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July 8, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
01:01:21
Episode 591 Scott Adams: Antifa’s Diversity Problem, Equal pay for Soccer Players, Slaughter Meter
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Bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum Hello everybody!
What a wonderful day it is.
Wonderful day. It's a great country, great year.
Things are going in the right direction.
And Lee Stranahan is doing a film, Road to Charlottesville.
Well, I assume that he's giving the real story there, not the hoax version.
So that will be interesting.
But I got interrupted.
What I wanted to say is, it's time for your dopamine hit, the best part of your day, the part that makes all the rest of your day better.
It starts when you grab a cup of mug or a glass, a chalice, a stein, a tankard, maybe a thermos, could be a flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid. I like coffee.
and join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of this simultaneous sip.
Ah, that's great.
Let's talk about Slippery Slopes.
I have become somewhat known for saying that slippery slopes don't exist.
They are imaginary.
And the reason I say that is that whenever you have a slippery slope and things are going in one direction, you always have a counterforce that pops up to respond.
So if it looks like it's going to be a slippery slope forever, You're always missing the most important thing, that if everybody notices it's a slippery slope, somebody, and probably lots of people, will organize to create a counterforce to stop it from slipping.
Let me give you some examples.
Somebody called this the privacy stack.
And the idea is that for each of these social media platforms, which you might be concerned about in terms of your privacy, in terms of censorship, you have an alternative now.
So instead of YouTube, you've got BitChute, B-I-T, BitChute.
Instead of Chrome, you've got the Brave browser.
Instead of Google for searches, you've got DuckDuckGo.
Instead of Gmail, you've got ProtonMail.
Instead of Twitter, you've got Parler.
Instead of Facebook, I think you have Minds.
I haven't looked at Minds before.
M-I-N-D-S. So I don't know what the deal is there.
Now, I would say that all of the competitors are just weak little slivers of the thing that they hope to compete with.
And I would say at this point, the likely future is that the competitors aren't going to do that much.
Oh yeah, I should have mentioned Interface by Wenhub, my company, as an alternative to Patreon.
I don't think of Patreon as social media, but in this context, they've...
They banned some people for their speech on other platforms, so I think that's fair.
Now, my point is that you see that the alternatives popped up.
And the alternatives will always pop up when the slippery slope gets sliding a little too far and it's a little too slippery.
At this point, I would say that we're in sort of a equilibrium finding zone where we're trying to figure out if we've already gone too far.
And if we have, you would expect that these alternative platforms would get a lot stronger.
If we haven't gone too far, and the slippery slope is just going to sort of peter out on its own, then you would expect that the alternative platforms would not thrive, because they wouldn't be as necessary.
You would stick with the one that gets you the most traffic.
But here's another example.
There was a festival in Detroit called Afrofuture.
It's some kind of futurist group about African American, I don't know, culture or people or something.
But the thing that got in a lot of headlines is that they charged a different entry fee depending on your ethnicity.
So if you were a, quote, person of color, you paid half as much for the festival as if you were white.
Now, some of you would say, well, there it is.
There's the slippery slope.
I told you this would happen.
You know, sure, it was good that we ended slavery.
Everybody agreed with that.
Yes, it was good that we fought for, you know, we, the people who were alive, fought for civil rights and did a great job there.
That's all great. But what happens when things get equal?
Maybe it will just keep sliding.
Maybe it will slide until only black people are in charge and Obama's your president and white people can't get jobs.
That's not really likely.
Because this very event tells you what happens.
So the Afrofuture Festival attempted to take the slippery slope a little too far.
And they actually charged a different price based on your color.
And they were going to charge white people more.
The theory being that historically there were advantages to being a white person and you could go to any city and go to a festival.
But if you were poor and you were a person of color, maybe you couldn't leave your cities.
So they had some excuse that nobody really bought.
So what happened?
The public rebelled.
At least one artist pulled out.
Eventbrite, they handled the online ticketing, said, nope, we're not going to handle you.
If you don't follow the basic rules of society, you can't even sell tickets on our site.
And so they reversed.
They reversed.
Now, they tried to sort of get around it by having a white person voluntary contribution.
Okay, if it's voluntary, it's voluntary.
I'm not going to worry about that.
But here are two good examples of where the slippery slope always leads to a response, and you can depend on that.
Alright, that's enough about that.
So, women's soccer.
What a good world it is.
What a good country it is when we're talking about pay equality for women's soccer after the American women just repeated winning the World Cup.
I mean seriously. How about the fact that the most famous and celebrated member of the women's team is a lesbian?
You couldn't have a healthier country, right?
Literally, This is the best bad story you could ever have.
So it's a story because there's some bad news in it, right?
The bad news is that Megan Rapinoe maybe doesn't want to visit the White House and doesn't like Trump.
And then their salaries for the women's players are far lower than for the men's.
So if that's your worst story, That a lesbian incredible athlete just led American women's soccer to the highest level of success?
And that's our bad news?
You know, I get that the other issues are fun, but if that's your bad news, man, are we doing well.
Of course, the issue with women's soccer pay...
Is that women would like to get as much as men get, but I don't know how they're counting this stuff.
Most of you who are economists and objective would say to yourself, hey, shouldn't the women only make some similar percentage of the overall money that's produced by their sport?
And if men are producing more money for their sport...
And they're getting, you know, the same percentage, let's say, of that big basket.
Isn't it the percentage that matters?
You know, if they both had, let's say, if the players had, I don't know, 20% of the money that was coming into their sport, wouldn't that be fair?
And if the women get more viewers, then they could ask for more money.
Now, some people would say that's fair, but I don't think you should look at this as necessarily an attempt to fairness.
Sure, there are some people who are putting it in those terms, but I think you have to see this as a negotiation.
I think you have to see it as a negotiation.
Meaning, That women can probably get a better deal by claiming that there is some unfairness.
It's a real good negotiating strategy.
So if you are the women who are trying to get higher salaries, you should act as though it doesn't matter how much your sport is making, because that works against your argument.
So I'm also loving the fact that women are negotiating so effectively.
That's good news. Women are taking every lever they can pull, every button they can push.
If women are negotiating aggressively for greater pay, and let's say they're using a little hyperbole to get there.
Let's say they're using an approach that, who am I thinking of?
Who would be a person we all know Who sometimes will stretch the facts and maybe paint a picture that's a little hyperbolic and maybe it's not the most logically accurate way to look at the world, but it works really well for negotiating.
Who is that reminding me of?
Oh yeah! It reminds me of the person that the women's soccer team hates the most.
President Trump.
They're using a President Trump technique to negotiate for better salaries, to which I say, good job.
Good job.
Good job winning the World Cup.
Good job being great role models, at least in terms of, you know, being powerful women who are doing things that change the world and in their own little corner of the world.
And good job negotiating.
When you're negotiating, the last thing you want to do is be rational.
If I could teach you only one thing today, it's this.
If you are negotiating, don't act entirely rational.
The most rational negotiator is the one that loses.
You want to be seen as somebody who can't be reasoned with.
Because if you can't be reasoned with, and you just got to get past this situation...
Somebody's going to cave in because, hey, you can't reason with them.
They can't see the logic of our argument.
So the women's soccer team is doing a total trump on their industry.
By acting irrational, but very rationally irrational, meaning it's exactly the way they should be handling this.
If this were me, if I were on the women's soccer team, I would not be saying, hey, let's look at the percentage that men make for soccer, and if we get the same percentage of that total basket, even though our basket is smaller, wouldn't that be fair?
I might be thinking that, but I'm not going to say it out loud if I'm negotiating.
If I'm negotiating, I'm just going to say, hey, why are women getting 80 cents on the dollar?
What's wrong? This is all unfair.
All right. So congratulations to the women's soccer team.
I would like it if they respected our president more and all that, but it's not important.
It's really not important.
Somebody says, hi, you like sports now.
I like the show.
I think the sports in general should be rethought.
I think that we force a lot of people into sports at the school level, who maybe that's not where they're going to thrive.
So I think the whole process of sports needs to be rethought.
But you can't take anything away from the women's soccer team because they killed it this year.
They just killed it. All right.
Let's talk about Antifa.
So you probably saw this.
Probably one of my most viral tweets the other day was based on some mugshot photos of Antifa.
I'm going to lower my screen here.
Do you notice anything about these folks?
Is there anything that just jumps out?
What jumps out about the Antifa people who were arrested?
You don't have to see the details.
Is there anything that just jumps right down at you?
There are no African-American people who got arrested.
In Antifa, I guess it was in Seattle.
Or was it Oregon? It was in Portland.
Now, I don't think they're all white, by the way.
I'm just guessing without knowing.
But I would say that a number of them have some...
Interesting, has some interesting ethnic backgrounds, but none of them look African American.
And I just thought it was a little bit funny and a little bit embarrassing that when the masks came off, when the masks came off, I guess the masks came off, didn't they?
I've been saying for a while that it's the Antifa, the ones who are putting on the masks and looking for trouble, that it's a lifestyle choice.
It's not politics. It's about the excitement.
It's about belonging.
It's about feeling important. It's about the adrenaline.
It's about a lot of things, and then they excuse it by saying there's some political reason for it, but that's just an excuse.
If it were a genuine political movement, I'm almost positive you'd see more diversity, wouldn't you?
Now, I don't know that that's true, but it is hilariously embarrassing for them.
Now, one of the things that got that tweet a lot of attention, I think it's probably approaching 9,000 retweets now, probably will be my biggest tweet of the year.
But I noticed that Devin Nunes retweeted it with an LOL to me.
And I have to tell you that the...
I've said this before, but I'd like to remind you.
The weirdest thing in the world is to be me.
Hmm. My technology just decided to talk to me.
That was weird. Cancel.
Canceling. So anyway, I was saying that often when I talk about the news, I get drawn into the news.
So I have Google alerts set on my phone so if anybody mentions me in a news story it pops up in my email so I can see it.
And every time there's a big-ish story that I've commented on, not every time, but quite often, I end up being dragged into the story.
So Suddenly, you know, I'll be watching television and I'll see people arguing about the fate of the United States and the world, and next thing I know I'm interacting with them on Twitter, and it is just a weird small world.
Anyway, here's my point on Antifa.
I believe that Antifa has jumped the shark.
I hate using that term, but it seems like it fits in this case.
There was a time when people didn't know what Antifa was, and it looked like it was just sort of an anti-Trump movement, and other people were anti-Trump too, so they said, well, you're anti-Trump, I'm anti-Trump, I guess you're okay.
But I think the Antifa, especially because of the violent members, and largely because of the masks, which are pretty scary looking, I think that, check me on this, but it feels like this is my reading of the zeitgeist.
My reading of the zeitgeist is that from now until Election Day, In 2020, every time the Antifa marches in public, even if there's no violence, every time they're in public with their scary outfits, I think President Trump gets more popular.
So I think that their entire movement has now become the opposite of its intention.
The more you see of them, the less credible they become.
Can you think of anybody else who had that same arc?
You know, you can imagine the early days of the three-lettered entity that also wear hoods, right?
When the Klan was, you know, early on, don't you think that publicity was good for them?
I don't know, however many decades ago it was.
Was it a hundred years ago when the Klan started?
I don't know the exact dates, but decades ago, don't you think it was good For the Klan, every time they got publicity.
They helped their cause.
Like, hey, we're getting publicity.
More people are joining. We're doing great.
But in time, their reputation became so toxic Would you agree with me that every time there's some little Klan demonstration in some park where 12 people show up, it makes their whole ideology look pathetic and ridiculous?
So in other words, every time the Klan organizes, it works against the Klan.
Wouldn't you agree? At this point, they're so completely marginalized that the more you see of them, the less you like them.
Very much like Joe Biden.
The more you see of Joe Biden, the lower his poll numbers will go because he doesn't really match up the energy of the younger people and it's clear that he's out of it, etc.
So the more you see Antifa and the more you see Joe Biden, The worst Democrats will do, even if Joe Biden is not the nominee, because he becomes part of their brand.
Joe Biden is probably taking the energy right out of the Democrats right now.
I would love to be in the room or like to fly on the wall to listen to Democrats who absolutely hate President Trump and are looking for him to lose the next election and they're looking at their standard bearer being Joe Biden.
What do the 20-somethings say when they're alone and they're having a drink or doing a couple of bongs?
What do they say when they're alone?
I'm sure they dislike the president as much as ever.
A few people may have moved over, but mostly people stay on their teams.
But do they say to themselves, hey, hey, Ashley, hey, hey, Kevin, I think Biden's going to do it for us.
I think Joe Biden's going to take it home.
Do they say that?
Because I don't think they say that.
I think they say, oh, we are so screwed.
We are in so much trouble.
If this guy is our standard bearer, we're done.
I think that there must be some kind of panic setting in.
I think there will be a point of, I'll call it acceptance, around Election Day, where I think by Election Day the Democrats may have given up It depends how close the polls are.
If the polls are close, we'll have a lot of turnout.
But there might be some capitulation coming.
We'll see. It depends where the polls are on the final day.
But I would say at this point, I want Antifa to be unmasked, and I would like the police to unmask at least a few of them every time.
It did help that the ones who got arrested got unmasked.
I mean, I think that probably put a dent in their movement to see all of the faces of the people that got unmasked and see that floating around social media.
Very popular on social media, I might add.
So I think that probably took a dent out of it.
But I am now in favor of Antifa demonstrations under the following conditions.
Those of you who oppose Antifa should leave immediately.
Or make sure you're in the city that has a police department that can handle this sort of thing.
Now, as I said before, the D.C. Police Department, apparently, and you can't tell unless you're there, but based on news reports, based on clips I've seen, it looks like the actual police, the people on the streets, did great.
It looks like they did great in keeping the violence to a minimum, but they obviously were handicapped by their management.
I think it's obvious, this is not confirmed, but I think it's obvious that That management told the police on the street to not unmask people, even though the law allows them to do that.
There must have been a decision about that.
But still, they did the best job they could under the rules that they were operating on.
There was a very funny tweet from Michael Malice, who often has funny tweets.
You should follow him. If you're not following Michael Malice, You're missing some great acerbic wit.
So if you like your tweets edgy, if you like a little spice on your tweets, follow Michael Malice.
But he tweeted yesterday, I think, a picture of, do you remember E. Jean Carroll, who was accusing the president?
And you remember how long ago that was?
Two weeks. As Michael Malice pointed out in his tweet, it was only two weeks ago we were talking about E. Jean Carroll.
Do you know why we're not talking about her anymore?
It didn't work.
It didn't hurt the president.
So it's not news anymore because it doesn't hurt the president.
She was so non-credible in her Let's say the way the story evolved.
I'm not saying anything about her personally or her thoughts or what happened, because those are things I can't know.
But the way the public received her was not in a way that's bad for the president.
Somebody's asked me if I can talk about Epstein.
Well, there's a lot of unknowns on Epstein, and so I generally try to avoid talking about stories the way they do on the news, where they'll say, well, we don't know what's going to happen, but if this happens and if that happens, those are the least interesting stories.
I think Epstein is a wait-and-see.
Because there's just way too much we don't know.
Somebody saying that Dershowitz is done, I would bet against that.
If I had to bet one thing, I would bet that Alan Dershowitz will come out of this fine for a variety of reasons.
But, you know, I suppose we live in a world where any surprise is possible, but I don't think that's going to surprise you.
Meaning that I think Dershowitz will be fine and all this stuff.
But... If it's true that Bill Clinton was on Epstein's jet 26 times or whatever, I don't know how you explain that.
Do you? All right, we're just deleting all of the people who complained about the sound right now.
So, one down. All right.
I saw a story that the Navy is outfitting the destroyers, that the Navy is putting lasers on ships.
Lasers. Now, apparently the big problem with a laser on the ship is having enough power source on the ship to power the laser.
And, you know, maybe even nuclear isn't enough because you have to...
It's not enough that you produce a lot of energy.
You have to store it so that it can be released in its most concentrated form.
So they have some technical things that are tough, but apparently they're on the way to solving them.
And we'll actually have lasers that can take out drones.
So imagine this.
You're probably going to see this in the future.
Imagine a fleet of hundreds of enemy drones.
They could be small or they could be big, but let's say there are hundreds of them.
It's just blackening the sky and it's coming toward your carrier group.
And imagine that the destroyer fires up his laser.
And of course, the advantage of a laser, I think, is that it's the speed of light, right?
If you fire a bullet or a missile, you have to time it so that the flight of the bullet or missile matches a flying object, which is hard.
But if you're aiming a laser, the laser essentially arrives at the same time as fired.
Speed of light. I mean, there's a little delay, but the object will not have moved much.
So I think you can simply light up your screen with all your targets, and I think the laser Maybe not version one, but I think the laser can just go bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, and take out 300 drones in five seconds.
I guess it depends how long the pulse lasts.
But the other thing it could do is sort of like...
Babylon 5, the shadows, where you saw that the laser would just be continuous, so instead of firing bursts, it would be like a sword in the air.
It would just be a sword that goes and just paints all the drones out of the sky.
So, I only point that out to say, we're definitely going to have lasers in the military.
I would say at this point, you don't have to wonder if that's going to happen.
That's happening. We've got lasers.
And the next war is going to be small drones Versus lasers.
Because I think lasers are going to be the only defense against swarms of small things.
Would you agree? I don't know that there's another defense, unless it's electronic, maybe jamming, I suppose.
But certainly war is taking an interesting direction, not in a good way.
I saw a...
Story that said that the RNC, the Republican National Committee, attracted, quote, a larger share of donations under $200 than the Democratic National Committee.
This is according to the New York Times.
So in other words, if you take $200 as your threshold, and I suppose it would be different depending on which threshold you pick, but if you say anything under $200 is a, quote, small donation, The Republicans got more small donations than the Democratic National Committee.
Now, could there be a better indicator of President Trump's re-election chances?
That's really, really good indicator.
Because I believe President Trump not only got more donations from big donors, but also more donations from small donors.
I think he got more donations from everybody.
Now you add that, so apparently the president will have just a tremendous amount of money for re-election that he did not have for election.
So point one, the president won with very little money against what some people thought was the strongest candidate the Democrats have ever had, And then, of course, in hindsight, Hillary Clinton looked like the worst candidate.
But at the time, we thought she was super strong.
And the president beat her anyway.
But now he's the incumbent.
Incumbents don't often lose.
And if an incumbent has a strong economy, they really don't lose.
And if the incumbent has all the charisma versus the challenger, then they really, really don't lose.
And if the incumbent has way more money than the challenger, then they really, really don't lose.
And if there are no wars that are a problem for the voters, well, then the incumbent doesn't lose.
So, you have about five serious indicators to say that Trump is going to win re-election.
And that's before you even talk about how bad the competition is.
Who exactly is going to run against him?
I'm guessing Kamala Harris will eventually be the nominee, and I think she's got some game, but she doesn't have anything like the charisma of the president, and she's going to have a lot to explain by the time she gets the nomination,
if she does. So I would say the slaughter meter is at 200%, meaning the odds of President Trump getting re-elected in a landslide It is so high now that if you were to bet the other way, it would seem irrational.
Now, of course, it's still a long way off.
And of course, anything can happen.
Nothing is certain.
But if nothing big changes, I suppose it's almost a certainty that something big will change.
But if nothing big did change, It's a lock for the president to get re-elected, I think.
A couple more stories.
I saw, but I haven't seen much follow-up in the press, and I think there's a reason for that.
I believe the administration is looking to require pharmaceutical companies, the drug manufacturers who sell stuff in this country, to give us the same price as the best price that they sell at anywhere else in the world.
Now here's the catch.
The United States has been subsidizing healthcare in the rest of the world.
The fact that we pay too much for our drugs allows the pharmaceuticals to cover their fixed costs, etc.
And then since poor countries wouldn't be able to afford to pay a lot, They can charge them less, and then those poor countries get better health care because they're paying less for the drugs.
But it's being subsidized by the United States.
Now, apparently the Trump administration is going to require, and who knows if this will pass Supreme Court, who knows if there's a problem here, who knows who gets sued.
So this is by far not a done deal.
But the Trump administration is saying to pharmaceuticals, you have to offer, in this country, a price that's no worse than the lowest price in another country.
A most favored nations clause in the contract.
Now, you know what's amazing about this story?
What's the most amazing thing about this story?
I want to see if it's obvious to you what's the amazing thing.
The amazing thing about the story...
Is that this is the first time anybody thought of that?
Are you kidding me?
I used to negotiate contracts for a living.
So my job for several years in my corporate life was to deal with the vendors and negotiate contracts with mostly technology vendors.
The most favored nations clause that says you're not going to charge us more than you charge other people is pretty basic contract discussion.
In other words, if you're a professional negotiator of contracts, And you have not thought to ask for that, that nobody else gets a lower price?
Now, you can't always get that.
You might not have enough power to get that into your contract.
But if you're the United States, and you're the biggest customer for these pharmaceutical companies, and you're the government, so you can just change the law, you absolutely can get that.
It was laying there like free money on a table.
I said that exactly the same time somebody put in the comments, free money on the table.
I actually said it as the phrase was appearing in the comments.
So yeah, you got ahead of me.
This president, better than anybody ever has done it, is the only person who will pick up free money that's laying on a table.
And it's mind-boggling.
This, you know, I don't know what it's going to be, an executive order or some kind of a rule change, I don't know what it is, but if this administration gets away with it, Meaning if they can cause the pharmaceuticals to raise their prices in other countries, if that's necessary, I don't even know if that's necessary, or to at least give us those same prices, it will be an enormous change in the cost of your healthcare.
It will come at the expense of the pharmaceutical companies, which are, you know, in many cases also part of our economy, but I'll bet there are a lot of them that are not.
There must be a lot of foreign pharmaceutical companies that are overcharging in the United States.
Are you okay with that?
So that they can subsidize other countries?
Now, the cruel part of this is that it absolutely will, I would assume, have an impact on other countries being able to afford their healthcare.
But isn't that true for everything we do?
100% of the money that we spend in the United States, it could have been spent in another country where they needed it more.
People who are more poor, more desperate, have worse healthcare.
That's true of everything. Every dollar we spend on ourselves could have been spent for somebody else.
So the pharmaceutical stuff seems like it's just more of that.
And so you've got President Trump saying, hey, looks like there's some money on that table.
Why don't we just pick it up?
Now, if he gets this done, There's a very good chance, given other free market changes that the administration is making for healthcare, you know, things about organizing across state lines, etc.
If this stuff gets done and works into the system by election day, The president might be able to claim, just think about this, the president might be able to claim that he stopped the increase of health care expenses.
Now that's not as good as universal health care insurance to people who have no insurance.
They still would prefer that.
But that's a really strong story.
If you're running for reelection and you're the first president who made health care costs stop in their tracks, Maybe even go down?
Maybe? I don't know.
I don't know how he doesn't get re-elected.
Somebody said, is Viagra cheap yet?
I believe it is. It's a generic...
Why do we have to pay more?
Because other countries mismanage their money, somebody says.
Well, that's the whole point, is that we can do what's good for the United States, because that's how countries are organized.
They're organized to take care of themselves, and the idea is that if everybody did that, the world's a better place.
Then do university tuition.
Alright, I'm just looking at your comments here.
Generic drug companies caught conspiring to fix prices, is that true?
Alright, people are prompting me about a tweet in, I tweeted a story in which Bill Gates He had referred to himself as a minor wizard and referred to the late Steve Jobs as a major wizard who had a reality distortion field, and he could make a company work even if the product was bad, which he did with Next Computer.
He made a huge profit on something where nobody even wanted the product.
And Bill Gates noted that Steve Jobs' magic reality distortion field didn't work on Gates because Gates felt he had a little immunity to it because he was a small-time wizard himself.
Now, there's not much to say about that, except that when Gates talks about Jobs and his power of persuasion, you're hearing it from a credible and interesting source, and somebody who was close to the source, somebody who knew him well enough to have an informed opinion.
And even though Jobs was considered an a-hole, and I think Gates actually said that in the interview, Nobody could argue the fact that he could make people work harder and do things and buy things that other people couldn't make happen.
So he did seem to have the magic.
All right. Any other questions?
That's all I got today.
It's another wonderful day because, again, if you look at the news...
Hey, Nimble Navigate...
Oh yeah, Joe Biden is apologizing.
So Joe Biden said he waited to apologize about this busing thing.
Do you all understand the busing issue?
I don't. Apparently the issue is Democrats think other Democrats are racist because they agree with each other on busing.
I think that's it, right?
Did I get that wrong? Tell me if I got any of the facts wrong.
The Democrats, especially Kamala Harris and Joe Biden, they are mad at each other because they agree completely on the issue of busing that's a 20-year-old issue.
Isn't it something like that?
So it's sort of a non-issue that highlights how well things are going.
If the Democrats are debating a topic from 20 years ago, You're in good shape.
Think about it. You're in really good shape, if that's what you're doing.
Oh yeah, so there's a story about Kelly O'Hara picking up the flag when the other player drops it on the ground.
But I watched the video, and it's obvious that there were three of the women's soccer team players who were going to do sort of a A dance coordinated thing, you know, as a celebration, and one of them had the flag in her hand, and she put it down for a minute to do the coordinated thing.
I don't think she was thinking about it as being disrespectful.
I think it was just...
I just think she wasn't thinking.
I doubt she put the American flag on the ground to make a statement.
It was just a really thoughtless thing to do in public, but yeah, she's young.
Young people do thoughtless things.
So, at the end of my Periscope from yesterday, In which I did, I pinned yesterday's Periscope to my, top of my Twitter page.
I'm predicting it will be the most watched video that I've made so far.
So far, maybe 70,000 or 100,000 people have looked at it, if you count all the platforms together.
If you count YouTube plus Periscope plus BitChute.
So it'll be probably around 100,000 people who have seen it by today.
I'm thinking it might be the first video that I've made that reaches a million viewers.
And at the end of the video, I said something provocative.
The nature of the video is...
Well, you can just see it yourself.
But at the end of it, I... I said something that got a lot of reaction.
So a lot of people are quoting me and reacting to it.
And what I said was this sentence.
Listen to it carefully because you have to listen to it carefully to get what's happening.
It's just one sentence and I said God is what's left over after you take everything away.
God is what's left over after you take everything away.
Now Here's what's interesting about this, and here's why I said it.
Every one of you who heard that had a different opinion of what it meant.
You probably registered it as profound without knowing what it meant.
I'm going to read it again and see if your brain recognizes it as profound at the same time you're not sure what it means.
God is what's left after you take everything away.
It sounds profound, right?
You register it that way, but you're not sure exactly what it means.
And what people demonstrated in the comments is what I thought would happen, is that everybody had a different interpretation of what it meant.
You can interpret this as a statement that God exists outside of the normal rules of physics and matter.
You can interpret it as saying that there's no God because you took everything away and there wouldn't be anything left.
You can interpret it as the simulation.
You can interpret it any way you want.
But that's the point.
So what's profound about it is that the statement is exactly like all of your different views of the world.
It is a statement about subjective reality.
The statement is that you can all look at exactly the same stuff.
You can look at the same picture.
You can look at the same words.
You can think of the same idea.
But the way you process it will be an entirely different world.
And this sentence is one of those little ways where you can see that clearly.
So I'll say it again.
God is what's left after you take everything away.
So God is what's left over after you take everything away.
As you watch people completely reinterpret that as opposites, meaning that means God doesn't exist or that means that God does exist and he's beyond time and space and matter.
You can see the entire world.
Everything about your reality is in this sentence.
Once you understand that people are looking at their reality and interpreting it as their own movie, and there's nothing you can do about that, nor should you.
I mean, there's no reason to do anything about it.
We're living our own subjective reality.
And once you get that...
You become free.
If you understand reality to be objective, Then what it feels like is that you're a victim of reality.
Reality is here, and it's imposing its will on you, and you're doing the best you can, but reality is going to win.
It's subjective, and it's controlling you.
It controlled your DNA. It controls your choices.
It controls what your options are.
Reality is objective, and you're its victim.
But once you realize that we're all living subjective realities, and that those subjective realities pretty much all work.
Some better than others, but they all work.
Meaning that you can live your life thinking that you reincarnated from a cow, and I can live my life Believing in a Christian world.
Somebody else can live their life believing in an Islamic interpretation of the world.
And we can all eat, breathe, procreate.
It works fine.
These are completely different worldviews.
Once you understand that reality is subjective, here's the cool part.
You can control it.
Just let that sit there for a moment.
Once you realize that reality is subjective, you can control it.
That's how you escape the matrix, is understanding that it's under your control.
And that's the first, probably the first and most important mental shift you have to make.
Is to understand that you control your reality and that your reality is complete.
You can actually make things happen by focusing, by just putting your energy, your attention, reinterpreting things, reading things you need to do, doing what you need to do, having systems that get you where you want.
There are things that you can move and control that will change your reality.
You're watching me right now having a fairly substantial impact on On the country.
Now, do you think that I believe I live in an objective world where the only things I can do are the things that reality has allowed for me?
It's like, oh, you only have this path.
It's the only path you can get on.
You can't get on that path.
I don't live in that world.
I live in a subjective reality.
And because I understand it to be subjective, I don't see limitations the way I used to.
I would have imagined, okay, I don't have this set of skills, so I can't do that.
I don't have this training, so I can't do that.
I don't have enough time.
I don't have enough money. Somebody's going to dislike me.
I'm going to embarrass myself.
It might not work out.
What if it goes wrong?
That's subjective reality, and it's a prism.
Once you realize that there are fairly ordinary mechanisms that you can control, meaning your mind, the systems that you use to live your life, the things you focus on, the things you care about, the things you dream of, that these actually produce different realities.
You can't make a car disappear, you can't make an elephant appear, you can't make a bag of money appear.
It doesn't work like that.
But you can absolutely steer...
You know, your reality is there's still going to be stuff out there that's exterior to you, but you can steer your way to the movie you want.
Have you watched me do this, by the way?
Somebody's saying that the proof is my girlfriend, Christina.
That's pretty good proof.
Somebody says, is this in LoserThink?
The ideas that you're hearing now are sort of spread across my existing books, How to Failed Almost Everything and Still Win Big.
Also in my book, Win Bigly, about persuasion in general.
And if you really want a total mind effing, you should read my book, God's Debris.
God's Debris is fiction, but it's designed for you to feel for the first time, in many cases it would be the first time that people felt it, to feel that reality could be reinterpreted in a completely different way and still work.
So that's what God's Debris is about.
It's fiction. But as you read it, it's designed, because I used hypnosis techniques as well as writing techniques, it's designed to make most readers, not every one of you, because everybody's different, but it's designed to make most readers have the sensation that they could understand reality through a different filter for the first time, and that that filter works as well As the filter they came to it with.
Once you realize that you can see the world through two different filters, in other words, two movies, two different realities, and they both work, that's the key.
They both work.
If you don't get that part, you've missed the secret.
I hate to say the secret because that's the name of the book.
But if you believe that you just went from one filter on reality and then you got another one, you said, oh, this new one is good, so I'll get rid of the old one.
You haven't learned the lesson.
The lesson is they both work.
That's the lesson. So that's what God's degree tries to teach you indirectly in a fictional sense.
Loser think is more about mental traps that we get into and how to get out of them.
And so I'll talk a lot more about that in the coming months.
It's due out in November. What about chronic health problems?
Well, some of you may know that I had a problem with my voice.
I lost my ability to speak for three and a half years, and it was an incurable problem.
So I lived in this, for a while, I lived in this objective reality where some people get this condition called spasmodic dysphonia, which is what I had, which makes your vocal cords scrunch together when you're trying to talk and so you can't produce intelligible noise.
When I learned that it was incurable, there was no cure.
I would never be able to speak again.
Did I say to myself, oh no, I am a victim of a reality that is objective, and now I know the rules, and the rules say that this is incurable.
I guess that's the rest of my life.
Imagine going the rest of your life not being able to speak.
40, 50 years of life not being able to speak.
Just imagine it, okay?
That's the reality that I was handed.
I chose to violate that reality.
I chose to violate it.
From the first day that I found out it was incurable, I told myself that someday I would be doing this.
I would be talking to a large number of people with a perfect voice.
Now, my voice isn't perfect, but if you heard my voice before I had the voice problem, it's the best it's ever been.
In other words, my current speaking voice, the one you hear right now, is substantially better than the best voice I ever had before I had a voice problem.
I said, I'm not going to settle for getting my voice back.
I said that every single day.
Every time I got in my car, I repeated to myself mentally, I, Scott Adams, will have a perfect voice every day for three and a half years.
I hunted down the one doctor in the world who was experimentally doing some surgeries on people's nerves in their neck, and he had some successes in curing this problem.
I hunted him down.
I went to his office. I got the surgery after a lot of research.
And it doesn't work for everybody.
Not every person who has the surgery gets the good result.
Most get an improvement, but they don't all get a full improvement.
It took working on my voice every day for years after the surgery.
It's been a number of years.
Every single day, my voice improved because I worked at it.
I worked on my breathing.
I worked on my tone.
I took everything that I learned before the surgery about how to produce good vocal quality.
And you see me doing it right now.
I'm speaking in what's called the mask of my face.
So I said to Reality, Reality, I reject you.
I reject you. I'm not going to have an incurable voice problem.
I'm going to be the first person who cures it.
And then I did. Now, I wasn't the first person.
It turns out there were some people I didn't know about.
But most of the world who has this problem still has it.
I would say 95% of all the people who have the same voice problem I had still have it.
They still have it. They haven't solved it.
So, no. I could tell you more stories that are similar to that.
Somebody said, did prayer play a part?
It did not. No, I'm not a believer.
I'm very pro-religion, but I'm not a believer personally.
I think religion is a great filter on the world.
For a lot of people, and objectively speaking, it's just obvious.
Somebody says, so far I've lost 89 pounds.
I think you're referring to using a system for weight loss that I talked about in How to Failed Almost Everything and Still Win Big.
And a lot of people have been writing to me and telling me that they've lost massive amounts of weight, they got promotions, they've doubled their pay, and all of it It's the same phenomenon.
It's people who have decided that the reality that they were handed, they reject.
They just rejected it.
They said, no, I'm not going to take the reality I'm handed.
I'm going to make my own.
And here's another one, 40 pounds down.
Just look at the comments.
There's somebody who lost 89 pounds and somebody who lost 40 pounds just following a simple system.
The name of the book is How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big.
If you just Google my name on Amazon, all the books will pop up.
50 pounds? 30 pounds?
Oh my God! Look at all the people in the comments who have lost...
Somebody gained weight.
Somebody lost 20?
23 pounds in 30 days?
Holy cow! Another 40 pounder?
42 pounds? 10 pounds?
Oh my God. Abs at 33.
Somebody got their abs going.
Somebody quit smoking and lost 25 pounds.
Somebody lost 80 pounds.
John, do you really?
John, you lost 80 pounds?
It's amazing. 50 pounds.
Look at the comments.
Somebody gained 50. I don't think those people were using the system.
Somebody lost 40 pounds and they're keeping it off years later.
The keeping it off is the best pounds.
12 pounds. Closer to having abs at age 48, up my pay by $50,000.
These are in the comments. If you're watching this later on YouTube, you won't see the comments.
Somebody says they're trying to lose 150 pounds, parenthetically, my girlfriend.
Somebody does 300 push-ups during my Periscope every day.
That's the system! That is a heck of a good system.
So my compliments. So somebody here said they exercise during my periscopes.
That's a great system.
Because it reminds you to do it.
It's like brushing your teeth at the same time every day before you go to bed.
If you can key your workout to an external event, it really makes it easier.
I do the same thing.
I actually key my workouts depending on the time of the day.
If it's later in the day, I'll always listen to The Five.
So I've learned that listening to the TV show The Five on Fox News It's just really absorbing.
And, you know, I love the show.
It's my favorite show. And so I match that to my exercise time.
And it makes me want to exercise.
It's a great system. All right.
Somebody else walks during my periscope?
Yeah. Have I heard of David Goggins?
I have not. All right.
Just looking at your comments, and thanks so much, and I'm going to talk to all of you later.
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