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Dec. 29, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
59:51
Episode 771 Scott Adams: Confused Artists, Hoaxes and your Question
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Bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum Hey everybody!
Come on in here. It's time for Coffee with Scott Adams and I'm Scott Adams and you're here for coffee.
And as you're streaming in, preparing, do you notice the little ASMR noise I make?
Some of you are only going to listen to this on audio without watching.
But watch how comforting it is to hear this.
This is me organizing my papers.
That's right. There's a whole industry of people who listen to little sounds like that to fall asleep.
True story. It's called ASMR. But that's not why you're here.
No. Nope.
I know why you're here. You're here for the simultaneous sip, and all you need is a cup or a mug or a glass, a tank or chalice or stein, a canteen jug or flask, a vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee.
And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better, the simultaneous sip.
Go. Ah ha ha ha ha ha ha.
That's hitting the spot, isn't it?
Alright. How many of you, when 7 o'clock hits and you get your little alert, go running for your cups and vessels and mugs?
Probably a lot of you. I hope you do.
Alright. You may have noticed that because it's the holidays, all the news just sort of stopped.
Have you noticed that?
The only news that happened...
Seems to be the news that nobody wants you to talk about.
So as Jack Posavik pointed out on a tweet, that in the last week or so we've heard that the war in Afghanistan was basically a gigantic fraud perpetrated on the American public because we imagined that we were doing something useful there and apparently we were just killing people and getting killed.
So now it's been revealed that, at least privately, our military didn't think they were doing anything useful, which certainly puts President Trump in a good light.
There are some reports that he has to talk to the military enlisted people without the officers there, so that you could get a real idea of what was happening in Afghanistan, which puts him in a really good light, I've got to say, because I haven't seen anybody question the reports.
So the report is that he told the generals and the officers to stay out so he could talk to the people who actually did the fighting and get a real honest, unfiltered opinion for the first time.
But also we heard evidence.
I don't know if anything is ever confirmed these days.
You know, you think you hear something that's overturning something else or confirming something else.
You just never know.
But we're hearing that the alleged chemical attack in Syria that happened, I guess a couple years ago, that President Trump responded to militarily, was probably a fraud.
How many of you remember that when the gas attack first happened that I, and I'm not alone, there were a number of skeptical people who said the same thing, but I like to keep score.
I like to keep score when my predictions are right and when they're wrong, because that will give me an idea if there's some kind of predictions I'm good at, some kind I'm not.
The ones I tend to be good at have some kind of element of persuasion or psychological blind spot.
Now, I haven't rigorously tested this, but it does seem that whenever there's a psychological element, my impression, which could also be off, is that I'm better at that.
So when the gas attack happened, I said, well, from a psychological perspective, Wouldn't it make perfect sense for them to fake the attack?
Because it would be easy to fake.
People would believe it.
And it could change the fate of the war.
And it's people who don't have access to a lot of different kinds of weapons and defenses.
They have a pretty small set of things they can do.
And one of the things that they can do is try to bring in foreign powers with fake stories.
So, if you've read my book, Win Bigley...
You know that I'm famous for saying that whenever there's a situation where people can get away with something, and there's a huge upside advantage, and there are a lot of people involved, that in that situation, bad behavior will happen every time.
Now the context, I usually say that, is in financial.
So the general rule is this.
If there's a lot of money involved, but let's say upside, In a military situation, the upside is that you survive and your side wins.
So whether there's a lot of money to be gained or there's a military victory to be gained or just living, there's a lot to be gained.
So whenever you have the situation that looks like this, there's a lot to be gained.
The risk of being caught is small.
Let's say the people who faked the gas attack were detected.
No penalty. You don't go to jail for that, right?
It's a war zone. You can fake a gas attack, get caught, no penalty.
There's literally nothing bad that would happen to you for doing it.
So you've got this enormous potential gain, which is your life.
Maybe the life of your village, you know, if you can change the course of the war.
And it's trivial to do.
Faking the gas attack...
Turned out to be kind of easy.
You just put some canisters here.
You have some people say, oh, I'm suffering from something.
You film them selectively with your camera.
It's literally the easiest thing you could ever fake.
And by the time anybody found out you had faked it, the damage is done.
You've already created a situation.
So here's the setup.
Whenever you have an enormous thing you could gain, You've got lots of people involved, so at least some of them are going to have the bad idea.
It helps to have a lot of people involved.
If there's only one person in this situation, well, you might get a situation where that one person is virtuous, and they won't take the opportunity to do evil.
But if you have a lot of people involved, it's guaranteed, guaranteed, that one of them is going to say, hey, are you telling me that I could change the course of the war, maybe?
There's no penalty.
And it's easy to do.
It should happen every time.
Remember, as soon as the Turks started taking over the territory for the Kurds, the most recent stuff, immediately you heard stories of atrocities.
And immediately I said, could be true, but if the Kurds are not inventing fake atrocities, Why aren't they?
It's the obvious play.
Somebody in that big Kurd community is going to say, wait a minute, if I fake an atrocity, it could help, and it could help a lot.
But if I got caught faking an atrocity, no penalty.
There's no penalty at all.
In fact, if we found out that some Syrian or some Kurd had faked an atrocity for the purpose of helping their own people survive, I wouldn't even feel bad about it.
I mean, I wouldn't even have a bad opinion of the person who did it.
Because indeed, let me say as clearly as I can, if you put me in that situation, He said, Scott, we're being surrounded by enemies and we might all die, but you could do this fake gas attack, Scott. It might change things.
Would I, Scott, do a fake hoax gas attack if I thought it would work?
Yeah, of course. In a heartbeat, wouldn't you?
It's war. All right, enough about that.
Joe Biden has painted himself in a corner, or it got painted for him, I'm not sure.
But you can't not love the fact that the whole reason, well, a big reason that the president is being impeached is that he refused to comply with Congress's subpoenas.
He refused to let his people go testify.
Yeah. And now Joe Biden is doing the same, or saying he'll do the same, but he wants to be really clear that this is different.
And here's how it's different.
It's different because if the Senate asked Joe Biden to testify, which they threatened they would do, that that would not be legitimate.
So it's different. Because Joe Biden, in his opinion, says that asking the President's people to testify would be legitimate, so therefore it's a problem when he didn't do it.
But Joe says, of course I would comply with any legal request unless it was illegitimate.
And it would be illegitimate to ask me to go in and testify.
To which I ask the obvious question, who gets to decide what's legitimate?
Because if Joe Biden gets to decide what is legitimate, he's putting himself above the law.
I mean, literally, literally as literal as anything could be.
You can't get more literally above the law.
I mean, not in the distance above sense, but in terms of putting yourself as more important as Of a decision maker than the law, than to say, is your decision whether to obey it?
Is your decision if a law is legitimate?
Do we all get that?
Do I get to kill somebody and say, whoa, whoa, whoa, I know what you're thinking.
Yes, yes, I did murder my neighbor.
That's true. But you have to look at how legitimate it was.
I mean, have you seen this guy?
He's loud. He's obnoxious.
I all get it. Yeah, I get it.
Murder has to be illegal for most situations.
But can we make an exception?
I mean, seriously, have you met...
Did you know my neighbor?
I think you have to say it was pretty legitimate.
If you knew this guy... He deserved to get killed.
So don't be arresting me for this murder thing that's the generic law.
You've got to look at the specifics.
The specific is, sure, I killed him because he was annoying, but he was really annoying.
It was legitimate this time.
So Joe Biden has blundered into probably the worst argument you could ever have, which is this time he gets to override the Congress or the law, subpoenas, the courts.
I mean, it's...
I don't know what to say about it except that it's funny.
It's just sort of funny that he trapped himself so completely.
I don't think it will make any difference to anything because we're at that point in politics and society where maybe it just doesn't matter what you say or what you do or what you think.
I don't think any of it matters.
Um... Are you having the same feeling about impeachment that I am after several days of being in sort of holiday mode and the news just sort of stopped talking about it?
Does it feel that any of that stuff was ever important?
Have you noticed that as soon as the news stops talking about Russia collusion and impeachment and stuff, I mean, they still, you know, they tease it a little bit, but basically they've stopped talking for the holidays.
That as soon as they stopped talking, it didn't matter.
Think about that.
As soon as the news stopped talking about it, it also stopped mattering in every way that anything can matter.
None of it matters.
It's one of these little moments where you should step back and say, hey, wait a minute.
Is the problem what the Congress is doing or the President is doing, or is it the way we talk about it?
Because as soon as we stop talking about it, I don't know, my life's the same.
Nothing hurt me. I'm not worried about something.
It's all fine. Everybody just stop talking about it.
So, there's going to be, you know, a lot of people predicted this after the holiday break.
That the public would just be exhausted and totally over the impeachment stuff, and the more they talk about it, the more we're going to get bored and annoyed with it, and it's not going to be productive.
Not that it was ever productive.
So, I've been having this fascinating experience since my book, Loser Think, came out.
Incredibly successful. You should have it.
Everybody's talking about it.
Actually, everybody is talking about it.
Not everybody, of course, but a lot of people are using the quote side of the book.
A lot of people are using the title and a lot of the concepts.
So it's definitely making a dent in the national consciousness, as I hoped.
But one of the things I wrote in there is that artists would have different world views than, let's say, economists or scientists or engineers or lawyers or whatever, and that each of them might be great in their own way, but unless you have a little bit of experience in different fields, it's hard to get but unless you have a little bit of experience in different fields, it's hard to get a
And in particular, I've called out artists of all types, whether it's visual or writing or music or whatever, as being unusually and obviously less capable of understanding their world.
Now, let me be as careful as I can.
There are lots of artists that are not all the same.
There are some artists who also take a real interest in Let's say critical thinking and philosophy and things.
And so they probably are just well-rounded.
So in those cases, they're artists, but there are also lots of other things.
The people who tend to get stuck are the ones who have not broadened their horizons.
And so it seems that there are two kinds of artists, those who have a fully rounded view of the world and they can have opinions anywhere.
But the ones who are sort of stuck in artist mode, if you will, they seem to be universally pulled in by all the hoaxes.
They'll believe the fine people hoax.
They believe that the president mocked a disabled man with an arm.
And in some cases, let's say the person is an engineer and they believed one of those two things.
So you're an engineer and you believe That the president called the neo-Nazis fine people.
So you say, well, I believe it.
I mean, I saw it in the news.
That's what they reported. Not just one news.
I saw it reported on multiple news stations that the president did that.
But if you're an engineer, you just need one fact that you believe...
That will change your mind.
So you send the engineer the transcript.
You say, oh, here's the part they cut out.
They show you the first part, and it reverses the meaning.
Now you see the whole thing. You can see that he didn't say that.
He said exactly the opposite.
You do that with an engineer.
Do you know what the engineer will say?
Well, okay, good point.
I have these other things to complain about.
But, you know, we're done with that one.
Point made. Evidence.
Evidence given. None.
But that doesn't work with artists more often than not.
Again, there are lots of different artists.
But the correlation is today, for example, I told you before that all the professional trolls seem to have disappeared for the holidays.
You notice that? So the people who would just come in and insult me or bring up some hoax about me from the past to do nothing but cause trouble, they're all on vacation.
They're just all gone. And Twitter has become this kinder, more gentle place.
So when people disagree with me this week because the professional trolls are on vacation, they're actually real people.
And it's the first time it's just obvious that the people who have been engaging with me lately are real people with real jobs.
They're not trolls. And what I noticed is that almost 100% of them Who are disagreeing on the hoax stuff are artists, according to their own profiles.
So, what are the odds and what is causing this?
Is it just lack of exposure?
In one case, there was an artist who was arguing with me that the president mocked the man with the bad arm.
And I said, well, why don't you just Google it, and you'll see the compilation clips of the president using a similar gesture for lots of different people, and then you'll know it in context, so you know that's likely not what he was doing.
And she argued and said, well, you know, if you had a link for that, you would have sent it to me.
And I'm like, ugh. All right.
So I Google it.
I send her a link.
And then she looks at the link, and it's clear as day that he's mocking other people with the same gesture.
And then she says, yes, but he was a little more animated, and his gestures were bigger when he was talking about the man who had the actual bad arm.
When he talked about the other people, it was a similar gesture, but it wasn't as big.
To which I say, so?
That means nothing. Because the clips show that he does the gesture in a variety of different ways.
Sometimes bigger, sometimes smaller.
It's very clear. You can see it throughout the clip.
Sometimes he would go big, sometimes he'd go not so big.
So the fact that one of them was extra big doesn't mean anything, because one of them was going to be bigger than the others.
So the critical thinking involved from the artist is...
Shockingly lacking, but they still seem confident.
Here's my speculation.
My speculation is that when you work in the arts, everything matters.
That is to say, if you were reading a novel, and in the first chapter there was something about the hero of the story playing with their expensive watch, you could reasonably assume that later in the story that watch will be important.
Because in the world of art, whether it's music, photography, writing, you don't put something in the art unless it matters.
In fact, art is about getting rid of all the things that don't matter.
So when you look at any artistic world, there's no such thing as coincidences, because they're all engineered out.
You live in a coincidence-free world when you're an artist, and you're trying to make it that way.
The real world is all coincidence.
It's just things happening randomly that you don't know why all the time.
It's not all coincidence, but it's rife with coincidence.
So when you see something like this very example, when she says, well, is it a coincidence?
Could it be, Scott, a coincidence that when he's talking about the actual guy with the bad arm, That he goes a little bit bigger in his gestures.
Is that a coincidence? To which I say, yeah, that's how coincidences work.
That's exactly a coincidence.
There could be no better example than that.
That's the perfect example of a coincidence.
But the artist says, no, that's got to mean something, because everything means something.
And so they pull these coincidences into their world where everything means something, and it's hard to get them off that.
But the engineer, the scientist, the lawyer, they live in a world where coincidences are probably coincidences at least as often as they're meaningful.
So they're all on the alert for a coincidence being over-interpreted.
Artists? Probably not.
Probably the opposite.
All right. Is anything else happening?
Is it my imagination that not much is happening?
What is the best path for rapid U.S. development of Gen 4 nuclear?
Here's what I think it is.
So the Energy Department has already set up a test site.
To rapidly test different nuclear fuels, which would get you closer to the Generation 4 technology.
I think what we need is more leadership at the top.
Now, what I mean by that is President Trump.
In my opinion, and every time I criticize the President for not doing enough or doing something wrong, I like to call it out.
Because for some reason, people can watch me forever and come to the impression that I've never criticized anything Trump did, which is so completely wildly wrong.
That I call it out.
So, I think nuclear is one of those cases.
Now, when I say wrong, I mean not enough.
I believe that everything that Trump has done has been really, really good, because, you know, Trump's the boss, his Department of Energy has been quite aggressive under Perry, helping to develop nuclear, but probably not nearly as aggressive as it could be.
For example, I always talk about Bill Gates and TerraPower, one of the companies he's funded that's trying to build the new generation of nuclear energy.
And the main thing that they need is places to test it.
Now, maybe they have that.
Maybe they have a plan on that.
But I would think that the President of the United States should be visiting TerraPower, We should actually take a day and go there so that the rest of the country can be informed.
Because if you can inform the rest of the country that there's this good thing happening, that technology to eat existing nuclear waste and turn it into fuel is being developed, that shouldn't just be a little blurb in Wired magazine.
That shouldn't be like a little thing in the New York Times, hey, there's some other technologies, we think they could be good, whatever.
That should be the President of the United States taking the day off.
Meeting Bill Gates and having Bill Gates walk him around the test facility and then maybe do it a few more times at, I think, NuScale.
There are other companies in this business.
But the president has this gigantic spotlight that he can spotlight on anything.
And if he spotlighted nuclear energy, he would take the high ground on the climate change debate.
Now, imagine being able to take the high ground on your opponents, maybe one of their strongest arguments.
You could actually take it away from them.
So how can I not call that a mistake on the president's part?
Because it's a mistake when you do something that's an error, but it's also a mistake when there's this big, teeming, obvious thing to do that would be positive, and you don't do it.
If you're not taking the opening that's given, that's a mistake.
And on the nuclear stuff, while Trump has been, I think, A-plus in terms of policy, he's been completely missing in action in terms of persuasion, and it's a persuasion problem.
You know, it doesn't help the country to have a good technical direction if there's no persuasion backing it up to get people, you know, moving in the same direction.
So I criticize the president on nuclear persuasion, but not nuclear policy.
I think the policy is probably pretty clean.
Anyway. He says, Scott, maybe you're just out of the loop.
Well, I don't know how that comment makes sense, because the loop I'm talking about is public exposure.
And I watch the news a lot, so I doubt I would have missed it if the president was strongly persuading on nuclear power.
He hurt himself a little bit, a little bit, with the windmill stuff.
You know, what's funny about it is people mock him for not understanding windmills.
But if you see him talk about it, he drops enough facts about windmills that it's obvious he does know about windmills.
So he knows enough about windmills pluses and minuses to be able to riff on it.
You know, he's no expert on green technology.
But he does know what he's talking about.
He does know they kill a lot of birds.
He does know that if the wind isn't blowing, you're going to have to do something.
Those are the big points. I think 2020 might be the year that Trump...
Goes hard at it.
Now, there must be some political or other reason why he hasn't done it so far.
My guess is that it just doesn't feel safe to do it, maybe, as a political strategy.
Maybe the polling is so anti-nuclear that maybe it just doesn't pay to be vocal about it.
But I think that would be leaving the entire civilization of the world at peril.
You know, if the reason you're not talking about nuclear energy is because it's politically inconvenient, then you're literally allowing civilization to be at risk for a political point.
I mean, that's a pretty big trade-off.
It contradicts his coal promise.
No, it doesn't. Because the coal promise was about jobs.
The way I saw it. The coal promise was not coal is the only way to make electricity.
The coal promise is totally about jobs.
And pushing hard at coal while we still need it and creating jobs is actually, I would say, a respectable trade-off even if you wouldn't do it.
Meaning that letting unemployed people have jobs It's pretty important, and if what that costs is one one-hundredth of a degree over 50 years of extra temperature, or whatever it is, because American coal miners, you know, the extra, the little bit of extra America coal mining that might happen because of Trump, what's that?
One one-thousandth of a degree of temperature over 50 years?
I don't know. Could we even measure it?
So if it's creating jobs and having a trivial effect on the world, that's not a disrespectful trade-off.
People need jobs too.
Who drops out of the Democrat race next?
I don't know.
Cory Booker is going to have a tough time holding on, I think.
Free energy is the near future.
Could be. Somebody says nuclear is net inefficient.
Well, depends what you mean by inefficient.
If you mean for the price, then I would say that you can't determine that.
Because the price of nuclear is, if you look at it historically, it's all distorted by politics and the fact that the technology was legitimately dangerous in the beginning.
So you've got a lot of factors that just wouldn't exist if you built smaller, modular Generation 4, because then you could standardize the parts, you could make them smaller, you could have the engineering and approval sort of canned, so that instead of starting from scratch on a new design for nuclear, you know, if you're looking at a new plant that's never been built before, even if it uses some parts of technology that exist, it's still a new plant.
So getting approval and then sign off on new technology for nuclear is just the hardest thing you could possibly do.
But the future is these small modular ones where once you've decided that one of them works, you just build another one like it.
And then the second time they go, okay, it's one of these.
So much easier to approve.
And therefore the cost will come way down.
Oh, here's a good question from Gay Shit Kevin Say.
On which topics do you purposely manipulate the nuance?
Well, would you say manipulate the nuance to be persuasive?
Is that the question?
Because I believe I try to persuade on anything important.
So the word manipulate...
Gets to intention.
So I usually try to stay away from that word.
So I don't manipulate for bad purpose, but everybody who communicates Tries to communicate effectively.
And that means, you know, emphasizing this over something else.
So, maybe always.
I'm not sure I can turn off just the communication habit of emphasizing what I want to emphasize.
I'm not sure I can turn that off.
But I think your question was a good one.
Maybe I can think of an example, but it doesn't come to mind.
Will Dilbert dip into the political discussion in 2020?
Not in the Democrat versus Republican sense, but I might have Dilbert more involved with topics.
So I've had climate change interfere with the Dilbert world, but without making much of a political point, just it exists.
it's part of the conversation so it made sense that it would overlap at some point let's see, do you ever laugh Of course I do. You've seen me laugh on here.
Can Democrats hire persuasion experts to coach their candidates?
Well, they have. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama both had persuasion experts coaching them.
And all the political professionals should also be persuasion experts of a different type.
Sam Harris has worried that you were manipulating him during the podcast.
Well, what does that mean?
See, it's that word manipulating that throws everything off.
What if you just said that I'm persuasive?
What's the difference? If you say somebody's persuasive, you take the evil intention out of it.
If you say, hey, he's manipulative.
What if you're just persuasive?
Because you can persuade in a positive way.
Yeah, manipulation is not the right word because that gets to intention as opposed to the tool.
What is one online self-promotion advice you would give a writer?
Well, some of the best advice I saw came from writer Stephen King.
He wrote a book called On Writing.
So that's the title of the book, On Writing.
And one of the pieces of advice he gives, which is spot on in my opinion, is that it's actually easy to get published.
People don't realize this.
But if you decide, I'm going to be a writer tomorrow, and you've got a little bit of writing talent, you can get published by the end of the week.
But where you can get published by the end of the week is in a small local publication.
Or maybe some kind of online thing that takes guest artists or something.
Something small. Then maybe you get a lot of retweets or clicks.
Maybe the local newspaper or publication said, oh, we like it.
Give us another one. So you build up a body of work that you can take to the next level up.
Now the next level up, if you've been writing articles for small newspapers, might be larger publications.
Might be blogging, might be a guest blogger on Huffington Post or something.
But what you do is you just keep creating a body of work that becomes your resume for the next up until you're a popular columnist and then a publisher says, hey, if you're good at writing these popular columns, maybe you could write a book.
So basically, you take advantage of the fact that pretty much every writer can get published.
It's one of the easiest fields to break into, as weird as that sounds.
Now, it's almost impossible for any one person to become a best-selling author.
That's hard. But becoming a working, published author, very easy.
I always tell this story back when I was in my corporate days.
At a big bank.
And one of my employees, I was a supervisor, one of my employees decided he wanted to write an article for a spreadsheet magazine.
It was a magazine that just did tricks and tips for people who use spreadsheets.
He'd never written anything, never been paid for writing anything, hadn't been asked to write anything.
He just saw this industry publication and he thought, oh, I have some ideas that I should submit to them.
Maybe they'll pay me. So I worked with him a little bit.
He wrote up an article.
It was not really good.
And it got published.
They actually rewrote most of the article and paid him.
They rewrote his bad writing because his idea was fresh.
And they liked the idea.
And then he said, wow, I got paid.
I got paid for being a writer.
And it was actually pretty good money.
It was like $1,500 30 years ago.
And So he gets paid, and he's like, well, I'll write another one.
So he writes another article.
It's also not that good.
They rewrite half of it, but not all of it this time.
It gets published. He gets paid.
The guy who was my boss at the phone company saw me succeeding with Dilbert, and he said, hey, I think I'll try to write a book.
Basically, random guy in a cubicle decides to write a book.
Now, what are the odds that random guy in cubicle, my boss, who had no writing experience, no writing experience whatsoever, what are the odds that he would publish his book?
He published a frickin' book.
It's an actual book.
He wrote a book.
About his father had been captured by the Japanese in World War II and executed.
He had the whole story from the war crimes records and stuff.
And so he writes a book about it.
It was actually a really interesting book.
No experience, gets paid, and the book did well enough.
I think that if he'd had a second book in him, I don't think he did, but he would have been able to write a second book.
So writing is actually...
Probably one of the most accessible fields you'll ever get into, but only to start.
That bottom entry is just really easy.
Then you have to build your way up.
By the way, the Dilbert 2020 calendar ended the year as the number one calendar.
I think it was the number one calendar on Amazon.
It was ranked in terms of all books on Amazon, and imagine how many books are on Amazon.
Millions and millions of books.
I think it ended at, the rank was 34.
So out of all the books and calendars that were sold on Amazon, the Dilbert calendar was 34.
I think that might be one of the best performances yet.
So that's 30 years that Dilbert has been out, and the calendar just came in number one.
It's not bad. It's got legs.
Yeah, somebody says, who the hell still uses calendars?
So they're used almost entirely as a gift item and something that people put on their desk just to have a joke.
So I don't know that anybody uses a Dilbert calendar for the calendar part.
It's more of a... It's almost a tradition.
People have been giving it to their father forever and they just keep doing it.
Somebody says, oh, Lucy uses one.
I'll give you some WenHub updates after the new year.
Somebody says, I love that you're so happy.
Thank you. I am pretty happy.
Any advice for fine artists?
Let me tell you a story.
Somebody has to stop me in case I told you this story, because I feel like I was planning to tell it, and maybe I did, but I don't think I did.
So a few weeks ago, I got a message from a young man who had been part of my, let's say, extended social circle.
I'm going to be a little bit nonspecific here for privacy purposes.
So it's a young man who several years ago had asked for my advice on what to do with his life.
He was smart, ambitious, but he didn't have a direction.
And so I started telling him my talent stack concept.
Now the idea was to start with whatever talents he had and then intelligently pile on new talents until he had something strong.
And I said, I was just sort of brainstorming what I would do if I were him.
If we had switched places and I had to use my strategy, but starting from his starting point, what would I do?
I said, I'll tell you what I'd do.
He was a good graphic artist.
So he already had a base for the artistic mindset.
And he also had a good mind for technology and other stuff.
So I said, I would learn to program.
And I would learn to design user interfaces because if you have artistic talent and you know how to design a user interface, those go really well together.
The artistic sense and the user interface design, if you've got both of those, that's strong.
But on top of that, if you could actually code it, You could visualize it.
You could visualize it well because you're an artist.
And then you could code it yourself with a variety of languages.
So I said that's what I would do.
I would take classes until I could do user interface.
Graphic design, and I could code it all up into anything I wanted.
And he, so I gave this advice maybe, I don't know, three years ago.
And I was aware that he started taking classes in that realm.
And he just, he just emailed me, I think it was email, the other day.
I think maybe it was a text message.
And he told me that he wanted to let me know that he just got a job in the field.
With Apple Computer in their user interface group.
Now, some of you understand what I just said.
For the rest of you, let me explain it.
If you were trying to get a job in the field of designing user interfaces, there's one place that's the best place in the world, and then there's every place else.
The best place in the world, unambiguously, His Apple computer, Bay Area, user interface.
That's the job he just got.
This was after probably five years of extreme poverty, meaning that he was a starving student, you know, living out, living with a grandparent, I think.
And you could barely make it to school.
Like, if he had car problems, that day he couldn't go to school.
You know, so he was just, just scraping by.
You know, with physical resources.
And he put his talent stack together, created a strategy, and nailed it.
Made me feel really good, I gotta say.
Made me feel really good.
Alright. Name one podcast you recommend.
You know, I have to say, I don't spend time listening to podcasts.
But I will give you a few that I can recommend anyway.
Anything that Tim Ferriss does, anything that James Altusher does, anything that Joe Rogan does, that would be a good start.
I know I'm forgetting some people.
It depends what you call a podcast.
Anything that Mike Cernovich does is always interesting.
If you call that podcasting, I don't know.
Live streaming, I guess.
So those would be the ones that I'd look at.
Does Byron New York have a podcast?
Yeah, I would say Jordan Peterson, but I don't know what he's doing lately.
Did Scott tell the engagement story?
I will tell you the engagement story.
So the engagement story goes like this.
I convinced Christina that we should open one gift the night before Christmas.
And I had pre-packaged some package of C's candy that was gift wrapped, but one of the candies in the middle had been replaced with an engagement ring.
So... I said, yeah, we should just open one thing.
And I had already bought her her gift earlier.
So her Christmas gift was already taken care of and it was a piano.
So she got a piano for her Christmas gift.
But it had already been delivered a month ago.
So I said, for Christmas itself, I'll just give you something small.
So I kept telling her to reduce her expectations for Christmas Day presents because it's just going to be something small.
But of course, the whole time, I knew that something small meant the diamond ring.
So she opened it up, saw the ring.
I asked her. She said yes.
And that's the basic story.
Oh yeah, the Adam Carolla and Anything with Dr.
Drew are great podcasts too.
Somebody is reminding me here in the comments.
I think Adam Carolla is one of the most popular podcasts actually in the world.
How has China tried to economically punish you for your comments?
I have not yet detected any problems that would be coming from China.
Now like I said, all of my trolls are on vacation, like actually literally on vacation.
And I've always suspected that maybe some percentage of them are Chinese.
If you were China, And you were trying to control things in the United States, and why wouldn't you?
You would have some trolls, and you would assign those trolls to various voices that you didn't like so that they could be tamped down and argued with.
I haven't seen evidence that China has done that.
There are no trolls which just jump out as being Chinese agents or anything like that.
But maybe. Maybe.
Somebody's mentioning the Sam Harris podcast.
Yeah, the Sam Harris podcast is always going to be interesting.
That's actually... I probably have listened to more Sam Harris than anybody else because he's always interesting.
What's your view on the societal pressure for a diamond engagement ring that needs to spend too much salary?
You know, all of this marriage stuff...
It's just a struggle because it's one size that doesn't fit all.
So you're always struggling to figure out, okay, I know what I'm supposed to do, but aren't I different?
Isn't this a different situation?
Oh yeah, the No Agenda podcast.
Excellent podcast. All right.
You want 2020 predictions?
Well, I've made some predictions.
I don't want to rework those.
Had you not proposed, do you think she ever would have?
Did you see the story about Lindsey Vonn?
Was it Lindsey Vonn who proposed to her boyfriend?
The answer is no.
I don't see any circumstance in which Christina would have proposed.
But only, not because she wouldn't want to.
I mean, not because she wouldn't want to be married.
But rather, that would be so far out of her expected behavior.
Did McAfee inspire me to get married?
No, he did not.
Somebody says, how do I handle my sister-in-law becoming gender neutral?
Why do you care?
Why in the world do you care if your sister-in-law is gender neutral?
What's that got to do with you?
So everybody wants to ask if I was unbended knee, and the answer is no.
And it was conscious.
I don't believe in starting a relationship with one person on their knees.
Maybe it's just me, but if there were one thing to get rid of in the tradition of marriage, I don't think anybody should get on their knees as the first start of a relationship.
That would be the exact opposite of what anybody should do.
So, not only did I not, we were just sitting together on the couch.
I don't think anybody should.
I've always been especially bothered by that particular thing.
Now, if you look at the tradition of it, I believe that the tradition of it is that when the gender balance was so unequal, that it sort of made sense because the guy was dialing down his power As a male in society, for this specific purpose, you know, to show that, you know, that the love is there, etc.
But in today's world, where the genders are, you know, we'll always argue about who's exactly, you know, getting the advantage, but we're a lot closer to even, right?
You know, there's a reasonable argument on both sides that one gender or the other has the advantage, depending on the category you're talking about.
But in today's world, I think we should come at it as something closer to peers.
So that's my take on it.
All right.
Just looking at your questions here.
Somebody says, will Christina be a trophy wife?
I like to think so.
In all the good ways.
You know, there's nothing wrong with a trophy.
I like trophies.
But obviously, we wouldn't get married unless the relationship was real.
We've been together three years, so we don't have any illusions.
And I have to tell you, three years into it, it's better.
It's absolutely better three years into it.
We're closer than ever.
Big wedding or small wedding?
Haven't even talked about it, but not big.
We're not planning on children.
Prenup. I can't believe anybody would even ask that.
Somebody's asking me if I'll have a prenup.
I'm an economics major.
What do you think?
Can you tell us about the mental prisons that you escaped and said were very weird and you didn't write?
I'm not sure I exactly understand the story, but in my book, Loser Thing, and also in my book, Win Bigly, I do talk about bubbles that I've been in that I got out of.
So I think that's your question, but it's better.
You want to see the long version of the book.
It's more entertaining. How can one-third of people not have a sense of humor?
Well, I've been famously saying that a third of the public doesn't have a sense of humor and also doesn't know it.
Because if you don't have it, you don't know you're missing it.
You think to yourself, well, I laugh at things.
Other people laugh at things.
I guess I have a sense of humor.
But you can see it in the wild where people will just not even recognize a joke necessarily unless other people have recognized it first.
Will you write a book regarding your relationship and road to marriage and No. You know, one of the tricks of writing is that you have to write about other people.
I learned this the hard way.
You can imagine that if you're a big celebrity, you can write your own biography.
And people care because you're a famous celebrity.
But people mostly care about themselves.
So when I write, I'm saying to myself, okay, who's the consumer for this and what's good for them?
How can I make their life better by something I've written?
It's got to be relating to them and it's got to be about them.
That's my personal writer philosophy.
Are the one-third without a sense of humor bitter and unhappy?
I don't know. I haven't noticed that they're less happy.
They might laugh less.
I feel as though having a sense of humor is sort of, it's almost an unfair advantage in life.
Because there are times when things are going really poorly when I can't stop laughing.
Have you ever had this situation where something goes so wrong that it becomes hilarious and you're actually genuinely entertained and you can't stop laughing because something is just so wrong?
I have that and I always think what if when things went wrong you just felt bad?
What if you were one of the people who you get some bad luck And it just makes you feel bad.
I thought, that sounds terrible.
Because when I get bad luck, unless somebody's hurt, you know, unless it's like a real problem.
But most problems are just, you know, BS problems.
And most of them just make me laugh.
I cannot tell you how many times I've been busted in a personal relationship for laughing at something that I'm not supposed to laugh at.
It happens a lot.
I will laugh at anything that's wrong, which sometimes is good, but sometimes you're laughing at something that's wrong in front of people who don't think that's so funny.
So it's a problem.
Somebody's saying that Cernovich is covering the Jewish stabbings in New York City.
You know, I'm seeing...
Headlines and stories suggesting that antisemitism is on the rise.
Now, I don't know if that's true, because it's exactly the category of things that could be reported as true without being true.
I worry that it's true, and I would certainly say it's in the category of a big problem that we need to treat as seriously as possible.
But it's the sort of thing that you have to ask yourself, how was it measured before?
How is it being measured now?
Is it the measurement that's different?
Or is it really more?
Or is it really not more, but it feels like more because of the way it's being reported?
I would say I have great questions on this category.
But questions aside, it has to be treated like it's...
I mean, it only makes sense to treat it like it's one of the most serious things in the world because it is.
Likewise, since it's the holiday season and I'm full of love for my fellow humans, there was a tweet I retweeted from Judd Apatow.
Now, if you don't know, Judd Apatow, a super talented director of many hit movies, including a whole bunch of funny hit movies you know about, The Hangover, etc.
And he's super anti-Trump.
Super anti-Trump.
And so he's got a pretty harsh Twitter feed when it comes to Republicans and Trump.
But he tweeted, I think it was yesterday, that why is it that China has concentration camps for the Uyghur minorities and we know it and we're sort of not talking about it.
So I'm paraphrasing very poorly the Judd Apatow point of view that how could it be How could it be?
And by the way, I don't know if Judd Apatow is Jewish, but that would be important in this story, because anybody who has the Holocaust as sort of an informing history for themselves, I think have to ask some extra questions here.
You've got to ask some extra questions if the Holocaust is part of your history, and I don't know if that's the case with Judd Apatow.
But if it is, he's asking the most respected question, that you'll ever see on social media.
So, I'm seeing people saying that he is Jewish, but whether he is or not, that shouldn't be too relevant to my next point, which is, I can't think of an opinion I would respect more than somebody with a Jewish background, who's got a lot to lose, right, a public figure, going in public and saying, you know, what's up with concentration camps in China?
How the hell are you ignoring this?
I respect that opinion.
I really respect that opinion.
Because that is consistent.
It is moral.
It's right. It's everything.
It's everything you want in an opinion.
So I retweeted it with support for that opinion.
And I like the fact that, at least on this issue, Judd Apatow and I would be on almost polar opposites for a lot of political stuff.
But on this issue, there's just nothing to discuss.
On this issue, Judd Apatow is 100% right.
What's wrong with it?
Why are we ignoring this?
Like it's a small business.
It's not a small business.
It's a million people in a concentration camp because of their religion.
Sound familiar?
All right.
Big difference between blah, blah, blah.
All right.
Yeah, I don't want to get too far into that.
Just look at your comments here in case it gets quiet.
If you're listening to this in the podcast, when I go quiet, it's because I'm reading.
Alright, looks like we've extended our...
that we've done everything we can do for now.
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