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July 9, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
56:04
Episode 592 Scott Adams: Let’s Talk About the UK Ambassador, Tom Steyer
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Well, well, well, it appears that I have accidentally triggered this periscope, so I'm just going to go with it.
I was actually typing in the title and my fat finger hit the go live button.
So, we're live.
Sooner than I thought.
Three minutes earlier than usual.
So, isn't it time for a little dopamine?
I think it is. I think it is.
Somebody says, I threw Twitter into a tizzy.
Did I do that? I'm not sure which topic you're talking about.
But anyway... It's time for the best part of the day.
It's the part of the day that makes all the rest of the day worthwhile.
It gives meaning to your life.
Yes, it's time for the simultaneous sip.
It's when we all feel together, part of something bigger than ourselves, something amazing.
And it starts by grabbing a cup or a mug or a glass.
It might be a tank or a stein or a chalice.
It could be a thermos, maybe a flask.
Vessel of any kind, fill it with your favorite liquid.
liquid I like coffee and join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the simultaneous sip.
Ah, for those of you who have not yet figured it out, every now and then you might want to skip the simultaneous sip and just listen to the content.
But the simultaneous sip gives you a way to do that, because when you see my mug go up like this, you know that that's the end of the introduction and the beginning of the content.
So it's very functional.
All right, let's talk first about President Trump's tweet about the British ambassador.
One of my favorite tweets of all time.
There's lots to choose among the favorites.
But you might know the story that there was an uncovered or, I guess, a leaked email message from the UK ambassador saying some negative things about the Trump administration.
President Trump decided to tweet a reply, and here's his presidential reply to the very diplomatic ambassador who said some bad things to him.
First of all, let me say this.
How is it that an ambassador's private messages get leaked?
What's up with that?
I'd love to know the story of how a private ambassador's message got leaked.
There's something to be explored about that.
Anyway, here's what the President said about the ambassador who insulted him in the private email.
The President says in his tweet, the wacky ambassador that the UK foisted upon the United States, already I love it.
There's lots more to go.
But when your tweet starts with the wacky ambassador that the UK foisted upon the United States, I'm sorry, I like whatever is going to come next.
I don't even need to read the rest of it.
I'm already, you know, you had me on foisted.
Okay. Is not someone we're thrilled with.
A very stupid guy.
Okay. Could you possibly enjoy politics better?
Than having the President of the United States say in public, in writing, that the ambassador from the UK is a very stupid guy.
He should speak to his country and Prime Minister May about their failed Brexit negotiation and not be upset with my criticism of how badly it was handled.
I told Theresa May how to do that deal, but she went down her own foolish way and was unable to get it done.
A disaster! And here's the next best part.
He goes, I don't know the ambassador.
He doesn't know the ambassador from the UK, our closest ally.
He's like, I don't even know that ambassador.
But have been told he's a pompous fool.
Tell him the USA now has the best economy and military anywhere in the world, by far.
And they're both only getting bigger, better, and stronger.
Thank you, Mr. President.
So he ends his tweet by thanking himself.
Thank you, Mr. President.
Now, some of the many things I like about this, and there's a lot to like about this, Is that he fits in there, telling the USA has the best economy and military.
Because it's true.
True enough, anyway.
And it forces his critics to have to say that.
Because it's impossible to ignore this tweet.
It's news.
And if the news decides to get rid of all the people complaining about the audio...
Blocked. So social media is going to make it a thing, even if the regular news doesn't cover it.
So he gets his message embedded in this insult.
Now, I saw some people who were just aghast.
They were aghast that our president could act so unpresidential, to which I say, man, you just don't understand this show.
I call it the show.
President Trump brings the show, and the show is weaponized.
The show is his persuasion.
The show is what gets his attention on the topics he wants.
He knows how to bring the show.
If you're watching the show and you don't know that it's a show, you would be very confused, maybe even scared.
But once you understand what it is and why he does it and how useful it is, It's a lot of fun.
There's a new poll that says that there's some substantial number of people who claim to like, no, they don't like President Trump's, quote, behavior, whatever that means.
They don't like his behavior, but they still approve of his performance.
So that's something that pretty much guarantees his re-election.
If there are a significant number of people answering polls by saying that they don't like his behavior, but they like his performance, those people might be the determining people.
So yesterday, my YouTube video Did not get demonetized.
So that's good news, right?
So I did a YouTube video, did not get demonetized.
Most of my videos...
I don't know if it's keywords or there's a person who does it or what.
But this one did not.
The one from yesterday did not get demonetized.
It did, however, have zero recommended videos.
So typically, my normal videos, whether they're demonetized or not, they get somewhere in the neighborhood of 13 to 20% of the traffic comes from YouTube recommending the video because somebody watched something similar.
This last video got zero recommended.
Zero. Oh, I can see that the periscope is glitching out now.
Usually the The glitches don't occur in replay, and a lot of the audio problems are going to be on your end, not in the system.
But anyway, so YouTube didn't demonetize me, but they gave no recommended videos.
And I thought to myself, what content did I have there yesterday that caused that?
And I realized that one of the things I talked about was YouTube's competitor.
So, the one time I talked about YouTube's competitor, I got zero recommended videos.
Coincidence? Probably not, right?
Probably not a coincidence.
But you can't trust anything in terms of the algorithm at this point.
There's a new technology, apparently, in which they can use a laser from above, from a drone, for example, And the laser can identify an individual by their heartbeat.
Now, obviously, I guess you have to measure somebody's heartbeat once and know who it is in order to have a baseline.
But once you have somebody's baseline, you can identify them from a laser from the sky through their clothes.
With something like 95% plus reliability.
Now put it all together.
Laser. Drone.
95% likelihood they can identify you from space.
And kill you.
So now we have flying machines that can identify you as a human with certainty and kill you with equal certainty.
Wow. I've got a feeling that life is going to go underground.
I worry that our future is that we're just going to have to be underground.
Because if you get the high ground, you know, whoever controls space is sort of going to control the world.
If you can control the air above the ground, you sort of control the ground as well.
So that's quite a fight we've got coming up.
So, two changes in the Democrats running for president.
Eric Swalwell is out.
I'm going to give Eric Swalwell a well done.
Now, I don't think he managed to get anything above 0% support for running for president, but I'm not entirely sure that that was the end goal.
Of course, he would have liked to be president, but I don't think he expected it.
What I did see was Eric Swalwell making a big impression on the country, becoming a household name even more than he had been by appearing on the news channels, and probably growing in stature and reputation, and probably will get re-elected easily because he's so much more of a national name now.
So I would say that strategy-wise, Eric Swalwell nailed it.
I've been watching him for a while, and even if you hate everything he says, you don't like his politics, blah, blah, blah, blah, he's pretty strategic.
So I gotta say, I can't ignore that.
He seems to make a lot of good plays for his situation.
But the funny part is that anti-Trumper And impeachment pusher Tom Steyer is apparently signaling that he's going to enter the race.
What does it tell you?
I hear my dog dreaming and barking.
Snickers will bark in her sleep.
She's in the other room barking in her sleep.
What does it tell you that Tom Steyer waited so long and decided to get into the race?
What do you know if you know that?
Well, I think it tells you that Tom Steyer thinks that they don't have a chance of winning.
His highest priority is getting Trump out of office.
If he thinks he has to run for president to do it, it kind of means he doesn't think anybody else can do it.
In other words, even Democrats are sort of giving up on 2020.
Now, I think it's going to be a long time before anybody says that out loud, but...
I would expect to hear lots more Democrats saying, okay, we don't have a chance.
You're going to see that. I saw that the President was framing the Green New Deal that he opposes as something that will crush minorities.
That's a really strong persuasion framing.
So if we can, for a moment, divorce ourselves from the science and the truth and the models and all that, which are fun topics, but today just looking at the persuasion framing, it's a pretty powerful framing.
Because it feels true to me.
If you were to do everything that the Green New Deal wants you to do, I feel as though that would be really good for the people who own beachfront property, and very bad for the people who want a better job, or a job in general.
So it seems to me that the President's framing of that as the Green New Deal is, you know, this is my own take on it, as bad for black people, I'm exaggerating what the president said, because he said it's bad for minorities.
But in terms of the election, I think a lot of people are going to look at that and say, what do you mean it's bad for me?
Why is it bad for me? And the answer is, it might slow down your ability to get a job.
That would be the claim.
I'm not sure that I could confirm that or not.
Epstein. Well, The Epstein story is frustrating because all of the things that are important are the things we don't know.
Right? Because how that goes and what it means to the world and who else is involved and what happened that got him the sweet deal the first time, blah, blah, blah.
It all depends on what we find out in the future.
We just don't know enough.
So, predictably, it has sorted into two movies where half of the world is saying, look what Bill Clinton did, and the other half is saying, look what President Trump did before he was president.
I don't know that the Trump stuff is going to hold up.
It looks like that's the weakest part of the story.
But there certainly are a lot of questions.
I got into a Twitter...
What would I call it?
Exchange. Let's call it an exchange with somebody who had a theory that Epstein's fortune is somewhat unexplained.
And apparently if you had money and you called Epstein and said, I'd like to invest in your hedge fund, he wouldn't necessarily even return your call.
So however he made his vast amount of money, the one thing that we can be sure of Is that it wasn't in a normal way.
And it's also somewhat mysterious.
So the speculation was that he was luring people into having inappropriate relationships with underage females and using that to blackmail.
Now, blackmail, I don't know if he would have had to explicitly blackmail.
Because I think it would be enough if he simply had convinced important people to engage in this activity or even just get on his plane and go to his island.
You don't actually have to say to somebody, hey, you were on my island, I have pictures, I can make this bad for you.
You don't really have to go that far.
So I don't know that Epstein ever directly...
Blackmailed anybody, but it might have been just the situation itself that acts as blackmail without ever having to say the words.
In other words, anybody who might have been involved in this alleged activity, it seems like they would naturally want to make sure that Epstein didn't make a plea bargain someday and start giving up names.
So... I think...
I think you might see at least one person lose their job over this.
I've got a feeling that there's a lot of badness that's yet to come out.
So there's not much else to say until we know more.
And then I saw Mike Surnovich tweet saying that the charges were limited To what happened in New York, I guess.
So anything that happened on the, quote, Lolita Express or anything that happened on his little island, Epstein's Island, apparently is not subject of the latest legal activity.
So it could be that the famous people whose names have been dragged into this Maybe they don't have as much to fear.
It could be that it's limited to some New York specific activities and maybe they weren't involved in any of that.
So, I think this is a situation, I think this is one of those situations where we may never know What the deal was.
So everybody's going to go away with their own opinion of who did what, which is pretty devastating for anybody who wasn't involved.
And he gets dragged into it.
You know, they said that they found Epstein had a whole bunch of incriminating photos of young-looking women.
And I asked myself, what the heck...
Kind of accused sex offender keeps evidence in his house.
Has he never heard of the internet?
It wouldn't be hard to have your collection of bad pictures on the internet with passwords and secret places or whatever.
It's weird that there are literally photos.
Sort of an old school way to be that kind of a person.
All right. Yeah, somebody says it's common.
It probably is. My periscopes are working with Atlantic broadband now.
Were they banned before?
Or just not working technically?
All right, so...
There's more evidence that the Afghans might be heading toward some kind of a peace, or at least the framework of a path for peace.
The BBC reported it, but I didn't see much about it in the mainstream medias.
So let me give you the most optimistic thing you've ever heard.
Correct me if I'm wrong.
I'm going to make a statement that I just want you to think about for a second.
What would be the most impossible thing you could imagine happening?
The most unlikely thing you could happen in terms of the presidency and politics?
I would say the most unlikely outcome would be some kind of a broad peace deal in the Middle East.
Wouldn't you agree? If you were going to rank the likelihood of political events, you'd probably put that one near the bottom.
Right? So, something we all know to be true, peace in the Middle East, incredibly unlikely.
Right? We're all on the same page on that, right?
Now let me tell you a fact that I want you to fact check me on.
We could have peace in the Middle East if one person, out of 7 billion people in the world, just one person, decides to do it.
The Ayatollah, Khomeini, however you pronounce his name.
Iran's supreme leader is really the only person left.
Because it looks to me that the Arab countries have decided that they don't want to have war with Israel anymore.
The Palestinians depend on Iran and depend on some backing.
The various proxies of Iran depend on Iran.
So, correct me if I'm wrong, peace in the Middle East seems the least likely, most impossible thing that could ever happen, and, simultaneously, there's one octogenarian who's the only person keeping up from happening.
You're one person away from peace in the Middle East, and that person is close to death.
And that person is in a bad situation.
You know, his country is having some pretty serious problems with the economy, etc.
So, think about it.
Think about it. The most impossible thing you can imagine, just one person in the whole world.
Just one person. And if he changes his mind, the most unlikely thing you could ever imagine Could happen.
All the variables are lining up.
I'm seeing in the comments people are telling me that Ross Perot died.
I can't confirm that.
I'm just seeing it in the comments.
Somebody says Cuba didn't change much when Castro died.
I would disagree with that.
I would say that It seems to me that Cuba is sort of on a path to reintegrate with the rest of the continent, you know, the rest of North America.
I think that they're on a slow but steady path in that direction, and we certainly don't worry about them militarily.
So I think we're heading in the right direction there too.
Yeah.
Can I talk more about my God comment from yesterday?
Yeah, so that's one of the most, let's say, provocative things I've said lately.
A lot of people have spent days thinking about it.
And what I said was that, well, I'd have to look at my exact quote, but the idea was that God is what's left after you take everything away.
God is what's left after you take everything away.
Now, what I like about it, and what made people think about it a lot, is that it can be interpreted any way you want it, which is really sort of a meta-complement, no, not a compliment, a meta-comment about the subjectivity of reality.
And that's all. But people are going to think about that a lot.
I do plan to do a reading of my book, God's Debris, and put it on YouTube.
I just have to find a block of time to do that.
So I think you're going to enjoy that.
Alright, if we have any questions, it's a weirdly slow news situation because President Trump is doing so well on so many things.
Yeah, God's Debris is already on Audible, so you can buy it, but I was thinking of putting it on YouTube so you could just consume it that way and it would get much bigger play.
Do I follow Kapil?
Never heard of that name.
How do affirmations work?
Good question. Probably the most frequent question I get is, how do affirmations work?
Now, I talk about that in my book, How to Failed Almost Everything and Still Win Big.
And the idea behind affirmations is that you write some kind of a simple declarative sentence about what you want, You do it every day and it helps you focus on it.
Now, people say, what's the exact way you do it and do you have to write it down?
Does it matter if you type it?
What if you throw away the paper?
Do you have to use a pencil?
None of that matters.
It's all about focusing every day and visualizing what you want.
Now, I have no evidence, scientific evidence, to say that it works.
What I do have is lots of experience that tells me that when I do it, I get the impression that it worked.
Which is interesting, because if reality is subjective, then my impression that it works might be all I care about.
And there have been a number of times when I used it to achieve, or at least I used them before I achieved.
I won't say that they were the cause, because I can't prove that.
But I used it before I achieved things which were highly unlikely.
One of them was to become a best-selling author when I had never before written a book.
And that happened.
One of them was to become a famous syndicated cartoonist.
Very unlikely. And that happened.
One of them was to regain my ability to speak clearly when I had an incurable voice problem.
That happened too.
And these are just samples.
There are a number of things that I can't tell you about that are just that unlikely, but they happened in my personal life.
And I can't explain all that unless I'm authoring the simulation.
Somebody says, my girlfriend is a 12.
That is not true.
She's a 15, if anything.
15 and a 10. Yeah, I live a life that doesn't seem any way to explain it if reality is objective.
unless I'm just the luckiest person in the world, which is possible.
Do you still do your voice exercises?
I don't do them explicitly, but one of the things I do when you hear me coming on the Periscope, and the first thing you hear is me saying, bum bum bum, bum bum bum, that's actually a voice warm-up exercise.
Because I still have trouble sometimes if I haven't spoken for a long time.
And you're actually the first people I talk to in the morning.
So I can be up for a couple hours in the morning and having never talked to an actual living human, and so the first time I speak after I've awakened from the day is usually on Periscope.
So part of the benefit of the pum pum pum is that's a real good way to just loosen up your vocal cords.
It's sort of like humming, but a little bit more.
Will the voice exercises help people with Alzheimer's?
I don't think so.
Oh, somebody says their dad does that to avoid morning stammer.
I bet it works. Yeah, humming happy birthday is the classic voice exercise, as somebody is saying in the comments here.
Do you talk to yourself out loud?
Only if I'm having ADHD problems.
So one of my more popular videos I did quite a while ago is teaching people how to focus when they can't focus.
And one of the tricks I use is to narrate my physical actions.
So there are so many times when I sit at my computer and I know I need to do some work, I just can't do it.
My brain is a thousand different places.
I want to click on websites.
I want to follow the story.
I want to tweet something.
But the last thing I want to do is work because the work often can be so boring if it's just mechanical work such as drawing another comic.
So boring that I actually can't even talk my own brain into it.
I'll sit in front of the computer and my brain just won't do it.
I have a workaround for that which is that I narrate.
And so I say to myself, as I sit down at the computer, pick up the stylus, pick up the stylus, pick up the stylus, and I'll repeat it until I pick up the stylus.
And then I'll say, open the page, whatever page I want to work on.
And I say, select the text, select the text.
So whatever the task is, I repeat it until I've done the task, and then I repeat the next task.
And what it does is, since you're Your verbal abilities essentially control your thoughts.
Because if you think about it, you think in words.
When you have ideas about things, they're formed in actual language within your head.
So if you can hijack the language in your head...
Which is what the repeating your next step does.
It hijacks the part of your brain that controls language.
It's kind of impossible to be doing language, saying, pick up the pen, pick up the stylus, open the webpage, go to this, open this.
You can't have two conversations in your head at the same time.
You can sort of hold two thoughts a little bit in your head, but not really.
You're actually just going between thoughts quickly.
But you can't really have two conversations in your head.
Your verbal part of your brain is just so dominant that if it's busy, that's all you can do.
It's hard to talk and think at the same time.
And I was doing it yesterday.
Yesterday I just could not finish a comic that I needed to draw.
And I just started saying, open the file, open the file.
Scott, open the file, open the file.
Until it was opened. And I wouldn't do or say anything else until I had done that next step.
Now the other thing I teach is how to get off the couch.
There'll be more of this in my upcoming book.
But one of the tricks you can use to get motivated to do something big is to not think of it as something big.
So let's say you said to yourself, you know, I should really go to law school.
And forget about this being a goal for you.
It's just something big. Whatever it is.
I should start a company. I should go to law school.
If you have that thought, maybe I should go to law school, That's such a big thought that it's hard to say, okay, today's the day I'm going to make that happen, unless you're quite motivated.
If you need a little help, ask yourself what's the smallest thing you can do in that direction and then do it.
The smallest thing you do might be to Google a list of law schools within driving distance.
And just do that.
Don't do anything else.
Just Google the list of law schools within driving distance.
You have to break your steps into the smallest and smallest chunks until you find something so easy you can do it.
And Googling is easy.
So just do that.
After you've done that, say, what's the next thing I can do that's so easy I can't not do it.
Well, the next thing might be to look at a couple of those schools and just drill down.
Maybe you just want to find out what they cost, and you're done for the day.
That's it. You just found out a general cost.
For a school that you liked, you're done for the day.
Next day, one small thing.
I call them micro steps.
So, I use this technique all the time.
And I often start projects that I don't complete Because I get to a stage where it doesn't look like it's a good idea anymore, but I can get there fairly quickly through these micro steps.
So at any given time, I've got several projects going on where I can just pick at them, a step, a micro step at a time.
Some of them will take on a life of their own.
The things that end up being important are the things where the energy comes from the project.
Other people say you have to be passionate about it, etc.
But the way I like to put it is, and a good example of this is writing a book.
When I sit down to write a book, do you know how big of a mental, let's say, challenge that is?
If you've never written a book, just for a moment think about an author who sits down and says, now I'm going to start to write a book.
Wow. It's a gigantic, daunting, totally off-putting task because it's so big.
So what I do is I write a title.
So I open a file, that little note file on my computer, and I say, huh, what will I call it?
And then I realize that I don't have a good title name.
So, because I don't have a good title name, should I wait until the next day?
Never. You have to take a micro step.
Never, ever back off from a micro step.
If it's too big...
Make it smaller. If that's still too big, make that smaller.
There is something small enough that you're going to do.
So if I can't think of a good title, even if that's the smallest thing I can think of to do, do you know what I do?
I write down a bad title.
Because having the right title was too big a step.
But writing down a bad title on a note...
It's such a small step that anybody can do it, so I do it.
And then I say to myself, I can think of a second bad title.
I write that down. Maybe the next day I look at those bad titles and I go, ah, those are bad titles.
How about another one?
20 seconds of work.
I'm starting a book that's going to take me months.
It's going to basically eat up all of my free time for a year.
But I might spend 20 seconds the first day.
Just 20 seconds. The second day I might spend a full minute.
Because I'm starting to see that the bad titles have a path to becoming a good title.
Then I might open a document and give it that working title, knowing that the title will change.
It always does. And then I'll write a first sentence.
And then I'll close it and I'll do my other work for the day.
So to start a gigantic project, do the microsteps until you've done enough microsteps that the project starts to tap you on the shoulder when you're not thinking about it.
What you want is that you're doing something for leisure.
You're just thinking about other things.
Your day is going on.
You might be taking a walk.
You might be at the gym. And something taps you on the shoulder, you know, your own brain, and says, you know, I can think of what a good chapter would be.
I don't know the writing of the chapter, but I can think of a topic that would be good for that book.
And I write it down.
And the next day, I'll just write, this would be a good chapter, chapter title.
That's it. Now, at some point, after I've written a few pages, because I keep micro-stepping my way through, there's almost always a day where I sit down and get excited and say, oh, this would be a good chapter.
I don't know if this is a book, but I'm going to write a good chapter.
And this good chapter won't be good on the first pass.
It'll be a bad chapter.
That's what I have time for.
So I write a bad chapter.
I have to work on it a lot before it's a good chapter.
So that's how you do it.
You just pick your way through the microsteps and you keep shortening the microsteps until there's something you can do.
If you've done enough of those microsteps, the project should start giving you energy instead of requiring it.
That's the step that tells you you're an author.
If you can't ever experience that, you're probably not an author, and it's maybe not the work you should be doing.
I suppose you could power yourself through a book, hating every step of it.
But at some point, you have to feel that thing that says, I'm not putting energy into this project anymore.
This project is now giving me energy.
It's a source of energy.
It's not a use of energy.
And so, I'm looking for that That transition period where it becomes a source of energy.
All right. Motivation by moderation, somebody's calling it.
I like my words, micro steps.
How do you find your purpose?
Excellent question. A lot of people ask me, what's the meaning of life?
What's your purpose? I've thought about this a lot, as many of you have.
And I've come to, I think, a view that is either compatible with Jordan Peterson's or similar.
I don't want to summarize his opinion, but I think there are other people who have hit on similar approaches philosophically.
Here's what I've discovered.
Whenever I'm doing things which are compatible with my basic biological design, I feel purpose in my life.
So that's the standard that I use.
And it's very consistent.
Let me give you an example. I've never had a day where I had great sex and I was also concerned about the meaning of life.
That's not a joke.
I've never had a day where I had great sex and I was also concerned about the meaning of life.
Let me tell you why.
There's a reason. It's not a joke.
There is a reason.
The sexual act is, even if you're not trying to reproduce, your body and your brain recognize it as part of the reproductive process.
It's your most basic biological function.
It's the one you're born to do.
What are you born to do?
Reproduce. And reproduce well.
That's the second part.
So, if I'm doing something that is supportive of the, let's say, sexual and or reproductive process, no matter how indirect, it gives me purpose.
Okay? Now, I get greater purpose doing things that are good for the human, um, the human, let's say, the human, um, So, a lot of stuff you see me do in public is specifically because I know that if I do something that looks like it's a positive for human beings in some way that is meaningful,
that makes me feel purpose.
Now, I believe that if you feel purpose, you have purpose.
Somebody says, yeah, but I'm 63 and have two grown-up kids.
If you have two grown-up kids, you probably feel purpose whenever you interact with them, think about them, realize that you have created two new humans.
So I don't think you have to have the kids.
To feel your connection to your biological, let's say, truth.
You could just go through the process of doing the things that makes babies without actually making the baby.
So, I would ask you this.
If you feel that you don't have meaning in your life, ask yourself, how much are you doing that would be supportive of your own reproductive capabilities?
And for that, I would say, are you exercising?
Are you eating right?
Are you taking care of your appearance?
Have you refreshed your wardrobe so that you look good?
Could you get a haircut?
All of those things you might tell yourself you're doing for other reasons.
People like to lie to themselves and say, I'm making myself look good, not for other people, but for my own self.
I'm doing it because it feels good for me.
That's never true.
Everything you do is some kind of a ripple effect from the fact that you are biologically designed to reproduce and to reproduce well, meaning the best genetic material you can get your hands on, reproductively, is what you're designed to find.
Anybody who says they don't feel meaning in their life, the two things you should look at is what are you doing to make yourself look more like a good object of reproduction?
Are you dating? Are you exercising?
Are you working on your career?
Because the resources that you can control through your income, etc., is all part of that reproductive signaling.
So if you're not directly involved in the sex, dating, reproduction mode, and you still want meaning in your life, and a lot of people are not really following that If you want meaning, ask yourself what you're doing for other people.
What are you doing to support the species?
What did you do for charity?
What did you do for somebody who couldn't help themselves?
What did you do to make the world more prosperous, more happy, less suffering?
So, if you're doing those things, then you're compatible with your biological self.
You don't need any God in there.
You don't need any God.
God is a bonus. If you believe in God and it works for you, I'm all for it.
For those of you who don't know, I say this often, but I'm not a believer.
Religious-wise, I'm not a believer, but I'm a big proponent and big supporter of religion.
When religion is used productively.
So Christianity, probably one of the best inventions ever.
It organizes people's thoughts and lives, gives them meaning.
It's a very useful thing for people who are believers.
All right. So somebody is questioning whether gay people can feel the meaning of life.
And the answer is yes, in all the ways that everybody else does.
No difference. Because I said to you that even if you're, let's say you're straight and you're just having meaningless sex, You're not trying to reproduce.
You're just doing something that's sort of a theater or a reflex, essentially, that connects you to that feeling of being part of the reproductive process.
My assumption is that if you're anywhere in the LGBTQ community and you, too, do anything that's sort of a shadow of, similar to, remind you of reproduction, even if those things don't reproduce, But if they're in the same realm of experience that creates those good feelings of sexual satisfaction, however you're getting it,
my guess is that you feel more connected and that you feel that you're not as desperate to seek meaning my guess is that you feel more connected and that you feel that you're not as desperate Yeah, not everyone wants kids.
So it is absolutely not necessary to have your own children to feel connected to the reproductive, you know, I'll say design of your body.
Is helping the earth with trees helpful?
Yeah, I would think that if you thought that Climate change was threatening the world and threatening the human species in particular.
And you went out and planted trees every day just to do your small part.
You know, by yourself, you're not going to plant enough trees to make a difference.
But if you thought other people were and it was part of the big process, you probably would feel meaning from that.
Yes. So here's the test.
Ask yourself if you're doing enough things that at least remind you of or connect you to the reproductive process, or at least, if you're not part of that in any way, if you're not having sex, you're not raising kids, you're not a grandparent, if you're not part of any of that directly, at least you're doing something for the species.
Because when you're doing something for the species, you're doing things for other people's kids.
Yeah, let's talk about cartoonist Ben Garrison.
If you're not watching that controversy, he's being accused of some anti-Semitic cartoons.
He was invited to the White House as part of this summit for finding out if the tech companies are being too biased.
Now, in that context, It shouldn't matter that he did comics that some or many people find offensive.
In the context of free speech questions, you certainly want to have some offensive people as part of the conversation.
So I don't think the White House has anything to explain.
He's controversial.
We know what the controversy is.
I haven't heard his side of it, so I'm going to be silent on it.
So here's my thing on Ben Garrison.
Apparently they're There are some actual cartoons that he did that are on his website that some folks call anti-Semitic.
People have different opinions of what it is to be anti-Semitic, so I will just say that there might be a difference of opinion there.
But on top of that, I understand that there are people who are doctoring his comics to make them look worse than the original.
So, first of all, you have to say that there's a bunch of frauds and trolls, Creating content with his comic happens to me all the time.
You can't judge him by that stuff.
But there is at least one comic I've seen that I say to myself, Ben Garrison, I would like to hear your explanation of why you did this comic.
If I just look at it on its face...
I have the same reaction that Jake Tapper had when he tweeted around, which is, what?
Do you mean this comic?
Is this comic supposed to be your opinion?
What? The specific comic I'm talking about.
It was one that I think is a real one.
It showed a puppet master and it was two generals, McMasters and somebody else, being puppets of George Soros and then George Soros being further a puppet of the Rothschild.
So between the Rothschild reference and the Soros reference, that's plenty enough to get it categorized as anti-Semitic.
But I have enough experience in this business to say that until you hear Ben Garrison explain what he was thinking, you don't really know what he was thinking.
And what he was thinking sort of matters, because the topic is, what does that guy think?
That's the question, right? I mean, normally, I say don't try to read minds, but since this comic is out there and the comic has left his brain and is out in the real world, I think he has an obligation to explain it.
I have not heard the explanation.
If it goes unexplained, I think he has to live with the ADL's interpretation of it.
I think he has to live with Jake Tapper's impression of it.
I think he has to live with other people's impression of it.
But if he explains it, what he meant, it could have been anything.
Suppose he says, I didn't mean this to be my opinion, but rather this is how people see things.
That's possible. I've done comics that are not my own opinion.
They are somebody else's popular opinion.
Maybe. Maybe he was making fun of conspiracy theories.
And he showed two levels of conspiracy theories.
Maybe. So until you hear him explain what he intended by the comic, You don't really know what's going on.
So I'm just going to say, I tweeted something about it and I deleted the tweet because I decided that this is a wait and see.
If he explains it in a way that you say, oh, okay, yeah, it looked really bad when I saw it, but now that you explain it, that changes the context.
I don't know that he can do that, but until I've seen his response to it, I'm going to say that's a wait and see.
It's up to him to explain.
I don't want to be in the position of trying to defend anybody before I even know what their point was.
For a later Periscope, how would you revamp education?
Well, Education is going to become virtual reality, and I think technology is going to get there, and startups will essentially take bad teachers out of the mix.
I think that's the main thing.
You have to get bad teachers out of the process.
Sorry, my cat's trying to ruin my thing here.
She's getting in with a microphone.
Get that off your tail. All right.
All right. I would like to know more about hypocrisy.
Really? Hypocrisy I've often labeled as the most boring of all political opinions.
There's nothing more boring than if you say, X did something bad and somebody says, oh yeah?
Well, you like this other person and they did something different that was bad or something similar that was bad.
That's the lowest level of political analysis besides analogies, I guess.
Somebody says a grown man with cats You need a girlfriend. Well, if it helps you, the cat was left over from...
It wasn't my choice, let's just say.
What's the highest? The highest type of analysis would be persuasion.
Understanding that people are not rational creatures and that hypocrisy has no meaning.
It's not an active variable.
It doesn't affect anybody.
Nobody ever changed their opinion to be less of a hypocrite.
Nobody ever got fired for being called a hypocrite.
You always think it's going to be powerful, but it's a placebo.
That's the way to say it. I'm going to say that now even a placebo is giving it too much...
Too much power. Hypocrisy is just something that people say for entertainment.
It doesn't have a persuasive effect.
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