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Oct. 5, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
54:10
Episode 684 Scott Adams: Biden, Pillaging, Pelosi’s Boss, Failed Whataboutism
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Hey, good to see you.
Jackie, come on in here.
Grab a seat. Do you have your coffee?
Good to see you, Beth, Andrew, James.
What a delight to have you all here again.
What a day! What a day!
It's an incredible day.
Because we're all alive.
Well, most of you are alive.
A couple of zombies in there.
But most of us are alive.
What a great day. And we're going to enjoy something called the Simultaneous Sip.
And all you need to enjoy it is a cover, a mug, or a glass of Stein the Chalice, a tanker, a thermos, a plastic, a canteen, a grail, a goblet, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid. I am partial to coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine at the end of the day, the best part of your day that makes everything better.
It's called the simultaneous sip.
Go! Oh, I don't think it's hyperbole to say that's the best sip of the day.
Am I right? I think I'm right.
Well, let me summarize all of the news.
Are you ready? Here now, my summary of all of the news.
Everything that's in the news.
Ukraine, Ukraine.
Ukraine, Ukraine. Ukraine, Ukraine.
Trump, Biden. Trump, Biden.
Trump, Biden. Ukraine. Ukraine, Ukraine.
Trump, Biden. And scene.
Alright, let's get into some interesting details.
I was reading an article by Mike Goodwin.
He was writing about the president.
I guess he spent the day hanging out with the president and wrote an article about him.
And one of the most interesting parts of the article is that Trump is enjoying all of this.
When I say all of this, I mean all the drama, the fighting, the rumors, the scandals, the Ukrainian this or that, the re-election.
Trump is just sort of having fun because he likes the fight.
And he admitted that he was quoted as saying that it must be a personality defect.
So that's Trump talking about himself.
He's saying he must have a personality defect because he's enjoying himself.
And I thought, that's like just the best way to put it.
Because as we observe his life, It's easy to say, man, I don't know if I'd like any of that.
He's taking fire from everywhere all the time.
But on the other hand, he's the most important person in the world.
So that balances it down a little bit.
But I wanted to contrast that.
So you've got Trump fighting for re-election.
And from what we can see, it honestly looks like he loves it.
When I visited him a year ago in the Oval Office, I got to chat with the President for a little bit.
My largest overall impression was that he was enjoying himself.
That was actually my personal takeaway, was, I think he's enjoying this.
It looks like he was completely comfortable and just looked like he was exactly where he wanted to be, President of the United States.
So, contrast that to Joe Biden.
Does Joe Biden look like he wants to be running for president?
Think about it. He looks like he hates it.
If you saw the interview with him, I think it was yesterday, where he was lashing out, as the news says.
He's lashing out, or melting down, depending on which network you're watching.
Biden was either lashing out at Trump or he was melting down.
It was all the same thing. But, you know, your two-movie situation.
But look at Biden the next time he's giving an interview, and ask yourself if he wants to be there.
He so doesn't want to be there.
Now, of course, I can't read his mind, so, you know, be careful about anybody interpreting other people's thoughts, because we can't know his thoughts.
But he sure acts like he doesn't want to be there.
Trump acts like he could do this forever, like it's his favorite day every time he wakes up.
When you see Trump talking to the press before he gets on the helicopter, tell me he doesn't look like he's having a good time.
He looks like he's having fun.
And don't think that doesn't matter, because when you're running for re-election, do you want to vote for the guy who doesn't want to be there?
It's harder. It makes a difference.
Let's talk a little bit more about Joe Biden.
So Trump is starting to use the word pillaging.
He says the Bidens are pillaging other countries.
I thought to myself, when do you ever get to use the word pillage in actual political conversation?
Has anybody ever used that before?
It might be the first time anybody's ever said pillaged.
And what's funny is, you hear the word, it's such a non-standard word for ordinary political conversation.
It's such a non-standard word, and then you hear it, pillage.
And you think, well, that's not too far off, right?
Given that the average, I think the average annual income in Ukraine is like, or monthly, is like $300 a month.
So the average income in Ukraine is $300 a month, and Hunter Biden was taking $50,000 a month from this oil company.
And I'm thinking, that's a little pillagy, a little bit, just a little bit pillagy.
All right. I'm going to tell you something that's going to, you're going to hate it.
I'm going to tell you something that's obvious and invisible at the same time.
That's what's fun about it, right?
So when I tell you this, you're going to say, oh, that's true, and it's obvious, but only after you told me.
It's something you already know, but you're acting like you don't know it.
Are you ready? What's the biggest...
Objection to Hunter Biden taking a role on the board of directors of an oil company.
The biggest objection, besides the fact that there's a conflict of interest, the biggest objection is that he's not qualified.
Right? People on the left say it.
People on the right say it.
They say he has no prior experience in the oil industry, so why is he on the board of directors?
Alright, that's the part you know.
Here's the part you also know, but for some reason it is temporarily invisible to your brain.
Are you ready? That just described most board members of most companies.
A complete lack of experience in the company that you're on the board of?
That's normal. That's a normal situation.
See what it's doing to your head right now?
Because you know that.
You've seen a million boards of directors, and you know that people are put on from completely different industries, completely different experience.
Now, how do you feel about the fact that for weeks you've been told that this is an unusual situation?
Both sides.
Both sides said this is an unusual situation.
It's the most usual situation.
There's somebody with no experience in that specific industry as a board member.
In fact, you're going to hate this.
That's sometimes why they do it.
Sometimes why you do it is to put somebody with a different level kind of experience, you know, onto the board because they might bring something else.
They might have some related experience that could have some, you know, impact.
Maybe they know people. Now, suppose it's Hunter Biden and you say to yourself, hey, I think the only reason they put him on the board is because he might have good contacts.
To which I say, that's normal.
If you're a startup in Silicon Valley and you want to add somebody to your board, do you, number one, make sure there's somebody who has expertise in your industry?
No. No, you don't do that.
If that person has contacts that you think could be useful in the future, my cat's going crazy over there, if you think a person has contacts that will be useful, could be for funding, could be for marketing, could be for some important other corporate contact, you would certainly want them on your board.
And somebody's saying diversity.
That's another reason.
It is not unusual to add diversity to a board.
So when we're talking about Hunter Biden, let's say you're over in the Ukraine and you think you might want to have contacts in the United States.
Who would be a good choice to be on your board who would have contacts in the United States?
Hunter Biden. Apparently he has lots of contacts in the United States.
So, here's the thing.
When you hear the news reporting that it's crazy because he doesn't have any expertise in the industry, that, my friends, is an example of loser think.
Now, this is my new book that is available now for pre-order.
It'll drop in a few weeks on November 5th.
You can order it now.
Let me define loser think.
Loser think does not say that the person who's doing the thinking is a loser.
So loser think is not about the person.
It's about a style of thinking that's not productive.
And specifically, it's because you may not have experience across different areas.
So in this specific example, if you had experience in business and you heard that somebody was put on a board of directors, got a lot of money, and did not have experience in that industry, what would you say if you have my experience?
I've been in a lot of companies.
I've looked for boards of directors.
So I've had to get board of directors and advisors and stuff.
People like me say, oh, well, that's not that unusual at all.
People who don't have that experience are often in the news business.
So the news business is people who don't necessarily have business experience.
And would it seem unusual to them that somebody with no experience is on a board?
It might. Because that's the way they're reporting it.
So the point of loserthink is that if you haven't been at least a little bit exposed, you don't have to be an expert, but if you haven't seen a little bit about how economists think, how historians think, how psychologists think, etc., you would be ill-equipped.
To analyze the world.
And so I fill in some of those gaps with some of the main thematic elements from the various fields so you can tell where your blind spot is.
The thing that keeps you in a little bubble Usually you've got some blind spots.
There's just some things that you can't see because you don't have the kind of experience that would give you visibility.
Just like this board member thing, you wouldn't have the visibility.
Now, let me say, I'm not defending Hunter Biden.
I'm just saying that the fact that he has no experience should be viewed as completely normal for a board member.
What? You know, if he has contacts in the United States, that's actually a good reason.
That's a perfectly good reason to add somebody to a board.
Hey, we need better contacts in the United States.
Who do you got? How about the Vice President's son?
He knows a lot of people.
Done. That said, Is it ethical?
Well that's another question, isn't it?
Certainly, it gives the impression of conflict of interest.
But let me go to another topic here, which is Joe Biden defending himself.
I think it was yesterday.
Maybe it was the day before.
He was interviewed about whatever Trump is accusing him of and the Ukraine situation.
Here are the exact quotes from Joe Biden defending himself from accusations of pillaging.
Quote, There's no indication of any conflict of interest.
What? There's no indication of any conflict of interest?
While you were vice president and Ukraine was part of your portfolio, your son took a very high paid position connected to oligarchs.
That's the very definition of the appearance of conflict of interest.
Which is different from actually acting in a way that's bad for the country or something.
But the indication of any conflict of interest, I don't think that could be more obvious.
That's actually something everybody agrees on, that we're all looking at the same thing.
He was vice president, his son took a job with a country...
How do you not call that at least an indication of conflict of interest?
Here's what people who are not guilty say.
They say more like, there was no conflict of interest, we never acted in any way that would be concerning.
If you're innocent, you say, nothing happened.
If you are guilty, you're more likely to say, there's no indication of any conflict of interest.
You depersonalize it.
Here's a little trick for identifying liars.
Somebody telling the truth will say, I didn't do a damn thing.
You know, there's nothing I did that is even close to being conflict of interest.
That's what an honest person says.
Somebody lying to you will say, there's no indication of conflict of interest.
They depersonalize it.
And they say, here's another thing.
This is an actual quote from Joe Biden, also on the same day, within like a minute or so of the other comment.
He said, there's not a shred of evidence anything has been done wrong.
I've actually taught you, literally, if you've followed my periscopes, that when somebody says, I didn't do it, they might be telling the truth.
They might be lying, but they might be telling the truth, so I didn't do it.
That did not happen.
That sounds like an honest person.
Here's what a liar sounds like.
Consistently, you'll see this type of answer from a liar.
What kind of evidence do you have?
What do you know? I haven't seen any evidence of it.
Nobody's seen any evidence that I've done anything.
You can't prove that I did something wrong.
That's how all guilty people talk.
Now, let me back up there.
I said that's how all guilty people talk.
This is not the kind of rule that you want to, you know, send somebody to the gas chamber for.
Like, I can't claim that this is 100% accurate.
But I can claim I've never seen it be inaccurate.
And so there's a little bit of an anecdotal...
Well, there's a lot of anecdotal flavor to what I just said.
But over my entire life, in the situations that I've monitored, in which somebody has talked like this, the evidence seems insufficient.
When you do find out for sure what was the truth, the people who talk about the evidence are almost always lying.
The people who say, damn it, I didn't do a thing.
Those people might be telling you the truth.
They might be just better liars.
But that's what you're looking for.
If somebody makes an appeal to the lack of evidence, that's not a good sign.
And then Biden also did the meltdown, got angry, etc.
And honestly, there's just no way to...
There's no way to soften this.
He doesn't look mentally competent, even when he was answering the questions.
Everybody can see it at this point, I think.
Am I wrong? Don't you think Democrats can see it?
You know, you have to be careful because our perceptions are being filtered through our own biases.
Now, to most of the people who would spend time on this periscope, you're probably saying to yourself, yeah, it's totally obvious.
But remember, it's not going to be as obvious to the people who are his supporters.
Those people are biased toward not seeing it, and don't, because he obviously has lots of support in the polls.
My guess, this is just a guess, that the Biden support...
Is probably now almost entirely people who aren't paying attention.
Because remember, he's still got the name recognition, he's got the Obama connection, etc.
I feel as though Joe Biden doesn't have any support, any, from people who have seen his recent news clips.
Because if you've seen him talking recently, you know he's not the one you want in charge.
I think you'd know that. Again, regardless of policy, regardless of what you think of President Trump, those would be independent questions.
Anybody who sees Joe Biden talking in public recently, they couldn't possibly think that that looks like he's got his full faculties as he did when he was younger.
There's just no way you could see it that way.
So I really think that Biden's support is consistent with the number of people who don't pay attention.
And if you just called somebody who wasn't paying attention and said, I got 16 names, three of them you've heard of, one of them is Biden, and one of them is Bernie, and maybe you like Biden better.
That's probably the whole thing. I don't think there's any real support, as in people who have been paying attention, for Biden.
But Trump is taking him out so effectively that I don't think you have to worry about Biden getting nominated.
Let's talk about Bernie. So remember I told you the cat's on the roof joke?
You know, there's a joke, I won't tell you the whole joke, but the joke is that somebody's cat died, but you don't want to break it to them right away, so the first day you say your cat's on the roof, and you say you're trying to get it down, and the next day you say, oh, the cat got injured when we tried to get it down, and then later you say the cat died.
And the reason is, you sort of, you get people softened up for the idea, So that they're ready for it when it comes.
You don't want to just abruptly say, oh, your cat died.
Your cat died. Too shocking.
So then we're watching this, Bernie goes into the hospital, and the first thing we hear is, oh, he's got a little, you know, he didn't feel good, so he went in, they gave him a couple of stents, gets a simple operation, he'll be back on the trail tomorrow.
And I thought to myself, huh, Got a couple of stents.
Simple operation. Be back in his feet in a couple days.
That doesn't sound so bad.
Today the campaign said, well, it was a heart attack.
It was a little heart attack.
But he'll be back in a couple days.
Yeah, got a couple of stents.
It was just a little bit of a heart attack.
He'll be right back to work.
Good to go. Cats on the roof.
Let me ask you this.
How would you feel if Bernie had been elected, let's say he had gotten a nomination over Clinton and got elected, he would be the sitting president right now with a heart attack.
Who's his vice president?
It matters, doesn't it?
Who's Bernie's vice president in the hypothetical scenario that he had won the last election?
Because he's president right now.
Right? Bernie's president right now.
For three days, somebody else was president.
Maybe more. Right?
Because while he was semi-incapacitated, presumably the vice president would have stepped in.
Who was it? We don't know.
Because he never got to pick one.
But that's who would have been your president for three days.
Maybe longer.
Because we don't know what else Bernie's got going on, right?
He's at that age where things can sneak up on you kind of suddenly.
So if you're Bernie and you're running for president now after a heart attack, can you run for president without telling us who your vice presidential pick is going to be ahead of time?
Now it's traditionally they wait, right?
They always wait. Bernie can't do that anymore.
Because if you're voting for Bernie, you're kind of also voting for a vice president who has a higher-than-normal chance of being the president during Bernie's term.
And if you talk about a second term...
Now, here's the other thing.
Do you want to elect a president who you would not want to elect for a second term, and you know that when you elect them the first time?
Do we do that? Do you want a president who can't make it two terms if they're doing well?
Why would you do that?
Because it seems like there's so much advantage of having an incumbent who's learned the job to just do a second term.
If they've done a good job on the first term, you're happy enough.
That's a good situation, a second term president.
It can be. It can be a good situation.
But with Bernie, do you get even the option of a second term?
Not now, because I think the heart attack closes down in your mind the options of a second term.
Yeah, it's possible.
I mean, anything's possible.
But in your mind, you're sort of ruling that out.
So would you ever vote for a candidate who's not really a two-term possibility?
Not really. Probably not.
All right, so I think Bernie is done.
With the campaign, but we hope he goes on to live a long and healthy life.
And again, I have great respect for Bernie on a whole bunch of levels.
Not policies.
Not a big fan of his specific policies.
But you gotta like Bernie on a lot of different levels, right?
He's got a lot of character, fight...
I don't know, spunkiness.
I think he wants what's best for the country in his opinion.
I like the diversity of thought.
I like the fact that his views are so different.
I like the fact that he moved the Democrats.
I like the fact that he changed the conversation.
I've said for a long time that I think a huge mistake that the Republicans make Is to not adopt Bernie's goal of complete healthcare.
Because if you're a Republican, you can adopt the goal at the same time you can say, we don't know how to get there right away.
I think that would be fair.
You could say, we too would like everybody to have good healthcare and good healthcare insurance and not have to pay.
As a Republican, you should be able to say that out loud and often and just say, but we're trying to get there.
You know, it's just, it's not easy.
We're doing it our way by improving the economy, getting people working where they can get health care.
There were some announcements.
The president tweeted, I think I'd wait for a fact check on this one, but he said that Medicare Advantage, I think that's where the Medicare folks can buy a little extra insurance for the little extra care.
The price actually came down.
For the first time in 13 years.
I think I have that fact right.
Now, I would check that fact, because maybe somebody else is going to come in and say that there's something wrong with the fact.
But he's reporting it.
So the Republicans do have a way to inch their way towards something like full coverage.
I think they should adopt Bernie's goal.
Want everybody covered.
The President has said that.
But I just think you shouldn't be embarrassed at wanting to take care of everybody.
The fact that you don't know how, that's just a fact.
You're working on it. Don't know how to get there quickly.
All right. CNN did the worst case of...
The worst case of whataboutism that you'll ever see.
All right. So the news...
It's all about Biden and Hunter Biden and their alleged conflict of interest over in Ukraine.
So CNN tries to run a what about Trump's kid story and here's the best they came up with.
This is their best whataboutism.
Well, the Trump children, mostly I think Eric and Don Jr., Are running the Trump Organization and the Trump Organization's making international deals?
What? How are those the same?
Those don't even sound like slightly similar.
One is a multinational corporation that's been operating for decades and they took over and they're just doing what they do.
Operating an international corporation.
That obviously has, you know, deals in different places because somebody says, it's worst, you jerk.
Goodbye. So, and they didn't, I thought it was going to go into some kind of detail.
I thought it was going to be, and, you know, and one of them signed this deal or that deal with, I don't know, Kim Jong-un or something.
I thought it was going to be some wild, specific story.
And it turned out to be a generic story that it turns out that Eric and Don Jr.
have jobs. That's about it.
Yeah. And those Trump children, they work hard.
And they have jobs for an international corporation.
I don't know, that wasn't the best whataboutism I've seen.
I'm kind of amazed.
And then there was also the stuff about Ivanka had a deal or something, some kind of a shoe deal.
And so I forget which pundit was laughing about it and saying, Ivanka knows shoes.
That's sort of like, you know, sort of a perfect fit, you know, fashion, shoes, clothing.
But I thought Ivanka was closing down some part of her outside business.
So I don't know the deal is there, but it seems obvious to me that whatever the Trump kids are doing...
I call them kids. They're all obviously not children.
But all the Trump kids seem to be doing, just doing a good job doing their jobs.
Because otherwise we'd know about it.
I think there's no chance we wouldn't know about it if there was some problem there.
Interesting little story.
Elizabeth Warren had to get rid of a top campaign ad for, quote, inappropriate behavior.
And so I read the article trying to find out what that inappropriate behavior was and couldn't find it.
But apparently all kinds of inappropriate behavior from a male member of Elizabeth Warren's staff.
All kinds of inappropriate behavior.
So she got rid of them.
So let me recap the news of the week.
News of the week, President Trump gets a 3.5% unemployment rate, the best in 50 years.
Okay, so that was the President Trump news.
Joe Biden has a meltdown and he's pillaging Ukraine.
That was the Biden news.
The Bernie news is he had a heart attack while he was campaigning.
And the Elizabeth Warren news, and this is like the only news this week, Is she had to fire a top campaign ad for inappropriate behavior?
And it's sort of better that you don't know what it is.
Because if it was just Me Too stuff, I feel like they would just say that, wouldn't they?
Say there was some harassment claim or something.
So they're not saying that, which is hilarious because it allows you then to imagine whatever the inappropriate behavior was, and your mind will go to whatever is the worst thing.
I won't tell you where my mind went, because I'll let you have your own, but we're all imagining this whole portfolio of bad behavior, and we're ascribing it to this Warren high-level aide on the campaign, and we don't even know what he did.
But it sounds extra terrible because they won't tell us inappropriate behavior.
I think he actually ate a baby.
He might be the first Democrat to actually eat a baby to save us from climate change.
All right. This was Biden's big concern when he got all meltdown-y when he was talking about Trump.
They were asking him questions about Ukraine.
And Biden said his main concern about Trump is that Trump would do something stupid before he leaves office and that he's unhinged.
So of all the things that Biden could say about Trump, the best thing he could come up with In a press conference, was that Trump might do something stupid before he leaves office.
Do you know who else might do something stupid?
Everybody? Everybody?
What kind of a complaint is that?
That he might do something stupid?
He's been there three years.
You don't have one fucking thing to complain about?
Joe Biden, the president, has been the president three years.
The only thing you have to complain about is that he might, in some unspecified way, do something bad in the future.
Are you kidding me?
Are you kidding me?
That's the best you got.
You've been practicing to run for president.
You're running for president.
It's your full-time job.
And you can't come up with anything that the president did for the last three years that you want to criticize.
The best you could do is he might do something bad in the future.
Are you kidding me?
That is hilariously incompetent.
The president enjoying his making trouble for the Democrats.
I don't think there's anything more fun We're good to go.
You know, he can pick them off because there's so many Democrats he's fighting against at the same time.
So, you know, everything from already elected people like Pelosi to people running for office, some of them already elected too, but running for president.
So he's got all these targets.
Like, he wakes up every morning, he's like, whoa, look at this target list.
Man, I'm going to have fun today.
Bing, nickname. Bing, bing, bing, bing.
He goes down the list. But my favorite one was he's creating the frame that Pelosi is just a puppet of AOC and that also the squad is sort of just tagging along with AOC. So he calls the squad AOC plus three because he's minimizing the other three and basically saying, well, they're just the plus three.
It's really AOC. Now, And then he also says, he referred in a tweet, he said, along with Pelosi and her boss AOC, so Trump is calling AOC Pelosi's boss.
Now he's doing it at the same time that AOC had this embarrassing situation with a troll who was complaining about we need to eat babies.
You know all about that one.
So I love the president...
Promoting AOC above the other Democrats.
Now, I have to tell you there's a risk with this strategy.
It's very clever because it gets you arguing about whether AOC or Pelosi is in charge.
Presumably it gets under Pelosi's skin, which of course is the point of it.
Pelosi does a good job of getting under Trump's skin, you know, in the give and take ways.
So Pelosi does a good, she gives as good as she gets, I have to say.
She's very well respected in terms of being an operator and a strategist.
But watching the president put AOC, pit AOC and Pelosi against each other in public, Oh, and then he calls Pelosi the do-nothing Democrat.
And he puts it in quote, leader.
He put leader in quotes, leader, with AOC, her boss.
He's so good at this, of just getting in their heads.
All right. So while you were all distracted by Ukraine, the president issued a proclamation.
Now, I don't even know what that means to you.
What the hell is a proclamation?
The president issued a proclamation?
Is that like an executive order?
What the hell is a proclamation?
I don't know. Is it binding?
Is there such a thing as a binding presidential proclamation?
I don't even know. Does anybody know?
But he ordered, he issued a proclamation.
Maybe he's just making this stuff up as he goes.
Suspending entry into the U.S. of...
I hate this word, aliens.
Do you hate that word as much as I do?
Calling people who want to come to this country aliens?
I freaking hate that word.
Aren't we a whole country of immigrants, in some sense, past or current?
You know, immigrant at least is somewhat descriptive.
It's like you were someplace and you went someplace else, so you're an immigrant.
I don't love that word, but I don't hate it.
But alien, that's...
Do you have the same response to that?
Calling somebody who wants to come and be an American in most cases?
Sometimes they just want to work here and enjoy the country.
Sometimes they want to be the country.
They want to be Americans. And to call somebody an alien.
I just hate the word.
Just the word. But anyway, so the proclamation says that aliens have to show that they can financially take care of their own health care.
So they have 30 days to prove that they can afford health care and they'll take care of it.
And I thought, the President is really chipping away at a lot of different things.
He's just taking a little piece here, a little piece there, and you say to yourself, well, okay, that little piece is not the hill I'm going to die on, even if you're on the other side of that issue.
You might say to yourself, well...
All right, you know, I'm in favor of immigration, but it does make sense that people, you know, should pay their own way for health care, because why would I pay for it?
So you can imagine that there are enough Democrats who look at that and go, there's the president again.
Oh, that's not terrible.
Because I would think this would apply to every ethnicity and religion.
It doesn't seem to be discriminating except by income, which we accept as being fairly standard.
The world discriminates by income all the time.
Because poor people can't buy the same things as rich people.
So it's a very discriminatory world on incomes.
And so the president is discriminating a little bit more on essentially income by requiring that you be able to afford your own health care insurance if you come to this country under a visa.
So, that's like a win, right, for the president?
You might not like that or you do, but in terms of what he's trying to do for his supporters, that looks like a win.
He had a good week.
All right. I believe that brings me to the end of my prepared statements.
I will remind you again, as my publisher reminds me every day, that you should know about my book, Loser Think.
Now, let me tell you what this book will do for the conversation.
I talk about a lot of the techniques you're going to see on social media and in the news.
In other words, the bad arguments that people make, the arguments that have blind spots and they're just missing something.
So I talk about those and the technique for getting people out of their little bubble.
So you can get yourself out of your bubble if you're in one, and most of us are.
And it can help you get other people out of your bubble.
I will say, in the interest of full humility, there are no ideas in this book in terms of how to think better that I have not done wrong myself and continue to do wrong.
So, it's not a book where I tell you how to be smart.
It's a book where I confess that I've made all of these mistakes, and I hope that you will learn from my experience as well.
So, by Loser Think, it's the best book in the world.
I just saw that the business and humor category has, I think, four books on it that have something to do with me.
Oh, and by the way, New Dilbert book is out too.
Book of Dilbert comics, in case you missed anything.
It's all here. 30th.
Believe it or not, 30 years.
So we've got all that going on.
All right. Washington Post op-ed said we're looking at the wrong movie.
Yeah, have you seen how often the two movies thing is being discussed everywhere?
Visa seekers are visitors to our country.
Well, they are visitors.
That is true.
Unless they overstay.
So there's a lot of people overstay.
So the visa people, somebody is...
Correcting me here, the visa people are not people who are coming here to live forever, but they might be coming here to work and live as Americans do, but on a visa.
When am I doing the Periscope with Christina?
So that will be a separate thing.
It won't be the morning sip.
But Christina and I are preparing for it.
We have a couple of little elements we're pulling together, and then we're going to do something fun separately.
Somebody says, describe my gym workout.
Well, if you have read my book, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, You'll know that I use a system for fitness, not some specific set of steps.
And by a system, I mean that I concentrate primarily on my mind.
Because if you get your mind right, your fitness will take care of itself.
And the way I get my mind right is that I make sure I enjoy working out on a regular basis, or at least being active, even if I don't work out that day.
And so I make sure that I enjoy it.
It's fun. I give myself a protein shake and a little downtime afterwards.
I go to a nice gym because I like the ambiance and I have more energy if other people are working out.
So all I do for my fitness is make sure that when I'm done exercising that day, That I make sure that I've done something fun enough or enjoyable enough that I'm going to want to do it again.
Now sometimes the exercise itself puts you in a good frame of mind and that's enough.
But I don't over-exercise and then hurt myself and then not want to do it the next day.
The whole game is to want to do it tomorrow.
If you get that right, all of the details of your workouts, you'll just figure that out over time.
You'll add diversity to your workout because you get bored.
You'll learn tips because you see other people at the gym.
You start talking about it.
People will say, hey, have you tried this?
So the specifics of it, you want to build up over time.
Building technique.
Find out what works for you, etc.
Because what works for you is going to be different than What other people do.
Alright, so just some specifics, because people ask.
I always do weights.
So weights are always part of my exercise.
Not every day, but I try to do it several times a week.
And then some cardio that's not too bad for my joints, basically.
I usually like the stair machines, the automatic stair machines.
But everybody's different.
You should not take my model as your model, except that you probably should add weight and resistance training and some cardio into your routine.
So that's all you need to know.
Well, everything that I do weights-wise is adjusted for age.
So there are things I would have done at 20 that I'm not going to do at my current age.
So somebody was talking about pull-ups and push-ups.
Not at my age. At 25, you wouldn't want to be in a pull-up competition with me because I probably would win.
But at my current age, I try to make sure I'm not hurting myself.
So I put a very high premium on avoiding injury.
Because at my age, if you have an injury, you lose two weeks of exercise.
You can imagine you get to the point where you just say, ah...
I'm done with exercising.
I'll just ride out the rest of my time on this world.
And I think a lot of people do that.
I think people get to the point where they go, ah, I think I'm done with exercising.
I've just reached that age.
I don't think you should ever do that.
"If I keep looking for a new job, won't I look bad to future employers with job hopping?" Nope. No, you will not.
I would not worry about job hopping for even one second.
Why? Because the unemployment rate is 3.5%.
I'm assuming this question is coming from somebody working here in America.
If the employment rate is 3.5%, use your power.
Your power is that employers want you more than you need them at the moment.
So, depending on what your skill set is, that's probably true.
So, no. There was a time in the past, in the old days, that I think job hopping would look bad.
But if you job hop to a better job, it's because you have more qualifications.
If you're an employer and you're holding it against somebody who's rising to the level of their skill, What's wrong with you?
Don't work for that guy or woman.
If your boss isn't actively hoping you get a better job or a better situation, even if you leave, get another boss.
In my brief time when I was a boss in the corporate world, I had a small group I was managing.
One of my principals, I had two principals.
One of them was that everybody had to be learning something all the time.
So I would tell my people, I don't care why you're learning.
It doesn't have to even be relevant to the specific job.
But as a lifetime practice, you should be learning something all the time.
Ideally something useful, but you should always be learning because when we're learning, we're sort of optimized as humans.
A learning human is the perfect human.
We're really optimized to learn.
And if you're not learning, You're going to feel incomplete in a way that you can't quite identify.
So I would tell them, I will support you in whatever way to be learning.
I'll teach you something. I'll help you get into a class.
Whatever it takes. But you all have to be learning something.
I don't care what it is.
And then the next thing was, I would tell them that my personal ambition as a manager was to promote them out of my department or to get them a better job.
And I would tell them that.
I'd say, as long as you work for me, I'm trying to get rid of you.
In a good way. I want you to take whatever you're learning here and take it somewhere else better.
Your job is to go somewhere better.
Your job is to leave me.
Get some skills. Get some confidence.
Get some experience. Meet some people.
I'll give you a recommendation.
I'll train you. Your job is to leave.
Because here's why.
I would simply take people's personal ambitions and say, I'm not going to pretend that you're not here for your own good.
I don't want to live in the artificial world where I'm trying to trick you into staying here for my benefit.
You're not working for my benefit.
You're working for yourself.
Now, it happened to be the types of jobs where it wouldn't have been that hard to train somebody new coming in.
So I had that advantage.
You know, I didn't need to keep some highly trained specialists in place.
And maybe I would have acted differently if I needed them for the business to succeed.
You know, don't leave, don't leave.
But for normal jobs, especially these were closer to entry-level jobs, my job was to get rid of them.
Now, I didn't say that.
I wouldn't say I want to get rid of you.
But what do you think happened As a result of telling people I wanted them to learn every day, and I was trying to get them better jobs.
What do you think the result was?
Nobody wanted to leave.
I was like the best boss ever.
Who wants to leave that?
Do you want to leave that boss?
The boss who's literally trying to improve your skills until you can leave and go get a better job somewhere else?
Who leaves that boss?
So it sort of worked opposite of how you might expect, because people just enjoyed their situation.
And so I will state unambiguously I'm not a good boss.
Meaning that I'm not good for the stockholders, because I just can't abuse the employees the way the stockholders need me to, you know, depending on the situation.
So I will never be a great boss, because I can't be mean enough when the situation calls for it.
But I can certainly be a helpful boss.
You wouldn't mind working for me if you were an employee, that's for sure.
All right, that's about all I got.
Oh, and somebody else agreeing.
Somebody else saying they want to optimize every employee.
I didn't manage up.
Yeah. How's your drumming?
Thanks for asking. So, a few years ago, I sent myself, I guess, a I won't say a goal because I didn't have a specific goal, but I tried to learn the drums and it was more about keeping a different part of my brain active.
Learning a new skill, and it was fun.
And, you know, Christina's a gifted musician, so it gave us something more to talk about.
So yesterday, Christina and I were out in my garage.
I ended up with two electronic drum sets.
One is mine, one I inherited from my stepson, who was deceased a year ago.
So I ended up with two electronic drum sets.
And so the two of us, Christina and I, my girlfriend...
We're in the garage having a drum off because she's such a good musician.
She could learn the drums sort of in 10 minutes.
It's really humiliating because she's really smart but also very experienced with music and she's very coordinated too.
You know, she just has musical coordination.
So, you know, I've been practicing for months and months and months, and she just sits down with the drums, and she says, all right, show me what to do.
And I'm like, watch this.
See if you can do all this.
I'll do a thing, and she'll look at me, and she'll go, and I'll say, okay, that was a little too easy.
So, yeah, she has the gift.
Anyway, it's a lot of fun.
I'm not good and never will be and don't care, but it's a lot of fun.
Is the name Hunter evidence of the simulation?
Certainly makes me wonder.
He was more of a gatherer than a hunter, wouldn't you say?
Do I still play tennis and golf?
No. I quit tennis because I didn't like being sore every day.
And I was. If you play tennis often, you're kind of sore every day.
Golf, I haven't played, I don't think I've played since my stepson died.
I only learned golf to play with him.
You have to have something to bond over and it doesn't feel the same anymore.
I think you understand. But that's all for now.
Ever considered running a marathon?
I've considered it, but I'm pretty sure that my body is not optimized for that sort of a thing.
I think some people are just built for distance.
Some people are built for speed.
I'm sort of built for speed.
I'm not built for distance.
All right. That's all for now.
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