in the comments and stuff.
I'm not telling you you need to like her.
I'm not telling you you need to...
Somebody says game knows game.
I was just going to say that, but you beat me to it.
So yes, my belief, without doing any mind reading, so this is just speculation on my part, I would bet that if you had a private conversation with President Trump, he would admire AOC. That's what I think.
Now, I'm not saying he likes her policies, doesn't like her politics, of course, I know that.
But I'll bet, I'll bet those two, if nobody were watching, you could never have this situation, but if AOC and President Trump hung out together, like they just hung out together and had a coffee or something, I think they'd be friends.
I really do. All right.
Here's the most fun thing that's coming up.
I sent a message on Twitter to a Democrat candidate, Andrew Yang.
And I thought to myself, what are the odds that a Democratic president, Andrew Yang, would answer my message on Twitter?
And I asked him to come on my Periscope.
And I thought, well, if anybody were going to come on this Periscope, he'd be sort of the perfect one.
He responded to me, I think, within the hour, pretty quickly.
And he said, sure.
And he referred me to, I think, his brother to set up the appointment.
So I've got a message in to set up an appointment.
So Andrew Yang, presidential candidate, will be appearing on this Periscope sometime soon if we can schedule it.
I assume it's going to happen.
We'll be able to schedule it.
That will be probably the most interesting conversation ever.
One of the most interesting conversations you're ever going to see between now and Election Day.
I guarantee you this is going to be fun, in a good way.
Fun, you're going to learn something.
Let me tell you what I like about Andrew Yang.
I don't know all of his policies, so I'm not going to say I love or dislike specific policies.
Here's what I like.
Number one, somehow he came from nowhere.
And we're talking about him.
How'd that happen? Did you ever ask yourself, how in the world are we talking about Andrew Yang?
What happened?
How is that even possible?
He doesn't have government experience.
He's a young guy.
I don't know anything about his background.
Nothing. I'm still talking about him.
What did he do to make that happen?
Because that was talent.
I'm going to say that Until we confirm what he did, if I find out he's got a famous relative or something, I might change my mind.
But as far as I know, it's just talent.
So that makes him interesting.
The second thing is that whenever he tweets, even if you don't agree with his whatever point, it's always kind of interesting.
He doesn't know how to turn off interesting.
Like he can't be uninteresting if he tried.
Compare him to Kamala Harris.
Try reading Kamala Harris's tweet from beginning to end without feeling sleepy.
It's like it's a soporific.
That's a new word I learned.
Soporific makes you tired.
I think that's what that means.
Somebody needs to fact check me on that vocabulary.
But And I'm actually amazed when I read a Kamala Harris tweet.
I almost can't get to the last word.
And they're just little tweets.
And I'm so bored by the time I get to the end of it.
I'm like, let's see what Kamala Harris has to say.
The president's a big old impeachment.
We've got to do better.
Kamala. Thank you, ASMR. And then you read a...
Andrew Yang tweet, or a AOC tweet, or a President Trump tweet, and it stays with you all day long.
I mean, all three of those people can give you a tweet routinely, you know, not just once in a while, just their everyday language sticks with you all day long.
It's a big difference.
All right. So I think Andrew Yang is a valuable contributor to the conversation because he's bringing in ideas that maybe would not have been introduced.
His UBI idea, which most of you hate, is way smarter than you think it is.
I'm not going to say I think it's a good idea yet.
We'll hear him argue for it.
But I think you're in for a surprise that that universal basic income idea It's way better than you think on first exposure.
It's way better. Maybe not good enough that you want to do it, but it's way better than you think.
We're also going to ask him about nuclear and Green New Deal and some other things, so we'll get to some good stuff.
Anyway, whenever we schedule that, I'll let you know.
Naval disagrees with him.
I think Naval's take on that is that a universal basic income Would be better if it was expressed in goods and services.
So in other words, if you're poor, you can have access to less expensive stuff under some certain conditions, enough to give you some basic quality of life while you try to improve.
So I think Naval has a good twist on that that makes sense, but it's still UBI. It's just a different form, in my opinion.
All right. Why not make the poor rich?
Sure, why not? Okay, is there anything else anybody wants to ask me?
Let's see what time it is.
Oh, it's time to end.
I think we've done enough for now.
Maybe more than enough.
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